The Testament of Beauty

...There are numerous landscapes, curiously etherialized, which seem like Constable merged in a silvery mist...

...It would throw the arch of a gleaming metaphysical bridge between the world of man and nature, holding that Man's mind, Nature's entrusted gem, her own mirror cannot be isolated from her other works by self-abstraction of its unique fecundity in the new realm of his transcendent life...

...in its supremacy confess'd of all, since all in their degree hav felt its divine exaltation and bestial abasement...

...It is, I think, an astonishing, well-nigh miraculous thing...

...Perhaps...

...We may well believe, with science, that "all the dumb activities in atom or molecule" are primitive phenomena of selfhood, which, refined and nurtured, begets "its own restraint" in man...

...THE TESTAMENT OF BEAUTY By GEORGE N. SHUSTER WHO can forget, if he have read them, the lines in the Apologia which sum up Newman's remembrance of Oxford: "There used to be much snap-dragon growing on the walls opposite my freshman's rooms there, and I had for years taken it as the emblem of my own perpetual residence even unto death in my university...

...Bridges's poem are not utterly worthless they will reveal at least some shadow of the large conceptions which dominate its every detail so well that no digression, no thought, no picture exists for its own sake...

...Name after name of poet and philosopher reappears in the company of utterances which wisdom cannot neglect...

...but where the animal truly ceases to be and man emerges, peace responds to hope and needs "no vindication...

...If these halting comments on the doctrine of Mr...

...The thing has really been thought through, visualized thoroughly...

...The moods of Plato, Dante, Saint Francis, Coventry Patmore and Chaucer accompany the artist's personal emotion-suggest even that the book is a conversation from which the monologue has been conserved...

...Bridges's poem is frankly an endeavor to reveal this greatness...

...It would be wrong to leave the impression that this is merely a rhymed philosophy, with no more inspiration than a text-book...

...It is, one may suppose, based largely upon what is the corporate intellectual position of Oxford today...

...They who understand not cannot forget, and they who keep not his commandment call him Master and Lord...

...The twin drifts of Self and Breed are seen, therefore, to impose a choice which is nevertheless not the whim of an individual but a "necessity" corporate in the law of the world...

...Similarly, it is true that breed is made more evident and beautiful as nature advances from the lowest types of life through animals whose "mutual attraction sometimes engages beauty" to man in whom "a constant conscient passion" is transformed by reason to "spiritual love...

...By the truth that all the world is adrift in a sea the omnipresent fringe of which is Divinity, revealed to us and sanctioned by the word of Christ...

...And of course the multiplicity of scientific images called forth reminds us of the fruits of a study which, regardless of poetic inability to evaluate them, are now also a tradition...

...As the natural universe awakens to consciousness of self, it likewise ascends to the life of reason...

...One had supposed, for instance, that further experiment with the settled forms of English metre was impossible-that the alexandrine, which Spenser has introduced to close his stanza, would necessarily halt the flow of discourse...

...He preach'd once to the herd, but now calleth the wise, and shall in his second Advent, that tarried long, be glorified by the Greeks that come to the feast...

...Yet this is not a dream about things but of nature and the life of man...

...And if the great school, which crusaders established and saints loved, has seen the prizes for investigation and philosophy go elsewhere, she retains her charm as the symbol of permanent wisdom coveted by this age as hotly as by any other...

...This necessity is, we are told, "pleasure" that cannot be distinguished from happiness...

...I am not far from thinking that such a triumph, capable of opening the door to the expression of the hitherto inexpressible, is destined to swing writing away from disjoined imag-ism to the settled flow of harmony...

...Protection of the weak is the function by which masculine selfhood has rightly justified martial action...

...A year ago we should all have said confidently that such an event was impossible...

...Intermediate is maternal affection, compelling the poet to say: Nor count I any scripture to be better inspired with eternal wisdom or by insight of man than the four words wherewith the sad penitent hymn calleth aloud on Mary standing neath the cross: EIA MATER, it Saith, MATER FONS AMORIS...

...And how shall one guarantee the rightness of this ideal pleasure...

...Bridges's repudiation of the Thomistic emphasis upon original sin is a mistake, not compensated for by the ardent advocacy of Franciscanism...

...For the worship of Him is the means by which mankind has made glad escape from the "dilemma of pagan thought" which proposed that friendship between God and man is impossible "because of their unlimited disparity...

...The poem of a scholar, you will say...

...More narrowly the theme is the reconciliation of animal and spirit in man, as suggested by Plato's figure of the charioteer reason driving the yoked horses of selfhood and breed...

...The strange, almost incredible thing about The Testament of Beauty is the circumstance that it is beautiful...

...All this the poet sums up for us in the following crisp lines which are, I think, the kernel of his reflective epic: Breed then together with Selfhood steppeth in pair, for as Self grew thru' Reason from animal rage to vice of war and gluttony, but meanwhile uprose thru' motherly yearning to a profounder affection, so Breed, from like degrading brutality at heart, distilleth in the altruism of spiritual love to be the sublimest passion of humanity, with parallel corruption...

...Not many passages in modern verse bear such high witness as this: his kingdom is God's kingdom, and his holy temple not in Athens or Rome but in the heart of man...

...But the great Light shineth in great darkness, the seed that fell by the wayside hath been trodden under foot, that which fell on the Rock is nigh wither'd away...

...Personally I have no hesitation in believing that The Testament of Beauty is destined to become an enduring testimonial to the faith and struggle of our time...

...The concept of evolution is, therefore, the central image, but in it natural and supernatural blend into unity...

...While louder and louder thru' the dazed head of the Sphinx the old lion's voice roareth o'er all the lands...

...At least it is this note one may hear in Shelley's eagerness to follow the "lodestar of my one desire," and in his happy exclamation: "No keel has ever ploughed that path before !" Thus possibly it should be admitted regarding ourselves that a secret greatness lies in the industry with which we listen to the hum of science, not in order to glean sundry cheap recipes of emancipation, but to understand more clearly the nature of our souls...

...Yet when these matters have been duly weighed no one of us will fail to rejoice in the stature of this achievement, which towers far above the easy anathemas of the spirit which a hundred rhymsters have jotted down, to reach the clear air in which the radiance of Christ seems like the very light of the sun...

...The Testament of Beauty is established upon Christ as firmly as Dante's Comedy itself...

...That Oxford's is no idle boast is proved once again by the poem which Robert Bridges has called The Testament of Beauty...

...The Catholic will, therefore, not be completely satisfied with it...

...An achievement having stature, I have said...

...Chaucer's loving emphasis upon the "yonge sonne" and the Miller's wart was surely the divination of the new naturalism, in essence half-mystically Franciscan and half Greek, which was to characterize more than one century...

...Possibly it was the inevitable function of Romantic poetry to sound the explorer's note-that zest for the unknown, the not-yet-discovered, which had led throngs to Eldorados everywhere...

...And the final diapasons of the epic, which it were profanation to quote, limn the outlines of that everlasting affection which Christians desire with a reverent insight in which many a soul is destined to seek relief from mortal thirst...

...Long Latin words are balanced upon these hammock-like rhythms with a grace as unforgettable as the motion of swans...

...As man grows conscious of his "higher energies" the "quality and value of his pleasures will so change" that his joy, though a persistent animal note be discernible in it, "cometh by excellence to need a special term...

...But here is an alexandrine having ceaseless vitality and elasticity, victorious over monotony in a way which renders even the open line of Keats's Hyperion seemingly lame...

...Indeed, it is hardly a dream at all, but a scrutiny for the truth which can be discerned by reason: Wisdom will repudiate thee, if thou think to enquire WHY things are as they are or whence they came: thy task is first to learn what is, and in pursuant knowledge pure intellect will find pure pleasur and the only ground for a philosophy conformable to truth...

...Is this not the poetic quintessence of our age ? A man may well believe that the business of verse is, in every time, to hit upon the expressive gesture in which the curve of life is revealed...

...Even now one is half inclined to fancy that this neat book, bearing the imprint of the Oxford University Press, really enshrines some treasure recovered from the past...

...The poem opens, like Langland's, with a vision from an upland path beneath which the poet's home lay "small as a faded thought...

...He will hold that Mr...

...But who shall say that the scholar is not the poet we have been waiting for, even as thirteen silent centuries yearned for Dante...

...It is based upon a scrupulous study of both stress and quantity in English prosody-is indeed the final discovery of one whose examination of Milton contributed more than is generally realized to our knowledge of poetic measures...

...and the religious outlook certainly seems allied to that of Bishop Gore...

...But if The Testament of Beauty is definitely individual it is none the less a distillation of tradition...