New Roads to Childhood and Roads to Childhood: Views and Reviews of Children’s Books, both by Anne Carroll Moore, supervisor of work with children in the New York Public Library; and A Century of Children’s Books, by Florence V. Barry.
6. The Twentieth Century Gothic of Aldous Huxley
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In that closing chapter, classical in its quality, which rounds off his Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley writes:
“Shearwater sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a man in a nightmare.... From time to time his dog-faced young friend, Lancing, came and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber to see how he was getting on.... The sweat poured off him and was caught as it rained down in a water proof sheet, to trickle down its sloping folds into a large glass receptacle....
“Lancing expounded to the visitors all the secrets. The vast, unbelievable, fantastic world opened out as he spoke. There were tropics, there were cold seas busy with living beings, there were forests full of horrible trees, silence and darkness. There were ferments and infinitesimal poisons floating in the air. There were leviathans suckling their young, there were flies and worms, there were men, living in cities, thinking, knowing good and evil. And all were changing continuously, moment by moment, and each remained all the time itself by virtue of some unimaginable enchantment....
“In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled. He was across the channel now; he felt himself safe. Still he trod on; he would be at Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate. He was escaping, he had escaped. He was building up his strong light dome of life. Proportion, cried the old man, proportion! And it hung there proportioned and beautiful in the dark confused horror of his desires, solid and strong and durable among his broken thoughts. Time floated darkly past.”
This is not the Aldous Huxley, you will say, of Limbo, or of Crome Yellow, nor even of the collection of tales called Mortal Coils. No, it isn’t. The intelligent child, the studious Oxford youth, the young man in maiden meditation fancy free, have gone somewhere. (We need not mind where.) The person that emerges in their place has a mind vaulted and full of pointed arches. His thoughts are lighted through stained glass, glass that singularly resembles the colored microscopic slides with which Grandfather Huxley was intently preoccupied. It is a Gothic mind with a special twentieth century illumination through the windows of applied science; the lighting is not very satisfactory nor is the source entirely congruous; but this mind-place is one of many and singular pleasures. A sense of airy spaciousness exists, and there is a comfortable feeling that one is not too closely observed, except by God. The delight of sanctuary would be perfect if one were not forced to go outside, now and then. However, there is the sense of escaping, of having escaped—from Grandfather, with his courage and his science and his controversies; from Aunt Humphry Ward with her formula for writing novels; from Laforgue and the French school; from Oxford and the English school; from Applied Religion; and this goes some way to compensate for the necessity of living in London and struggling to build up a strong light dome of life with stories, critiques, poems, books, essays, feuilletons.