THE ROMANCE OF THE IDEAL

 BY IOTA.

" The World Grown Young " (being a brief record of reforms carried out from 1894-1914) is the title of a book recently issued, and it sets speculation adrift. Not for any particular virtue it may have, but because it comes as a fresh addition to a class, because it typifies a movement. That movement is the straining after the ideal, the pursuit of the Golden Age, the hope of the Millennium.

Society has of late suffered from this mental influenza severely, but like the bodily influenza, the seizure is as old as man. Plato's "Republic," Donnelly's "Caesar's Column," Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," Bellamy's "Looking Backward," Campanella's "City of the Sun," William Morris's " News from Nowhere," on they go, jostling one another in beautiful confusion. Whether it comes from a philosopher like Plato, with the soul of a poet, or in the cold and formal phrase of a Karl Marx whether it be the stilted bombast of a modern political reformer, or a prose idyll of Morris's written in the "plush of speech" that Meredith speaks of, it is still the same. The cry is always for an escape from the unsatisfying Present to the vague but soul-illumined Future. The cry, it has been said, is one that echoes from far-off times, but within recent years it has been heard with peculiar force London that great baby that must have its toy to caress or to rend, has taken to its care H. P. B. (Blavatsky) and her shadowy schemes, and has, as it thinks, beautifully pulled out all the sawdust and stuffing, while the Besantine Kingdom, as a flippant London scribe has styled it, has come in for a like hauling. Mrs. Oliphant's Memoirs of the gifted Laurence Oliphant have brought into the light again the pathetic story of his " Great Renunciation " and his constant striving after his ideal. The Memoirs has also revealed once more the mystic Thomas Lake Harris, saint and seer according to some, rogue and blackguard in the opinion of others with his plans for the redemption of society. The picture of Laurence and the gentle and beautiful Alice Oliphant, with their hard taskmaster, more autocratic than the Czar of all the Russias, it would be hard to parallel in the whole range of fiction. The "new social order" has also been a happy fiction with certain classes in this colony of late, to be brought about by the " downtrodden masses " getting a direct voice in the affairs of the nation. Now they have got it the blissful change seems as far off as ever. True they have made a step by seeking to fine and imprison a man who works a longer time than they consider he should, but beyond that they have not gone far.

Milton, in some of his earlier poems, has shown his skill in gaining a happy effect from the mere iteration of a string of names. What impression, think you, would the names of the romances of the ideal convey? We have the "Coming Race," "Old Order and the New," " Utopia,"' "New Atlantis," " City of the Sun," " Golden Age," " Mundus Alter et Idem," News from Nowhere," "Looking Backward," "Looking Further Forward," " A Social Tangle," " Cæsar's Column," "The Crystal Button," " Life in Utopia," &c. The man who prides himself on his "common sense" mutters, " Chatterings of unhinged minds, the effervescence of of over-stimulated brains." To the enthusiast, the complacent optimist, they convey the hope, the promise of the long-expected "New Order." To him they mean the truth of Whitman's words—

In this broad earth of ours,

Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,

 Enclosed and safe within its central heart,

 Nestles the seed perfection.

The historian that is alive to feel the beats of the nation's pulse notes these efforts, and gives them their due significance.

In Rip Van Winkle style pass for a while into the land of dreams, only instead of it being unconsciously on the mountain side as with that worthy, let it be consciously among the romances of the ideal. Your feelings on awakening will be every whit as strange and perplexing as his ; your mind will be as ragged and disorganised as were his garments. This, of course, provided you soak yourself sufficiently. " I'm overdosed with the ideal," said a friend, R——, to me, who ought to know, having taken it like a course of Turkish baths, "and piously crave a return to the everyday world, unlovely though it is." His mental haze was not surprising, for your Utopian writer gives to his work an air of vraisemblance. If you are at all in harmony with his general principles, if you are a disciple of the "new order," saturated with the " new spirit," you are swept along by the tide of his enthusiasm, and revel in a world of possibilities. Your ideas of the real and the ideal run into one another and tie themselves in a knot, your present existence becomes shadowy, your imaginary life the real. From the pinnacle of your "Nowhere" you look askance at ordinary mortals and at ordinary things. " Was it a dream ?" asks William Morris's "Rip Van Winkle." " If so, why was I so conscious all along that I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and struggle ? All along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as if I had no business amongst them as though the time would come when they would reject me and say, as Ellen's last mournful look seemed to say, 'No, it will not do; you cannot be of us, you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that, in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day, there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship—but not before.' " All here below seems so flat, stale, and unprofitable, and this " time of rest in store for the world " is so captivating. The Is—" the time before Equality of Life," Morris calls it—appears an unsightly wench ; the Might Be a maid that a wondrous fair, inviting a closer acquaintance.

In these schemes for knocking the universe into shape we can but admire the resolute grasping of the nettle, the rude breaking in where the proverbial angel fears to tread. With what airiness are crooked things here made straight! How the stubborn problems that have been troubling the world are muzzled, knocked on the head, and finally kicked aside. Here are provided remedies for all the ills that flesh is heir to, and for that matter, also for those that mind is heir to. It is a small matter, that to some the remedy seems to be worse than the disease. When property and money are no more, when greed and strife are at an end, what then ? As love feeds on hate, content on discontent, so conflict is the salt of life, the spice of labour. The abyss of consuming monotony yawns before us. Save us from the Millennium, a tiresome existence. Some we can conceive as preferring the orthodox hell to the tedium of the orthodox heaven of certain folk. Are we in future to lack first-rate villains ? Are we to have no more sad examples to hold up as awful warnings! Happily " man never is, but always to be, blest." Thus the evil day is staved off.

In a conversation once with Robert Buchanan, G. H. Lewes said, " Man is pre-doomed to aspiration as the smoke flies upward." And this is well. Humanity has its safety valves, and the romances of the ideal are of them. These singers of the Golden Age fail to grasp the significance of Lowell's words, " 'Tis heaven must come, not we must go."

Meanwhile it is certain that we will continue to have Cities of the Sun, more budgets of News from Nowhere (the "where" may in time be located), more Looking Backwards, and Looking Forwards, until this world no longer be a stage to feed contention in a lingering act.

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW 1891)http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13849819