WAS TENNYSON EITHER GNOSTIC OR AGNOSTIC ?
IT is stated that Tennyson, like the earlier Gnostics, was at one time tempted to solve the difficulty as to the mani- fold shortcomings of our human world, by imagining that the structure of our earth and its social system had been entrusted to the creative providence of a powerful but limited demiurgus
not quite equal to the task committed to his hands. At least, so Mr. Knowles says in his notes on Tennyson in the Nineteenth Centwry for the present month. But we cannot say that we
attach any very great importance to the statement. Of course, Tennyson, on some one occasion, must have said some-
thing very like the opinion reported by Mr. Knowles, namely, that the theory of a Demiurge with whom alone man comes into direct contact, was, perhaps, " the nearest explanation of the facts of the world which we can get." But we do not suppose that such an incidental statement meant more than the remark imputed to the ideal King in " The Passing of Arthur " :—
" 0 me for why is all around us here As if some lesser god had made the world, But had not force to shape it as he would, Till the High God behold it from beyond, And enter it, and make it beautiful ?"
That is a fine and natural expression of Arthur's doubt and despondency, when be finds all his hope of embodying a divine chivalry in a great human society ebbing away to nothingness.
But though such an expression may well befit the lips of even the ideal King of men, when his life is ending in tragedy, it does not follow that it would be expressive of the whole life of such a King ; nor, indeed, would it be so. No one could have inaugurated a new order, such as Arthur is portrayed as conceiving and partially establishing, without a much deeper faith in the divine power within and above him, than could be placed in this sort of subordinate deity.
Still less should we be disposed to attach much import- ance to Tennyson's own obiter dictum, even if we could be quite sure that Mr. Knowles, who does not tell us that he took down Tennyson's remarks in shorthand as the conversation
proceeded, had not omitted some qualifying word which would indicate that what he said was rather a vivid illus- tration of his difficulty in understanding the apparent im- perfections in the universe, than a deliberate solution of them. This kind of conversational remark, however seriously made, should be taken together with all a thinking man's other
remarks on the same subject ; and it seems to us that Mr. Knowles would have done much better, had he communicated his few notes to Lord Tennyson, and left it to him to use them, in conjunction with other illustrations of his father's faith and doubts, so as to give them in their true perspective. We are very doubtful, indeed, whether a considerable number of "personal reminiscences," such as Mr. Knowles
has registered for us, and appears desirous to elicit from other friends of the late Laureate, would really give the man " in his habit as he lived." Would they not rather give a variety of portraits with exaggerated, though differently exaggerated, features, the net result of which would be a portrait exaggerated on all its sides ? To our
mind, Mr. Knowles's portrait appears one of which the gnostic and agnostic elements are considerably, if not excessively, exaggerated, unless we are to give up the poems as the truest of all expressions of Tennyson's deepest faith. We do not believe for a moment, for instance, that the saying recorded of Tennyson, " There's a something that watches over us, and our 'individuality endures; that's my faith, and that's all my faith," conveyed anything but the most inadequate and plainly fragmentary, not to say infinitesimal, proportion of his faith, instead of being "all his faith." Can we suppose for a moment that it was not part of his faith that the " Something " was a Righteous and Holy Something P Why, every religious poem that Tennyson ever wrote,—and he wrote a great multitude of them,—would prove at once that this was the most essential part of his faith; and yet it was omitted alto- gether from what Mr. Knowles tells us that Tennyson an- nounced as containing "all his faith." Again, can any one doubt for a moment that he held Christ's life to be a direct revelation of the divine character P yet that, again, was not included in this careless obiter dictum which Mr. Knowles gives to the world as containing that magnum in parvo, the whole of Tennyson's faith. We take leave to say that Mr. Knowles's reminiscences of Tennyson's religious convictions conspicu- ously and greatly distort the reality of the poet's mind in the direction of the gnosticism or agnosticism of superior persons. For the present, at least, we shall take leave to think Mr. Knowles's reminiscences of Tennyson's religious con- victions a very much diluted as well as distorted image of the convictions we find impressed and indelibly impressed, on a long series of poems.
But to return to our first subject, Tennyson's supposed leaning towards the demiurgus view of the universe, which we do not at all believe to have been more than a mere tenta- tive feeler put out by his imagination, to which it would be folly to attach any particular importance ; otherwise it would appear more clearly in others of his poems, and not merely in depicting the melancholy reflections of King Arthur's last hours after he had taken leave of his un- faithful wife, and was expecting that " last great battle in the West " which would extinguish his lofty hopes. The demiurgus theory is not a real solution of any difficulty, unless indeed it is to be assumed that the discipline and probation of these limited and subordinate deities into whose care portions of the universe were supposed to have been delivered by " the High God," was the main purpose of that "High God" in passing over creatures like Man to a subordinate providence's care, and consequently that our own moral and spiritual discipline was quite a secondary object,—and that is postulating the existence of a whole class of beings of which we have no evidence at all, in order to explain our own intellectual and moral em- barrassments. If it is only our own probation and dis- cipline that we want to understand better, the explana- tion offered only pushes back the difficulty. It explains, perhaps, why there is so much sin and ignorance and error in our subordinate world. But it does not explain at all why Omniscience delegated to a being of partial knowledge and partial holiness, a work which he himself might have con- ducted so much better. One of the early Gnostics, who regarded the God of the Old Testament as a mere demiurgus, represented the third verse of the first chapter of Genesis as a passionate and despairing prayer, instead of as a divine command. Sitting in the desolation of the chaos which he was supposed to be impotent to reduce to order, this despairing maker of a world is represented as uttering the passionate appeal for aid to the most High God, " Let there be light ! "- to which the High God responds by granting the prayer, " And there was light." But all this was pure Gnosticism, which means, as we think, the ambition of knowing a good deal more than it is given us to know, The Gnostic was never content with the humble task of dealing with the problem actually before him. He loved to magnify it, to invent new and imaginary problems of a more dignified kind, in order to solve, by their aid, the problem which really exercised his conscience and his will. The ancient Gnostics invented long processions and emanations of dim divine personalities, in order to avoid what they regarded as the desecration of bringing the original Creator into too close a contact with our material and impure world. But the modern Gnostic does not in- vent divine pleromas and processions of gods. He mingles curiously Agnosticism with Gnosticism, and professes only to refine and manufacture his own humanity till it attains an exaltation or springs to a sort of power, both intel- lectual and moral, previously unknown. The modern Gnostic is sometimes a theosophist. He professes to purify and exalt the spirit of man by his rites, till he can exchange the humble position of a finite being who stands in need of grace to keep
him from falling into sin, for the proof-armour of an intel- lectual and moral magic by which man is qualified to rise to a position above ordinary frailty,—the position of a Mahatma. Now, all this was totally foreign to Tennyson. Nothing is more characteristic of him than the humility of his philosophy. He loved to see man exactly as he is, and to "turn to scorn with lips divine " the falsehood of magnificent preten- sions. The whole motive of " The Palace of Art," for instance, is to paint the folly and misery of superfine in- tellectual pretensions. He no more undertook to rehabilitate man by degrading God to the position of a demiurgus, than he undertook to exalt man by initiatory rites or by ascetic feats above the ordinary frailties of humanity. He accepted man as be is, and God as he is revealed in Christ. He saw, it is true, that there are difficulties which in our present state we cannot surmount, even in the Christian revelation. But it certainly never occurred to him to attenuate these diffi- culties by setting deliberately an inferior and subordinate divine being between man and the most High God. The whole of his poetry bears witness against any such notion. It is poetry of which humility is the most prominent, as well as the most touching, feature, The sentences on which Mr. Knowles lays so misleading an emphasis, were, in our opinion, imaginative modes of stating the difficulties of moral evil, not in any sense solutions of those difficulties. He insisted again and again that man could only walk by faith ; that if he would insist on knowledge, he could not walk upright at all ; and, beyond all question, the faith by which he walked was the faith that God had entered into the conditions of our human lot in the life of Jesus Christ. He expressed this conviction not only in " In Memoriam," in many parts of which he deals with the incidents of Christ's life,—for instance, with the resurrection of Lazarus,—in the spirit of the most humble faith, but in his latest poem, " Akbar's Dream," the publication of which was really posthumous. And it seems to us about as reasonable to throw any serious doubt on this belief, on the strength of such occasional paradoxes as Mr. Knowles records, as to attribute to Professor Huxley a serious conviction that Providence is playing a great game of chess with man, because he has so for a moment represented the inexorable laws of nature in one of the most effective of his lay sermons. Tennyson no doubt talked freely to his friends of the theological difficulties he could not surmount ; but we do not think that these premature confidences and isolated scraps of his conversa- tion, which Mr. Knowles has preserved for us, should have been given in this raw condition to the world. They are not at all likely to promote that fall understanding of the man, for which we may look whenever his son's memoir of him shall appear,
Previous page
