The Victorian Novel of Adulthood. Rebecca Rainof
thou art calling me; I know it now.
Not by the token of this faltering breath,
This chill at heart, this dampness on my brow,
(Jesu, have mercy! Mary, pray for me!)
’Tis this new feeling, never felt before,
(Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!)
(5)
Observations about his personal condition, “This chill at heart, this dampness on my brow,” alternate with lines that echo hymns and biblical lamentation, “Mary, pray for me! . . . Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!” This division between personal reflection and ceremony becomes more pronounced later in the poem when the ritualism of part 1 meets the soliloquies of part 2. As part 1 proceeds, Gerontius’s life ends and the poem increasingly yields to a full quotation of Catholic ritual, including a chorus of Assistants chanting the rite for commending a departing soul to God, “Kyrie eleïson, Christe eleïson, Kyrie eleïson,” followed by “Holy Mary, pray for him,” all taken from the Catholic mass (6). Newman here exceeds the ritualism ascribed to devotional writers of the period who were also influenced by Tractarianism, for example Christina Rossetti.52 Although her poems include an array of ritualistic elements that invoke the Anglo-Catholic mass, including “Great mitred priests,” “incense turned to fire / In golden censers,” and “lamps ablaze and garlands round about,” unlike Newman, she does not quote from religious services verbatim and at length.53
In contrast, Newman’s direct, lengthy inclusions from the Roman Catholic mass in the first section could potentially be controversial content for Victorian readers and might give a staunch Evangelical Christian like Gordon pause. And indeed, pausing is most likely what happened for many readers of the poem—pausing, that is, and skipping. Tellingly, in his copy, Gordon marks the lines that precede the introduction of Roman Catholic rites and Gerontius’s words “Pray for me, O my friends,” but then skips over the rites themselves and the following parts where the Priest and Attendants speak. The next passage that he marks at length is the soliloquy following Gerontius’s death that opens section 2, which gives the speaker’s first impressions of the afterlife as a disembodied soul. This is the same passage cited by Doyle as being the best part of the poem: “The finest thing it contains is the early soliloquy of Gerontius when he finds himself, as he believes at first, alone with infinity” (115). Doyle further says that he prefers “the blank verse; the speeches rather. The lyrical portion are, in my judgment, less successful . . . [and] do not move me much more than those average hymns which people, who certainly are not angels yet, sing weekly in church” (117). By the “lyrical portion” Doyle means the more overtly religious parts that partake of Roman Catholic liturgy. Therefore, either implicitly or explicitly, Doyle and Gordon both recommend a strategy of reading around the most openly Catholic parts of the poem.
In thus reading along with Gordon and Doyle, as Victorian readers themselves did, contemporary readers can gain a new understanding of the poem’s early reception history, and more specifically, of how Newman’s demarcated structure allowed Victorian readers to skip, skim, and otherwise exclude the most overtly ritualistic elements of the poem. This insight into Victorian reading practices affords crucial new information about the poem’s success, for it helps to explain how readers rationalized their own, seemingly perverse, delight in the poem; they did so through a strategy of selective reading based on the belief that they could excise the “Catholic parts” of the poem, in particular, the rites and rituals of part 1. But the question remains, is such an extraction really possible? By skipping or critically dismissing part 1, could Victorians truly quarantine themselves from the poem’s Catholic content, as they so claimed? The answer, quite simply, is no.
Upon closer investigation, one finds that the most beloved parts of the poem, the soliloquies that readers gave themselves full license to enjoy, in fact contain the most controversial views in the poem. Indeed, in the soliloquies, Newman again sets forth the views on purgatory he had articulated in Tract 90. Yet for some reason, when presented in soliloquies in The Dream—and not in Tracts for the Times—these views passed muster. Newman had succeeded in fostering the illusion that readers could read around the Catholic parts of the poem, while in fact smuggling his most controversial eschatology in plain sight by embedding these views in the most accessible, comforting, and seemingly nondenominational parts of the poem: the soliloquies.
Progressive Suspension: The Soliloquies
The soliloquy that opens part 2 is especially pivotal in bringing Catholic ritualistic elements into a larger narrative of conversion between life and the afterlife. Lines assigned to “Gerontius” are now spoken by the “Soul of Gerontius” and soon after by a “Soul” after an Angel comes down to assure him that he is saved, a precondition for entering purgatory. By the end of the poem, Newman takes this process of deindividualization to its limit when Gerontius becomes one of a chorus of undifferentiated “Souls in Purgatory.” Using the soliloquy, an introspective and self-revelatory form employed in dramatic monologues, Newman moves away from developing his protagonist’s individual identity by way of first-person revelations. Instead, he has his protagonist reflect on becoming part of a general pool of unnamed souls. This diffusion of the protagonist’s identity jars with the sense of character development as a process of increasing specification and self-exposure over time. In The Dream, the protagonist instead sheds character as the poem progresses, becoming less individualized as a character with a marked disposition. The soliloquies therefore help Newman to enact a central principle of his conception of purgatory, the cleansing of self-interest and the purging of individual persona, while working through a more seemingly secular form usually devoted to revealing character and presenting persona.
They also allow Newman to achieve a balance between suspension and progression that lies at the heart of his idea of purgatory as a state of productive waiting. After partaking of the suspended effect of apostrophe—exemplified by the lamentations, prayers, and spoken rites of the opening section—the poem further inducts readers into a purgatorial mode of progress with its soliloquies.54 The apostrophic quality of Gerontius’s cries—“Jesu, have mercy! Mary, pray for me!”—works much like his subsequent soliloquizing in providing lyric suspension while still contributing to the overall narrative of a man journeying to the afterlife. By definition, this narrative in verse must continue moving forward though Newman uses poetic devices to help suspend narrative elements and to create a sense of change that is internalized, reflective, and discursive in nature. As Jonathan Culler writes, “Apostrophe resists narrative because its now is not a moment in a temporal sequence but a now of discourse, of writing.”55 Newman, accordingly, employs apostrophe and soliloquy to resist narrative’s pull, thereby capturing gradual development on the level of poetic plotting. But it is important to realize that he employs this model of poetic plotting with a larger goal in mind: that of making purgatorial gradualism understandable, despite its seeming contradiction between suspension and movement. Newman’s use of devotional poetry thus allows him to perform purgatorial gradualism rather than simply explain it as he did in Tract 90.
Exploring the tension between narrative and lyric modes in the long Victorian poem, Morgan shows how verse meditations can yield this subtle form of narrative movement. She makes the case that the dramatic monologue especially exemplifies a “seamless blend of lyric and narrative temporalities” (160). Soliloquies can be said to function similarly in combining lyric with narrative elements to achieve equipoise between stasis and movement. This balance between lyric and narrative modes is the temporal essence of purgatory—a state caught between progress and suspension. Fittingly, this temporal paradox of progressive suspension is the subject of Gerontius’s first soliloquy:
. . . How still it is!
I hear no more the busy beat of time,
No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse;
Nor does one moment differ from the next.
I had a dream; yes:—someone softly said
“He’s gone;” and then a sigh went round the room.
And then I surely heard a priestly voice