THIS CYNICAL AGE

Evening Star, Issue 20586, 11 September 1930, Page 6

THIS CYNICAL AGE

WHERE ARE OUR GREAT LOVERS? Never has the English-speaking world been so interested in “ passion ” as it is at present, and never has it been so incapable of experiencing it, writes Janies Laver, in the ‘ Sunday Nows.’ The very word is almost worn out with constant repetition. Every fifth book, every second play, and every film is concerned with nothing but Passion with a capital P. From every hoarding, from every railway bookstall, the same message is proclaimed in all the iridescent colours of the decaying mackerel If only our cheaper literature survives. posterity will imagine that the early twentieth century thought of nothing else. Undoubtedly, what is called Haming love ” is an obsession with us, but perhaps for that very reason it s singularly rare in real life. Where are they, these passionate lovers? How often have we met the man or the woman who would sacrifice everything for a passion, whether of love or hate? If they are not to be met with in the banks and offices 01 the city, still less can they bo found at the cocktail parties of Mayfair. The whole spirit of the age seems hostile to passion, for nothing is so fatal to it as the cold, critical attitude which is common among us, even in our discussions of sex. It is partly the result of our being huddled together in cities. The passionate man is a bad pedestrian; he fits uncomfortably into buses, and is a disquieting neighbour when hanging from a strap. In a large city distractions are easy, and (to make the obvious point) nothing is more distracing. What a contrast with ourselves is to be seen oven in such a comparatively recent book as ‘ Withering Heights.’ Those isolated and bottled-up people developed forces strong enough to devastate the countryside. What loves! What hates' What passions! And further back the contrast becomes even more remarkable. We take these things more calmly, because we do not feel them so deeply. We are tolerant, we are reasonable, we are wise. In a word, we are civilised , but the “ Great Lovers ” of past ages would rise up shouting with laughter if we flattered ourselves that we were passionate. Even jealousy, that strange hybrid oi love and hate, however common in Latin countries, exists in England onlyin a mild and innocuous form. We believe in individual liberty and a thousand modern notions with which passion will have nothing to do. The extent to which passion has decayed is shown by our humorous attitude towards it. Wo may occasionally revive an old melodrama, hut it is onlyin order to smile at its absurdity. Snow-white heroines and coal-black villains are out of date. Human character has grown grey, like the aspect of the world. Yet passion does not die. It is onlyburied. Beneath the cool crust of our ordinary everyday life, volcanic fires still slumber, ready to burst forth again when a crack appears in the surface. The strange city of Chicago, with its odd likeness (under obvious surface differences) to some medieval Italian town rent by faction, develops passions unknown to those who live under the protection of an efficient police force. We have spoken of the hard crust which seems to form over our instincts. In the eighteenth century it was so hard and smooth and shining that men and women could skate on it, cut figures, amuse themselves witli love as though it were a game. In the nineteenth century the crust grew soft and sticky, but it still held. The Byronists did not fall through. Those whiskered gentlemen in the chock trousers only played at passion. They made literature out of it, and wo have carried the process a step further, and commercialised the literature