“The Ideal” is Logan Pearsall Smith’s satiric dream of the impossibility of an ideal English picnic.
Smith conjectures that though he might be promised a perfect day for a picnic and feasting in the shade of splendid trees, “when, in the rainy twilight, I was deposited soaked, and half-dead with fatigue, out of that open motor, was there nothing side of me but chill and disillusion? I had dreamed a dream incompatible with climate and social conditions of these Islands, had I not, out of that very dream and disenchantment, create like the Platonic Lover, a Platonic and imperishable vision-the ideal Picnic, the Picnic as it might be-the wonderful windless weather, the Watteauish landscape, where a group of mortals talk and feast as they talked and feasted of the Golden Age?”
Featured Image: John Leech’s “The Pic-Nic,” Punch 1851
See Logan Pearsall Smith. “The Ideal.” In All Trivia: Trivia, More Trivia, Afterthoughts, Last Words. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1920