TASTING HISTORY

Waipa Post, Volume 42, Issue 3304, 2 June 1931, Page 7

TASTING HISTORY

In common with all but the hard-est-headed persons, I have often wished that I could know how life tasted to the people of bygone days. Fortunately, their buildings, their pictures, their books and the chance relics which we find in museums do make it possible to imagine a great part of their life. After some time, indeed, a couple of words, if carefully savoured, can give us the feeling of a whole period; for the past, as we know from personal experience, is most vividly evoked by trifles. If, for example, we meditate upon mahogany and missionaries, we are borne back, as though in a barouche,to the heyday of Queen Victoria’s reign. Snuff-boxes and prize-fights, considered together will bring us a whiff of the Regency. When we learn that Dr Johnson stirred his tea with the forefinger, we look through a peephole at a large area of the eighteenth century. The knowledge that people in the boxes of a theatre amused themselves by spitting upon the people below them transports us in the twinkling of an eye to the days of Charles the Second. If we associate the words “ bear-baiting,” and “ madrigals,” we return to Elizabethan London, and to amplify our sense of that age we have only to remember that Shakespeare never handled a fork. With what formular will our great-grandchildren call up a ghost of the Nineteen-twen-ties ? Perhaps they will catch a feeling of that faded period when they repeat, like an incantation, the two words “ petrol ” and “ cynicism.”—Mr Clifford Bax, in the Fortnightly Review.