has been framed as the legacy of Tractarian poetry but a modest and ephemeral one at best. G. B. Tennyson asks, “What, for example did the Tractarians accomplish in their poetry as poetry? Certainly it could not be argued that they left any single work of great poetry or even a single great short poem.”61 In the long term, he finds that consolation was simply not enough: “Most readers of poetry want more than a soothing tendency. . . . Readers who cannot bring to the reading of poetry a sympathy with the ideas the Tractarians were at pains to advance will probably not be won over by the power of the poetry alone” (190). Although twentieth-century interest in Newman’s poetry waned, many Victorians with little sympathy for Tractarianism were in fact professedly won over by Newman’s “poetry alone”—the “alone” part being a crucial component in their approval, at least as they understood it.62 This early perception of the poem as a work made up of discrete, isolatable parts proved crucial to its acceptance—though it was by no means true that readers could perform a neat excision of the poem’s theological content and achieve sanitized readings, as they believed. The frequently excerpted soliloquies were in fact the center of Newman’s eschatological musings. Newman’s success resides precisely in fostering this illusion. The poetic form he chose allowed readers to come to a consoling, albeit false, conclusion: namely, that a distinction could be made between his poem’s Catholic content and its “poetry.”
This distinction was made by Kingsley, Doyle, Gordon, and many others in their praise of The Dream. As Doyle says of the poem, “Of the doctrines involved in this striking production it is unnecessary to say more than that there is nothing, except the bare idea of purgatory (a theological and not a poetical blemish), which need prevent any Christian, or, indeed, any one who believes in the providence of God, from valuing it according to its deserts. It is built mainly upon those noble foundations which were laid eighteen hundred years ago, and which are still the common inheritance of Christendom, the common centre of our European civilisation.”63 After suggesting that the poem’s subject and form can be considered separately—lyricism outweighing and even redeeming or canceling out the religious content—Doyle immediately claims the same religious heritage for all Catholics and Anglicans and urges an Oxford ceasefire. He ends by lamenting the “antagonism,” “hostile zeal,” and “unsympathetic demeanor” of those at Oxford with grudges against Newman, and he appeals to his audience’s “genuine respect” and “undiminished affection” for an individual of such worth (123). Doyle’s final comments are evidence of a widespread phenomenon in the poem’s reception history: its ability as a poem to foster a slippage between consolation and conciliation, even when there is nothing especially compromising about the poem ideologically speaking. After all, it is almost exactly the same model of purgatory that Newman presented in Tract 90.
Thus, despite its controversial content, The Dream became renowned for offering relief to its readers, but it ultimately succeeded because it offered readers something more: a cleansing of animosities from the Oxford Movement. As Newman writes in his essay on Keble, “Poetry is the refuge of those who have not the Catholic Church to flee to and repose upon, for the Church herself is the most sacred and august of poets. . . . Now what is the Catholic Church, viewed in her human aspect, but a discipline of the affections and passions? What are her ordinances and practices but the regulated expression of keen, or deep, or turbid feeling, and thus a ‘cleansing,’ as Aristotle would word it, of the sick soul?”64 Newman distinguishes the “cleansing” of Catholics from the lesser consolation prize of nonbelievers reading poetry to find “refuge.” In taking The Dream to heart, many of Newman’s non-Catholic readers may not have followed the kind of cleansing regime its author imagined as a strictly Catholic (and indeed purgatorial) experience, instead finding consolation in his work. But this consolation was nevertheless not without wider implications than merely soothing a few “sick souls.” Newman’s consoling poem did not merely provide refuge for those facing death and seeking a literary balm. It also helped many of its readers perform a different kind of purgation—a cleansing of bitterness following Tract 90.
Accordingly, religious historians have marveled at the poem’s conciliatory powers. Geoffrey Rowell observes not only that The Dream “reached a far larger audience” and “enjoyed great popularity” but also that, ultimately, through The Dream, Newman “presented an understanding of purgatory which was acceptable to many outside his own communion.”65 Novels such as Villette reveal this process of consideration midcentury, and subsequent chapters discuss the resonance of Newman’s theological writing and midcentury eschatology in works of fiction more broadly, showing how a new consoling model of the afterlife eventually surfaced in an array of novels as a metaphor for gradual change and maturation of the most subtle, beneficial kind. Consequently, regardless of whether or not Anglicans fully came around, the poem certainly helped Victorians (including Kingsley) to purge their bitter feelings about Tract 90 and its fallout. The model of the afterlife that had once been a source of vexed conflict instead became a site of soothing consolation. Therefore, more than just offering refuge and relief, purgatory finally came to occupy a central position as both a point of controversy and grounds for larger compromise. In the end, The Dream can be said to have helped Newman accomplish one of his previous, and most ambitious, goals: that of making purgatory into a via media after all.
The Afterlife of The Dream
Newman’s intermediate model of purgatory would continue to permeate Victorian literature and culture long after the appearance of Tract 90. Most explicitly, Newman’s eschatology surfaced in literary visions of the afterlife and theological tracts published later in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Such literary visions of judgment include Margaret Oliphant’s “The Land of Darkness” and “A Beleaguered City” as well as C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, all works that present a non-Catholic vision of purgatory in which the soul’s main “activity” is to interpret its own state, as Gerontius does for most of The Dream.66 In Oliphant’s “The Land of Darkness,” readers at first cannot be sure whether they are encountering a vision of purgatory as they follow the newly dead protagonist through regions in the afterlife dedicated to everything from hedonism to totalitarian tidiness. The tale concludes with a hellish circling back that casts doubt on the protagonist’s potential for progress. Yet this humbling regression simultaneously gives value to the difficulty of achieving progress in a place of unforeseeable duration. If limbo is desire without hope, purgatory is desire with hope, and in Oliphant’s open-ended conclusion the protagonist’s potential for hope gives the narrative the chance of being one of progressive linearity, instead of merely a story of circular resignation.67 Similarly, in Lewis’s The Great Divorce a penitent soul enters an intermediate place of Judgment that slips either into hell or into heaven, depending on the choices he or she makes there. Those who continue in error are already in a state of hell without knowing it. Those who persist in improvement, often without it being recognizable to them, are living in a purgatory that can only retrospectively be understood as such.
In theology of the twentieth century, Newman’s influence is even clearer. During World War I, Newman’s gentler ideal of purgatory as a place for maturation experienced a tremendous resurgence, offering grieving families the consolatory prospect of continued growth for the many young men who had died in battle. General studies of modernism and twentieth-century religion rarely mention this facet of postwar fervor, but taking this brief interval in Britain’s religious history into account may contribute to a new understanding of twentieth-century responses to Victorian theology, ranging from tracts and war documents to literary works. As one professor of theology wrote in 1918, “Men are seeking assurance of life to come for those who have given their lives. . . . We hope as never before for an assured and abundant life after death.”68 Letters home from the trenches reveal that soldiers deeply feared going to hell, especially when their last act might be that of killing another person. As one British soldier wrote home to his parents, “So you think that if a man is fighting on the side of righteousness and mercy no matter what kind of life he has led in the past he will not go to the purgatory as pictured by Dante. I agree.”69 The belief in heaven offered the strongest comfort possible for many, but
