W CHAPTER XXIV. TENNYSON AS A RELIGIOUS POET. HILE Tennyson has touched, with more or less success, almost every stop in the great organ of poetry, yet perhaps the strongest impression which he leaves upon the mind is that he is essentially a religious poet, and it is in the realm of religious poetry that his noblest work is to be found. It may be said, indeed, that the religious spirit pervades all that he has written. He might almost be called an ecclesiastical poet, for his writings abound in references to the familiar sanctities of the Church, the font, the altar, the church clock measuring out the lives of men, the graveyard with its yews whose roots grasp the bones of the dead, the sacrament, where The kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God. How deep a reverence he has had for the Bible may be inferred from the fact that no fewer than three hundred Scripture quotations have been discovered in his poetry. He has played with agnosticism, and expressed its doubts and ponderings, but he has never become an agnostic. "Poetry is faith" was the saying of a great critic, and assuredly without living faith the highest poetry is impossible. One may fairly suppose that the religious tendency in Tennyson was hereditary, and every influence of his life has conserved that tendency and strengthened it. There is a remarkable passage in a recently published letter of Tennyson's, which throws considerable light upon this side of his character, and which it is interesting to compare with Wordsworth's similar confession of his early inability to realize the potency of death. The letter is dated Farringford, Isle of Wight, May 7th, 1874, and is written in reply to a gentleman who had communicated to him certain strange experiences he had undergone under the effects of anaesthetics. Tennyson says: "I have never had any revelations through anæsthetics, but a kind of waking trance (this for lack of a better name) I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently till, all at once as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being; and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?" This is a perfect description of the philosophic and religious dreamer, and narrates an experience commoner in the East than in the West. The deduction which Tennyson himself makes from his experience is that it verifies the truth of the separate existence of the human spirit, and that that spirit "will last for æons and æons." Something of the same state and experience is described in "In Memoriam" when he says of his lost friend, The dead man touched me from the past, The living soul was flash'd on mine, And mine in this was wound and whirl'd Eonian music measuring out The steps of Time, the shocks of Chance, Was cancelled. A poet so sensitively constituted, and liable to such moments of spiritual trance as this, could hardly fail to be a religious poet. To him the unseen world would be an ever-present reality, and he would live as seeing that which is invisible. Gazing into what he himself has called "the abysmal deeps of personality," he would be always conscious of the greatness of the soul, and the thought of final annihilation would be to him impossible. For him death would be already abolished, and his vision would be of life for evermore. 'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, More life and fuller, that we want, And from this is his own utterance of his own desire. calm and steadfast belief in immortality, this infallible assurance of the eternity of personal life, all that is noblest and serenest in the poetry of Tennyson has risen. But from personal belief in immortality to the embodiment of religious beliefs in religious forms, it is a long step, and Tennyson has shown considerable antagonism to religious forms. If we glance over his writings, leaving out the "In Memoriam," which is the greatest achievement in religious poetry which our age has produced, we see that he has carefully studied religious problems, and has reached certain memorable conclusions. First of all, we find in the three poems of "St. Simeon Stylites," "Sir Galahad," and "St. Agnes' Eve," Tennyson's statement of, and judgment upon, religious mysticism. "St. Simeon Stylites" is something more than a historical portrait: it is a satire upon the monastic spirit and ideal of life. The figure of St. Simeon on his pillar, alternately coveting and cursing the world, sighing for the shade of comfortable roofs, warm clothes, and wholesome food, and then dilating with pride at his own heroic renunciation, as he cries: I wake; the chill stars sparkle, I am wet With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost, is a monument of all that is harshest, grossest, and most repellent in the monastic ideal of life. The very humility of the man is loathsome; it is the pride which apes humility. He may be all he says he is, The basest of mankind, From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin, but his depth of self-humiliation is farcical when it becomes a plea for sainthood, and when the secret hope of his life is that A time may come, yea, even now, When you may worship me without reproach, The most virulent poison of monasticism is in the man's blood, and one knows not which is more loathsome, the humiliation or the ambition of St. Simeon. Yet in the main it is a just and true portraiture, and appearing, as it did, at a time when the public mind was being roused into frenzy over the revival of mediævalism in the Church of England, it was a tremendous rebuke. Tennyson marks in St. Simeon his utter abhorrence of the monastic ideal of life. Self-renunciation he can preach, but renunciation which despises and forsakes the glad activities of daily life, as in themselves foul and unclean, he will not regard as other than a form of ecclesiastical madness. Nor is his sense of the imperfection of religious mysticism less strong in such poems as "St. Agnes' Eve" and "Sir Galahad." Just as St. Simeon expresses all that is most degrading in monasticism, these two beautiful poems express all that is loveliest and most tender in its forms of life. In St. Simeon the mediaval religious spirit is intense self-consciousness, sinking into uttermost degradation; in St. Agnes it is renunciation of self, rising into rapture and beatific vision. It is the pure and yearning spirit of a true woman-saint which sighs for the heavenly Bridegroom, and cries, as the trance of ecstasy deepens into the vision of death, He lifts me to the golden doors; The flashes come and go; All heaven bursts her starry floors, And strows her light below, And deepens on and up! The gates Roll back, and far within For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits |