T.H. Huxley as a man of letters / by Aldous Huxley.

  • Aldous Huxley
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: T.H. Huxley as a man of letters / by Aldous Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    or disparaging names. But this is not enough. Critics should take pains to show why such and such a piece of writing provokes us to call it by such and such a name. The observable facts of literature are words arranged in certain patterns. The words have a meaning independent of the pattern in which they are arranged; but it is the pattern that gives to this meaning its peculiar quality and intensity; that can make a statement seem somehow truer or somehow less true than the truth. Moreover, a word-pattern of one kind will cause us to say of its inventor : “ This man is (for example) sincere; ” of another kind : This man is affected and false.” It is the business of the literary artist to make word-patterns in such a way that his readers shall be compelled to draw certain inferences from them. It is the business of the critic to show how our judgments are affected by varia¬ tions in word-patterns. This is what I shall try to do in the present case. But before beginning my analysis of Huxley’s achieve¬ ments as a literary artist, I think it would be advisable to say a few words by way of general introduction about the relations between literature and science. The function of language is twofold : to communicate emotion and to give information. The rudimentary language of the lower animals seems to be purely emotive. Beasts make noises to express desire, fear, anger and the like; to let off their superfluous energy; and to make their presence known to their fellow-creatures. Never do they express a concept. When a startled blackbird flies off at our approach with his characteristic cry, he is not saying, ‘‘ There is a man; ” he is saying, “ I am afraid ”—or rather, he is simply screaming with terror. And at the sound of the scream, other blackbirds are terrified. Communication is by emotional infection, never, apparently, by conceptual statement. Man has invented concepts. He does not merely scream with terror : he also says why and of what he is afraid. The noises he makes stand for classes of objects.
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