Virtuoso Solo
AFTER his dozen years in California Aldous Huxley remains a most sensitive recorder of the aesthetic emotion, and one of the most accomplished writers of the century. What he has added to himself in his long exile and by his patient apprenticeship to contemporary exponents of the Vedanta is hard to assess. Certainly there is no greater insight in his biographical sketch of Maine de Biran, which fills more than half of this book, than in his fuller biography of the less ineffectual Father Joseph. Grey Eminence, in fact, appears to have been written with the greater authority. The choice of subject for this new essay, an introspective French intellectual of the early nineteenth century, was clearly influenced by the psychological theories of William Sheldon, in whose hideous jargon Huxley describes the timid philosopher as " an extreme cerebrotonic—a slender, small-boned, thin-muscled person in whom the nerves and vital organs are uncomfortably close to the surface."
With this constitution, according to Sheldon, goes a preoccupation with thought and imagination, and with the variations of feeling
and consciousness. But whatever his physiological make-up, Maine de Biran was a master of introspection, whose journal reflects every aspect of aimlessness and self-distrust. But as the subject of a biography he would certainly be inadequate, were it not for the speculative variations with which his biographer has embellished the dim little theme of his life.
For Huxley is preoccupied with the mutual interactions between public events and the subjective world, and concerned to prove that not only the mystics, who have one foot in the timeless world, but cerebrotonics in general, are to a large extent impervious to the 'boisterous currents of history that wash so uncomfortably close to their doorsteps. Maine de Biran was certainly insulated against the shocks of the revolution, the Napoleonic dictatorship and the restoration ; but he played his part as an intellectual and a minor politician with a sane objectivity, and was not afraid to take a firm line when his reason told him so. There is less tolerance for such men of principle in our modern dictatorships ; the cerebrotonic's independence, if it persists today, must linger on in self-frustrating isolation, or founder in forced compromise.
But Maine de Biran's resistance to the insanities of his age does not offer Huxley a pretext for writing of what concerns him most. Preoccupied with his physical ailments and his paralysing alterna- tions of mood, he did not indulge in psychological speculation, nor had he any but the vaguest understanding of the religious way. To develop his chief theme, therefore, Huxley must describe not only the climate of thought to which his introspective subject was sensi- tive, but also the many contemporary currents that passed him by. His biographical sketch, indeed, soon becomes a mere excuse for the most brilliant discussion of experiences which Maine de Biran, for various reasons, never had. Only Aldous Huxley could make a success of so paradoxical a project.
The shorter pieces, On a Baroque Tomb, On El Greco and On Goya, are the most subtle of interpretative essays. Huxley's aesthetic intuitions are never at fault, and his field of reference in all the arts preserves its old, miraculous breadth. No one after reading his few pages will look at an El Greco or a Goya in quite the same way again. His concluding essay, however, on the problem of increasing population and diminishing food supplies, presents an analysis with which we have grown familiar in the past few years. His solution is, no doubt, no more chimerical than any other ; and at least it serves to prove that, whatever the impact upon the cerebrotonic of the disasters of our time, his capacity for influencing the actions of man in the mass has diminished, rather than increased, since Maine de Biran made his surprising demand for greater political freedom at the moment when Napoleon's armies were being driven
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