Old Familiar Faces

by Theodore Watts-Dunton

but faith, we cannot know.’ He dreaded the dogmatism of sects and rash definitions of God. ‘I dare hardly name His Name,’ he would say, and accordingly he named Him in ‘The Ancient Sage’ the ‘Nameless.’ ‘But take away belief in the self-conscious personality of God,’ he said, ‘and you take away the backbone of the world.’ ‘On God and God-like men we build our trust.’ A week before his death I was sitting by him, and he talked long of the Personality and of the Love of God, ‘That God, Whose eyes consider the poor,’ ‘Who catereth, even for the sparrow.’ ‘I should,’ he said, ‘infinitely rather feel myself the most miserable wretch on the face of the earth with a God above, than the highest type of man standing alone.’ He would allow that God is unknowable in ‘his whole world-self, and all-in-all,’ and that, therefore, there was some force in the objection made by some people to the word ‘Personality’ as being ‘anthropomorphic,’ and that, perhaps ‘Self-consciousness’ or ‘Mind’ might be clearer to them: but at the same time he insisted that, although ‘man is like a thing of nought’ in ‘the boundless plan,’ our highest view of God must be more or less anthropomorphic: and that ‘Personality,’ as far as our intelligence goes, is the widest definition and includes ‘Mind,’ ‘Self-consciousness,’ ‘Will,’ ‘Love,’ and other attributes of the Real, the Supreme, ‘the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth Eternity, Whose name is Holy.’”

And then Lord Tennyson quotes a manuscript note of Jowett’s in which he says:—

“Alfred Tennyson thinks it ridiculous to

believe in a God and deny his consciousness, and was amused at some one who said of him that he had versified Hegelianism.”

He notes also an anecdote of Edward Fitzgerald’s which speaks of a week with Tennyson, when the poet, picking up a daisy, and looking closely at its crimson-tipped leaves, said, “Does not this look like a thinking Artificer, one who wishes to ornament?”

Here is a paragraph which will be read with the deepest interest, not only by every lover of poetry, but by every man whose heart has been rung by the most terrible of all bereavements—the loss of a beloved friend. Close as the tie of blood relationship undoubtedly is, it is based upon convention as much as upon nature. It may exist and flourish vigorously when there is little or no community of taste or of thought:—

“It may be as well to say here that all the letters from my father to Arthur Hallam were destroyed by his father after Arthur’s death: a great loss, as these particular letters probably revealed his inner self more truly than anything outside his poems.”

We confess to belonging to those who always read with a twinge of remorse the private letters of a man in print. But if there is a case where one must needs long to see the letters between two intimate friends, it is that of Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. They would have been only second in interest to Shakespeare’s

letters to that mysterious “Mr. W. H.” whose identity now can never be traced. For, notwithstanding all that has recently been said, and ably said, to the contrary, the man to whom many of the sonnets were addressed was he whom “T. T.” addresses as “Mr. W. H.”

But for an intimacy to be so strong as that which existed between Tennyson and Arthur H. Hallam there must be a kinship of soul so close and so rare that the tie of blood relationship seems weak beside it. It is then that friendship may sometimes pass from a sentiment into a passion. It did so in the case of Shakespeare and his mysterious friend, as the sonnets in question make manifest; but we are not aware that there is in English literature any other instance of friendship as a passion until we get to ‘In Memoriam.’ So profound was the effect of Hallam’s death upon Tennyson that it was the origin, his son tells us, of ‘The Two Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide.’ What was the secret of Hallam’s influence over Tennyson can never be guessed from anything that he has left behind either in prose or verse. But besides the creative genius of the artist there is that genius of personality which is irresistible. With a very large gift of this kind of genius Arthur Hallam seems to have been endowed.