“Force is from the heights” is the thought which underlies the Sage’s interpretation of all that perplexes the younger man. We cannot fully understand what is beyond and above us, but if we are wise we shall steadily look upwards, and enough light will eventually be gained for our guidance. “Lucerna pedibus meis verbum tuum.” As God’s law is enough to guide our footsteps, though we cannot hope to understand His full counsel, so the light by which the spiritual world is disclosed is sufficient for those who look for it, though its disclosure is only gradual and partial. If we are said not to know what we cannot submit in its entirety to scientific tests, we can never know anything worth knowing. If, again, we are to disbelieve in the spiritual world because it is filled with mystery, what are we to say of the mysteries which face us in this earth—inexplicable yet undeniable? The conception of God is not more mysterious than the thought that a grain of sand may be divided a million times, and yet be no nearer its ultimate division than it is now. Time and space are full of mystery. A man under chloroform has been known to pass many hours of sensation in a few minutes. Time is made an objective measure of things, and yet its phenomena are so subjective that Kant conceived it to have no real existence. When the younger man complains that “the Nameless Power or Powers that rule were never heard nor seen,” the Sage thus replies:
If thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,
There, brooding by the central altar, thou
May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise,
As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know;
For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,
The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within
The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,
And in the million-millionth of a grain,
Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,
And ever vanishing, never vanishes,
To me, my son, more mystic than myself,
Or even than the Nameless is to me.
And so, too, when the youth calls for further proof of the “Nameless,” the Sage reminds him that there are universally acknowledged truths incapable of formal proof. The thought which the poet here dwells upon is similar to Cardinal Newman’s teaching in the Grammar of Assent, though Tennyson’s use of words does not here, as elsewhere, harmonize with Catholic doctrine. There are truths, the knowledge of which is so intimately connected with our own personality, that the material for complete formal proof eludes verbal statement. We reject, for example, with a clear and unerring instinct, the notion that when we converse with our friends, the words and thoughts which come to us proceed possibly from some principle within us and not from an external cause, and yet it is not a matter on which we can offer logical proof. The same sensations could conceivably be produced from within, as they are in a dream. Logical proof, then, has (so the Ancient Sage maintains) to be dispensed with in much that is of highest moment:
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay, my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven.
And close upon this follows the beautiful passage in which the hopeful and wistful upward gaze of faith is described. While melancholy and perplexity constantly attend on the exercises of the speculative intellect, we are to “cling to 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 “Mirage”!
These lines present to the reader the hopefulness of the spiritual mind, hopefulness not akin to the merely sanguine temperament, but based on a deep conviction of the reality of the spiritual world, and on unfailing certainty that there is in it a key to the perplexities of this universe of which we men understand so little. We know from experience that material Nature is working out her ends, however little we understand the process, and however unpromising portions of her work might appear without this knowledge. That an acorn should have within it forces which compel earth, air, and water to come to its assistance and become the oak tree, would seem incredible were it not so habitually known as a fact; and the certainty which such experiences give in the material order, the eye of faith gives in the spiritual order. However perplexing the universe now seems to us we have this deep trust that there is an explanation, and that when we are in a position to judge the whole, instead of looking on from this corner of time and space, the truth of the spiritual interpretation of its phenomena will be clear—“ut iustificeris in sermonibus tuis et vincas cum iudicaris.” This view runs not only through the passages I have just quoted, but through all the poem. The poet pleads for steadfast trust and hope in the face of difficulty, as we would trust a known and intimate friend in the face of ominous suspicions.
It is, of course, just that keen realization of the plausibleness of the sceptical view of life, to which some of our modern critics object as a sign of weakness, which gives this poem its strength. Such assistance as Tennyson gives us in seeing and realizing the spiritual view is needed only or mainly by those to whom agnosticism in its various forms is a plausible, and, at first sight, a reasonable attitude. The old-fashioned “irrefragable arguments” are of little use by themselves to persons in such a condition. However evident spiritual truths may be to an absolutely purified reason, they are not evident to intellects which are impregnated with a view of things opposed to the religious view. Moreover, we do not consult a doctor with much confidence if he does not believe in the reality of our illness; and one who finds the sceptical view persuasive will have little trust in those who tell him that it has no plausibility at all. With Tennyson, as with Cardinal Newman, half the secret of his influence in this respect is that the sceptically minded reader finds those very disturbing thoughts which had troubled his own mind anticipated and stated. And yet a truer and deeper view is likewise depicted, which sees beyond these thoughts, which detects through the clouds the light in the heavens beyond.
In the “Ancient Sage” there is a striking instance of this characteristic. The young philosopher, filled with the failure of fair promise and the collapse of apparent purpose in Nature and in man, pours forth his sceptical lament. Here is a selection from it, typical of the rest:
The years that made the stripling wise
Undo their work again,
And leave him, blind of heart and eyes,
The last and least of men;
······
His winter chills him to the root,
He withers marrow and mind;
The kernel of the shrivell’d fruit
Is jutting thro’ the rind;
The tiger spasms tear his chest,
The palsy wags his head;
The wife, the sons, who love him best
Would fain that he were dead;
······
The statesman’s brain that sway’d the past
Is feebler than his knees;
The passive sailor wrecks at last
In ever-silent seas;
The warrior hath forgot his arms,
The Learned all his lore;
The changing market frets or charms
The merchant’s hope no more;
The prophet’s beacon burn’d in vain,
And now is lost in cloud;
The plowman passes, bent with pain,
To mix with what he plow’d;
The poet whom his Age would quote
As heir of endless fame—
He knows not ev’n the book he wrote,
Not even his own name.
For man has overlived his day,
And, darkening in the light,
Scarce feels the senses break away
To mix with ancient Night.