PAST ROMANCE

NZ Truth, Issue 1306, 22 December 1930, Page 7

PAST ROMANCE

Present Holds As Many Thrills

There are surely no more over-worked and abused words m the English language than "romance" and its corresponding adjective "romantic." Many weddings, especially if the bridesmaids are attired m some fantastic disguise, are described as romantic as a matter of course, although all the friends of the couple concerned know that they are not really m love with one another, and that the inevitable divorce is only a question of time.

ALL ruined abbeys and castles are romantic according to the guidebooks, as well as any inn that is more than a century old, while a man or woman has only to do something a little out of the ordinary for the world to talk of the romance of their lives. In fact, we apply the label romance to anything that is either out of date or not entirely conventional, without stopping to think what it means. There are many people who always describe smuggling and smugglers -as romantic and get a thrill out of the caves where contraband goods were stored. * Yet It is difficult to see that there was any more romance m running a cargo of brandy m the eighteenth century than there is to-day m a girl stepping off the boat with a few pairs of silk stockings concealed about her person m the hope of avoiding payment of the customs duty. The truth is that, real romance is independent of time and place, and there are several men alive at the present moment— Signor Mussolini is one of them — whose careers have been just as romantic as those of any of the heroes of the past. It is a curious thing how much the past fascinates us to-day. Our ancestors recked nothing of it, and our care for the preservation of ancient monuments would have seemed wholly inexplicable a little more than a century ago. _ The reason is that the vast majority of the population leads a very dull life, and as it cannot taste, romance, itself

it likes to enjoy it second-hand. That is why the man on the motorbike and the girl on the carrier like to associate romance with every old building they pass, though m all probability their lives contain just as much or as little of it as those who lived' three centuries ag l^. There is' as much true romance m the world to-day as ever there was, if we only know where to look for it, and that is not the place m which it is most advertised. Surely Smith, who always sits next to us m the train, and who held a trench on the Somme single-handed with a machine-gun for an hour until relief came, is just as romantic" a figure as any swashbuckling musketeer of old, even if he does not go to the city with a plumed hat on his head and a rapier dangling by his side. In short, if we want real romance we have no need on the one hand to go to ivy-clad ruins and the loves of Cleopatra or on the other to read all the details of some peer's engagement to a factory girl. All we have to do is to look round us, and we shall soon see that there is as much romance under Brown* grey as ever there was under any hero's buff jerkin. So let us give "romance" and "romantic" a 'rest when they are not appropriate, for we shall find plenty of occasions when we can employ them correctly.