man. But just now the fashion is all for the things.
Ruskin and Carlyle set it going, and to-day the demand for ideals
exceeds the supply. And as a result, we meet with innumerable people
anxious to have the correct thing, but a little unsympathetic or
inexpert, and those unavoidable people who do not like the things but
feel compelled to get them. Ideals are not the easiest possessions to
have and manage, and they may even rise to the level of serious
inconveniences. So that I sometimes wonder these Extension people have
not taken up the subject of their management and use.

"Note, for instance, the folly of bringing ideals too much into the
daily life; it is childish, like a baby insisting on its new toy at
meal times, and taking it to bed. Never use an ideal as a standard,
and avoid any that reflect upon your conduct. The extremest decorative
people refrain from enamelling their kettles, and my cook though a
'born lady' does not wear her silk dress in the kitchen. Ideals are
the full dress of the soul. A business man, for instance, who let
visions of reverend Venetian and Genoese seigniors interfere with his
agile City movements--who, to carry out our comparison, draped his mind
with these things--would be uncommonly like a bowler in a dressing-gown.

"Then an ideal, we are also told, is an elevating influence in life;
but unless one is very careful one may get hoist with one's own petard
to a pitifully transitory soar above common humanity. The soar itself
is not unpleasant, but the sequel is sometimes disagreeable.

"To show how an ideal may trip up an inexpert mortal, take that man
Javvers and his wife. She also had an ideal husband, which was,
indeed, a kind of bigamy, and her constant references to this creation
of hers used to drive poor old Javvers frantic. It became as
objectionable as if she had been its sorrowing widow, and ultimately it
wrecked the happiness of their little home very completely.

"The seat of ideals, then, in one's mind, should be, as it were, a
lounge, over which these hangings may drape and flap harmlessly; but it
may easily become as the bed of Procrustes. To turn ideals to idols,
and to command your whole world to bow down to them, savours of the
folly of Nebuchadnezzar the king. Let your ideal world be far away
from reality, fit it with rococo furniture, angels and
birds-of-paradise, Minnesinger flowers and views of the Delectable
Mountains: and go there occasionally a