The Shining Pyramid (collection)/Unconscious Magic

The facsimile page of Lord Tennyson's handwriting in the second volume of the "Memoir" gives us some curious information as to the symbolism of the "Idylls." By the "Round Table," it seems, we are to understand "Liberal Institutions," and it must be confessed that to some of us the interpretation is not a little terrifying. No doubt the poet would not have had us take his words in their strictly literal sense; we are not for the future to read into his lines references to Equal Electoral Districts, Payments of Members and the City Council, but from the high and mystic order of the Round Table to "Liberal Institutions" in their mildest form there is surely a frightful and abominable descent. I may admit at once that Tennyson never meant us to associate a "Program" of any kind with Lancelot; that we are free to enjoy the session of the holy knights without a thought of Local Veto; yet when every allowance has been made, those of us who had dreamed of something beneath the sacrament of the words, are left chilled by the poet's explanation. We will give the most favourable gloss to the phrase, and confess how good and joyful a thing it is that brethren should dwell together in unity, under equal laws, ruled by noble kings, while freedom broadens slowly down from precedent to precedent; but still, I, for one, must say at the last that I have lost my earlier heaven. Wordsworth could be prosaic, even to absolute bathos, but he never paraphrased "heaven lies about us in our infancy" by "wholesome maternal influences surround us in our childhood." Let us make a distinction once for all; the important things of life are to the poets foolishness; freedom, justice, equal laws, all that lights the cheerful glow of our household fires, are but dead ashes when we look through the magic casements and behold the knights arrayed, and the glory streaming from the Vessel of the Grail. We do not wish to be told then that the Magic Bark symbolises increased facilities of locomotion. Clearly, if Tennyson knew what he meant we are betrayed and undone; while we thought the poet had been chanting to us of certain awful and hidden things, he has really been expounding the principles of an amiable Whiggery; the enchanted towers of Carbonek shrivel up into a Mechanic's Institute.

But did Tennyson know what he meant? The question sounds an impertinence, but it must be asked quite seriously not only of Tennyson, but of many other great writers. Perhaps if we could have examined Cervantes and asked him the true significance of the "Don Quixote," he would have told us in all sobriety that it was nothing more than a satire on the foolish books of Knight-errantry then in fashion. It seems highly probable that he would have made some such answer; throughout his book he insists that his object was merely to reform a current perversity of literary taste. And Rabelais too—he would not have hesitated, we may be sure, if one could have taken him apart and inquired into the meaning of his magic-lantern visions, as Coleridge calls them. He would have remembered the evil days in the convent of Fontenay-le-Comte, the ignorance, the bigotry, the brutality of the Greyfriars, and no doubt he would have replied that in "Gargantua" and "Pantagruel" he had wished to express his hatred of "clericalism" and monks and monastic rules. Sterne set out on "Tristram Shandy" with an idea of laughing at some local enemies; Dickens tells how he began "Pickwick" in order that Seymour might have a text for his pictures of Cockney sportsmen, how he continued it so that bribery and corruption at elections, unscrupulous attorneys, and Fleet Prison should be no more. Hawthorne was in a way a conscious mystic, but it is doubtful whether he realized how small a part is borne by the moral tragedy in the grand achievement of the "Scarlet Letter."

Did they know what they meant? I will return to my first example of the late poet laureate with his "Liberal Institutions," and so far as he and his symbolism are concerned, I answer "No" at once, and without hesitation. It is true that we can not say in words what we seek as we go down to Camelot, we know not how it may be when the trumpet sounds and the Knights of the Round Table are gathered together, we bow in silence at the Elevation of the Grail. It does not yet appear what these things signify. But we do know that while we read the "Idylls" our attitude of mind is wholly mystical, that our hearts lie still under enchantment, that we are never troubled by the thoughts of any "institutions," however valuable such things may be in themselves. To us, indeed, it must seem astounding that Tennyson should resolve our doubts in such a manner, but our amazement would perhaps be less if we could have breathed the atmosphere of the 'thirties with the poet. Then, as in the early time of Wordsworth and Cole ridge, as through all the days of Shelley, "poetical" and "political" seemed almost synonymous adjectives, and Mr. Snodgrass, the "great poet," spoke quite in character when he alluded to the Revolution of July as that "glorious scene." They thought highly of "Freedom" in those days, not quite knowing what they meant, not at all understanding that the word usually stands for jobbery and corruption of the most offensive sort, and perhaps the mistiness of the conception made it glamourous [sic] and poetical. I am thankful that Keats did not explain his poetry. Perhaps if he had done so he would have told us that by "faery lands forlorn" he meant to signify the countries oppressed by the Holy Alliance and the Roman Pontiff.

And perhaps the case becomes stronger if I leave Tennyson and pass to others. For though we have the unimpeachable evidence of the poet's handwriting as to the fact of his interpretation, yet I, at all events, cannot quite believe that the Parliamentary ideal was in his mind as he wrote the great lines of the "Idylls." It was probably an afterthought, or perhaps a forethought, but not the palmary thought of the creative moment. With Cervantes, however, it is different. Again and again he interrupts the splendid passage of his knight to assure the reader that he means no more than a little satire—that his only object is to write down these tedious romances of chivalry. In literature all things are conjectural, but, if anything is certain, one may be sure that Cervantes meant "Don Quixote" to be a burlesque on Amadis and Belianis, and the rest of them; he intended the best book in profane letters to be a "skit," as we should call it. It will be hardly necessary to show at length how much more the author accomplished, how utterly nonsensical is the line about laughing Spain's chivalry away. To me it seems that Cervantes distilled as into a quintessence all the marvel and wonder and awe of chivalry; that even the "Morte d'Arthur" is contained in "Don Quixote" as the less in the greater; that this masterpiece is one of those books written within and without. To the gross eye, to the formal understanding, it is a witty history of comic misadventure, but the elect listen through its golden pages to the winding of King Arthur's magic horn, to the chant of the choir that guards the Grail.

My original question was, perhaps, too harshly framed; I will not ask "Did they know what they meant?" but rather enquire as to how far the fine and rare effects of literature were consciously devised and produced. As has been stated, there cannot be much doubt as to the intention of Rabelais in inventing his extraordinary book. He willed to run a tilt at things in general—to please the vulgar with vulgar words and obscene tales—but, above all, to render the Church and the monks hateful and contemptible. And now how little this counts with the enlightened Rabelaisian of today! It is true that the baser bookseller catalogues the volume with "Maria Monk" and "Fast Life in Paris"; it is true that the more inept critics are not resolved whether Brother John be a "type of the Christian Soldier" or a "good man spoiled by the monastic discipline"; whether Panurge be the "careful portrait of a man without a soul," or merely a personification of the Renaissance. But the initiated heed nothing of all this. They see the Tourainian sun shine on the hot rock above Chinon, on the maze of narrow mounting streets, on the high-pitched roofs, on the grey-blue tourelles pricking upwards from the fantastic labyrinth of walls. There is the sound of sonorous plainsong from the monastic choir, of gross exuberant gaiety from the vineyards by the river; one listens to the eternal mystic mirth of them that rest in the purple shadow by the white, climbing road. The gracious and ornate châteaux on the Loire and the Vienne rise fair and shining to confront the incredible secrets of dim, far lifted Gothic naves, that seem ready to take the great deep and float away from the mist and dust of earthly towns to anchor in the haven of the clear city that hath foundations; the rank tale of the garderobe, of the farm kitchen, mingles with the reasoned, endless legend of the Schools, with luminous Platonic argument, with the spring of a fresh life. There is a smell of wine and of incense, of flowers and of ancient books; and through it all there is the exultation of chiming bells ringing for a new feast in a new land. For my part, I care very little whether Rabelais has overdrawn the depravity of the monastic orders, or whether Brother John was indeed spoiled by cloistral discipline.

We may go far afield and search the most distant ages and authors grotesquely unlike to one another, and yet we shall come to the same conclusion, that the casket alone was designed, that the jewel slipped in unawares. From the England of the Middle Ages to the New England of the Unitarians there is a far way. But Chaucer desired to tell amusing and gallant tales, not thinking at all of the great and glorious tapestry that his rich words were weaving, of the full descant to which one sets every line he wrote. And Hawthorne, though a more conscious artist, scarcely understood that his puritan village tragedy but glimmers in the light of Sabbath fires, in the red air of supernatural suggestion that he wrought around it; and the figure is hardly discernible in the midst of its radiant and terrible aureole. I have pointed out how Dickens began a common task, and at the end of it congratulated himself and his readers on the gradual reformation of the abuses which he had attacked; but I cannot discover in any part that Dickens realised how in "Pickwick" he had written perhaps the last romance of the picaro that the world will ever see, that he had closed a great canon of literature. In "Pickwick," though the author understood nothing of it, we follow our hero into the unknown, with the wonder and charm and laughter, though not with the awe, with which we followed "Don Quixote" as he rode towards the enchanted land of desire, we relish probably for the last time the joy of the winding lane, the thought of what lies beyond the wood and the hill, the surmise of the company that will gather in the ancient galleried inn. And Dickens, reviewing his book, parleys with us of the license of Counsel, of Poor Laws—prophesies of the School Board even!

Literature is full of secrets, but perhaps it offers no stranger matter for our consideration than melodies unheard by those that made them, than Siren songs that never came to the Sirens' ears. The magicians have murmured strong spells and most powerful evocations, but like the Coptic priests, they have hardly or not at all understood the words of might.