REVIEWS
Ape
and Essence, by Aldous Huxley (Harper & Brothers,
publishers New York. Price $ 2.50)
“PEOPLE
are discovering that a frightful queerness has come into life. Even quite
unobservant people are betraying, by fits and starts, a certain wonder, a shrinking
and fugitive sense that something is happening so that life will never be quite
the same again.” So thought and wrote H. G. Wells whose curious intellect could
see the chaos in man and nature that is responsible more for the extinction of
the former than in the permanence of the latter. Are we to blame the scientists
who torture nature to find the flow of the primeval principle, which knowledge
sets man against society or state against state? Are we to blame man? Are we
really interested in the events of days which are to come, which we cannot
definitely dream to see? Whether we are interested or not, we optimists think
that life could have no utter ruin. Although we are all–high, low, and
neutral-minded types of men–conscious that we belong to a perennial flow, we
are apt to be sceptics as we have no comprehension of a final release from
being to be reabsorbed in that flow again. The intellectual, full of ideas and
ideals, develops a sort of contempt nourished in sarcasm and dressed in
devastating wit or satire. His contempt for the existing order of things offers
him no rest. Either within or without the sad, strong, sincere intellectual
perceives life in any sphere of activity or inactivity disgusting and ruinous.
But should we think that the presence of an intellectual is a menace to
civilisation? Not at all. His presence is an illuminating light saving souls
from daemonic powers ever petrifying and purifying the universal stream. Such
an intellectual, scholar, and wit is Mr. Aldous Huxley. Huxley has a mind
treasuring what need be treasured. To the wisdom, to the acquired knowledge, to
what all he had learnt from books, from men and things, from experience, the
intellectual in him never yields. It questions. It seeks an answer. It creates
a doubt, but it never pretends to have found out any truth. It neither accepts
defeat nor exults in victory. It waits. It practises. It strives toward
perfection. In its individual progress it meets the callousness of humanity,
the ruin awaiting it. His emotions explode in savage wit and laughter. In a
battle of ideas his personality beams unhampered. He has the gift of separating
his astral person from a conflict of motives. The motives are there for
everyone to see and encounter, if necessary. His ideas burn and char but never
guide. Huxley has neither the intensity of Keats nor the wisdom of Gandhi.
Though related to Matthew Arnold on his mother’s side he has not the obscure
gravity of a pedant; he has the inquisitiveness of a scientist–he is the
grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the famous Victorian scientist–and the subdued
arrogance of an omnivorously read man.
“It
was the day of Gandhi’s assassination; but on Calvary the sightseers were more
interested in the content of their picnic baskets than in the possible
significance of the, after all, rather commonplace event they had turned out to
witness. In spite of all the astronomers can say. Ptolemy was perfectly right:
the center of the universe is here, not there. Gandhi might be dead; but
across the desk in his office, across the lunch table in the Studio Commissary,
Bob Briggs was concerned to talk only about himself.”
So
begins Huxley’s latest book, Ape and Essence. If really the ape in man
vitiates the essence in him there is every possibility for the collapse of
civilisation resulting in the rule of the devils. Whether war is a necessity or
not there is a curse of malignant potency to which mankind submits. Undoubtedly
it is a tragic submission, the submission of the many to a few, and the
submission of the few to disastrous instincts,–the conquest of impulse over
intelligence. Gandhi was assassinated. Jesus was crucified. The man interested
in himself cared not for Brahman or Atman, he neglected the ethical approach to
solve any problem concerning either his decent survival or disgraceful doom.
There were two wars that revealed the death of virtue in humanity, and the
mighty age of science is not adolescent yet. Ape and Essence is written
in the form of a film scenario; Huxley has adopted this device “because he
feels that it allows him greater freedom as a narrator than the orthodox method
of story-telling.” What is it that we find in his theme? The collapse of
civilisation after another war, the rediscovery of America, the worship of
Belial, man becoming aware of his sex, the infernal point where the East and
the West converge. Huxley never tells a story. He talks on a thousand subjects
affecting the daily existence and progress of man, and to him the progress is
towards a steaming Gehenna. Still, he saves his famous Dr. Poole from the grip
of grave-diggers and shows the centre of attraction for him. The submissive son
of a strong-willed mother rediscovers his lost rib in Loola. Even in utter
destruction man has the strength to realise his sex urge that seeks fulfilment.
It is because he should survive.
Has Huxley become a pessimist? That is the question that rises uppermost in one’s mind after reading through the book. And the answer is: Definitely Huxley is no pessimist. As a creative writer he has energy in the life of the imagination. But as it was for Blake and other mystics it is not real life for him yet. He observes and analyses the facts of life garnered from the East and the West. They embarrass him. And, all contempt for an egoistic mankind, he detaches himself in quest of his own peace. But he is too learned, too much of a savant to be a creative genius, and the glow of rich and varied gifts in him is veiled by his “funny, dry mind” as the late D. H. Lawrence put it. We agree with Frank Swinnerton who writes: “He (Huxley) has a greater capacity for wisdom than any encyclopaedia-stuffed man of this era; and may yet lead his generation, and the younger generation, into a state of grace out of which great things will come.”
K.
K. Hebbar. A Nalanda Publication. Bombay. Price Rs. 25.
WE
are very fortunate in having such Publishers as the Nalanda Publication House
of Bombay who can produce Art-plates in colours sumptuously. We have here an
instance of their flawless execution of nearly sixteen plates of paintings in
watercolour, oils and tempera. Mr. Hebbar is a delightful artist hailing from
South Kanara. He is already known for his high-class reproductions in line and
colour of his penetrative impressions of life. One can at once assure the
student of art who looks into this collection how the picture “Kanyakumari” in
tempera, is a very beautiful artistic creation of the Cape, where is situated
the shrine of the virgin goddess whose feet are lapped by the waves of the
three seas. Apart from the impression one will have of the picture that it is a
view from the sea in front, it is in itself a compendium of colour scheme,
conceit and correlation of tints like blue, red and white which produce
something like the effect of a decorative design.
One
can perceive in this collection the influence of two different types of art,
namely, paintings after the fashion of Rajput School and pictures possessing
the influence of modern Western art. We can pick out from both the types
illustrative pictures showing the peak of the artist’s individuality.
“Affection” is a picture of a milk-maid letting loose a calf which almost drags
her in its avidity to reach its mother-cow’s udder. It is a very fine piece
from aspects of both realistic touch as well as the conventional type of
medieval Indian art.
In
the latter group of paintings with the perceptible influence of Western style,
the picture “Pandits” is a remarkable reproduction instilling in our minds the
thoughtful or pensive attitude of Pandits, while they pore over the ancient
Puranas in all the solemnity and dignity of their calling. One cannot escape
the impression of a touch of sarcasm even in the artist in making the two
Pandits sitting side by side as belonging to the two different sub-communities
within the Brahmin fold and a third figure behind almost dozing under the
effect of the readings from the Puranas.
The
introduction by G. Venkatachalam reads very appropriate, bringing out, as it
does, the essential features of Hebbar’s excellence in his chosen field.
K. C.
Art
of Y. K. Shukla. A Nalanda Publication. Bombay. Price
Rs. 7-8.
THIS
album contains thirteen plates of reproductions of the Artist, Y. K. Shukla.
Dry-point, etching, aquatint are some of the mediums through which this artist
tries to communicate his ideas or interpretations of life. The introductory
long note by H. Goetz makes very fine reading by itself, though one feels the
plates reproduced here do not create the same effect upon us. It is claimed for
the artist that his productions are in the graphic technique, which has been
introduced only in the last few decades in India from foreign sources. It
augurs well that students of art unfamiliar to this type of pictorial
reproduction should have been enabled to acquire the knowledge or enrich their
experience by possessing an album of this kind.
K. C.