13J 
 1581 
 
 UC-NRLF 
 
 EflS 532 
 
 
 
GIFT OF 
 Gladys Isaacson 
 
FELLOWSHIP BOOKS 
 
 THE QUEST OF 
 THE IDEAL 
 
 COPYRIGHT 1913 
 
 BY E. P. DUTTON & CO. 
 
THE QUEST OF 
 THE IDEAL 
 
 GIFT Off 
 GLADYS fSAACSON 
 
(jhose tnoiwdts to me were 
 W tnee it/ere osiers oowea. 
 
 I. THE CHARM OF THE WORD 
 
 THE word "ideal" is still beautiful, 
 though it is in danger of being hor- 
 ribly misused. It will be a pity if it 
 is cheapened out of existence. I know of 
 none that can take its place. Its roots strike 
 deep into the past. It has grown up like a 
 lily from an immemorial world. It is one of 
 the fairest things among us and very nearly 
 the most valuable. 
 
 <% Perhaps we shall appreciate it more if we 
 call up some of its companions, if we can 
 glance backwards at its origin; but it is no 
 easy matter to get at the real source. When 
 did the first faint conception of a possible 
 ideal arise in any mind? .Can any one sur- 
 prise the moment of the capture of an idea, 
 
' : ; <?f;tbe birth 1 of a word: what is a thought be- 
 ' f6re : if ; iS l thought? 
 
 ^ Phantoms arise, formless, blown like smoke 
 along the far horizons of the mind. Day 
 by day, night after night, the mind pursues 
 the half-seen chase; a shadowy huntsman 
 following a shadowy stag where hunter 
 and hunted and forest are one. At last one 
 mind more powerful than the rest, sees 
 more clearly, and hunts more swiftly; the 
 idea is grasped, a name is fixed upon it, and 
 the world has a new word for its use; the 
 mind of the world is the wiser by a 
 thought. 
 
 ^ Who can say how old is the Greek word 
 c?8o>, to perceive, to know? 
 ^fe Less old is the Greek word ffiea, an idea, 
 form, appearance; which, unlike our English 
 equivalent, may mean the appearance of a 
 thought within the borders of the mind, or 
 of form without; "that which is perceived," 
 in fact; either without as form, or within, 
 as thought. It is well to keep the inter- 
 changeable nature of both these appearances 
 clearly before the mind. Thought is form of 
 a kind. Form often springs from thought. 
 Here we begin to perceive the birth-right of 
 2 
 
the strong mind upon whose movements wait 
 the multiplicities of form. 
 *fc 8os is another of these words, not very 
 different in its meaning from idea. 8a>Aov is 
 likewise a kindred word; first it meant a 
 phantom; an appearance which had no real 
 existence, then it was by a curious twist of 
 the mind fastened on the solid reflection of a 
 false idea of the divine Spirit, an idol. 
 <Sfc These are fine words ; there is music in the 
 sound of them, the music of the Spring- 
 time of the mind. They have the sound of 
 breaking chains, of the bursting of the 
 sheath. From them we learn the ages-old 
 action of the human mind at its greatest 
 moments. 
 
 tifc It was probably Plato who gave us our 
 * earliest conception of the ideal. He had a 
 * notion of a perfect pattern of everything 
 earthly subsisting somewhere in a heavenly 
 country. He first put in words what we all 
 feel and know. 
 
 Sfe And we owe him a debt; and we owe the 
 poor misused word a debt. For the belief 
 in a fixed good, not seen, but pictured as ex- 
 isting across the borders of the seen and con- 
 trasting with its misery or futility is one of 
 3 
 
the most powerful weapons ever put into the 
 hand of man. 
 
 II. THE PARADISAIC DREAM 
 
 1 THE ideal first sprang into life from the 
 contact with pain on one hand and beauty 
 on the other; with one added ingredient 
 which I shall mention later on. 
 fife Did some fearful pterodactyl, flying 
 against the sunset in the effort to escape 
 from another swifter than he, dream of a 
 warm and gorgeous atmosphere where hor- 
 rible combats would be no longer a necessity 
 of his life? Did a wounded brontosaurus 
 thundering in his swamp, dream, as he lifted 
 his head from the mud, of placid lakes where 
 unharmed he might trumpet to his mate and 
 she to him? Paradise is always compounded 
 of the finest moments of life as it is known 
 and experienced by the dreamer. 
 fife At first, while man was in his wild state, 
 when the earth was untamed and the other 
 creatures were mightier than he, his life was 
 a state of fear, a state it is difficult for us to 
 have any conception of. The rabbit hunted 
 by the weasel knows it; so does the small bird 
 under the shadow of the hawk. Out of this 
 
state Man had to rise by his own savage effort. 
 By killing and slaying and mastering the 
 earth, that old fierce and tormented one has 
 gained a measure of peace for his kind. But 
 it is along this fearful path men have come: 
 the dream has been hard to rescue, hard to 
 hold by, in a world ruled by blood and lust 
 and fear. 
 
 *% Our more gentle ideals were impossible in 
 that old world. Men fashioned their heav- 
 ens out of the best moments they knew. 
 Remember those Northern warriors who lived 
 by slaughter, who came out of their frosty 
 north, terror running before them, and blood 
 behind. Their heaven was pictured as a dark 
 hall where they might sit drinking strong 
 mead from the skulls of their enemies. And 
 yet these terrible ones were the sons of God 
 as well as we ; they knew the love of mate and 
 child; they felt the Breath within the soul; 
 they lived between the splendour of the waves 
 and the blue tent of the open sky. 
 % The Turkish Heaven is not a much better 
 place, less fierce, more sensual: set the para- 
 dise of the cold north against the paradise of 
 the warm south; the enemy's skull against 
 the plump houri, and choose between if you 
 5 *fc can. 
 
can. Better than either appears the Indian's 
 dream of the wide prairie and the happy 
 hunter. All the primitive heavens are built 
 on these models. The paradise of the prairie 
 flower would be the silent rolling sea of flower 
 and leaf with neither stamping hoof nor rend- 
 ing teeth to come next or nigh. The paradise 
 of hoof and horn would be the wide green 
 world vexed neither by hunter nor beast of 
 prey. The paradise of the hunter includes 
 the travail of the herd. 
 
 III. THE RULER OF THE DREAM 
 
 <% THE dream of Paradise was begotten, 
 was it not, of pain on the one hand and joy 
 on the other. But there was a third greater 
 contributing cause, one that is an eternal puz- 
 zle to express; it is at once the oldest thing 
 in life and the most elusive; the most hack- 
 neyed, the least understood ; the most familiar, 
 the most mysterious; the most talked about, 
 the least regarded; and that is the Source of 
 Inspiration, the Feeder of the Soul. None 
 of us, not the deepest spirited, understand it. 
 No one can explain it, though temples in- 
 numerable have been built to house it and 
 millions of men's lives have been spent in 
 6 
 
discoursing of it. Still the mystery hangs 
 there, our chiefest concern, our chiefest 
 delight, incomprehensible always, always 
 adored. 
 
 *fc What is it, whence is it, this wonder? 
 How many names have been given to it, both 
 on this star and on many another? Om, 
 Allah, Zeus, Spiritus Sanctus, The First 
 Cause, The Light Eternal, The Word. By 
 this and many and other strange names men 
 have tried to express this light and law: 
 countless millions of women and men have at- 
 tempted to explore its nature and faculties; 
 they have tied it up tight in creeds and books ; 
 they have leaped on their altars and cried and 
 cut themselves, ay and other people too, with 
 knives ; and the mystery still hangs there, un- 
 thinkable, not to be imprisoned, in nature and 
 faculties always the same. 
 <% Always the same: the same as it broods 
 over the plunging of the fiery gulfs of the far 
 suns ; the same as it lights the staggering beetle 
 to its food along the moss; the same on the 
 waste moor and in the crowded church; the 
 same upon the forehead of the Saint and on 
 this earth before ever a man was. 
 *fc It was the dim perception of the presence 
 7 S&of 
 
of this Spirit that began to enter into and 
 colour people's notions of paradise. It must 
 evidently rule there since the earth was not 
 without it. Those who understand nature 
 know that the green kingdoms of the earth 
 live under this law: that the footprints of the 
 Unknowable One are to be found along the 
 fields and in the wood, when they are missed 
 from the dwellings of men. That is why the 
 shepherd on the hills, the old wife at her cot- 
 tage door, the negro in the cotton field, some- 
 times collect a pure wisdom more valuable 
 than the deliberate intelligence of books. 
 Sfe Therefore since this irrefutable Law reigns 
 over the earth, animating the least vital, and 
 leaping into glory in the most splendid mo- 
 ments of its most splendid creatures, how 
 should Paradise be without that sweetness, 
 better than honey to the simple soul? 
 
 IV. THE LABOURER 
 
 *fc THE Idealist stands with feet planted in 
 the original clay from which he sprang. 
 Above him is his dream. In his heart is a 
 desire more or less strong to bring the actual 
 into some likeness of the dream. The tool 
 that is to shape out in this intractable earth 
 8 
 
the ideal conscience at the root of him and 
 thus connect the two is nothing but his will 
 and his right hand. As a man fashions a gar- 
 den out of rough ground, so must the idealist 
 seize upon the material of life that is nearest 
 to him ; so that at long last his eyes may look 
 on what the eyes of his soul have beheld from 
 the beginning. This is creator's work, tre- 
 mendous work, for the raw material of life is 
 stubborn and rude and hard ; rude and hard 
 enough to have broken many and many a 
 great heart. Magnificent as they are, the 
 laws that bind and shape this raw material of 
 life are rude and hard also. 
 .*fe Which of us that has eyes to see and the 
 power of thought but has staggered at that 
 first law that life feeds on life? So terrible is 
 it that men have covered it up and cloaked it, 
 hiding it away from themselves and each 
 other. Not one in a hundred dares to face it; 
 each of us has his own brightly coloured 
 screen, painted all over with impossible and 
 beautiful designs, to put up to hide the truth. 
 V& The true idealist is he who does not fear 
 the truth, who takes the bitterest truth as the 
 salted bread between his teeth and gets nour- 
 ishment thereby. 
 
 9 ^$s How 
 
% How can the gardener turn the waste to 
 blossom unless he knows of the frost and the 
 tempest, the blight and the worm? 
 Sfc So must the idealist ponder well the whole 
 picture of his dream, and the nature of his 
 materials before he can get to work. The 
 more widely he can cast his thought, the more 
 sane and firm will his ideals be. The more 
 thorough his knowledge, the less will be his 
 fear of failure. 
 
 <% We see then what enormous qualities the 
 quest of the Ideal demands to-day; a purity 
 and a devotion to the dream as absolute as 
 that of the heroes of the San Graal, a power 
 of clear thought that shrinks from no truth, 
 that seeks everywhere the essences of things, 
 that examines the nature and properties of 
 those appearances that make up his surround- 
 ings : and besides, a strong right hand and the 
 will to labour in obedience to the Law that 
 commands the creation of order and beauty. 
 
 V. THE GARDEN 
 
 *fe I HAD almost said that the will to labour 
 and the power of the will, were the best quali- 
 ties of the idealist; forgetting that they must 
 always come second to the imaginative powers 
 10 
 
of the soul. But even in this kingdom of the 
 soul little is to be got without labour. 
 *fc Call the Soul a garden as they do on the 
 backs of the prayer books and then look how 
 heavy is the work. There is the soil full of 
 ugly primitive worms and grubs and horned 
 things struggling up from below. How must 
 Will the Gardener bend and stoop and hoe 
 and scratch to keep under these primitive ap- 
 pearances! There are the flowers, the lovely 
 virtues, all in rows, shedding a sweet savour; 
 how soon they wilt and wither and the blos- 
 soms fall; what great knowledge must the 
 Gardener have of their natures and how un- 
 tiringly must he tend them. There are the 
 weeds with their inevitable secret growth; 
 God knows how a whole crop may spring up 
 in the heart of a morning. There is the rain; 
 alas for our tears, but alas for the dry heart 
 that has never known a sorrow. There is the 
 awful mystery of the recurring visits of the 
 sunlight: the flowers stretching towards it 
 through the night and spreading their cups 
 in the morning. Without it they are not, be- 
 cause of it they are. How did the bud know 
 as it slept through the darkness that in the 
 morning it would be blest? 
 
fife When the mysterious sunlight and the good 
 soil and the hand of the Gardener have done 
 their work and rendered fruitful the garden 
 of the Soul, why then the work of the ideal- 
 ist is only beginning. 
 
 fife As the engraver cuts the well imagined pic- 
 ture into steel or copper, so must the idealist 
 reproduce in the clay on which he stands, 
 in stones and mortar and flesh and blood, the 
 features of his dream. 
 
 YI. ON THE MANIPULATING OF 
 MATTER BY SPIRIT 
 
 fife THERE is a relation between the para- 
 disaic dream and the crude terrors of the ma- 
 terial life; the link is the desire of the human 
 creature to realise the dream within the limits 
 of his material conditioning. The happy 
 man is he who is able to shape out a course 
 for his thought and actions which is fitted to 
 bring about an agreement between Heaven 
 and earth, fitted to induce the dream to. take 
 up its abode within the bondage of matter. 
 fife The unhappy man is he who fails; per- 
 haps through some lack of judgment or fac- 
 ulty or pure strength. A greater than Sam- 
 12 
 
son is wanted for this fight, in which God 
 Himself is so often worsted. 
 *fe For if there is one thing but too patent, 
 it is that matter is capable of choking spirit; 
 that Spirit has an almost insuperable difficulty 
 in controlling matter. With her soft breath 
 and tenuous hands the soul labours at her 
 tremendous task of creating order and beauty 
 out of chaos: often, too often the breath is 
 sighed away, and hardly a line or mark is left 
 to tell she has been there. For long enough 
 spirit has been struggling in the grip of mat- 
 ter; here and there emerging in a great and 
 noble intelligence, continually thrust back and 
 held down. 
 
 % How much spirit was there in the matter 
 of the plecthyosaurus as he crawled on to the 
 mud bank to lie in the sun? Consider the 
 patience of the Mighty One who presided at 
 his birth. What of the infant born yesterday 
 into a slum to which the mud of the reptile is 
 a garden born to a stricken mother and a 
 hypothetical father ; no room indeed for it and 
 no such gentle receptacle as a manger; an old 
 black cloth for all its swaddling clothes. 
 Consider the patience of the Mighty One who 
 presides at that birth also! How much 
 13 ^s chance 
 
chance has that small being of conquering the 
 varieties of matter by which it is surrounded, 
 and of emerging into an ideal world? 
 Sfe There is infinite value in such spectacles 
 for us; no true thing is ever shirked or put 
 away in the dark that does not breed a rotten 
 spot in thought and a corresponding feeble- 
 ness of life. 
 
 % If spirit is here overwhelmed, and the 
 idealists are the soldiers of the Spirit, the 
 more need for their swords. 
 <% If once the doctrine of an Omnipotence 
 that could shape matter and life at will, and 
 does not, were overthrown, how freely might 
 you breathe I How freely act! We have 
 done with the idea of an Omnipotent who 
 might and could help and cure but will not. 
 No more can the unhappy curse God and die. 
 The responsibility is now transferred. 
 Sfc We the ungrateful ones! We the sinners! 
 We the blind! We the deaf who have 
 stopped our ears to the music of the heavenly 
 command that bids us live for Service! We 
 the cold hearted that leave the Blessed One 
 to suffer and die afresh each day in our hid- 
 eous streets and lanes! 
 <% Gone the Hebrew ideal of the Angry Je- 
 
 14 
 
hovah fighting and smiting and breaking his 
 enemy's teeth at random! 
 ^fe Gone the mediaeval Almighty, with his 
 inscrutable code of morals, afflicting the inno- 
 cent with misery, pains, and diseases, and for 
 their good! 
 
 fife The problems solved that gave many of 
 us a wet pillow before morning! 
 fife All the world as a field of action when 
 each man and woman and child stands forth 
 as a helper in the new old crusade! 
 fife Consider then how bright a responsibility 
 falls into the hand of man. 
 fife Loud and very loud the voice of the Beau- 
 tiful One has been preaching in our ears; 
 only a few of us have moved at all in answer. 
 With many-coloured and many-shaped beau- 
 ties He drapes every foot of earth, every hedge 
 and ditch side. We answer by defiling His 
 earth with hideous erections and stupid un- 
 cleanness. He allows every one of us a share 
 in His own creator spirit and many of us an- 
 swer by creating vileness. 
 fife Think of the joy of heart of each child 
 born into the splendour of the new ideal. 
 Every one with the love of the Unseeable One 
 in his heart, every one with the love of his 
 15 <% fellow 
 
fellow men, every one with a sword of light 
 in his hand to liberate the Good Spirit of 
 order and grace, to work in the service of this 
 Spirit till the earth blooms as a garden. 
 fife Even now any one can see how fast is the 
 advance; it is certain that we are growing 
 daily more powerful in dealing with matter. 
 The angels of life have now at their disposal 
 an electric current that thrills round the 
 Earth. When this weapon is in the hands of 
 the great ones great things will come into be- 
 ing. 
 
 fife Great things are being done to-day. I 
 have seen a clear spirit, grown powerful, shin- 
 ing like a sun, smoothing out the most diffi- 
 cult life, bringing marvels to light about it; 
 shape after shape of beauty rising up around 
 it in ever increasing circles that grew finally 
 world-wide. 
 
 ^s It seems as though no limit could be set 
 to the operations in matter of the powerful 
 soul. 
 
 VII. CONDUCTORS OF THE IDEAL 
 
 "K ALL the lovers of heavenly things know 
 that there is a moment when illumination 
 16 
 
comes as suddenly, passing as quickly as a 
 bird that crosses the sky. There is no question 
 but that these moments of inspiration are, to 
 those who have known them, the greatest good 
 in life. They bring ecstasy, which means 
 simply a getting out of the body. 
 ffe Any one who has felt this ecstasy in either 
 a greater or a lesser degree must desire to ex- 
 perience it again; for this reason all the ave- 
 nues to the ideal are explored. 
 fife Which are these avenues? Music is one. 
 Painting another. Poetry. Wine perhaps? 
 Or a fine day. Or a child's face. Boehme 
 found his vision of heaven in a pewter plate. 
 "Sitting one day in his room his eye" (Boehme 
 the shoemaker's) "fell on a burnished pewter 
 dish which reflected the sunshine with such 
 marvellous splendour, that he fell into an in- 
 ward ecstasy and it seemed to him that he 
 could now look into the principles and deepest 
 foundations of things. He believed that it 
 was only a fancy and in order to banish it 
 from his mind went out upon the green. But 
 here he remarked that he gazed into the very 
 heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and 
 that actual nature harmonised with what he 
 had inwardly seen. He said nothing about 
 17 fife this 
 
this to any one, but praised and thanked God 
 in silence." 
 
 fife We cannot all have the insight of a 
 Boehme, and see Paradise in a pewter plate; 
 but we all of us can know ecstasy, even heav- 
 enly ecstasy and many and many are the roads 
 by which we see it. For pure ecstasy brings 
 wisdom, knowledge and peace. 
 fife Men have built churches in order to cap- 
 ture this ideal vision; all the resources of 
 architecture, colour, light, sound and even 
 perfume have been ransacked to this end. 
 Along these many paths all converging to one 
 point the vision comes to many. 
 fife Others find that the divine voice is silent 
 for them in the midst of so much human art 
 and artifice. They leave the church with its 
 linking arches and painted shadows, its in- 
 cense and singing of boys and strive to make 
 their souls in night and darkness, on the hill- 
 side, by the sea, or in the still room. Others 
 again seek this light in the eyes of their fellow 
 men; in the hearts and the lives and the in- 
 tellects of men they find the highest expression 
 of all forms of life; and in the service of the 
 ideal in mankind they lose and find them- 
 selves. 
 18 
 
fife Some seek the vision of the Graal by the 
 road of the cultivation of the inner self ; every- 
 thing goes down before that tremendous pre- 
 occupation homely life and love and simple 
 ways, all appetite, joys of the senses, claims of 
 their fellow men: nothing matters to them 
 but the call that resounds through the emptied 
 spaces of their souls. 
 
 fife Set against these the men who search for 
 the ideal by the road of the senses. There is 
 many a cruel lover who tests and tries and 
 flings away hearts who in some dim blind way 
 is searching for the one pure gem that he has 
 figured to himself in his dreams. There are 
 some who even in their lust are seekers; 
 strange and contradictory as that may seem. 
 fife There is another sort still who have been 
 in love with an imagined beauty and break 
 their hearts because the primitive laws of life 
 are so fierce, so much at war with the features 
 of their dream. These are the people of large 
 hearts, brains and appetites who are strong 
 enough to shake off traditions of thought, 
 keen enough to see the limitations of reality, 
 not strong enough of will and not wise enough 
 to devise a means of bringing the two, the 
 ideal thought and the obstinate material of 
 19 fc life, 
 
life, into harmony. These are the sort who 
 are always hoping for an imagined good by 
 the road of excess ; who fly to the never ending 
 and quite certain consolation of satisfying 
 their appetites; certain at least as long as their 
 appetites last. How many of this sort have 
 not used whisky as a refuge from thought? 
 That drunken woman with her hat on one side, 
 that man rolling home and singing as he goes, 
 they may be idealists at heart; neither you nor 
 I can tell. 
 
 ^s It is a wise man that can say where appe- 
 tite ends and the search for the ideal begins. 
 The fact is, there is no division. Nose, 
 tongue, hand, eye and ear; ay and the whole 
 body; such are the roads by which the divine 
 comes to man. There is no getting out of the 
 body for long, at least. The more necessary 
 that it should be clean: that a seal should be 
 set upon each gateway, that the Blessed One 
 may not falter at any entrance, nor be turned 
 away at the doors. 
 
 VIII. THE BASIS OF THE IDEAL 
 A Chapter not to be read in a drawing-room 
 ^ CAN it be that the mediaeval hell was a 
 more philosophic idea than it has of late 
 20 
 
gained credit for? It seems to have ex- 
 pressed something that we try to leave out; 
 it expressed the terror of life, the central fires, 
 the split lightning in the hand of Jove. 
 % We live a strange life nowadays; we are 
 huddled together in our massed cities, pro- 
 tected from Nature's boldness by our clever 
 inventions ; so it comes that we are apt to for- 
 get the hole of the pit whence we are digged. 
 We like to think of Nature and the God in 
 Nature as something pitiful, gentle and se- 
 rene as a good woman ordering her house. 
 But the laws of Nature are not so; it is right 
 that we should know it. 
 % It is good for us sometimes to detach our- 
 selves from the every-day conditions of our 
 daily life, to look down into the roots and 
 foundations of our being and our thoughts. 
 A down pillow and a screen is that what 
 we are wanting; or is it a glimpse of the 
 truth; sweet or bitter, what matter so it be 
 the truth? It is good for us to have all our 
 down pillows snatched away and to be forced 
 from a warm fireside out into the open air, 
 even if it is to face the rain and the storm. 
 Sfc The divine Beatrice went down into hell ; 
 so should we all for a season, for heaven rests 
 21 ^3 upon 
 
upon hell of a sort. Our very peace and our 
 ideals depend upon the balance of turbulent 
 forces. The sunlight by which we live is an 
 emanation from an appalling and unthinkable 
 chaos of flame. 
 
 Sfe When we look at the welter out of which 
 we have risen, we see man then for what he 
 is, the most cruel, lustful and bloody of all 
 the beasts; and wonder of wonders the most 
 godlike too. 
 
 % Many men and most women would rather 
 not look on these things at all. Their creed 
 is that the evil that is not spoken of, is not 
 there. They will sin as it were behind the 
 hand. The good women who do not sin, pre- 
 tend they know nothing. They have even 
 elevated their determined ignorance into a 
 virtue. 
 
 % To these good women one might say that 
 Beatrice still shone in hell, that she emerged 
 thence more lovely and more wise. A fig for 
 drawing-room pretences. It is as though our 
 city fathers were too pure-minded to look into 
 the city sewers; and the consequences, moral 
 and physical, might make a match of it. No ; 
 we cannot be wise unless we look at life as a 
 whole. The more the boundaries of our con- 
 22 
 
sciousness are enlarged, the saner becomes our 
 attitude towards life ; the more wisely we shall 
 deal with the seething of the life force that 
 goes on at our doors, and within them. 
 *fc All this our modern existence tends to sup- 
 press. How many a hot young man has been 
 driven from his home by the too much bread 
 and milk, by the ignoring of the world, the 
 flesh and the devil whose voices are roaring 
 in his ears. 
 
 *fe As four walls and a lighted hearth will 
 shut out night, storm and cold, so does our 
 soft primness seek to cover away the turbu- 
 lence of life. 
 
 % Revolt, rage, lust, fear and pain, they are 
 all there; the counterparts in the soul of the 
 grim forces of the universe. Governed and 
 ordered, they become strength, energy, agility, 
 rapidity, beauty; and at the last, peace. 
 % We are the children of mystery, born of 
 the mud and the fiery sun. There is no peace 
 for us save the peace of balanced forces. 
 % It is difficult to express exactly what I 
 mean. What could be more peaceful than a 
 summer evening of sunshine? Yet look what 
 enormities of force and fire and headlong mo- 
 tion have brought it about. 
 
 23 ^3 What 
 
fc What could be quieter than the peace of 
 a saintly face? But that too is builded upon 
 central fires. What you see there is the 
 chained energy of potential outbreakings and 
 storms; that peace is the more lucent because 
 of the primal force on which it rests. 
 *fc The great man is he whose passions have 
 learned to sit as quiet as the eagle at the feet 
 of Jove. The ruling woman is she who guides 
 the men of her house by scarcely perceptible 
 motions. Knowing the power of the forces 
 of life, having governed her own soul, she 
 governs others by a smile. 
 
 IX. ON CONSCIENCE 
 
 Sfc THE question of conscience is curiously 
 related to the ideal. What is it, this thing 
 we call conscience? What is it that smites 
 us this hard blow when we have been false to 
 our own code of right? Watch your sensa- 
 tions when you have done or said an unwise, 
 even ever so slightly cruel thing: tell me then 
 if something does not strike a blow at your 
 heart, sickening you, half-stopping your 
 breath, punishing you till you have repented 
 and made good your fault. Who is it strikes 
 the blow? Who is it holds the whip? 
 24 
 
*fc Children suffer under the strokes of this 
 tormentor. I remember a kind father forgiv- 
 ing a troublesome little chap of three. He 
 patted his back and said, "There now, you 
 will be father's good little boy?" "No, no," 
 said the child, bursting into a passion of tears, 
 and throwing himself into his father's arms: 
 "No, no! It's dada's naughty, wicked little 
 boy." This thing of three had already his 
 own private ideals and wept to find himself 
 falling short. 
 
 *fc The interesting fact is that the bold fellow 
 who drives you with his whip is just as fal- 
 lible as can be : he is always making mistakes ; 
 often he lets you off when you have been do- 
 ing what other people can see is wrong: all 
 the while you and your foolish conscience 
 have been as happy as possible together. Not 
 only is he a stupid fellow, requiring to be 
 educated, but he is also a very simple fellow; 
 you yourself can pet and handle and delude 
 him ; put him and his whip to sleep with false 
 promises, bad reasoning, and other narcotics. 
 There he will lie and drowse and sicken and 
 give you scarcely any trouble unless fear comes 
 to wake him. 
 
 *fc On the other hand, I have known good 
 25 % people, 
 
people, the saints of the earth, cherishing a 
 great bloated overgrown conscience. This 
 monster has ruled their every moment with 
 a rod of iron; reduced them to a diet of bread 
 and fruit, and forced them little by little into 
 an active and suffering sainthood. 
 Sfe That is what a pampered conscience does. 
 It becomes a clumsy monster who will know 
 no bounds and no excuses. It will work you 
 like the stoker of an engine. It will strip you 
 of your fine linen and your outer garment, and 
 drive you at last upon the arms of a cross. 
 fife And after all, why not? Better any an- 
 guish than the slow suffocation of ease. 
 
 X. THE WEAPONS OF IDEALISM 
 
 <fc THE Real and the Ideal! What harm 
 has been done by this senseless antithesis! 
 The Ideal is by far the realest thing on earth, 
 as political economists and statesmen are be- 
 ginning to find out through their mistakes. 
 fife All the people who live for noble ends, the 
 great people of the earth, are idealists. It is 
 they who have the gift to divine the uses and 
 properties of matter, who see through it and 
 beyond it and all around it by means of its 
 properties, and control it to great ends. 
 26 
 
% Give stones and mortar to an idealist who 
 has had the force and will to learn their uses 
 and the control of them and he will build you 
 a cathedral. His idealism will give the mere 
 rough material of his trade a value which is 
 not to be measured. Give the same material 
 to the cunning man of small brain, to the 
 man who is called the practical man, and he 
 will build you a hideous street, cheating as 
 he goes, in which his lack of real practical 
 sense is manifest, because, in flat disobedience 
 to the commands of his Creator, he is creating 
 an unremunerative ugliness, when remunera- 
 tive beauty might have better rewarded him. 
 Bricks and stones have often been the weapons 
 of the idealist, and will be so once more in the 
 future. 
 
 <% Colour and line are other ideal weapons. 
 Give a blank wall to one who has had force 
 of will to learn the control and the use of 
 colour and he will present you with the glories 
 of the imagination. The human creature who 
 is all appetite and no imagination will deco- 
 rate it for you with foul words ; which wall of 
 the two will have the most real existence, that 
 adorned with the ejaculations of appetite or 
 that which speaks the language of the soul? 
 27 % They 
 
They are both real; as the thrush and the 
 woodlouse may haunt the same tree; and by 
 that I mean no disrespect to the woodlouse, 
 who is a clever enough little beast in his way, 
 as you will soon see if you tickle him with a 
 straw. 
 
 <% Science is one of the strongest weapons of 
 the idealist. All the greatest scientists have 
 been and are idealists; they have great and 
 clear imaginations that can leap at the living 
 principle behind appearances, and work upon 
 that. Galileo was not the only one of them 
 who lived and died for an ideal. What saint, 
 what poet has ever had a greater imagination 
 than Tyndall? Was ever truth more nobly 
 expressed than by him? With a little gas and 
 a few yards of tubing, his singing flame will 
 tell you some of the deepest secrets of the 
 universe. And there are one or two of his 
 sort alive to-day. 
 
 *fc These are only a few of the weapons of 
 idealism; there are a thousand others. I 
 should weary of cataloguing them. Smiles, 
 tears, laughter, good cookery, humour, cold 
 water, sunlight, common sense, yes, and car- 
 bolic. On the subduing weapon of love I 
 cannot even touch, so mighty a mystery is it, 
 28 
 
as broad and deep as the ocean and much more 
 incomprehensible. I will only mention one 
 more, one whose power and importance war- 
 rants me in dealing with it separately. 
 
 XL MONEY 
 
 *fc MONEY is one of the chief weapons of 
 idealism. The Latin authors said that the 
 Druids sold places in the other world in return 
 for money. That is a very suggestive bit of 
 scandal. Possibly it is partly true; after all 
 why should not one visit the nearest apparent 
 Guardians of Paradise with treasure? 
 <% Money in those far-away times was a much 
 purer and simpler thing than it is to-day. It 
 was a symbol of labour; whether the hard 
 labour of fighting or the quieter labour of the 
 fields or the highly-prized labour of the smith, 
 the artist in metals or in embroidered clothing. 
 <% Those who sacrificed the fruit of such 
 effort in symbol at the doors of the unknown 
 were by no means fools of their own inven- 
 tion. All true labourers do, in one way or 
 another, so offer their labours; why, the very 
 rascals of commerce who have shorn their 
 brothers and sisters as close as a June flock in 
 spite of helpless baaings when they have 
 29 <% heaped 
 
heaped up their pile of fleeces as high as the 
 stars, so that all men gape upon it with open 
 mouths, are they not constrained to make an 
 offering to the ideal which in spite of them 
 lurks in the background of their thought? 
 These offerings may take the shape of hospital 
 wards, churches, gold jugs and basins pre- 
 sented for the Almighty's use, parks, libraries 
 and other public institutions. 
 *fc In so far as such things are precipitations 
 of personal vanity they are simply curious. 
 Probably there is mixed up with this motive 
 a concession to their own still surviving sense 
 of the best; and also a concession to other 
 people's ideals, for which they still have a 
 respect which is almost fear, 
 "fc Now arises the question: can a gift of 
 tainted money brought by impure hands turn 
 to good? The more one puzzles over this 
 question, the more complex and difficult it 
 appears. Money is certainly an impersonal 
 thing: if you or I steal a sixpence that six- 
 pence is just the same as any other, yet should 
 we expect what is called "a blessing" with it? 
 Yet it would be quite a healthy sixpence if 
 passed on to any one else. 
 *fc Perhaps tainted money in impure hands 
 30 
 
never can quite be a sword of light. Some 
 unsavoury flavour will hang about the jug 
 and basin, the park, the library or the statue 
 and what not : there will be something in the 
 mode of giving, some lack of a true equation 
 between the thing given and those to whom 
 it is given, or else a fault in the manner of 
 giving, that will stamp the gift and keep it 
 from thriving. 
 
 <8fe On the other hand, I do believe that tainted 
 money in pure and innocent hands used for 
 ideal ends can become extraordinarily power- 
 ful. Remember that all money is a symbol of 
 effort or labour of some kind; any creature 
 who has money is as if it were possessed of a 
 little army of goblin hands which can be set 
 to work both fast and well on any task their 
 master chooses ; to work with a goblin clev- 
 erness too, far in excess of any qualities owned 
 by their master. 
 
 1 He or she who has money then is possessed 
 of a talisman as powerful as the ring or the 
 lamp of the Arabian Nights' tale; with this 
 difference, that the talisman is a more delicate 
 one than is told of in any marvellous tale. 
 9k This is its virtue; when held in the hand 
 of the owner it takes the colour of the heart; 
 31 feit 
 
it turns to a poisonous mass, exhaling an evil 
 odour, in the hand of the vicious ; it turns to 
 trash in the hand of the fool ; it shines a long- 
 rayed star of powerful emanations in the hand 
 of him who loves his fellow-men. 
 
 XII. SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE 
 
 Sfe ONE day I happened to find myself among 
 a little group of people on a winter afternoon. 
 The talk ran presently on a woman known to 
 us all, whose husband was openly and repeat- 
 edly unfaithful and quite indifferent to her; 
 yet the woman still clung to her uncomfortable 
 position as his wife. "It is extraordinary/' 
 said one of the party, "how a woman of her 
 intelligence can be contented to take the 
 shadow and leave the substance." 
 9k I felt curious at once to see how such a 
 remark would be taken; glancing round, at 
 each face in turn, I saw that no one had mis- 
 understood. There was neither hesitation nor 
 questioning on any face. 
 *% Here was an extraordinary thing; such a 
 paradox to be taken as a commonplace among 
 people who made no parade of religion or 
 higher thought! 
 32 
 
fifc What was the interpretation of that re- 
 mark? 
 
 Sfc That love is substance ; that such things as 
 income, houses, silver forks and motor cars 
 may be shadows: real enough if they stand 
 for the real things, otherwise valueless. 
 <fc That is to say that the spiritual is the one 
 reality, the material is the reflection. 
 fifc And to say that people accept such a wild 
 notion for a rule of life! 
 fife How many of us look at solid things as 
 shadows and seek for the spirit of which they 
 are the projections? How many of us know 
 only those solid shadows, those affluent pro- 
 jections? 
 
 <% How many of us but would hurry to the 
 potter's field and pick up those thirty pieces 
 of silver to put them in the bank? 
 
 Pecunia non olet; "Money has no smell." 
 Is not that a respectable doctrine? And how 
 many subscribe to it? 
 
 "fife On the other hand there are very many 
 people who hold half unconsciously the other 
 faith, wild and transcendental as it looks when 
 written down: good comfortable people and 
 unreflecting, perhaps over-valuing their pos- 
 sessions, yet holding to the right by instinct, 
 
 33 fife for 
 
for whom the sun would lose its light, and 
 life lose all its value if they were forced into 
 cruelty or dishonour in order to keep their 
 hold of those possessions. In such a case as 
 that, a dining-room table may be the pleasant 
 projection of a man's sunny goodwill towards 
 his kind. In another and a worse case you 
 may have the same class of table, qua legs and 
 finish, and yet no better thing than an altar to 
 a belly god. 
 
 fife It is the spirit that animates the table that 
 really counts. 
 
 *fe It is the animating spirit that counts every- 
 where. One of the things that have most 
 staggered reflecting people, from David on- 
 ward, is the apparent success of the unright- 
 eous. The lovers of the concrete, the wor- 
 shippers of the material for its own sake, 
 the masters and mistresses of the art of grab, 
 how they get on ! 
 
 fife Well, let them! Why should you, oh 
 good man ! oh good woman ! covet their fester- 
 ing rubbish heaps? Do you know the venom 
 generated by a great pile of ill-gotten fer- 
 menting money? Moreover before you com- 
 plain of the success of the unrighteous, you 
 have to be quite sure that your man is what 
 34 
 
you take him for. He may have a quite 
 beautiful vein of virtue in him that sweetens 
 the whole lump. For instance, I have seen 
 the worshipper of the material for its own 
 sake succeed and flourish; but when I have 
 looked carefully into his case, I have found 
 that he has been an idealist somewhere: per- 
 haps a devoted husband and father ; and with 
 a motive that has seemed pure to himself he 
 has wrung the hearts of others. His dealings 
 with matter, which for the sake of the crea- 
 tures beloved by him he has learned to control, 
 have been masterly. Perhaps his sole fault 
 has been that he has worn a pair of moral 
 blinkers, that he has made the mistake of con- 
 founding spirit and matter (one often made 
 by political economists who should be wise) 
 and has taken and pounded the hearts and the 
 souls and the lives of his brothers and sisters 
 in his mortar along with the rest! 
 fifc And in any case, why should you, oh 
 brother, oh sister, with your hands full of 
 lilies and roses, honey on your tongue, and the 
 far music of a dream in your ears, vex your 
 souls because of a cock crowing on a dunghill? 
 
XIII. THE BEAUTIFUL WAY 
 
 jflfc QUITE poor and apparently unimportant 
 people sometimes have a large influence. In 
 small ways they are great. The large spirit 
 grown powerful through exercise may be able 
 to deal freely with life and with matter, and 
 bring about great results: most of us have 
 to be content with small things. But even in 
 the doing of the smallest thing there lurks a 
 wonderful efficacy and sweetness, if only it be 
 done in a Beautiful Way. I have met people 
 who never talked about an ideal, and who 
 would be frightened at the notion of enter- 
 taining one, who yet had a beautiful way of 
 doing things. 
 
 % Simple things done beautifully have the 
 gift of becoming translucent. They acquire a 
 large significance. 
 
 *% You can light a fire and tend a hearth in 
 such a way that it becomes a symbol of all the 
 lighted hearts in the world. 
 % You can place food on a table in such a 
 way that those whom you serve are thrice fed. 
 <% You can put clothes on as cleanly and as 
 fairly as the rose clothes itself in June. 
 % I have seen a woman bid good day to a 
 shop-assistant in such a way as to spill a radi- 
 36 
 
ance on the counter, and bring depths of sweet- 
 ness and hills of peace before the worker's 
 eyes. Why there is even a way of rebuking 
 that generates love. 
 
 % There are creatures so endeared of heaven 
 that all they do is lovely and smacks of the 
 country of their dreams. Not all of us are 
 dear to heaven, and our self-conscious efforts 
 after the Beautiful Way may be ludicrous to 
 other folk; but if we persist in our efforts 
 something will pierce through our clumsiness. 
 ^s The light that shines at the wick of a tallow 
 candle is made of fire and related to the light 
 of sacred lamps. 
 
 % Even if you have to cook pies or sit on a 
 high stool doing accounts you can do it in an 
 extraordinary way. A sort of flavour will 
 hang about you and your pies and your 
 accounts. At odd moments those who come 
 in contact with you will have glimpses of 
 those deep seas of light where your daily ablu- 
 tions are performed. 
 
 XIV. ON THE FORMING OF 
 IDEALS 
 
 ^fe ONE might almost say that there are as 
 
 many different kinds of idealists as there are 
 
 37 Sfe people 
 
people; that there are as many ideals as 
 there are souls. 
 
 fifc What is the ideal of life for you and me? 
 *fc There is not one common to us both ; there 
 are a few broad points on which we can meet, 
 but my set of working ideals would hardly 
 do for you, nor yours for me. Yours might 
 be too complicated for me, mine too unprac- 
 tical for you. The essence of this thing we 
 call the ideal is that it should be a pictured 
 image or a series of pictured images of life; a 
 sort of triple extract of human conclusions 
 concerning the forms and appearances of 
 things, boiled down and reduced to theory. 
 As a matter of fact all of us harbour an end- 
 less series of working ideals relating to things 
 within and without the mind; for instance I 
 have my own notion of a perfectly darned 
 sock; of what blackberry jam should be; and 
 what, a sequence of ideas. You too have a 
 storehouse of such samples of perfection which 
 you are eternally turning over and taking out 
 for use. 
 
 % When we say that so and so has a high 
 ideal we mean a most complicated and diffi- 
 cult thing; we mean that he is in possession 
 of a whole gallery of beautiful patterns of 
 
 38 
 
thought, language, manners and achievement 
 of all sorts. 
 
 % The value of such a gallery of ideals de- 
 pends a good deal on the power and lucidity 
 of the mind that has collected them. 
 *fe Some people are without sufficient think- 
 ing power to evolve an ideal for themselves; 
 as a rule they accept the ideals of the thinkers 
 who have preceded them, under the name of 
 religion. A good thing that they do. Who 
 wants the conclusions of a fool upon folly? 
 The ready-made code is safe and sure. The 
 fresh waters of spring may well run in the 
 noble old courses. 
 
 ^fe But if we are to be of real value we must 
 reflect: reflect with passion and with truth; 
 nothing is to be accepted ; everything is to be 
 examined; so fast do new forms of life evolve 
 that last year's virtue must appear in a differ- 
 ent trim to-day and take another weapon in 
 her hand. The love of the supreme good and 
 of our fellow men may yet drive us on to 
 strange thoughts and deeds, unthinkable and 
 undoable in the long ago. 
 *fe We have said that the idealist stands with 
 his dream above him and his feet in the mud. 
 Between the two are the hands that must bring 
 39 flfcihe 
 
the intractable clay into some likeness of the 
 heaven he has conceived. As time goes on 
 and his labours go on, the clay takes un- 
 expected shapes about him, some beautiful, 
 some ugly and mean. His dream too alters 
 with the years. He wants now to remedy 
 some of his mistakes; he wants to embody 
 some of the new features of his dream. He 
 himself alters with the years. So it is that our 
 ideals must be elastic, we must be ever ready 
 to deal with fresh circumstances. The old 
 ways may be better than the new ways ; but the 
 new ways may have some seed of betterment, 
 of progression in them that the old ways 
 lacked. To be rigid is generally to be wrong. 
 We may want new laws to fit a whole nation 
 full of a new sort of people. 
 9k We shall never be right till we have re- 
 considered our ideals. 
 
 % We shall never get right till we have 
 ceased to believe in the Victorian clever man's 
 principle that men might be used as machines. 
 <% We shall never get right till the human 
 babe becomes for us sacro-sanct; whether its 
 father be saint or sinner, whether he choose to 
 forsake it or no. 
 
 flfc We shall never get right till natural law, 
 40 
 
and not the male, is left to determine the 
 relative functions of man and woman. 
 *fe We shall never get right till we have 
 formed a national ideal of responsibility to 
 the earth's surface beginning with such trifles 
 as ginger-beer bottles and paper-bags and end- 
 ing up with battle-fields, railway companies 
 and slums. 
 
 ^fe We shall never get right till we have a 
 new Doomsday Book of the towns of the 
 country written out fairly for all men to read. 
 flfe We shall never get right till we have a new 
 international ideal. The world has had 
 enough of the morals of the public-school boy 
 in the diplomatist's coat. The day when the 
 "cannon's flesh" rises up and refuses its destiny 
 will be a great day in the history of mankind. 
 % Meantime we had all better cultivate elas- 
 ticity of mind, which includes tolerance, with- 
 out which our ideals may become mere rods 
 to whip each other's backs. 
 
 XV. MATERIAL OF THE IDEALIST 
 
 "fc ALL that is of real value to a life proceeds 
 from within outwards. No beauty, riches, 
 honours, are of real import to any unless 
 the soul within is beautiful; rich and honour- 
 41 % able 
 
able enough to enter into correspondence with 
 its opportunities. You cannot give any living 
 creature that which has no relation to himself. 
 You cannot give a burglar the Divina Corn- 
 media. You cannot give the National Gal- 
 lery to a procuress. You cannot give a sunrise 
 to a cardsharper. You cannot give human 
 souls in charge to a person who hasn't got one. 
 *fe You cannot give cities in charge to men of 
 no wider view than the mole who only sees 
 his own little underground path. 
 <% When the devil wanted to show Christ the 
 kingdoms of the world, he took him up to the 
 top of a high mountain. Let any one who 
 wishes to see what the kingdoms of the world 
 look like to-day, climb to the highest acces- 
 sible point in the heart of a great city. 
 Sfc Get up to the top of St. Paul's and behold 
 London. Look over that vast heaving sea; 
 before you have looked long you will be ready 
 to confess the powerlessness of man to control 
 the destinies of men. 
 
 Sfe There it lies, a living ocean : house roofs 
 peaked like ranks of ocean waves. What 
 man's eye or hand wrought these things or 
 brought these masses together? It was no 
 man at all. The strongest of us and the most 
 42 
 
intentionate are but livelier instruments of far 
 travelling forces, whose beginning and whose 
 ending no one knows. 
 
 ^fe On such an eminence as this all rancours 
 drop away: what large matters are these men's 
 pigmy foulness, those men's pigmy tyrannies 
 and hates? We are in the presence of vital 
 impulses which have whirled men into a 
 centre as the streaming nebulae are whirled. 
 Such a spectacle as this is one of those evolu- 
 tions which are as independent of the will as 
 the massed movements of birds, the westward 
 and eastward movement of crowded hu- 
 manity, the crusades, the necessity that covers 
 the sea with ships and sends men crawling to 
 the fop of high mountains and the poles. 
 <% The vastness of the thing amazes: what 
 does it portend? Look at that heaving and 
 distracted sea; think of the million children's 
 lives there, stunted and granite-bound. In 
 God's name, what pattern of life can we fit to 
 these people's needs? 
 
 *fc Look deep enough, and perhaps it will 
 appear that here in the midst of terrors is 
 the very point of salvation. Here has been 
 formed, independent of any human will, the 
 monster crucible in which the human race is 
 43 flfcto 
 
to be fused and refined. The vast cauldron 
 whirls and seethes and threatens eruption; 
 countless fresh units of life are attracted to 
 it and caught in, there to be fused with the 
 rest. 
 
 *fc And the movement is not all centripetal. 
 Already we see the centrifugal tendency 
 counteracting. Having learned what the 
 city has to give, another and quite new race 
 of creatures is flung off on the land. It is not 
 all bad, this huge melting-pot of mankind. 
 There is no need to despair. "Don't look at 
 it from the top downward," said the poet son 
 of a drunken carpenter to me the other day. 
 "Look at it from below upward, if you want 
 to see the light. It becomes glorious then." 
 Glorious it might be to him because his genius 
 had set him free: it is often not very glorious 
 to the others. Yet there was truth in what he 
 said. There is life in that mass. There is a 
 heaving in the lower depths that betokens life. 
 Imponderable shapes and essences float above 
 it, the thoughts and ideals of men, changing 
 always, unrealised as yet. 
 "% Moreover the women, for so long sub- 
 merged and silenced, are beginning to rise; 
 some strong impulsion drives them on; they 
 44 
 
are taught by hard lessoning that on them de- 
 pends the race, that in freedom with good 
 counsel there is health and life; that the sons 
 of slaves share in the mother's abasement; that 
 the soul, the light-giver and leader of the 
 body, faints and corrupts when exposed to 
 ignominy. 
 
 *fc Hope is moving the people; now what 
 ideal to set before them to help them to their 
 hope? Here is the raw material of life; raw 
 indeed. There yonder is the excellent pattern 
 of the dream. How can the will and the two 
 hands of the idealist so work upon this mass 
 as to bring the two into some semblance of 
 each other? 
 
 *fc But the idealists are at it already, a thou- 
 sand of them! The miracle will accomplish 
 itself; they, we, can no more help going for- 
 ward than the stream can help running to the 
 sea. Let us only discern which way the uni- 
 versal current sets, so that we may save our- 
 selves the trouble of swimming up-hill. Go 
 forward we must: and where is the sense of 
 doing it backwards? 
 
 <% Those men who, gripping their property,, 
 
 oppose the advance of social science; those 
 
 men who oppose the advance of women, re- 
 
 45 <8fc mind 
 
mind me of nothing so much as of a he-goat 
 that butts at the edges of a travelling bog. 
 ^s No; let us sail with the blessed wind and 
 not against it. Give liberty and give bread 
 to soul and body. Let us be rid of the illusion 
 of purely male energy that is without pity, 
 without wisdom, and without love. 
 <% For heaven's sake, let us teach the children 
 to be good. We shall bring all the nation 
 into contempt, if we do not. You cannot 
 build up a respectable State on a foundation of 
 rotten units. 
 
 $fc Some day we shall come to try the spirit 
 as a weapon. We have never tried it yet. 
 When we do we shall find it to be the true 
 earth shaker, stronger and more persuasive 
 than the cannon or the sword. 
 *fc The walls of Jericho fell down at the sound 
 of a trumpet; so might the old walls of pride 
 and stupidity fall down round the City of 
 Souls and the flood come in. 
 *fc Did the wind of the spirit, blowing 
 strongly from the right quarter but gain an 
 entrance, we should all become intelligent 
 enough to believe in the power of simple good- 
 ness; simple private goodness which is the 
 only thing for all of us from the Lord Cham- 
 
berlain down to the knife and boot boy. Not 
 a comfortable soul among us but would be 
 willing to lay down his meal too many and 
 his superfluous bits of shining metal and stone 
 in order to bring light to the myriad eyes of 
 the disinherited children who should be our 
 care. 
 
 <% Not a lazy soul among us but would leave 
 his selfish muddling to help in the labour of 
 regeneration, a work for angels and for gods, 
 incomparably difficult, incomparably great 
 
 XVI. THE REWARDS OF THE 
 IDEAL 
 
 ^s I HAVE not lived long enough to watch 
 the generations. I can only record here the 
 result of say twenty intelligent years of obser- 
 vation; not long enough to entitle one to 
 speak with authority. Still, twenty years 
 make a long enough space in which to come to 
 a conclusion. The conclusion I have come to 
 is that the rewards of the ideal are constant 
 and valuable. At one time I did not think 
 it was so. I was forced during some years to 
 conclude that cunning was the most valuable, 
 the most frequently and richly rewarded of all 
 qualities, the cunning that is the grand tool 
 47 *& of 
 
of the appetites ; the cunning that knows how 
 to handle men and women and facts, with an 
 unsleeping eye to its own advantage. 
 Sfe Later on when I found Cunning sitting 
 among his gathered sheaves I was not particu- 
 larly enticed by the quality of the harvest, nor 
 by the flavours that pervaded the harvest field. 
 *fe On the other hand when I became intelli- 
 gent enough myself to watch the pilgrimage 
 of a soul living for ideal ends through all the 
 intricacies of shows and appearances that 
 make up our life, I became gradually more 
 impressed. I had seen a good many things: I 
 had seen a dull soul gradually extinguishing 
 the beauty of a noble face and form; form and 
 face growing more opaque and heavy year by 
 year. I had seen a coarse soul, born to every 
 shape and appearance of material beauty, sur- 
 rounded from birth with all the shows and 
 forms that are for delight, I had seen that 
 soul make a hell for itself and others out of a 
 Paradise of the senses. 
 
 <% Now I saw a pure soul growing strong, 
 and conquering untoward and difficult sur- 
 roundings precisely as a man by labour con- 
 quers a harsh unfruitful soil. I have watched 
 that soul interpenetrate others, while weaving 
 
about itself continually widening circles of 
 colour and light. 
 
 *fc Lastly I saw a fine spirit literally draw 
 afresh the lines of a plain uninteresting 
 countenance. 
 
 *fe Have I seen, or do I delude myself in 
 thinking I have seen the child born of the 
 heavenly mind fairer than its parents in body 
 because of their power of thought? 
 Sfc Can fine minds improve a breed or race? 
 Be sure they can. 
 
 % Other rewards the pursuit of the Ideal 
 brings with it; for one thing it leaves the 
 seekers no time to be lazy minded; the con- 
 stant falling short, the humiliation, the lapses, 
 the repentance that follows these lapses; the 
 ceaseless effort to discriminate between values 
 and appearances; all this preserves in the 
 mind the agility and suppleness of youth. 
 Mere good-nature or even goodness will not 
 save the soul alive in middle and old age. 
 There is something mental and spiritual that 
 has an exact parallel in stoutness of body; it 
 might be described as a sort of comfortable 
 fuzziness: it ends by smothering the soul in 
 excellent good people sometimes. From this 
 disease the seekers of the ideal are saved ; their 
 49 % search 
 
search keeps them lively. It sharpens their 
 faculties. 
 
 Sfc They are like gold-seekers, ransacking 
 every soil for the one pure grain. They gain 
 in the end great skill in discerning the nature 
 of the different soils and rock-veins, in divin- 
 ing where this gold streak is to be found. 
 /You can tell idealists by their skill in the 
 objective. To the common mind, what is 
 called a hard fact is something solid, opaque, 
 and final. The common mind has the clever- 
 ness of the jackdaw in collecting these solid 
 objects about it. 
 
 *fc A "thing" has the same value as a fact, or 
 even more ; there it is ; see round it if you dare ; 
 that red brick house; that motor-car; is not 
 that convincing? See that large lump of 
 gold? Why will you not bob and curtsey to 
 it? 
 
 % But your idealists will not bob until they 
 have reflected; they want to penetrate these 
 facts, these objects ; of what stream of thought, 
 motive, and desire are they the deposit? 
 Whence came they? How came they? 
 Whither are they tending? As we divine the 
 passage of the grinding glacier from the rock- 
 heaps it leaves behind, so do they divine the 
 50 
 
courses of the will by the accretion of the solid 
 objects about it. You think to impress the 
 eye of the ideal thinker by a gold chain or a 
 chin or a wrist held high? He will, if his at- 
 tention happens to be attracted, at once begin 
 to reflect on your symptoms; to analyse the 
 conclusions of the mind that have gone to de- 
 termine the angle at which your chin or your 
 wrist is held; your gold chain will be like a 
 little scroll of fine writing and read at a 
 glance. 
 
 *fc For your true idealist, well trained in the 
 sternest of all schools, has a mind agile beyond 
 description. How long do you think it would 
 take an Emerson to analyse a Rockefeller? 
 Half a look, half a word, the recognition of 
 an atmosphere; and the story is told. 
 *fc I am talking of course of the great ones, 
 the masters and mistresses who have been long 
 on the road and know every yard of it and all 
 the signs of the weather. To us, who never 
 can hope for such wisdom as theirs, is left the 
 continual attempting and the humiliation that 
 comes of repeated small failures. The great 
 thinkers have their moments of despair; the 
 small ones have no temptation to be anything 
 but humble. 
 
 51 . 
 
fifc One cannot even say, "Follow your dream 
 and you will be happy." You may be happy, 
 you probably will; but you may not; and in 
 any case that is not quite what you are after, 
 though it generally includes it. Circum- 
 stances may be too many for you. But what 
 one can say is, Follow your dream and you 
 will not be sleepy. You will not be old. You 
 will keep a young heart and you will always 
 have plenty to do. Your mind will be agile 
 and increasingly agile, your life fuller and 
 more worth living every day. 
 <% These are only a few of the rewards of the 
 ideal; they are really so numerous and ex- 
 traordinary that one might be all day telling 
 them; the harvest is so rich that one hardly 
 knows where to begin the tale. Perhaps one 
 of the greatest rewards is the increasing value 
 and meaning that one finds in simple things. 
 The assayer of gold will find that they stand 
 the test. The reason seems to me to be that 
 there is a perfection in simplicity that is only 
 beaten by the very topmost perfection in art 
 and scarcely even then. You can have perfect 
 bread and cheese for instance. A perfect 
 French dinner can only be had by very few. 
 Take a boiled egg for another example or a 
 
whitewashed wall; a fine morning; a rose- 
 bush or even a row of peas; for women the 
 pleasure of baking a loaf or making a garment 
 or bathing a child. For men and women the 
 pleasure of making or doing anything really 
 well. There are large meanings in these 
 simple things ; the idealist sees them, and reads 
 them in, always more and more ; only the male 
 and female fool deride them. 
 % It follows that as the simple things of life 
 grow in beauty and value, so does life itself 
 increase in beauty and significance. This 
 gain the idealist will find he shares with the 
 scientist. Everything is interesting to the 
 scientist certainly, but there are degrees of 
 interest: a yard of Hedgerow interests him 
 more than the drawing-room carpet; a patch 
 of the night sky more than the constellations 
 of the shop-window. Our pilgrim on his or 
 her pilgrimage will find just the same sifting 
 of estimates going on in his mind; values will 
 change places; the true things, the eternal 
 things will come to the top; the temporary 
 things go down. Not that we must under- 
 value the drawing-room carpet and the shop 
 windows. Unless the one is elevated into a 
 fetich and the other into a stage upon which 
 53 . % Folly 
 
Folly screams at her top note, they are a nat- 
 ural and interesting part of life. But the 
 pure-hearted woman will not be intoxicated 
 by them as the female materialists are. Nor 
 can the male materialist plume himself on 
 any superiority ; his follies may be less gaudy, 
 they may be more impure and as trivial in 
 their way. 
 
 Sfe Our pilgrim finds himself more and more 
 in love with the simplicities ; his wallet grows 
 fuller, but his step is lighter, his eye keener 
 as it glances abroad. Moreover he is getting 
 forward on his journey. This is another of 
 his rewards. There is nothing static in the 
 spiritual quest. There is a delicious sense of 
 moving onward. There are continual fresh 
 horizons appearing. Every point that is 
 passed is like a new stage upon the road. 
 % There is no delight comparable to that of 
 the spiritual life ; when I speak of our pilgrim 
 being in love with the simplicities, I do not 
 mean that he will always be hoeing round a 
 rose-bush with his eyes turned up to the stars, 
 on a diet of boiled eggs. What I do mean 
 is that from the simple things of life to the 
 great things is but an easy step. It is a much 
 longer and more toilsome step from the in- 
 54 
 
tricacies of a sophisticated life to simple great- 
 ness. Cleverness is death to greatness. The 
 business point of view, so called, has been the 
 winding-sheet of many a fine mind. Your 
 true quester, who sees straight in simple 
 things, will see straight on a steep and crooked 
 path that will catch the clever man in a fall. 
 And it is not only in straightness and pureness 
 that your spiritual man gains; power and 
 agility of mind come to him also; and on a 
 higher plane than they come to his clever 
 friend. 
 
 fife One of his most delightful rewards is the 
 good company in which he finds himself. He 
 is one of a confraternity. All the poets are 
 his brethren, so are the great painters and the 
 great musicians. So are the saints, the think- 
 ers of all countries and of all religions: their 
 wisdom is his, their spiritual consolation is 
 his. 
 
 fife Friendships are worth just so much as the 
 stuff they feed upon. Do you drink with your 
 friend? Then your friendship is worth as 
 much and no more than the liquor in the glass. 
 Do you hunt with your friend? Your friend- 
 ship is worth just so much as a shout across the 
 hill. Do you talk with your friend? Of 
 55 fife what 
 
what do you talk? Of just that stuff is your 
 love or friendship made. It may be worth 
 no more than a sensual jest: it may be as broad 
 as the seas, as high as the heavens. Let the 
 young lovers know that the ideal is the only 
 safe bond. In the difficult night the youth 
 knows his beloved by the light she carries and 
 she him. 
 
 *% See now where our pilgrim of the soul 
 comes in and pulls off the prize! Of what 
 immortal stuff are his loves and his friend- 
 ships made! Instead of forming one otf a 
 jostling crowd, hungry, selfish, unheeding, he 
 climbs a golden ladder on whose steps he 
 meets with the angels. Along that rising path 
 lie, like summer fragrance, the consolations 
 especially needed by sensitive souls in these 
 stormy days when the robust progeny of old, 
 dead sins are becoming so formidable. The 
 idealist finds in his creed a continual encour- 
 agement to keep going on. He sees, even in 
 events that are untoward and cruel a principle 
 of progression. Above the slums of Wapping 
 and the acres of chimney-tops he can see the 
 apple-trees of the Isles of the Blest, the spires 
 of a new city of the children of men. He can 
 even foretell the new state whose conditioning 
 
 56 
 
is in accord with the creative rhythms of the 
 universe. 
 
 *fc As for himself, he has no fear and no un- 
 easiness. A crust is good enough for him. A 
 whitewashed room is a paradise. His com- 
 panions are the glorious company of the 
 apostles. Even death and the judgment are 
 his old friends. Nay, death may appear to 
 him as a veiled lover, into whose arms he runs ! 
 
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY