A Novelist on Novels Part 8

Romance is a maligned word, debased to fit any calf-love; romance is pinkish, or bluish, tender, feeble, and ends in orange blossom, or, as the case may be, tears by the side of mother's grave. That is the romance of the provincial touring company. True romance is virile, generous, and its voice is as that of the trumpet. Romance is the wage of the watcher, who with ever-open eyes scans the boundless air in eternal expectation that a thing unknown will appear. Romance is the quest of the unknown thing; it is Don Quixote riding Rozinante, Vasco da Gama for the first time pa.s.sing the Cape; romance is every little boy who dug in the back garden in the hope of reaching the antipodes. For the romantic goal is always on the other side of the hill; everlastingly we seek it in love, for the spirit of the loved thing is on the other side of the hill, because, more exactly, what we seek is on the other side of ourselves.

In our modern world it is possible to lead the romantic life, even though the equator and the poles be accessible to the touring agencies, even though most loves be contracts, for we live in times of disturbance, where war, international and civil holds its sway, where democracies stir, where men are exalted and abased. All times, no doubt, were stirring, and after the fall of the Roman Empire, they followed almost everywhere the same course. After the invasion of the barbarians, romance fell into the hands of the rough knights, who established order by the sword; it pa.s.sed to the more spiritual knights, who went forth on the Crusade; then the kings dominated the knights, creating States, while the citizens raised their banners and exacted equality with kings; the age of exploration came, the triumph of the merchant in India, Virginia, Hudson's Bay; wealth arose, an ambitious foe of royal and aristocratic power. Then came the revolutions, the American, the French, the European struggle of 1848, the grand battle against slavery, culminating in the United States. That was romance, all that excitement, ambition, achievement, carrying its men high. If citizen slays aristocrat, if rich man slays labour, now labour may slay rich man.

Divisions of blood have gone and every day fall lower, as the Portuguese, the Chinese, the Russians set up republican states where no blood is blue. That is not the end, for the modern division is economic, and the romance of mankind will be the establishment of states where strife will kill strife, where tolerance if not justice can reign, where discontent will give way to a content not ign.o.ble.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many romantic lives have been led; startling persons have risen like meteors, and a few still burn like suns. Men like Cecil Rhodes, like Mr Lloyd George, like President Carranza, Mr Hearst, Mr Leiter, Mr Rockefeller, Prince Kropotkin, have lived startling lives of contest and desire. In these movements still obscure, where labour will array itself against wealth, where hideous, tyrannic things will be done in the name of liberty, where hatred will smooth the path to love, I think there will be extraordinary careers because nothing is impossible to men, and a few things may become possible to women. Many say too lightly that opportunity is not as great as under Elizabeth; they forget, that if the arts are sick, other careers are open; while one man could expect coronation by Elizabeth, many can now aim at the high crown of the love or hatred of Demos.

Republics, too, can have their Rasputins.

The future of genius lies with science and the State, because the State has effected a corner in power and romance. For art and letters there is little hope in a growingly mechanical civilisation, because the modern powerful depend upon the mob and not upon each other; therefore, as Napoleon said, they must be a little like the mob--be the super-mob. In their view, as in the view of those who follow them, art cannot rival money and domination. The mob hates the arts whenever they rise high, for the arts can be felt, but not understood; at other times it scorns them. Therefore, the arts must suffer from the atmosphere of indifference they must breathe. They will not vanish, for mankind needs always to express itself, its aspiration, its content, its discontent; those three can be expressed only in the arts. But this does not mean that the arts can aspire to thrones or be worthy of them; as science and the State dwarf them, they must become little stimulants, sing little songs that will less and less be heard amid the roar of the spinning world.

GLASGOW: W. COLLINS SONS AND CO. LTD.

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