great talker at school. I did nothing at Trinity but talk, my reading was done
at odd hours. I was the best talker ever seen in Oxford."
"And did you find any teacher there like Mahaffy?" I asked, "any professor with
a touch of the poet?"
He came to seriousness at once.
"There were two or three teachers, Frank," he replied, "greater than Mahaffy;
teachers of the world as well as of Oxford. There was Ruskin for instance, who
appealed to me intensely--a wonderful man and a most wonderful writer. A sort
of exquisite romantic flower; like a violet filling the whole air with the
ineffable perfume of belief. Ruskin has always seemed to me the Plato of
England--a Prophet of the Good and True and Beautiful, who saw as Plato saw that
the three are one perfect flower. But it was his prose I loved, and not his
piety. His sympathy with the poor bored me: the road he wanted us to build was
tiresome. I could see nothing in poverty that appealed to me, nothing; I shrank
away from it as from a degradation of the spirit; but his prose was lyrical and
rose on broad wings into the blue. He was a great poet and teacher, Frank, and
therefore of course a most preposterous professor; he bored you to death when he
taught, but was an inspiration when he sang.
"Then there was Pater, Pater the classic, Pater the scholar, who had already
written the greatest English prose: I think a page or two of the greatest prose
in all literature. Pater meant everything to me. He taught me the highest form
of art: the austerity of beauty. I came to my full growth with Pater. He was a
sort of silent, sympathetic elder brother. Fortunately for me he could not talk
at all; but he was an admirable listener, and I talked to him by the hour. I
learned the instrument of speech with him, for I could see by his face when I
had said anything extraordinary. He did not praise me but quickened me
astonishingly, forced me always to do better than my best--an intense vivifying
influence, the influence of Greek art at its supremest."
"He was the Gamaliel then?" I questioned, "at whose feet you sat?"
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