ODD PAPERS

Southland Times, Issue 20963, 21 December 1929, Page 13

ODD PAPERS

THE ROAD TO YESTERDAY

(By

"Q.R.S.”)

It was all very puzzling, indeed. I couldn’t see anything but a young man with

rather sad eyes and a morose expression. And he was undoubtedly thin too, so much so that he loked as if he really should be taking Malt Extract. Yet whenever this "Thrill”—as the village girls called him—crossed the -horizon or entered the room or drove past, in the trail behind him were they all left in a melted condition, if you understand what I mean. All the daughters of Eve in sight became dewy-eyed and clasped their hands and yearned and languished in the most astonishing manner. But .what made matters worse, I noticed it wasn’t only the flappers but also frustrated middle-aged women! who reacted in this surprising way. So as I contrived to arouse one or two of my acquaintances from the trance into which they had inevitably fallen, I inquired about the matter from them. “What is it?” I queried. “What is there about this man that does this to you?” The result of my question-

ing was to reduce them right back again into languishing. There was clasping of hands and heaving of great sighs while I applied smelling salts, and shook their shoulders. But I became tired of the fruitless inquisition and left them propped up against the shops in Dee Street.

These modern “Thrills” may be quite all right, but, for me, always, the “Thrill” of those days of Romance and Adventure. There is a phrase that I shall never forget. Years ago, when I was a small boy, it leaped out at me from between the covers of a book: “The field of the cloth of gold.” The book was in my grandfather’s library, and I am still grateful to the old gentleman for those seven words of sorcery. For a long time they were a sign and symbol of all that was romantic and alluring in a painted past. They led me to history and the historians —to Carlyle and Macaulay, to Prescott and Hume, to Motley and Green. Thereafter history was for me a delicious nightmare producing glorious chills and fevers, a confused and colourful drama of rogues and heroes, of haggard Kings and kindly vagabonds, of lovely, unfortunate women and brave Byronic men, of swords sparkling in moonlight and the hoofs of horses pounding through the night. I had found the magic glasses, the spectacles of glamour, and was forever lost in the wonder of that timeless mist we call history. I rejoiced along the road to yesterday. Chivalry was in my blood, and the fire and romance of Spain, and' the exotic mystery of Turkey and the untamed freedom of Roumania’s impenetrable forests. Probably I understood little of what I read. It was the romance of it all that captivated me. It was not that these things had ’happened and were true, for truth I conceived vaguely to be that which I chose to believe true. Untruth, in those days, would have pleased me just as well. So it came about that I was reading those writers of fiction who .had been similarly captured, for it. is surprising to : find how large a proportion of our best writers have entered the domain of Historical or SemiHistorical Romance. Hence I read Charles Reade, and Dumas the Elder, Sir Walter of Abbotsford, Disraeli, Charlotte Bronte, Hugo and, later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who is an infinitely greater novelist when writing of the middle ages than when writing of Sherlock Holmes. But, perhaps because I am now much older in years, I have tired a little of the fictionists. Dumas and Scott, I am sorry to say, have faded woefully. Again I am back where I began. One of the volumes of Carlyle’s “The French Revolution” is by my hand. “A Tale of Two Cities” is relegated to the background. I am reading history again, and no more delightful occupation can be imagined. The glamour with which my, youth surrounded it in some degree is gone. The dust, has settled. But what gorgeous realism that old romance has become! There is nothing to compare with it in any other deparment of literature. History proverbially leaves young people slightly cold. “Flaming Youth”—the phrase, not the book—has been, I think, for some time, a text for the literature of adolescence. But, happily, librarians testify that history and biography are coming back. The best selling books of the month, we hear, are books of incredible truth and bizarre reality—the lives and deeds of the greatest figures of the ages. Saints or sinners, there is more romance in their histories than in all of fiction.

For long the tendency was toward naturalism and contemporaneous bad manners, but are they not both in history? And in a degree that even the newspapers cannot out do ? If you desire the kitchen gossip of royalty, why not, read the story of Elizabeth of England, who made ruffs and hoopskirts the mode, the one to hide the warts ujion her neck, the other to conceal her two bowlegs? And if it be high romance that you prefer, where better may it be found than in the mystic drama of the Maid of Orleans, in the amazing epic of Napoleon—the “Man of destiny,” in the short and brilliant, tragedy of Major Andre? Surely Icon’s bold quest for the fountain of youth is a more glittering narrative than that same quest as reported of a modern Ponce seeking his dubious youth in a transplantation of glands? I suppose that, scientifically, the gland is of more significance than the fountain, but in literature the difference between them is all the difference between romance and bad journalism. However, I, personally, would write “Enter History, wiping his sword upon his cloak.” That would be my stage direction for the entrance of history in person. Give me those vanished years, the centuries of the sword—the rapier, delicate and deft. Duels, to-dAy, are so disheartening. In the headlines of Chicago or New York newspapers one reads “Bandits’ Duel In Dark With Police.” But the old years live as ever in history, and in the histories, for those who will turn back. In examining them the human interest is made intense and our sympathies easily awakened. Yes! give me Tolstoy and George Sand. What visions do the mere titles of the following works arouse in the minds of many of us: ‘The Last Days of Pompeii,” “Ben Hur,” “A Gentleman of France,” “The Master of Ballantrae” and even “For The Term of His Natural Life”!

Past years are always romantic, for they are coloured by man’s dream of “domnei” and of derring do. A volume of the moment may elicit his applause, but deep in his heart he would‘rather read about a roaring duel or an amour propre beneath a balcony than bother his head about his complexes or the misdemeanours of his neighbours. Is not: the reason quite obvious? The modern fellow is so civilized, so inhibited that he cannot himself draw sword from thigh to resent an injury, nor, without ridicule, can he salute his lady beneath her window. You village girls can call your male folk "Thrills” if you so desire, but I contend they are but invalids in wheel chairs, dreaming of adventure on perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn. And this, too, is realism and the highest reality, when those words are understood. •

You villagers who turn aside from history, thinking it the dull record of dull people, long dead and therefore unimpor-

tant, are missing a great deal of fine reading. Yes! You are missing a literature that no manufactured fiction from the beginning of books has been able to improve. Perhaps, some day, you will glance idly into some spirited history of the English people and forget .that, you were going to the pictures. It will be the beginning of a new chapter of living!