Part 10 (1/2)
Great the Master And sweet the magic, When o'er the valley In early summers, O'er the mountain, On human faces, And all around me Moving to melody Floated the gleam.
The spirit of poetry, which bade him follow on in spite of discouragement, touched all on which it hovered with a mystic light, ”moving him to melody”. It was the soul of religion, binding the spirit of man to nature and to ”human faces” in themselves, and to the Supreme, in whom all is One.
But what is an allegory in the spirit of the gleam is a reality in the song of love, ”pa.s.sing the love of women,” which he laid as the n.o.blest offering ever yet made at the bier of a departed friend. The religion of Tennyson is there, but the poem must be carefully studied if its true inwardness is to be grasped. Isolating a few stanzas wherein the poet, alarmed and perplexed at the cruelties and terrors of Nature, her dark and circuitous ways, her astounding prodigality and wastefulness, lifts up in his helplessness ”lame hands of faith,” and falters where once he firmly trod, many writers have professed to see in Tennyson the expression of a reverent agnosticism. Such agnosticism we may all respect, for it is very different from the noisy, clamorous thing which, aping in name the humility of greater men, insists that the sense limitations imposed upon its own intelligence shall forthwith be erected into a dogma to be accepted as infallible by everybody else's intelligence. Be as reverent as Darwin in your agnosticism, as tolerant as Comte, we would say to such men, and there is much to commend in your teaching; but spare us the ridiculous spectacle of a handful of pamphleteers and minor essayists arraigning the sublimest philosophy ever known to the world, and consecrated by the homage of ninety out of every hundred thinkers who have ever approached its study, as a system erected upon a mirage--the image of a man's own personality distorted by its projection into the infinite. Tennyson himself once said that ”the average Englishman's G.o.d was an immeasurable clergyman, and that not a few of them mistook their devil for their G.o.d”, That may very well be, but the philosophers of the world who have built the house of wisdom are not ”average Englishmen,”
and to describe their theism as the imagination of an immeasurable man--surpliced clergyman or otherwise--is a criticism, not of the philosophers, but of their would-be critics. _Non ragionian di lor, ma guarda e pa.s.sa!_
But Tennyson was a pa.s.sionately convinced theist. With that scrupulous voraciousness which, according to those who knew him most intimately, was his leading characteristic, he surveys nature not only with the reverent eye of a mystic, but with the exact vision of science, and faithfully reports what he sees--so faithfully, indeed, that he was hailed by Tyndall in, the sixties as ”the poet of science”. Loving truth, ”by which no man yet was ever harmed,” he does not hesitate to portray nature ”red in tooth and claw with ravine shrieking against the creed” of a moral and beneficent power. And when no reconciliation is obvious he can but ”faintly trust the larger hope” and point hence where possibly the discords of life will be resolved into a final harmony.
What hope of answer or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil!
But these facts, however unmistakable, are powerless to alter the main inevitable conclusion that beneficent power does rule the cosmos, though they may modify it provisionally, until a better insight into the workings of nature supplies us with a clue to the mystery's solution. He is a sorry philosopher indeed who will insist that nothing whatever can be known because everything cannot be known, that an established fact must be no fact because no explanation of it is forthcoming. Tennyson is not one of these thriftless people, and the ”In Memoriam,” read aright, leads one upward ”upon the great world's altar-stairs that slope through darkness up to G.o.d”.
The poem is a drama of life. It was not written at one time or one place, but over a path of some years. Those years and places are a symbol of the ever-changeful thoughts and moods of man who communes much with the world concealed behind the veil of sense. It is the vivid portraiture of the soul, its sorrows, doubts, anxieties, and aspirations; it tells of the eclipse as well as of the dawn and meridian of faith. In fact, it is Tennyson's own religious life which is the life of uncounted numbers in these latter times. Before the supreme sad experience, the sudden, and to him incomprehensible, death of Arthur Hallam, the poet had agnostic leanings. He did then veritably fail and ”falter” before the questions of life and death which beset him. His long years of comparative poverty, ”the eternal want of pence,” his failure to attract any measure of attention, his long-delayed marriage as far off as ever, the _res angusta domi_ which made his family dependent upon him, all conspired to shut out the vision of anything but an iron necessity controlling him and everything. Such lives are infinitely pathetic, and perhaps one had rather devote oneself to ministering to minds distressed like these than to any other form of charitable enterprise. Such souls have been wounded inexpressibly; they are sore to the most delicate touch, and gentle indeed must be the hand, and soft the voice, which would comfort stricken creatures like these. To think of such afflicted spirits is to recall the picture of the ideal servant of Jahveh, of whom Isaiah sings in words of unearthly beauty: ”A bruised reed he shall not break and a smoking flax he shall not quench,” for only by ministrations such as these can they be healed.
Strangely enough, as it would seem, it was the last and saddest experience of all, the blow which almost crushed his life, which brought the young soul back to health and strength. It was the hand of death, inopportunely touching the fairest and n.o.blest thing he ever hoped to know, which helped him to see that--
My own dim life should teach me this, That life shall live for evermore, Else earth is darkness at the core, And dust and ashes all that is.
The conception of such a life as that of his lost friend, annihilated with the vanis.h.i.+ng of the touch of his hand and the sound of his voice, was plainly an impossible one, and if one remembers all the bright hopes, the extraordinarily brilliant future which, in the judgment of all who knew him, were buried with that young life, it is impossible to marvel at the change his death produced in the heart of his poet friend.
Now this temporary eclipse of faith is truthfully set forth in the poem, together with the manifold reasons which weigh at times so powerfully, even with the most devout minds, suggesting that the universe is not ”righteous at heart”. We all know them well, for we have felt them, and it is a comfort for us to be a.s.sured that minds more penetrating, consciences more sensitive, and emotions far deeper, have been enabled to withstand the shock which nature so rudely deals at our moral instincts, and to believe with a fervour and enthusiasm conquering all obstacles, that--
Good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When G.o.d hath made the pile complete.
It is ”the heart-piercing, mind-bewildering” mystery of evil and pain which has quenched the light in many a sincere and fervent heart. But it is not for ever. Two things we may remember for our guidance amid all this weltering sea of sorrow and distress. First, it is not all nature. It is only a side of it; and if it is the most obvious, it is only because it is a breach of the order and beneficence so uniformly obtaining. And next, the holiest hearts, the spirits of the just made perfect on earth were not adversely influenced by it. In spite of it all, an elect spirit, such as Jesus of Nazara, could patiently endure a life of austerity, and meet a death of unspeakable anguish with a calmness and resignation seldom equalled and never surpa.s.sed. ”Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” is a serious rebuke to those who suffer so little and complain so loudly that the times are out of joint, the world as probably as not the work of malignity or indifference, and that he is no G.o.d who does not stretch forth an omnipotent hand to slay the accursed thing of evil where it stands.
This is in very deed ”the crying of an infant in the night”. We forget when we utter these foolish things that we ourselves should be among the first to fall beneath that avenging hand.
And so with Tennyson. It was the visitation of evil in its most mournful shape--the cold hand of death that fell upon the brow of his beloved friend--which opened his eyes. His faith in goodness, in beneficent purpose, was restored. The cloud was lifted for evermore.
He married. Wedded love, mystic symbol, sacramental image of a union higher still, came at length as an added blessing, after years of expectancy and disappointment. ”When I wedded her the peace of G.o.d entered into my heart,” he wrote. His cup was full; ”out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh,” and therefore he sang that stately invocation, that sublime _Magnificat_ which, we may well believe with his own most intimate friends, will endure while the lips of men frame the sounds of our English speech.
Strong Son of G.o.d, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove.
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: Thou madest man, he knows not why; He thinks he was not made to die; And Thou hast made him: Thou art just.
Thus were ”the wild and wandering cries, confusions of a wasted youth”
forgotten in the song of adoration, which is in reality the epilogue of the elegiac drama. We can almost imagine its coming after the closing glory of the bridal hymn which sings to its last note of G.o.d:--
That G.o.d which ever lives and loves, One G.o.d, one law, one element, And one far-off Divine event, To which the whole creation moves.
A wedding on earth--that of his sister--is thus for him the symbol of that love eternal which moves all things: _Amor che tutto muove_, of Dante's peerless song. That light of love once seen anew he never lost. As life declined it grew in intensity: brighter and more rea.s.suring than ever did it glow as the darkness of earth began to close round him. It was borne in upon him with a depth of conviction too deep for utterance that death was but a fact, like any other in our many-sided life, that it was but a momentary occurrence, in no wise impeding that progress of the individual spirit in that path which has been with philosophic accuracy described by the Hebrew psalmist as ”the way everlasting”. The most perfect prayer is that: ”Lead me in the ever-lasting way,” for it is the destiny of man to one day reach that journey's end; to be one day perfect; to be absolutely conformed in mind and will to that most sacred of realities--the moral law.
It was this new vision which dawned on his soul, when the face and form of his much-loved friend was taken away, and filled him with a profound calm as the inevitable hour drew near.
I can no longer But die rejoicing, For through the magic Of Him, the Mighty, Who taught me in childhood There on the borders Of boundless ocean, And all but in Heaven, Hovers the gleam.