The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

The Ideal: The True Art of Life.

[Charlotte Fortescue Yonge, 1856-1940, daughter of the Rev. John Eyre Yonge, master at Eton, was cousin to the children's writer Charlotte Mary Yonge. She never married.]

I think it should be the aim of all education to implant ideals. The holiest and best lives are those in which high ideals are faithfully lived up to. "Ideals are the very soul of life," said Bishop Westcott, and they have, as we know, happily a tendency to become ever higher when they are the aspirations of a life in which good work is conscientiously carried out.

Necessary as high ideals have always been, perhaps there has never been a greater need for them than now, when so many people are awake to the increasingly pressing necessity of material improvement for the masses, as, were we to define this period and its leading characteristic, we should be inclined to say it was one wherein the majority are interested in social reform. By "the majority" including millionaires, land-owners, professional men, tradesmen, artisans, labourers, many of all classes in fact, above the unmotived herd that only sleep and feed, and work merely when obliged, who also unfortunately can be found in all classes and all ranks. It is this widely-spread interest which makes the increase in the university and other settlements and their workers, evolves the Rowton houses, the workmen's buildings, and all the attempts on larger and smaller scales to provide cheap, yet healthy, dwellings, rouses more comments and questionings on the Charity Organization Society, and made the choice of the new Bishop of London last year [Arthur Winnington-Ingram] such a popular one.

[Rowton houses: comfortable hostels for workers; more at Wikipedia]

The danger of a leading characteristic of any period, more particularly when it is connected with work for others, is of its having a fascination for those who would rush in to act, without considering if the work is meant for them, and if they are suited by character and conduct for it. Of all great factors in the work of true education and right enlightenment, the force of conscientious and well-balanced personal character stands out pre-eminent. What we are, should be our first consideration; what we do our second, though, of course, the two act and react upon each other, and the old sayings, "To do good, be good," and "To be good, do good," can be read either way. Pope's aphorism, "He can't be wrong whose life is in the right," may prove sometimes fallacious, but its inversion is in all cases true--"he can't be right whose life is in the wrong." A few words from a woman whose well-spent life gives her a right to speak, will probably influence hearers far more lastingly than an exceedingly eloquent speech from one whose life bears witness that she holds a different standard for herself than the one she is advocating to her hearers, that, like a sign-post, she points to ways she does not follow. For instance, words of advice to factory girls may be listened to, and liked, but immediately after, the effect may be completely nullified to them by the reading the speaker's name as connected with some society scandal, for personal gossip is circulated and read with as much avidity in the cheaper papers, as unhappily it is in the more expensive ones, which equally pander to vitiated tastes.

High ideals are a necessity for those who would do lasting work--we must all believe in our Utopias, and our conceptions of such should be increasingly fuller and happier. It is fatally easy for those who do not aim high, to slide down imperceptibly. Those who lead the lower sort of life, an unthinking existence from day to day, become at last absolutely incapable of discerning good, like the old story in Pilgrim's Progress of the man with the muck-rake, who looked so continuously on the ground for sticks and straws that at last he could not look up to see the celestial crown held just above his head. We grow to what we care for, downwards or upwards. Someone has defined a good man's life as looking up, and lifting up; it certainly would be labour lost to try and accomplish the second without the first. Charles Wyndham's clever play, Mrs. Dane's Defence, is thoroughly true to life when the heroine tells some of her past history, and shows that her perceptions have become so blunted, that in the face of confessed facts she constantly asseverates, "But I am not a bad woman," and she is perfectly blind to the utter difference of the moral standing to which she has lowered herself, with that held by the horrified hearer, who would have been her fatherly friend, had "Mrs. Dane" been capable of contrition.

In all work, and in life, our own as well as in that of others, we have to "consider the end." Concerning our own lives we see it is a higher thing to keep our own individuality, than to merge it in a society, sinking our own personality; concerning the lives of others we see that influence is best gained by personal contact, by the simple way of making friends, not de haut en bas, but as equals. As R. L. [Robert Louis] Stevenson remarks: "We should wipe two words from our vocabulary--gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented." It is only in this present generation that we are putting in practice to any large extent the art of living among the poor, the necessity of which was so much advocated by James Hinton, Arnold Toynbee, and Edward Denison.

[James Hinton, 1822-1875, was a surgeon, Arnold Toynbee,1852-1883, worked to improve the living conditions of the working class, Edward Denison, 1840-1870, was a politician who helped people in the East End of London and died at age 29.]

The ideal life in some past ages was to be lived apart form the world. "Come ye out and be ye separate," was the whisper of conscience obeyed by hermits and saints of old. Now it is to be lived in the world, to bear fruit by close contact, not by distant example. Tolstoi* says, "The religious perception of our time in its widest and most practical application is the consciousness that our well-being, both material and spiritual, individual and collective, temporal and eternal, lies in the growth of brotherhood among all men--in their loving harmony with one another."

*What is Art?, by Leo Tolstoi.

There is an increasing number of workers at the present day, anxious for social reform; some work on a definitely religious footing, others on entirely undenominational lines. Toynbee Hall, opened seventeen years ago, has been the pioneer of many Settlements, both of men and women, in London and in our great cities. Those Settlements are not entirely uniform in their work, but have certain recognized principles which are mostly common to all, the chief of which may shortly be summed up as follows:--They hold that family life among the poor is to be considered sacred, that parental responsibility is to be fostered, that the encouragement of self-help is more than almsgiving, that in the strengthening of character lies the hope of a better future. Most of the Settlements, we believe, send workers to the branch nearest them of the Charity Organization Society. As is well known, the C.O.S. does an immense amount of work not only directly among the poor, but indirectly as setting an example to individuals and societies of how work should be done, and of the great need of investigation before help is given. Settlement workers differ greatly from members of a Brotherhood or Sisterhood; one striking difference being that those leading a conventual life cut themselves off from their family and the world, devoting themselves entirely to work among the poor, while Settlement workers go to live among the poor to be a link between them and the more cultured classes, so that each may get a fuller acquaintance with the other. Canon [Samuel Augustus] Barnett especially impressed on Toynbee Hall residents that coming to the East end must not induce them to forsake their West end friends, and Miss Octavia Hill also is known to advocate, where possible, work among the poor for three or four days a week, the other time being given to family affairs, literature, art, or some occupation quite different. "Keep your individuality," she says, "you will make both sorts of work more valuable."

In all social work we should look at the larger issues of life in the far future as well as the seemingly small immediate duties of the present time. For instance, we should discourage children spending their farthings on sweets. Not because it is bad for health, as that is a moot point, even when the "goodies" have a strong proportion of violent colour, cheap essence, and of East end atmosphere from the factory and shop, but because it is self-indulgence, the root of every moral and physical evil. Another way of regarding the great in the small is to refrain from buying cheap clothing, not only because the maker's physical health must have suffered from under-pay and over-work to ensure that cheapness, but also because it is bad for the moral health for anyone to work at a shoddy thing. It destroys self-respect for anyone knowingly to continue putting bad, unlasting work into all their day's labour, making it a treadmill instead of dignified employment. There is nothing cheap in the world. Everything so called is dear in a terrible manner to someone!

What should constitute the higher standard of life to which we should point as the desirable one? Is it too Utopian to hope that some day Sir Thomas More's six hours of work may be the rule? That people will have strength and health in better circumstances and after generations of wiser parentage? That happiness will be understood by all to be that state coming from proper culture of soul and mind and body? That Trades Unions, C.O.S. [Charity Organisation Societies], Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and various other associations will some day have attained their ideal, and cease to exist from there being no need for them, when rights and justice are secure by all citizens being alive to their duty?

The essentials of a good and happy life are, after all, very few, while many persons whose character can conquer untoward circumstances find goodness and happiness in even less than these same few--home, health, sufficient work and occupied leisure.

We speak of four essentials, and we come across numberless people who are overworked, with barely leisure even to rest, certainly not enough in which to cultivate any joys of home; leisure, health and home all swallowed up in a Juggernaut of work. Yet these people we meet in the poor parts of London and elsewhere are the same as ourselves, save for their environment. That they have not higher standards of life, of morality, of health, of happiness, is all due to their surroundings, present and hereditary. There are parents fond of their children, young men and women anxious to get on in the world, school-boys and school-girls of vivid imagination. How thankful we should be, by the way, that children have that heaven-sent gift of imagination! It is often a sufficient buffer to prevent feeling what else would be knockdown blows of an adverse fate. To see children enthusiastically playing with the rainy puddles, or the dusty hillocks in some neglected square, devoid of grass; to see boys as excited cricketers in a narrow court or street, none the less keen because their bat, solitary stump, and the ball, are each only lengths of wood torn from a broken box; to hear a barrel organ strike up a lively dance tune, and then to watch all the juveniles within hearing delightedly run to join in the dance--it is a thing to be thankful for anywhere, but more especially among sordid, dull, poverty-stricken lives, to find that happy childhood is possible through child-nature being able by imagination to transmute all around it into a golden light of its own. But childhood is only too soon over, and for many it hardly exists. Where there is one drunken parent, and the other at work all day, or where the father has deserted, the children are too often over-weighted with family cares, and under-weighted with food and rest. In other cases, the school children may look tolerably strong, but many, we might say most, fail rapidly in looks and health when at factory work; the effect of their own defective stamina, the heat of the workrooms, the often improper food and hurried meals, and frequently the fatigue of too much standing. It sometimes takes a good part of our life to fully understand the limitations set around us, both for ourselves and others, barriers of circumstance, health, time and ability, and this especially applies to our power of helping on social reform. Shyness and want of youth seem barriers to some, want of experience and steadiness of age to others! It is curious to reflect how the same word represents immensely diverse ideas to different people, as for instance, "Westminster" may mean to each of three persons solely the Abbey, or "the whispering gallery of the world," [the one in St. Paul's Cathedral?] or the [Royal] Aquarium! So to some people, middle age signifies a time of withered ambitions, and ghosts of broken day dreams, while to others it is the time above all to work, a time 'twixt future visions and dreams of the past, when we are experienced enough to have hope and faith, and are not too old to have living enthusiasms. It is as we go on in life that we find the master key of every seeming dead-lock is an increase of love. Prophets and teachers all enjoin upon us that it is the great want in the world, the electric power to move all creation. Mr. Watts shows it to us in "Love and Life," where the overshadowing power of love enables the frail form of life to ascend to greater heights, braving the stony paths. Love need not be the love of one; it can equally be the love of humanity, either in the parable of the painting or in Bourdillon's beautiful words:--

"The night hath a thousand eyes
      And the day but one:
Yet the light of a whole world dies
      With the setting sun.
The mind hath a thousand eyes
      And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
      If love is done."

Having found out our limitations (or having had the knowledge concerning them rubbed into us), the best way of making them innocuous is to see that our ideals reach beyond them. It is only when we have the ideal perspective that we can at all estimate the heights and depths of true realities. A writer in the Nineteenth Century lately remarked that painters of to-day lack the sense of beauty because they do not study to steep themselves in beautiful ideas. Ideals can be created and our power of idealizing cultivated by dwelling on the great things of life, goodness and beauty. Even our sleep may raise our ideals, as dreams are unconscious reflections of day-thoughts, and may either bind us to earth, or waft us into a purer air. The beautiful painting of St. Helena,* seeing in her dreams the vision of the True Cross, makes us think of how, when the waking thoughts are kept innocent, the sleeping ones may be sent to raise us to worlds unrealized before.

*Paul Veronese. (Nat. Gall.) [The Dream of Saint Helena by Paolo Veronese in the National Gallery]

There are many analogies between the art of living and the art of painting. We should look at our life as an artist at his canvas, or a sculptor at his block of marble, seeing in the mind's eye all the ideal possibilities which may be brought out. Anyone can see the surface of things. True artists look deeper, through an atmosphere of thought, if they would see anything worth seeing. The worth of a picture, of a statue, of a life, is the quantity of the invisible, of the ideal, of the true reality put into it over and above the mere handicraft. That which makes the Madonnas of Raffael, and some of those of Murillo (especially, perhaps, the Madonna el Rosario) appeal to us so much more than do the merely beautiful women of Andrea del Sarto, is the blending of innocence with the awe inspired heavenly knowledge, which the first two artists believed in, and delineated in their models, while Del Sarto's spirit was earth-bound by his love for his unworthy wife. He could not endure her portrait with high-minded innocence as he knew her for the frivolous self-seeking woman she was, and loved her in spite of higher aspirations, not in accordance with them. It is the idealistic that is the principle of all true art and worth; and it has been well remarked, that in the pictures of the old masters we have not merely what they looked upon, but also the soul of the painter, ideal or material, according to their inspiration. We said just now we should look at life as an artist at his canvas, perhaps also as an evangelist with his message. We all have something to express, some conveyed to ourselves individually, some experience undergone, which should render us useful to our kind. As most great manifestations of artistic life have taken place among, or as the result of, great national disturbances, such as the finest time of painting in France came in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Dutch master-pieces came mostly into being after wars with Spain, the Italian renaissance when Italy was distracted with revolutions, so ideal work in life is often helped by, if not originally owing its creation to, the experiences and trials which have come to the workers, who possibly pursue it at first only as being the best medicine for the mind, but later continue doing it more self-lessly, and even come to be thankful for suffering which has given them added powers of sympathy.

Change is the order of the world, and neither ideals nor limitations remain immovable. The first should always be getting higher, Alps behind Alps rising as we climb our mountains, and the second getting more expansive. Alas! that they sometimes lower and contract!

To sum up. To form and to heighten our own character, we must create Ideals. To see life in true proportion, we must have the Ideal perspective. To "take away the stones"* of bad dwellings, over-work, inadequate leisure, etc., which weigh down so many of our kind, we must work toward an ideal Utopia. When we think of the influence of Ideals on our own life, and that of others, we are reminded of Lowell's words:--

"Still through our paltry stir and strife
      Glows down the wished Ideal,
And Longing moulds in clay what life
      Carves in the marble Real."
            [Longing, by James Russell Lowell]

*[Bishop [Charles] Gore says that our Lord directed the stones to be taken away before He raised Lazarus to life, and that we should remove what now hinders spiritual or moral life in those among whom we work.]

Typed by Blossom, Mar. 2022; Proofread by LNL, Jan. 2025