From Jacques Barzun, “Beliefs for Sale: 1900–1950” (2001/2002, The Georgia Review, v. 55/56):

I was reminded just a few days ago when Lord Lindsay died, of an address that he gave at Columbia shortly after he had become master of Balliol College. He began his remarks by saying, “Gentlemen, I should tell you that I am a liberal, a conservative, and a socialist.” Some of the audience were naturally bewildered, but Lord Lindsay went on to explain that he meant something which should by now be perfectly obvious… He meant that as a free man endowed with independence and originality — gifts of nature — he wanted a liberal regime; as a propertied man, a student of history, and a political philosopher, he wanted to conserve some of the great institutions and great traditions that his own country and Western culture generally put at his disposal; while as a man of the twentieth century he recognized the needs created by technology and the rise everywhere of popular states, of universal democracy. He knew that new institutions — whether called socialist or democratic or anything else — must arise to meet the demands of community life. The occasion for them may be public hygiene or flood control or the regulation of the airways: one need not specify here (nor be systematic anywhere) as regards the purview of the new collective institutions. The important thing is rather to recognize that the three traditions of the Western world can no longer be taken as mutually exclusive choices. The problem is not whether to stay a liberal and fight the conservatives, or else join hands between liberals and conservatives to fight the socialists. The problem is to find a way of compounding what is livable in all three so that a stupid, doctrinaire socialism will not down the liberal individual; so that a stupid, doctrinaire liberalism will not let the nation and the economy fritter itself away; and so that a stupid, doctrinaire conservatism will not sulk and dream, and resist the forward-moving reality.

Available at IWP Books:

• 1923, On the Margin
• 1925, Along the Road
• 1926, Jesting Pilate
• 1927, Proper Studies
• 1929, Do What You Will
• 1930, Music at Night
• 1934, Beyond the Mexique Bay (NEW)
• 1936, The Olive Tree
• 1937, Ends and Means
• 1941, Grey Eminence
• 1947, Science, Liberty and Peace
• 1950, Themes & Variations
• 1956, Adonis and the Alphabet
• 1958, Brave New World Revisited (NEW)

From “Books for the Journey” (Aldous Huxley, 1925, Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist):

India paper and photography have rendered possible the inclusion in a portable library of what in my opinion is the best traveller’s book of all — a volume (any one of the thirty-two will do) of the twelfth, half-size edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It takes up very little room (eight and a half inches by six and a half by one is not excessive), it contains about a thousand pages and an almost countless number of curious and improbable facts. It can be dipped into anywhere, its component chapters are complete in themselves and not too long. For the traveller, disposing as he does only of brief half-hours, it is the perfect book, the more so, since I take it that, being a born traveller, he is likely also to be one of those desultory and self-indulgent readers to whom the Encyclopaedia, when not used for some practical purpose, must specially appeal. I never pass a day away from home without taking a volume with me. It is the book of books. Turning over its pages, rummaging among the stores of fantastically varied facts which the hazards of alphabetical arrangement bring together, I wallow in my mental vice. A stray volume of the Encyclopaedia is like the mind of a learned madman — stored with correct ideas, between which, however, there is no other connection than the fact that there is a B in both; from orach, or mountain spinach, one passes directly to oracles. That one does not oneself go mad, or become, in the process of reading the Encyclopaedia, a mine of useless and unrelated knowledge is due to the fact that one forgets. The mind has a vast capacity for oblivion. Providentially; otherwise, in the chaos of futile memories, it would be impossible to remember anything useful or coherent. In practice, we work with generalizations, abstracted out of the turmoil of realities. If we remembered everything perfectly, we should never be able to generalize at all; for there would appear before our minds nothing but individual images, precise and different. Without ignorance we could not generalize. Let us thank Heaven for our powers of forgetting. With regard to the Encyclopaedia, they are enormous. The mind only remembers that of which it has some need. Five minutes after reading about mountain spinach, the ordinary man, who is neither a botanist nor a cook, has forgotten all about it. Read for amusement, the Encyclopaedia serves only to distract for the moment; it does not instruct, it deposits nothing on the surface of the mind that will remain. It is a mere time-killer and momentary tickler of the mind. I use it only for amusement on my travels; I should be ashamed to indulge so wantonly in mere curiosity at home, during seasons of serious business.

Available at IWP Books:

• 1923, On the Margin
• 1926, Jesting Pilate
• 1927, Proper Studies
• 1929, Do What You Will
• 1930, Music at Night
• 1936, The Olive Tree
• 1937, Ends and Means
• 1941, Grey Eminence
• 1947, Science, Liberty and Peace
• 1950, Themes & Variations
• 1956, Adonis and the Alphabet

More on the way.

More by Huxley at IWP Books: Grey Eminence (1941) and Themes & Variations (1950)

New at IWP Books: Aldous Huxley, 1936, The Olive Tree and Other Essays. The essay on Words and Behaviour published separately, too, and available at IWP Articles.

New at IWP Books: Aldous Huxley, 1923, On the Margin. From the Essay on Pleasures:

We have heard a great deal, since 1914, about the things which are a menace to civilization. First it was Prussian militarism; then the Germans at large; then the prolongation of the war; then the shortening of the same; then, after a time, the Treaty of Versailles; then French militarism — with, all the while, a running accompaniment of such minor menaces as Prohibition, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Bryan, Comstockery….

Civilization, however, has resisted the combined attacks of these enemies wonderfully well. For still, in 1923, it stands not so very far from where it stood in that “giant age before the flood” of nine years since. Where, in relation to Neanderthal on the one hand and Athens on the other, where precisely it stood then is a question which each may answer according to his taste. The important fact is that these menaces to our civilization, such as it is — menaces including the largest war and the stupidest peace known to history — have confined themselves in most places and up till now to mere threats, barking more furiously than they bite.

No, the dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the external dangers — wild men, wars and the bankruptcy that wars bring after them. The most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within, that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary man.

Of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of auto-intoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few, it seems to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that curious and appalling thing that is technically known as “pleasure.” “Pleasure” (I place the word between inverted commas to show that I mean, not real pleasure, but the organized activities officially known by the same name) “pleasure” — what nightmare visions the word evokes! Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. But I would rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned to lead a life of “pleasure”; I would even, I believe, prefer to write a million words of journalism a year.

The horrors of modern “pleasure” arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile. There was a time when people indulged themselves with distractions requiring the expense of a certain intellectual effort…

New at IWP Books: Aldous Huxley, 1956, Adonis and the Alphabet.

New at IWP Books: Aldous Huxley, 1930, Music at Night. From the Essay on Foreheads Villainous Low:

If by some miracle the dreams of the educationists were realized and the majority of human beings began to take an exclusive interest in the things of the mind, the whole industrial system would instantly collapse. Given modern machinery, there can be no industrial prosperity without mass production. Mass production is impossible without mass consumption. Other things being equal, consumption varies inversely with the intensity of mental life. A man who is exclusively interested in the things of the mind will be quite happy (in Pascal’s phrase) sitting quietly in a room. A man who has no interest in the things of the mind will be bored to death if he has to sit quietly in a room. Lacking thoughts with which to distract himself, he must acquire things to take their place; incapable of mental travel, he must move about in the body. In a word, he is the ideal consumer, the mass consumer of objects and of transport.

New at IWP Books: Desmond MacCarthy, Shaw, 1951. From Jacques Barzun’s review of the book:

Desmond MacCarthy has not in this country the reputation that he deserves. A few know him as the one-time editor of a periodical of the Thirties called Life and Letters, as the author of a book on the much earlier but no less significant Court Theatre, and as a critic at large for the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. He is also to be numbered among the band of learned lunatics (I profess to be one too) who take pleasure in the pseudo-scholarship of Sherlock Holmes. The reissue in book form of Mr. MacCarthy’s reviews of twenty Shaw plays should fill out this indistinct sketch and show the author for what he is — a judicious critic of drama who is also a strong admirer of Shaw.