"Take me away, and in the lowest deep There let me be."
Why Cardinal Newman should have presented the experience of a soul after death as a "dream" we can imagine from his habitual caution in dealing with all subjects of importance. He has the boldness of neither Dante nor Milton, and he will not present the poetical experience of a man, at such a vitally sacred moment, as an actual fact; he is too reverential for that, and he calls it a "Dream." In a letter written in answer to an inquiry as to the meaning of the lines in "The Pillar of the Cloud,"
"And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile,"--
he says, quoting Keble, that poets are "not bound to be critics or to give a sense to what they had written,"[8] and he adds that "there must be a statute of limitations, or it would be quite a tyranny, if in an art which is the expression not of truth but of imagination and sentiment, one were obliged to stand an examination on the transient state of mind which came upon one when homesick, or seasick, or in any other way sensitive or excited."
It is well to take a great poem like this without too much inquiry or analysis. If the author's intention is not evident in his poem, either he has failed to be clear, or he is consciously obscure, or we are incapable of appreciating his work. The first and second defects do not appear in "The Dream of Gerontius." The third, let us trust, does not exist in us. The notes, few in number, are intended to explain only what is not obvious.
In his "Recollections" Aubrey De Vere says: "'The Dream of Gerontius,' as Newman informed me, owed its preservation to an accident. He had written it on a sudden impulse, put it aside and forgotten it. The editor of a magazine"--it appeared in The Month, of London, 1865, in two parts--"wrote to him asking for a contribution. He looked into all his pigeon-holes and found nothing theological; but, in answering his correspondent, he added that he had come upon some verses which, if, as editor, he cared to have, were at his command. The wise editor did care, and they were published at once."
R. H. Hutton, writing of Cardinal Newman, speaks in this way of "The Dream of Gerontius": "Before the Vatican disputes and shortly after the controversy with Canon Kingsley, Newman had written a poem of which he himself thought so little that it was, as I have heard, consigned or doomed to the waste-basket.... Some friend who had an eye for true poetry rescued it, and was the means, therefore, of preserving to the world one of the most unique and original poems of the present century, as well as that one of all of them which is, in every sense, the least in sympathy with the temper of the present century.... None of his writings engraves more vividly on his readers the significance of the intensely practical convictions which shaped his career. And especially it impresses on us one of the great secrets of his influence. For Newman has been a sign to this generation that unless there is a great deal of the loneliness of death in life, there can hardly be much of the higher equanimity of life in death. To my mind 'The Dream of Gerontius' is the poem of a man to whom the vision of the Christian revelation has at all times been more real, more potent to influence action, and more powerful to preoccupy the imagination than all worldly interests put together." (R. H. Hutton, "Cardinal Newman.")
The song of the soul in "The Dream of Gerontius" has sometimes been compared with "The Pillar of the Cloud"--a sacred lyric which is a household canticle wherever the English language is spoken. It is often misquoted, a fourth stanza having been added to it. This is the authorized version:
"Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home-- Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene--one step enough for me.
"I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou Shouldst lead me on. I loved to choose my path, but now Lead Thou me on. I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, Pride ruled my will; remember not past years.
"So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still Will lead me on, O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent till The night is gone; And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile."
In the "Apologia Pro Vita Sua" Dr. Newman wrote: "We"--Mr. Hurrell Froude, brother of the historian James Anthony Froude, being the other person--"set out in December 1832. It was during this expedition that my verses which are in the 'Apostolica' were written--a few, indeed, before it, but not more than one or two of them after it. At Whitechurch, while waiting for the down mail to Falmouth, I wrote the verses about 'My Guardian Angel' which begin with these words:
"'Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?'"
It must be remembered that John Henry Newman had not yet entered the Catholic Church. It is strange that he should at this time have held the belief in a ministering spirit which is so marked in "The Dream of Gerontius."
In the sextette of this sonnet he says:
"Were I Christ's own, then fitly might I call That vision real; for to the thoughtful mind That walks with Him He half reveals His face; But when on earth-stained souls such tokens fall, These dare not claim as theirs what there they find, Yet, not all hopeless, eye His boundless grace."
This vision, he says, "which haunted me,--the vision is more or less brought out in the whole series of compositions." "Gerontius" itself is more a "vision" than a "dream."
"The Pillar of the Cloud" was written in an orange-boat. "We were becalmed a whole week in the Straits of Bonifaccio. Then it was," he says in the "Apologia"--the finest model of modern English prose extant--"that I wrote 'Lead, Kindly Light,' which has since become well known. I was writing verses the whole time of my passage."
The "vision" of which he speaks he saw everywhere, and all his poems seem, in one way or other, to contain hints of the great poem to come; for there can be no doubt that "The Dream of Gerontius" is the culmination of his poetical moods. One cannot open any of his prose works without finding allusions to these eternal truths made so clear through the processes of the soul of a normal old man,--our young readers will please look up the derivation of Gerontius,[9] which is from the Greek,--but it is in his poems that we discover easily the germs of his poetical masterpiece. Even in the poems he loved we note the constant dwelling on the main theme of "The Dream"--Eternity. In 1889 Cardinal Newman was very ill. During his convalescence he asked that Faber's "Eternal Years"[A] should be sung to him with musical accompaniment. He said that he would like to hear it when he came to die. It is a poem of sixteen stanzas, to be found in Faber's "Hymns." It begins:
"How shalt thou bear the cross that now So dread a weight appears? Keep quietly to God, and think Upon the eternal years.
Austerity is little help, Although it sometimes cheers; Thine oil of gladness is the thought Of the eternal years."
"Novissima hora est!" Gerontius exclaims, "and I fain would sleep." He is thinking of the eternal hours and years in this last hour on earth.
At sea, in June, 1833, Newman had written some verses called "Hora Novissima":
"Whene'er goes forth Thy dread command, And my last hour is nigh, Lord, grant me in a Christian land, As I was born, to die.
"I pray not, Lord, that friends may be, Or kindred, standing by,-- Choice blessing! which I leave to Thee To grant me or deny.