Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Tom Allen, David Moynihan, Charles Franks
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IDEALA
BY SARAH GRAND
"L'esprit ne nous garantit pas
des sottises de notre humeur."--VAUVENARGUES
PREFACE
You will ask me, perhaps, even you who are all charity, why parts of
this book are what they are. I can only answer with another question:
Why are we what we are? But I warn you that it would not be fair to
take any of Ideala's opinions, here given, as final. Much of what she
thought was the mere effervescence of a strong mind in a state of
fermentation, a mind passing successively through the three stages of
the process; the _vinous_, alcoholic, or excitable stage; the
_acetous_, jaundiced, or embittered stage; and the _putrefactive_,
or unwholesome stage; and also embodying, at different times, the
characteristics of all three. But, even during its worst phase, it was
an earnest mind, seeking the truth diligently, and not to be blamed
for stumbling upon good and bad together by the way. It is, in fact,
not a perfect, but a transitional state which I offer for your
consideration, a state which has its repulsive features, but which, it
may be hoped, would result in a beautiful deposit, when at last the
inevitable effervescence had subsided.
But why exhibit the details of the process, you may ask. To encourage
others, of course. What help is there in the contemplation of
perfection ready made? It only disheartens us. We should lay down our
arms, we should struggle no longer, we should be hopeless, despairing,
reckless, if we never had a glimpse of growth, of those "stepping-
stones of their dead selves" upon which men mount to higher things. The
imperfections must be studied, because it is only from the details of
the process that anything can be learned. Putting aside the people who
criticise, not with a view to mending matters, but because a
... low desire
Not to seem lowest makes them level all;
the people who judge, who condemn, who have no mercy on any faults and
failings but their own, and who,
... if they find
Some stain or blemish in a name of note,
Not grieving that their greatest are so small,
Inflate themselves with some insane delight,
and would ostracise a neighbour for the first offence by ruling that
one mistake must mar a life--anybody's life but their own, of course;
who have no peace in themselves, no habit of sweet thought; whose lives
are one long agony of excitement, objection, envy, hate, and unrest;
the decently clad devils of society who may be known by their eternal
carping, and who are already in torment, and doing their utmost to drag
others after them. Putting them aside, as any one may who has the
courage to face them--for they are terrible cowards--and taking the
best of us, and the best intentioned among us, we find that all are apt
to make some one trait in the characters, some one trick in the
manners, some one incident in the lives of people we meet the text of
an objection to the whole person. And a state of objection is a
miserable state, and a dangerous one, because it stops our growth by
robbing us of half our power to love, in which lies all our strength,
and which, with the delight of being loved, is the one thing worth
living for. When we know in ourselves that love is heaven, and hate is
hell, and all the intervals of like and dislike are antechambers to
either, we possess the key to joy and sorrow, by which alone we can
attain to the mystery that may not be mentioned here, but beyond which
ecstasy awaits us.
This is why such details are necessary.
Doctors-spiritual must face the horrors of the dissecting-room, and
learn before they can cure or teach; and even we, poor feeble
creatures, who have no strength, however great our desire, to do
either, can help at least a little by not hindering, if we attend to
our own mental health, which we shall do all the better for knowing
something of our moral anatomy, and the diseases to which it is liable.
We hate and despise in our ignorance, and grow weak; but love and pity
thrive on knowledge, and to love and pity we owe all the beauty of
life, and all our highest power.
_"It is that life of custom and accident in which many of us pass
much of our time in this world; that life in which we do what we have
not purposed, and speak what we do not mean, and assent to what we do
not understand; that life which is overlaid by the weight of things
external to it, and is moulded by them, instead of assimilating them;
that which, instead of growing and blossoming under any wholesome dew,
is crystallised over with it, as with hoar frost, and becomes to the
true life what an arborescence is to a tree, a candied agglomeration of
thoughts and habits foreign to it, brittle, obstinate, and icy, which
can neither bend nor grow, but must be crushed and broken to bits if it
stands in our way. All men are liable to be in some degree frost-bitten
in this sort; all are partly encumbered and crusted over with idle
matter; only, if they have real life in them, they are always breaking
this bark away in noble rents, until it becomes, like the black strips
upon the birch tree, only a witness of their own inward strength."_
--RUSKIN.
IDEALA
CHAPTER I.
She came among us without flourish of trumpets. She just slipped into
her place, almost unnoticed, but once she was settled there it seemed
as if we had got something we had wanted all our lives, and we should
have missed her as you would miss the thrushes in the spring, or any
other sweet familiar thing. But what the secret of her charm was I
cannot say. She was full of inconsistencies. She disliked ostentation,
and never wore those ornamental fidgets ladies delight in, but she
would take a piece of priceless lace to cover her head when she went
to water her flowers. And she said rings were a mistake; if your hands
were ugly they drew attention to them, if pretty they hid their
beauty; yet she wore half-a-dozen worthless ones habitually for the
love of those who gave them, to her. It was said that she was striking
in appearance, but cold and indifferent in manner. Some, on whom she
had never turned her eyes, called her repellent. But it was noticed
that men who took her down to dinner, or had any other opportunity of
talking to her, were never very positive in, what they said of her
afterwards. She made every one, men and women alike, feel, and she did
it unconsciously. Without effort, without eccentricity, without
anything you could name or define, she impressed you, and she held you
--or at least she held _me_, always--expectant. Nothing about her ever
seemed to be of the present. When she talked she made you wonder what
her past had been, and when she was silent you began to speculate
about her future. But she did not talk much as a rule, and when she
did speak it was always some subject of interest, some fact that she
wanted to ascertain accurately, or some beautiful idea, that occupied
her; she had absolutely no small talk for any but her most intimate
friends, whom she was wont at times to amuse with an endless stock of
anecdotes and quaint observations; and this made people of limited
capacity hard on her. Some of these called her a cold, ambitious,
unsympathetic woman; and perhaps, from their point of view, she was
so. She certainly aspired to something far above them, and had nothing
but scorn for the dead level of dull mediocrity from which they would
not try to rise.
"To be distinguished among these people," she once said, "it is only
necessary to have one's heart
Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.
There is no need to _do_ anything; if you have the right _feeling_ you
may be as passive as a cow, and still excel them all, for they never
thrill to a noble thought."
"Then, pity them," I said.
"No, despise them," she answered. "Pity is for affliction, for such
shortcomings as are hereditary and can hardly be remedied--for the
taint in nature which is all but hopeless. But these people are not
afflicted. They could do better if they would. They know the higher
walk, and deliberately pursue the lower. Their whole feeling is for
themselves, and such things as have power to move them through the
flesh only. I would almost rather sin on the impulse of a generous but
misguided nature, and have the power to appreciate and the will to be
better, than live a perfect, loveless woman, caring only for myself,
like these. I should do more good."
They called Ideala unsympathetic, yet I have known her silent from
excess of sympathy. She could walk with you, reading your heart and
soul, sorrowing and rejoicing with you, and make you feel without a
word that she did so. It was this power to sympathise, and the longing
she had to find good in everything, that made her forgive the faults
that were patent in a nature with which she was finally brought into
contact, for the sake of the virtues which she discovered hidden away
deep down under a slowly hardening crust of that kind of self-
indulgence which mars a man.
But her own life was set to a tune that admitted of endless variations.
Sometimes it was difficult even for those who knew her best to detect
the original melody among the clashing cords that concealed it; but,
let it be hidden as it might, one felt that it would resolve itself
eventually, through many a jarring modulation and startling cadence,
perhaps, back to the perfect key.
I saw her first at a garden party. She scarcely noticed me when we were
introduced. There were great masses of white cloud drifting up over the
blue above the garden, and she was wholly occupied with them when she
could watch them without rudeness to those about her; and even when she
was obliged to look away, I could see that she was still thinking of
the sky. "Do you live much in cloudland?" I asked, and felt for a
moment I had said a silly thing; but she turned to me quickly, and
looked at me for the first time as if she saw me--and when I say she
looked at me, I mean something more than an ordinary look, for Ideala's
eyes were a wonder, affecting you as a poem does which has power to
exalt.
"Ah, you feel it too," she said. "Are they not beautiful? Will you sit
beside me here? You can see the river as well--down there, beneath the
trees."
I thought she would have talked after that, but she did not. When I
spoke to her once or twice she answered absently; and presently she
forgot me altogether, and began to sing to herself softly:
Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,
Thy tribute wave deliver;
No more by thee my steps shall be
For ever and for ever.
Then suddenly recollecting herself, she stopped, and exclaimed, in much
confusion, "O please forgive me! That stupid thing has been running in
my head all day--and it is a way I have. I always forget people and
begin to sing."
She did not see in the least that her apology might have been
considered an adding of insult to injury, and, of course, I was careful
not to let her know that I thought it so, although I must confess that
for a moment I felt just a trifle aggrieved. I thought my presence had
bored her, and was surprised to see, when I got up to go, that she
would rather have had me stay.
She cared little for people in general, and had few likings. It was
love with her if anything; but those whom she loved once she loved
always, never changing in her affection for them, however badly they
might treat her. And she had the power of liking people for themselves,
regardless of their feeling for her; indeed, her indifference on this
score was curious. I once heard a lady say to her: "You are one of the
few young married ladies whom I dare chaperon in these degenerate days.
No degree of admiration or worship ever seems to touch you. Is it real
or pretended, your unconsciousness?"
"Unconsciousness of what?"
"Of the feeling you excite."
"The feeling _I_ excite?" Ideala seemed to think a moment; then she
answered gravely: "I do not think I am conscious of anything that
relates to myself, personally, in my intercourse with people. They are
ideas to me for the most part--men especially so."
That way she had of forgetting people's presence was one of her
peculiarities. If she liked you she was content just to have you there,
but she never showed it except by a regretful glance when you went
away. She was very absent, too. One day I found her with a big, awkward
volume on her knee, heated, excited, and evidently put out.
"Is anything the matter?" I wanted to know.
"O yes," she answered desperately; "I've lost my pen, and I'm writing
for the mail."
"Why, where are you looking for it?" I asked.
She glanced at me, and then at the book.
"I--I believe," she faltered, "I was looking for it among the p's in
the French dictionary."
On another occasion I watched her revising a manuscript. As she wrote
her emendations she gummed them on over the old copy, and she was so
absorbed that at last she put the gum-brush into the ink-bottle.
Discovering her mistake, she gave a little disconcerted sort of laugh,
and took the brush away to wash it. She returned presently, examining
it critically to see if it were perfectly cleansed, and having
satisfied herself, she carefully put it back in the ink-bottle.
But perhaps the funniest instance of this peculiarity of hers was one
that happened in the Grosvenor Gallery on a certain occasion. She had
been busy with her catalogue, doing the pictures conscientiously, and
not talking at all, when suddenly she burst out laughing.
"Do you know what I have been doing?" she said. "I wanted to know who
that man is"--indicating a gentleman of peculiar appearance in the
crowd--"and I have been looking all over him for his number, that I
might hunt up his name in the catalogue!"
Her way of seeing analogies as plausible as the obvious relation of p
to pen, and of acting on wholly wrong conclusions deduced from most
unexceptionable premises, was another characteristic. She always blamed
her early education, or rather want of education, for it. "If I had
been taught to think," she said, "when my memory was being burdened
with historical anecdotes torn from the text, and other useless scraps
of knowledge, I should be able to see both sides of a subject, and
judge rationally, now. As it is, I never see more than one side at a
time, and when I have mastered that, I feel like the old judge in some
Greek play, who, when he had heard one party to a suit, begged that the
other would not speak as it would only poggle what was then clear to
him."
But in this Ideala was not quite fair to herself.
It was not always--although, unfortunately, it was oftenest at critical
moments--that she was beset with this inability to see more than one
side of a subject at a time. The odd thing about it was that one never
knew which side, the pathetic or the humorous, would strike her.
Generally, however, it was the one that related least to herself
personally. This self-forgetfulness, with a keen sense of the
ludicrous, led her sometimes, when she had anything amusing to relate,
to overlook considerations which would have kept other people silent.
"I saw a pair of horses running away with a heavy wagon the other day,"
she told us once. "It was in Cross Street, and there was a child in the
way--there always is a child in the way!--and, as there was no one else
to do it, I ran into the road to remove that child. I had to pull it
aside quickly, and there was no time to say 'Allow me'--in fact, there
was no time for anything--and in my hurry I lost my balance and fell in
the mud, and the wagon came tearing over me. It was an unpleasant
sensation, but I wasn't hurt, you know; neither the wheels nor the
horses touched me. I got very dirty, though, and I have no doubt I
looked as ridiculous as I felt, and for that I expected to be tenderly
dealt with; but when I went to ask after the child, a few days later, a
neighbour told me that its mother was out, and it was a good thing too,
as she had been heard to declare she would 'go for that lady the next
time she saw her, for flingin' of her bairn about!'"
When she had told the story, Ideala was horrified to find that the
fact, which she had overlooked, of her having risked her life to save
the child struck us all much more forcibly than the ingratitude that
amused her.
Although her sense of humour was keen, it was not always, as I said
before, the humorous side of a subject that struck her. I found her one
day looking utterly miserable.
"What has happened?" I asked. "You look sad."
"And I feel sad," she answered. "I was just thinking what a pity it is
those gay, pleasure-loving, flower-clad people of Hawaii are dying
out!"
She was quite in earnest, and could not be made to see that there was
anything droll in her mourning poignantly for a people so remote.
Another instance of her absent-mindedness recurs to me. The incident
was related at our house one evening, in Ideala's presence, by Mr.
Lloyd, a mutual friend. A clever drawing by another friend, of Ideala
trying to force a cabman to take ten shillings for a half-crown fare--
one of the great fears of her life being the chance of not giving
people of that kind as much as they expected--had caused Ideala to
protest that she _did_ understand money matters.
"O yes, we all know that your capacity for business is quite
extraordinary," Mr. Lloyd said, with a smile that meant something. And
then, addressing us all, he asked: "Did I ever tell you about her
coming to borrow five shillings from me one day? Shall I tell, Ideala?"
"You may, if you like," Ideala answered, getting very red. "But the
story is not interesting."
We all began to be anxious to hear it.
"Judge for yourselves," Mr. Lloyd said. "One day the head clerk came
into my private room at the Bank, looking perplexed and discomfited.
'Please, sir' he said, 'a lady wishes to see you.' 'A lady,' I
answered. 'Ladies have no business here. What does she want?' 'She
would not say, sir, and she would not send in her name. She said it did
not matter.' I began to wonder what I had been doing. 'What is she
like?' I asked. He looked all round as if in search of a simile, and
then he answered: 'Well, sir, she's more like a picture than anything.'
'Show her in,' I said."
Here the story was interrupted by a shout of laughter. He laughed a
little himself.
"I should have been polite in any case," he declared, apologetically.
"The clerk ushered in a lady whose extreme embarrassment made me sorry
for her. She changed colour half-a-dozen times in as many seconds, and
then she hurled her errand at my head in these words, without any
previous preparation to break the blow: 'Mr. Lloyd, can you lend me
five shillings?' and before I had recovered she continued--'I came in
by train this morning, and I've lost my purse, and can't get back if
you won't help me--at least I think I've lost my purse. I took it out
to give sixpence to a beggar--and--and here is the sixpence!' and she
held it out to me. She had given her purse to the beggar and carried
the sixpence off in triumph. You may well say 'Oh, Ideala!'"
"And Mr. Lloyd was so very good as to take me to the station, and see
me into the train," Ideala murmured; "and he gave me his bank-book to
amuse me on the journey, and carried Huxley's _Elementary Physiology_,
which I had come in to buy, off in triumph!"
But with all her self-forgetfulness there were moments in which she
showed that she must have thought deeply about herself, weighing her
own individuality against others, to see what place she occupied in her
own age, and how she stood with regard to the ages that had gone
before; yet even this she seemed to have done in a selfless way, having
apparently examined herself coolly, critically, fairly, as she might
have examined any other specimen of humanity in which she felt an
interest, unbiassed by any special regard.
"People always want to know if I write, or paint, or play, or what I
do," she once said to me. "They all expect me to do something. My
function is not to do, but to be. I make no poetry. I am a poem--if you
read me aright."
And again, in a moment of despondency, she said, "I am one of the weary
women of the nineteenth century. No other age could have produced me."
When she said she did nothing she must have meant she was not great in
anything, for her time was all occupied, and those things in which she
was interested were never so well done without her help. If any crying
abuse were brought to light in the old Cathedral city; if any large
measure of reform were set on foot; if the local papers suddenly became
eloquent in favour of some good movement, and adroit in their powers of
persuasion; if burdens had to be lifted from the oppressed, and the
weak defended against great odds, you might be sure that Ideala was
busy, and her work could be detected in it all. And she was especially
active when efforts were being made to find amusement for the people.
"That is what they want, poor things," she would say. "Their lives are
such a dreary round of dull monotonous toil, and they have so little
sun to cheer them. They ought to be taught to laugh, and have the
brightness put into themselves, and then it would seem as if they had
been relieved of half the atmospheric pressure beneath which they
groan. Think what your own life would be if day day after day brought
you nothing but toil; if you had nothing to look back upon, nothing to
look forward to, but the labour that makes a machine of you, deadening
the power to care, and holding mind and body in the galling bondage and
weariness of everlasting routine."
She thought laughter an unfailing specific for most of the ills of
life. "We can none of us be thankful enough for the sensation," she
said. "Nothing relieves the mental oppression, which does such moral
and physical harm, like mirth; of course, I mean legitimate laughter,
not levity, nor the ill-natured rejoicing of small minds in such
subjects for sorrow as their neighbours' faults, follies, and mistakes.
What I am thinking of is the pleasure without excitement which there is
in sympathetic intercourse with those large, loving natures that
elevate, and the laughter without bitterness which is always a part of
it."
Like most people whose goodness is neither affected nor acquired, but
natural to them, Ideala saw no merit in her own works, and would not
take the credit she deserved for them; nor would she have had her good
deeds known at all if she could have helped it. But knowledge of these
things leaks out somehow, although probably not a third of what she did
will ever be even suspected.