Style 217 



To put it in another way : it would be extremely easy 

 to translate any of Huxley's writings into French or 

 German, and they would lose extremely little of the 

 personal flavour of their author. The present writer 

 has just been reading French translations of Huxley's 

 Physiography and Crayfish, made at different times 

 by different translators. At first reading it seems 

 almost miraculous how identically the effect produced 

 by the original is reproduced by the French rendering, 

 but the secret is really no secret at all. Huxle}^ pro- 

 duced his effects by the ordering of his ideas and not 

 by the ordering of his words. From the technical 

 point of view of literary craftsmanship, he cannot be 

 assigned a high place ; he is one of our great English 

 writers, but he is not a great writer of English. 



