TENNYSON'S UNDERTONES.

-u-NDER the title, "Is Tennyson a Spiritualist ?" there appeared recently in the Pall Mall Gazette* an amount of a letter which has been published in Chicago. The original—in the Laureate's own handwriting—is said to be dated from Farringford, May 7th, 1874, and contains this extraordinary account of his experiences :— " 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 ? "

It has been pointed out by Professor Thomas Davidson, who had seen the letter, that the same conviction is described in "In Memoriam " (xcv.) Students of Tennyson, however, will recall many other passages which are, as it were, explicit vouchers for the authenticity of this letter.t The subject is one of large interest, and the writer of these lines is not aware that it has before been followed up at any length. It may be set down clearly at once that Tennyson is no spiritualist in the ordinarily accepted sense of that term. At the same time, the sense of an underlying life, so to speak, is strong in him; and he shares with others that attentiveness to its sounds and movements which makes it more or less a reality to him. There is no denying the fact—if personal testimony is of any value at all as proof—that the profoundest issues have come to some men out of what, to the large majority of their fellows, can only appear as the voids of being. While it is no doubt true that very few indeed would be disposed to assert with Thoreau that "the most glorious fact of our experience is not anything we have done, or may tope to do, but a transient thought, or vision, or dream that we have had," most men who have, not acquired, but found themselves in possession of, a certain nimbleness of spirit and open outlook, would not care to deny the revivifying power that dwells in those brilliant visitants which outline themselves for a moment on the background of our every-day life, and— are gone ! Remembering, however, that an illustration is often a final court of appeal, crystal in its authoritative im- port, when explanation merely seems to throw a giant shadow in which the subject of search is enveloped and lost, as much as may be the poet should be allowed to speak for himself.

An exact parallel passage to that which appears in the letter referred to may be found in. an early poem of Lord

'Tennyson's :— " Oft On me when boy there came what then I called, Who knew no books and no philosophies, In my boy phrase, The Passion of the Past.' The first grey streak of earliest summer-dawn, The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom,

As if the late and early were but one—

A height, a broken grange, a grove, a flower, Had murmurs, Lost and gone, and lost and gone V

A breath, a whisper—some divine farewell— Desolate sweetness—far and far away—

What had he loved, what had he lost the boy ?

I know not and I speak of what has been.

And more for more than once when I at all alone, revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the self was loosed And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into heaven. I touched my limbs, the limbs Were strange, not mine—and yet no shade of doubt, But utter clearness, and through loss of self,

The gain of such large life as matched with ours

Were sun to spark—unshadowable in words Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world."

A portion of these lines vividly recalls one of the songs in 4‘ The Princess," and the latter part, bringing to mind a passage in Lord Beaconsfield's " Contarini Fleming," is at the same time akin to those "weird seizures" to which, it will be remembered, the Prince in "The Princess" was subject :—

" While I listened came

On a sudden the weird seizure and the doubt : I seemed to move among a world of ghosts ;

• December 20th, 1888. t The portion of the letter which refers to Tennyson is in no way affected by Professor Htialey's vigorous denial of the truth of the statement regarding himself.—Tide Pall Malt Gazette, January let, 1889.

The Princess with her monstrous woman-guard, The jest and earnest working side by side, The cataract and the tumult and the kings Were shadows; and the long fantastic night With all its doings had and had not been."

The fascination of such subjects for the Laureate's mind reveals itself again in "The Golden Supper." Sometimes there is a vagueness of feeling which—unpronounced though it be—instantly discredits the things that are, as though with a gentle uplifting of the finger. Again, there are hauntings of the memory of an earlier life, with which many, before and after the " Pluedo" made its appearance, have been tolerably familiar. These hauntings are seldom definite in any sense whatever. They seem to come from quarters far withdrawn, like those of "the happy dead" described in "In Memoriam :"

"The days have vanished, tone and tint, And yet perhaps the hoarding sense Gives out at times (he knows not whence) A little flash, a mystic hint."

In an early sonnet, we have a more or less common, yet curious, impression referred to :— "As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood, And ebb into a former life, or seem

To lapse far back in some confused dream To states of mystical similitude ; If one but speaks or hems or stirs his chair, Ever the wonder waxeth more and more, So that we say, All this bath been before,' 'All this hath been, I know not when or where: "

Coleridge also, it may be mentioned, has thought this feeling worth recording in sonnet-form. Here are some very delicately touched lines from "The Two Voices: "— " Moreover, something is or seems. That touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—

Of something felt, like something here ; Of something done, I know not where ; Such as no language may declare."

Beside these instances may be placed that transcendently beautiful passage in "The Holy Grail," in which the King admits no right to see "visions," or submit to "seizures," in the face of duty undone. Surely it would be impossible to find a lovelier conditioning of the higher experience than we have here,—the gates of the Unseen, as it were, turning only on the hinges of absolute performance which takes place under the common sunlight of our working day. The King says that Duty—a home-abiding worker for the most part— "being done,

Let visions of the night or of the day Come as they will ; and many a time they come, Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, This air that smites his forehead is not air,

But vision—yea, his very hand and foot—

In moments when he feels he cannot die, And knows himself no vision of himself, Nor the high God a vision, nor that One Who rose again."

Very rich in suggestiveness—if feeble in outline—are the couple of lines, found in "In Memoriam :"—

" The glory of the sum of things

Will flash along the chords and go."

What Edgar Allan Poe called the Great Secret exercises peculiar mastery over the poet. The subject is introduced in "The Day-Dream :"— " For all his life the charm did talk About his path, and hover near With words of promise in his walk, And whispered voices at his ear."

And again, in "The Lover's Tale :"— " We stood, When first we came from out the pines at noon, With hands for eaves, uplooking and almost Waiting to see some blessed shape in heaven."

Sometimes trifles overturn great things, coming as they do charged with strange import, which demands, and never fails, in certain mental conditions, to receive, instant recognition. In times of grave moment, even the intensest of our lives, the imprint left upon the mind is frequently not the thrilling event itself, which has gathered the interest of our life together, but some trifle in remote relation to the whole affair. In "Maud," for instance, we have :— " Strange that the mind, when fraught

With a passion so intense One would think that it well Might drown all life in the eye,—

That it should, by being so overwrought Suddenly strike on a sharper sense, For a shell, or a flower, little things Which else would, have been past by !"

In " Morte d'Arthur," again, we find Sir Bedivere, meditating

on the wonders of Excalibur, and wrestling with his tempta- tion to conceal the sword, while walking by the mere's edge,—

" Counting the dewy pebbles, fixed in thought."

While speaking of such things as these, mention may be made of that gentle form of tyranny to which no one, perhaps, is wholly a stranger,—the tyranny of trifles, as it may be called. Thus, in " Elaine " (and here, again, we find words perfectly in keeping with those in the letter extracted in this

paper) it is said :— " As when we dwell upon a word we know, Repeating, till the word we know so well Becomes a wonder, and we know not why ; So dwelt the father on her face, and thought 'Is this Elaine ?' " In " Aylmer's Field," again the weird passage occurs :— " Star to star vibrates light : may soul to soul Strike through a finer element of her own ? So—from afar—touch as at once ? or why That night, that moment, when she named his name, Did the keen shriek, Yes, love, yes, Edith, yes,' Shrill, till the comrade of his chambers woke."

These odd experiences, which seem to live on a borderland between this and another life—adequately to depict which requires, as it were, the impossible marriage between the vision of the one life and the language of the other—are, wherever found, necessarily associated with a certain sensi- tiveness to touch, and indisposition to declare themselves.

They come and go, fitfully, unmasked ; but their visits are like those of the angels, in the too well-authenticated matters of shortness and paucity. They but reveal openings : what lies beyond is never reached. -For the faculty of vision is dim ; yet not so much dim as short-lived. The result, however, is much the same. The picture is inadequate, fragmentary, abrupt in its beginnings, shadowy in its outlines. The thing -seen recoils from reproduction, as does a sensitive plant from the touch, because—in the Laureate's words-

" Because all words, though culled with choicest art, Failing to give the bitter of the sweet, Wither beneath the palate, and the heart Faints, faded by its heat."

Ulysses-like, the poet may say of himself in such connections : "I.am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move."

That these illustrations may, in the minds of some, seem not a little separate from each other, one may not pretend to dis- believe. Yet have they not all, without exception, under- ground connections ? They are at least part and parcel of the life that lies beyond deliberate choice. More than this, they are, to some minds, doubtless not without a very real kind of witness-hearing to what we call the supernatural; not -on the side of revelation of any kind, it may be, but rather by way of unsolicited and not always quiet insistence of the fact of incompleteness, which demands from us a larger theory of life than the material one can afford :— "A deep below the deep, And a height beyond the height ! Our hearing is not hearing, And our seeing is not sight."

It may be, that could we but see aright, we should find that this subtle presence—this power, to borrow a phrase from Emerson, "which trifles with time and space "—that ever and anon stings our dull souls into recognition of its nearness to us, is none other than that over which, with pauseless, and in measure irresponsible activity, flows the current of our outer life ; is that, indeed, which, alike unacknowledged and uncon- ditioned, gives to that very life much of its form, its very mystery of colour, and its hints of ideal significance.