A Scrapbook of Ideals
The Speaker, August 10, 1901

Ideals of Life and Citizenship. By C.E. Maurice. Francis Redell Henderson. 2s. 6d.

Mr Maurice's book Ideals of Life and Citizenship is a collection of extracts from the greatest writers indicative of the various conceptions of the perfect citizen that have been entertained in various ages by various men. Such a collection could scarcely be published at a more appropriate time. That men in this particular crisis of our civilisation do not keep the laws they have made, enjoy the peace they have made possible, or live up to the ideals they have themselves created, matters nothing. Men never did live up to their ideals, and probably never will. But there has arisen among us in these days a definite school of philosophers who dispute the validity of ideals and idealism, urging mankind to rely more exclusively upon an emancipated judgment of the particular event. Of course, these men are by nature visionaries. It is only the most abstracted and unworldly persons who object to idealism. A cold and practical judgment of life is only thought possible by men who have never lived, just as the duty of scientific observation is generally urged by a professor who falls over his own door mat. All practical people are idealists, soldiers, politicians, pirates, even men of fashion. To live out of the reach of ideals is a project for a hermit. But, nevertheless, the anti-idealistic school does exist, and I think, although it is a dangerous thing to say of anything, almost for the first time in history. Such, at least, is the impression produced by glancing through Mr. Maurice's collection. Here we have men of almost every conceivable intellectual attitude and moral character: primitive Protestants, and mediaeval Christians who would have burned them, Elizabethan play-actors and Puritan statesmen who would have flogged them, nineteenth century atheists and eighteenth century Tories who would have kicked them downstairs, Sir Philip Sidney and George Fox, George Herbert and Prince Kropotkin, Samuel Johnson and Percy Bysshe Shelley, men who can be hardly thought of as understanding each other even in an eternity of bliss, and yet of all of them it would be difficult to say which was the most idealistic. Neither in the wildest and most iconoclastic vagaries of the revolutionist nor in the darkest and most detached moods of the satirist does it ever occur to them for a moment to think that the actuality is more important than the dream.

Another circumstance which makes ideals the most practical things in the world is the fact that they last the longest. We can enter to some extent into the ideal conceptions of Greece or of the Middle Ages. It  is when we come to their science, their logic and their rationality that we seem to be reading something monstrously insane, like the Scriptures of Limbo and Tartarus. It is the final, lucid, synthetic philosophies of men that break and float away like clouds; it is only the hope that remains. A day will come when the works of Mr. Herbert Spencer will read like the endless arguments of some mediaaval schoolman discussing whether angels eat and drink, or whether the bodies at the Resurrection will rise with their clothes on. But when that day comes the mere ideal of Isaiah will still remain, and men will still speak of the Golden Age as the day when swords shall be beaten into ploughshares and the lion shall lie down with the lamb.

Thus it happens that although Mr. Maurice's extracts are taken from dusty folios in remote centuries, there is hardly one of them which does not seem startlingly modern, or, to speak more sensibly, human. Certainly he could not have opened with anything better in English literature than Chaucer's description of the ideal parson.

The profoundly popular note of that description, its hatred of snobbishness and corruption and sinecure, its bracing reverence for a dignity which was plain and even ugly, its admirable temperance and lack of exaggeration, its deep sense of the merciless practicality of Christianity, combine to form a picture which might have been written by a poet in any age if he were one who was also a man. Chaucer lived and died a good Catholic in the days when the word Catholic meant what it said. Yet we find very much the same virile and humorous test of religion offered by Hugh Latimer in one of his bold and brisk sermons included in this volume. All the arguments which are now indulged in about the merits of the Catholic Church and the merits of the Reformation, all disquisitions on tradition and authority, must abide finally by the fact that a man like Chaucer, with healthy, universal sentiments, found himself in one age inside the Church and at another age outside. There was little or no conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in the time of Chaucer, because in that time Catholicism included Protestantism. Latimer was a great demagogue, Chaucer was a great poet, and every great demagogue and every great poet must be first and foremost an average man. And whether in Catholicism or out of it the Protestant means the average man.

The Protestant ideal, or ideal of the common man, the ideal of preserving absolutely intact such things as liberty, domesticity, the right to eat and grumble, and marry and give in marriage, is unquestionably one of the recurrent ideals of mankind, though to some it may scarcely seem an ideal. It is an ideal, however, because it is a principle or generalisation for the sake of which men are called upon to curb their instantaneous impulses. It is the strangest and noblest of all the strange qualities of man that asceticism can be to him a dissipation, that pain can be an indulgence. It is an astonishing and not uninspiring thought, when we come to realise it, that parents have often had more trouble in dissuading their children from obliterating all youth and pleasure in a nunnery than from over-indulging them in a ball-room. So long as this dark and lawless holiness remains unexplored in human nature, it remains perfectly right and necessary that among the ideals of mankind there should be the ideal of being ordinary, capable of regarding inspiration as a danger and purity as a snare.

It has been often remarked that Catholicism and Protestantism may in some degree be called respectively feminine and masculine. One point of truth in this has perhaps not often been noticed. Catholicism, with all its silence and discipline, is a far more ambitious religion; it teems with legends of champions who have almost stolen the secret of things. The liberty so much desired by Protestantism is, after all, chiefly the liberty to be unceasingly respectable. And in this sense the Protestant ideal bears a close resemblance to the masculine- men are immeasurably more conventional than women. Conventions are to them not superficial, but basic. We read of women lavishing huge sums in order to eclipse each other in dress, but whoever heard of any man (except an unpresentable cad) putting on evening dress which was intended to eclipse some other man? The great object of a man in evening dress is to be "the right thing." That is to say, to be easily mistaken for anybody else. Here we have in full swing this peculiar ambition which we have first noticed, the soaring, starry, and wholly unattainable ambition of being ordinary. It is unattainable because every man was born extraordinary, and the average man is an ideal, like the Magnanimous Man of Aristotle, only much nicer. Somewhat allied, though superior to the ideal of being ordinary, is the ideal of being universal, well and sufficiently represented in Mr. Maurice's pages by Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and, indeed, all the Elizabethans. This conception of the universal man, who may be called the magnified average man, is a conception the precise place of which may be fairly in dispute; but it is extraordinary to notice how its very existence is ignored in the judging of many persons. It is constantly said, with an air of finality, that such and such a man might have been really successful if he had not frittered away his talents upon a number of different things, as if man should live by bread or fossils or literature alone. It is surely better to see the skies and smell the flowers and hear the thunder than to be like the man in Grimm’s fairy-tale who could hear the grass growing and remain blind and scentless. A man who grasps all the chances of life with the hundred hands of an Indian idol may be less wealthy, but he is certainly not less successful. It is better to be Philip Sidney and belong to a score of noble fellowships than merely to play the tyrant over one. If Julius Caesar ever really said that it was better to be first in a little Iberian village than to be second in Rome, I can only say that he uttered a very vulgar and parochial sentiment of which he ought to have been thoroughly ashamed. Of men who in our day play the Elizabethan part, it is constantly said that this one and that one would be great if he were not versatile. It would be more truly expressed in the form that he would be famous if he were not great.

An instance of this may be found, for example, in the sense of literary delicacy and polish which, in Mr. Maurice's book, distinguishes the extracts from Sidney and Raleigh. Such dandyism in a modern writer would probably denote some knock-kneed artistic fop who had purchased sensibility at the price of the last farthing of manly self-respect. But these were men with long heads and stout hearts who led great expeditions and ruled savage tribes. They were not the less careful about their ships and their State papers, because they were exceptionally careful about their ruffles and their bows. According to the recent fashion imperial strength is synonymous with coarseness and a formless candour; but the grossest and squarest and ugliest of contemporary empire-builders would feel very uncomfortable if pitted against Walter Raleigh.

Many of the great ethical conceptions which have dominated English history are represented in Mr. Maurice's extracts more fully and clearly than we have space to notice. It is enough to comment briefly on a book- the study of which cannot fail to be profitable. It is a matter of life and death both to us and to our country, a matter far transcending any masterpieces or any crimes, what ideals we select. But that we shall select some ideals and that they will be the breath of life to us, that is written in the primal bones of our being. We shall certainly do that, even if we only follow the new intellectual anarchists who toil and talk and suffer much social inconvenience for the ideal of anti-idealism.