Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 314, 27 March 1928, Page 5

Mundane Musings

A Return to the Beautiful Post-war conventions have substituted slang for the romantic lore of love. The true lover nowadays calls his sweetheart “old thing,” and, as often as not, the young girl, full of concealed sentiment, responds with “silly ass.” Materially-minded people think this rough comradeship a vast improvement on the sentiment of other days, when the wooer was poetic, and compared his beloved to flowers and stars and other things of beauty, and the wooed was thrilled to the soul by such homage. Is it possible that modern lovers are merely playing a game, and disguising their real feelings behind a camouflage of cheery matter-of-factness? It is probable, anyhow. All through the ages the lover has worshipped at the shrine in which a very ordinary girl has occupied the niche of a goddess, and perhaps felt a bit like one. Sometimes, of course, the roles were reversed and an adoring nymph made herself a handmaiden for her divinity—a quite average young man. In any event a great deal of glamour was attached to the love-making. Today this glamour is non-existent. The contracting couples, at any rate, do their best to conceal it under a barrage of brusquerie. These young people are missing a lot. They are foolishly discarding the poetry of life. Every lover must be in his inmost heart a knight-errant. So. instead of lolling around in plus-fours talking current slang, he should be singing in praise of love to his queen of beauty. The girl is missing just as much, however apparent her limbs, however glaring her lip-stick mouth, however full of “back-chat” her responses. One of these days a very brave youth will arise who will wear his lady’s colours and hymn her loveliness and will inspire in the said lady a spirit to correspond with his splendid enthusiasms She will discard chaff and pay him with the golden grain of beautiful speech. That return to romanticism will subject the gallant pair to much goodnatured ridicule. It is only the fear of ridicule that prevents poetic lovemaking in the life of to-day. The pioneer couple, however, will blaze the trail for scores and hundreds of others. The world will be a much better place when poetry returns to it via romance. We may have no new Dantes and Petrarchs, but the Shelley and Keats, the Rossetti and Tennyson spirit will come back; and the enraptured lover will write lyrics on his own account about the sweetness of his fiancee’s brows or the splendour of her eyes. For some considerable time he will not be able to rhyme about the glory of her hair or the grace of her waist; yet a really romantic swain, rising to the full height of adoration, may even wax ecstatic about his mistress’s shingle; when she is in evening dress he may compose a triolet about her swan-white back. Yes, romantic love is bound to flame up again, however it has been damped by the cold water of common' sense.