Romance, Farewell!

WHY should the spirit of mortal be proud? The question has an air of finality about it which would suggest that there is no reason in the world, but it is odd what pretexts we offer for an indulgence in this deadly sin. For some reason, we are usually proudest of those virtues which we do not possess, and next of those for which we are in no wise responsible : a man will boast of his nationality or his pedigree, but be silent about his prowess in battle ; or a woman may be vain of her beauty, but blush when you mention her charities. We are all proud of the town we were born in ; if we are Westerners, we are proud of that, and if Easterners, then prouder still of tliatr But most fantastic of all, we are proud of the century we happen to live in. This last truly false pride is fed and bolstered by Mr. Kipling, who celebrates with most enthusiasm these our involuntary glories, and has brought us fairly to plume ourselves on having chosen to be born into the Anglo-Saxon race and to grow up in the nineteenth century; while, by voicing for us the lyrics of whirring wheels, he has even flattered us into believing ours a romantic age.

So it lias become the fashion to deride the “ good old times,” and to label crabbed and ill-tempered, or else sentimental, the carping critic who harks back to them with plaintive note, and longs for sinrplicity and leisure and escape from a too rapid civilization. It is all very well, he is reminded, to play at being primitive, like Marie Antoinette tasting the joys of milkmaid life out in the side yard of her own palace; but how, pray, would he like to be leisurely and simple in a draughty house, without hot and cold water, in a world innocent of telegraphs and ocean liners?

And certainly, if he would be comfortable, I admit he would best stay snug in the year 1901 and enjoy good plumbing and Pullman cars; but if it be romance, and not comfort, to which he is casting backward looks, then, notwithstanding Mr. Kipling, I must range myself on the critic’s side. No doubt there is poetry in a machine age, and “ all unseen romance brings up the nine fifteen; ” but to the plain person romance seems to lie farther afield, and to live always in the place that is not here, and the time that is not now. So to a machine age machinery is not romantic ; and though it will probably have a fine glamour in perspective a hundred years hence, and the railway will then look as romantic as does the sedan chair now, still, to most of us, who must regretfully disclaim the poet’s insight, the convenient is not now heroic, and modern improvements would be a dreadful impertinence in the Forest of Arden. Should I be alone in the confession that I blench at the thought of George Washington or Joan of Arc astride a bicycle ? Or would it please even Mr. Kipling to picture the Lady of the Lake shooting across Loch Lomond with an electric motor in her shallop, or the Last Minstrel chanting his Lay to the faultily faultless pianola ?

We are often told that American life is matter of fact and prosaic, and in the intervals of denying it try to account for it by saying that America is very young. But perhaps it is also because America has too many modern improvements. There is something wrong with a nation whose tourist pilgrims quarrel with a palace on the Grand Canal because it does not have electric light and porcelain bathtubs. We could scarcely be depended upon to make the gallant choice of the single year of Europe, if we were sure that Cathay was well ventilated and comfortable; we burn incense to the modern God from the Machine, and he runs not only our factories, but our households.

I have in mind a lovely country place, green and flowery with pretty airs of rusticity, but which is a machine-run Arcady after all, where you would have far to seek to prove those pleasures once praised in vain by the passionate shepherd. The cot whither he beckoned his love was never so convenient — nor so noisy. There is the water pump, whose powerful engine puffs all day long with a busy, jolty little puff, putting to shame the distant windmill, — so picturesque and incompetent with its drooping sails, — and far more efficient than the old oaken water bucket, though not so likely to have a poem written about it; there are the gas machine (for the improved Eden does not get on with candles), the electric fan, and the telephone ; the ice-cream freezer sends up its grinding bass, a typewriter clicks and clangs, and a clavier contributes its regular drip-drip, like a systematized rainstorm; while the sailboat and the horse — last survivals from a more heroic age ! — are abandoned for the gasoline launch with its popping engine and the scent in its wake, and the automobile which clatters through the country landscape, an anachronism and a blot. Admirably reliable and laborsaving, all these ; but they make life seem somewhat diagrammatic, and the last piquant element of uncertainty is removed by an almanac so accurate as to suggest the discouraging idea that even the weather is run on scheduled time.

And now I ask humbly, How can one idle and know that it is August, in such an atmosphere of briskness, punctuality, and time-tables ? Is it well to run even our holidays and pleasure places by machinery, and are romance and atmosphere possible to a people whose very country life is drilled into regularity and speed, with never a lazy spot to dream in ? Though we ourselves would prefer to stay in the present, and should be very much bored at having to be a lady in a ballad, still daily life was surely more poetic when Elaine sat at her frame in her chamber up a tower to the east, and ladies could sit lang, lang with their fans intil their hands, and have nothing else to do. There is something bigoted in our aggressive loyalty to our own time ; for one age differeth from another in glory, and we cannot have the glory of both past and present. And if the glory of the increasing past be romance, and the king is never to be seen to-day, then they need not be chidden that go a-seeking him in the times and places that are “ far from this our war.”