The Testament of Beauty

from Book I, Introduction

Man’s Reason is in such deep insolvency to sense,

that tho’ she guide his highest flight heav’nward, and teach him

dignity morals manners and human comfort,

she can delicatly and dangerously bedizen

the rioting joys that fringe the sad pathways of Hell.

Not without alliance of the animal senses

hath she any miracle: Lov’st thou in the blithe hour

of April dawns—nay marvelest thou not—to hear

the ravishing music that the small birdës make

in garden or woodland, rapturously heralding

the break of day; when the first lark on high hath warn’d

the vigilant robin already of the sun’s approach,

and he on slender pipe calleth the nesting tribes

to awake and fill and thrill their myriad-warbling throats

praising life’s God, untill the blisful revel grow

in wild profusion unfeign’d to such a hymn as man

hath never in temple or grove pour’d to the Lord of heav’n?

      Hast thou then thought that all this ravishing music,

that stirreth so thy heart, making thee dream of things

illimitable unsearchable and of heavenly import,

is but a light disturbance of the atoms of air,

whose jostling ripples, gather’d within the ear, are tuned

to resonant scale, and thence by the enthron’d mind received

on the spiral stairway of her audience chamber

as heralds of high spiritual significance?

and that without thine ear, sound would hav no report.

Nature hav no music; nor would ther be for thee

any better melody in the April woods at dawn

than what an old stone-deaf labourer, lying awake

o’night in his comfortless attic, might perchance

be aware of, when the rats run amok in his thatch?

      Now since the thoughtless birds not only act and enjoy

this music, but to their offspring teach it with care,

handing on those small folk-songs from father to son

in such faithful tradition that they are familiar

unchanging to the changeful generations of men—

and year by year, listening to himself the nightingale

as amorous of his art as of his brooding mate

practiseth every phrase of his espousal lay,

and still provoketh envy of the lesser songsters

with the same notes that woke poetic eloquence

alike in Sophocles and the sick heart of Keats—

see then how deeply seated is the urgence whereto

Bach and Mozart obey’d, or those other minstrels

who pioneer’d for us on the marches of heav’n

and paid no heed to wars that swept the world around,

nor in their homes wer more troubled by cannon-roar

than late the small birds wer, that nested and carol’d

upon the devastated battlefields of France.

      Birds are of all animals the nearest to men

for that they take delight in both music and dance,

and gracefully schooling leisure to enliven life

wer the earlier artists: moreover in their airy flight

(which in its swiftness symboleth man’s soaring thought)

they hav no rival but man, and easily surpass

in their free voyaging his most desperate daring,

altho’ he hath fed and sped his ocean-ships with fire;

and now, disturbing me as I write, I hear on high

his roaring airplanes, and idly raising my head

see them there; like a migratory flock of birds

that rustle southward from the cold fall of the year

in order’d phalanx—so the thin-rankt squadrons ply,

til sound and sight failing me they are lost in the clouds.

       .....

Time eateth away at many an old delusion,

yet with civilization delusions make head;

the thicket of the people wil take furtiv fire

from irresponsible catchwords of live ideas,

      sudden as a gorse-bush from the smouldering end

of any loiterer’s match-splint, which, unless trodden out

afore it spredd, or quell’d with wieldy threshing-rods

wil burn ten years of planting with all last year’s ricks

and blacken a countryside. ’Tis like enough that men

ignorant of fire and poison should be precondemn’d

to sudden deaths and burnings, but ’tis mightily

to the reproach of Reason that she cannot save

nor guide the herd; that minds who else wer fit to rule

must win to power by flattery and pretence, and so

by spiritual dishonesty in their flurried reign

confirm the disrepute of all authority—

but only in sackcloth can the Muse speak of such things.

       from Book II. Selfhood

The Spartan General Brasidas, the strenuous man,

who earn’d historic favour from his conquer’d foe,

once caught a mouse foraging in his messbasket

among the figs, but when it bit him let it go,

praising its show of fight in words that Plutarch judged

worth treasuring; and since I redd the story at school

unto this hour I hav never thought of Brasidas

and cannot hear his name, but that I straightway see

a table and an arm’d man smiling with hand outstretch’d

above a little mouse that is scampering away.

      Why should this thing so hold me? and why do I welcome now

the tiny beast, that hath come running up to me

as if here in my cantos he had spied a crevice,

and counting on my friendship would make it his home?

      ’Tis such a pictur as must by mere beauty of fitness

convince natural feeling with added comfort.

The soldier seeth the instinct of Selfhood in the mouse

to be the same impulse that maketh virtue in him.

For Brasidas held that courage ennobleth man,

and from unworth redeemeth, and that folk who shrink

from ventur of battle in self-defence are thereby doom’d

to slavery and extinction: and so this mouse, albeit

its little teeth had done him a petty hurt, deserved

liberty for its courage, and found grace in man.

       .....

What is Beauty? saith my sufferings then.—I answer

the lover and poet in my loose alexandrines:

Beauty is the highest of all these occult influences,

the quality of appearances that thru’ the sense

wakeneth spiritual emotion in the mind of man:

And Art, as it createth new forms of beauty,

awakeneth new ideas that advance the spirit

in the life of Reason to the wisdom of God.

But highest Art must be as rare as nativ faculty is

and her surprise of magic winneth favor of men

more than her inspiration: most are led away

by fairseeming pretences, which being wrought for gain

pursue the ephemeral fashion that assureth it;

and their thin influences are of the same low grade

as the unaccomplish’d forms; their poverty is exposed

when they would stake their charm on ethic excellence;

for then weak simulations of virtues appear,

such as convention approveth, but not Virtue itself,

tho’ not void of all good: and (as I read) ’twas this

that Benvenuto intended, saying that not only

Virtue was memorable but things so truly done

that they wer like to Virtue; and thus prefaced his book,

thinking to justify both himself and his works.

      The authority of Reason therefor relieth at last

hereon—that her discernment of spiritual things,

the ideas of Beauty, is her conscience of instinct

upgrown in her (as she unto conscience of all

upgrew from lower to higher) to conscience of Beauty

judging itself by its own beauteous judgment.

       from Book III. Breed

How was November’s melancholy endear’d to me

in the effigy of plowteams following and recrossing

patiently the desolat landscape from dawn to dusk,

as the slow-creeping ripple of their single furrow

submerged the sodden litter of summer’s festival!

They are fled, those gracious teams; high on the headland now

squatted, a roaring engin toweth to itself

a beam of bolted shares, that glideth to and fro

combing the stubbled glebe: and agriculture here,

blotting out with such daub so rich a pictur of grace,

hath lost as much of beauty as it hath saved in toil.

      Again where reapers, bending to the ripen’d corn,

were wont to scythe in rank and step with measured stroke,

a shark-tooth’d chariot rampeth biting a broad way,

and, jerking its high swindging arms around in the air,

swoopeth the swath. Yet this queer Pterodactyl is well,

that in the sinister torpor of the blazing day

clicketeth in heartless mockery of swoon and sweat,

as ’twer the salamandrine voice of all parch’d things:

and the dry grasshopper wondering knoweth his God.

       from Book IV, Ethick

Beauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God

and Angel of his Presence thru’ all creation,

fashioning her new love-realm in the mind of man,

attempteth every mortal child with influences

of her divine supremacy ... ev’n as in a plant

when the sap mounteth secretly and its wintry stalk

breaketh out in the prolific miracle of Spring,

or as the red blood floodeth into a beating heart

to build the animal body comely and strong; so she

in her transcendant rivalry would flush his spirit

with pleasurable ichor of heaven: and where she hath found

responsiv faculty in some richly favour’d soul—

L’anima vaga delle cose belle, as saith

the Florentine,—she wil inaugurate her feast

of dedication, and even in thatt earliest onset,

when yet infant Desire hath neither goal nor clue

to fix the dream, ev’n then, altho’ it graspeth nought

and passeth in its airy vision away, and dieth

out of remembrance, ’tis in its earnest of life

and dawn of bliss purer and hath less of earthly tinge

than any other after-attainment of the understanding:

for all man’s knowledge kenneth also of toil and flaw

and even his noblest works, tho’ they illume the dark

with individual consummation, are cast upon

by the irrelevant black shadows of time and fate.

       .....

Repudiation of pleasur is a reason’d folly

of imperfection. Ther is no motiv can rebate

or decompose the intrinsic joy of activ life,

whereon all function whatsoever in man is based.

Consider how this mortal sensibility

hath a wide jurisdiction of range in all degrees,

from mountainous gravity to imperceptible

faintest tenuities:—The imponderable fragrance

of my window-jasmin, that from her starry cup

of red-stemm’d ivory invadeth my being,

as she floateth it forth, and wantoning unabash’d

asserteth her idea in the omnipotent blaze

of the tormented sun-ball, checquering the grey wall

with shadow-tracery of her shapely fronds; this frail

unique spice of perfumery, in which she holdeth

monopoly by royal licence of Nature,

is but one of a thousand angelic species,

original beauties that win conscience in man:

a like marvel hangeth o’er the rosebed, and where

the honeysuckle escapeth in serpentine sprays

from its dark-cloister’d clamber thru’ the old holly-bush,

spreading its joybunches to finger at the sky

in revel above rivalry. Legion is their name;

Lily-of-the-vale, Violet, Verbena, Mignonette,

Hyacinth, Heliotrope, Sweet-briar, Pinks and Peas,

Lilac and Wallflower, or such white and purple blooms

that sleep i’ the sun, and their heavy perfumes withhold

to mingle their heart’s incense with the wonder-dreams,

love-laden prayers and reveries that steal forth from earth,

under the dome of night: and tho’ these blossomy breaths,

that hav presumed the title of their gay genitors,

enter but singly into our neighboring sense, that hath

no panorama, yet the mind’s eye is not blind

unto their multitudinous presences:—I know

that if odour wer visible as color is, I’d see

the summer garden aureoled in rainbow clouds,

with such warfare of hues as a painter might choose

to show his sunset sky or a forest aflame;

while o’er the country-side the wide clover-pastures

and the beanfields of June would wear a mantle, thick

as when in late October, at the drooping of day

the dark grey mist arising blotteth out the land

with ghostly shroud. Now these and such-like influences

of tender specialty must not—so fine they be—

fall in neglect and all their loveliness be lost,

being to the soul deep springs of happiness, and full

of lovingkindness to the natural man, who is apt

kindly to judge of good by comfortable effect.

Thus all men ever hav judged the wholesomness of food

from the comfort of body ensuing thereupon,

whereby all animals retrieve their proper diet;

but if when in discomfort ’tis for pleasant hope

of health restored we swallow nauseous medicines,

so mystics use asceticism, yea, and no man

readier than they to assert eventual happiness

to justify their conduct. Whence it is not strange

(for so scientific minds in search of truth digest

assimilable hypotheses) they should extend

their pragmatism, and from their happiness deduce

the very existence and the natur of God, and take

religious consolation for the ground of faith:

as if the pleasur of life wer the sign-manual

of Nature when she set her hand to her covenant.

      But man, vain of his Reason and thinking more to assure

its independence, wil disclaim complicity

with human emotion; and regarding his Mother

deemeth it dutiful and nobler in honesty

coldly to criticize than purblindly to love;

and in pride of this quarrel he hath been led in the end

to make distinction of kind 'twixt Pleasur and Happiness;

observing truly enough how one may hav pleasure

and yet miss happiness; but this warpeth the sense

and common use of speech, since all tongues in the world

call children and silly folk happy and sometimes ev’n brutes.

      The name of happiness is but a wider term

for the unalloy’d conditions of the Pleasur of Life,

attendant on all function, and not to be deny’d

to th’ soul, unless forsooth in our thought of nature

spiritual is by definition unnatural.