Medley

POINT COUNTER POINT--Aldous Huxley--Doubleday Doran ($2.50).

Intricate and difficult is counterpoint--"the art of adding melodies, according to fixed rules, as accompaniment to a given melody." If Author Huxley's "given melody" is perhaps the conflict between passion and reason, it is outnoised by his myriad irrelevant themes. If he has any "fixed rules," they are well camouflaged in a medley of deliriously discordant, rarely harmonious, characters--famous Artist Bidlake whose voluptuous youth has reluctantly passed into caustic Rabelaisian senility; his writer-son who flings aside a reproachful mistress for the wanton daughter of a musty scientist; a suave sadist who bullies, tortures, kills, for the sheer thrill of it; an editor-publisher, bitterly caricatured, who fleeces his authors, but shows his mistress an almost inhuman tenderness; a conversational philosopher who is said to be the author's particular mouthpiece. As such, he is a brilliantly garrulous person, for Huxley fairly seethes with things to be said about art, science, life.

His abstruse writings are delectable to a few devotees; but to many they are meaningless, affected, smartly vulgar. Point Counter Point is a rich symphony of modern semi-intellectual London, done into polished prose that will be read slowly and with great relish--by the devotees.