CHAPTER IV
When his servant called him about eight o'clock my brother sent a note
to Mr. Gaskell at New College, begging him to come round to Magdalen
Hall as soon as might be in the course of the morning. His summons was
at once obeyed, and Mr. Gaskell was with him before he had finished
breakfast. My brother was still much agitated, and at once told him what
had happened the night before, detailing the various circumstances with
minuteness, and not even concealing from him the sentiments which he
entertained towards Miss Constance Temple. In narrating the appearance
which he had seen in the chair, his agitation was still so excessive
that he had difficulty in controlling his voice.
Mr. Gaskell heard him with much attention, and did not at once reply
when John had finished his narration. At length he said, "I suppose many
friends would think it right to affect, even if they did not feel, an
incredulity as to what you have just told me. They might consider it
more prudent to attempt to allay your distress by persuading you that
what you have seen has no objective reality, but is merely the phantasm
of an excited imagination; that if you had not been in love, had not sat
up all night, and had not thus overtaxed your physical powers, you would
have seen no vision. I shall not argue thus, for I am as certainly
convinced as of the fact that we sit here, that on all the nights when
we have played this suite called the 'Areopagita,' there has been some
one listening to us, and that you have at length been fortunate or
unfortunate enough to see him."
"Do not say fortunate," said my brother; "for I feel as though I shall
never recover from last night's shock."
"That is likely enough," Mr. Gaskell answered, coolly; "for as in the
history of the race or individual, increased culture and a finer mental
susceptibility necessarily impair the brute courage and powers of
endurance which we note in savages, so any supernatural vision such
as you have seen must be purchased at the cost of physical reaction. From the first evening that we played this music, and heard the noises mimicking so closely the sitting down and rising up of some person, I have felt convinced that causes other than those which we usually call natural were at work, and that we were very near the manifestation of some extraordinary phenomenon."
"I do not quite apprehend your meaning."
"I mean this," he continued, "that this man or spirit of a man has been
sitting here night after night, and that we have not been able to see
him, because our minds are dull and obtuse. Last night the elevating
force of a strong passion, such as that which you have confided to me, combined with the power of fine music, so exalted your mind that you became endowed, as it were, with a sixth sense, and suddenly were enabled to see that which had previously been invisible. To this sixth sense music gives, I believe, the key. We are at present only on the threshold of such a knowledge of that art as will enable us to use it eventually as the greatest of all humanising and educational agents. Music will prove a ladder to the loftier regions of thought; indeed I have long found for myself that I cannot attain to the highest range of my intellectual power except when hearing good music. All poets, and most writers of prose, will say that their thought is never so exalted, their sense of beauty and proportion never so just, as when they are listening either to the artificial music made by man, or to some of the grander tones of nature, such as the roar of a western ocean, or the sighing of wind in a clump of firs. Though I have often felt on such occasions on the very verge of some high mental discovery, and though a hand has been stretched forward as it were to rend the veil, yet it has never been vouchsafed me to see behind it. This you no doubt were allowed in a measure to do last night. You probably played the music with a deeper intuition than usual, and this, combined with the excitement under which you were already labouring, raised you for a moment to the required pitch of mental exaltation."
"It is true," John said, "that I never felt the melody so deeply as when
I played it last night."