THE LATE LORD TENNYSON ON THE FUTURE LIFE.
yr RS. WELD, in the short but interesting paper which she entitles " Talks with Tennyson," in the March number of the Contemporary Review, tells us that, in his conversations with her,—she is his wife's niece,—he always loved best to
talk "about spiritual matters," and that "no clergyman was ever a more earnest student of the Bible" than the late Poet.
Laureate. "The Ancient Sage," she says, "sets forth his own views more fully than any of his other poems." This we doubt,—tbough it may set forth the views which he would have held had there been no Christian revelation, more accurately than any other poem. But as "The Ancient Sage" declares itself the picture of a sage's faith "a thousand summers ere the time of Christ," we cannot suppose that Tennyson, with the passion that he has expressed for Christ, the "Strong Son of God, Immortal Love," could image his own convictions in the dim anticipations of an ancient seer, as adequately as he images them in the "In Memoriam," or "The Idylls of the King," or "The Passing of the Bar," where he writes frankly out of the very heart of Christian faith. Indeed, Mrs. Weld entirely admits this when she records Tennyson's confession of faith in Christ in the following remarkable words :—" I believe that beside our material body we possess an immaterial body, something like what the ancient Egyptians called the Ka. I do not care to make distinctions between the soul and the spirit, as men did in days of old, though perhaps the spirit is the best word to use of our higher nature, that nature which
I believe in Christ to have been truly divine, the very presence of the Father, the one only God, dwelling in the perfect man.
Though nothing is such a distress of soul to me as to have this divinity of Christ assailed, yet I feel we must never lose sight of the unity of the Godhead, the three persons of the Trinity being like three candles giving together one light. I love that hymn, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty,' and should like to write such a one. We shall have much to learn in a future world, and I think we shall all be children to begin with when we get to heaven, whatever our age when we die, and shall grow on there from childhood to the prime of
life, at which we shall remain for ever. My idea of heaven is to be engaged in perpetual ministry to souls in this and other worlds."
What Mrs. Weld means by saying that Tennyson expressed his own faith better in. "The Ancient Sage" than in any other of his poems, is rather that he explained his philosophy of faith better in it than even in "The Two Voices," or "The Idylls of the King." And the lines she quotes from "The Ancient Sage" do express, with admirable precision, the secret of the power which faith bestows :— " Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of 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 ' Without forecasting the harvest, no man could deliberately sow his seed. No man whose heart bad not passed fully into the effect, could painfully and laboriously bring about the cause. But still, the deliberate choice of "the sunnier side of doubt" is one thing, and the "distress of soul," with which
Tennyson contemplated the assaults on the divinity of Christ, was quite another and a higher thing. And nothing could better prove it to be another and a higher thing, than the great explicitness with which Tennyson confessed to Mrs Weld his belief that the heavenly state would consist in the "perpetual ministry to souls in this and other worlds," as .compared with the extreme vagueness of that hope which "" the ancient Sage" is made to express as to the possibility of .another world :— "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 P The doors of Night may be the gates of Light ; For wart 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 shore Await the last and largest sense to make The phantom walls of this illusion fade, And show us that the world is wholly fair."
That is an anticipation worthy of a noble nature a thousand years before Christ, but it is not nearly so adequate an expres- lion of faith for nearly two thousand years after Christ, as 'Tennyson felt that he could personally avow without ex- aggerating in the least the depth of his conviction.
There is certainly something singularly inane, and, we might also say, even un-English, in the ordinary idea which English believers in immortality so often seem to accept, -.--that it will consist in mere rest and praise, in repose and expressions of wonder at the goodness of God. The notion appears to be derived from the passage in Scripture in which it is briefly said that the good who die in the Lord may "rest from their labours, and their works do follow them," which certainly does not promise them any indolent repose in the satisfaction of already achieved and rewarded effort, but would rather seem to convey, on the contrary, a restoration of energy in the next life which will fall into the same grooves with the -energy of this. The vision in the Apocalypse of exalted beings who are perpetually ascribing glory to God, has no doubt given rise to the feeblest of all conceptions of the character -of that doxology. As human beings do not show their true xeverence for men by indolent cries of admiration, but by throwing their whole hearts and energies into the attitude which they so much admire, so what Catholics call the beatific vision," is certainly far less to be construed as passive and supine rapture, than as an exalted form of the same state of mind in which human beings show their human reverence. Who is it that best indicates his reverence for the great travellers, or the great biologists, or the great mathemati- cians, or the great astronomers, or the great philanthropists of the past P Surely, he who treads in their footsteps,—who -explores Africa with the patience and fortitude of Mungo Park, or follows up the clue of evolution with the humble -assiduity of Darwin, or extends the calculus of number with the masterly concentration of Newton, or explores the heavens with the patient search of Herschel, or alleviates human misery with the self-sacrifice of Howard or Elizabeth Fry. And it is almost childish to suppose that it can take less energy and less effort to enter into the glory of the Creator than it takes to enter into the glory of the creature,—to follow in the foot- steps of the Infinite Wisdom and Righteousness than it takes to follow in the footsteps of finite curiosity and finite good- ness. The sense in which men rest from their labours while their works follow them, is surely not the sense in which human beings fall asleep in glad fatigue with a feeling upon their hearts of having earned their rest, for that would imply a cessation rather than an expansion of life,—a long night of half-conscious or unconscious repose, instead of a great increase of divine power. It seems almost monstrous to regard the initiation into divine life as implying a cessation of all that we most closely associate with life here, — as the happy trance of languid ecstasy in- stead of the new glow of creative vigour. Clearly, the 41 beatific vision" must there, as here, be the vision which makes happy; and the vision which makes us happiest is never a vision of indolent contemplativeness, but a vision to which we lend all our powers and all our vitality. It is, in fact, a vision in which the will is as much alive as the intellect, the sympathies as the imagination ; in which the whole nature springs into a new vividness of activity as well as insight. The ordinary anticipation of the blessedness of the future is of a kind of happy trance. But a trance is not the fullness of life, rather, on the contrary, a kind of half-death, half-life, in which the mind catches a glimpse of something beyond the verge of its ordinary horizon. Heaven, we may be sure, produces not a trance but a steady growth in the knowledge of God; and growth in the knowledge of him whose very Sabbath of rest is glad work still, cannot be mere contempla- tion. "My father worketh hitherto and I work," said our Lord, when justifying on the Sabbath, the restoration of power to the paralytic. And the "beatific vision," however free it may be from the sense of exhaustion, which really means the inadequacy of our powers to the work they have to do, can certainly never be free from the sense of growing life and strength and of that divine energy which we call creative. No wonder Tennyson could not endure that conception of Heaven which made it a mere contrast to the very best life of earth, instead of a transfiguration of that very best life. If we cannot really do honour to men without catching something of their power,—and surely this is self- evident, for how are we to know what they were without appreciating the difficulties they have overcome and the triumphs they have achieved F—it is infinitely more true that we can only ascribe glory to God in any true sense, as we slowly and humbly learn to understand the infinitude of his life, and the infinitude of his gifts of life to others. Divine life, whatever else it is, is one immeasurable gift, and even to strive to enter into the secret of one immeasurable gift without at least measurable giving, is simply impossible. The "beatific vision" is a vision of giving ; but a vision of giving can only grow into truth, as the life of giving grows into reality. It is not more certain, we take it, that we cannot spring at one bound into purity without purification, than that we cannot spring at one bound into beatitude without slowly learning that which is of the essence of beatitude,—the infinite munificence and passion of the divine generosity.
Previous page
