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!