ROMANCE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3772, 29 June 1926, Page 74

ROMANCE.

I have just been reading, writes Robert Blatchford in the Clarion, some extracts from an article by Mr Pcnrhyn Chave on novels and romances, from which I take this passage: Just now there is a glut of panaceas for human misery. Our present need is for more romance. The modern novel is simply a stagnant narrative of sickening ineptitude: it is the aftermath of a harvest whose beneficence it can neither realise nor repeat. We do not want in exchange an artificial hotch-potch of makeshift medievalisms. We cannot and should not put the clock back. The world should be always a child, since the future is endlessly before it. Is the modern novel a “stagnant narrative of sickening ineptitude?” This very natural question gave me a shock, for I suddenly realised that I could not answer it. What are the modern novels? I ran over in my mind some popular names, and I became conscious that they were only names to me. I have not read the modern novels. I don’t get down any farther than Conrad and Galsworthy and Henry James. Some of the most successful living authors I cannot read, others I don’t read. Obviously I am a back number. Detective and mystery fiction I am familiar with; but those would hardly be accounted novels. Some few new books have impressed me. For instance, there is “Legend,” by Clemence Dane, and “Mariposa,” by Henry Baerlein, which are excellent, and there is “Merton of the Movies,” a delightful book. But here another question pops up its head. What is the distinction between a novel and a romance? When we read carefully the above quotation from Mr Chavc’s article there arises in our mind a doubt. If the modern novel changed from a stagnant narrative, and became vital and beautiful, would it not become a romance? What are “The Country House” and “Victory” and “Sylvestre Bonnard?” Are they novels or romances? If they are not romances what is a romance? The life they deal with differs materially from that of “Kenilworth” or “The Throe Musketeers;” but is not the atmosphere of them all equally romantic? What v/o really want in a novel, aneieut or modern, is genius. Let us look back at one of the immortals: Defoe. Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe.” Is that a romance, or n novel? I answer that it is both. A realistic novel which never oversteps the probabilities, it is yet a glowing romance from the first page almost to the last. Defoe deals with the ordinary hazards and adventures of his time. Storms and shipwrecks, a sea fight, slavery, escape; a man, quite, an ordinary Englishman, cast away on an island, with Ills essays at carpentry, pottery, an house keeping, and yet it is as arresting and absorbing as a fairy talc. That is what I mean by genius. Look at Conrad's story, “The Return.” It is a description of a misunderstanding between a commonplace man and his commonplace wife; but it thrills us with the glamour of genius. Then there is “Legend,” which is a long discussion of an absent woman. She wrote a book, she got married, and her circle discuss her marriage aud her work, &r.d the hook is as romantic as “Jane Byre” or “Romeo and Juliet.” But whether it should be classed as novel or romance, who can say? To my mind the difference lietwecn the two kinds of story •corns to be one of genius. A novel is an unimaginative and a romance an imaginative work of fiction. I should class Galsworthy’s “Stoic” a* romance. John Masefield’s novel, ‘ Sard Harkcr,” I should call'melodrama. So I come back to my original claim that whnt Mr Chave is really asking the modern novelist to supply is genius; *nd how can he supply genius if he has

none? On the other hand, if he has genius any novel he writes, no matter what the subject or the period, will be suffused with the colour and the fragrance we call romance. Gilbert White could make a dissertation on different soils read like poetry, and we know what the imagination of Keats did with the song of the nightingale. He did, in effect, what John Masefield has done with a fox hunt, and what Defoe did with the plague, and Sterne with a flirtation in a glove shop. If the modern novel is “a stagnant narrative of sickening ineptitude” it is because the modern novelists are journeymen talc makers, and have not the magic of the masters. r I use the word magic advisedly. Defoe was a magician. Read “Captain Singleton.” The story is as real as Burnaby’s “Ride to Khiva.” It is told in a slovenly and discursive style, by an illiterate sailor and pirate. It describes, amongst ether incidents, a long trek across Africa. There is no descriptive writing, as moderns use it. Defoe never describes the sea, except to say that it i 3 rough or calm. He never mentions the sky. His scenery is mere topographical outline. There is not a line of love in the book. There is no hero and no heroine; no woman. He never describes his characters; we do not know whether they are dark or fair, tall or short, nor how they are dressed. He gives abundance of detail about food and arms and cargoes and money without ever being tedious or uninspired. And the net result is a thrilling romance made out of companies of ordinary men and the usual episodes of discovery ar.d travel. “Captain Singleton” can hardly claim to be a novel. It has a story; but no plot. But the genius of the author makes his inventions real and his realities romantic. Not one of his characters is heroic. They are for the most part rude, unintelligent pirates. There are no feats of daring. The men are fairly brave and their powers are humanly limited. Yet this book is as thrilling and dramatic as Alexander Dumas. I have read “Sard Harker” once and “Robinson Crusoe” perhaps a hundred times. I do not want Masefield’s novel any more; but I shall keep on reading Defoe. Yet Masefield sets out to be romantic, and Defoe—well, who knows what his purpose was? He was a magician. Thackeray wrote “Catherine” as a satire on Bulwer Lytton; he meant to strip all the romance from crime, and he produced a story as romantic as “Great Expectations.” De Quincey took a Newgate Calendar report of the Williams murders and turned that sordid and horrible story into a tale of terror and genius. He did for that series of crimes what Clara Butt has done fer the ballad of Barbara Allen : he turned a disgusting reality into tragic drama. Then there was John Bunyan. Ho actually made an immortal allegorical romance out of the wearisome and gloomy theology of the Puritans. Magic again; the magic of genius which like the sunshine can transform drab citv into a fairyland of silver roofs and golden steeples. Remember Mrs Gaskell’s “Cranford.” It is a legend of a prosaic and narrow English town of which her tender fancy has made a Hans Anderson village inhabitated by Dresden China figures. There is “The Altar of the Dead,” by Henry James. A man and a woman, unknown to each other, meet in a forgotten church in a London by-street, where they have gone to mourn a dead friend. Well, it is a work of the most delicate imaginative beauty, and I have read it many times. But no one but Henry James could have written it. And could any one but Conrad have made an epic romance out of the characters and material of “Typhoon.” A pedestrian, matter-of-fact skipper, a stupid mate, a cahstic Scotch engineer, a crowd of Chinese coolies, and a hurricane ; and the result is as romantic as •'Comus.” The moral of this rambling article, if it has a moral, would seem to be that we need not fret over the barrenness of our modern novels if we will take the trouble to re-read the old masters. Sterne and Rabelais, Dickens and Thackeray, Jane Austen and Captain Marryatt, Anatole France and Dumas, Walter Scott and Gilbert White, Sir Thomas Browne and John Selden, Bunyan, Carlyle, Defoe, Conrad, Henry James and Galsworthy, Peter Wilkins and the Book of Job, and all the poets and essayists and books of travel. Besides, T cannot admit the whole of the indictment brought by Mr Chave against the moderns. I have mentioned two whose books are works of genius, and I know several more who cannot be condemned as “stagnant narratives of sickening ineptitude.” Even the best sellers are not all ns bad ns that. Let me think. Would you call Anthony Hope a modern? “The Dolly Dialogues” is very dainty and charming. Conan Doyle, is he modern ? The Sherlock Holmes books and “The Lost World” are good reading. “Tho White Company” is a sterling romance. I read a book by Miss Irvine called “Out of the House,” which seemed to me to show rare originality and distinction. And what is the matter with Neil J,yonß? He is a short story writer, but docs he not oonjure romance out of the prosaic? Well, there it is, and if the worst comes to the worst, we can always fall back on Shakespeare.