At first glance these new essays would seem to demonstrate no more than what has been apparent for some years: the decline of Aldous Huxley. Once an unrivalled satirist of his age, he has become in late years a moderately entertaining highbrow journalist and a semi-slick novelist.
In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow he touches upon a potpourri of subjects—from activated sludge and do-it-yourself (of which he approves) to Dante, Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot (of whom he disapproves). The mode of his style has not changed in thirty years, but the life has gone out of it. The turned phrase just misses the mark; the association of incongruous ideas that in Antic Hay or Mortal Coils exposed in a brilliant flash some absurdity of twentieth-century civilization is now too often slightly on the hither side of banality, and sometimes degenerates into sheer bad taste.
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