THE SOUL IS AN EMANATION FROM GOD 487

view of the dignity of human nature is inseparable from his conception of a universal divine order: there is order, because there is one substance at the basis of all beings and all things. "The Two Voices" suggests that life may exist after the soul is sundered from the body, because we have faint reminiscences of a state prior to the soul's existence in a body.

Yet how should I for certain hold,
Because my memory is so cold,
That I first was in human mold?

Much more, if first I floated free,
As naked essence, must I be
Incompetent of memory:

For memory dealing but with time,
And he with matter, could she climb
Beyond her own material prime?

Moreover something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams-

Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where ;
Such as no language may declare.

The beginning of a human life is described in the Epilogue to "In Memoriam":

A soul shall draw from out the vast

And strike his being into bounds,

And moved through life of lower phase,
Result in man, be born and think,
And act and love.

Our life in time and space is necessary to our separate personality:

So rounds he to a separate mind

From whence clear memory may begin,

As through the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.

This use may lie in blood and breath,

Which else were fruitless of their due,

Had man to learn himself anew

Beyond the second birth of Death.

The physical universe exists for the sake of developing this personality. In "The Higher Pantheism" we read:

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,

Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?

Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why;
For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel "I am I''?

Man's life is from God and in God, yet he feels his own distinctness and responsibility. "The Ancient Sage" recognizes both the oneness with God and the difference from God:

But that one ripple on the boundless deep
Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself
Forever changing form, but ever more

One with the boundless motion of the deep.

And lest we should say that the wave is but the form and manifestation of the ocean, and can have no real separateness or freedom, Tennyson tells us in "De Profundis" that God wrought

YET TENNYSON IS NO PANTHEIST

Not matter, nor the finite-infinite,

But this main-miracle, that thou art thou,

With power on thine own act and on the world.

489

And in his address "To the Duke of Argyll" he speaks of the will as

A power to make

This ever-changing world of circumstance,

In changing, chime with never-changing Law.

"The Higher Pantheism" then is no pantheism at all, for it asserts that both God and man are distinct personalities, and that God is not confined to the universe but is transcendent above it. There are yet further proofs that Tennyson is no pantheist, first, in his doctrine of prayer; secondly, in his doctrine of conscience; and thirdly, in his doctrine of the soul's separate existence after death. The last words of King Arthur give us the doctrine of prayer:

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.

For what are men better than sheep or goats

That nourish a blind life within the brain,

If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer

Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

In other words, the poet believes in intercourse and communion between man and God, such as can occur only between separate persons, and such as excludes all pantheistic confounding of one personality with the other.

Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet— Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.

The commands and the reproaches of conscience are a witness against pantheism. If man has no separate personality, but is a waif upon an infinite stream, what sense in talking to him of right or wrong? Whatever is, is right; pleasure and duty are one. But we find Tennyson asserting the claims of conscience over against pleasure:

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,

These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
Yet not for power (power of herself
Would come uncalled for) but to live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear;

And, because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.

Arthur's knights bind themselves "to reverence their conscience as their king." As the demand of conscience indicates a personal Lawgiver, so the pangs of conscience indicate a personal Judge, and to Lancelot in his sin the Holy Grail has

a stormy glare, a heat

As from a seven times heated furnace,

which blasts and burns and blinds him, with such fierceness that he swoons away.

Nor is man absorbed in God even after this earthly life is ended. "In Memoriam" gives us Tennyson's doctrine of the soul's separate existence after death:

That each, who seems a separate whole,

Should move his rounds and, fusing all

PERSONALITY PERSISTS AFTER DEATH

The skirts of self again, should fall
Remerging in the general Soul,

Is faith as vague as all unsweet :
Eternal form shall still divide

The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet :

And we shall sit at endless feast,

Enjoying each the other's good :

What vaster dream can hit the mood
Of Love on earth?

491

And Mr. Knowles, in "The Nineteenth Century" (January, 1893), writes of Tennyson: "He formulated once and quite deliberately his own religious creed in the words: There is a Something that watches over us; and our individuality endures; that's my faith, and that's all my faith!'"

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But in his poems the spirit of the seer possesses him, and he asserts a larger and more definite creed:

I trust I have not wasted breath :

I think we are not wholly brain,
Magnetic mockeries; not in vain,
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;

Not only cunning casts in clay :

Let Science prove we are, and then
What matters Science unto men,

At least to me? I would not stay.

Let him, the wiser man who springs
Hereafter, up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape;
But I was born to better things.

Let it live then-ay, till when?

Earth passes, all is lost