"I found Him in the shining of the stars,
I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,
But in His ways with men I find Him not.
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.
O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would,
Till the High God behold it from beyond,
And enter it, and make it beautiful?
Or else as if the world were wholly fair,
But that these eyes of men are dense and dim,
And have not power to see it as it is:
Perchance, because we see not to the close; —
For I, being simple, thought to work His will,
And have but stricken with the sword in vain;
And all whereon I leaned in wife and friend
Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm
Reels back into the beast, and is no more.
My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death:
Nay — god my Christ — I pass but shall not die. (line 9-28)
aving been "tested" and fatally wounded by his disobedient nephew Mordred, Arthur decries his debasement as he lies dying upon a wasteland that parallels the severe terrain of his inner or psychological landscape. Weary of the ongoing process of defining and redefining his precarious faith to God, self, and fellow man, Arthur experiences a crisis of faith. He doubts God; "why is all around us here / As if some lesser God had made the world." He doubts humanity and marriage; "all whereon I leaned in wife and friend / Is traitor to my peace. But most importantly he doubts himself — not so much in terms of morality but in terms of epistemology or his capacity to know (Landow, "Having and Keeping of Faith"). "Because we see not to the close," Arthur recognizes that his eyes too are "as dense and dim" perhaps as Gawain's and Lancelot's. In the manner of In Memoriam, Tennyson not only dramatizes the processes in which man mediates faith and doubt, but problematizes the dubious meaning of faith itself. "Faith," George Landow writes, "however essential, is necessarily a tenuous, subjective, nonrational matter," and it is clear throughout the Idylls how competing allegiances to love, friendship, and God often render man helpless. Tennyson utilizes the technique of dramatic monologue, which is characterized by three features: 1) a speaker "who is not patently the speaker," 2) the singular and unmediated perspective of that speaker, however much he interacts with other characters (God, in this case), and 3) a subsequent revealing of the speaker's "temperament and character" (M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 48). Tennyson in this sense does not align his own identity with that of Arthur. The questioning of faith instead offers the reader a glimpse into Arthur's psychic unrest.
Using different rhetorical techniques and with almost antithetical implications, Dickens recasts Tennyson's idea of faith and its authentification. If Arthur is "tested" by Mordred, Lancelot, and Gawain, so too is Pickwick in his "trial" versus Mrs. Bardell and her opportunist shyster lawyers. Whereas in the The Passing of Arthur, Bedivere's fealty reaffirms Arthur's shaken evaluation of both his own faith and that of others, Pickwick's mistrust of lawyers is so great that he compromises his innocence by paying his own fine, Bardell's fine, Jingle's fine, and Dodson and Fogg's exorbitant compensation. Perker advises his client essentially to abandon integrity, to concede to the exigencies of bogus law.
And now, my dear Sir, I put it to you. This one hundred and fifty pounds, or whatever it may be — take it in round numbers — is nothing to you. A jury has decided against you; well, there verdict is wrong, but still they decided as they thought right, and it is against you. You have now an opportunity, on easy terms, of placing yourself in a much higher position than you ever could by remaining here; which would only be imnputed by people who didn't know you to sheer, dogged, wrong headed, brutal obstinacy: nothing else, my dear Sir, believe me. Can you hesitate to avail yourself of it, when it restores you to your friends, your old pusuits, your health and amusements; when it liberates your faithful and attached servant, whom you otherwise doom to imprisonment for the whole of your life? (726)
What's interesting is that Perker advises Pickwick's compromise on the grounds that it will "liberate" Sam Weller. By severing his faith from the legal system, Pickwick nonetheless maintains his allegiance to friends. Such suggests the same competing loyalties which dismantle Arthur's faith in the Idylls. Whereas Tennyson uses the technique of dramatic monologue — in which the speaker announces his dilemma — Dickens has Perker explain Pickwick's situation in an effort to emphasize how little control Pickwick has over his predicament. The law itself, no matter how corrupt, establishes the conditions for Pickwick's crisis in faith and allows him little recourse but compromise.
Perhaps most salient to the idea of faith is the biographical context of Tennyson's tragic relationship to Arthur Hallam, a close friend and associate who died in 1833. In the face of loss and with the sudden recognition of life's futility, "Tennyson was overwhelmed with doubts about the meaning of life and humanity's role in the universe, doubts reinforced by his own study of geology and other sciences" (Norton II 1084). Immediately after Hallam's death, Tennyson began writing In Memoriam in an attempt both to pay final homage to his friend and authenticate his own beliefs amidst the therapuetic setting of literary exploration and creative renewal. In the Idylls of the King, Tennyson reappropriates the archaic Arthurian legend in order to dramatize his own doubts as he worked towards a reconciliation of the self in relation to nature, industry, and God.
Last modified 1996