FICTION
THUNDER ON THE LEFT
SURELY it is true that the Anglo-Saxon races have invented a relationship between themselves and their children which
is unique. It is they who have realized most acutely that the child is the image of perfected manS physically further away from the rude, root-grubbing cave-dweller than the adult. Immature, it is yet superior, and the more so by reason of its ignorance of the turbulent and—one sometimes thinks— ignoble passions. Perhaps it is vain to believe we are adept at preserving the exquisite distance between grown-ups and the innocents : yet it does seem by contrast that the Latin races at least regard their offspring as "little men" rather than what is, in fact, a different race inhabiting another, a sharper cut and lovelier world :—
"People pretend that children are just human beings of a smaller size, but I think they're something quite different. They live in a world with only three dimensions, a physical world immersed lathe moment, a reasonable world, a world without that awful sorcery of a fourth measurement which makes us ill at ease."
Having postulated this, Mr. Morley in Thunder on the Left fantastically and almost unbearably flings the worlds of the child and of the grown-up together. The book is crammed
with beauty and pain, for the agonies of two worlds thread here into each other but cannot communicate. The children's birthday party, with which the book opens, is magically pre- sented, the embarrassed giving of presents with parents
looking on and blundering grossly and unknowingly, the special adjustment of the children to each other when they are alone, their sudden passion to know if grown-ups are happy- .
It is a little confusing to pass immediately into another sphere twenty-one years later as time slips past in a dream. One of the children of the party, a child seeming a man, has
pushed himself into adult ranks, mixes with them, trying to spy out the truth. Another one, ghostlike, tugs at him now
and then and calls him back to the safe nursery. The men and women around play out the drama of loving as superior men and women do, by their intellect, and of living in spurts, as they do through their civilized senses : his presence makes them feel embarrassed. Their passions seem an absurd agony to the man-child. He is translated back to his proper estate before, happily, he has had time to grasp the desire and the frustration of their lives.
The love story the book tells is delicate, is moving and bitter. It is almost terribly frank, but it is so penetrating and so full of sentiment as to be quite disarming. Back in the realm of childhood again at the end of the book, the reader feels a relief. For there is safety in innocence, and it would have been unbearable had little Martin really guessed along what tortuous, inconstant paths the grown-ups make their way. The horror of the book is less than that of The Turn of the Screw ; the playful understanding of it is as subtle a brand as Mr. A. A. Milne's, and if the exercise of fantasy strains the groundwork of the story, it is so built together with lovely writing and with a clarity of vision that one can forgive this inherent weakness :—
"If there were only one moonshiny night in each century, men would never be done talking of it. Old lying books would be consulted; in padded club chairs grizzled gentry whose grandfathers had witnessed it would prate of that milky pervasion that once diluted the unmixed absolute of night."
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