a younger generation but it is
not always articulate. The war may not have changed the face of the world,
but it changed the faces of very many young men. Faces of naive enthusiasm
and an innocent expectancy were not particularly noticeable in the years
1918 to 1922. The sombreness, the abruptness, the savage mood evident in
the writings of such men as Barbusse and Siegfried Sassoon were abandoned.
Confronted with the riddle of life, spared the enigma of death, the young
men have felt nothing more befitting their age and generation than the
personal "gesture."

If you ask me what is a gesture, I can't say that I know. It is something
felt in the attitude of a person to whom one is talking or whose book one
is reading. And the gesture is accompanied, in some of our younger
writers, with an expression that is both serious and smiling. These
half-smiles are, I take it, youth's comment on the riddle of a continued
existence, on the loss of well-lost illusions, on the uncertainty of all
future values. What is there worth trying for? It is not too clear, hence
the gesture. What is there worth the expenditure of emotion? It is
doubtful; and a half-smile is the best.

Such a writer, busily experimenting in several directions, is Aldous
Huxley. This child of 1894, the son of Leonard Huxley (eldest son and
biographer of Prof. T. H. Huxley) and Julia Arnold (niece of Martha Arnold
and sister of Mrs. Humphry Ward), has with three books of prose built up a
considerable and devoted following of American readers. First there was
_Limbo_. Then came _Crome Yellow_, and on the heels of that we had the
five stories--if you like to call them so--composing _Mortal Coils_. I
have seen no comment more penetrating than that of Michael Sadleir,
himself the author of a novel of distinction. Sadleir says:

"Already Huxley is the most readable of his generation. He has the
allurement of his own inconsistency, and the inconsistency of youth is its
questing spirit, and, consequently, its chief claim to respect.

"At present there are several Huxleys--the artificer in words, the amateur
of garbage, pierrot lunaire, the cynic in rag-time, the fastidious
sensualist. For my part, I believe only in the last, taking that to be the
real Huxley and the rest prank, virtuosity, and, most of all,
self-consciousness. As the foal will shy at his own shadow, so Aldous
Huxley, nervous by fits at the poise of his own reality, sidesteps with
graceful violence in