PASSING AWAY.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17613, 16 November 1922, Page 2

PASSING AWAY.

DISAPPEARANCE OF THE ROMANTICS. Is there not something a - little alarming (writes a correspondent in the "Manchester Guardian") in the rapid disappearance of the romantics f One after another they are passing away, and, they are leaving no successors. Wilfrid Scawen" Blunt was a cosmopolitan romantic, George Sims was a Cockney romantic, CobdenBanderson was a romantic of handicraft, Sir Pertab Singh was a chivalrous romantic; even honest John Osborne deserves a place among the romantics in his fanatical love of the horse and his devotion to the Turf, not as a means of making money, but' as a groat sport. We talk scornfully of the ''Victorians" as a dull and unimaginative race, and yet, as the Victorians pass away, we are confronted continually with the fact that we are losing not merely men but types. Bornance, as Kipling has reminded us, is not of necessity the product of any age; romance flourishes independently -of'what'we call the march of progress, provided always that the types are there. It would be'easy to suggest that there is more room for romance in the modern world than in the mid-Victorian world. War is supposed to breed romance, and we have had war enough; romance is supposed to flourish among revolutions, and revolutions are part of our daily life. And yet, for the time, we seem (continues the depressed correspondent) to have lost the romantic touch. Where we have romantics they are survivors (a little bewildered) from another age, and every day reduces the number. Diplomacy breeds no Blunts, the Consular Service no Burtons. . There is no Stevenson in modern letters; there is no Brunei among engineers, no Disraeli among politicians. Sir Benaell Bodd may have been the last. of the poet-ambassadors. - Teats is growing old; there are no Bossettis. No one would read a Buskin if he began to write to-day; no one writes nonsense with the abandon of Lewis Carroll or , Edward Lear; and no modern journalist . sees in Fleet street the romance which was the secret of Alfred Harmsworth'*