RISE OF ROMANCE

Waipa Post, Volume 45, Issue 3211, 2 August 1932, Page 3

RISE OF ROMANCE

It is quite easy to define things we can see and touch, but it is a very different matter when we come to deal with emotional and imaginative experiences. Any one can describe to you a jester’s motley coat and bauble, but who will undertake to disengage and imprison within definite and precise terms the meaning of Humour or Romance? Many a person who declaims “I am incorrigibly romantic!” or who confesses “there is nothing romantic about me” would be brought to*a stand if asked to explain what he or she considered romantic. Besides, one has the feeling that if the questioner does not already know what Romance is no number of descriptive or defining words will enlighten him. There is not even any firm boundary betwixt Romance and Realism. Daniel /Defoe was a realist if ever there was one, but Robinson Crusoe’s recoiling from a footprint in the sand, or his discovery of the few things left on the wreck, is so thrillingly romantic that the scene abides in the mind’s eye for ever. The realism of some of the great French and Russian novelists brings with it such a profound sense of the significance and mystery of life that it satisfies the deepest romantic instinct in our breasts. In the wideslt sense everything is romantic which touches to finer issues our feelings and imagination. Most people will have it that Philology is a dismal science, a mere grubbing among the dry roots of language with nothing more exciting in it than Grimm’s Law. In reality it is not seldom a fascinating and illuminating study, as may be seen when one traces the history of the word “ romantic ” in the English language under the guidance of such an expert as Mr Logan Pearsall Smith, in whose hands “ Words and Idioms ” are by no means bloodless cateories. It is rather astonishing to discover that the adjective “ romantic ” is of purely English origin, and was adopted from the English into the other languages of Europe. It is by no means an old word either, though ‘ Romance ” itself goes back to the days of the troubadours, jongleurs, and minnesingers who used for their tales, not the polished Latin of the scholars and schoolmen, but the local and colloquial Roman dialects which became French, Spanish and Italian—the Romance languages. Shakespeare never called anything “ romantic ” or yet did Milton, for these coiners of words felt no need for it. The first recorded instance of its use occurs in a treatise on “ The Immortality of the Soul ” by Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, in 1659, where that mystic philosopher places Imagination in the fourth ventrical of the brain, the-chief seat of the soul, “ which is most free, such as we use in Romantick Inventions.” The term gained acceptance, because it expressed a new aspect of thought and feeling, which became general toward the middle of the seventeenth century a distaste for the old romances. In these mediaeval tales of chivalry, to use the words of Hazlitt, “The Palmerins of England and the Amadises of Gaul, made their way to their 1ni^ 1,68363 ’ hearts by slaying giants and taming dragons.” Less tolerable still were the prolix French tales of intrigue and gallantry, where heroes, impossibly brave, wooed ladies incredibly fair, which made the light reading of our early seventeenth century ancestors. With the dawn of reason all this knight-errantry, with its giants, magicians, enchanted castles, invulnerable men, and flying horses, and all the false and high-flown sentiments of Gallic tales were swept contemptuously . aside with the damning word “romantic.” In Spain Cervantes, and contemporary of Shakespeare, had performed the same office with his immortal “Don Quixote.” For over a century Englishmen were wont to fasten on whatever was chimerical, bombastic, childish, and supernatural the disparaging label “romantic” with the same flourish as later literary bill-stickers used to stick up the notice “ Victorian.” The Augean stables were cleansed. “Imagination,” said Thomas Warton, “ gave way to correctness,” and the Age of Reason gave us poetry full of bewigged platitudes, shallow criticism, and intolerable didacticism. A reaction was bound to be evoked, and the first index of this opposition is a new use of the term “ romantic.” Addison commended Milton’s account of Thammuz as “finely romantic,” and men like Thomson of “ The Seasons ” turned back to the romantic Spenser, admitting the absurdity, yet confessing the fascinaltion that “ the armoury of invincible knights of old ” exercised upon the imagination. More confidently men began to call places romantic. Samuel Pepys, who never did things by halves, called Windsor “ the most romantique castle which is in the world and soon people were calling mountains, forests, seashores, pastoral plains, all waste and solitary places romantic. Thus half unconsciously a newly awakened love for wild noture expressed itself. Evelyn had called the Alps “the rubbish-

heaps of Creation,” but at their base Rousseau was now giving currency to this English attribute for everything that stirred up his literary emotion. In Germany old friendships were damaged in wordy strife between Classicists and Romanticists as if the ancients were on one side of the debate. If the Odyssey of Homer is not romantic what is? Most literary controversies arise because the shield has two sides, even the shield of Achilles. The Romantic Movement came in like a tide and submerged all polemics. The only one way to abolish Romance is to gain full knowledge and absolute certainty about human life and experience. As things stand the mystery of life shows no signs of dissolving. We are for ever skirting the perilous edge of the unknown. Life continues to be a romantic adventure. “ Drama,” said Stevenson, “ is the poetry of conduct; Romance is the poetry of circumstance.” But this is too antithetical to be completely true. Yet is points to the leading feature of Romance, its abundance of incident, and it is to satisfy this hunger for exciting incident that all the great romances have been written, from Homer to Joseph Conrad. The oldest of these is Greek — the epic tale of the wandering Ulysses. The next is British—the legend of Arthur and his Round Table. Another is Oriental—the product of Arabian storytellers. And what is “ Don Quixote,” where Cervantes laughs at the coxcombry of the old chivalry, but a greater romance than the romances which the temper of his times, no less than pastoral concern of the good cure, had consigned to the flames?