The Victorian Novel of Adulthood. Rebecca Rainof
fainter and more faint the accents come,
As at an ever-widening interval.
(14)
Time has not stopped; the “interval” between Gerontius’s moment of death and his reflections is “ever-widening.” The speaking of “Subvenite,” the responsorial recitation in the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, marks a countertime, reappearing at intervals to offset a subjective, lyrical, and discursive time of meditation from earthly time marked by ongoing spoken rites and the poem’s meter.56 He is reassured that change will continue unfolding even though it cannot be measured by even the smallest narrative unit, the moment, let alone more dramatic narrative markers such as events and turning points. As the Angel next explains, Gerontius’s sense of time passing slowly is irregular and does not correspond to the actual speed of his journey between death and purgatory.
Thou art not let; but with extremest speed
Art hurrying to the just and Holy Judge:
For scarcely art thou disembodied yet.
Divide a moment, as men measure time,
Into its million-million-millionth part,
Yet even less than that the interval
Since thou didst leave the body. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Precise and punctual, men divide the hours,
Equal, continuous, for their common use.
Not so with us in th’ immaterial world;
But intervals in their succession
Are measured by the living thought alone,
And grow or wane with its intensity.
And time is not a common property;
But what is long is short, and swift is slow,
And near is distant, as received and grasped
By this mind and by that, and every one
Is standard of his own chronology.
(22–23)
The “hurrying” that immediately follows Gerontius’s death appears as stasis to him, and this sense of uneventful reflection is crucial to Newman’s ideas about conversion as a gradual rather than revolutionary process. Depicting the ultimate conversion from life to the afterlife, Newman attempts to have the best of both worlds: the temporality of the earthly poet—“precise,” “punctual,” and metered—and the temporality of suspended time in which the “fruit of grace” can go through a process of “maturing” (“Intermediate State,” 377) without being hurried and without conforming to measurable standards. This contradiction of a seemingly timeless duration is one of the central paradoxes Newman strives to represent. In his conception, purgatory occurs outside of earthly time, but it remains finite and telos-oriented. The goal of purgatory is to prepare souls for their exit from this state and their entrance into paradise. Yet despite unfolding in time, one’s duration in purgatory is indefinite, immeasurable, and not for “common use.” In trying to represent this temporal paradox, Newman uses soliloquies to explain his concept of the timeless duration while at the same time performing it, an effect uniquely achieved through poetic means. In other words, the soliloquies allow Newman to perform suspended contemplative action in the very act of describing it to readers, thereby uniting form and content in a way previously unavailable to him in his sermons and tracts.
Converting the Dramatic Monologue
Yet if Newman uses soliloquies to capture the “seamless blend of lyric and narrative temporalities” associated with the dramatic monologue, he also uses soliloquies to turn the dramatic monologue on its head. In featuring a lone central speaker, The Dream reframes the conflict between spiritual progress and egoism that Tennyson and Browning imagine in poems including “St. Simeon Stylites” and “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” respectively.57 Johannes Agricola declares, “For I intend to get to God, / For ’tis to God I speed so fast” (lines 6–7) but circularly asserts that “God’s Breast” (line 8) is “where I have always lain” (line 11). This form of spiritual claim jumping involves a problem of not knowing, or at least not acknowledging, the difference between “reach and grasp.”58 In trying to collapse this distinction, dramatic monologue speakers such as St. Simeon Stylites attempt to bypass the between state of being “unfit for earth, unfit for heaven” (line 3), a holding pattern that constitutes the central condition of growth in purgatory and also the suspended form of the dramatic monologue itself. But whereas Tennyson and Browning channel suspension and gradual revelation into doubt through dramatic irony, Newman tells us that Gerontius is saved from the beginning. This certainty of salvation marks an important difference between Newman’s poem and Tennyson’s and Browning’s dramatic monologues, a contrast more starkly realized when considering a work such as “Tithonus,”59 given Tennyson’s emphasis on immortality without redemption and stasis without the promise of progress, however imperceptible. In its structure, The Dream consequently operates quite differently than dramatic monologues by Tennyson and Browning, for The Dream instead works as a reassurance against doubt, using the soliloquies first to entertain apprehension and doubts and then turning to the explicatory dialogue with the Angel to dispel them. In this way, doubt of a spiritual nature is shifted to doubt of an experiential kind: the uncertainty of an individual in unfamiliar circumstances, not the doubt of someone on the brink of damnation. Angels accordingly take a leading hand and demons are relegated to the sidelines, where they appear comical and impotent as Satan’s cheerleaders, speaking in a doggerel reminiscent of Christina Rossetti’s goblin men: “What’s a saint? / One whose breath / Doth the air taint” (28).
The main threat in the poem instead comes from the isolation and fear of solipsism Gerontius experiences after first arriving in the afterlife, an anxiety that the poem itself performs by briefly collapsing into “the unconstrained lyrical ‘I’” of the dramatic monologue.60 Gerontius’s experience as a lone speaker is one of “deep rest” but also of strenuous “pain” in having his “thoughts” driven back “upon their spring” (14). His initial meditations are portrayed not restfully but as an act of self-cannibalism: “I now begin to feed upon myself, / Because I have nought else to feed upon” (15). This negative isolation is remedied by the Angel’s eventual appearance and the poem’s expansion into dramatic forms; thus, conversation rescues Gerontius from the social vacuum imagined at the core of his soliloquies. In relief, his soul says,
Now know I surely that I am at length
Out of the body: had I part with earth,
I never could have drunk those accents in,
And not have worshipped as a god the voice
That was so musical; but now I am
So whole of heart, so calm, so self-possessed,
With such a full content, and with a sense
So apprehensive and discriminant
As no temptation can intoxicate.
(20)
Only by losing self-possession—the transition from “Gerontius” to nameless “Soul” in purgatory—can the central speaker become fully “self-possessed” and “full content.” The pun on “content” as both an emotional state and one of repletion points up the paradox of feeling substantial only when removed from the world of earthly substance, but it also reconfigures the earlier cannibalism imagery as benign self-satisfaction: instead of eating away at oneself through depleting rumination, the Soul now feels “whole of heart,” a strangeness of eating one’s cake and having it too. This sense of paradoxical fullness counteracts the smug contentment of speakers such as Browning’s Johannes Agricola, who asserts that he was made by God “because that love had need / Of something irreversibly / Pledged solely its content to be” (lines 28–30). Newman illustrates a contentment that comes only with the