Tennyson and His Friends Part 27

If thou would'st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive Into the Temple-cave of thine own self, There, brooding by the central altar, thou May'st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice, By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise, As if thou knewest, tho' thou canst not know; For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there But never yet hath dipt into the abysm, The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth, And in the million-millionth of a grain, Which cleft and cleft again for evermore, And ever vanishing, never vanishes, To me, my son, more mystic than myself, Or even than the Nameless is to me.

And so, too, when the youth calls for further proof of the "Nameless," the Sage reminds him that there are universally acknowledged truths incapable of formal proof. The thought which the poet here dwells upon is similar to Cardinal Newman's teaching in the _Grammar of a.s.sent_, though Tennyson's use of words does not here, as elsewhere, harmonize with Catholic doctrine. There are truths, the knowledge of which is so intimately connected with our own personality, that the material for complete formal proof eludes verbal statement. We reject, for example, with a clear and unerring instinct, the notion that when we converse with our friends, the words and thoughts which come to us proceed possibly from some principle within us and not from an external cause, and yet it is not a matter on which we can offer logical proof. The same sensations could conceivably be produced from within, as they are in a dream. Logical proof, then, has (so the Ancient Sage maintains) to be dispensed with in much that is of highest moment:

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one: Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son, Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee, Am not thyself in converse with thyself, For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven.

And close upon this follows the beautiful pa.s.sage in which the hopeful and wistful upward gaze of faith is described. While melancholy and perplexity constantly attend on the exercises of the speculative intellect, we are to "cling to faith":

She reels not in the storm of warring words, She brightens at the clash of "Yes" and "No,"

She sees the Best that glimmers thro' the Worst, She feels the Sun is hid but for a night.

She spies the summer thro' the winter bud, She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, She hears the lark within the songless egg, She finds the fountain where they wailed "Mirage"!

These lines present to the reader the hopefulness of the spiritual mind, hopefulness not akin to the merely sanguine temperament, but based on a deep conviction of the reality of the spiritual world, and on unfailing certainty that there is in it a key to the perplexities of this universe of which we men understand so little. We know from experience that material Nature is working out her ends, however little we understand the process, and however unpromising portions of her work might appear without this knowledge. That an acorn should have within it forces which compel earth, air, and water to come to its a.s.sistance and become the oak tree, would seem incredible were it not so habitually known as a fact; and the certainty which such experiences give in the material order, the eye of faith gives in the spiritual order. However perplexing the universe now seems to us we have this deep trust that there _is_ an explanation, and that when we are in a position to judge the _whole_, instead of looking on from this corner of time and s.p.a.ce, the truth of the spiritual interpretation of its phenomena will be clear--"ut iustificeris in sermonibus tuis et vincas c.u.m iudicaris." This view runs not only through the pa.s.sages I have just quoted, but through all the poem. The poet pleads for steadfast trust and hope in the face of difficulty, as we would trust a known and intimate friend in the face of ominous suspicions.

It is, of course, just that keen realization of the plausibleness of the sceptical view of life, to which some of our modern critics object as a sign of weakness, which gives this poem its strength. Such a.s.sistance as Tennyson gives us in seeing and realizing the spiritual view is needed only or mainly by those to whom agnosticism in its various forms is a plausible, and, at first sight, a reasonable att.i.tude. The old-fashioned "irrefragable arguments" are of little use by themselves to persons in such a condition. However evident spiritual truths may be to an absolutely purified reason, they are not evident to intellects which are impregnated with a view of things opposed to the religious view. Moreover, we do not consult a doctor with much confidence if he does not believe in the reality of our illness; and one who finds the sceptical view persuasive will have little trust in those who tell him that it has no plausibility at all. With Tennyson, as with Cardinal Newman, half the secret of his influence in this respect is that the sceptically minded reader finds those very disturbing thoughts which had troubled his own mind antic.i.p.ated and stated. And yet a truer and deeper view is likewise depicted, which sees beyond these thoughts, which detects through the clouds the light in the heavens beyond.

In the "Ancient Sage" there is a striking instance of this characteristic.

The young philosopher, filled with the failure of fair promise and the collapse of apparent purpose in Nature and in man, pours forth his sceptical lament. Here is a selection from it, typical of the rest:

The years that made the stripling wise Undo their work again, And leave him, blind of heart and eyes, The last and least of men;

His winter chills him to the root, He withers marrow and mind; The kernel of the shrivell'd fruit Is jutting thro' the rind; The tiger spasms tear his chest, The palsy wags his head; The wife, the sons, who love him best Would fain that he were dead;

The statesman's brain that sway'd the past Is feebler than his knees; The pa.s.sive sailor wrecks at last In ever-silent seas; The warrior hath forgot his arms, The Learned all his lore; The changing market frets or charms The merchant's hope no more; The prophet's beacon burn'd in vain, And now is lost in cloud; The plowman pa.s.ses, bent with pain, To mix with what he plow'd;

The poet whom his Age would quote As heir of endless fame-- He knows not ev'n the book he wrote, Not even his own name.

For man has overlived his day, And, darkening in the light, Scarce feels the senses break away To mix with ancient Night.

The Sage--far from denying the force of what he says--contends for a deeper and wider view. The "_darkness is in man_." It is the result of the incompleteness of his knowledge. That is to say, what is black to his imperfect view, and taken by itself, may be a necessary part of a great scheme. Not that the things are not really sad, but that the whole is not sad. As there may be pain in tears of joy, and yet it is lost in exquisite pleasure, so the dark elements of life, when our ultimate destiny is attained and we can view age and suffering as part of the whole, may be so entirely eclipsed, that we may say with truth that the "world is wholly fair":

My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves, So dark that men cry out against the Heavens.

Who knows but that the darkness is in man?

The doors of Night may be the gates of Light; For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then Suddenly heal'd, how would'st thou glory in all The splendours and the voices of the world!

And we, the poor earth's dying race, and yet No phantoms, watching from a phantom sh.o.r.e Await the last and largest sense to make The phantom walls of this illusion fade, And show us that the world is wholly fair.

"The doors of night may be the gates of light," says the Sage; and in unison with this note are his replies to some of the details of the younger man's wail, while his very argument presupposes that _all_ cannot now be answered until we have the "last and largest sense." Thus, when the dreary, hopeless vision of bodily decay, which seems to point to total dissolution of a n.o.ble nature, is referred to, he says:

The sh.e.l.l must break before the bird can fly.

The breaking of the sh.e.l.l might seem, at first sight, total destruction, but the forthcoming of the bird transforms the conception of decay into a conception of new birth. And so, too, in answer to the complaint that "the shaft of scorn that once had stung, but wakes the dotard smile," he suggests that a more complete view may show it to be "the placid gleam of sunset after storm." The transition may be not from intense life to apathy, but from blinding pa.s.sion to a calmer, a serener vision.

Another of the later poems--"Vastness"--brings into especial relief a parallel I have often noted between Lord Tennyson and Cardinal Newman in their keen sense of the mysteries of the universe, which religion helps us to bear with but does not solve. So far as this planet goes, and our own human race, Cardinal Newman has expressed this sense in the _Apologia_, and the parallel between his view and Tennyson's is sufficiently instructive to make it worth while to quote the pa.s.sage in full:

To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers and truths, the progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described by the Apostle, "having no hope and without G.o.d in the world," all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution.

Lord Tennyson takes in a wider range of considerations than the Cardinal.

He paints graphically, not only the mystery of the lot of mankind, but the further sense of bewilderment which arises when we contemplate the aimlessness of this vast universe of which our earth is such an inappreciable fragment. Logically the poem asks only the question: "Great or small, grand or ign.o.ble, what does anything matter if we are but creatures of the day with no eternal destiny?" But its grandeur consists in the manner in which it sweeps from end to end of human experience and knowledge, from thoughts overwhelming in their vastness, from ideas carrying the mind over the length and breadth of s.p.a.ce and over visions of all eternity, to pictures of this planet, with its microscopic details, the hopes, anxieties, plans, pleasures, griefs which make up the immediate life of man. The imagination vacillates between a keen sense of the importance of all, even the smallest, and the worthlessness of all, even the greatest. At one moment comes the thought that one life out of the myriads of lives pa.s.sed on this tiny planet, if it be lived and given up for righteousness, is of infinite and eternal value, and the next moment comes the sense that the whole universe is worthless and meaningless, if, indeed, the only percipient beings who are affected by it are but creatures who feel for a day and then pa.s.s to nothingness. Each picture of the various aspects of human life rouses an instinctive sympathy, and a feeling in the background, "it can't be worthless and meaningless," and yet the poet relentlessly forces us to confess that it is only some far wider view of human nature and destiny than this world alone can justify, which can make the scenes he depicts of any value. What Mill called "the disastrous feeling of 'not worth while'" threatens the reader at every turn; though the pictures of life in its innumerable aspects of happiness, misery, sensuality, purity, selfishness, self-devotion, ambition, aspiration, craft, cruelty, are so intensely real and rivet the imagination so strongly, that he refuses to yield to the feeling. I subjoin some of the couplets where good and bad, great and small, alternate:

Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish'd face, Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanish'd race.

Raving politics, never at rest--as this poor earth's pale history runs,-- What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?

Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the gloom of doubts that darken the schools; Craft with a bunch of all-heal in her hand, follow'd up by her va.s.sal legion of fools.

Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; honest Poverty, bare to the bone; Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty: Flattery gilding the rift in a throne.

Love for the maiden, crown'd with marriage, no regrets for aught that has been, Household happiness, gracious children, debtless competence, golden mean;

National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire; Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, and vows that are snapt in a moment of fire;

He that has lived for the l.u.s.t of the minute, and died in the doing it, flesh without mind; He that has nail'd all flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in the love of his kind;

Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these old revolutions of earth; All new-old revolutions of Empire--change of the tide--what is all of it worth?

What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices of prayer?

All that is n.o.blest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all that is fair?

What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last, Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps of a meaningless Past?

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's anger of bees in their hive?

The thought which seems to oppress the seer is the insignificance of everything when compared to a standard--ever conceivable and ever actual--above it. The ruts of a ploughed field may seem to the diminutive insect as vast and overcoming as the Alps seem to us. Then contrast the thought of Mont Blanc with that of the whole globe; proceed from the globe to the solar system, and from that to the myriads of systems lost in s.p.a.ce. All that is great to us is relatively great, and becomes small at once when the mind rises higher. So, too, in the moral order, all those aspects of human life which sway our deepest emotions are but "a murmur of gnats in the gloom," if regard be had to our comparative insignificance.

The ground yields at every step, and the mind looks for some _terra firma_, some absolute basis of trust, and this is only to be found in the conception of man as possessing an eternal destiny. The infinite value of all that concerns an immortal being stands proof against the thoughts that bewildered our vision. "He that has nailed all flesh to the cross till self died out in the love of his kind" may be but a speck in the universe, but faith measures him by a standard other than that of s.p.a.cial vastness.

The idea of the _eternal worth of morality_ steps in to calm the imagination, and this idea in its measure justifies the conception of the value and importance of all the phases of human existence which make up the drama of life. Human Love is the side of man's nature which the poet looks to as conveying the sense of his immortal destiny. The undying union of spirit with spirit is a union which the grave cannot end. The bewildering nightmare of the nothingness and vanity of all things is abruptly cut short, as the sense of what is deepest in the human heart promptly gives the lie to what it cannot solve in detail:

Peace, let it be! for I loved him and love him for ever.

The dead are not dead but alive.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SOUTH SIDE OF ENTRANCE FROM BELOW THE TERRACE, ALDWORTH. Drawn by W. Bis...o...b.. Gardner.]

TENNYSON AND ALDWORTH

By SIR JAMES KNOWLES, K.C.V.O.

Farringford he never forsook, though he added another home to it; and a.s.suredly no poet has ever before called two such residences his own.

Both of them were sweetened by the presence there, so graciously prolonged, of her to whom the lovers of song owe so deep a debt of grat.i.tude. The second home was as well chosen as the first. It lifted England's great poet to a height from which he could gaze on a large portion of that English land which he loved so well, see it basking in its most affluent summer beauty, and only bounded by "the inviolate sea." Year after year he trod its two stately terraces with men the most noted of their time; statesmen, warriors, men of letters, science, and art, some of royal race, some famous in far lands, but none more welcome to him than the friends of his youth. Nearly all of those were taken from him by degrees; but many of them stand successively recorded in his verse. The days which I pa.s.sed there yearly with him and his were the happiest days of each year. They will retain a happy place in my memory during whatever short period my life may last; and the sea-murmurs of Freshwater will blend with the sighing of the woods around Aldworth, for me, as for many more worthy, a music, if mournful, yet full of consolation.