ROMANCE!

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21882, 18 August 1934, Page 6 (Supplement)

ROMANCE!

THE FIRE OF LIFE DREAMS THAT FREE BY BESSIE NINA WATTY Romance is the fire and warmth at the heart of life. It is the living spirit of truth, as distinct from the dry bones of fact. It is the soul of things, as distinct from the skeleton of things. The life of birds and beasts and flowers is touched with it; all human associations, activities, and achievements are tinged with its soft light. Immensities and insignificances alike have their imprisoned story. Behind everything, tremendous or trivial, there is a taleromance. Mr. Kipling found it in so mundane and material a thing as a railway train. "Romance," he said, "brings up the five-fifteen.", The poet, sensitive to inner significances, transmutes the mechanical monster into a In ing messenger bearing loads of eager mortals bent on fateful errands, carrying a freightage of human laughter and tears. Bread —and Cake It is true, too, bf less obvious things than railway trains. In happier times the price 6f bread caused no acute concern, and one had time to think of other things—cake, for example. It is possible, of course, to live on bread and potatoes —Browning did it for three years —but we need cake, and perhaps the davs of cake will come again. How* well I remember as a child the ecstasy of delight, far transcending the purely material joy of a satisfied appetite, with which I anticipated the makino- of cakes in all their infinite variety! Victuals "spirituals" they were, deep with frostings and of melting sweetness—insubstantial. impalpable, ethereal, feeding more than the body and satisfying some more subtle need than physical hunger. We are "of the stuff that dreams are made of," and those cakes ministered to that part of my nature which did not wholly subsist on material fare. Romance was in them. Pie, to be real pie, must have its four-and-twenty blackbirds, which must sing. It is not a very romantic affair when all we can do is to "stick in a thumb and pull out a plum." "He dreamed a dream," someone has said, "who made the original pie." The Soul of a Dog

Even my dog seems to know something of the call of romance. He is a faithful friend and keeps all the secrets I pour into his shaggy ears with beautiful respect. He clings closer than ever just now as if some inner voice were urging him with whispers he cannot interpret to me. He _is wearing the outward insignia of his earthly bondage, his cellar and licence number, much as we mortals wear our own worldly fetters; but it is evident that his soul is elsewhere. When he growls in his sleep before the fire, I know that he is, wandering through whatever worlds are reserved for the romances of his kind. All dogs are dreamers, travellers by twilight, sharing with aspiring humans a journey toward some long-deferred dawn. Not of the sunlight. Not of the moonlight, Not of the starlight, is the tender, troubled light in the eyes of dogs.' The Spark That Never Dies Human life always has romance—it is the hidden fire at the heart. Though it may have burned to mere embers :it needs but a touch to stir it to flame again. In the dross of all souls there is the infinitesimal spark that has never died out. It may not be "the true light," yet it "lighteth eveiy man that cometh into the world." Every living person is, or knows, a story, if we could but get at the tale. The real trouble with our modern literature seems to be a kind of writer's cramp, of the mental kind —an inability to see, seize and interpret the story, all of it, the inner truth as well as the outward facts. It is a defect not of observation but of imagination. •There is more in life than the realist sees. The magnitudes and distances of astronomy do not greatly concern us; /for man is still the simple shepherd, keeping watch by night, and all he knows of the stars is that they brood over the sleeping hills, and now and then, in some holy hush, they sing • together. / / ————————