As he thought of it a wave of joy seemed to raise him up suddenly on its strong, full flood; a deep happiness that had come to him often before in his solitude, and which, for the time at any rate, was sufficient. To live! to live! to live! it seemed to cry—that was enough; there was nothing else in the world. Ah, surely he must be happy so long as the sun shone and all nature sang with that great rhythmic chaunt of sensuous life! He closed his eyes that the exquisitely fresh and living smell of the earth, his mother, the cool sweet green smell of the swaying grass, might creep into his very being. How delicious it was just to lie there in the lush green grass, among the clear, floating shadows—to lie and think his thoughts as they drifted into his mind from the outer sunshine.
When he chose to look in their direction, he could see his schoolfellows eager still over their game of cricket; but he was content to watch them, content to look on, lazily, dreamily, through his half-closed eyelids, following every now and then the swift curving passage of the ball through the air, when it rose above the fielders’ heads.
And in everything, though in a somewhat misty fashion, he seemed to feel the personality, the influence, of Harold Brocklehurst. Was it not all—his extraordinarily vivid sense of life—bound up in some subtle way with the beauty of their friendship? Had not their friendship helped him to realise the mystery and loveliness of nature; helped him to make things out; helped to unseal his eyes? It was the force of a temperament that found expression very easily, which he felt to be working now upon his own simpler nature, his spirit, his mind,—altering everything around him, awakening a new beauty in familiar things, suggesting a wider, deeper, more mystical beauty where before he had only been conscious of a material impression. It carried with it, too, a hundred hints, memories, of a strangely familiar paganism, of a fresher, younger world; a hundred touches of poetry:—the sun, the climbing plant: Apollo, Dionysus:—strong, beautiful, swift. This boy!—what had he to do with them? Why should he suggest them? And then, in the background, a haunting sense of something darker, more fateful—tragic even!—again the legend of Dionysus; but more pitiable, quite human, vaguely pathetic and bewildering.
By and by he opened a copy of the Phaedrus, which he had worked through with his father, and began to read.
They had studied together most of the shorter dialogues, and the whole of the Republic, but the Phaedrus Graham cared for most. In its pages he had taken his first peep at philosophy—philosophy, as conceived by him, so near to, so replete with, poetry;—‘Really, Phaedrus, you make a most charming guide.’ Nay, it was poetry! deep, impassioned poetry! for with Plato, even the trees and streams, all the lovely things of the visible world, were made to play their parts. It was as if they possessed active and living souls. They had at least, the boy felt, a wonderful share in the development of one’s own soul: they seemed to breathe about it an atmosphere of light and purity and happiness. In Plato’s philosophy—so far as he understood it—there was little he could not accept. On one very hot, still day, for instance, a passing breath of wind on his face had suddenly awakened in him the recollection of a prior existence—faintly, vaguely, perhaps, but still quite clearly enough to stamp a definite impression on his mind.
And for him, of all writers, this old Greek had the most delightfully personal charm. As he read him, indeed, it seemed as if the peculiar beauty of his nature were exhaled gently from the printed pages—gently and very delicately—like, say, the faint perfume of a spray of sweet-briar he had dried a few days ago between them, and which now as he came suddenly upon it and held it to his lips, breathed still the ghostly shadow of its former fragrance. Surely no other books were so fair and sweet, so wise and true. In the charmed circle of their range, the coarser qualities of things were forgotten, the light was cleansed, the whole realm of the soul lay clear. He knew no other writings that flowed in with so gracious a charm upon one’s spirit, filling it with a love for all that is beautiful and good, watering its ‘wing-feathers’: no others that exercised so humanising an influence upon one’s character. For it was, in truth, before all else, a philosophy of life, of the highest life one may hope to lead here upon earth, or later on in heaven. A philosophy of love, too, necessarily!—and of beauty. Of all earthly things beauty approximated most nearly to its eternal idea: and love!—well, all desire for good and happiness, nay, even the working of philosophy itself—all that was only the gracious power of love. On these the path was builded, the Platonic ladder reaching from earth to heaven; for one climbed, after all, to those pure, colourless regions, to that radiant world of ideas, by Phaedo’s golden hair.
Well! such a doctrine met most of the needs of his own spirit, and awakened in him, naturally, a very friendly feeling for its author; the kind of affection we have for any one who has thought just the same thought, felt just the same joy or sorrow, that we are thinking and feeling now. As a young boy will linger long beside some deep pool of sea-water he finds among the rocks, peering down into its minute caverns and among its seaweeds for unknown curiosities and treasures, so Graham lingered over these pages, trying to learn all things from them, a rule of life for himself, a rule whereby he might, as far as was possible, enter into and judge the lives of others, might discover what to cling to, what to throw away. Over the dark still well of Life he leaned, and through that deep cool water, ruffled gently by the soft warm breath of youth, the face of Love himself arose, his hair streaming back like a flame, his sad grey eyes full of an infinite pity.
And he began to dream of an immortal love which, though unable to realise itself perfectly in this world, yet might be strong enough to draw two souls together, after death, in some far heaven. Far! But in truth it seemed quite near just now:—was here, a soft radiance, in his own spirit, in the warm air that blew about his face, in the sunlight, in the trees, in the voices of his playmates. Only afterwards—afterwards there would be that untroubled and perfect communion which hovered now before him as an unattainable ideal, a light behind the clouds, a flame on the horizon; ‘for then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone.’
Plato’s theories blew just like a cool wind upon the dust gathered in one’s mind. They entered one’s mind easily and at once, sinking down into the very depths of one’s spirit, to be a light there for ever, to sing there for ever, as the morning stars sang together.
And they were so bound up with ordinary existence, with the affairs of every day! They stretched out from their idealism a friendly hand to which he could cling when struggling along the rough muddy roads of the world. But above all, he was charmed with the theory of natural suggestion, the influence beautiful things have upon one in childhood and boyhood in the building-up and equipment of one’s character. The grouping of clouds about a sunset, the noise of running water—these, and other things like these, were working always, working delicately, upon one’s mind and temper, shading them, as it were, to fairer colours and softer outlines. For material beauty is at least one rung, though it be the lowest, in the Platonic ladder. Higher fair souls; fair virtues higher still; and highest of all the pure idea of Beauty itself, invisible to the eye of sense, but lying bright and clear before the vision of the mind, a glorious sight, to be viewed by those alone who have cleansed their souls of earthly passions:—‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’