Aldous Huxley's career resembles that of several other eminent twentieth-century writers: he began as an enfant terrible and ended as a sage…. Each of his novels, from Crome Yellow through Island, is indisputably modern, even though the later books differ so radically from the earlier ones. Huxley seems to have been born mistrustful of received attitudes and disdainful of those creeds that provided his forebears with a sense of order, continuity, and spiritual composure. His intellectual temperament, if one may call it that, was skeptical, restless, experimental. In his youth he was a debunker of moribund truths; in middle age he became an ardent seeker of new truths or of fresh combinations of old truths. His zestful assault on the old order of things in Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, and pre-eminently in Point Counter Point gave way in time to a strenuous and eclectic attempt to find a new order, to fashion a "perennial philosophy" from disparate fragments of the human past. The transition was not quite as abrupt as it is sometimes made to seem: the road to mysticism is as clearly implied in Those Barren Leaves as is the road to orthodoxy in The Waste Land.
