e lesson which both essays seem intended to inculcate is this: love,
like poetry and prophecy, is a divine gift, which diverts men from the
common current of their lives; but in the right use of this gift lies
the secret of all human excellence. The passion which grovels in the
filth of sensual grossness may be transformed into a glorious
enthusiasm, a winged splendour, capable of soaring to the contemplation
of eternal verities. How strange will it be, when once those heights of
intellectual intuition have been scaled, to look down again to earth and
view the _Meirakidia_ in whom the soul first recognised the form of
beauty![158] There is a deeply-rooted mysticism, an impenetrable
soofyism, in the Socratic doctrine of Eros.

In the _Phaedrus_, the _Symposium_, the _Charmides_, the _Lysis_, and the
_Republic_, Plato dramatised the real Socrates, while he gave liberal
scope to his own personal sympathy for paiderastia.[159] In the _Laws_,
if we accept this treatise as the work of his old age, he discarded the
Socratic mask, and wrote a kind of palinode, which indicates more moral
growth than pure disapprobation of the paiderastic passion. I have
already tried to show that the point of view in the _Laws_ is still
Greek: that their author has not passed beyond the sphere of Hellenic
ethics. He has only become more ascetic in his rule of conduct as the
years advanced, importing the _rumores senum severiorum_ into his
discourse, and recognising the imperfection of that halting-point
between the two logical extremes of Pagan license and monastic
asceticism which in the fervour of his greener age he advocated. As a
young man, Plato felt sympathy for love so long as it was paiderastic
and not spent on women; he even condoned a lapse through warmth of
feeling into self-indulgence. As an old man, he denounced carnal
pleasure of all kinds, and sought to limit the amative instincts to the
one sole end of procreation.

It has so happened that Plato's name is still connected with the ideal
of passion purged from sensuality. Much might be written about the
parallel between the _mania_ of the _Phaedrus_ and the _joy_ of mediaeval
amorists. Nor would it be unprofitable to trace the points of contact
between the love described by Dante in the _Vita Nuova_ and the
paiderastia exalted to the heavens by Plato.[160] The spiritual passion
for Beatrice, which raised the Florentine poet above vile things, and
led him by the philosophic paths o