Mystic Moderns: Agency and Enchantment in Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb 1498583776, 9781498583770

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Mystic Moderns

Mystic Moderns Agency and Enchantment in Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb James H. Thrall

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Copyrighted material from Evelyn Underhill: Artist of the Infinite Life by Dana Greene, is included with the kind of permission of the University of Notre Dame press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956722 TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For my wife, Grace, and daughters, Johanna and Jennifer, without whose encouragement and indulgence this book would not have been completed or begun.

Contents

Introduction: Agencies and Innovations 1

Considering the New: “Modern,” “Modernity,” and “Modernism”

I: Evelyn Underhill’s Heroic Mysticism

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1 15

2

Mystic Modes: Living, Dying, Knowing

17

3

Catholic Aesthetics and Medieval Modernity

37

4

Magics and Mysticisms: Finding a New Orthodoxy

51

5

The Heroic Individual on the Mystic Way

63

6

Gender, Class, and Mysticism

79

II: May Sinclair’s Erotic Mysticism

93

7

Language and the Lure of Idealism

8

Deepest Desires: Embracing Erotic Mysticism

109

95

9

Maintaining Control: Will and the Boundaries of Self

123

10 Evolution’s Promise: Consciousness, Species, Religion

143

11 Modernity, War, and Death: Mystic Responses

155

12 Meeting the Dead: Ghost Stories for Moderns

173

III: Mary Webb’s Mysticism of Nature

187

13 Country Living: Tales of Old and New

189

14 Agency and Choice: Romanticism, Mysticism, Capitalism

205

15 Acting Naturally: Christianity, Sexuality, Agency

221

16 Other Ways to Think?: The Puzzle of a Medieval Turn

243

Conclusion: Connections and Crossings Bibliography Index About the Author

vii

261 273 285 293

Introduction Agencies and Innovations

What is “modern” is always a moving target, an attempt to capture with a word the quicksilver of “now.” 1 I will be considering the responses of three authors—Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), May Sinclair (1863–1946), and Mary Webb (1881–1927)—to the evolving “now” of one period in British history: the long early twentieth-century moment encompassing the First World War. In particular, I will examine how their fiction and essays explored divergent but overlapping understandings of what mystical experience might be, and how its pursuit might establish and validate the personal agency of individuals and especially women. Through complicated negotiations with the modernity of their time, these authors both embraced and critiqued their era’s drive toward ceaseless innovation. They rejected claims that modernity’s celebration of the secular and rational had no place for the mystical; rather, they countered, their particular understandings of what it meant to be mystics were integral to their identities as modern women. Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb may not have been familiar with the work of their contemporary Max Weber (1864–1920), but his assertion of the “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of the world assumed the triumph of secularization they resisted. In his 1918 lecture “Science as a Vocation” (Wissenschaft als Beruf), Weber argued that in a disenchanted, technological age “there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.” 2 Gustavo Benavides observes that modernity has “generally been identified with the resolute rejection of a sacramental view of reality . . . , as well as even more radically with an outright rejection of any notion of transcendence.” 3 Randall Styers notes that “modern” subjectivity has been defined largely as rational autonomy of thought liberated from magical thinking. 4 In contrast, Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb defined their understandings of modernity and of agency through their investments in a transcendent reality obscured, they claimed, by the misleading appearances of the material world. Each allied herself to some expression of what was popularly called New Mysticism, a widely inclusive designation for varied endeavors at extra-rational perception of “the real.” 5 Even as their constructions of mysticism rejected the dominance of scientific materialism, however, they depended on intellectual trends powered ix

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Introduction

by the same post-Enlightenment turn to empirical thought. This is especially apparent in their shared emphasis on the authority of individual experience, their engagement with such emerging forms of deductive inquiry as psychoanalysis, and their openness to the contested promise of evolutionary progress for both individuals and humanity. In reasserting a supernatural aspect for a modern landscape seen as lacking clear indicators of meaning, moreover, their forms of mystic modernity emerged as interweavings of conservative, progressive, and even transgressive impulses attempting to determine what might be of authentic value. As the appellation “New Mysticism” suggests, all three women were, consciously or not, embarked on projects of translation and transformation, adapting old modes of thought to new cultural contexts. Each in her own way sought a self-authenticating spiritual system separate from the rigid orthodoxy of establishment Christianity on the one hand, and from the extreme heterodoxy of occultism on the other. In constructing their alternatives in terms of personal agency, they turned to prevailing theories of “life force” or “vital energy” to explain the invigorating flow of modern existence, especially as reflected in the complex interrelations of an individual with her world. As a result, their preoccupations with the dynamism of human connection, including sexuality, channeled modernity’s own erotic energy of change. At the same time, all three set the energy of individual agency in complicated relationship not just with prevailing cultural currents, the agencies of other individuals, and internal psychological influences, but also with the transcendent reality each assumed was accessible through mystical experience. Each found her formulation of that transcendent reality provided a limiting but, in some ways, reassuring boundary to agency. True communion with something eternal, as they described it, depended on the largely untapped spiritual potential of all humans, but also offered humbling reminders of human finitude. More specifically, Underhill struggled to negotiate the poles of energetic effort and patient waiting she found integral to the mystic way toward what she called the “unitive state,” a struggle crystallized through her recurring difficulty in balancing a Christian mystic’s “reaching up” with the grace-powered “reaching down” of the divine. Sinclair relied on a process she associated with the Jungian concept of “sublimation” to direct the energy of personal volition into creative readiness for unexpected perceptions of the “real” in momentary experiences of transcendent beauty. Webb associated the almost personified supernatural element her protagonists found in nature with a controlling destiny, even if that destiny played out through the actions of individuals. Their recognition of “something greater,” finally, infused their work with ethical purpose and consequence, as they worked out their mystical philosophies against the backdrop of a crisis of meaning defined largely in terms of mortality and sharpened by the outbreak of war. While not

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themselves utopian authors, each was touched by her era’s complex hunger for the best of all possible worlds. Their constructions in fiction of how an individual should live in response to modernity simultaneously projected visions of what that modernity itself should become. Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb were not alone among their literary contemporaries in being interested in heightened or alternative states of consciousness. Sinclair biographer Suzanne Raitt describes especially Sinclair’s A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions (1917) and Underhill’s Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (1911) as falling within a “more general trend of research on the history and practice of mysticism” that characterized the era. Raitt notes Vita Sackville-West’s biographies of female saints, and the mystical interests of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot as representative of other literary expressions of the movement. 6 Rebeccah Kinnamon Neff sees Sinclair’s mystic formulations in Defence of Idealism, as well as her prose poem The Dark Night and her supernatural short fiction, significantly shaping Eliot’s immersion in Christian mysticism, as revealed by correlative imagery in such works as “Little Gidding,” “The Waste Land,” and “Four Quartets.” 7 Eliot also took “copious notes” in his copy of Underhill’s Mysticism. 8 The experimental eclecticism of the literary and spiritual age also pushed the bounds of the dominant Christian culture, as in Sinclair’s exploration of Buddhist or Hindu themes of karma in her supernatural stories, or E. M. Forster’s excursions into Hindu sensibilities in A Passage to India (1924). Although Buddhist shadings in “Little Gidding” and “Four Quartets” have long been recognized, Neff’s examination reveals “the extent to which Eliot’s use of Buddhist doctrine coincides with his reading of Sinclair’s fiction and her psychoanalytic interpretation of Oriental mysticism.” 9 Both Underhill and Sinclair were also acquainted with Bengali Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore, an interest they shared with Yeats, among others. 10 Sinclair wrote a laudatory review of Tagore’s volume Gitanjali, which she later largely reproduced in her chapter on “The New Mysticism” in Defence of Idealism, and Underhill collaborated with Tagore in several translation projects. 11 In addition, to greater or lesser degrees, each of the three showed at least initial sympathy with the specifically paranormal experimentation and magically oriented occultism in vogue during the fin de siècle and early decades of the century. In part a cultural preoccupation prompted by the First World War’s excessive loss of life, forms of what was broadly called “spiritualism” engaged such authors as J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others. 12 Paradoxically, the era’s explosion of technological innovation was also motivation for increased interest in the paranormal. 13 During the period, Peter Gay observes,

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Introduction the very advances of scientific explanations called into being a diverse, at times desperate response; mysticism in many guises flourished as it had not done for centuries. It inundated Western civilization with a sundry menu of spiritualist dogmas all the way from primitive credulity to sophisticated logic chopping, from séances devoted to Tarot cards and table moving to semi-scientific researches into unexplained psychological phenomena. 14

The various degrees of tension with traditional Christianity experienced by Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb likewise were in keeping with another trend Gay describes, as “thousands, educated and uneducated alike,” turned to spiritualism because they could “no longer accept the Christian legend of a divine Saviour and the tales surrounding his brief appearance among humans—really, when you think about it, a highly improbable story—but found it repugnant to embrace what they thought the chilly, deadening materialism of natural science.” Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb shared one tendency, however, that set them apart from at least some of their compatriots: their approach to mysticism as an extraordinary experience that could still be rooted in the ordinary. In contrast to the more extreme incarnations of mystical speculation that marked their era, the mysticisms these authors advanced exhibited a mainstream flavor that sought spiritual innovation without excess. As one result, they arguably stand in closer relationship to contemporary uses of the broad term “spirituality” than more flamboyant practitioners of the occult of their day. As wickedly intriguing as the likes of Aleister Crowley may be, for example, the sexual and drug-induced excesses of his esoteric ceremonies may reverberate less extensively than the assumptions of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb that mystic sensibility can pervade everyday existence. 15 Their investments in generic, even universally accessible forms of mystic apprehension that could function outside the bounds of particular faith traditions show strong affinities to contemporary concepts of non-doctrinal and extra-institutional spiritual awareness. Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb might well have understood and, to various extents, might even have affirmed, elements of the identity so often expressed today as “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Such language simply captures, they might say, the common personal experience of “something more” that underlies much public ritual. While covering similar terrain, the three authors also diverged, revealing varied understandings of modernity and mysticism, and reflecting different approaches to asserting agency while maintaining, re-establishing, or simply recasting the enchantment of the world. In certain respects, their different mystic musings reflect their different trajectories of personal development. The specific flavors of their individual approaches to mysticism, furthermore, helped define a variety of general directions of spiritual inquiry whose influences are felt today.

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After a youthful flirtation with atheism, and a short-lived period of what she described as “an intelligent and irresponsible sort of theism which I enjoyed thoroughly,” Underhill developed an increasingly Christian framework for her thought. Despite a life-long universalism open to a range of mystical traditions, including some elements of the paranormal, she largely abandoned the interest in occultism reflected in her three early novels. The Gray World/The Grey World (1904) is the story of a young man who dies and returns to life after experiencing an afterlife. The Lost Word (1907) is a romance set against the backdrop of a young architect’s mystical perception of ideal forms of construction. The Column of Dust (1909) considers both occult and Christian access to a transcendent reality. 16 Instead, her attraction to Roman Catholicism, also presented in her novels, propelled her explorations of mysticism toward Anglican and specifically Anglo-Catholic contexts. 17 As author of the pivotal Mysticism, which helped popularize the study of mysticism for early twentieth-century readers, and of a prolific collection of further writings on spirituality, Underhill became a sought-after spiritual guide and leader of retreats. Her work is a key foundation for what is loosely termed “Christian spirituality,” a widely inclusive catch-all for mystical practices and techniques focused through Christian images and concepts. 18 The continued sale of her works on prayer and mysticism—in the case of Mysticism more than a century after its publication—testifies to her enduring appeal. Of the three authors, Underhill was the most open to the potential benefits of religious ritual and traditional ecclesial practices, though she was no defender of conventional piety if she felt that “conventional” equaled “empty.” Where Sinclair emphasized individual experience with little consideration for the bounds of community, and seemed less concerned about maintaining the specific construction that might be called God (even as she used that language), Underhill stressed the primary importance of a personal relationship with “the Divine” supported by a mystic practice set within a communal context. 19 Her approach to what she called the Mystic Way, however, cast the pursuit of mystic consciousness as a disciplined endeavor that invites the description “heroic.” Her development in mystic thought played out in part as negotiation between her focus on the experience of the mystic as an extraordinarily committed individual, and the importance she attributed to the mutual support that could be provided by others in a shared faith tradition. Sinclair was a pioneer in delving into psychoanalytical depths familiar to today’s mystical practitioners who seek clinical language to describe their ephemeral experiences. Of the three, she found the strongest links between sublimated sexual energy and mystical awareness. Raised by a manipulative mother who applied a restrictive Protestantism in her campaign of control, Sinclair rejected Christianity as a young adult. Although she at times uses the term “prayer” to describe her experiences of mystic apprehension of the real, she drew more heavily on the interest in Eastern

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strains of mystical practice she shared with Underhill and avoided restricting her mysticism within specific religious limits. At best, she allowed, existing constructions of Christianity pointed to a less bounded, true spirituality that had been lost under accretions of law and doctrine. Sinclair also balanced a fascination with and a scientifically grounded skepticism toward the occult and paranormal, maintaining her membership in the Society for Psychical Research throughout her life, but reserving judgment about the continuance of consciousness after death. 20 Webb mingled elements of Christian thought with folk and pagan beliefs common to her native Shropshire to forge a new pantheism invigorated by a romantic turn to pastoral nature. Her evocation of nature’s mystical resonances fed a post-war interest in the therapeutic potential of natural settings that continues in contemporary strains of nature-oriented spirituality. She was not as directly engaged with occult or paranormal movements as Underhill or Sinclair, yet of the three perhaps best straddled the divide between “established” and “esoteric.” Her narratives incorporate traditional rural practices of churchgoing and spellcasting, but, like Sinclair’s and Underhill’s work, also reflect modern trends toward a universally available spirituality. In Webb’s stories, Christians, and especially clergy, are a mixed bag, yet tend most often to illustrate failings of institutional Christianity, at least as defined by and practiced in closely bounded communities. At the same time, Webb relied heavily on Christlike sacrificial models in her characterizations. Much like Sinclair, her preferred characters’ mystic sensibilities pointed toward the possibility of a true form of antinomian Christianity uncorrupted by institutional encrustations and bourgeois hypocrisy. If divergent in their contours, the lives of the three women, as well as their work and interests, intertwined. Sinclair maintained a friendship with Underhill that was both personal and professional. The two women took a number of summer trips aboard Underhill’s yacht, and Sinclair felt sufficiently close to Underhill to name her a beneficiary of her will. 21 Professionally, not only did Underhill share portions of the manuscript of Mysticism with Sinclair for comment, acknowledging her assistance in the book’s preface, but Sinclair appears to make only slightly disguised reference to Underhill’s writing in at least one of her novels. 22 Underhill reciprocated with praise as well as writerly suggestions for Sinclair’s work, including comments on Sinclair’s novel The Creators and novella “The Flaw in the Crystal.” 23 That Sinclair’s own thinking about mysticism was influenced by Underhill’s work is clear, especially in her exploration of the concept of sublimation. 24 This common interest in the psychological underpinnings of mysticism, which situated both of them within the modernist exploration of “stream of consciousness” narrative, formed another bond. 25 Their work overlapped in other coincidental ways as well, as when Sinclair’s first novel, The Divine Fire, and Underhill’s first novel, The Gray World, were both reviewed in the same 1905 New York

Introduction

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Times article. 26 Indeed, Sinclair liked The Gray World enough to send copies to friends as Christmas presents. 27 In 1908, Underhill wrote a defense of Sinclair’s The Helpmate against criticism by Lady Robert Cecil. In her correspondence with Sinclair, she also frequently supported Sinclair’s efforts to explore new possibilities for fiction. 28 By the time Webb began writing novels she had read both William James and Underhill. 29 After moving to London with her husband in 1921, she first met Sinclair and then, through Sinclair, Underhill. Webb wrote at least one favorable review of Sinclair’s work for The Bookman, a short essay on the novel Far End that shows familiarity with Sinclair’s other writing. 30 Webb’s writing also shows elements of stream of consciousness, as constructed by Underhill and explored by Sinclair. She may not have been aware, at least at the beginning of her career, that her work reflected such tendencies. She also did not try to present quite the immediacy of access to her characters’ thoughts that Sinclair did. But her concentration on the mystic resonance between human instinct and some primal force of nature corresponds with Underhill’s explanation that the unconscious contains “all those ‘uncivilized’ instincts and vices, those remains of the ancestral savage, which education has forced out of the stream of consciousness and which now only send their messages to the surface in a carefully disguised form.” 31 The literary legacies of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb are perhaps more difficult to gauge than their influences on New Mysticism and subsequent forms of spiritual exploration. All three authors attracted significant readership for their fiction during, or in Webb’s case, at least immediately after their lifetimes, though interest in the literary works of all three later declined. Webb has long been celebrated through the research of the Britain-based Mary Webb Society. Her novels Precious Bane (1924) and Seven for a Secret (1922) were adapted for the stage (unsuccessfully, biographer Michèle Aina Barale asserts) in the 1930s, and Precious Bane was the basis for a television series aired in England during the 1960s. A film version (more successful, according to Barale) of her novel Gone to Earth was produced in the 1950s. 32 Except for Precious Bane, which has tended to stay in print, however, Webb’s novels have only recently begun to be reprinted. Similarly, readers familiar with Underhill’s spiritual writings may be unaware that she even wrote fiction, which has also now been reprinted. Sinclair has enjoyed a renaissance of scholarly attention since the 1990s, but it comes after decades of neglect, and has only recently extended to reprinting some of her cardinal works. 33 FORMAT AND APPROACH Sinclair and Underhill were active as writers into the 1940s—Sinclair of fiction and essays; Underhill of essays and spiritual guides. I will focus,

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however, on certain significant examples of the three authors’ fiction writing completed during the twentieth century’s first three decades, the period in which Sinclair produced her most distinctive work, and Underhill and Webb their entire fictional oeuvres. 34 In discussing each author’s works, I will pursue something of a chronological order, beginning with Underhill, whose period as a fiction writer was early and relatively brief, and whose influence as an essayist on mysticism was felt by both Sinclair and Webb. I am most interested in what Underhill’s fiction suggests about her entry into mystical studies as reflected in her pre-war production of Mysticism, her first extended non-fiction work, and its sequel, The Mystic Way: A Psychological Study in Christian Origins (1913). I will also consider, however, how the concerns identified in her early work were extended and refined in her mature essays on spirituality by looking at two late summarizing or retrospective works, The School of Charity (1934) and The Golden Sequence (1933). I begin with Underhill as well because her emphasis on the primacy of an interior, intuitive knowledge demonstrates most clearly the particular epistemology she shared with Sinclair and Webb. I turn next to Sinclair, picking up her literary production with the onset of war and tracing selected texts through the first years of the 1920s. I explore in particular Sinclair’s use of psychoanalytic frames of reference to explain the contribution of internal currents of sexual energy to an external relationship with higher reality. Because of her life choices in sacrificing long-term sexual intimacy in the name of heightened creative and mystical perception, Sinclair serves best to illustrate the close intertwining by all three authors of the sexual and the mystical. Steeped in nineteenth-century philosophy as well as contemporary literary theory, Sinclair drew strongly on Arthur Schopenhauer’s foundational understanding of a motivating and mystifying “will.” Exercising mystic agency for Sinclair was, as with Underhill, a highly individual process that positioned the personal will in particular relation to broader kinds of social and cultural influences that might also be understood as expressions of a ubiquitous life force permeating the world. Webb’s literary exploration of mysticism through fiction began with Gone to Earth (1917), written during the war, and concluded with her final manuscript, Armour Wherein He Trusted, left unfinished at her death in 1927. In translating the mystic endeavor into rural environs and connecting her protagonists to life energy as experienced in nature, Webb expresses most strongly the pantheistic celebration of nature’s mystical resonances. With its exploration of rural blends of popular Christianity and popular “folk religion,” Webb’s fiction, furthermore, lays out in peculiar complexity the tension between the generalized mystic ability—a generic “spirituality,” in other words—assumed by all three authors, and the specific demands of a particular religious structure. Complicated by her own health and other life challenges, that exploration of the interrelation

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of the specific and the general may have become in the end the arena for working out her own concerns with mortality. Attempting to consider the work of all three authors within the broad contexts of their time has meant touching on many topics only lightly or not at all. I have had to be selective not only in the works I consider, but also in the genres, considering each author’s poetry, for example, only in passing. I have also not attempted to be exhaustive in covering each author’s biographical details, for which I am especially indebted to the work of biographers Christopher Armstrong and Dana Greene (Underhill); Theophilus Boll, Suzanne Raitt, and Hrisey Zegger (Sinclair); and Michèle Aina Barale and Gladys Mary Coles (Webb). I greatly appreciate the assistance of Dana Greene, Gladys Mary Coles, Becky Bowler, Carl McColman, and both David McCarthy, Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sarah Davis, Archivist for the Shropshire Archives, for assistance in locating and reproducing images of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb. I am also grateful for the insights and guidance provided by Kenneth Surin, my doctoral advisor at Duke University, and the other members of my doctoral committee, Theresa Berger, Peter Hawkins, Wesley Kort, and Randall Styers, as well as for my anonymous external reviewer’s cogent suggestions for improvement. Responsibility for any deficiencies in the resulting product, however, is entirely mine. Finally, I must thank Lindsey Porambo Falk, Jessica Thwaite, Holly Buchanan, and Megan Conley, the Lexington Books editorial staff members who shepherded this project with such grace and patience. Their advice and steady direction through the publishing process have been invaluable. NOTES 1. “Modern” as a reference to both “now” and “new” derives from Latin modernus, which itself derives from the adverb modo, a term that since the fifth century CE was equivalent to the German nunc, “now.” Benavides, “Modernity,” 186. 2. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 139. “Calculability,” for Weber, does not require, for example, that a streetcar rider know the physics of the machine’s motion, but only that “he may ‘count’ on the behavior of the streetcar.” The rider “orients his conduct according to this expectation,” and, more important, lives within a calculable universe because he could learn the physics if he chose. 3. Benavides, “Modernity,” 190. 4. Styers, Making Magic, introduction and chapter 1. 5. The Rev. Henry A. Reed, a Methodist minister in Elmira, New York, observed in 1922 that “[t]he New Mysticism is frankly eclectic. It has its naturalistic mystics who find mystical inspirations in nature; its ecclesiastical mystics who find their inspiration in the church; its intellectual mystics whose ‘visions’ and ‘ascents’ are in the study, and it has most happily a vision of felicity that finds its realization in the direct service of society.” Reed, “New Mysticism,” 869. 6. Raitt, Vita and Virginia, 120, 118. Raitt, May Sinclair, 233, fn 67. See also Surette, Birth of Modernism. 7. Neff, “‘New Mysticism.’”

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8. See Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years. Referenced in Neff, “‘New Mysticism,’” 108n5. 9. Neff, “‘New Mysticism,’” 106. 10. Raitt, May Sinclair, 194n43. 11. Sinclair, “The ‘Gitanjali’: Or Song-Offerings of Rabindranath Tagore.” See Raitt, May Sinclair, 194n43. Raitt notes that “Sinclair heard Yeats read Tagore’s poems to a small gathering at [William] Rothenstein’s house.” Tagore subsequently wrote to her to thank her “for her letter in praise of his poems, and for ‘the evident sign of response they had awakened in your heart.’” 12. See Johnson, Mourning and Mysticism. 13. According to Jeffrey Kripal, the term “paranormal” originated in the early twentieth century to refer to “physical or quasi-physical events, often of an outrageous or impossible nature . . . believed to be controlled by as yet unknown physical, that is, natural laws.” “Occultism” was drawn from Latin occultus for “hidden” or “secret” and applied broadly to “a wide variety of ideas, beliefs, and practices—everything from alchemical speculations, astrology, and tarot reading, to crystal gazing, magical practices, and various psychical and spiritualist phenomena.” Occult practices commonly included belief that initiates could obtain secret knowledge about spheres of reality beyond sensory perception. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible, 8. 14. Gay, Modernism, 28. 15. See Urban, “Magia Sexualis,” esp. 706–14. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, however, notes Crowley’s continued legacy in such contemporary movements as “Ordo Templi Orientis, the Church of Satan, Wicca, the Chaos Magic movement, and a number of diverse neo-pagan organizations.” Josephson-Storm, Myth of Disenchantment, 154. 16. The Grey World was released in the United States as The Gray World. For consistency, I employ the American spelling in most uses of the title. 17. For Underhill’s synopsis of her transition to Christianity, see Underhill to Mrs. Meyrick Heath, May 14, 1911, in C. Williams, Letters, 125. Raitt and Christopher Armstrong date the end of Underhill’s doubts about Christianity to 1906. Raitt, Vita and Virginia, 120; C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 31. Dana Greene observes that while Underhill, like Sinclair, was a scholar of psychology, philosophy, and science, and could be counted a “religious seeker,” her particular pilgrimage “led from unbelief to Christianity” rather than in the opposite direction. Greene, introduction to Underhill: Modern Guide, 3. 18. At least one historian of the Church of England, Roger Lloyd, lists Underhill as a “main architect” of the mystical revival preceding the First World War. C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, xi. See also Macquarrie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought, 408–9; and Greene, introduction to Underhill: Modern Guide, 19. 19. See Greene, introduction to Underhill: Modern Guide, 12. Cf. also Underhill, “Christian Fellowship: Past and Present” and “The Authority of Personal Religious Experience.” 20. Boll, Miss May Sinclair: Novelist, 105. Founded in 1882 and still active, the Society for Psychical Research claims scientific objectivity as a hallmark. The Society used “psychical” as an adjectival form of “psychic,” a term developed by nineteenth-century researchers into extraordinary mental forces. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible, 7–8. 21. Raitt, May Sinclair, 113–14, 235–36, 236n75, 265–66. See also C. Williams, introduction to Letters, 8. According to Greene, however, the correspondence of Underhill and Sinclair “reveals that Underhill shared little of her inner life with [Sinclair],” though this might be a reaction to Sinclair’s own close guarding of her personal life. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 38. 22. Underhill, preface to the first edition, Mysticism, xv. In Sinclair’s A Cure of Souls, Canon Chamberlain loans a parishioner a text titled Mystic Experience, which, though attributed to a male author, may refer to Underhill’s Mysticism, given its emphasis on spiritual discipline in achieving the “unitive life.” Sinclair, Cure, 217–18. 23. See Underhill to Sinclair, [1909] and May 2, 1909, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 162–63 and 189–90.

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24. See Raitt, May Sinclair, 233–34, 236. 25. See Raitt, Vita and Virginia, 138–39; also Raitt, May Sinclair, 219. 26. Brock, “Fire and Smoke.” See Raitt, May Sinclair, 129–30n78. 27. See Raitt, May Sinclair, 129–30n78. 28. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 42. Underhill, “‘The Cant of Unconventionality’: A Rejoinder to Lady Robert Cecil.” See Raitt, May Sinclair, 236n75. On correspondence, see Boll, 85, 92–93, 98–99. 29. McDowell, “Mary Webb.” 30. Webb, “Knowest Thou the Land?” 62. 31. Underhill, Mysticism, 52–53; cf. Raitt, May Sinclair, 219n23. See also McDowell, “Mary Webb.” 32. See Barale, Daughters and Lovers, 147–48. 33. Writing in 1943, C. Williams observed that Sinclair was “now too little recollected; for the present writer and for others of the then young her novels had a quite unusual attraction.” C. Williams, introduction to Letters, 8. 34. Underhill published her first book of verse, A Bar-Lamb’s Ballad Book, in 1902. The Gray World followed in 1904. While Underhill wrote prolifically until just before her death in 1941, she is perhaps best known for Mysticism, which was reissued in twelve editions through 1930. Sinclair published twenty-four novels and six collections of short stories, as well as several collections of poems, beginning in 1887 with Nakiketas and Other Poems. Webb published her first novel, The Golden Arrow, in 1916, but her greatest fame came six months after her death in 1927, when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin praised Precious Bane in an address before the Royal Literary Fund Society.

ONE Considering the New “Modern,” “Modernity,” and “Modernism”

Defining what the term “modern” might have meant for Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb is as difficult as defining “modernity” itself. In her study of British occultism before the First World War, Alex Owen sums up just a few of “modernity’s” applications, including being “variously conceived as a helpful periodizing device, a philosophical discourse, a descriptive account of massive and interrelated structural processes, a discrete set of social practices, and particular kinds of lived experience and their representations.” 1 For my purposes, and without otherwise attempting to limit its disparate meanings, I take modernity primarily in Owen’s last sense, as the lived state of unavoidable engagement with and response to “the modern” as “the new.” Among other things, this state involved a growing sense at the fin de siècle of anticipation and unsettlement in the face of accelerating innovation that brought gains of new freedoms but also irredeemable losses. The mosaic of technological advances, cultural experimentation, geo-political upheavals, and artistic excesses that marked the lifetimes of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb both dismayed and delighted the societies in which they found themselves. 2 As a result, certain moods or experiences are associated with their moment of modernity to the point of being truisms: on the one hand, anxiety, disillusionment, disorientation; on the other, excitement, hope, and expectation. 3 To be more specific, I am concerned primarily with the engagements of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb with that particular strain of modernity often called “the project of Enlightenment,” or that David Harvey, in fact, simply designates “the project of modernity.” 4 This, as we have seen in Weber’s terms, is the experience of modern life as disenchanted by an 1

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ascendant “rationalizing calculability” and scientific control. 5 It is closely associated with that other common marker of modernity, “secularization,” as the rejection of what is dismissed as religious superstition by those who elevate human reason. Charles Taylor clusters common references to “secularization” within two general families of meaning. The first group understands secularity “in terms of public spaces” that have been “allegedly emptied of God, or of any reference to ultimate reality,” he writes. “Or taken from another side, as we function within various spheres of activity—economic, political, cultural, educational, professional, recreational—the norms and principles we follow, the deliberations we engage in, generally don’t refer us to God or to any religious beliefs; the considerations we act on are internal to the ‘rationality’ of each sphere.” 6 Evacuating religious reference from such public spheres, however completely or incompletely, does not, of course, preclude continued religious commitment and participation by individuals. A second family of definitions, therefore, addresses secularity on this private, social level, as “the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from God, and no longer going to Church.” Taylor directs his own focus to a third option related to what he calls the “conditions of belief.” In this, “[t]he shift to secularity . . . consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” In shorthand: “Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives.” 7 Within secularization’s broadly diverse meanings, Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb experienced it in Taylor’s first and second, but mostly in this third sense as the progressive loss of purpose and order previously provided by a common “sacralized” understanding of life represented by a widely accepted and predominantly Christian metaphysics. 8 As their varied investments in forms of mysticism indicate, however, this transition was far from complete. 9 For one thing, it is not clear just how universal the supposed earlier adherence to a defining Christianity was, or how widespread the retreat. Owen Chadwick, for example, argues against assuming that Christianity exercised quite the pre-Enlightenment hegemony frequently contrasted with post-Enlightenment secularization. 10 Frank J. Lechner likewise questions “an apparent assumption behind the notion of a shift: there once existed a religious golden age, in which belief was commonly held and publicly affirmed.” Rather, he maintains, “even in the heyday of medieval Catholicism heterodoxy was prevalent, commitment to the church tenuous, and conflict between church and secular authority common.” 11 At the same time, Gay notes that “well before 1900, Western civilization seemed to be entering a post-Christian era,” but also argues for caution in describing the extent of that shift. “[E]stablished sectarian beliefs retained masses of loyalists in the middle classes, the very classes from which secularists also drew most of their

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recruits,” he observes. “The guardians of divine truths and magical rituals, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish alike, might moan over the escalating secularism of nineteenth-century society, but they could also look with some satisfaction on places of worship still unquestioned, still crowded, still soundly endowed.” 12 Even more significantly, as a number of voices have noted, the modernity Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb confronted was shifting expectations of “sacralized existence” into increasingly diverse avenues for making sense of a universe still understood to be a place of mystery. 13 In her examination of fin de siècle occultism, Owen argues that the “‘new’ occultism was one manifestation of a secularizing process that spells neither the inevitable decline nor the irreconcilable loss of significant religious beliefs and behaviors in the modern age. What it does indicate is the way in which the search for spiritual meaning can renew itself and adapt to the changing climate of a secularizing culture.” 14 Drawing on Philip Gorski’s preference for “religious change” rather than “religious decline” in describing these trends, Gauri Viswanathan sees signs of continuity in this shifting focus. Assessing post-Enlightenment societies as more or less religious “is not particularly useful,” she argues, since the abandoned religious ideas had existed previously “in tension with residual beliefs in magic, reincarnation, and astrology, among other beliefs.” The alternative practices coming into prominence were simply “other religious systems not conventionally brought under the rubric of mainstream religions such as Christianity or Judaism. In other words, there is no spiritual vacuum one can point to as evidence of religion’s total decline.” 15 In his evocatively titled book The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason Ā JosephsonStorm argues forcefully that the accepted narrative of cultural disenchantment has simply been wrong. In challenging this “conventional notion of modernity,” Josephson-Storm maintains that “we should be less surprised than we usually are to find scientists of all stripes keeping company with magicians; that reason does not eliminate ‘superstition’ but piggybacks upon it; that mechanism often produces vitalism; and that often, in a single room, we can find both séance and science.” 16 Jose Harris and Benavides both mark new emphases on privatized, subjective experience, with connotations of “the spiritual” removed from the reach of calculation, in theories about religion and art dubbed “modern.” Benavides attributes the development to the increased delimitation of institutional religion’s sphere of influence: “The cultivation of subjectivity found among the romantics, the pietists, and the theorists of religion who flourished during the first few decades of this [twentieth] century can be seen as a response to the Enlightenment, and then to the accelerating urbanization, industrialization, and above all to the disciplining of everyday life.” 17 Even scientific thinking itself played a role. “Certainly ‘PostChristian’ was not synonymous with atheism,” Gay states. “Quite the contrary, the nineteenth century was a golden age for incubating new

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dogmas, or for old dogmas brought into modern times as they borrowed prestige from contemporary physics, chemistry, and biology, disciplines that—even skeptics admitted—were clearing up mysteries that had been thought beyond rational explanation.” 18 It was no accident, he adds, that scientific allusions played such a role in the success of such spiritual innovations as Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy and Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science. A general perception, however, may forge its own reality, at least as far as expectations are concerned, and a common assumption of the time, evinced in Weber’s sweeping Entzauberung, was that an earlier theological-metaphysical grounding once had been but was no longer. In her study of similar assumptions of disenchantment in the late twentieth century, Jane Bennett offers a helpful summation of what might stand as secularization’s defining myth: There was once a time when Nature was purposive, God was active in the details of human affairs, human and other creatures were defined by a preexisting web of relations, social life was characterized by faceto-face relations, and political order took the form of organic community. Then, this premodern world gave way to forces of scientific and instrumental rationality, secularism, individualism, and the bureaucratic state—all of which, combined, disenchant the world. 19

At the very least, in the period of our authors’ work, the authority of the established church was seen in some quarters as vulnerable simply because claims that the church could provide a totalizing system of meaning for British society confronted daily evidence to the contrary. If such tension between the spiritual and the secular defined, at least in part, the terrain Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb sought to negotiate, then it is most useful to consider their valuations of different elements of modernity as contestation over the terms of modern change rather than simple allegiance or reaction to that change. Their search for some middle ground of a new mystic orthodoxy, therefore, may have represented a not entirely conscious sifting and weighing of the cultures in which they found themselves, while their complicated narratives of individualism, pragmatic experience, and subjective mystic perception in the service of active agency underscored the complex state of their modernity itself. 20 While my primary concern is with the “modern” responses of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb to “modernity,” all three worked as well against the backdrop of an equally fluid “modernism,” another term with floating signification. Gay calls modernism “easier to exemplify than to define,” putting it in the same category as Justice Potter Stewart’s claim to know pornography when he saw it. 21 For my purposes, I understand modernism as a cultural movement or trend within creative arts that is a complex artistic reaction to the particular modernity of the fin de siècle and early twentieth century. To return to Owen’s terminology, modern-

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ism might be understood as the creative “representations” of the “particular kinds of lived experience” that constituted modernity. Just when the modernist movement began and ended, or when it was at its height are matters of debate, with little agreement even on whether the movement has run its course. While some see the “innovative and revivifying movement” of modernism playing out “by the late 1940s,” when it was supplanted by post-modernism, J. A. Cuddon maintains that “in fact, such movements, of their nature, do not just start and stop; the evolution is gradual. The impetus and energy of the one diminishes (but continues) as the momentum of another burgeons.” 22 Alan Warren Friedman recounts a variety of moments for modernism’s emergence, though in a reflection of the confusion surrounding these terms he mingles what I would somewhat artificially keep distinct: “modernity” as a cultural state, and “modernism” as an artistic reaction to that condition. According to different theorists, Friedman writes, modernism began in the Renaissance (or “early modern period”); in the eighteenth century (with the rise of the middle class and mass literacy and communication); between 1815 and 1830; in the Victorian period with the industrial revolution, Marx, Darwin, and the death of God; in 1900 with “the sudden irruption of forces totally new” or with Victoria’s death in 1901; with the outbreak of World War One, or with England’s first conscript army in 1916. 23

Whatever the timeframe, however, modernist trends were at least prevalent in England during the period I will be examining, namely the early decades of the twentieth century. 24 Accounts of the kinds of artistic representation modernism encompassed, meanwhile, may be even more multifaceted than definitions of modernity. Chana Kronfeld describes modernism as a “tattered and oversized umbrella,” with few usefully recognizable boundaries. “There simply is no set of distinctive features that can apply to all the subgroupings of modernism (from futurism to surrealism) and separate them from all nonmodernist groupings (classicism, baroque, romanticism, and so forth).” 25 Gay describes a similarly eclectic range of modernism’s manifestations, but points to two generally defining characteristics: an accepted mandate to upset established assumptions and practices, synthesized best, perhaps, in Ezra Pound’s pithy admonition “Make it new!”; and an emphasis on “principled self-scrutiny” through a new effort to understand subjective experience. 26 My forays into consideration of modernism as an artistic designation will therefore be guided by the particular subjective explorations of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb as they engaged with particular innovative tendencies subsumed under that “tattered umbrella.” I am, for example, most interested in those aspects of modernism that drew analytic and therapeutic attention to both the disruption and the promise inherent in this period’s accelerating change. As

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Daniel R. Schwarz notes, one way to approach at least some elements of modernism is to see that it is “paradoxically both an ideology of possibility and hope—a positive response to difficult circumstances—and an ideology of despair—a response to excessive faith in industrialism, urbanization, so-called technological progress, and the Great War of 1914 to 1918 as the War to End All Wars.” 27 While doing little to narrow modernism’s parameters, such an inclusive understanding will be convenient in encompassing the varied aspects of these authors’ work and relating them to the contested context of the time. One characteristic of artistry defined as modernist, for example, is indulgence of vernacular forms and themes as a reaction to what is seen as the oppressive dominance of technology, reflected in Underhill’s attraction to the Arts and Crafts movement. The accompanying tendency to privilege spontaneity, interiority, and intuition will be helpful in considering Webb’s pastoralism. At the same time, it was a modernist stance to believe in “art and in the artist as visionary prophet” guided by the authority of personal truth. 28 This will be useful in considering how all three authors’ efforts to discover or restore the meaning that Weber complained had been evacuated from the world were pursued through aesthetic explorations of the experience of incessant change. Baudelaire’s oft-quoted observation that “modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one half of art, the other being the eternal and immutable” encapsulates the paradox of modernism, Harvey maintains, and lends weight to Lionel Trilling’s claim that modernism can, in Harvey’s paraphrase, “swing around in meaning until it is facing the opposite direction.” 29 Sinclair, for example, may have been attempting just such a modernist bridging of the transcendently perfect and the immanently fluid in her pointillist, stream-of-consciousness autobiographical novel Mary Olivier: A Life. Similarly, at the center of her second novel, The Lost Word, Underhill juxtaposes service to the transcendence of perfect architectural forms with acquiescence to the earth-bound compromises of human relationships. Of the three, only Sinclair could qualify as a “high” modernist, as Maria DiBattista defines high modernism, by belonging to that cadre of “self-conscious formalists” of the early twentieth century such as Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf, who were “wrestling with newly perceived instabilities of language and meaning.” 30 Despite the philosophical aspirations of Underhill’s fiction, it would be hard to argue that her prose approaches such artistic elevation on any regular basis. Webb’s homespun narratives, meanwhile, frequently show affinity with later popular romance novels. DiBattista, however, argues against what she calls the self-blinding propensity of literary historians to delineate too sharply between “high” and “low” modernists, and finds instead “convergences” and “interminglings” between “highs” and those who supposedly lack the “imputed moral as well as aesthetic ‘difficulty’” required to rise above “low or middlebrow culture.” From that perspective,

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the varied output of all three may wander through high, middle, and low territory, with even Underhill and Webb achieving moments of perceptively psychological characterization, while Sinclair’s work spans esoteric poetry and sensationally erotic ghost stories. In the end, however, the chief significance of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb may lie not in their literary statures, however these are finally assessed, but in the ways they participated in, expressed, and shaped British culture, both popular and elite, during a particularly fraught period of history. Through their varied works, all three women opened windows on the preoccupations of many in the general public who found themselves torn between the intoxicating attraction of accelerating progress, and the equally urgent pull to accommodate the enchantment that that progress failed fully to expunge, and to which it even contributed. In their chartings of a world “beyond,” Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb helped that public map a contested terrain in which modernity could be simultaneously rational and mystical. A MATTER OF BUTTER AND MARGARINE For these three authors, establishing the parameters of mystic agency within modernity required ongoing negotiation with competing and intertwined values of transience and tradition. In a telling reference early in her 1917 novel Gone to Earth, Webb offers what may be a useful metaphor for this negotiation when she contrasts the simple country naturalness of her protagonist Hazel Woodus with the unnaturalness of modern society’s innovations. Over tea with her aunt and cousin Albert during a rare visit to town, Hazel finds herself enjoying Albert’s rapt attention. “He was in a margarine shop, and spent his days explaining that Margarine was as good as butter,” Webb writes. “But, looking at Hazel, he felt that here was butter—something that needed no apology, and created its own demand.” 31 Set against the artificiality of margarine, the advantage in Webb’s imagery goes to the butter, associated presumably with such values as established tradition, wholesome food, country living, and, most important, identified in Albert’s parlance as somehow “real”—precisely what margarine is not. In Webb’s novel, the juxtaposition of Hazel’s own engaging ingenuousness and the failings of her more sophisticated neighbors, who are guilty of hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty (among other sins), plays out the butter/margarine contrast in full. In a different treatment, however, the technological progress that can offer margarine’s convenience and economy might provide support for Albert’s sales pitch. “As good as,” even if not “the same,” may indeed be a strong selling point if combined with other advantages, especially if margarine is understood as somehow inevitable, a product whose time has come. And the modernity associated with margarine might become

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distinctly attractive if described in even more positive terms, such as freedom from stultifying conformity and backward custom. The “modern” in this regard might connote not the lack of tradition’s substance, but the enlightenment of discovered knowledge, the delight of surprise, or the promise of the transformed and transforming. Approaching the modern as the experience of change, therefore, means considering contrasting aspects that are as perennial as change itself: gain and loss, continuity and discontinuity, disruption and opportunity. Such an either/or comparison of the metaphoric “margarine” and “butter,” however, obscures the underlying dynamic in which experiences rendered loosely by the terms “modern” and “traditional” are, as Albert puts it, being commodified, generating demand according to how they are perceived. Those perceptions depend in large part on contrasts between mutually dependent valuations: the “modern,” in other words, is understood in juxtaposition with whatever it is not, just as understanding margarine depends in part on knowing and having evaluated the butter it is to replace. To fully consider the modern, therefore, is to reflect on the always-being-determined value of the “new” as it represents change from the always-being-determined value of the “old.” 32 The challenges to establishing and asserting personal agency confronting Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb were themselves expressions of this complexity of modernity’s transition from tradition. As one aspect, modernity invited the questioning of traditional values and established social mores that restricted individual agency, especially women’s. All three authors at times place their protagonists in the roles of moderns struggling against forces of small-minded prejudice, superstition, and assumed gender roles that were hardly new. Sinclair’s autobiographical Mary Olivier, for example, describes the quest for self-determination by a woman ensnared in her family’s dysfunctional relationships, and caught, especially, by the machinations of her mother. While in some ways timeless, Mary’s situation and her efforts at intellectual and spiritual achievement are set in tension with specifically Victorian constructions of masculine and feminine roles. Similarly, for all her celebration of rural life, Mary Webb repeatedly exposes the restrictive, even dangerous impulses of backward country communities threatened by whatever fails to conform to their norms. Her protagonists in these contexts could be said to claim the positive associations of margarine as enlightened liberation from such constraints. Modernity could, of course, dangle possibilities of new agency without delivering on that promise, simply reshaping traditional limitations while adding others. In describing an excruciatingly avant-garde enclave of dabblers in the occult in The Column of Dust, for example, Underhill shows how age-old prejudices of class and conventional morality could simply be camouflaged in modern trappings. Furthermore, as Sinclair’s characterizations indicate in particular, the intellectual discoveries of a

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modern age could have decidedly mixed effects on perceptions of agency. The advances of new psychoanalytical theories that mapped hitherto unknown terrains of consciousness could offer freeing perspectives on human motivations, but also raise disturbing questions about the nature and sources of volition. Similarly, evolutionary theory could promise the possibility of human development into ever higher levels of self-achievement, but simultaneously suggest new and irresistible forces of determinism. Mary Olivier’s intellectual precocity, for example, frees her from what she decides is Christian superstition, but traps her instead in despairing of temporary acquiescence to the forces of heredity. Moreover, the particularly modern perception of social groupings as unreflective masses subject to mob rule, demonstrated especially in the early rush of support for the war, could threaten any sense of individual autonomy at all. For Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb, the pursuit of agency was framed primarily in terms of competing lines of energy and influence. While they approached the question of agency in part as an issue of free will versus determinism, I am particularly interested in the ways in which they interrelated personal autonomy with broadly defined “external” modes of influence and action, including with transcendent reality as they each understood it. In an age of ever-new technology able to manipulate the physical world, their particular constructions of personal autonomy as “moderns” and specifically as women participated in a multifaceted concern with achieving the New Man, or, in their cases, the New Woman, who could control both destiny and environment. Their attraction to descriptions of the world as infused with a life energy, and their concomitant interest in such disparate forces as mysterious psychological currents, evolution, and external social impulses that might sweep a world to war, seems touched with anxiety over the potential these vaguely defined influences could hold for overwhelming the individual or society, tempered with the invigorating promises they might also present. Finally, as Weber theorized, and Webb’s tragically driven character Gilbert in Precious Bane demonstrates, the avaricious materiality of modern progress could produce a supposedly autonomous modern man who is in fact controlled by the desire to accumulate for its own sake. 33 At the same time, even when successful in establishing new alternatives to outmoded tradition, the extreme rationalism of modernity could simultaneously rob individuals of tradition’s orienting and therefore empowering context. The popularity of Webb’s paeans to rural life demonstrates just how a sense of being situated within a familiar place could be lost, and just how much it could be missed. Similarly, in all three of Underhill’s novels, her protagonists seek grounding in what is classic and enduring as an essential aspect of their journeys to modern selfassertion. What might appear to be simply a resurrection of the traditional, therefore, could be a modern impulse to carve out a new position in a modern terrain otherwise lacking established boundaries or landmarks.

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The paradox of the period is compounded further by the frequency of often simultaneous statements of attraction to and/or distaste for the commonplace, the banal, and the bourgeois. Gay notes that modernism’s heroic emphases on radical innovation and unfiltered subjectivity consistently translated into hostility against what was perceived to be the stultifying and self-censoring practices of the bourgeoisie. 34 Peter Hansen, writing about the late nineteenth-century popularity of mountain climbing, discovers an association, in this case expressed negatively, of the modern with the domestically quotidian. He sees the growing English interest in climbing mountains as expressing both the desire for an escape from “commonplace” modernity, and as providing a specifically modern arena for heroic effort. In the performativity of mountain climbing, physical and spiritual achievement merge with a desire to participate in positive modernity. 35 As Virginia Woolf’s father, the mountaineer and literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen, explained, “Mountain scenery is the antithesis not so much of the plains as of the commonplace. Its charm lies in its vigorous originality; and if political philosophers speak the truth, which I admit to be an exceedingly doubtful proposition, the danger of modern times consists in our loss of that quality.” 36 His point underscores an important association of the modern with issues of individuality: “One man, so it is said, grows more like another; national costumes die out before monotonous black hats and coats; we all read the same newspapers, talk the same twaddle, are bound by the same laws of propriety, and are submitting to a uniform imposition of dull respectability.” For Stephen, by contrast, “the Alps, as yet, remain. They are places of refuge where we may escape from ourselves and from our neighbours.” 37 The modernity of “the domestic” that Stephen eschews as the foil to his mountain-climbing endeavors, however, remains as more than just the negative locus of banal ordinariness. To step back from Stephen’s “heroic imperialism” into a celebration of hearth and home was itself a move of “conservative modernity,” Alison Light argues. It could be “conservative in effect and yet was often modern in form; a conservatism itself in revolt against the past, trying to make room for the present.” 38 Light emphasizes the contrast inherent in that turn to the domestic, asserting that “the 1920s and ‘30s saw a move away from formerly heroic and officially masculine public rhetorics of national destiny and from a dynamic and missionary view of the Victorian and Edwardian middle classes in ‘Great Britain’ to an Englishness at once less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private—and, in terms of prewar standards, more ‘feminine.’” 39 My consideration of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb falls along these lines, at least in tracing the complex interplay of conservative and progressive impulses in their constructions of a mysticism that was, as Light would put it, “Janus-faced.” It looked back at the reassurance of established meaning, of ways of making sense

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of the world, but also forward toward newly configured understandings of what that sense could signify. With curious ambivalence, in fact, Weber himself highlighted the question of meaning as he described the ascendancy of modern sensibility, and specifically of capitalism, in terms that both supported and undercut the accompanying rationalization of modern life. Lost in the shift to a “calculable” universe, Weber cautioned, were established structures of what is meaningful, or even of processes to determine meaning. 40 In such a world, he claimed, even death is meaningless since there is no way to assess the value of life. In his embrace of what he termed Wertfreiheit, or “ethical neutrality,” Weber thus bracketed out of the sphere of science or calculation the crucial function of selecting and adhering to a particular ethos of values—a particular system of “making sense” of existence. 41 Without the “coherent unity” of magic to explain the world, or the imposed coherence of a Christian or other religious metaphysic in place, the scientific method is itself incapable of filling the void, he argued. Science may pursue knowledge about the “ultimate laws of cosmic events,” for example, but cannot determine whether such laws are worth knowing. “And still less,” Weber adds, “can it be proved that the existence of the world which these sciences describe is worth while, that it has any ‘meaning,’ or that it makes sense to live in such a world. Science does not ask for the answers to such questions.” In its recognition of science’s inability to determine value, Weber’s Wertfreiheit is at base “a passionate refusal of the illusions of meaning itself,” Fredric Jameson maintains, and specifically “a repudiation of all philosophies which—the Hegelian world spirit and the Marxist dialectic just as much as Christian Providence—seek to convince us that some teleological movement is immanent in the otherwise chaotic and random agitation of empirical life.” 42 At the same time, the need to choose nonetheless among competing value systems was for Weber a defining aspect of an individual’s negotiated position as a “modern.” Weber thus described a modern freedom of unavoidable choice without guidance, where even to adopt the disenchanting stance of scientific objectivity was to choose. 43 In their explorations of human agency within contexts that specifically invited description as “enchantment,” Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb spoke as moderns, mystics, and women to the potentially empty landscape that Weber described, charting their own answers to his question, “What is of value?” Accepting both the opportunity and the challenge of modernity’s new potential and demand for self-determination, their allegiances to personal, intuitive perception of the “real” was an answer to and an extension of Weber’s quandary. With proper mystic orientation, an individual could intuitively “know” what values to hold, they answered. Yet, they each asked as well how one could in fact know if and when that intuition was operating accurately. In seeking a new orthodoxy of self-authenticating mysticism, these authors sought to establish

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new guidelines that might identify legitimate expressions of that intuitive sense, and distinguish between proper and improper interaction with the transcendent reality. At the same time, with their emphasis on the “selfauthenticating” element of their constructions, they reflected Weber’s ambivalence by continually pushing against the very limits they tried to establish. NOTES 1. Owen, Enchantment, 9. 2. Daniel R. Schwarz lists just some of the major cultural impacts of the late nineteenth century leading into the early twentieth century that “challenged monistic theories of truth,” from Nietzsche’s claim that “God is Dead” to the continued impact of Darwin’s Origin of Species, to advances in psychiatry, physics, and history. Schwarz, Reconfiguring Modernism, 3. 3. See, e.g., David Liu’s use of several of these terms. Liu, “Modernism,” Encyclopedia of Protestantism, 1288. 4. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 12. 5. In describing the “project of Enlightenment,” Owen adds the further characteristic of “a commitment to an ethic of equality and justice as reflected in a new juridical and political order.” Other aspects include “the rapid development of industrialism and the related regulation of labor and the marketplace, the rise and consolidation of nation-states, the increased bureaucratization of governments and of social life, and the secularized culture that operates as counterpart to these processes.” Owen, Enchantment, 9. 6. Taylor, Secular Age, 2. 7. Taylor, 3. 8. See Owen, Enchantment, 9. Owen notes that despite different understandings of secularization, “the concept of a rational secularized culture as a key signifier of modernity has remained a constant.” Owen, Enchantment, 10. 9. See Harris, Private Lives, 174–77. 10. See Chadwick, Secularization. 11. Lechner, “Secularization,” 1704. He adds, however, that “secularization accounts need not assume general orthodoxy, deep commitment, or a triumphant church on the part of medieval Europeans; nor do they depend exclusively on decline in Christian influence. Their key claim, more difficult to measure but supported by evidence, is about decline in significance.” 12. Gay, Modernism, 27–28. Jose Harris agrees, cautioning that “it is by no means self-evident that the process of change in this period was a simple, unilinear movement from the sacred to the secular—or that the two were necessarily at opposite poles from each other.” Harris, Private Lives, 152. 13. Viswanathan, “Secularism,” 468. 14. Owen, Enchantment, 11. 15. Viswanathan, “Secularism,” 467. 16. Josephson-Storm, Myth of Disenchantment, 3. 17. Benavides, “Modernity,” 196–97. See Harris, Private Lives, 176ff. 18. Gay, Modernism, 28. 19. Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, 7. 20. Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger, for example, observe the “ambivalence” frequently at work in “negotiations of modernity,” with “those who emphasized the creative and positive dimensions of innovation being equally conscious of its destructive aspects.” Daunton and Rieger, introduction to Meanings of Modernity, 6–7. 21. Gay, Modernism, 1.

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22. Cuddon, “Modernism,” 551. 23. Friedman, Fictional Death, 3. 24. Schwarz speaks definitively of “the high modernist period from 1890 to 1940.” Schwarz, Reconfiguring Modernism, 1. Friedman accepts what he calls the conventional dating of literary modernism as between 1890 and 1930, though he calls that dating “convenient rather than ‘true.’” Friedman, Fictional Death, 3, 4. See also Cuddon, who notes that “some suggest the 1920s” for the apex. Cuddon, “Modernism,” 551. 25. Kronfeld, Margins of Modernism, 27. See also Schwarz, Reconfiguring Modernism, 2. 26. Gay, Modernism, 4–5. 27. Schwarz, Reconfiguring Modernism, 3. 28. Schwarz, Reconfiguring Modernism, 5. 29. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 10. 30. DiBattista, introduction to High and Low Moderns, 3–4. 31. Webb, Gone to Earth, 20. Webb returned to this contrast in her 1925 essay “Hark, how the Birds do Sing!” A robin would sing for her after sampling her butterdish, “[b]ut he would not sing at all for margarine, only shaking his head a little, and wiping his beak insultingly upon the grass, and beadily staring, as if to say: ‘The singer is worthy of something better than mere margarine.’” Webb, “Hark,” 41. 32. Benavides describes the eleventh-century development of modernitas as “modernity” in terms of comparison, since “in order to count oneself among the modernii one had to distinguish oneself from the antiquii.” The example of theologians of the early thirteenth century who, in their “self-conscious marking of the new,” considered “those of the last third of the previous century as belonging to the antiquii,” illustrates the continually shifting reference points. Benavides, “Modernity,” 186–87. Raymond Williams similarly traces the continual juxtaposition of the contemporary moment with a nostalgically remembered past back to classical literature. R. Williams, Country and City, 9–12. 33. See Weber, Protestant Ethic, 51–53. 34. Gay, Modernism, 5–8. 35. Hansen, “Modern Mountains,” 186–87. 36. Stephen, Playground of Europe, 66. 37. Stephen, 67. 38. Light, Forever England, 11. 39. Light, 8. 40. Weber, “Science,” 139, 143. 41. Weber, 144. Weber was only one late voice in a long-standing chorus lamenting a sense of dissolution spawned by a scientific age. See, e.g., Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” (1851) with its description of a world with “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,” given the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “Sea of Faith.” 42. Jameson, “The Vanishing Mediator,” 10. 43. The modern condition, Weber suggests, requires a stark courage to either make the choice in the marketplace of alternatives, or make the “leap of faith” back into the enchanted existence that allows no choice: “To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. . . . One way or another he has to bring his ‘intellectual sacrifice’—that is inevitable.” Weber, “Science,” 155.

I

Evelyn Underhill’s Heroic Mysticism

Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941)

TWO Mystic Modes Living, Dying, Knowing

Published in the decade before the outbreak of war, and leading up to the writing of her prodigious Mysticism, Underhill’s fiction not only reveals the preoccupations that powered her entry into the field of mystic studies, but encapsulates themes that would engage her throughout her life. Her three novels—The Gray World (1904), The Lost Word (1907), and The Column of Dust (1909)—address issues of perception and intuition, individualism and interconnection, sacrifice and fulfillment within narratives that highlight their protagonists’ at times difficult negotiations with modernity. I will pay closest attention to these novels, though Underhill also wrote poetry and a number of short stories, several of which also address fantastic themes. 1 The novels introduce Underhill’s conception of the mystic journey as heroic quest, with its particularly medieval flavor; her incorporation of aestheticism as an integral aid to that process; and, most important, her fundamental assumption about the accessibility of a transcendent reality lying beyond the obscuring appearances of the physical world. While such tendencies reflect a certain conservative turn that can be seen as merely reasserting the enchantment Weber dismissed, Underhill’s fiction reveals how her thought in these early years was shaped by the progressive energy of her historical moment. Speaking of the United States, though her observations pertain to Britain as well, Jane Bennett describes opposing trends of thought prevalent before the First World War that set what came to be known as “vitalism” as “a new sense of the universe as lively and incalculable, as ‘a world of incessant and unforeseeable change and possibility, a world always about to be,’” in opposition to the perspective of “materialists” who believed “every entity or 17

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force, however complex, ‘organic,’ or subtle, was ultimately or in principle explicable in mechanical or, as they called it, ‘physico-chemical’ terms.” 2 Such competing propensities to either reduce all elements of human existence, including human consciousness, to mechanical explanations, or to embrace more intangible understandings, underlay William James’s energetic critique of “medical materialism.” James accepted that there could be physiological explanations for states of mind, but complained that “when other people criticize our own more exalted soulflights by calling them ‘nothing but’ expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism’s peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth.” 3 Whatever its possible insights, he concluded, “we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.” Similarly rejecting what she saw as the limits of scientific materialism, Underhill was at the same time far from anti-scientific in her desire for verifiable data of mystic perception. Echoing James in his resistance, she was also like James in seeking a rational rubric for examining the irrational. For Underhill, mystic experiences were generic phenomena one might (up to a point, at least) study. In formulating her concepts of intuitive perception in Mysticism and her later essays, and in examining the motivating impulses of mystic sensibility, she drew on Henri Bergson’s philosophy of vitalism as well as on contemporary psychoanalytic approaches to probing human consciousness. Underhill addresses the second chapter of Mysticism to the topic of “Mysticism and Vitalism,” and drew on Bergson for her second substantive work on mysticism, The Mystic Way: A Psychological Study in Christian Origins (1913). In a 1913 letter, Underhill wrote: “I’m still drunk with Bergson, who sharpened one’s mind and swept one off one’s feet both at once. Those lectures have been a real, great experience: direct contact with the personality of a profound intuitive thinker of the first rank!” 4 She would, over time, rethink her deep engagement with Bergson, and was as critical of psychoanalytical reduction of the mystic experience as she was with other efforts to explain away her sense of direct access to “reality.” Even so, to make use of Albert’s metaphor, in her advocacy of a popular mysticism Underhill was in many respects a comforting yet challenging voice promising the continued relevance of butter, but arguing her case with margarine’s language and tools. Underhill found herself challenged by the need to do justice to various, at times competing, themes in her thought, especially as her thinking evolved. Her descriptions of a mystical process of goal-oriented effort participated strongly in modernity’s cult of the individual with its emphasis on both personal achievement and subjective interiority. Assuming both the authority of personal experience and the universality of mystic potential for individuals, Underhill saw the committed pursuit of

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mystical enlightenment as the prime path to self-actualization by a selfdetermining agent. At the same time, since the object of that self-actualization was loss of personal agency in united cooperation with the divine (what Underhill called the “unitive state”), she was simultaneously engaged in a complicated balancing act that employed agency as the critical force in its own dissolution. The essentially solitary nature of what she saw as a mystic quest competed as well in her thought with the importance of communal support and guidance on the way. And despite her focus on an “other-worldly” reality, she become increasingly convinced of the necessity of “this-worldly” commitment. While theoretically mutually interrelated, energy directed upward in mystic apprehension of the divine could find itself in tension with energy directed outward in communal service. Her allegiances to universalism and self-authenticating experience also could complicate her efforts to marry the expansive visions of New Mysticism to a traditional Christian structure, and to give increasing weight to what she called the grace-powered “given-ness” of the mystic experience. Underhill’s engagement with modernity was as much cultural as it was intellectual. Despite aspects of her spiritual advice that remained bounded by her own middle-class milieu, she was sharply critical of modern bourgeois banality. In an echo of Leslie Stephen, “modern” to her often meant unimaginative conformity to limiting standards. At the same time, “everyday life” was for Underhill a primary arena for exploring the extraordinary through mystic perception of the “real.” She was also strongly attracted to other elements of modern thought and practice, including the Modernist trend in biblical and theological scholarship, an affinity that put her at odds with reactionary tendencies in the Roman Catholicism with which she was otherwise enamored. Her fiction, especially The Column of Dust, furthermore, explored unconventional possibilities for female gender roles and sexuality. Even though in her later Anglo-Catholic allegiance she resisted proposals for the ordination of women, she herself achieved notable prominence as an authority within maledominated circles of the church. 5 As complex and at times contradictory as the age in which she lived, Underhill embodied many of the tensions between progressive and conservative trajectories of the New Mysticism she did so much to shape. Underhill’s three novels are admittedly more interesting as windows on her understanding of her modern world and the foundations of her mystic thought than they are impressive as literature. 6 Yet, while all suffer from occasionally overwrought prose and excursions into didacticism, they also relate imaginative stories with often engaging humor and grace. In writing fiction, Underhill told one of her spiritual advisees, “I just write what comes into my head & leave the result to luck.” 7 If written with the free association she describes, the novels may be especially useful in revealing unvoiced assumptions from Underhill’s early, for-

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mative period, tapping even deeper psychological wells than her later, more controlled essays on mysticism. Notably, her last novel, The Column of Dust, was published in 1909 when Underhill had already begun writing Mysticism, her first “serious” book on mysticism as she described it, and so overlapped with the earliest formal articulation of her spiritual thinking. 8 Underhill used her novels to explore an idealist philosophy in which the “real” is occasionally perceivable through the filter of physical existence but fully revealed only in death. Christopher Armstrong refers to these parallel realms in describing all three novels as being “concerned with the problem of living in two worlds.” 9 The interweaving of Christian, pagan, and occult imagery demonstrates the openness of Underhill’s inventive mind in exploring a range of supernatural possibilities for accessing that reality. Her repeated expositions of mortality, meanwhile, reflects death’s importance as both issue and motivation for her era’s overlapping pursuits of spiritualism and Christian-oriented mysticism. Even as her mystic philosophy moved progressively, if somewhat idiosyncratically, ever deeper into a Christian mode, her novels played with the diverse potential of both mysticism and forms of what might be called magic in ways that lingered. Although the novels come to different conclusions about how a life of spiritual integrity might be lived out, they all assert that through committed pursuit of heightened apprehension of the real, a higher, better form of living is possible than that offered by reductive scientific materialism. The stultifying limitations of modernity can be overcome, Underhill maintains in The Gray World, for example, through sensitive attention to the aesthetics of nature and art, dedication to careful artisanship, and, above all, to intuitive perception of both the ephemeral nature of physical reality and of a “truer” reality beyond. 10 The Lost Word incorporates themes of aesthetic endeavor itself as a form of mystic quest, though its protagonists end up pursuing their spiritual goals through more mundane avenues of mutually sacrificial domestic love. And in The Column of Dust, only the death of the main character suffices to fully achieve access to the real. In each case, the effective exercise of agency by an autonomous individual becomes a matter of progressive enlightenment: what one does with one’s life must be guided by slow-won understanding of what is or is not worth pursuing. The Gray World begins inauspiciously. In the first chapter its protagonist, a young boy from the London slums, dies of typhoid. Rather than bringing the plot to an abrupt end, however, this event propels it. After spending a brief though unsettling time in the “gray world” of spirits, the boy returns to life as Willie Hopkinson, son and sibling in a middle-class family. 11 While not of his doing, his inexplicable second chance at life seems to have occurred as the result of his passionately expressed desire to live again. Miserable in his ghostly state over the unattainable proxim-

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ity of his former boyish pleasures, “he flung out the whole force of his poor little spirit in prayer, to some Force which he dreaded but knew not, for a return, at any price, to the excitements and uncertainties of life.” 12 With that unexplained Force’s intervention, and the assistance of a chapter change, “the stucco of a western suburb received him back into life; and he next looked out on the world from the barred windows of a fourth-floor nursery, set in a wide brown street of reputable gloom.” 13 In another echo of Leslie Stephen, Underhill describes the atmosphere of Willie’s new home as “English and domestic: conventional therefore.” 14 More of a dreamer than a metaphorical conqueror of mountains, Willie exhibits enough self-possession to take seriously his lingering consciousness of death and occasionally disturbing visions of the spirit world; at least he resists, for the most part, the conformist influence of his suburban surroundings. Since death for him was a shadowy world in which streams of unhappy souls searched futilely for some contact with the physical lives they lost, most of the novel shows him preoccupied with discovering a way of being alive that will allow him to escape returning to that gray existence. He believes an alternative and better afterlife, or any number of alternative afterlives, is possible. Underhill offers few specifics about the nature of those other options, making the novel primarily a study in how to live, rather than in what happens after death. To be avoided in particular, Willie decides, is attachment to the limiting concerns of bourgeois life that holds residents of the gray world in thrall. The physical world, he knows from his view of it from the other side, is itself a gray and shadowy realm. Before his reincarnation, Willie had observed that his fellow travelers in the afterlife were regretting earth and its pleasures as keenly as he was; not, perhaps, its bread and jam, but other things which were now equally wanting in substance. All their interests were there apparently—in money, friends, games, ambitions, discoveries; all the things that go to make up the fullness of life. Now this life that they had so reluctantly left was seen to be only a gray, uncertain shadow, all its beauty gone, all its realities deceptive; but still they could not kill their desire for it. 15

To be sought instead, Willie decides, is commitment to lasting values, specifically creative, physical work, beauty experienced in both art and nature, and sincere human affection. He must, as Weber might put it, construct the meaning that will infuse his life by remembering that the real world lies elsewhere. Willie’s final life choices, incorporating medieval aestheticism with “simple living” artisanship exemplified in the Arts and Crafts movement, reflect certain modernist trends toward romanticism as a way, paradoxically, to leapfrog modernity’s perceived deficiencies. Even with the knowledge Willie possesses, however, those proper ends of true values are far from certain. Like Weber, Underhill anticipates little guidance as to how such a valuation might even be approached,

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although she does assume the reality of an ultimate world, and with that world the possibility of ultimate—and accessible—answers. In The Column of Dust, Constance Tyrrel, an otherwise pragmatically minded woman in her mid-thirties, likewise breaches the barrier between natural and supernatural in an unexpectedly successful attempt to magically summon spirits. Constance’s experiment, Underhill explains, is motivated by her “mania for adventure,” and her longing for “new landscape, experience, danger.” 16 Her ceremony, involving candles, a mirror, the writing of occult symbols, and chanting from a Grimoire or book of magical formulas, draws an immortal spirit dubbed the “Watcher,” who takes up residence within Constance’s consciousness. 17 Curious but disdainful of human quotidian existence, the Watcher advocates death’s release as a way to escape the pettiness of life’s dream and participate in the real beyond. When Constance tries to explain, to herself as much as to him, that life’s seemingly pointless activity feeds into an ongoing chain of significance that makes it worthwhile, at least through the production of children, he responds, “But the children will die in their turn. They will all die. Then they will exist in the Real for ever and ever, without earning or eating or any kind of fuss. Why undertake this weariness and struggle, just to stay a few more hours with the dream? It is so ugly, miserable, and meaningless! Why do they not all try to die as soon as they can?” 18 The effort to answer his question—why not just die?—provides the narrative’s fundamental issue. Less centrally focused on the idea of death, The Lost Word still makes the death of a spiritually attuned character a precipitating event in the progressive reorientation of a self-absorbed artist, Catherine, toward greater appreciation for the possibilities of human connection. Anguished over the disruption her romantic love for architect Paul Vickery is causing to his ability to perceive transcendent and perfect architectural forms, Catherine is urged by Jimmy, another co-worker, to let the imminent death of a mutual friend provide perspective. “Go to Letty. She’s ill—dying, I think—right away in the country alone,” Jimmy tells her. “No artifice there to confuse you: just the inevitable things. Watch her: square yourself from that brink—the only place from which you can see the lacrymarum vallis as a landscape, a whole—.” 19 Catherine’s first sight of Letty’s emaciation makes death, and an accompanying urgency of life, vividly present, as Catherine realizes that she, too, “would shrink slowly out of life, with ever-increasing wrinkles and hideousness, as vitality receded and the poor stretched skin fell back upon bones. . . . [I]t was happening all the while: and all the while, new things were coming to birth, eating up the short banquet of youth and going out to die. There was obviously no time to waste.” 20 Yet, Letty’s cheerful expectation of death, which she likens to “waking” from the dream of life to something better and more real, suggests a greater context that might help direct the course of that urgent life. “[L]ife is only temporary lodgings, isn’t it?”

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Letty observes. In his perception of the real forms, Paul, she adds, “isn’t fast asleep like the rest of us. He dozes, of course; but he opens his eyes now and then, and sees the real. I’ve often felt just on the edge of it too, haven’t you?” 21 Returning from a walk to find Letty dead, Catherine struggles to understand the event. “Many vague and unimportant minutes passed: farm-hands were summoned, messengers sent out. Catherine, meanwhile, gazed steadfastly and hungrily at the face of the dead. There were many questions that she wished to ask Letty now. . . . She whispered to herself perpetually: ‘Out of the dream! Out of the dream!’” 22 In The Gray World and The Column of Dust, the question of death offers common ground to Underhill’s protagonists and the occult-oriented groups with which they associate, but the groups’ vapid speculations contrast starkly with Willie’s and Constance’s serious engagements with existential quandaries. In both novels, in fact, Underhill stresses the distinction between those who “know” about esoteric truths out of personal experience, and therefore take death seriously, and those who merely pontificate. Her emergence from the atheism she claimed as a young woman was engineered in part by her relationship with occultist A. E. Waite, which led her to join his branch of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of the more prominent esoteric societies of the time. 23 The Gray World, written during Underhill’s early period of involvement with Waite, suggests that she quickly developed critical perspective on the myriad organizations vying to explain the inexplicable. When Willie is drawn to attend meetings of the Searchers of the Soul, Underhill’s description of the group’s arcane activities suggests some exasperation colored her perception of pre-war spiritual experimentation. On the one hand, Willie’s unhappy experience with being dead belies his father’s certainty that science has established that “the dead cannot be lonely” because “it is impossible for emotion to survive the destruction of the brain-cortex.” 24 But on the other, Willie’s personal knowledge undercuts the claims of those who pursue the opposite tack of groundless invention. Willie finds the Searchers’ meetings reek of “banality, a childish affectation of occult knowledge.” 25 While the “great conundrum” of death occupies the group, as it does Willie, a “world of wild conjecture” marks one society presentation on afterlife and reincarnation; Willie concludes that “a genial tolerance of anything that was improbable seemed to be the distinguishing characteristic of the Searchers of the Soul.” 26 Similarly, in a chapter of The Column of Dust tellingly titled “A Lecture and a Demonstration,” Underhill juxtaposes a self-proclaimed occult expert’s rhetoric about death with the actual death of her husband in an adjacent room. A purveyor of the overblown language of Egyptian mysteries that Underhill would have known from Golden Dawn, Helen Reed had already demonstrated the obfuscating effects of alchemically flavored jargon:

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Chapter 2 “Salt, sulphur, and mercury,” she said, “are really in their ultimate implications the Three Maries at the sepulchre of Sol. When we have learned this, we are at the threshold of the Grand Arcanum; for complicity of myth merges in unity of experience, if we could but understand.” “What is the Grand Arcanum?” asked the youth. . . . The sallow lady looked at him severely. “Osiris,” she said, “died a sacrifice; and of Isis Horus was reborn. Alchemical gold is the fruit of destroying fire. Does this tell you nothing?” 27

In her lecture, Helen reassures her listeners that “the illuminated mind can but hail the deaths of those whom it loves with triumph and delight; for there is a sense in which every living being wrapped in matter is but a mummy, till death comes to undo the swaddling-bands of carnal things.” 28 Underhill’s contemporary, Sigmund Freud, however, saw the experience of a loved one’s death as the primary challenge to psychological denial of death’s inevitability. He might well have been writing about Helen when he observed: “The complement to this cultural and conventional attitude towards death is provided by our complete collapse when death has struck down someone whom we love—a parent or a partner in marriage, a brother or sister, a child or a close friend. Our hopes, our desires and our pleasures lie in the grave with him, we will not be consoled, we will not fill the lost one’s place.” 29 Confronted with her husband’s actual demise, Helen is so distraught that she kills their pet cat Ra to keep Mr. Reed company among the dead—a shocking twist on the Egyptian-tinged philosophy she claims to follow. When Constance, all too aware of the continued existence of spirits, reassures Helen that death is “an illusion which will pass away,” Helen sadly responds, “Oh, I know, . . . I used to say those sorts of things.” 30 In this instance Underhill unmasks not the sentiment—as the existence of the Watcher attests, Helen was correct in her portrayal of a better life after death—but rather the gap between the reality of loss and empty words not supported by actual knowledge. For all of her criticism of uninformed speculation—lampooning in the case of the Searchers of the Soul, more poignantly sympathetic in the presentation of Helen—Underhill throughout her life was willing to attribute validity to a range of psychic phenomena that fell in what she called the “borderland” between human sensible and supernatural experience. Her openness to paranormal events, however, combined with her fastidious eschewing of humbug to underscore the critical importance she saw in determining what counted as legitimate mystical access to the spiritual realm. This goal powered her life-long mission to establish a new mystic orthodoxy somewhere between the opposite extremes of absolute Christian traditionalism and esoteric anarchy. For Underhill, the challenge was to delineate boundaries for an appropriate mystic sensibil-

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ity within a wide-ranging understanding of generic mysticism that threatened to be too inclusive, without losing that inclusivity altogether. In privileging the knowledge of the spirit world possessed by Constance and Willie—in fact in turning to the authority of their experience at all—Underhill relied on an epistemological standard that paradoxically resisted the reductiveness of scientific method, while applying a certain empiricism of its own. Her presentations of the two characters incorporate at least two different understandings of the word “experience.” For one, both Willie’s and Constance’s educations in spiritual matters are experiential in the sense of their having “participated in” or “lived through” events. Robert Sharf offers the examples of “I have combat experience” or “I have experience with diesel engines” for this understanding of experience. 31 In this sense, Willie actually was dead; Constance actually summoned a spirit. Each receives additional guidance from more knowledgeable individuals, but, apart from Constance’s use of a magical text in designing her summoning ceremony, and the atmospheric influences of certain scraps of liturgical language, neither turns to any form of scripture or other external sources to design a proper way of living in response to their experiences. As Underhill would write later to Margaret Robinson, a spiritual advisee, doctrines are useful but receive their validation from personal experience, rather than vice versa. “Live the life,” she wrote, “and so shalt thou learn the doctrine.” 32 Shifting the burden of authentication to the validating experiences of life in this way raises the bar on what will pass as mystic knowledge, but also suggests a willingness to accept as fellow travelers anyone with similar experiences. In the other sense of the word “experience,” Underhill extends what Sharf refers to as the “hermeneutic of experience” by privileging “the subjective, the personal, the private.” 33 Sharf explains that a more “epistemological or phenomenological” meaning of experience is “to ‘directly perceive,’ ‘observe,’ ‘be aware of,’ or ‘be conscious of.’” Even though the referent in this sense may be something external, “here there is a tendency to think of experience as a subjective ‘mental event’ or ‘inner process’ that eludes public scrutiny.” 34 In her efforts to describe mystic experience, Underhill follows James as well as Friedrich Schleiermacher in setting aside institutional authority to highlight the authority of “religious feeling,” but also in elevating inner experience over external perception of the “objective” or “empirical.” 35 She also reflects the tenor of her time by embracing the subjectivism that Peter Gay sees as a central characteristic of modernism. 36 By Sharf’s reading, furthermore, Underhill follows an approach of later twentieth- and early twenty-first-century theologians and secular scholars of religion who seek to preserve “religion” as a sphere of legitimate study in the face of dismissive science: “Religious truth claims were not to be understood as pertaining to the objective or material world, which was the proper domain of science, but to the inner spiritual world, for which the scientific method was deemed inappropri-

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ate.” 37 Underhill’s positing of a universal mystic sensibility likewise would fit with the other justification Sharf sees for the elevation of a generic religious experience, the sense that such experience provides a response to the problem of religious pluralism. As Sharf puts it, theologians and scholars privileging interior religious experience “could argue that all religious traditions emerged from, and were attempts to give expression to, an apprehension of the divine or the ultimate.” 38 Any “[d]ifferences in doctrine and forms of worship are to be expected due to vast differences in linguistic, social, and cultural conditions.” Even so, “as a response to a fundamentally human (and thus pancultural and ahistorical) sense of the transcendent, all religious traditions could lay some claim to truth.” Underhill was thus immersed in an ongoing conversation that sought to formulate an alternative form of “knowing” that still drew on empiricism’s emphasis on experience. Notably, the epigraph for Mysticism is poet Coventry Patmore’s summation: “What the world, which truly knows nothing, calls ‘mysticism’ is the science of ultimates, . . . the science of self-evident Reality, which cannot be ‘reasoned about,’ because it is the object of pure reason or perception.” 39 The configuration of Underhill’s particular turns to “internal” or “intuitive” experience, and to the “universal,” which she laid out in detail in Mysticism, depended heavily on the particularly Bergsonian context of her early thought. The engagements of all three authors with issues of life energy and agency reveal affinities with the volitional philosophies of Bergson, and before him, Arthur Schopenhauer. Expressed first in Schopenhauer’s central concept of the “Will,” and broadened in Bergson’s élan vital, this philosophical trajectory approached personal agency as one expression of the energy invigorating all natural phenomena. Bergson’s concept of élan vital, translated as “holy thrust” in one of Underhill’s poems, was particularly popular at the time of her writing of Mysticism. 40 Christopher Armstrong describes élan vital as “that unsleeping dynamo which throbs in all life from the lowest to the highest, like a ‘sainte inquiétude’ which leads biological creation through achievement after achievement until finally it attains in man the power of conscious self-orientation and true creativity.” 41 Despite Sinclair’s later critique of Bergsonian Vitalism in A Defence of Idealism, and Underhill’s second thoughts about her early infatuation, the mystic epistemologies of all three authors, and especially Underhill, echo Bergson’s emphasis on “intuition” and “intellectual sympathy” with an object to be known, his suspicion of sensory empiricism and rationalism, and his preference for a dynamic language of continuity and “becoming” as expressed in his term durée. 42 Analysis, the arena of “positive science,” is “a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from successive points of view,” Bergson wrote. His preferred “metaphysics” based on intuition, on the other hand, is the means of “possessing a reality absolutely instead of knowing it relatively, of placing oneself within it.” 43 The goal, defined in terms of Idealism, is “the

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absolute,” which Bergson explains is “the object and not its representation, the original and not its translation,” which is “perfect, being perfectly what it is.” 44 All three authors worked, with more or less conscious explication, within a similarly “intuitive” approach to knowledge of what lies beyond material appearances. Underhill, for her part, rehearses Bergson’s approach to knowledge early in Mysticism, finding validation for mystics’ claims of heightened awareness of reality in his emphasis on the creative flow of life and on intuitive awareness. She links Bergson with others— Hans Driesch, Rudolph Eucken, Friedrich Nietzsche—who overlap in “the stress which they lay on the supreme importance and value of life— a great Cosmic life transcending and including our own,” but it is Bergson’s theory of intuition that she then describes. 45 She assumed a mystic sensibility defined vaguely as a form of Bergsonian intuition: “Do not then confuse that surface-consciousness which man has trained to be an organ of utility and nothing more—and which therefore can only deal adequately with the ‘given’ world of sense—with that mysterious something in you, that ground of personality, inarticulate but inextinguishable, by which you are aware that a greater truth exists.” 46 Christopher Armstrong explains: The Bergsonian emphasis . . . on the very imperfect correlation between subjective perceptions which register a static, strictly delimited, universe, and the ever-fluid, ever-dynamic nature of a reality which knows no once-and-for-all definitions nor any single moment when it is not in passage from one state to another, seemed a perfect confirmation of the mystic’s assertion that the world is fundamentally maya or illusion, a perpetually evolving flux which the mind breaks up for convenience into a series of scenes and believes to endure. 47

While Underhill toned down her adulation in a later edition and took pains to balance the emphasis on Bergsonian dynamism with an Idealist emphasis on the perfect stillness of union with a changeless absolute, she did not drop her incorporation of Bergson entirely. Sinclair and Webb likewise assumed forms of pre-conscious awareness of a “reality” imperfectly represented by physical appearances that could ally individuals with a fundamental life energy very like Bergson’s élan vital. What Christopher Armstrong says of Underhill’s Mysticism, therefore, might also be said of their works, that they were written through “the temperament of a time,” defined by an Edwardian emphasis on “the immanence and dynamism of whatever aspect of the ‘Life Force’ chiefly concerned them, the sense of an on-going inexorable progress of the human race towards a greater fulfillment of human potentialities.” 48 In the face of an often dehumanizing modernity, a general vocabulary of energy offered, if nothing else, an endorsement of the promise of human agency that these authors found congenial.

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In conjunction with her defense of the primary value of intuitive knowledge, Underhill devotes the first part of Mysticism to outlining the inadequacy of empirical assumptions about sensory access to knowledge of external reality. Her position might be seen as a wholesale denial of Weber’s scientific calculability: the world is not calculable, she asserts; ultimately, the world is not even completely available to the senses. In a reversal of prevailing celebrations of her era’s burgeoning possibilities for instantaneous communication, Underhill uses telecommunication as a metaphor for the ever-possible, if not probable, mis-communication of sensory experience. 49 Sitting as though at the “receiving end of a telegraph wire,” the conscious self must rely on bodily senses for knowledge of an elusive external reality: “She does not know, and—so long as she remains dependent on that instrument—never can know, the object, the reality at the other end of the wire, by which those messages are sent; neither can the messages truly disclose the nature of that object.” 50 Senses, like the telecommunications apparatus, necessarily modify the message, whether conveyed as “dash and dot” or “colour and shape.” In either case, “a portion of the message is always lost; or in other language, there are aspects of the world which we can never know.” Instead, Underhill builds an epistemology on the basis of what might be called “an empiricism of intuited experience.” In reaction to what she perceives as modernity’s over-investment in a worldview enamored with “physicochemical” analysis, a neologism she may have acquired from Bergson, 51 Underhill argues for what might be described (awkwardly) as a “felt,” or in Bergson’s specific term, “intuited” apprehension of some higher plane of existence. Her redrafting of the four characteristics of mysticism that James offered—Ineffability, Noetic Quality, Transiency, and Passivity— into an alternative fourfold claim that mysticism is “active and practical,” “transcendental and spiritual,” motivated by love, and “a definite state or form of enhanced life” makes this explicit, especially in her fourth assertion that the “state or form of enhanced life” is achieved through the “liberation of a new, or rather latent, form of consciousness.” 52 Mysticism, she explains, is no disembodied philosophy but rather “that organic process” by which the mystic as agent establishes “his conscious relation with the Absolute.” 53 To again draw on two uses of the same word, Underhill could be said to pursue a certain empiricist epistemology in assessing the intuitively “sensed” data of her inner experience, despite her stated distrust of externally “sensed” data communicated by bodily senses. In her formulation, mystics are those willing to deny the world in order to find it. Rather than take “the ‘visible world’ for granted,” based on “lazy assumptions that somehow science is ‘real’ and metaphysics is not,” Underhill argues that “we must pull down our own card houses— descend, as the mystics say, ‘into our nothingness’—and examine for ourselves the foundations of all possible human experience, before we

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are in a position to criticize the buildings of the visionaries, the poets, and the saints.” 54 This understanding of religious experience not as a rejection of empirical values but as an application of those values in a different sphere (interior rather than exterior) in order to consider different data (intuition, rather than sensory data) is encapsulated, as Sharf notes, in the words of Indian philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), who “argued that ‘if philosophy of religion is to become scientific, it must become empirical and found itself on religious experience.’ . . . Thus in a single stroke Radhakrishnan could associate true religion with both personal experience and the empirical method.” 55 Paradoxically, Underhill’s aesthetic emphasis depends on the same sensory input that, in her allegiance to Bergsonian intuition, she rejects as a reliable vehicle for knowledge of the external world. Even as Bergson himself uses empiricism as a negative contrast to intuition, however, he at times also admits a role for external observation, describing intuition as something like a perfected empiricism that completes or complements scientific observation. First, he explains, a complex array of external images can “by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized.” 56 But in drawing close to such a point, such empiricism seems to possess the capability of crossing over or of being joined with intuitive knowledge: “A true empiricism is that which proposes to get as near to the original itself as possible, to search deeply into its life, and so, by a kind of intellectual auscultation, to feel the throbbings of its soul; and this true empiricism is the true metaphysics.” 57 Underhill appears to participate in Bergson’s ambiguity by assuming at least some role for sensory perception, if only in providing stimuli that could spur mystic apprehension, such as visions of natural scenery or the olfactory, auditory, and visual impressions of liturgical space. As empirical observation led Bergson to the threshold of intuition, so for Underhill sensory perception of beauty that evokes a sense of sublimity could encourage internal states of mystical perception and feeling. Even so, while appreciation of music, poetry, or nature requires sensory input, “the qualities of beauty and rhythm, the evoked sensations of awe, reverence, and rapture” demand explanation not from science but from aesthetics, she argues. In an echo, we shall see, of Schopenhauer, Underhill raises the “insoluble” question of “why an apparent corrugation of the Earth’s surface, called for convenience’ sake an Alp, coated with congealed water, and perceived by us as a snowy peak, should produce in certain natures acute sensations of ecstasy and adoration, why the skylark’s song should catch us up to heaven, and wonder and mystery speak to us alike in ‘the little speedwell’s darling blue’ and in the cadence of the wind.” In the face of these experiences, Underhill asserts, “Madam How and Lady Why alike are silent.” 58 For whatever reason, however, she argues, beauty, which otherwise has no

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apparent utility, inspires the “upward march of life,” with a fully developed mystic sensibility the potential end result. Bergson also acknowledged the danger of solipsism in his approach, wondering, “If metaphysics is to proceed by intuition, if intuition has the mobility of duration as its object, and if duration is of a psychical nature, shall we not be confining the philosopher to the exclusive contemplation of himself?” 59 With her knowledge of contemporary theories of psychology, which shaped her understanding of mysticism as an achieved state of mind, Underhill was likewise troubled by the subjective nature of the intuited data on which her understanding of mysticism depended. 60 Her confidence in the precedence of “inner knowledge” over sensory perception, which supported moments of feeling “settled” in her belief in mystic apprehension, alternated with severe doubts that were barely mitigated over time. She attributed her own “conversion” to Christianity following a visit to a convent in 1907 to being gripped “quite suddenly once and for all by an overpowering vision which had really no specific Christian elements, but yet convinced me that the Catholic religion was true.” 61 Yet, in the midst of an ongoing exchange with her later spiritual advisor Baron Friedrich von Hügel in the 1920s, she would write: A terrible overwhelming suspicion that after all my whole “invisible experience” may only be subjective. . . . I may have deceived myself right through, and, always studying these things, self-suggestion would be horribly easy. These doubts are absolute torture . . . how am I to know for certain this is not just some psychic mechanism? There are times when I wish I had never heard of psychology. 62

Underhill in one sense was undercut by her reliance on empirical experience, however she approached it, as both “outer” and “inner” data proved suspect. Her distress was further fed by the at times all too apparent disconnection between the confidence of her public statements about mysticism, and her own inner qualms. Her letters of spiritual guidance, for example, often caution against being overly concerned with the emotional state achieved or not achieved through meditation, an indication at least in part of the at times fickle nature of her own feelings. 63 And in writing to Father Robert Hugh Benson, son of the archbishop of Canterbury and himself a Catholic convert, about her struggles over whether to convert to Roman Catholicism, Underhill admitted that “[t]he alternative fits of mystical fervour and critical examination lead nowhere except to complete self-contempt, and a miserable sense of the unreality of all things, and the incalculable dangers of self suggestion.” 64 Even as experiments with occultism and experiences with mysticism fed her growing assumption of some reality beyond the physical, she was too much of a rationalist not to have doubts. In general, however, Underhill’s concern about the validity of her intuited experience underscored how exacting her desire was to ground

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the mysticism she taught. At least in her public communication, and especially after her several years’ relationship with von Hügel, who chided her on her need for certainty, 65 Underhill was an unambiguous endorser of the significance of human “spiritual sensibilities” as definitive of humanity itself: “There is, it is true, no point at which we can draw a line and say with certainty: here the animal leaves off, and the human self begins. But it is equally certain that nothing in the greater ground-ape seems to lead by logical stages to the Second Isaiah or St. Francis of Assisi.” 66 She especially considered inadequate any theory of determinism that focused on survival instincts as the sole basis for human endeavor. She exhibits more than a whiff of anti-Darwinism as she rejects the reduction of human agency to the survivalist promptings of a “willto-live.” Something about the human condition is left out, she protests, in the seemingly mechanistic implications of natural selection. Rather than just a “tool-making animal,” a human is “a vision-making animal; a creature of perverse and unpractical ideals, dominated by dreams no less than by appetites—dreams which can only be justified upon the theory that he moves towards some other goal than that of physical perfection or intellectual supremacy, is controlled by some higher and more vital reality than that of the determinists.” 67 Science, in any case, Underhill claims, is hard-pressed to account for certain “fundamental experiences—violent and unforgettable sensations” that while evoking “exalted emotion” apparently “fulfill no office in relation to [science’s] pet ‘functions of nutrition and reproduction.’” While filling no practical purpose, such experiences are “far-reaching in their effects on character,” and are “often recognized by us as the greatest, most significant hours of our lives.” 68 Underhill’s own description of the spiritual sensibilities she is talking about remains, like Bergson’s talk of intuition, indistinct and suggestive. She appears, however, to grasp for various elements of what Rudolf Otto, a theologian she admired, calls the sense of the numinous, or that Schopenhauer describes as the experience of sublimity. 69 Her description of the ultimate end of those experiences in theological terms that associated moments of elevated awareness with a desire for God reflected the specifically Christian orientation of her interest in mysticism. But in many ways her consideration of “alternate consciousness” shared the broader goals of the researchers of the Society for Psychical Research, and other experimenters in paranormal or occult phenomena, in assuming that individuals possessed a psychic, or, Underhill would prefer, spiritual power able to perceive a reality “beyond the natural.” For Underhill, mysticism “culminates in the perfect consummation of the love of God.” 70 Although achievement of the “unitive state,” or sense of union with God, was relatively rare, for Underhill other, lesser experiences nonetheless revealed a continuum of heightened apprehension leading up to that apogee. Having rejected what she saw as the restrictions of Darwinian evolutionary theory, in fact, Underhill reintroduces a form of “spiritual

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evolution” as a central aspect of her thought. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, and further revealing the influences of Bergson’s élan vital, Underhill endorses the “view of human psychology” that “allows us to look upon the soul as an entity capable of progress, of growth in real being, of those developments which we call character and personality,” and to expect that “it will move towards its assigned end, the truly existent object of its interest and desire.” 71 Underhill thus finds in the “new” discoveries of psychology a warrant for a teleological understanding of human development, with the assumption that an “assigned end” and “object of . . . interest and desire” exists. That development, she learned from von Hügel, is necessarily pursued through the experiences of everyday life. Her assumption, then, is that a mystical goal is attainable, both because the “real” exists and because humans are attuned to find it through proper orientation to the details of their lived lives. The question raised by her three novels—how shall we live?—thus rests on a foundational expectation that everyday living could, indeed, amount to something quite important. NOTES 1. In 1904 and 1905, five of Underhill’s stories appeared in two issues of Horlick’s Magazine and Home Journal for Australia, India and the Colonies, edited by her friend A. E. Waite. 2. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 64. Vitalism became a general term for various theories that summed up “the prevailing worship of life in all its exuberance, variety and apparently limitless possibility, which pervaded every aspect of pre-1914 culture and society.” C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 119. 3. See, James, Varieties, Lecture 1. 4. Underhill to Mrs. Meyrick Heath, in C. Williams, Letters, 146. In the same letter, Underhill added, “I’ve been that driven this week! Mother’s Sale of Work, Monday to Wednesday—Bergson’s lectures, for which I have been simply living, then a sudden demand for an article on him—ordered Thursday and printed Saturday!” 5. See Underhill to Ursula Roberts, February 4, 1933, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 265. 6. Greene calls The Gray World “valuable not as great literature but as popular literature of the early twentieth century and for what it reveals of its author.” She says of The Lost Word that it is “not a good novel.” Greene, Underhill: Artist, 16, 22. Charles Williams similarly observes that even though Underhill won first prize in a short story competition conducted by Hearth and Home magazine when she was 16, all three of her novels “are not, it must be admitted, as good as one expects them to be,” despite being well received. C. Williams, introduction to Letters, 8, 10. Writing in the 1970s, Christopher Armstrong reports that “by 1916 Evelyn’s reputation as a poet stood a good deal higher than her reputation as a novelist if not as high as her fame as the exponent of mysticism,” yet adds, “it is difficult to engage in critical dialogue about Evelyn’s verse since scarcely anyone these days reads it.” C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 169, 170. 7. In the full quote, Underhill admonished her advisee, Margaret Robinson, to curb the seriousness with which she read The Column of Dust, claiming limited intentionality as author: “And don’t look on reading the Column of Dust as a solemn and saddening ceremonial! It hasn’t been written in that spirit, I assure you—nor am I the pious and pain-enduring invalid you seem to suppose. Do get these ideas out of your

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head! No, everybody does not ‘find my works painful!’ Some find them dull and some eccentric—and others read their own prepossessions into them!! They don’t tear themselves into ribbons over them anyhow—& neither do I. I just write what comes into my head & leave the result to luck.” Underhill to M. Robinson, October 1, 1909, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 160. 8. Underhill to M. Robinson, October 22, 1908, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 134. 9. C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 62. 10. In a letter to a spiritual advisee, Underhill urged daily meditation as a way to maintain a proper relationship to “reality” beyond materiality. “When you are really sure that every bush is ‘aflame with God’ you will no longer feel contempt for the triviality of the bush. You will see that the material world, although of course an illusion in the form in which it appears to us, is an illusion which has strict relations with reality. It is the dim shadow of the thought of God.” Underhill to M. Robinson, April 22, 1907, in C. Williams, Letters, 57. 11. Before his death, Underhill identifies the boy only as ten years old and Cockney. She glosses over the details of his insertion into his new family, beginning Willie’s story at the age of eleven. 12. Underhill, Gray World, 19. 13. Underhill, 20. 14. Underhill, 21. 15. Underhill, 17. 16. Underhill, Column, 20–21. 17. Reflecting Underhill’s own attraction to the magical writings of Éliphas Lévi, Constance uses a “recipe of Éliphas Lévi” in drawing the occult symbols, as well as the “Grand Grimoire,” a “grammar” of magical formulas translated in part by A. E. Waite in his The Book of Black Magic and Pacts (1898), which was later reissued as The Book of Ceremonial Magic (1913). Underhill, Column, 8. The sharing of psychic space that results from the Watcher’s arrival plays with the anxiety about permeable personalities that Pamela Thurschwell identifies as common among psychic researchers. Thurschwell, Technology and Magical Thinking, 32. Overtones of sexual violation could be present as the male Watcher inhabits Constance’s female consciousness but are not raised by Underhill. 18. Underhill, Column, 65. 19. Underhill, Lost Word, 231. 20. Underhill, 238. 21. Underhill, 240. 22. Underhill, 248–49. 23. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which counted both Aleister Crowley and W. B. Yeats among its members, was concerned with ritual or ceremonial magic. Owen, Enchantment, 3–4. A split among the society’s leaders led Waite to form his own branch, more focused on Christian mysticism, in November, 1903. Underhill was initiated into that group in 1903 or 1904, the year The Gray World was published. Owen, Enchantment, 82–83. Greene notes that Underhill probably left the group in 1905, though the group’s “influence on her was probably substantial.” Greene, Underhill: Artist, 17. Underhill cites Waite’s works on “The Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah,” “The Occult Sciences,” and “The Holy Kabalah” in her references to magic in Mysticism. See nn on pages 108, 151, 158. See also Zaleski, preface to Practical Mysticism and Abba, xvii–xviii. 24. Underhill, Gray World, 280. 25. Underhill, 83. 26. Underhill, 84, 85. 27. Underhill, Column, 86–87. 28. Underhill, 173. 29. Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” 290. 30. Underhill, Column, 192. 31. Sharf, “Experience,”104.

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32. Underhill to M. Robinson, April 22, 1907, in C. Williams, Letters, 58. As will be discussed later, Underhill did see value in the structure religious doctrine could provide the mystic life. In the same letter, she wrote: “I do not know of course how far the dogmatic side of Christianity appeals to you. I do think that if you study it, you will find there the solution of many problems and doubts.” 33. Sharf, “Experience,” 98, 94. 34. Sharf, 104. 35. Sharf, 94. See also Schleiermacher, On Religion. 36. Gay, Modernism, 106, 166, 501. 37. Sharf, “Experience,” 95. 38. Sharf, “Experience,” 96. See also Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Making of Modern ‘Mysticism.’” 39. Underhill, Mysticism, 2. From Patmore, The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, 39. 40. Underhill, “Dynamic Love,” 4. 41. C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 118–19. 42. See Sinclair, “Vitalism,” in Defence of Idealism, 44–66. See Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 23. 43. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 24. 44. Bergson, 23. 45. Underhill, Mysticism, 26–31. 46. Underhill, 31. 47. C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 119. 48. C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 127. The interest of Underhill and Sinclair in Bergson was in part discovery of a fellow traveler. Webb does not write specifically about his work but reflected the cultural vocabulary of “life force” that he helped shape. See Kumar, Bergson, 40. 49. New forms of electronic communication technology at the fin de siècle were often offered as promising models for psychic communication. See Thurschwell, Technology and Magical Thinking. Underhill, however, may have been drawing on personal experience with the new devices’ less-than-perfect functioning. 50. Underhill, Mysticism, 6. 51. See Kumar, Bergson, passim. 52. See James, Varieties, 371–72. Underhill, Mysticism, 80–81. See also C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 111ff. 53. Underhill, Mysticism, 81. 54. Underhill, 4–5. 55. Sharf adds that Radhakrishnan’s interest in experience is traceable to James, Francis Herbert Bradley, Bergson, and von Hügel, all of whom also influenced Underhill, and that his writings include “appreciative references to a variety of American and European thinkers popular at the time,” including Underhill. Sharf, “Experience,” 100. 56. Bergson, Metaphysics, 27. 57. Bergson, 30. 58. Underhill, Mysticism, 20. See Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 200–207. 59. Bergson, Metaphysics, 44–45. 60. See Sharf, “Experience,” 113–14, on the difficulties of relying on representations of “subjective experience.” While aware of the challenge of describing an ineffable experience, as Sharf explores, Underhill’s concern is a slightly different one of worrying about her interpretation of that experience. 61. Underhill to Mrs. Meyrick Heath, May 14, 1911, in C. Williams, Letters, 125. See also Greene, Underhill: Artist, 25. 62. Underhill to von Hügel, June 1923, Von Hügel–Underhill Letter Collection, St. Andrews University Archives. Quoted in Greene, Underhill: Artist, 85–86. 63. Cf., e.g., Underhill to M. Robinson, February 17, 1909, and Underhill to M. Robinson, Wednesday in Holy Week 1909, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 144–45, 148–49. See also Greene, Underhill: Artist, 25.

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64. Underhill to Benson, quoted in Margaret Cropper, Evelyn Underhill, 30. 65. Von Hügel to Underhill, 1921, quoted in C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 221–22. 66. Underhill, “Our Two-Fold Relation to Reality,” 164. 67. Underhill, Mysticism, 16–17. 68. Underhill, 17. 69. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 9. See Underhill to D. Otter, August 12, 1927, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 232. 70. Greene, introduction to Underhill: Modern Guide, 5. 71. Underhill, “Two-Fold Relation,” in Greene, Underhill: Modern Guide, 166.

THREE Catholic Aesthetics and Medieval Modernity

Underhill was hardly unique in advancing a natural, evolving, and theoretically universal capacity for spiritual communion with God. She understood her project in Mysticism as more descriptive than constructive: the text is largely a selective summation of a range of ancient, medieval, and more contemporary works on the spiritual life. It was in considering these writings in the context of her modern world, and formulating the particular understanding of a mystic sensibility that she drew from them, that Underhill struck the resonant cultural chord that she did. The net she cast for her sources was wide-ranging, encompassing Christian but also other religious traditions. The particular flavor of Christianity that she presented, and explored in all three of her novels, however, was strongly influenced by her preoccupation with Roman Catholicism, especially in its medieval expressions. Underhill came close to converting to Roman Catholicism as a young woman, a decision forestalled by her fiancé’s displeasure and the realization that the church’s turn to traditionalism was incompatible with her own emerging views. 1 Her sympathies with the theological trend dubbed “Modernism” indicated her appreciation for the modes of modern thinking represented by new techniques of biblical scholarship, but helped create the roadblock that stopped her wholesale movement into the Catholic fold. Emerging primarily among Catholic scholars interested in applying historical criticism and scientific inquiry to religious studies, Modernism in this context refers not to the broad artistic and intellectual response to the condition of modernity discussed in chapter 1, but to a more narrowly defined interrogation of Christian tradition. Underhill’s interest in Roman Catholicism seems in part to have been the product of influential relationships with friends who happened to be Catholic, while 37

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her novels indicate that an aesthetic attraction to the particular “atmosphere” of Catholicism shaped her growing investment in the possibility of mystically accessible reality. 2 As Underhill saw it, Catholic Modernism’s endorsement of unfettered intellectual openness could only aid the process of understanding that mystical access. The 1907 publication of the anti-Modernist papal encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis made it clear the official view was otherwise. In harshly, even sarcastically condemning the Modernists, the encyclical targeted a number of tendencies that would come to characterize Underhill’s thought. As Greene sums up, the encyclical called Modernists “‘audacious,’ ‘sacrilegious,’ ‘corrupting,’ and disdainful of all authority. Modernists were ‘agnostics,’ believers in ‘vital immanence,’ ‘Protestants,’ and ‘pseudo-mystics’” who claimed “religious certitude based on individual experience,” and were therefore “‘poisoning,’ and ‘striking at the root’ of the church itself.” 3 In particular, the encyclical attacked the emphasis on intuitive perception, the “vital immanence” that lodges a “need of the divine” in the “subconscious,” which, it complained, assumed an internal sensibility of God constituting a form of direct revelation. 4 The result, it warned, is that “every religion, according to the different aspect under which it is viewed, must be considered as both natural and supernatural.” As we have seen, this would indeed reflect Underhill’s views. While Underhill gradually modified her theory to comply more with traditional Christian doctrine by giving unique status to God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, for the most part she was happy to see “religious consciousness . . . put on an equal footing with revelation,” as the encyclical states. 5 In particular, she would follow Modernist elevation of “the experience of the individual,” seen by the encyclical as patently heretical: This is [the Modernists’] manner of putting the question: In the religious sentiment one must recognize a kind of intuition of the heart which puts man in immediate contact with the very reality of God, and infuses such a persuasion of God’s existence and His action both within and without man as to excel greatly any scientific conviction. They assert, therefore, the existence of a real experience, and one of a kind that surpasses all rational experience. . . . It is this experience which, when a person acquires it, makes him properly and truly a believer. 6

Central to the critique, furthermore, was concern about claims for the self-authenticating nature of evolving religious sentiment, as well as for progressive development of fluid dogma. According to Modernists, the encyclical maintains, in a fair approximation of Underhill’s eventual words, “the sentiment, which was at first only rudimentary and almost formless, gradually matured, under the influence of that mysterious principle from which it originated, with the progress of human life.” 7 Dogma, furthermore, “is not only able, but ought to evolve and to be changed.” 8

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In certain significant ways, the encyclical’s description of Modernism did not match Underhill’s eventual theology. Modernists, the encyclical claims, undermine the Catholic doctrine of natural revelation by asserting that human reason is “confined entirely within the field of phenomena, that is to say, to things that are perceptible to the senses” and that therefore reason is “incapable of lifting itself up to God, and of recognising His Existence, even by means of visible things.” 9 As we have seen, Underhill, in following Bergson’s emphasis on intuition, allowed some role for sensory perception but only in directing intuitive consciousness toward its natural perception of a higher reality. She would also come to share von Hügel’s investment in the “concrete, sensible, finite world of our temporal existence, as the scene within which alone our capacity for the infinite can expand.” 10 Overall, however, Underhill could not help but see the encyclical as unwelcoming to her views. Given the encyclical’s blows against her own emerging theology, Underhill found herself unwilling to convert, though throughout her life she retained her Catholic affinity. 11 For some time she was reluctant to make do with other Christian expressions (such as the Anglicanism of her youth) that she felt lacked Catholicism’s mastery of symbolic access to transcendent reality. Delaying until 1921 her decision to re-associate formally with the Anglican Church, Underhill may have developed the individualistic aspects of her thought as much as she did in part because of the absence during this early formative period of an acceptable institutional home. Her upbringing by parents who were no longer practicing Anglicans also may have been a factor in her spiritual development. 12 Since Underhill seems to have evolved into her commitment to Christianity as a necessary structure for her otherwise more generically experienced mysticism, it is possible that with a different childhood she might have identified more strongly and earlier as a Christian, but less as a mystic. Once again officially an Anglican, however, her continuing Catholic sympathies expressed themselves through her eventual Anglo-Catholicism. Even before the encyclical, however, Underhill had raised the issue of intellectual integrity in her first tentative moves toward Catholicism, specifically around questions of the relationship between experience and spiritual knowledge. In her early 1907 correspondence with Fr. Benson, Underhill expressed her concern that being Catholic required getting “into a state of mind which ignores all the results of the study of Comparative religions, and accepts, for instance the Ascension, in as literal and concrete a spirit as the Spanish Armada. Is this really so?” 13 While in this case she seems to have been wrestling with qualms about Christianity’s miraculous events, rather than the reliability of mystic experience or the theological viability of the doctrine of the atonement that powered Sinclair’s rejection of Christianity, Underhill’s agonizing over the question of becoming a Catholic appears to have been at root a struggle with the possibility of religious faith itself. Charles Williams suggests that the par-

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ticular challenges to Underhill’s intellectual integrity that she identified may not have demanded the “surrender of her intellectual honour” that she imagined, and that even “on the points where she was then obstinate, she eventually came to the orthodox belief.” 14 But for Underhill, her strong desire to understand the mystic experience she sought would not allow her to accept overly easy answers. If Underhill was willing—reluctantly—to give up Catholicism, her fiction underscores the centrality of personal “experience” as one issue that made the sacrifice necessary. In the supernaturalism of all three of her novels, she chose to highlight the enticing promise of heightened and direct knowledge of spiritual truth that she hoped Catholicism would provide. In suggesting the possibility of some universal access to reality, the novels downplay doctrinal issues, exploring instead Christianity’s aesthetic engagement with a more widely based and less specifically defined communion with mystery. The Gray World, for example, seems more interested in the process of Christian devotion than in the content of theology, when Underhill treats Christianity per se at all. What aspects of belief are related are limited largely to characters’ convictions about the efficacy of particular spaces and places, and the moods they evoke, in conveying impressions of some plane of existence beyond the physical. Underhill revealed her Christian tendencies from the outset in being more willing than either Sinclair or Webb to consider the liturgical space of a church building—and particularly a Catholic building—conducive to genuine mystic apprehension. Colored by a lifetime of knowledgeable touring of ecclesial sites throughout Europe and especially Italy, Underhill’s aesthetic sensibility gravitated to the sacred spaces of cathedrals, churches, and chapels, which in turn fed into her more general elevation of “beauty” as a spiritual force. The Lost Word, for example, focuses on the potential of a carefully designed church to serve as enabling space for apprehending the real. Avenues to true knowledge of the world beyond the mundane, however, could just as easily lie outside church environs, though Underhill still presents those avenues in largely aesthetic terms. The protagonists in The Gray World and The Column of Dust are drawn toward Christianity through the portals of ecclesiastical space, but also through the beauty of nature, and, in Willie’s case in The Gray World, artistic works. Underhill’s treatment of the inspirational power of specifically Catholic sacred space fit with a more general rise in Protestant attraction to Catholic, and especially medieval Catholic, aesthetics in the United States at the fin de siècle and early twentieth century. “[H]oused in massive cathedrals, preserved in solemn sacraments, the aesthetic legacy of medieval Catholicism charmed increasing numbers of nineteenth-century American Protestants,” T. J. Jackson Lears observes. 15 Similar impulses likely influenced their British cousins with even easier access to the aweinspiring spaces. While ostensibly a turn to the past, the interest in med-

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ievalism was powered by the same engagement with a sense of modern energy that supported popular interest in Bergson’s élan vital. “Impatient with the stodginess of bourgeois virtue, many Americans imagined an ecstatic medieval piety—soaring to summits of spiritual exaltation, dropping to abysses of self-abasement, burning always with a white-hot flame,” Lears explains. 16 “From the vitalist perspective, the medieval believer exerted much the same appeal as the chivalric warrior and the legendary lovers like Guenevere and Lancelot, Paolo and Francesca, or Tristan and Isolde. All lived at a high pitch of emotional intensity; all seemed emblems of ‘real life.’” Lears suggests that while Protestant bourgeois society “demanded moderate citizens” and advanced a “Protestant ideal of useful service and the Victorian cult of domesticity,” by the turn of the century, “religious practices which had seemed barbarous or bizarre [to Protestants] were winning renewed attention and respect.” Protestant ambivalence was still at work, however, combining attraction to the Catholic potential for “childlike spontaneity” with unease at the potential for “worldliness” and excessive emotionalism. 17 Just as the specifically Christian content of especially Underhill’s early mystical writings seems at times to be somewhat arbitrary, the degree to which the aesthetic effects of the new medievalism in worship could be tied directly to Christian content was seen as debatable. “For many, the central question was posed by the heroine of Henry Adams’s Esther (1884). Impressed by an Episcopalian service in a Gothic revival church, she wondered, ‘was the moral equal to the aesthetic effect, or was the former paralyzed or overshadowed by the latter . . . was the worship spiritual or simply dramatic?’” 18 Such concerns surface in an exchange between Underhill and the Scottish Presbyterian laywoman Robinson, who first wrote to Underhill after reading The Gray World. From Underhill’s response, Robinson apparently had been moved by the book to wonder whether beauty’s “sensuous side” might be “dangerous and distracting.” Underhill reassured her that with heightened mystic apprehension, it becomes clear that “beauty is the ‘outward and visible sign’ of the greatest of sacraments.” Once that is realized, she adds, “I don’t think you can ever again get hopelessly entangled by its merely visible side.” 19 But Underhill’s claim that beauty’s power to engage spiritual sensibility supported a specifically Christian spirituality seems to have depended at least in part on a willful choice to define it so. Whatever the doctrinal associations that might or might not have been operative in this new entertainment of Catholic forms, Lears reads “the rise of Protestant aestheticism” as a sign of “widespread, complex dissent from modern culture.” 20 For Lears, “the new enthusiasm for the decorative and theatrical was an effort, half-conscious and rarely articulated, to ease modern anxieties by reviving public ritual,” which, it was hoped, might provide an experience of transcendence. 21 Something of the sense of loss associated with Weber’s description of a calculable universe seems

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to have driven this desire to rediscover mystery. Yet even this elevated experience could lose any particularly theological connotation, superseded by a burgeoning cult of the “therapeutic” that celebrated cathedrals in the same category as art in providing “spiritual comfort and therapeutic restoration.” 22 The new cultural vocabulary stressed that “aesthetic experience was primarily psychological rather than moral,” Lears observes. 23 “Americans began to appreciate art not because it stirred them to heroic thoughts and deeds but because it calmed them, provided them with respite from the constant demands of the modern superego.” Underhill’s exhibition of similar tendencies in a British context, therefore, allied her with an explicitly, if somewhat paradoxically, modern response of anti-modernism. In The Gray World, Underhill immerses Willie in the aesthetic experiences of liturgical space, art, and nature, shaping his spiritual journey with something like her own Catholic-oriented sensibility, while tapping her own experience of such material arts as bookbinding. Early in his search for solace that might ease his painful knowledge of what can lie beyond death, Willie wanders into a Catholic church with a medieval design of “wide aisles—a high vault—transepts,” and is surprised both to find it occupied on a weekday and to discover its peculiar air of being extraordinary space: “Far away he saw lights burning, and persons who knelt by them. . . . He felt as if he had penetrated to the home of a race of beings not entirely human—an unsuspected world within the world.” 24 What sets the space apart is its Catholic nature, as compared to Protestant churches that had left no mark on his spirit, and gave him no clue to this experience—to the hush, the awe, the weight of a new form of life. The idea of a religious building as provocative of emotion was strange to him. This place was so still, so remote from ordinary existence, that it seemed incredible that fifty yards away newsboys were offering the latest details of the Bootle Horror, and omnibuses full of cheerful persons were hurrying eastwards to matinees and exhibitions. 25

The sanctuary suggests the presence of a greater, or at least more important, “reality” to Willie, perhaps specifically because of its juxtaposition with the “ordinary existence” of newsboys and omnibuses beyond. A later conversation with an unnamed young man who is a regular visitor to the church clarifies the inversion. The church, the man explains, is a point in the armor of the material world. Where there is a shrine set apart, you know, the other world presses through into this. . . . That atmosphere which you notice is faith—ecstasy—the knowledge of spiritual things which overflows in the soul, and affects everything which is near it. Catholic sanctuaries are charged with a kind of holy magic. They are so old, so venerable. Their very walls are saturate with God. . . . But Protestants discourage ecstasy. Theirs is the religion of

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common-sense. They turn their enthusiasm toward work, not toward faith. 26

In a similar way, a woman’s devotion to a saint impresses Willie because he senses that “her real life had been in the moment when she kissed the image with a convinced sincerity which did not belong to Suburbia and its gods.” To him, at that moment, “it was evident that great matters happened in this building.” 27 In an apparent example of the therapeutic function Lears describes, however, Willie finds the church attractive primarily as a place of soulsoothing refuge, rather than of worship. Curiosity, and “no impulse of inquisitive piety,” draws him in the first time, and his repeated visits are prompted by his need for solitude rather than for communal ceremony. When he does hear a high mass sung, he finds it “ornate, dazzling,” but disappointing: “He loved best the quiet moments of devotion, when the place was a home, not a court. When love outweighed ceremonial respect, and showed itself in a familiar simplicity, tears came to his eyes and sorrow for his dumbness to his heart. He knew then that a beautiful reality wrapped him round and helped him.” Willie’s connection to the space still has nothing to do with a traditional experience of Christian conversion, at least as set within the bounds of a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. When the young man comforts Willie with the promise that he will eventually “find faith,” his promise is framed in terms of sensitivity to beauty: “His friend had spoken to him of faith with the quiet, balanced conviction with which one accepts the ordinary and indisputable in life. . . . In his soul, lit up by an inner light, Willie saw for the first time a reflection of the Beautiful God.” 28 While The Gray World never develops any theological parsing of distinctions between Catholic and Reformation principles, Underhill’s disdain for Protestant plainness as contrasted to this rich Catholic sensibility provides one of several points of entry into her condemnation of modern bourgeois vulgarity. With overdrawn but telling strokes, for example, Underhill paints the obtuse and Catholic-hating Pastor John Finchley and his wife as types: crass British tourists who fail to appreciate the mystical—and specifically Catholic—enchantment of the Italian countryside. Rather than share Willie’s sympathy for the spiritual efficacy of devotion to a saint, Mrs. Finchley disparages the Italian ubiquity of such veneration: “Saints seem natural here,” said Willie. “Yes, I suppose they are: one must expect that in Roman Catholic countries [replied Mrs. Finchley]. But I can never get really used to them; they seem to me such wicked creatures! It’s the way I was brought up, I suppose. And to think of praying to them!” “It’s a great pity,” said her husband, “that the Protestant religion hasn’t produced any great artists. They would have painted the truths of evangelical Christianity, and prevented popish art from attracting so

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Chapter 3 much attention. These Romanist subjects are harmful to weak minds; they promote idolatry. Of course the reason is that our great thinkers have been engaged with the higher aspects of things, and had no attention left for outward display.” “A spiritual religion scarcely needs pictures, does it, dear?” said Mrs. Finchley. Willie sighed, looked at her figure—short skirt and Panama hat clearly outlined against the delicate Perugino landscape—and supposed his happy day was at an end. He had suffered a good deal from the Finchleys since leaving England in their company nine days before. 29

Willie’s experience in Italy, in contrast, parallels Underhill’s own enraptured encounter with the country, especially in his progressive discovery of the illuminating effects of natural and artistic beauty. 30 She “claimed that she first came to God through philosophy, and certainly her reading of Plotinus and others ignited in her a sense of the Divine. But she found more powerful and evocative access to the Divine in the art, architecture, and landscape of Italy,” Greene relates. 31 Above all, Italy was a portal to medieval times, which for her “intimately linked matter and spirit, the inner and the outer, the natural and the supernatural. At shrines and in medieval towns in Italy and later in France she found the same sense of unity.” 32 In his quest to understand how he should live, Willie is similarly influenced by his encounters with art. At home in England, he is attracted to the solace of the National Gallery, where “coming for art, he stayed for serenity; and still influences began their slow civilizing work upon his soul.” 33 In Italy, Willie visits a Franciscan chapel in the company of a friar, where he is struck by a sense of personal connection with his as yet unmet soulmate, Hester Waring, through her portrait of Lady Poverty. “What he saw was a woman’s figure; spare, simple, ugly almost, in its short torn canvas dress that showed the bare feet, worn by long traveling. Behind her was the dim green Umbrian landscape, as it stretches out from St. Mary of the Angels. Round her head a cloud of wheeling birds made a halo; and within the halo a vision of the cross.” 34 In contrast to the “cheap ornaments and artificial flowers of the altar,” the painting seems to Willie in keeping with “the exquisite shrine of the earth where Nature offers her sacrifice.” This introduction through art and natural imagery is repeated back in England when he is captivated by Hester’s painting of a wood goddess/Madonna, again before meeting Hester in person. More than just an appreciative viewer of portraits, however, Willie pursues an apprenticeship in bookbinding both as an escape from the purposeless ennui of his middle-class life and as a step on his path to some kind of enlightenment. Through Willie’s engagement with the creative process, especially as a key element in his search for a personally

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appropriate “way of being,” Underhill aligns herself with the modern utilitarian emphasis on human self-determination. Set in opposition to the trendy catering to current “style” of the other young employees, and indicative of Underhill’s own predilection, Willie’s careful attention to detail as advocated by the bindery’s master craftsman reflects Arts and Crafts nostalgia for former days of careful workmanship. It also places the tools of his spiritual self-shaping quite literally in his own hands: There was a flavor of past ages about the workshop; and the electric tram which took him home, took him also into another and less peaceful century. He learned here for the first time in his life the meaning of his hands, and discovered their use. They gave his soul a new and inexplicable pleasure. . . . The symbolic rightness of quiet work justified to him the existence of his body, and sometimes allowed him a glimpse of the gateway which leads to the heaven of the industrious. 35

While the particular past evoked in this elevation of careful accomplishment is indeterminate and largely imagined, Willie’s friend Elsa associates his philosophy of transcendence experienced as immanence in daily tasks with a “medieval tone of mind.” 36 The spiritual resonance of Underhill’s preferred Catholic medievalism is thus merged with an appreciation for simpler, hands-on participation in quality workmanship. The redemptive values of beauty (especially natural beauty) and of fulfilling labor also play roles in The Column of Dust. If not as closely joined as in The Gray World, beauty and tangible work at least serve as mutually supportive windows on transcendent reality. Both stand as correctives to the empty materialism of suburban life. Not a binder of books, Constance is still the highly capable manager of a bookstore (who also happens to have expertise in the bindings of the books she sells), a state of employment that sets her apart from a cadre of unsympathetically portrayed women of leisure. She also demonstrates a characteristic sensitivity to the visions of a greater reality presented by certain spaces and natural objects. Willie experiences his inspiring interaction with natural aesthetics primarily in Italy and in his later retreat to the Sussex countryside with Hester. For Constance, it occurs in her discovery during a country ramble in her native England of a pastoral chapel where a former priest, Martin, keeps vigil over the Holy Grail. It also is revealed in her earlier vision of the “Shining Tree,” an ordinary tree that is strangely illuminated in an epiphany of what the Watcher declares is “the meaning, the Real, the Idea!” 37 The atmosphere of the chapel and the presence of the Grail prompt Constance to fall to her knees in reverence, while the tree “sprang upon [Constance’s] consciousness out of the patchy, sunny world of paving-stones, window-boxes, and pale blue sky; complete, alive, a radiant personality, whose real roots, she was sure, penetrated far beyond the limitations of the material world.” 38 The “vision of another

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universe” that the tree communicates through its natural form gives Constance a sense of “the Cosmos as God’s flower garden.” 39 Such associations of the evocative potentials of nature, art, and of hallowed space work for Underhill, as they will even more explicitly for Webb, to make the natural world an extension, even alternative, to the sacred space of church environs. While it may reflect Underhill’s Catholic sensitivity to incarnational theology, nature’s elevation as a vehicle for the real at least offers an underlying brake on any exclusivity that might emerge as Underhill develops the Christian framework around her otherwise universalizing mysticism. In The Gray World, Willie chooses to call the urban church that attracts him “The Garden of the Soul,” and Underhill introduces the church in a chapter titled “A Wayside Shrine,” suggesting the ambiguous associations of Christian shrines that exploit the non-exclusive spirit of natural settings. Underhill later heightens the sense of ambiguity between Christian and “pagan” representations of mystery in nature when Willie first discovers Hester’s shrine to the memory of her dead husband. “Paganism is thrust upon one in the country,” Underhill’s narrative voice observes, so that “nothing is easier than to believe in nymphs, dryads, elemental presences of the forest” who claim continuity with Christ: You speak to us of a Christ who came from the heavens. We say no, he came from the earth. The sum of her pure impulses and poetic forces, her power for a magical righteousness, reached their term in him. He is the fair Brother of whom the dark creatures of the forest know dimly; as Jacob and Esau, so Pan and Christ. Both live. But do not fling back the terrible birth on earth’s bosom, and deny her beautiful Son. Look back, and see how many times she has strained toward the ideal which he perfected; see the Buddha births, the fair god of the Norsemen, Phoebus Apollo, and the rest. The Incarnation was an incarnation of earth-holiness, which God gave her with the breath of life when she was made. 40

In part merely an evocative description of nature’s power to set the imagination in motion, Underhill’s paean to paganism expresses something of her openness to the validity of mystical experience outside the bounds of Christianity and includes a hint of the inclusive reach of later twentiethand early twenty-first-century formulations of generic “spirituality.” Any distinctions between the spiritual influences of Christian piety, art, or folklore, in any case, seem nebulous to Willie as he moves closer to the shrine: He had strayed into the country of Dürer’s etchings, or the legendary landscape of Benozzo Gozzoli. He expected that any moment he might see a white hart flash past him, and follow it till it reached the cave where St. Giles was praying. He wondered which would be the most likely encounter—Snow-white and her dwarfs, or the Three Magi with

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their camels and their gifts. The background demanded pretty miracles, and he did not care whether folk-lore or piety supplied them. 41

Much as with the painting of Lady Poverty that Willie saw in Italy, the painting Hester has placed in the shrine merges images of the Madonna and the earth mother goddess, in a combination that presages the mixed symbolism (in quite another cultural context) of a Disney heroine attended by woodland animals: “One saw the Madonna, very tall and grave, standing in that forest. . . . At her feet was all the population of the wood, come out to welcome and worship her: rabbits and weasels, badgers, squirrels, dormice and birds, sitting together in friendship.” 42 Willie’s perception through the shrine of what might be described as both a “nature religion” and a “natural religion” not dependent on the particular content of revealed doctrine continues the pattern of general mystic uplift begun with his visits to the holy places of church and chapel. While the Christian specificity of the church space and the painted Madonna are thus not insignificant for Underhill, their greater importance lies in their participation in some wider, less defined reality. In The Lost Word, Paul is drawn to seek out his first artisanal comrade, Mark, by the mingled Christian and pagan imagery in a baptismal font Mark had carved: “A rout of satiric and angelic forms were carved round the bowl of it. . . . Pan and his fauns, tutelaries of the rivers and preservers of the secret magic of the springs, poured out the waters of nature where the angels of the spirit filled their vials: and impish masks, thorncrowned, half torment and half laughter, unwittingly helped on the cleansing work.” 43 The combination is “a decoration calculated to bewilder sponsors and embarrass the baptizing priest,” but for Paul it indicates “a mind that had dipped into the darkness which is under appearance, perhaps had passed from that to a certain apprehension of the light.” The distinction Underhill draws between darkness and light privileges the font’s Christian elements, but does not eradicate the continuity between the different sets of symbols. Later, having helped draw together the cadre of craftspeople constructing the church, Mark relates a strange vision of observing a secret ritual resembling the Catholic Mass that is performed deep in a magical wood for the forest gods and animals. Perhaps indicating some development in Underhill’s thought toward a more defined Christian sensibility, however, the figure of the god Pan himself is excluded from participating. 44 In focusing on the design and construction of a church, The Lost Word celebrates the artistry inherent in traditional crafts of stonework, glass staining, enameling, and needlework. For those with the proper vision to see, the overall conception of the church provides a vehicle for perceiving the “reality” of the perfect forms, especially as contrasted with the grim mediocrity of the modern neighborhood that surrounds it. Even the artisans at work on the church, however, display differing levels of percep-

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tion of the “real forms” the church is intended to convey, with the architect Paul Vickery possessing, at least initially, the greatest sensitivity. What Paul seeks is a Catholic sensibility of aesthetic access to the spiritual, a sensibility that threatens to conflict with the Protestant leanings of Anglicanism. In suggesting that a welcoming statue above the church’s main door, significantly identified as the Door of Beauty by Paul, be changed from the Virgin Mary into a more universally accepted Madonna with child, Paul’s patron Hugh voices Protestant suspicion of Marian veneration: “‘Wants a baby, to my mind,’ observed Hugh suddenly. ‘Very Roman without. I may be all wrong about art, but I jolly well know what’s Anglican and what isn’t. I’m sure there will be a row when the bishop sees it.’” 45 Although this change is still in keeping with the spirit of the church, Paul ultimately fails to fulfill his vision when, absent on his honeymoon, he is not present to curb Hugh’s other tendencies toward conventional and uninspiring decoration. Because of Hugh’s additions, instead of offering austere and clean lines focusing all attention on the altar, as Paul intended, “[t]he big clean nave, full of detail and empty of magic, looked, in the sharp morning light, extremely cheerful. It breathed a spirit of decorous and well-ventilated Christianity; as of some Urban District Council engaged in suitable religious exercise.” 46 The church, Paul concludes, “would enjoy, very properly, a long life dedicated to usefulness, morality, and practical religion.” 47 As he observes the marred space, it seems to Paul that “[t]he very saints in the stained windows seemed to feel the absurdity of their situation; casting the keen light of eternity on to these temporal manifestations of bad taste. No awful presences, no veiled and secret queens, awaited their lover; but Paul detected certain tutelary spirits, the proper guardians of a reasonable and convenient faith. They were humming, he thought, a popular hymn.” 48 Aesthetic access to mystery, therefore, rather than doctrinal niceties, remains in the end the primary issue. Uncomfortable with the strict limits of Christian doctrine, and yet aware of the unsettling infinity of possibility permitted by the absence of any defining boundaries, Underhill attempted to establish mysticism’s parameters via standards not exclusively dependent on Christian dogma. Just as Willie’s spiritual search in The Gray World has little to do with the specifics of Christian theology, to be religious was not defined in Mysticism “in terms of doctrinal adherence, scriptural fidelity, or theological purity,” Greene observes. 49 Mysticism “did not deal with these subjects and its language did not reflect them. Sin, grace, Christ, are barely mentioned.” Instead, Underhill almost backs into her ultimately Christian orientation by advocating a spiritual discipline, powered by love for God and beauty, and sensitive to suffering, that precedes any doctrinal specifics, whether Christian or otherwise. Even as late as The Golden Sequence of 1932, a revealing summation of her later thought, as we shall see, Underhill felt it necessary to address associations of “natural religion” that clung to her particular understanding of

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a transcendent divinity immanently present in the created world of image and human action. Although the correction reflected her more developed self-understanding as a specifically Christian theorist of spirituality, her continued belief in a generic spiritual ability possessed by all humans, and her open-ended description of a universally available greater reality or “Spirit” to which that ability responded, kept the need to define mysticism’s boundaries current. NOTES 1. Underhill’s fiancé, Hubert Stuart Moore, was reportedly uncomfortable with the possibility of intimate details of their married life being shared in Confession. Cropper, Evelyn Underhill, 30. Underhill’s decision not to convert seems to have allayed his concerns, though in a letter a few months before their wedding, she notes that “I have a sort of idea you are feeling rather depressed,” and reassures him “we are going to be so happy together, with absolutely no clouds & differences between us.” Underhill to Hubert Stuart Moore, April 22, 1907, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 98. 2. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 15. 3. Greene, 29. Underhill’s eventual spiritual director, von Hügel, was among the intellectuals to come under suspicion. Marschall, review of Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism, 207. 4. Pascendi, par. 7. 5. Pascendi, par. 8. 6. Pascendi, par. 14. 7. Pascendi, par. 10. 8. Pascendi, par. 13. 9. Pascendi, par. 6. 10. Underhill, “Finite and Infinite,” 218. 11. See Zaleski, preface to Practical Mysticism and Abba, xix. Also Greene, Modern Guide, 5. 12. Cropper, Evelyn Underhill, 3–7. 13. Underhill to Benson, quoted in Cropper, 29. See also Greene, Underhill: Artist, 25, and C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 53–59. 14. C. Williams, introduction to Letters, 14. 15. Lears, No Place of Grace, 184. 16. Lears, 161. 17. Lears, 160–61. 18. Lears, 192. 19. Underhill to M. Robinson, 29 November 1904, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 77. See Greene, Underhill: Artist, 20–21. 20. Lears, No Place of Grace, 193. 21. Lears, 194–95. 22. Lears, 190. 23. Lears, 191. 24. Underhill, Gray World, 195. 25. Underhill, 194–95. Lyons Street in Bootle was the scene of several notorious murders around the turn of the century. 26. Underhill, 216. 27. Underhill, 196. 28. Underhill, 217–18. 29. Underhill, 247–48. 30. Underhill first visited Italy in 1898, when she was 23, and eventually made sixteen trips to the Continent.

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31. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 12. 32. Greene, 13. 33. Underhill, Gray World, 106. 34. Underhill, 258. 35. Underhill, 143. 36. Underhill, 144. 37. Underhill, Column, 78. 38. Underhill, 76. 39. Underhill, 77. 40. Underhill, Gray World, 321–22. 41. Underhill, 324. 42. Underhill, 325. A celebration of premodern art, and of fantasy and fairy tales was one aspect of Protestant interest in medieval aestheticism. Lears, No Place of Grace, 60–97; 168–73. 43. Underhill, Lost Word, 68. 44. Underhill, 152–60. Mark’s account resembles the plot of “A Green Mass” (1904), one of Underhill’s short stories. 45. Underhill, Lost Word, 168. 46. Underhill, 305. 47. Underhill, 303. 48. Underhill, 306. 49. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 54.

FOUR Magics and Mysticisms Finding a New Orthodoxy

In 1936, when Underhill was firmly established as a respected spiritual writer and leader of retreats, and only five years before her death, Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang invited her to join an Anglican committee investigating spiritualism. 1 Only the fact that the invitation came from the archbishop persuaded her to set aside her discomfort with the subject and accept the appointment. Almost immediately, she changed her mind and resigned. 2 As she explained in her letter of resignation, the documents sent to committee members to review confirmed her initial belief “that my attitude to the whole business is too radically critical to make my presence on the Committee of effective use.” Her further exposition of her position is worth quoting at length as an indication of her mature views on the matter. In reading the material, she wrote, I am struck once more with the utterly sub-Christian, anthropo-centric, hopelessly unsupernatural character of the spiritualist outlook. It is all about man, his survival, prospects, etc., hardly at all about God, and really represents au fond the 19th century naturalistic attitude with a little superstition stirred in. There is nothing here about the specifically religious attitude of adoration and trust. The whole outlook is utilitarian. Not the glory of God, but our own consolation, future well-being etc., is in the foreground. Personal survival is made a primary issue, a “reason” for faith, and we are encouraged to bolster up our belief by experimental proofs that it is true; whereas surely for religion survival only matters in so far as it is part of the Will of God. I am sure that here Von Hügel was right—“the only safe path is from God to immortality, never from immortality to God,” and also sure that it will be a very ill day for the Church of England when she allows it to be assumed that 51

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Chapter 4 she can come to terms with the “spiritualist outlook” and abandon the theocentric point of view.

As we have seen, even as Underhill experimented with the esoteric Golden Dawn society early in her career, she was developing a keen sense of the absurdity of certain occult and paranormal practices. Her critique here, however, is interesting for the grounds on which it is based. While she considers spiritualist experience tainted with “superstition,” she does not question its possible validity, specifically as pertaining to evidence of life after death. Rather, she criticizes spiritualism’s emphases and goals, which she finds too human-centered. The scolding thrust of her letter is to remind the committee about the proper focus of Christian mysticism, which for her is God. She continues revealingly: I do not mean by this that I disbelieve in the existence of “psychic phenomena” or do not think their investigation important—especially the borderland group common to mediums and to certain religious types. But I think this investigation, which is really scientific and not religious in character, since it is concerned with an extended knowledge of the created order, should be left to the [Society for Psychical Research] or some similar body, and the church should stick to her supernatural job as the Body of Christ.

As before, Underhill’s preference is for careful study of even paranormal matters, though she draws a distinction between appropriate and inappropriate subjects for scientific inquiry, with supernatural mysticism falling outside the purview of traditional empirical science. Yet, the “created order,” she makes clear, includes a “borderland” marked by various forms of psychic phenomena that she considers natural and therefore a fitting subject for the Society for Psychical Research. Many of the leading writers on mysticism at the fin de siècle and early decades of the new century, including Underhill, were concerned with distinguishing between proper and improper, or as it was often couched, “normal” and “abnormal” mystic experience, notes Leigh Eric Schmidt. 3 In a likely case of protesting too much, however, at least some of the energy powering efforts to distinguish suspect occult practices from proper mysticism may have reflected an uncomfortable understanding of their fundamental affinities, a recognition that underlies Underhill’s letter. One connection was the generic, universal nature of spiritual apprehension that both mysticism and a broad swath of what often came to be lumped together as “magic” promised. While producing their own highly particular doctrinal arcana and often using rigorous initiation rituals to delineate increasingly exclusive stages of membership, occult groups by their number and varied natures pointed to an underlying generic possibility of supernatural perception. Even rival claims to exclusive access to supernatural realms, in other words, could not obscure the groups’ shared claim of the existence of a more than natural reality with which

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there could be communication at all. The resulting pluralistic atmosphere, Schmidt observes, was especially attractive in a modern moment of increasing challenges to Christian institutional authority. 4 In his effort to recover a properly historicized understanding of mysticism as a modern term, Schmidt highlights this early twentieth-century understanding of mysticism as somehow “general” or the “universal quintessence of religious experience” that is not limited to some specific sectarian creed, as possibly parallel with the contemporary use of “spirituality” as a ubiquitous term. Emphasis on the common features of such universal mystic experience offered “a means of interreligious engagement—a sympathetic meeting point in an increasingly global encounter of religions.” Still, in the pursuit of some boundaries, for most writers such expansiveness did not extend to “occultists, magi, clairvoyants, mediums, ‘weird psychical experiences,’ or ‘easy-going lotus eaters.’” 5 Similarly, “mysterious voices, strange sights, bodily oozings, and fleshly mortifications were freakish sideshows compared to an abstracted experience of divine union, an immediate consciousness of God’s presence, or a contemplative intuition of the Absolute.” 6 The Rev. Henry A. Reed, a Methodist minister in Elmira, New York, complained in 1922 that New Mysticism’s eclecticism allowed “too much room for quackery,” recalling “some of those old-time medical remedies that make such amusing reading for even the laity of to-day.” 7 And Randall Styers notes that, historically, scholarly assignment of certain practices within the general designation of “magic” has served the boundary-producing function of distinguishing what, by contrast, counts as proper “religion,” so that “one of the primary functions of magic . . . has been to serve as a foil for religion.” 8 Despite Underhill’s participation in the trend toward drawing distinctions, her openness to some generic spiritual experience of higher reality played out in a willingness to at least countenance the possible validity of practices associated with what she called magical ceremony. Much as some experimenters in the Society for Psychical Research saw their pursuits of telepathic communication and other paranormal abilities serving to justify religious faith, Underhill, at least early in her career, argued that magical insight and mystical knowledge of God could be placed on a continuum that helped explain mysticism’s ways. “Man’s inextinguishable conviction that there are other planes of being than those which his senses report to him,” along with “his craving for the hidden knowledge,” are the “starting point of all magic, and of all magical religion— the best and purest of occult activities,” she wrote in Mysticism. Magic is “in the eyes of those who really practise it, a moyen de parvenir: not the performance of illicit tricks, but a serious attempt to solve the riddle of the world.” 9 Often misnamed “mysticism,” magic represents mysticism’s opposite pole “of the same thing: the transcendental consciousness of humanity.” 10

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Here, as well as in her earlier article “A Defence of Magic” (1907), Underhill’s clear preference is for what she designates “mysticism,” with the distinction set in terms of focus, as it is in her letter resigning from the committee. Greene, who claims perhaps too definitively that Underhill’s article marks “an end to her interest in the occult,” observes perceptively that it was not coincidental that Underhill published it the same year she began work on Mysticism, her superseding concern. 11 At the same time, although the topic of magic largely disappears from Underhill’s later writing, it seems significant that as late as her 1930 revisions for Mysticism’s twelfth edition, she made no move to change her critical yet not completely dismissive discussion of it. 12 While scornful of the “archaic mystery-mongerings” of magic’s “external system of words and ceremonies,” Underhill grants that performativity genuine effectiveness as addressing some kind of active force operating beyond the realm of sensory perception. 13 For her, “religion” (apparently meaning by that religious practice and ritual) lies in the region between her two extremes of magic and mysticism. In an interesting interweaving of influences, Underhill points out the similarities among magical experimentation, religious ritual, medical science, and particularly psychological therapy. The purposes of both occult and traditional religious rites, she argues, are the same in producing particular states of mind able to penetrate through material appearances to the real: “The arduous preparation and strange rites of an evocation have power, not over the spirits of the dead, but over the consciousness of the living, who is thus caught up from the world of sense to a new plane of perception. . . . No philosophy ever said more plainly to its initiates ‘The Spirit of God is within you.’” 14 To claim that religious ceremony was intended to produce a form of consciousness does not denigrate the ceremony’s spiritual significance, particularly given the power psychoanalytic theory was attributing to the unconscious, Underhill maintained. “Only under that ecstatic condition which it is the very business of Magic to induce, can the subconscious mind which is the medium of our spiritual experiences come to its own, and communicate with the transcendental world. The appeal of religion is not to the intellect but to the soul. Its technology may or may not convince the reason: only its Magic will open the inner door.” 15 In her straddling of the rational and irrational, Underhill thus turned to psychological theory in attributing the effects of both occult ceremony and religious worship to the power of suggestion, but simultaneously maintained that the “subconscious mind” so stimulated has real ability to engage what is beyond. The orthodox “should be careful how they condemn the laws of magic,” therefore, Underhill cautions, “for they unwittingly conform to many of them whenever they go to church. All ceremonial religion contains some elements of magic.” 16 The result, she emphasizes, is as much a defense of the efficacy of religious worship as it is of occult ceremony: “Christianity, when she founds her external system on sacra-

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ments and symbols, on prayer and praise, and insists on the power of the pure and self-denying will and the ‘magic chain’ of congregational worship, joins hands with those Magi whose gold, frankincense and myrrh were the first gifts that she received.” 17 In The Lost Word, young Paul Vickery is surprised to find that even a Masonic initiation ceremony transcends its tawdry setting to provide access to the universal forms of the builder’s trade. Paul, an Oxford biology student committed to scientific empiricism, is initially dubious about the rite’s value, particularly given his surroundings: “It seemed especially ridiculous that this dismal tenement should be the home of the last descendants of the great building-guilds. . . . Linoleum on the floor, hatpegs on the wall, a dirty window, and a grey and undulating ceiling, do not form an inspiriting approach to esoteric mysteries.” 18 Despite his scorn for the setting and the ceremony’s performers, who “wore . . . the air of amateurs bidden to a rehearsal” and not of “initiates assembled to a mystical rite,” he begins to feel the ceremony’s power. It was “the language of ritual” that “fell on Paul’s ears. Its cadences seemed curiously familiar, for all rituals are but translations of the secret and spiritual language into audible speech. The supernatural powers which lie at the back of all symbolic representation began, to his great annoyance, to make themselves felt.” 19 As Paul succumbs to what Underhill calls the language of the soul rather than the intellect, the result is access to the “real” in a manner divorced from sensory empiricism: “He knew that he was walking in the Pattern World from which creative spirits project the dream in which we live: that all the beautiful things he had ever seen were only the images of those real things amongst which he now stood.” 20 The Column of Dust provides an even more striking illustration of Underhill’s valuation of efficacious ceremony. Underhill bookends her novel with the success of Constance’s magical summoning of the Watcher, and the equally potent performance of the Catholic Ritual of the Dead. Despite Underhill’s assertion that such rituals primarily produce states of mind, in this fictional context she grants those states of mind true power to engage supernatural spirits. Constance’s late-night ceremony involves seemingly silly accoutrements and practices, including the drawing of occult symbols on the floor of the bookstore. Underhill emphasizes the ludicrousness as Constance stands in her drawn circle, with symbols written in colored ink on a piece of cardboard hung by a string around her neck. But at the same time, the absurd rite creates a real doorway into mystery: “The childishness of these proceedings would have amused her had it not been for the intense silence, the loneliness of the bookshop, its dim uncertain corners, and the horrible impression of looking out into infinite and cruel darkness.” 21 When the initial incantation produces no results, Constance resorts to a “mighty and primitive spell,” which promises to accomplish “the most violent assault upon the unseen world,” and

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any sense of play-acting is eliminated. 22 A change comes over her voice as the words of the spell “drew from her—she knew not for what reason—a long and rhythmic cry. . . . She had ceased to be self-conscious, and was far away from the bookshop; her whole will pressing against the barriers of an experience which, as she had gradually and automatically come to believe, was close to her hand.” 23 In the mirroring ceremony near the book’s conclusion, Constance wanders out of the London fog into the chapel of the Helpers of the Holy Souls, a women’s order dedicated to remembering the dead. Distressed by her daughter Vera’s illness and the temptation to improve her own circumstances by letting the troublesome girl die, Constance is caught up in the Helpers’ performance of the Office of the Dead from the medieval Books of Hours. Through their ceremony she senses the presence of the dead souls the Watcher had told her shared the world. The welcoming communal space of the women’s chapel contrasts positively with the frightening solitude of Constance’s ritual in the bookstore, but it is clear that both ceremonies engage a common non-material reality: “In the fog, where bodies became as phantoms, and every standard of reality was at fault, it was easy to believe in them: to feel all about one, . . . the mighty wistful company of souls, called by the familiar rites to lean out from their country into this.” 24 Christian and spiritualist associations thus mingle in depicting a shadowy realm of the dead, reminiscent of Willie’s “other” world in The Gray World. Despite the similarities, however, Underhill gives the women’s compassionate Rite of the Dead the more sympathetic representation, in part by placing it in the kind of sacred church space she favors. At least by the time of her writing The Column of Dust, therefore, she was clear that occult expressions were the “same but not quite” when compared to Christian worship. The most fundamental distinction she draws is between what she describes as the self-centered emphasis of magic, and the self-sacrificial emphasis of mysticism. As compared to mysticism, she cautions, magic focuses too much on the acquisition of power and knowledge. Foreshadowing the position she advances in her letter resigning from the spiritualism committee, in Mysticism Underhill maintains that magic incorporates “all forms of self-seeking transcendentalism,” adding in a reductive shorthand: “Magic wants to get, mysticism wants to give.” 25 In what seems an ironic linking of the supernatural force of magic with specifically secular elements of scientifically oriented modern life, Underhill further criticized occultism for its participation in a modern, acquisitive ethos, an “intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness, until it includes the supersensual world.” 26 As in her resignation letter, she argues that the individual is unfortunately paramount in these magical exercises. Whether the intended recipient is a single person or a group, “the object is always the same: the deliberate exaltation of the will,

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till it transcends its usual limitations and obtains for itself or group of selves something which it or they did not previously possess.” In another blurring of boundaries, however, she cautions that such negative acquisitiveness may be at work whether expressed through “the incantations of the old magicians, the congregational prayer for rain of orthodox Churchmen, or the consciously self-hypnotizing devices of ‘New Thought’: whether the end proposed be the evocation of an angel, the power of transcending circumstance, or the healing of disease.” Proper mysticism, on the other hand, “is non-individualistic,” she claims, and implies, in fact, “the abolition of individuality; of that hard separateness, that ‘I, Me, Mine’ which makes of man a finite isolated thing.” 27 Mysticism is “essentially a movement of the heart, seeking to transcend the limitations of the individual standpoint and to surrender itself to ultimate Reality; for no personal gain, to satisfy no transcendental curiosity, to obtain no otherworldly joys, but purely from an instinct of love.” Already in her novels, Underhill had begun working out her understanding of the proper approach to accessing mystery by introducing this key element of self-sacrificial “love” that responds to suffering. Such love as an emphasis came to trump even her emphasis on aesthetic appreciation of beauty. Suffering, like beauty, Underhill observes, seems to carry no utilitarian value, making it “one of those facts of universal experience which are peculiarly intractable from the point of view of a merely materialistic philosophy.” 28 But within a system of spiritual consciousness, suffering does have a purpose, primarily as a goad to spiritual development. In answer to Constance’s Watcher, for example, The Column of Dust maintains that suffering is part of the inexplicable nature of life that provides equally inexplicable opportunities for personal growth. In Weber’s terms, Underhill presents suffering as that senseless aspect of existence that drives the desire for rationalization (and, hence the development of religion) as a process of systematization or of “making sense.” According to Weber, not only the shape of major religions (he notes Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, “and, to a certain extent, Paulinian and later Christianity”) but also resistance to religion are founded on the “rational need for a theodicy of suffering and of dying.” As late as 1906, he observed that “the ‘injustice’ of the order of this world,” rather than challenges from natural science, was the reason given by a majority of “a rather considerable number of proletarians” for not believing in Christianity. 29 At the same time, behind the many varieties of belief in different ideas of “‘from what’ and ‘for what’” one could be redeemed, “always lies a stand towards something in the actual world which is experienced as specifically ‘senseless,’” he states. “Thus, the demand has been implied: that the world order in its totality is, could, and should somehow be a meaningful ‘cosmos.’” 30 Underhill makes a similar claim. Experiences of suffering, “which may in their lower forms be life’s harsh guides on the path of physical

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evolution—in their higher and apparently ‘useless’ developments are her leaders and teachers in the upper school of Supra-sensible Reality.” 31 In debate with materialists, optimists believe that experiences of suffering, or sympathy for suffering that prompts a loving response, “press the self towards another world, still ‘natural’ for him, though ‘super-natural’ for his antagonist, in which it will be more at home. Watching life, he sees in Pain the complement of Love: and is inclined to call these the wings on which man’s spirit can best take flight towards the Absolute.” Initially individual and highly personal, this impetus toward rationalization (understood as “making sense”) through some higher level of perception suggests again the potential for a universal access to that higher reality: all suffer; therefore all may achieve union with the Absolute. Further unbalancing her not-quite-parallel pairing of “suffering” and “beauty” with the third term of “religion” as broadly inclusive of an array of practices and habits, Underhill holds out for access to “real” knowledge through mystical apprehension: “Down these three paths, as well as by many another secret way, [mystics] claim that news comes to the self concerning levels of reality which in their wholeness are inaccessible to the senses.” 32 Where in The Gray World Willie ends up pursuing beauty through an artisan’s life lived in relative solitude, Paul in The Lost Word loses his heightened perception of the real forms because of his unintended and resisted immersion in the earthly love of a woman, yet finds this sacrifice opens new possibilities of transcendence. In The Column of Dust, Constance is redeemed by her choice of sacrificial service over beauty. The opposition between the preferred perspective of Constance and the more limited perspective of the Watcher is introduced in the epiphany of the Shining Tree, as the Watcher exults in the beauty of the vision that reveals the “real” and momentarily improves his appreciation for the potential of ordinary life. 33 He takes umbrage, however, at a poor woman and her dirty child who intrude into the moment and introduce what is “unreal and ugly.” To the Watcher, the choice seems clear: “Why do you let your earth breed such horrible things?” he asks. “Stamp them out! Feed the beautiful and starve the vile!” 34 But Constance sees the beautiful and the ugly as inextricably tied together, “two great expressions of the Spirit of Life” that cause the poor woman to grow “to the likeness of the Shining Tree; she too was radiant, eternal and sublime.” 35 On the one hand, “[b]eauty called her through the parted veil of perception, casting open door after door upon the countless aspects of creation.” But, on the other, “pain, friendly, ugly human pain, was at her elbow, whispering that this was a birthright which she would only renounce at her cost.” In the act of giving the woman sixpence, Constance aligns herself with the perspective that will lead to her final complete self-sacrifice. While the concerns of love and suffering can be framed in as universal a light as aestheticism, Underhill seeks to give them a specifically Christian

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cast through Constance’s decision, prompted by the Rite of the Dead, to die in order to protect Vera from the Watcher. When Vera becomes ill, the Watcher argues that it would be best if the horrid child expires since her illegitimacy blocks Constance’s social acceptance and happiness. 36 Constance concludes instead that her own death is the only way to remove the Watcher from his bondage in her consciousness, and so remove his threat to Vera. Underhill draws the Christ-like contours of the sacrifice thickly, having Constance devote herself on Christmas Eve to saving the sick child she does not really like: “Love—divine love—the ceaseless passion for imperfect things, came on her. She perceived herself to be greatly blest in suffering, struggling for this. To give oneself for the unworthy; that, in this world of infinite gradations, was the only thing worth doing.” 37 The sacrifice is of her life, but also of her own participation in beauty, since in devoting herself to caring for Vera, she lost “her final chances of communion with the adorable world from which she went. It meant something to an impassioned lover of beauty to forego her last opportunity of seeing the spare trees in their dress of hoar-frost, the misty glory of the river when the light begins to fade, the miracle of Oxford Street at the moment in which its lamps flash splendid in the dusk.” 38 Underhill further strengthens the Christian associations of Constance’s mystic development by equating her act with the chivalric quest for the Holy Grail. The former priest Martin, in failing health, transfers keeping of the Grail to Constance, who achieves her final dying release into the Absolute while staring at this elusive object of ultimate devotion and desire. Underhill maintains that the total commitment to truth, encapsulated in the name “Vera,” that can make it “possible to see God,” requires the “Constancy” of personal action that participates in the sacrifice of “that Love in which all subsists.” In the final lines of The Column of Dust, the Watcher attains heaven along with Constance because of the love he showed her: “He, who had now all knowledge, saw himself outstripped by those who had a very little love. . . . But he had loved her a little. He had followed her faithfully. He had done for her his mistaken best.” 39 Such a seemingly straightforward formulation that Christian mysticism could be distinguished as unique by its engagement with self-sacrificial love was far from simple in application. Underhill seems to have spent her career working out its complexity, especially as it required balancing competing impulses in her thought. On the one hand, her commitment to identifying a properly Christian context for mysticism distinguished her from Sinclair and Webb. Having rejected Christianity at a relatively young age, Sinclair shaped her conception of mysticism as independent from any specific religious structure. While Webb’s protagonists usually consider themselves Christians, they often demonstrate a mystic sensibility largely at odds with prevailing Christian practice. On the other hand, Underhill’s desire to delineate boundaries around what she wanted to name Christian mysticism was complicated by her recognition and even advocacy of continuities among mysticism and other forms of supernatural perception. Reliance on such a

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widely applicable concept as love did not help her cause as much as she might have hoped, in large part because of her at least early discomfort with the strict limits of Christian or other dogma. The authorizing or legitimizing force of traditional “religions,” meaning by that not only Christianity, but also other major practices, could play important roles, Underhill allows. She argues that such traditions provide a useful, possibly even necessary structure for the mystic impulse, without which the mystic may be left a “spiritual anarchist.” The “great mystics” throughout history have been followers of the “great religions,” she maintains. “Almost any religious system which fosters unearthly love is potentially a nursery for mystics: and Christianity, Islam, Brahmanism, and Buddhism each receives its most sublime interpretation at their hands.” 40 Even so, she asserts, such traditions at best signify only the familiar territory from which true mystic exploration begins. And while Underhill privileged Christianity as most conducive to mystical formulation, a bias for which Sinclair took her to task, she firmly refused to limit mystic potentialities to any one tradition. 41 Each religious tradition, she says, is like a die stamping its peculiar imprint on the same substance: “Some give a far sharper, more coherent, impression than others. But the gold from which this diverse coinage is struck is always the same precious metal: always the same Beatific Vision of a Goodness, Truth, and Beauty which is one.” 42 Such sacrifice as Constance’s also contributes to an ambiguity in Underhill’s thought about the relationship between personal, human endeavor, and the saving force of divine grace, since Constance’s self-denying love is significantly its own event, modeled as a Christ-like sacrifice, but not dependent on a converting acceptance of Christ’s saving power. Underhill’s emphasis on non-individualistic self-sacrifice framed in Christian terms, as opposed to magic’s emphasis on individual gain, in this instance fails to escape an elevation of the individual called to engage in the disciplined effort that that self-abnegation required. Her focus on examples of what she called the heroes of the spiritual life similarly shaped her understanding of mysticism as, at root, a heroic endeavor. NOTES 1. Underhill to Archbishop Cosmo Lang, November 24, 1936, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 293–94. The move to establish such a committee reflected widespread interest in spiritualism, especially as a response to war losses, and a perceived need to determine what interrelation there might be with the church’s ministry to the bereaved. See Kollar, Searching for Raymond. 2. Underhill to Chairman of the Spiritualism Committee, 1936, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 294–95. The absence of Underhill was noted as “a serious blow” to the committee’s work when its report was completed in 1939. Kollar, Searching for Raymond, 109. 3. Schmidt, “Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” 290. In addition to Underhill as one example, Schmidt lists Rufus Jones, Cuthbert Butler, James Pratt, Charles Addison, and John Wright Buckham, “among others.” 4. Schmidt, 276.

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5. Schmidt, 290. 6. Schmidt, 291. 7. Reed, “New Mysticism,” 873. 8. Styers, Making Magic, 6. 9. Underhill, Mysticism, 151. 10. Underhill, 70. 11. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 32–33. Underhill would have prepared the article also around the time of writing The Column of Dust. Her discussion of magic in Mysticism reproduces the article’s general tenor, though Christopher Armstrong notes that in the Mysticism chapter “one misses . . . the clear apologetic tone of the article.” C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 42. Armstrong also sees Underhill’s experimentation with occultism as “only a staging post on the way” toward her more mature mystic vision. Still, he adds, “to anyone looking for some line of organic or consistent development in Evelyn such a period is bound to hold a particular interest given that it is undoubtedly the moment when she first encountered and explored in a fellowship of like-minded seekers, the possibility of communication with the ultimate mystery.” C. Armstrong, 38. 12. Greene describes Underhill’s revision for the twelfth edition as substantive but measured: “[W]hile she did tinker with the edition and state where changes might be made, she did not rewrite it. Mysticism, with all its limitations, still expressed her most basic thoughts.” Greene, Underhill: Artist, 111–12. 13. Underhill, “Defence of Magic,” 37. 14. Underhill, 42–43. 15. Underhill, 45. 16. Underhill, Mysticism, 152. 17. Underhill, “Defence of Magic,” 45. 18. Underhill, Lost Word, 40. 19. Underhill, 44. 20. Underhill, 46–47. 21. Underhill, Column, 8–10. 22. Underhill, 14. 23. Underhill, 16–17. 24. Underhill, 288. 25. Underhill, Mysticism, 70. See also Underhill to M. Robinson, May 12, 1907, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 102. 26. Underhill, Mysticism, 71. 27. Underhill, 71. 28. Underhill, 20. 29. Weber, “Social Psychology of World Religions,” 275–76. 30. Weber, 280–81. 31. Underhill, Mysticism, 19. 32. Underhill, 20. 33. Underhill, Column, 78. 34. Underhill, 79. 35. Underhill, 80. 36. Selfish and cruel, Vera delights in having drowned a baby chick and wants a gun for Christmas so she can “hit things” and make them bleed. Underhill, 165, 238. 37. Underhill, 275. 38. Underhill, 297. 39. Underhill, 303. 40. Underhill, Mysticism, 96. 41. See Zaleski, chronology in Practical Mysticism and Abba, xxxix. See also Cropper, Evelyn Underhill, 52–53. 42. Underhill, Mysticism, 96.

FIVE The Heroic Individual on the Mystic Way

Underhill’s conception of the mystic way turned for its models to examples of extraordinarily heroic individuals and the personal agency they exercised. While her insistence on the individual effort required in the mystic life may have been qualified in particular circumstances, theoretically balanced in her own mystic writings, and even eased over time with von Hügel’s influence, the presence in her fiction of such self-saving selfsacrifices as Constance’s death indicates the early ties she drew and continued to assume between individual effort and mystic achievement. Underhill’s frequent use of mountain-climbing metaphors and references to spiritual exertion likely found at least some of its origin in her own vigorous lifestyle as a walker and sailor. Letters describing her summer travels in Europe often speak of lengthy excursions and hikes to natural sites or interesting buildings. Her description of approaching the chapel of the Blessed Virgin in Rocamadour, France, as one example, reads like a metaphor for her later understanding of the mystic process: “There is a sense of clambering effort, quest and of quiet havens suddenly reached in the midst of the travail.” 1 Her references to scaling mountainous heights of mystic endeavor in fact shared much with the sentiments of those who scaled physical mountains. For the mystic practitioner, she maintained, something more could be accomplished, a higher form of existence experienced that was removed from the commonplace and ordinary. Like Stephen’s assaults on the Alps, Underhill’s attempt to reach that “something” constituted a specifically modern response to the spiritual failings of modernity’s banality. The mystic task, in Underhill’s assessment, was to attain a newer, freer, and better consciousness, so that the “old” ways of mystic contemplation became truly “new” ways of participating in the promise of the age. 63

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From Underhill’s first excursion into mystic theorizing in Mysticism, she intimates that the mystic journey might not only be challenging but even impossible for ordinary folk to complete. While she maintained that the desire to grasp the nature of “reality” directly through mystic apprehension is a universal characteristic of the human condition, in her vision only a special few, the “pioneers of the spiritual world,” might possess “the opportunity or the courage necessary” to pursue that desire to full realization of the unitive state. 2 For Underhill, the emotional investment of these pioneers drew another distinction between magic and proper mysticism. “Whilst the practice of magic—like the practice of science— does not necessarily entail passionate emotion, though of course it does and must entail interest of some kind,” she maintained, “mysticism, like art, cannot exist without it. We must feel, and feel acutely, before we want to act on this hard and heroic scale.” 3 In emphasizing the rugged discipline required, however, Underhill may have been, intentionally or not, exercising that psychological technique that encourages participation by stressing the difficulty of the task proposed. Despite her emphasis on the abnormal constitutional makeup of most mystics, in fact, Underhill manages simultaneously to convey the message that the club of mysticism is open to anyone willing to try, or at least willing to try hard enough. As in early twenty-first-century advertisements for the United States Marines that called for “the few, the proud,” her point may have been not to recruit a few, but rather, by inculcating such an impression, to recruit many. Devoting the bulk of Mysticism to a detailed how-to description of the mystic way at least suggests that following it is theoretically possible for any of her readers. Also, while such examples as St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, and Sts. Catherine of Siena and Genoa suggest her focus is on the great mystics of history, Underhill’s program was directed specifically at developing contemporary practitioners. Greene points out, for example, that Underhill resisted the appellation of “mystic” that was often given her, and redefined the word “to demythologize it.” 4 For her, “[t]he mystic way is the spiritual way, open to all, participated in by the many, fully realized by the few.” The title of the collection of lectures she gave in 1921 at Oxford University—The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today—as well as her 1914 guide Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People, and her later vocation as a leader of spiritual retreats, are all indications of Underhill’s impulse to serve as mysticism’s evangelist. In her preface to Practical Mysticism, Underhill emphasizes that neophytes without “philosophic, religious, or historical” knowledge were her intended audience. As a “faculty which all men possess in a greater or lesser degree,” the process of mystic perception can be taught to the “average man” curious about “what is meant by mysticism” and “how it helps to solve his problems, how it harmonizes with the duties and ideals of his active life.” 5 The attention she paid to the significant effort required of successful mystics

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may also have been in part a response to the competing enticements of esoteric societies such as Golden Dawn, which dangled lures of Gnosticlike knowledge available only to the select initiate. Instead of privileged knowledge of secret magical formulations, Underhill counseled an exclusivity of effort, though with a similar promise of some eventual higher acquisition, if not of arcane knowledge, then of the unitive state. Charles Williams notes that, somewhat paradoxically, Underhill often appears to work against these values of individual achievement and effort, urging restraint to the over-zealous among her advisees. Some of the references in her letters to those she directed “might leave an impression of too great ease, of an almost over-emphasis on relaxation,” he observes. Aware as she was of “the psycho-physical dangers, both in herself and in others,” he writes, “[s]he did not, certainly, wish to take too great risks with her inquirers.” 6 In a letter of advice to one of her spiritual charges, for example, Underhill recommends that “[h]ot milk and a thoroughly foolish novel are better things for you to go to bed on just now than St. Teresa.” 7 Williams asserts, however, that to define Underhill by these admonitions to relaxation could be misleading, since knowing about potential pitfalls and pointing them out “does not mean to renounce heroism.” 8 The greater emphasis in Underhill’s writing, he maintains, still lies with the self-disciplined effort required to meet the challenges of the mystic way. Underhill’s practical advice also reflects an inherent tension between the energetic effort of the mystic endeavor, and the transcendent stillness that is its goal. Having embraced Vitalism’s language of “becoming,” Underhill goes on to offer an accompanying vocabulary of “being” to describe the end state of an evolved mystic consciousness. In Mysticism, she writes, “Our World of Becoming rests on the bosom of that Pure Being which has ever been the final Object of man’s quest: the ‘river in which we cannot bathe twice’ is the stormy flood of life flowing toward that divine sea.” True mystics, she asserts, are those who are “able to perceive and react to reality under two modes,” the “‘Sea Pacific of the Godhead, indubitably present to him in his ecstasies, attained by him in the union of love,” and “that ‘stormy sea,’” the “vital World of Becoming which is the expression of Its will.” 9 Even so, the balance she describes is something “attained,” and attained through experience. For a great mystic, “the ‘problem of the Absolute’” is solved “in terms of life: by a change or growth of consciousness which—thanks to his peculiar genius—enables him to apprehend that two-fold Vision of Reality.” 10 “Becoming” through the unfolding of a lived life, it would seem, takes precedence in her thought, even as she offers the comforting promise of eventual repose in the goal of “being.” This apparent contradiction between Underhill’s talk of the dissolution of the individual in the divine, and her simultaneous emphasis on the individual effort required, is expressed regularly in letters to Robin-

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son where Underhill advocates “willing” a state of “not willing.” On the one hand, mystical discipline is an effort, as she explained in one of her earliest communications: “[I]t seems to me that one’s life only attains reality in so far as it is consciously lived in the Presence of God. This consciousness can be attained & clung to, by a definite act of the will—or rather by a series of graduated acts.” Key is a disciplined practice of “‘deep’ meditation which tends to pass over into unitive prayer” and that is not limited to “when they ‘feel in the mood’ or ‘when they can.’” So long as “the will is in proper control you can always enter into the silence, though often enough without finding anything (consciously) there. That, I think, doesn’t matter much. What does matter is, never to give up, once you have started on the way, in spite of the horrid discouragements & ups & downs.” 11 On another occasion, she wrote, “[T]urn constantly to God by an act of the will, whether it gives you happy feelings or not. Adoration remains a grim duty when it ceases to be a joy: & is twice as much worth while under these conditions.” 12 And in another letter to Robinson, accompanying a section of her manuscript of Mysticism, Underhill wrote that “all kinds of pain and struggle and all un-easy things done with effort, are or can be what I mean by the Way of the Cross,” adding, “I suppose taken alone it does seem rather an austere view of the universe: but I am sick of the feather-bed and dry champagne type of religion, aren’t you?” 13 At the same time, Underhill counters, this effort must be itself a form of surrender, what she calls making “the Cross the centre of your life really.” When Robinson complained about a period of spiritual aridity, she urged her to “[a]ccept what you are having, quite simply and obediently. Take it as it comes. Don’t ‘will’ or ‘want’ this or that; however virtuous and edifying your wishes may be. All such willings presuppose that you know better than the Spirit of God.” Instead of “struggling and tiring yourself out,” she instructs, “surrender is the only way out.” She caps the paradox by concluding that “humility and willing suffering have got to be learned if we want to be Christians, and some people learn them by boredom instead of by torture.” 14 Offering yet another twist, Underhill describes the willed discipline as itself facilitated by the surrender: “[Y]ou will not have any real peace till you have surrendered that self altogether, & tried to grasp nothing, not even love. When you absolutely & eagerly surrender yourself to the Will, you will cease to writhe under that sense of deprivation. You will take it all in the day’s work and go on steadily.” 15 As Charles Williams summed up, “[S]he was very clear that we ought all, and especially those upon the Way, above all upon this particular Way, to wait upon the Lord.” 16 Part of that surrender can include relinquishing a focus on oneself, by instead making meditation a time of intercession for others, again a matter of effort that she calls “a really unselfish as well as a difficult act!” 17 In both the early work of Mysticism, and in her letter resigning from the

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committee on spiritualism late in her career, however, it is love directed primarily and at least initially to the divine object of mystic apprehension that is most critical to the mystic quest. Greene notes that “Mysticism’s originality lay in the fact that it redefined what it is to be human and what it is to be religious. In the language of her day, Underhill claimed that to be fully human was to be ‘in love with the Absolute,’ and to have one’s character transmuted because of love.” 18 Mutual concern and engagement with others only grows out of that transmutation of a mystic’s soul through love of that divine object. Despite that focus on God as the object, the tension between personal endeavor and grace perennially dogged her thought. Especially as a result of her guidance by von Hügel, she came to situate her calls for individual effort within expectations of mutual support through the human community of the church, and to reiterate that community’s reliance on divine support. In a 1932 posthumous appreciation of von Hügel’s uncompleted Gifford Lectures, for example, she stresses his teachings that “we can suffer for one another—no soul is saved alone and by its own efforts,” yet also his assertion that “this mysterious but most actual Communion of Saints, depends for its life and reality on that deeper Life and Reality which penetrates and binds it in one—‘. . . God, the great prevenient Spirit who works within and through this His kingdom of spirits.’” 19 Even so, her focus rarely veers far from the inherently human effort involved. In her novels, even the Christian connotations of the crucifixion evoked by the Grail are offered as a model for such individual action as Constance’s, rather than pointing to an external salvific event. The Grail’s somewhat incongruous inclusion in all three novels, in fact, emphasizes the element of quest or endeavor in the Christian life, so that when Constance’s death finally releases her and the Watcher into “that Heart of Being which all creation eternally desires,” it is notably something that Constance herself has accomplished. Christopher Armstrong sees her sacrifice as an expression of the realization Underhill would eventually articulate, that “the primary factor had to become not ‘experience,’ . . . but faith which involves both submission and commitment, both an acknowledgement of an overwhelming ‘given’ divine reality and of one’s utter dependence upon it.” 20 As such, he maintains, Constance and the Watcher “have to humble themselves and consent to be redeemed.” Yet he also acknowledges that “the sacrifice in their case is the last, and the greatest, technique for inducing the vision.” Underhill shared perhaps the most explicit evidence of wrestling with the complexity of competing values of grace and human spiritual endeavor in The Mystic Way: A Psychological Study in Christian Origins (1913), her second book-length foray into mystical theorizing. The book was a daring attempt to establish Christianity as a mystical religion in its very nature. Underhill understood Mystic Way as a recuperative effort intended to show that “the root of Christian mysticism was in Jesus and not

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the Neoplatonists,” Greene asserts, and that “Christianity, with its emphasis on self-surrender, heroic love, and divine fecundity represented the true mysticism.” 21 Even so, Greene admits, the text did more to define Christianity in terms of mysticism than to define mysticism in terms of Christianity. Christopher Armstrong calls Mystic Way a “tour de force” in reinterpreting early church history and the New Testament “almost exclusively as a record of mystical experience.” 22 In a 1919 letter to a correspondent, Underhill made the claim explicit: “Of course I thoroughly agree with you that Christianity was from the first essentially a mystical religion; to me, the doctrine of the New Testament is only intelligible from that standpoint.” 23 In echoes of the Eastern philosophy of bhodisattva she may have absorbed through her work with Tagore, she explained that Christ’s atoning work was in perfectly realizing the mystic’s goal of the Unitive State and thereby making such achievement possible for his followers. 24 Underhill’s early interest in Bergson’s emphases on élan vital and evolutionary spiritual development are evident, Zaleski notes, as “Underhill presents Jesus as the exemplar or archetype of mystical consciousness that succeeds in perfect self-transcendence through total submission to the Universal Will.” 25 Defending herself against J. A. Herbert’s claim that The Mystic Way suggested that “Our Lord was inferior to the ‘really tip-top’ mystics,” Underhill reiterated the primacy she accorded Christ, but significantly did so in terms of Christ’s mystic ability: “I say over and over again that He represents the classic and perfect achievement of all that the greatest saints have aimed at but never wholly reached—that throughout His whole Ministry, He exhibited, as none other did, the characters of the Unitive Way in their highest perfection, that, in Him, for once life achieved freedom and touched the Divine.” She adds a bit petulantly, “[C]ould I make my disclaimer of the idea that I ‘rank Him below his followers’ much more plain?” 26 Greene explains that “of course what [Underhill] loved was the mystic consciousness and she wanted to find that embedded in the origins of Christianity. In doing this, she ruffled orthodox readers. . . . She wanted not only to establish Jesus as the greatest of the mystics, but she wanted to show how revelation took place within the context of human growth.” 27 The response was indeed strong. In a letter thanking a supporter for her kind comments about the book, Underhill notes that “so far the outstanding results of The Mystic Way have been a rather harrowing letter from Arthur Machen, making it obvious that he no longer considers me a Christian.” 28 She worries that she had received “some objectionable flattery from unbelievers,” and admits to feeling “dismal and outcast.” Herbert’s comments especially, she told him in her letter, were “very painful reading.” 29 Given the challenges to her Christian credentials from some of her most respected readers, Underhill appreciated May Sinclair’s support: “Yes, I knew your reading of the [Mystic Way] [would] involve the ele-

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ment of surprise but fully anticipated that it would also involve the element of disgust. . . . So I feel highly flattered & pleased that you were actually interested—but then you always are the most generous of appreciators to give me credit for about ten times more than I can ever manage to do.” 30 Yet, in contrast to Machen’s critique that she had left the Christian fold, she defended herself against the opposite charge from Sinclair, who apparently complained that the book was too exclusively Christian, and did not provide sufficient space for the self-emptying mysticisms of other traditions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. In responding, Underhill again turned to the idea of self-abnegating love as her touchstone. What is of central importance, she told Sinclair, is a tradition’s approach to self-sacrifice. “[S]elf-naughting is surely not the same for all mystics,” Underhill asserts. While “annihilation is one thing,” she explains, “the perfect self-surrender of love, which leaves personality intact & yet makes that personality an unresisting divine instrument, seems to me quite another thing—a rich, fruitful life-spending thing: & I cannot agree that the Hindu ideal is that.” To Underhill, Hinduism’s form of selfabnegation seemed an escape from full engagement with the realities of life and its suffering that she was after, much as, it might be said, the perspective of the Watcher in The Column of Dust failed in not understanding the importance of quotidian life in all its painful specificity. In an apparent reference to samadhi, or the process that leads to dissolution of the conscious self, Underhill tries to distinguish the goal of a Hindu practitioner from that of a Christian mystic, even as both talk about union with some sort of absolute reality: “The Xtian method of describing Union may be paradoxical & open to attack—yet I am convinced it’s nearer reality than any description, however logical, which involves total obliteration of the subject-object relation or the achievement of a point at which, as one Hindu philosopher explained to me with much pride, ‘the word love becomes meaningless.’” Admitting that the distinction she sought to draw is nuanced and “so elusive that every attempt to find a formula defeats itself,” Underhill frames the fruit of proper mysticism in terms of a self-sacrifice that is not a negation of individual existence, but rather direct engagement with everyday life. Her emphasis on “doing” provides a restatement of the physical, hands-on work celebrated in her novels. In writing to Robinson in 1907, Underhill asserted that “feeling must precede doing: but unless it finally results in doing, it is mere emotional satisfaction, of no value.” 31 Charles Williams cautions that, presumably as a result of von Hügel’s influence, Underhill later “came to distrust and dislike” The Mystic Way as presenting “‘false doctrine,’” finding in it and even in Mysticism “a tone, which she did not altogether mean even then, and of which she afterwards disapproved, of interior interpretation” that placed too much emphasis on the merely symbolic significance of Christian dogmas and miracles. 32 He may, however, have been working a bit too hard to protect

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Underhill’s Christian bona fides; he makes much, for example, of Underhill’s 1930 revision of Mysticism, pointing out Underhill’s admission in the preface that, were she writing Mysticism again, she would give more emphasis to “the predominant part played . . . by the free and prevenient action of the Supernatural—in theological language, by ‘grace’—as against all merely evolutionary or emergent theories of spiritual transcendence.” This recognition of a need for correction, however, underscores not only her initial investment in the efficacy of individual effort, but also the tension between the “given” and what might be called the “attained” that continued in her thought. It was a tension played out in her ongoing efforts to establish boundaries around proper mysticism, especially in contrast to magic, that never left behind an element of disciplined and even heroic effort. One apparent outcome of the controversy over The Mystic Way seems to have been the move toward greater accommodation of the institutional evidenced in her assessment of von Hügel’s Gifford Lectures. Significantly, her relationship with von Hügel was advanced through his pleased perception that by 1916 she had progressed from what he called “excessively mystical works” (including The Mystic Way) to a new emphasis on the “danger of the attempt to subordinate the historical to the symbolical or mystical.” 33 In articles prepared through the war years, Underhill did not set aside her understanding of Christ’s accomplishment as “mystic par excellence,” but tied it more closely with his identity as founder of the church. 34 She especially stressed the importance of the specific communal tradition by which a mystic was shaped in her tellingly titled 1915 article “Mysticism and the Corporate Life.” 35 For all her efforts to stress the value and even importance of an ongoing, and specifically Christian institutional structure for the mystic endeavor, however, her language, at least during this early period, gravitates often toward describing the church as conducive rather than essential to that task. The church provides the “body” that permits mysticism as the “soul of religion” to “fulfill its mighty destiny,” she wrote in “The Future of Mysticism” in 1918, since left untethered to an institutional expression, mysticism “tends to become strange, vague or merely sentimental.” An independent mystic sensibility does not, however, cease to be; the church, this article would indicate, is useful most in providing mystics with the structure of “a lofty moral code” and “strong sense of duty.” 36 Despite her vacillation, however, Underhill had sufficiently convinced herself of the importance of corporate structure to take the steps of rejoining the church in 1921, and of seeking a more formal relationship with the ecclesially committed von Hügel in 1922. Even as Underhill’s thought evolved through such relationships as von Hügel’s, and through her work as a spiritual advisor and retreat director, the core negotiation between individual effort and divine grace, between the individual and the communal church, and between Chris-

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tian pre-eminence and a more broadly defined universalism remained. The School of Charity (1934), a series of late meditations on the Nicene Creed prepared for one of her retreats, is a particularly strong demonstration of her development as a mature Christian thinker who is still balancing competing aspects of her thought. Somewhat atypically focused on church doctrine, the short book offers a ringing endorsement of Christian life rooted in the church as the shared Body of Christ. It acknowledges from the outset the multivarious spiritual context in which Underhill moved, as in her preface she encourages her readers to do “a little quiet home digging” in the spiritual resources of the Christian church, “instead of relying upon foreign imports, doubtfully labelled ‘Higher Wisdom,’ ‘Eastern Mysticism,’ and the rest.” 37 Drawing a distinction from the “empty” doctrine she had eschewed elsewhere, she describes the creed as “no mere academic document, no mere list of ‘dogmas,’” but rather as “an account of that which is; and every word it contains has a meaning at once universal, practical and spiritual with the particular experience of each soul.” 38 In committing to the Christian church, “[w]e make its Creeds, its solemn pronouncements regarding the essentials of Faith, our standard, trust them, take them seriously: not as a particular way of dealing with life—something happens to appeal to us—but as the way of dealing with life.” 39 Yet her approach still examines principal articles of the creed in terms of what they reveal of the lived experience of faith she always considers primary and prior to any doctrinal statement. It is because those creedal statements, as she interprets them, ring true to the nature of Christian life, in other words, that they speak with authority. “When Christians say the Creed,” she writes, “they say in effect, ‘This is what we believe to be the truth about existence; about God and the things of God, and so by implication about our own mysterious lives.’” 40 School of Charity’s focus in its central section on the incarnation of Christ similarly seems a departure from the generally theistic emphasis of much of Underhill’s thought. Yet what is most important about the incarnation for Underhill is what it reveals of God’s nature and God’s intimate communion with humanity. Underhill only obliquely addresses the idea of the incarnation and crucifixion as critical acts in a process of atonement, emphasizing instead this compassionate union of God with human nature. “Human beings are saved by a Love which enters and shares their actual struggle, darkness and bewilderment, their subjection to earthly conditions,” she explains. “By a supreme exercise of humility the deep purposes of God are worked out through man’s natural life with all its powers, humiliations, conflicts and sufferings, its immense capacity for heroic self-giving, disinterested love.” 41 As the ultimate expression of God’s sacrificial generosity—and with echoes of the “Christ as example” construction that permeated The Mystic Way—the incarnation presents a model for humans to emulate: “The immortal Figure of Christ, God’s pattern for humanity, stands over against life; and judges it by irradiating

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it. He sets the standard, shows what man is meant to be; revealing Himself in every demand on our generosity, however homely, and by that demand alone and our response to it separating the real from the unreal, the living from the dead.” 42 Given that model, love or compassion that is willing to engage with the world’s needs once more emerges as the defining characteristic of Christian life. The “true demand of religion,” she writes, “will never be a demand for correct behavior or correct belief; but for generosity, as the controlling factor in every relation between man and God and man and man.” 43 As has been expressed before, Underhill expects that life of generosity to be challenging. In proper response to the crucifixion, “there must always be something in this life which is the equivalent of the Passion and the Cross. Suffering has its place within the Divine purpose, and is transfigured by the touch of God. A desperate crisis, the demand for a total self-giving, a willingness to risk everything, an apparent failure, darkness and death—all these are likely to be incidents of a spiritual course.” 44 Christianity is thus “the manifestation in and through men of the self-spending Charity of God, and the binding together in one Divine Society of all who have been touched by that supernatural generosity and depend on its life-giving life.” 45 Underhill goes on to stress, on the one hand, that that Christian experience is fundamentally communal. “The incarnation of the Holy in this world is social,” she writes. “We are each to contribute our bit to it, and each to depend on the whole.” Rather than “the ardent individual devotee, the supposed recipient of special graces, ruled by special lights and experiences,” the “whole Body is the Bride of Christ.” 46 To find “true life,” she adds, “it is in this Body, at once mysterious and homely, that the individual Christian must consent to sink his life.” She calls for this commitment despite a well-informed sense of the limitations of the church as an institution, which, she admits, for an “enthusiast for ‘pure spirituality,’” may seem too characterized with “formalism and even frowstiness.” For such enthusiasts, “it seems far too stiff and institutional, too unventilated, to represent the generous and life-giving dealings of the Divine Charity with men. The chorus which exclaimed with awe and delight, “I believe in one God!” thins out a good deal when it comes to saying, “I believe in one Church!” On the other hand, her emphasis on a communal Body of Christ does not preclude individual, heroic effort. Her imagery, as always, reaches for the figure of a traveler out of doors, facing a hard slog through rough conditions: “If the road on which we find ourselves is narrow, with a bad surface and many sudden gradients, it is probably the right route,” she warns. 47 “Little wonder that the Christian must be sturdy about it; fit for all weathers, and indifferent to his interior ups and downs. Umbrellas, mackintoshes and digestive tabloids are not issued to genuine travelers. Comfort and safety-first must give place to courage and love, if we are to become—as we should be—the travelling agents of the Divine Charity.” And despite communal support,

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in the end each Christian traveler is on her own: “After a certain point the right road is marked ‘unfit for motors,’ and the traveler must go forward alone.” It is true that even the effort to model oneself on Christ’s example “is not truly our own,” she clarifies. 48 “It is the One God, indwelling in His deep humanity His little human creatures, Who stirs in us and initiates each movement of Charity.” In Underhill’s vision, “[t]he Spirit of Life stands alongside all those who are really living, making a genuine effort to stand up to the heroic obligations of the soul; not by those who value religion for its consolations, and treat their faith as a feather-bed.” 49 But, she adds, “[t]he energy of love will never do for us that which we ought to do for ourselves,” instead backing up “the creature’s efforts by its grace, coming into action just where our action fails.” These same themes and tensions emerge as foci of another of her later works, The Golden Sequence (1932), which Underhill described as “a personal little book” that draws together “the precipitation of my own thoughts, as they have moved to and fro during the last few years.” 50 In thanking Rufus Jones for his positive comments about the book, Underhill shared that The Golden Sequence meant more to her than any of her other books because it distilled “all I have come very gradually to think feel & know,” but also because “the actual writing of it had to be done in considerable mental and spiritual tension & suffering.” 51 Although the book again indicates ways in which Underhill had consciously moved her thought more in sync with traditional Christian theology, she admits to Jones that “the more rigid ecclesiastical mind finds it ‘unsafe,’” apparently because of her continued openness to the validity of mystic perception across religious traditions. “I know what you mean about the bit of religion we shall never share,” she writes. “But what does that matter? The glorious thing is the large bit we can’t help sharing—the Many Mansions bathed in the same Light.” In this compilation, Underhill continues the spirit-centered thrust of her earlier work, notably referring often to “God,” but relatively rarely to “Christ,” especially as compared to The School of Charity. When she does refer to Christ’s incarnation, it is most often offered again as the symbolic sign of the intimate intervention and presence of God in union with humans and the created order. Much as she would stress in her letter resigning from the spiritualism committee a few years later, Underhill seems most concerned with positioning mystic practice as a response to God’s initiating gesture. The result of her efforts to give sufficient weight to both sides of that cooperative process, however, again interweaves what God does and what the mystic is called to do, expressed primarily in the language of human endeavor. Little in her description of a human spirit responding to and orienting itself with that divine expression would necessarily be limited to a strictly Christian religious formulation. Underhill herself makes the point early in the book that neither her characterizations of God as “Spirit” (and so “ineffable and wholly supernatu-

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ral”), and as “our Heavenly Father” (and so in “direct relationship” with humans), is limited to Christianity: “All that they mean is already implied in the Psalms and the Prophets, and emerges in the deepest experiences of first-hand religion wherever found.” 52 Still, in a sign of her efforts to clarify her Christian allegiance, she goes on to claim, “each receives in Christianity a new expansion and richness of context.” Underhill uses the description “God is Spirit” to underscore the transcendence of God as a separate reality that chooses to intervene in the sensory world of human existence, but is not contained within it. She rejects the pantheism of which she had been accused as failing to acknowledge this element of divine distinctiveness. The Golden Sequence or Veni Sancte Spiritus, “the Church’s great hymn to the Spirit,” and the source of her book’s title, begins with the word “Come,” she notes, establishing the fundamental essence of God as separate from creation. 53 “It is true that the world is already ‘pregnant with God,’” she writes. “There is no place where God is not, no situation in which He is not there first; yet something from another dimension called the child Samuel, broke in upon the young Isaiah in the Temple, and on Saul on the Damascus road.” 54 Such language as “pregnant with God,” of course, still holds on to the idea that the transcendent God as “Spirit” is also the immanent God. Especially as Underhill turns to von Hügel’s description of his earliest sense of the world’s spiritual nature, the result for her theology seems at least a form of “panentheism,” in which God can be said to permeate creation, yet is not limited by creation’s extent. Von Hügel had described his perception as a child that nature was “‘penetrated and saturated by a Spirit distinct from what I saw, distinct from myself the seer,’” but also that “‘beautiful as the external nature was, God did not consist even in its full totality, but was a Life, an Intelligence, a Love distinct from it all, in spite of His close penetration of it all.’” 55 Underhill explains that “God is here a concrete Reality underlying all lesser realities; moulding, inspiring, and supporting His creation in every detail and at every point.” Yet, she observes, von Hügel also reminds of God’s close presence throughout creation: “So ‘God is Spirit’ guarantees religion both in its most transcendental and its most penetrating aspects: in its certitude of Presence and of purpose; in its passionate desire for purification, its incurable ‘otherness,’ its tendency towards the simple, the universal, the spaceless, which is yet the rich, the concrete, the Here.” 56 As in The School of Charity, Underhill offers the additional description of God as “Our Heavenly Father” to underscore the personal nature of that immanent intervention accomplished through the Holy Spirit. 57 The very intimacy of the relationship emphasizes a fundamental human dependency on a “personal Reality, which can and does make good the insufficiencies of a creature that emerges from the animal yet possesses a capacity for God.” 58 Underhill’s language indicates that she held on to her vision of both ordinary and extraordinary mystics straddling two

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realms that she first described in Mysticism. As Underhill’s reference to “a capacity for God” indicates, she understood humans as being particularly oriented to the world of the spirit, even as they exist in the world of sense, a dual characteristic she describes as being “amphibious,” and “a creature of the borderland ‘set between the unseen and the seen.’” 59 There is in humanity’s spiritual nature an inherent connection with God as Spirit that becomes clear “[w]hen we penetrate beyond the sensible,” she writes. “There is within us at least a crumb, a seed, which belongs already to the order of the timeless.” That seed cannot develop without the prior intervention of that Spirit, “cannot achieve its destiny, become fully real, without a gift from beyond itself.” But Underhill’s understanding of the process is of a cooperative effort in which both God and human play a part in a dance of “prayer and grace—prayer, the Godward movement of the soul; and grace, the manward movement of God’s Love.” 60 Despite her goal in The Golden Sequence of establishing God’s distinct pre-eminence, Underhill retains her conception of the human mystic as an active agent, turning once more to the heroism of both extraordinary exemplars and the ordinary individuals who follow their lead. “The saints, whose whole lives consist in a loyal and delighted response to God Present, are seldom easy-going optimists,” she observes. “Their humble steady consciousness of the reality of Spirit seems to bring a compensating sense of real dangers among which we live; and of the great spiritual energies which are hostile to the attainment of God.” 61 If the mystic relationship demands cooperation, therefore, it is cooperation requiring the highest effort by the human mystic: “On the one hand there is the constant acknowledgement of a solid and objective support given by the Immanent Holy to its feeble creatures. . . . On the other hand, there is the steady demand on the self’s own initiative and courage; on costly willing action, a total self-donation in the interests of Spirit, which may fulfill itself by way of homely self-denials or faithful unconsoled devotion, or may reach the summits of heroic sacrifice.” 62 Underhill seems to go so far as to suggest that salvation itself may be at stake in the process of progressively modeling oneself on Christ’s example. “Christ never represented salvation as something to be attained easily,” she observes. “Few, He thought, find the steep and narrow path which leads away from the ever-burning rubbish dump, and towards the austere victory of the Cross.” 63 Even more, human effort may itself participate in God’s salvific purpose, as the human soul, transformed through “co-operation with His grace,” is able to “take its part as the agent and tool of God in the redemptive action of the Holy on the world.” 64 The pre-eminence of the divine is not lost, she argues; in various ways, as in The School of Charity, she reiterates the underlying, and initiatory, support of the divine force in motivating the human mystic to the effort required. 65 And yet, paradoxically, language of modernity’s celebration of individual self-fulfillment mingles with language of depen-

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dence and “self-loss”: “The saints are not examples of limp surrender. In them we see dynamic personality using all its capacities; and acting with a freedom, originality and success which result from an utter humility, complete self-loss in the Divine life.” 66 Images of hiking and climbing, of course, appear as well. “Self-transcendence is a hard and heroic job,” she observes, often pursued “in the open under conditions of varying weather—dark wintry days, dry seasons, gales and fog.” Dependence on God’s grace, however, is key: “The mere habit of fortitude, the virtue of the hiker, slogging on after the first freshness is spent—even this essential disposition will hardly be established without the stimulus and the support of grace: still less, that ghostly strength which must carry the spirit safely over the most lonely and terrible stretches of the way.” 67 Even with that assistance, the mystic as mountaineer must resist the “natural life in all its fullness and charm” on the one hand, and the enticements of mere “spiritual consolations and experiences” on the other. 68 Instead, she cautions, “[t]he ascent to which he has been called is to the unseen summits of the Spirit; and that means the narrow way, the rock, the rope, and guide, and such a denudation of all preference and comfort, all softness, unreality and excess, as leaves him at last capable of giving all that Spirit asks, and receiving all that Spirit gives.” NOTES 1. Menzies, Biography of Evelyn Underhill, III, 11. Quoted in Greene, Underhill: Artist, 13. 2. Underhill, Mysticism, 4. 3. Underhill, 72. See Greene, Underhill: Artist, 52. 4. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 5. 5. Underhill, preface to Practical Mysticism, in Practical Mysticism and Abba, 7. 6. C. Williams, introduction to Letters, 32, 33. 7. Underhill letter, February 7, 1923, quoted by C. Williams, introduction to Letters, 33. 8. C. Williams, introduction to Letters, 32. 9. Underhill, Mysticism, 36. 10. Underhill, 37. 11. Underhill to M. Robinson, December 30, 1907, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 111–12. 12. Underhill to M. Robinson, February 17, 1909, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 144. 13. Underhill to M. Robinson, October 1, 1909, in C. Williams, Letters, 105. 14. Underhill to M. Robinson, February 7, 1911, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 181–82. 15. Underhill to M. Robinson, January 22, 1909, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 141–42. 16. C. Williams, introduction to Letters, 33. 17. Underhill to M. Robinson, Thursday night 1909, in C. Williams, Letters, 104. 18. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 54. 19. Underhill, “Finite and Infinite,” 224. She quotes from von Hügel’s lecture text “The Reality of Finites and the Reality of God.” See also C. Williams, introduction to Letters, 21. 20. C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 224–25. 21. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 64.

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22. C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 146. 23. Underhill to Horace Hutchinson, January 7, 1919, in C. Williams, Letters, 148. 24. See C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 192. 25. Zaleski, chronology in Practical Mysticism and Abba, xxxix. 26. Underhill to J. A. Herbert, March 30, 1913, in C. Williams, Letters, 142. 27. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 65. 28. Underhill to Miss Nancy Paul, Monday in Easter Week 1913, in C. Williams, Letters, 140. See also Greene, Underhill: Artist, 65. 29. Underhill to J. A. Herbert, March 30, 1913, in C. Williams, Letters, 141. 30. Underhill to May Sinclair, March 26, 1913, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 205–6. 31. Underhill to M. Robinson, May 30, 1907, in C. Williams, Letters, 67. 32. C. Williams, introduction to Letters, 18–19. 33. C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 190. Von Hügel to Underhill, June 26, 1916, quoted in C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 201. 34. See Underhill, “Mysticism and the Doctrine of the Atonement.” See also C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 191. 35. C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 191. 36. Underhill, “The Future of Mysticism.” Quoted in C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 204. See also C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 195–96. 37. Underhill, School of Charity, xiii. 38. Underhill, 5. 39. Underhill, 91. 40. Underhill, 4. 41. Underhill, 53. 42. Underhill, 72. 43. Underhill, 11. 44. Underhill, 54. 45. Underhill, 90. 46. Underhill, 92. 47. Underhill, 62. 48. Underhill, 72. 49. Underhill, 81. 50. Underhill, Golden Sequence, vii. 51. Underhill to R. Jones, January 6, 1933, in Poston, Making of a Mystic, 264–65. Underhill does not explain what difficulties she faced. 52. Underhill, Golden Sequence, 8–9. 53. Underhill, 18. 54. Underhill, 22. 55. Underhill, 9–10. 56. Underhill, 11. 57. Underhill, 32. 58. Underhill, 23. 59. Underhill, 45. 60. Underhill, 46–47. 61. Underhill, 107. 62. Underhill, 68–69. 63. Underhill, 107. 64. Underhill, 69. 65. Underhill, 70. 66. Underhill, 71. 67. Underhill, 86. 68. Underhill, 105.

SIX Gender, Class, and Mysticism

Underhill’s complex conception of mystic endeavor that mingled what her contemporary culture might identify as “masculine” values of effort with “feminine” values of passive acceptance drew her, perhaps unavoidably, into modern negotiations over the performance of gender and class. T. J. Jackson Lears sees a gendered trend in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century constructions of American male identity that distinguished between the “male” province of independent achievement, and passivity, often linked with interest in mysticism, dubbed “female.” 1 This was especially true, he asserts, if the latter was couched as a search for the “oceanic feeling” of undifferentiated union with the divine. Religious yearnings to “sink into a passive state of boundless union with all being” were nothing new, but acquired “new psychological and cultural significance” during the nineteenth century, as “[a]fflicted by a fragmenting sense of autonomous selfhood, late Victorians yearned increasingly for oceanic dependence—on the ‘great, everlasting currents’ of mind cure, on the sacraments of a nurturing mother church, on mystical union with God.” Such impulses, however, were only “half of a double consciousness” that also valorized the male preserve of self-directed action, for at the same time “they remained committed to nineteenth-century values of autonomous achievement and conscious control.” Lears acknowledges that competing pulls toward what were deemed masculine and feminine affected women as well as men, as, for example, in the home where Victorian women were expected to be subordinate to their husbands while also asserting “maternal strength.” 2 But, in the bourgeois culture of the fin de siècle, he maintains, this ambivalence was a specifically male burden: “To be engaged in practical affairs was to be in the world of men, where conscious control and autonomous achievement were most highly

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prized.” To turn away from such endeavors was to choose “the feminine sphere” of “passive leisure and emotional dependence.” To the extent that such gender categorizations may have been operative in British contexts, they fail to explain Underhill’s formulation of heroic mysticism. For her, “heroic” action lay primarily within the apparently passive context of contemplation, viewed precisely as a quest for a state of “inner oceanic repose.” Her description of the sought-after “unitive state” suggests the dissolution of the autonomous self in the boundlessness of the Absolute, as Lears relates. But as we have seen, her interpretation of the mystic quest approached that introspective experience as a nearly physical effort that, in the terms Lears describes, might be considered excessively masculine. Underhill’s own life was largely quiet, without outward experiences of “adventurous acts and deeds,” Greene observes. “The adventure here is the inner one, the conflict and reconciliation of mind and heart, the development of individual consciousness and its ultimate transcendence.” 3 Underhill had company in both her emphasis on mysticism’s effortful nature, and its relationship to extraordinary spiritual abilities of unusual individuals. William James, for one, similarly chose to study religion through the experiences of “great-souled persons,” or those “most accomplished in the religious life.” 4 He shared Underhill’s emphasis on the passion she saw as critical to mystic accomplishment, focusing on “individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever.” 5 Schmidt observes that “James imagined mystical experience as a way to unleash energy, to find the hot place of human initiative and endeavor, and to encourage the heroic, the strenuous, and the vital.” 6 Underhill’s familiarity with James seems one possible explanation for the overlapping imagery, though both may merely reflect the “muscular” flavor Schmidt sees as endemic to much writing on mysticism of the time: “The mystics were the great athletes of the spirit,” he asserts. “It would be ill conceived to think that James, [Rufus] Jones, and their wider liberal Protestant company domesticated, privatized, or feminized mysticism; instead, they did precisely the opposite.” Underhill’s mystic writings specifically engaged women with her strenuous terminology to an extent that could further confuse the gender assumptions Lears traces. Even as she led prayer retreats for the exclusively male Anglican clergy, she also gave retreats for laywomen, and her letters indicate that she attracted a particularly female following. By suggesting her own form of limited membership club, targeted not only but at least most effectively toward women, Underhill could be seen to advance the inclusion of women in a “modern masculinity” of worldly endeavor. The practice of mysticism according to her construction, in other words, might be understood as a “female” arena of endeavor that was not dismissively “feminine,” a recapitulation of wider cultural efforts to define a “New Woman” able to do such manly things as vote.

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The ambivalences in Underhill’s thought about mysticism, however, may build on and extend the reach of Lears’s model, even as it complicates his categories, by offering a potent example of female rather than male issues with identity. Through her advice to advisees, Underhill offers a picture of her own psyche as a modern woman torn between expectations (even if only her own) for achievement on the one hand, and the enticements of a mystic loss of self on the other. Particularly in her later career, she was something of an anomaly as a married woman who was also a public figure, and as the female director of male clergy in the spiritual arts that were their supposed professional sphere. A frequent appointee to church commissions, she often found herself the only woman among a membership of men. At the same time, for all her extraordinary success in gaining stature within male-controlled spheres, Underhill was still a middle-class woman produced largely by an Edwardian culture, intimated early on by her sacrifice of Catholicism partly in deference to her fiancé’s wishes. Her exclusion from the male privilege and professional identification provided by the academy or church may have granted “a certain freedom to examine unorthodox subjects and to give counsel to the fringes of these institutions,” Greene notes. “In her case marginality produced innovation and allowed for a certain protection.” 7 At the same time, Greene suggests the influences of assumed gender roles may have been a factor in Underhill’s readiness to doubt herself: “As a public person she had a strong self-image, but in her inner life she was dominated by a sense of her unworthiness and her failure to lead what she believed was a transformed life.” 8 Lears’s description of elite males who suffered from similar experiences of self-doubt, however, suggests that what Greene sees as a typically female “devaluation of self” may have been less gender-specific than either he or Greene assumes. Greene’s description of Underhill’s gender-driven engagement with the world via “relationship” may also reflect Underhill’s complex adoption of a modern, even “masculine,” stance of observation and experimentation pursued in “feminine” terms of human connection. In a formulation worthy of Bergson, Underhill determined early on that “the outer edges of experience are reached by . . . sympathetic imagination, an imagined participation with the subject,” Greene states. “From the time of her youth [Underhill] wanted ‘to cultivate a habit of observation and interest in everything,’ and to have a mind ‘wide to embrace all sorts of things’ and a ‘sense of one-ness with our kind.’ Identifying these values with ‘worthy womanhood,’ she inculcated them so deeply that they became a way of understanding reality.” 9 At the very least, Underhill’s emphasis on “active” mysticism fell within a broad pattern of mystic engagement with the world that Schmidt notes typified both male and female writers who rejected dismissals of mysticism as “ethicless”:

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Chapter 6 [Margaret] Fuller heralded the emancipatory potential of mysticism for women; [William] James sang the praises of saintly charity as a transformative social force; and [Rufus] Jones tirelessly insisted on the practical social implications of a revived mysticism. . . . Time and again, social-gospel Protestants were adamant about the inseparability of mysticism and political activism, religious experience and arduous saintliness, contemplation and efficiency, prayers and pickets. 10

Underhill’s own mystic practice developed into an active charitable involvement, especially following the encouragement of von Hügel that she counter her tendency toward “inwardness” with an appreciation of “outwardness” by working with the poor. Pragmatic engagement was for her a necessary component of mystic discipline, though admittedly pursued more along the lines of direct service than of picketing for social change. Despite the disruption and anguish she experienced during the First World War, for example, Underhill was supportive of the war effort in a variety of ways, including pursuing social work among the families of servicemen. 11 By the Second World War, this commitment led to her adoption of the seeming inactivity of pacifism, which she saw as the actual epitome of Christian action. Underhill’s preface to Practical Mysticism, published in the autumn of 1914, emphasizes the interconnections she drew between mysticism and a heroic involvement with the world suitable even for the advent of combat. She dedicated the work “to the unseen future,” and noted the timing of publication “in the first weeks of the Great War” in the preface’s opening sentence. 12 While she almost decided to postpone publication, concerned that her advocacy of mysticism might be seen as endorsement of an esoteric retreat from life, Underhill chose instead to underline the appropriateness of contemplation for times of struggle. Writing the preface as she did, “just after the first battle of the Marne, and two days before the Great War moved into the trenches, [Underhill] felt she must offer some justification,” Zaleski relates. “But the whole point of Practical Mysticism was to present mysticism as a heroic vision of life, involving a discipline as real, demanding, and fruitful as military training, like William James’s ‘moral equivalent of war.’” 13 Underhill points out that “the two women who have left the deepest mark upon the military history of France and England—Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale—both acted under mystical compulsion. So, too, did one of the noblest of modern soldiers, General Gordon.” 14 The title of her book, she notes, “means nothing if the attitude and the discipline which it recommends be adapted to fair weather alone, if the principles for which it stands break down when subjected to the pressure of events, and cannot be reconciled with the sterner duties of national life. To accept this position is to reduce mysticism to the status of spiritual plaything.” But, she continues, if mystic experiences truly do reveal “a world of higher truth and greater reality than the world of concrete happenings in which we seem to be im-

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mersed,” then the value of mysticism is “increased rather than lessened when confronted by the overwhelming disharmonies and sufferings of the present time.” 15 In fact, the historical record of mystical experiences from “periods of war and distress” suggests that “the stronger the forces of destruction appeared, the more intense grew the spiritual vision which opposed them.” War requires of mystics an expression of agency that encompasses action, resolve, and vitality, Underhill observes. Rather than engender a “selfish and other-worldly calm” that would isolate adherents from the nation’s communal pain, individual engagement in the spiritual life should feed into an all-important strengthening of the national soul through a “true patriotism” that would “keep the spiritual life, both of the individual citizen and of the social group, active and vigorous.” In another expression of complex positioning, the elitist aspect of her heroic mysticism may have contributed to her complicated relationship to the bourgeois status quo. Just as members of the Society for Psychical Research sought to distinguish their experimentation from unscientific quackery, and withdrew from the confusion of class and gender distinctions prevalent in popular séance situations, Underhill’s mysticism in subtle ways assumed boundaries at least of sensibility and sensitivity. Her efforts may have been devoted primarily to the agenda of bridging gaps between navel-gazing mysticism and active ethics, between “special career” and “practical life,” rather than in extending the mystic sorority or fraternity too far beyond middle-class society. It is at least difficult to know just how extensive were the bounds around her “normal people,” given her own privileged circumstances. Underhill’s father was a barrister, eventually knighted, who helped found the Royal Cruising Club. 16 An only child, she enjoyed annual trips of “high-society tourism” to France and Italy with her mother, 17 and, after her marriage, was supported in her writing by her husband. 18 At least one review of Margaret Cropper’s early biography of Underhill attacked Underhill for “cosiness, privilege, amateurishness, sloppy pseudo-mystical chit-chat over the teacups,” though Archbishop Ramsey defended Underhill, noting that “if there was a ‘cosy’ or ‘middle class’ tinge in her style and language the same may no doubt be said of St Francis de Sales and other spiritual guides.” 19 At the very least, Underhill’s prodigious output owed much to the leisure provided by her middle-class status. As Christopher Armstrong notes, “Lucy Menzies goes so far as to say that Evelyn Underhill ‘probably never boiled a potato in her life.’” 20 Underhill may have considered herself a Socialist when a young woman, “but politics were never a central interest for her; the drive toward inclusivity was expressed in other ways,” Greene states. 21 In a journal account written on the eve of her seventeenth birthday, Underhill called socialism “the only fair form of government,” since it “gives every class an equal status, and does away with the incentive to many sorts of crime.” 22 While presumably sincere (the young Underhill also reportedly tried to convert one of her

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father’s deckhands to socialism), 23 the couching of her political philosophy in terms of law and order suggests that Underhill’s negotiation of modernity was constrained, as was Sinclair’s, by her class parameters. If Underhill was restricted by her social situation, special merit is due any success she did have in breaking out of those limits. Greene notes that in at least one case Underhill developed an intimate relationship with Laura Rose, a “sickly young widow” from a “quite different economic background,” on the basis of their shared interest in the spiritual life. Although helping the poor would have been common for women of Evelyn’s circumstances, successfully crossing “the gap between the social classes was a unique achievement for that time.” 24 In any case, almost paraphrasing the thrust of Constance’s and Willie’s experiences, Zaleski summarizes Underhill’s primary concern as the transformation of “ordinary life,” even if that transformed ordinariness retained a middle-class tinge: “If ordinary life seems an unpromising terrain for spiritual progress, the fault lies with us; for ordinary life is in fact a terrible and enthralling adventure, and our failure to see it as such stems from our interior confusion and numbness.” 25 It is also interesting that in her novels, at least, Underhill translated mysticism’s active concern with the world into a sharp critique of middle-class culture. Constance’s true abilities as a mystic are closely allied with her genuine self-sufficiency and unconventionally progressive proclivities that reveal the hollowness of the supposed modernity of other, less adventurous women. Despite dabbling in occult theories and claiming to be “modern,” for example, Constance’s new middle-class acquaintances Phoebe Foster and Muriel Vince advocate “purity in wifehood,” which Muriel defines as “spiritual eugenics,” or the goal of bearing “one or two children of beautiful character,” and of shedding “an atmosphere of peace upon the home.” In one respect a liberated endorsement of female sexuality, their philosophy is perhaps more a call for female restraint: “‘One is obliged,’ [Phoebe] was saying, ‘to leave the static conception, the mere idle chastity, behind. Where, otherwise, would be Woman’s value to the race? The courtesan is a heretic; the nun is an atheist.’” 26 As an ideology, in any case, such purity appears oddly sterile in its apparent preference for the “chastity” side of things, despite the endorsement of some reproduction, leaving Muriel’s husband, Andrew, at least, dissatisfied. “[F]resh from the tossing current of the streets, the eager war with other brains which made up his daily work,” Andrew “felt that there was something chill and horrible in the peaceful grey light which came through the curtainless windows, the peaceful spaces of white walls and polished floor, and the arrogant prattle of these women who sat safely ensconced as in a fortress, protected from life and truth by the earnings of the men whom they despised.” 27 Certainly missing in this portrait of home life is evidence of the passion Underhill associated with true mystical aspiration. 28

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Constance’s situation also raises issues of class consciousness as her new intellectual friends initially allow their interest in her to offset their concern about the appropriateness of entertaining someone in “trade”: “Being in a shop, nowadays, is so very different,” said Phoebe. “Yes; but still, even now, a shop isn’t quite. It is books, you see. Rather a new idea, isn’t it? And rather a pity, I think. Of course, if it were hats, or old furniture, anyone would receive her.” 29

The continuation of the exchange reveals interesting depth as Underhill plays with the nuances of terminology, revealing again a distinction between her (and Andrew’s) understanding of the fullness of the word “woman,” with its potential for engaged presence, and the shallow understandings of the speakers: “I expect she is a lady; she certainly moves like one,” said another guest, who had been listening to the conversation. “Yes, I noticed that at once,” replied Muriel. Then, recollecting herself, she added hastily: “But at any rate she is a woman, which is of course a far greater thing.” “And rarer,” observed Andrew abruptly. All the ladies in his vicinity looked at him with as much surprise as if an infant in arms had made an intelligible remark. 30

In addition to contrasting the perspectives on femaleness of the women of leisure and Constance as a working woman, Underhill offers gender itself as fluid: Muriel’s son Felix and Constance’s daughter Vera present opposite, though reversed, depictions of assumed gender associations. Unlike the cruel Vera, who exhibits nothing like “feminine” sensitivity, Felix is “fair and languid,” with a “seraphic” smile, hair “a little too long,” and socks “a little too short.” The feminized Felix is the product of Muriel’s “modern” child-rearing technique that, influenced by the esoteric social group she frequents, eschews toys for activities such as the composition of “poetry and rhythmy things” conducive to developing inner spirit. In this instance, however, Underhill seems far from endorsing the reversal she has described. A nicer Vera would be an unquestionably good thing. And while Felix exhibits genuine “spiritual” perceptiveness, Underhill’s treatment endorses Andrew’s preference that Felix be raised “a man,” and sympathizes with Felix’s desire for a rocking horse, or to be taken to see a parade rather than to attend a lecture. Muriel explains, “He has his poetry-books and dancing and his singing-games; the newest authorities are agreed that those are the proper agents for the development of the subconscious mind. They awake the sense of joy, which has no rational relation to tin soldiers and mechanical ships.” To which Andrew responds, “Poor little beasts! It’s rather rough luck to be a modern child.” 31 For Underhill, it would seem, aesthetic sensibility improperly advanced can be as dangerous in its way as proper sensibility is necessary. Whatever their sexes, in any case, Underhill suggests, the emerging

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younger generation seems at risk of embodying modernity’s pitfalls of senseless violence (Vera) or effete dissociation (Felix). Although critical of Muriel’s and Phoebe’s particular presentation of the “modern” as “new,” however, The Column of Dust endorses a level of free-thinking that goes far beyond their postured feminism. Muriel’s theoretical elevation of female autonomy leads her to describe Christmas as “the celebration of a Birth—a fatherless Birth! Seen in the light of our modern concepts, it might well be the typical Feast of Womanhood!” 32 But her expansive opinions wreck on the shoals of Vera’s actual illegitimacy. Confronted by Constance’s confession that she is an unmarried mother, Muriel recoils: In her attitude towards both sin and religion, she had always exhibited that breadth of mind which is the prerogative of well-read inexperience. Now she remembered, for the first time after ten years of this intellectual freedom, that her father had been an archdeacon of the Established Church. Memory, in its most sardonic mood, reminded her of much that she had said in the interval concerning the pure nature of maternity and the unimportance of the sexual tie: but this did not mitigate the dreadfulness of a visitor—worse, an intimate—who confessed to the possession of an illegitimate child. 33

As Underhill goes on to observe, “unconventional opinions on such a subject are only decent in those who have never put them into practice.” Constance, meanwhile, tries to explain to Andrew why she chose to bear a child in terms of an Underhillian mystic’s vital engagement with existence: “‘Oh, because I longed for life!’ she said—‘for something actual and aboriginal; something that one could not alter by thinking about it. I was sick of thin theories and diluted dreams. I had been book-fed too long. I wanted to get down to the processes of creation; to take my turn.’” 34 The daring of Constance’s characterization is elevated by the further revelation that she pursued her impregnation by soliciting an unknown man. “What do I care who my child’s father may be?” she says. “What does he do in it? Starts the machinery which ends in birth. His part is over then, and I’m left in charge of the race. Rights of woman? Haven’t we got them? Do we not stand side by side with God and share the very pangs of creation?” 35 If she defines her life project within the biological determination of being able to give birth, she at least claims that as a specific endorsement of female participation in life. Constance’s choice to take matters into her own hands also reveals another element of class considerations. “What man of my own class, what being on the upward grade, would have done that which I asked? Would you?” she asks Andrew. “No; you would have talked about chivalry, and left me to find a navvy to father my child.” 36 Although friends with both Muriel and her husband, Constance also displays interest in Muriel bordering on romantic, a crush that heightens

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the risk of loss in revealing her past but also pushes the parameters of heterosexual binaries. Underhill does not specifically sexualize the relationship, but makes Constance’s desire for Muriel clear. 37 It seems noteworthy that, beyond making the infatuation a factor in the potential cost for Constance, Underhill does not make an issue of it, presenting Constance’s attraction to Muriel as simply the case. After she reveals the truth of Vera’s birth, Constance’s shunning by most of her new friends and, as she predicted, her dismissal from her job again confirm the tenuousness of modernity’s supposedly enlightened opinions. In The Gray World, Willie’s final situation of living in unmarried alliance with Hester presents a similarly counter-cultural denouement. The scenario of the couple occupying neighboring rural cabins while Hester pursues painting, and Willie the craft of bookbinding, is presented by Underhill as bohemian. Whether the relationship is platonic or not is never clarified, but whatever the case, Willie’s life choice offends at least one defender of respectability, his mother’s friend, Mrs. Steinmann: “And what upsets me,” continued Mrs. Steinmann, “is the risks that he must run. He was always delicate: and out in all weathers, with no one to see that he changes his boots! Cooking for himself, too; and one knows what that means—chronic dyspepsia for a certainty, if not gastritis. It’s really a mercy that his poor mother died before this happened; it would have killed her, for he was always her favorite. And then, as I said to Pauline, what sort of a place do people of that kind live in? Some horrible little hovel, I suppose, with windows that won’t open at the top; and ten to one the drains have never been inspected.” 38

In Underhill’s hands, Willie’s move to the country is both “conservative” in elevating a pastoral lifestyle, and “progressive” in seeking some better alternative to the given reality. As Lears frequently notes, it would be far from the only time that “dissent from modernity paved the way for modernity.” 39 Indeed, in Lears’s terms, the “artistic search for new structures of thought and expression” pursued by Willie—and by Underhill as well—could be their own examples of the romantic turns of “the ‘modernism’ which was so often a protest against the evasive banality of modern culture.” 40 Despite her disdain for the class consciousness of Constance’s friends, and her challenge to bourgeois values in both books, however, it must be acknowledged that in Willie’s case Underhill stops short of a full-fledged class critique. Mrs. Steinmann is certain Willie will be considered “a socialist,” but in truth he poses little threat to capitalism. Though disappearing from society to live with nature and Hester, he takes his annual one hundred pound allowance with him. 41 While a walking critical commentary on the bourgeois standards in which he finds himself, he is as dependent on his social situation as Underhill was for the leisure to pursue his spiritual quest. Willie remembers being dead, but does not seem

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to remember his earlier lower-class standing, at least not in ways that might have provided an additional corrective to the middle-class assumptions operating in the Hopkinson (and presumably Underhill) households. The resolution of his plight is also finally the self-absorbed independence of artistic production, rather than the communally engaged righting of social wrongs. In making a similar assault on bourgeois values, Mary Webb will draw on more of a consciousness of class distinctions, though even she seems finally enamored with some of the middleclass values she critiques. And Underhill’s entertainment of culturally alternative male-female arrangements stops short of embracing adultery. When Mrs. Levi, Willie’s early counselor in spiritual matters, suggests that a physical relationship “might become for us the symbols of transcendental mystery” because their heightened spiritual awareness makes them “independent of all the silly regulations of the world,” Underhill depicts Willie’s demurral as an escape from true evil. 42 She, in fact, offers the exchange as illustrative of a potential dark side to the mystical quest. In the pause in which Willie is considering his response, the “silence was strong and dangerous: more dangerous than all the subtleties of speech. There was distilled from it some violent impulse; morbid, evil, unspeakable. Willie knew now of pleasures more piercing than the common things of sense, and of the obscure temptations which come to those who have tried to live altogether in the spirit.” 43 In The Lost Word, Underhill also endorses married domesticity as at least a potential alternative road to spiritual fulfillment. One of the factors limiting the novel’s success, however, is her apparent ambivalence about the cost. Having built up the value of Paul’s austere dedication to the perfect forms, Underhill must allow that his failure to fulfill his vision constitutes real loss. There may be some rationalization of her own life choices at work in Paul’s and Catherine’s decisions to embrace the mutual love they feel through married domesticity, but if so, that rationalization communicates a certain sadness. As the novel concludes, Paul recognizes that in setting aside his goal of “Spiritual Chastity,” he has discovered another lofty goal of “Sacrifice.” Underhill continues: He left the church then, locked the door, and turned towards home: setting his face, once for all, towards the steady years of professional duty, domestic affection, material profit, and spiritual loss which lay between him and the journey’s end. What would arrive there, he wondered? Imperfect angel or successful architect? Neither, perhaps: but, if he could contrive it, a completed man. He crossed the gravelled court, passed the Feltham Reading-rooms, looked up at their green shutters, copper hinges, and fantastic eaves. From under one gable a heart-shaped ventilating hole winked at him with approval. Its demeanour suggested that his programme, however strange it might appear from the point of view of artist or mystic, could

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not fail to be satisfactory to the honest, wholesome sentiments of the British race. But there was little time for meditation: would be in all the future little time. It was already half-past eight; breakfast would be waiting. He recollected that Catherine was now a wife; worse, a housewife. She would not like the bacon to get cold. 44

Underhill sums up: “His angels laughed a little at this: but there was an accent of pity in their laughter.” Nevertheless, the adventurousness of the protagonists Underhill imagines, who are able to strive for the perfect forms, yet willing to set that endeavor aside for love (in Paul’s case), to arrange a pregnancy and summon a spirit (in Constance’s case), and to reject expectations of socio-economic status (in Willie’s case), remain concrete examples of the heroic effort in the service of compassion that Underhill saw as necessary for mysticism’s pursuit. CONCLUSION In the end, Underhill’s development as a Christian mystic depended on an ongoing negotiation of mingled issues of personal heroism, social critique, and mystic self-definition in the context of a hard-won and slowly adopted appreciation for institutional religious structure. It also required seeking a new balance between the “reaching up” of mystic agency, and the “being reached” of mystic release. While partly the product of a selfcritical personality, her construction of a strenuous mystic discipline was a legacy of her early attraction to the occult and the continued purview of “magic” in her mystic thought. Despite her efforts to distance herself from what she called the “getting” of magic, it was much harder to separate out the element of practice in both magic and mysticism. Hovering in the background of her assertions of ultimate reliance on divine grace, was the inescapable reality that mysticism, like magic, was something someone did. The emphasis on effort was also in part the result of Underhill’s attraction to Christian mysticism through the avenue of experience rather than doctrine. In this the papal encyclical was at least accurate in its assessment of the mindset Underhill shared, whatever judgment might be made about the validity of the accompanying condemnation. As a Modernist in this instance, Underhill was indeed modern in her reliance on empirical evidence, even if that evidence was found in the internal world of consciousness rather than the external world of sensory data. If anything, her bouts of doubt about her construction of mysticism intensified her drive to set as firm an empirical foundation to her process of mystical accomplishment as she could. Even when urged by von Hügel to focus on the faithful abandonment of self, a process of “letting go” that might relieve her uncertainty, she was a resistant learner.

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As her engagement with Christianity, and specifically Anglo-Catholic Christianity, increasingly provided the framework she needed for her mystical speculations, however, the Christology that she so strongly resisted was gradually communicated through the (for her) novel notion of unconditional acceptance. Von Hügel’s role was critical in his emphasis on God’s self-giving, as he rejected, for example, Underhill’s language of seeking a “half-way house between oneself and God.” Rather, he argued, an infant “does not feel its mother’s breast a half-way house, a queer, artificial intermezzo between itself and its mother.” 45 In a 1922 letter that von Hügel took quite seriously, and that several biographers have spotlighted as marking a pivotal shift in emphasis, Underhill confronted her despairing sense of unworthiness. “Only Christianity,” she told von Hügel, could meet her “agonizing need” by “coming right down to one in the dust. . . . Plotinus can never have had to face his own beastliness. Neo-Platonism goes to bits when one gets really to the bottom and knows oneself unmendably displeasing to God.” 46 Her sense of finding herself in the “dust,” itself a corrective to her emphasis on elevating experience, in turn fed her evolving understanding of the “givenness” of a relationship with God, and increasing acceptance of the assistance of religious community. Despite her experience of hitting bottom, however, the realization that this must translate into her own assimilation by a Christian denomination was still typically subject to her continuing and balancing emphasis on the personal and experiential. Nothing entirely offset the “oscillations” von Hügel cautioned her about, at least as expressed through a certain doubleness of vision. 47 Certainly her allegiance to the Anglican Church and her increased emphasis on the importance of a specific spiritual community did not eliminate continued belief in the generic nature of a mystic sensibility, demonstrated strikingly in her 1925 The Mystics of the Church. While not in this instance casting a universalizing net that would accommodate the “base metal” of all religions (though also not ruling that out), the collection of biographical sketches does assume a shared foundation to widely divergent Christian mystical experiences. 48 Even as she chose to step into the house of Christian liturgical practice and discipline, therefore, Underhill’s belief in the ubiquity of a common mystic sensibility left the windows and doors open. Conceived to the end largely as a partnership between the heroic mystic and the nurturing church, furthermore, Underhill’s adoption of a corporate home assumed the church’s need for the mystic as much as the mystic’s need for the church. Underhill’s move to bring her free-ranging conception of the mystic life of autonomous agents within the structure of the institutional church represented one possible response to the challenging freedom of her modern moment. In an act of reclamation, she recast a traditional structure to produce a workable framework for the modern and individual quest of self-

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definition. For her friend May Sinclair, on the other hand, being true to that quest required setting the church aside altogether. NOTES 1. Lears, No Place of Grace, 218–19. 2. Lears, 221. 3. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 3. 4. James, Varieties, 7, 5. 5. James, 9. 6. Schmidt, “Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” 292. 7. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 149. 8. Greene, 149–50. 9. Greene, 48. 10. Schmidt, “Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” 293. 11. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 68. 12. Underhill, preface to Practical Mysticism, in Practical Mysticism and Abba, 3. 13. Zaleski, preface to Practical Mysticism and Abba, xxii–xxiii. 14. Underhill, preface to Practical Mysticism, in Practical Mysticism and Abba, 5. Underhill apparently did not share Lytton Strachey’s less sanguine assessments of the characters of Nightingale and Gordon in his Eminent Victorians, published later in the war. 15. Underhill, 4–5. 16. Zaleski, preface to Practical Mysticism and Abba, xiii–xiv. 17. Zaleski, xviii. 18. Zaleski, Chronology in Practical Mysticism and Abba, xxxvi–xxxvii. 19. Christopher Armstrong, introduction to Evelyn Underhill, xviii. Ramsey, foreword to Christopher Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, x. 20. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 95. 21. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 9. 22. Cropper, Evelyn Underhill, 5. 23. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 12. 24. Greene, Underhill: Artist, 84. 25. Zaleski, preface to Practical Mysticism and Abba, xxiii. 26. Underhill, Column, 4–5. 27. Underhill, 49–50. 28. Underhill, Mysticism, 72. 29. Underhill, Column, 83. 30. Underhill, 83. 31. Underhill, 56. 32. Underhill, 249. 33. Underhill, 251. 34. Underhill, 257. 35. Underhill, 259. 36. Underhill, 256. 37. When Constance first meets Muriel, she “glanced at the new customer, and was at once wholly subjugated by her appearance; being one of those women for whom the crucial encounter and the overmastering appeal must always come from one of her own sex. As she put it to herself, men were interesting animals, but women mattered most. This brilliant, young, absurd, self-conscious creature, with her serene expression, embroidered dress and artistically unusual hat, was like a pretty novelty suddenly exhibited in the shop-window of life. She revived Constance’s drooping belief in the resources of the establishment; so that she at once became interested, wanted the delightful thing, and did not stop to ask the price.” Underhill, Column, 70. Underhill

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continues, “At this moment [Constance] felt a desperate need of something to fall in love with; something that would restore her lost confidence in the world of sense; and Muriel, being both silly and pretty, seemed specially adapted to this purpose.” Underhill, 71. And again, “To her, this was but the renewal of an experience which had been constant in her girlhood. That feverish and bewildering period, in which the sonorous rhythms of the classics that she wished to love had seldom succeeded in drowning the throb of life that exasperated her nerves and confused her brain, had been characterized by the savage and shamefaced emotion which she poured out, unasked, at the feet of certain chosen women. Her attitude towards them, always shy and always passionate, was seldom appreciated and never understood.” Underhill, 100. Finally, in her nervousness before confessing about her daughter, Constance “also wished to kiss Muriel before it was for ever too late.” Underhill, 248. 38. Underhill, Gray World, 342–43. 39. Lears, No Place of Grace, 167. 40. Lears, 167. 41. Underhill, Gray World, 342. 42. Underhill, 313, 312. 43. Underhill, 314. 44. Underhill, 315–16. 45. See C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 211. Also Cropper, Evelyn Underhill, 79. 46. Underhill to von Hügel, midsummer 1922. Von Hügel–Underhill Collection. Quoted in Greene, Underhill: Artist, 87. Christopher Armstrong, who quotes the same letter, notes that the letter manuscript shows von Hügel’s pencil notations as he marked the “sections and phrases upon which to base his reply.” The precipitating event for the letter was Underhill’s “attempt to confess in the Holy Week of 1922 when her self-torment led her to make a general confession to, as it happened, an evidently unsuitable and obtuse priest who ‘devoted his time to smashing me up.’ Nothing she realised afterwards but Christianity could redeem one in such a state of degradation as she then felt herself to be in.” C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 210. 47. See C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 212. 48. See also C. Armstrong, 226–29.

II

May Sinclair’s Erotic Mysticism

May Sinclair (1863–1946) Source: May Sinclair Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

SEVEN Language and the Lure of Idealism

Even more directly than Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair found the question of agency a recurrent spur for exploring the self-determined, creative, and ultimately mystical engagement of an individual with her world. If it is possible, in fact, Sinclair may have outdone Underhill in assuming the centrality of personal effort in the creation (especially by women) of not only a modern, liberated stance that might achieve mystical apprehension, but an individual identity at all. Especially as she employed an eroticized mysticism to negotiate the complicated terrain of human interrelation, Sinclair embodied her modern moment’s anxiety about the place of the individual within broader matrices of influence that might advance or threaten autonomy. Although Sinclair, much like Underhill, conceived of the mystic exercise of personal will as an alliance with a greater “divine” will, she decried social coercion’s threats to the individual and avoided the entanglements of sexual intimacy. Like Underhill, she propounded a sweeping evolutionary process of spiritual advancement in which individual mystic development fed into progress for the human species. At the same time, she also feared the binding determinism of heredity. Despite her belief in the potential of such paranormal phenomena as telepathy to bring communion between individuals, she worried about the dangers of psychic intrusion into permeable consciousness. Sinclair’s allegiance to mysticism was modern, in other words, in both its hopes and its fears. Her pursuit of a connection to something “more” was motivated by desire—for control and influence in an uncontrollable world; for connection and participation in the face of increasing fragmentation; and yet conversely, for carefully delineated boundaries of identity that could resist dissolving and penetrating threats to the integrity of the self. Her belief in the channeled creative force of a disciplined, sublimat95

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ed volition fed an engagement with productive personal purpose that was more than merely theoretical. Her choice of a life as a single artist was driven in particular by her investment in a personal vocation that was self-discovered, self-developed, and aggressively defended. Such a personally oriented life discipline, with its potential for profound if solitary mystic perception, was, however, also self-denying. Her investment in the psychological concept of sublimation could translate in practical terms into “willing” to give up “wanting,” and a belief that such sacrifice of her desires was necessary for the ultimate merger of her personal will with the wider will. Sinclair avoided total allegiance to any of the intellectual trends and fads of the new century, but, like Underhill, was engaged in conversation with a range of philosophical and psychological schools, from Bergson’s concept of élan vital with its recasting of Schopenhauer’s nineteenth-century language of “the Will,” to the emerging theories of Freud and Carl Jung. She participated in the intellectual flux of her time in other ways as well. Her early rejection of Christianity and advocacy of a creedless social ministry carried her beyond even Underhill’s universalist tendencies and joined her to a modern restlessness that sought spiritual satisfaction outside the limits of traditional religious institutions. Her fiction’s exploration of mystical and even ghostly themes, and her skeptical but intrigued interest in psychical experimentation reflected the same contemporary preoccupations with alternative states of consciousness that drew Underhill into her early occult involvement. And she was particularly engaged by the “magic” of technological and scientific exploration, seeing newly opened doors—and new challenges—for the development of the individual in the progress of modern innovation. Sinclair thus possessed the curiosity to entertain multiple possibilities of the “new,” as well as the self-assurance to assert her own positions in such extended philosophical apologetics as A Defence of Idealism (1917) and The New Idealism (1922). The first to apply the psychological construct of stream of consciousness as a literary term in her 1918 review of Dorothy Richardson’s novels, Sinclair experimented herself with modernist literary forms of “singular interiority” in at least Mary Olivier: A Life (1919) and Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), and showed intimations of the technique in her earlier A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915). Lionized as a literary figure in both the United States and England after the best-selling success of The Divine Fire (1904) and other conventional novels, she championed such avant-garde movements as imagism, and such young definers of modernism as H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), F. S. Flint, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. 1 Frequently linked by later commentators with her compatriot D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair’s sexual frankness was capable of shocking, at least in the face of more prudish standards early in her career, and she participated both in person and in print in the call for women’s suffrage. 2 In the preoccupation of her fiction with the success-

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ful, or unsuccessful, efforts of women to establish autonomous positions free from the psychological strictures of parents or the cultural limitations of society, she may have merely extended the Victorian-era concerns of such authors as her particular favorites, the Brontë sisters. 3 Still, the ways her fiction pushed the boundaries of accepted sexual and vocational identities, and probed the resources of psychoanalytic theory, reveal a modern sensibility attuned to unprecedented opportunities for understanding and achieving a “self.” Focusing on a period just after Underhill’s 1911 publication of Mysticism, I will pay closest attention to selected works Sinclair wrote before, during, and shortly after the war, including especially her novella The Flaw in the Crystal (1912); A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915), her memoir of time spent with an ambulance corps in Belgium; her largely autobiographical novel Mary Olivier: A Life (1919); and her novel A Cure of Souls (1924), an excoriating character study of an Anglican priest. In addition, I will consider the supernatural framing of her series of ghost or horror stories collected in Uncanny Stories (1923) and The Intercessor and Other Stories (1931). Sinclair’s first published prose work (other than essays for her college journal, the Cheltenham Ladies College Magazine) was prophetic in its concerns. With “The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism,” printed in The New World of December, 1893, Sinclair engaged the combination of humanistic and mystical strains in the philosophy of T. H. Green that her own work would echo. Her early attraction to Spinoza had initiated her into the principles of idealist monism that Green reinforced, and that she would develop herself in A Defence of Idealism and The New Idealism. 4 The similarities to themes in Sinclair’s fiction at least are clear in Hrisey D. Zegger’s description of Green’s philosophy: In contrast to utilitarianism, which tended to be materialistic, hedonistic, and nonhierarchical, Green regarded man’s spiritual nature, his consciousness, as primary; he viewed the universe as being divinely ordered and hierarchical, a manifestation of God’s consciousness to which man is related by his own consciousness; and he considered the primary ethical category to be man’s self-realization, the need for man and for society to help man reach his best and highest nature. 5

Zegger points to Sinclair’s parallel belief in a divinely ordered universe, and in the human ability to “touch” that divinity through realization of a “highest self.” Green was pantheistic in his quasi-mystical description of a God-infused cosmos. 6 Sinclair’s interest in self-realization, either as simply an individual ego, or, as Green advocates, a more highly developed consciousness, was likewise often expressed through mystical language that tended toward pantheism. 7 Sinclair also favored Green’s thought in subscribing to non-traditional spiritual systems focused on practical social service, rather than doctrine, laid out perhaps most clearly

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in her post-war novel A Cure of Souls. 8 Sinclair wrote in her article on Green that idealism’s influence was apparent in the rise of socialist thought, specifically in the “conception of the brotherhood of man that underlies the prominent socialistic ideal.” 9 Sinclair’s engagement with idealism would play out through what she understood to be mystic perception of “absolute reality” in moments of heightened awareness of an “illuminated” landscape of intense color and radiant light. Sinclair follows Underhill’s emphasis on the evidence of personal experience, and seems to echo Underhill’s language about the inherently spiritual nature of humans, as she concludes A Defence of Idealism with reference to the “certain” knowledge such moments provide: But lovers and poets and painters and musicians and mystics and heroes know them: moments when eternal Beauty is seized traveling through time; moments when things that we have seen all our lives without truly seeing them, the flowers in the garden, the trees in the field, the hawthorn on the hillside, change to us in an instant of time, and show the secret and imperishable life they harbour; moments when the human creature we have known all our life without truly knowing it, reveals its incredible godhead; moments of danger that are moments of sure and perfect happiness, because the adorable Reality gives itself to our very sight and touch. 10

If not directly pantheistic, such celebrations of hyper-awareness suggested something close to it in describing a physical world permeated with a usually obscured divinity. In Mary Olivier, such rare but repeated epiphanies accompanied by deep joy are key to Mary’s maturation, especially in legitimating her artistic commitment and idealist philosophy. 11 Mary’s initial vision as a seven-year-old child in which “she saw the queer white light for the first time” and “knew that the fields were beautiful” leaves her suddenly “so happy that she could hardly bear it.” 12 Similarly, the description of Mary’s adolescence begins with her experience of a “sudden, secret happiness” that “had something to do with the trees standing up in the golden white light. It had come before with a certain sharp white light flooding the fields, flooding the room.” 13 Sinclair, who liked The Gray World so much that she gave it as a Christmas present, bases her bildungsroman of Mary Olivier on a similar tension between images of grayness and death on the one hand, and of light and life on the other. 14 She appears to have Underhill’s novel in mind, for example, when she uses grayness to describe the influences of bourgeois hypocrisy from which Mary, like Willie, is trying to free herself. The images Sinclair offers for Mary’s moments of heightened vision are likewise frequently associated with the same mystic sensibility Underhill presents in all three of her novels. Mary has her visions of transformed landscapes just as Willie intermittently perceives the hidden but constantly present world of spirits, Constance in The Column of Dust sees her Shining Tree,

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and Paul in The Lost Word feels himself elevated into the realm of pure form. Seven years before writing Mary Olivier, Sinclair described such heightened perception of nature in “The Flaw in the Crystal,” a story of supernatural healing. There the mystic Agatha Verrall experiences an unexpected and instantaneous change in her rural surroundings: All the appearances of things, their colours, the movement and the stillness remained as if constant in their rhythm and their scale; but they were heightened, intensified; they were carried to a pitch that would have been vehement, vibrant, but that the stillness as well as the movement was intense. . . . She would have said now that the earth at her feet had become insubstantial, but that she knew, in a flash, that what she saw was the very substance of the visible world; live and subtle as flame; solid as crystal and as clean. It was the same world, flat field for flat field and hill for hill; but radiant, vibrant, and, as it were, infinitely transparent. 15

Asked to write about the story for The New York Times Review of Books, Sinclair focused on its description of psychic healing, apparently assuming the references to heightened awareness of a luminous reality required no explanation or defense. 16 Even more directly, if somewhat less dramatically, she would relay her own experience of “heightened reality” without the mediation of a fictional character in her A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, which was based on the diary she kept during seventeen days with an ambulance corps in the early weeks of the war. She described the war’s trauma in constant tension with a mystically resonant natural beauty, revealed in the terminology of sublime or ecstatic moments. During the corps’s drive to Ghent on the first day in Belgium, she relates: We pass low Flemish houses with white walls and red roofs. Their green doors and shutters are tall and slender like the trees, the colours vivid as if the paint had been laid on yesterday. It is all unspeakably beautiful and it comes to me with the natural, inevitable shock and ecstasy of beauty. I am going straight into the horror of war. For all I know it may be anywhere, here, behind this sentry; or there, beyond that line of willows. I don’t know. I don’t care. I cannot realize it. All that I can see or feel at the moment is this beauty. I look and look, so that I may remember it. 17

One of Sinclair’s earliest moments of tension in establishing her credentials as a bona fide member of the ambulance team involves an accusation that she is acting frivolously like a tourist during the group’s first full day in Ostend by sneaking off to see a cathedral. Combined in her account, therefore, are on the one hand an ongoing issue of voyeurism, presented first as a charge of tourism, and later as Sinclair’s disconcerting attraction

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to the war’s trauma as spectacle, and, on the other hand, this more positively presented call for Sinclair to “see” perceptively. 18 As the evocative use of descriptive language indicates, Sinclair’s exploration of moments of connection with her much-desired greater reality played out in the form as well as the content of her writing. As her writing evolved, she found such modern literary techniques as stream of consciousness and the movement of imagism especially conducive to describing the interior landscapes and visionary perceptions she wanted to convey. In rehearsing concepts promulgated by T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound in a defense of imagism, Sinclair stressed the coincidence between “the thing and its image,” explaining that “what the imagists are ‘out for’ is direct naked contact with reality.” 19 In Sinclair’s words, an imagist poet seeks to overcome the boundary between subject and object by becoming “what Schopenhauer called ‘der rein anschauende Subject,’ the pure perceiver”; in tracing her philosophical development, the young Mary specifically celebrates Schopenhauer’s theory of pure perception: There was Schopenhauer, though. He didn’t cheat you. There was “reine Anschauung,” pure perception; it happened when you looked at beautiful things. Beautiful things were crystal; you looked through them and saw Reality. You saw God. While the crystal flash lasted “Wille und Vorstellung,” the Will and the Idea, were not divided as they are in life; they were one. That was why beautiful things made you happy. 20

As Sinclair puts it in almost Bergsonian terms, both imagism and stream of consciousness use “concrete images” to seek direct access to reality, and to avoid presenting a “passion, emotion, or mood” as “an abstraction.” Thus, in writing about Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Sinclair stresses the “immediacy” of stream of consciousness as compared to an “objective” method. “What we used to call the ‘objective’ method is a method of afterthought, of spectacular reflection,” Sinclair writes. “The first-hand, intimate and intense reality of the happening is in [the protagonist] Miriam’s mind, and by presenting it thus and not otherwise Miss Richardson seizes reality alive.” 21 The language Sinclair attributes to Mary is both descriptive and metaphoric, but likewise accomplishes on occasion the conjoining of concrete image and consciousness, as when Mary’s random thought associations around the word “wool” sum up her sense of her controlling family life, and especially of the Christian religion imposed by her mother: “Wool-gathering. Gathering wool. The room was full of wool; wool flying about; hanging in the air and choking you. Clogging your mind. Old grey wool out of pew cushions that people had sat on for centuries, full of dirt. Wool, spun out, wound round you, woven in a net. You were tangled and strangled in a net of unclean wool.” 22

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It might be hard to determine which was the stronger pattern of influence, in fact: Sinclair’s interest in imagism on her particular approach to idealism, or her affinity for idealism on her attraction to imagism. In either case, the characteristics attributed to imagism seem to have been remarkably adaptable to her emphasis on the immediacy of mystic perception. 23 With her own excursions into imagist language, Sinclair offers such stark and fragmentary windows on Mary’s mind as this description: “Burnt patches. Tongues of heather, twisted and pointed, picked clean by fire, flickering grey over black earth. Towards evening, the black and grey ran together like ink and water, stilled into purple, the black purple of grapes.” 24 And such language overlaps, even coincides with the fragmented language used to relate Mary’s moments of mystic perception, offered primarily as impressionistic accounts of the transformation of physical scenes. Thus, Mary’s first moment of heightened apprehension, excerpted earlier, begins: A queer white light everywhere, like water thin and clear. Wide fields, flat and still, like water, flooded with the thin, clear light; grey earth, shot delicately with green blades, shimmering. Ley Street, a grey road, whitening suddenly where it crossed open country, a hard causeway thrown over the flood. The high trees, the small, scattered cottages, the two taverns, the one tall house had the look of standing up in water. 25

With such language, the combination of stream of consciousness and imagism continued and perhaps advanced the emphasis of Sinclair’s idealism on the precedence of consciousness over sensory perception, even as that perception served as a vehicle for the experience. In an echo of Underhill’s assumptions about the limits of sensory knowledge, Sinclair wrote to Catherine Dawson Scott: “Everything has to come through some recorder. Not even in life do we get direct contact with any object; only with our consciousness of the object or event.” 26 In her essay on Richardson, Sinclair calls for setting aside distinctions between “realism and idealism, or objective or subjective art” as “clichés” that miss “the new trend of the philosophies of the twentieth century.” 27 Zegger sees the affinity of stream of consciousness with Sinclair’s concurrent use of imagism as one foray within a broad array of efforts by early twentiethcentury authors to “capture or to get closer to reality” after the perceived failures of naturalism “to get at reality.” 28 Sinclair thus demonstrates again her position as a transitional figure, drawing on Neoplatonic assumptions about epistemological limits, and on modern skepticism about sensory access to “reality,” in ways that led into a more complex blurring of subjective boundaries. She extended this blurring even further through the use of multiple perspectives. The shifting between first-, second-, and third-person points of view that marks Mary Olivier (and that Sinclair had employed earlier in her Journal), for example, joins with her imagistic language to dissolve bar-

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riers between character and reader. Raitt suggests that with its fluid point of view, Mary Olivier was the text “in which [Sinclair] developed some of her most sophisticated ideas about the origins, constitution, and boundaries of the ‘I.’” 29 Sydney Janet Kaplan reads these various perspectives as different stances of Mary herself: There is an omniscient narrator for Mary, . . . but it is not an impersonal one; it is Mary herself. Usually this narrator describes the thoughts in Mary’s mind through the conventional third-person “she.” This is where the writer Mary, looking at her own life from a great distance in time or feeling, separates herself from the thoughts of the character Mary. . . . But when the omniscient narrator gets closer and closer to identification with the character Mary, the pronouns change. Thus she speaks to that other self. “You,” she calls it. And then, almost with a startling-seeming inconsistency, she switches to “I.” In these passages she gives us the mind itself, free from any interpretation. 30

Kaplan may actually impose too much order on this “startling-seeming inconsistency.” Her discovered pattern of greater or lesser degrees of narrative identification according to pronoun may identify certain effects of the shifts on a reader, but Sinclair seems more interested in the inconsistency itself than in tying each pronoun to a particular narrative stance. As we will see in her Journal, the changing points of view not only mimic the fluidity of self-consciousness—the “secondary consciousness” (in Theophilus Boll’s terminology) that is occasionally aware of itself—but plays as well with the levels of identification of Sinclair’s readers with Mary’s character. 31 Directed by Mary to herself, the “you” is also directed to Mary’s observers, so that, encompassed in its sweeping second person, readers find themselves complicit with Mary’s emotions and thoughts. In her exploration of the potential of the stream-of-consciousness literary approach, therefore, Sinclair may be reaching again for a way to heighten the sense of immediacy, so that readers mirror Mary’s own instantaneous and direct experience. The mingling of mystic and erotic impressions in Mary Olivier may, in fact, have been possible largely because of Sinclair’s use of such linguistic approaches to produce a potent erotics of connection between reader and character. That enlistment of her readers’ emotional involvement may be what makes Mary’s final failure to completely meet her own sexual longings so difficult for readers who find the ending uncomfortably personal. Alternatively, Katha Pollitt argues that even though readers may be torn by Mary’s final renunciations of a chance for loving partnership, “Sinclair has all too successfully enlisted us in the cause of Mary’s passionate, active self-creation—a self that longs to engage with the world, to love and be loved, and to make her mark as a writer.” 32 With the fluidity of her points of view, Sinclair also experiments with the functioning of memory, as when her opening exploration of the con-

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sciousness of a two-year-old is filtered through the adult chronicler’s narrative recollection. In describing her remembered bedtime routine, the magical sensibilities of an infant who attributes personality to inanimate objects are mingled with the mature vocabulary of “flourish,” “ironwork,” and “curlykew”: Every night, when Jenny had gone away with the doll and the donkey, you hunched up the blanket and the stiff white counterpane to hide the curtain and you played with the knob in the green painted iron railing of the cot. It stuck out close to your face, winking and grinning at you in a friendly way. . . . In the dark you could go tip-finger along the slender, lashing flourishes of the ironwork. By stretching your arm out tight you could reach the curlykew at the end. The short, steep flourish took you to the top of the railing and on behind your head. 33

By contrast, James Joyce opens A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published three years before Mary Olivier, with a similar child’s narration (and a similar shifting of pronouns between third and second person), but remains more firmly within the infant’s perspective he creates, at least as far as vocabulary is concerned. 34 Sinclair may be making explicit, however, what Joyce’s account still represents, the narrative construction of memory by an adult writer. The borderline between sleeping and being awake is also blurred in Sinclair’s opening passages as the child’s dreamy thoughts associate images from the bedroom with a forbidding country lane: Tip-fingering backwards that way you got into the grey lane where the prickly stones were and the hedge of little biting trees. When the door in the hedge opened you saw the man in the night-shirt. He had only half a face. From his nose and his cheek-bones downwards his beard hung straight like a dark cloth. You opened your mouth, but before you could scream you were back in the cot; the room was light; the green knob winked and grinned at you from the railing, and behind the curtain Papa and Mamma were lying in the big bed. 35

In Sinclair’s case, the scene introduces the infant Mary’s fear of her father, as well as the erotic undercurrent of Mary’s consciousness. Young Mary is unaware, though Sinclair presumably is not, of the suggestive imagery of playing with the knob: “You poked it till it left off and turned grey and went back into the railing. Then you had to feel for it with your finger. It fitted the hollow of your hand, cool and hard, with a blunt nose that pushed agreeably into the palm.” 36 Mary’s sensuousness is further associated with her mother’s body in a way that helps explain the perhaps too powerful connection between the two women that will be traced through the book. Frightened by the sight of her father in a nightshirt, young Mary, who shares a bedroom with her parents, is brought into the “big bed” by her mother:

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This eroticized yet often frustrated connection is made more explicit with the chapter’s conclusion: “When Papa was away the lifted curtain spread like a tent over Mary’s cot, shutting her in with Mamma. When he was there the drawn curtain hung straight down from the head of the bed.” 38 In A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, Sinclair’s emphasis on the emotional content of her brief sojourn in the war theater similarly combines with her frequent use of second-person address to involve her readers in what she felt, just as it would later draw her readers into the inner world of Mary’s thoughts and feelings. While reflective of Sinclair’s own support of the war, the absence of political commentary on the war’s cause and purpose also suggests a desire to immerse her readers in the scene, without distracting questions of justification and context. Drawn from Sinclair’s diary, the published Journal takes on what she calls a “psychological accuracy” even as she explains the unavoidable gap (ranging from a week to four months) between the actual events and her opportunity to write them “out,” as she puts it. Particularly during the urgency of the corps’s final retreat before the German advance, she reports, “It was as much as you could do to scribble the merest note of what happened in your Day-Book.” But those notes, specifically because of their necessarily spontaneous nature, she argues, grant an authority to the later recorded recollections, and perhaps, from a reader’s point of view, constitute a more trustworthy window on Sinclair’s state of mind than her more carefully worked texts: [W]hen you had made fast each day with its note, your impressions were safe, far safer than if you had tried to record them in their flux as they came. However far behind I might be with my Journal, it was kept. It is not written “up,” or round and about the original notes in my DayBook, it is simply written out. Each day of the seventeen had its own quality and was soaked in its own atmosphere; each had its own unique and incorruptible memory, and the slight lapse of time, so far from dulling or blurring that memory, crystallized it and made it sharp and clean. 39

Although not quite the unfiltered stream of consciousness account she attempts in her presentation of the inner life of Mary Olivier, the Journal is still imbued on some occasions with a certain “on the fly” breathlessness, and on others with more of an authored feeling, especially in the latter sections, which Sinclair admits, were “written up” the longest after

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the events they report. A shift in tone is particularly evident when Sinclair moves into the period for which her notes are most sketchy or nonexistent. It is as though, in the absence of limiting data, her impulses as a fiction writer cannot help but provide more narrative shape. In the Journal, the immediacy of first- and second-person narratives are tempered by the distancing effect of third person, as when Sinclair refers to herself ironically as “the War Correspondent,” or even in the plural as “we,” as when “our Secretary and Treasurer,” both roles she filled, slip off to visit the cathedral. Raitt points out that comparing Sinclair’s original journal with the published version shows that it was extensively edited, not just in changing the names of the participants, but also, as was typical for Sinclair, in culling some of the more personal revelations. 40 Sinclair was sent home through a duplicitous move by the corps’s commander, for example, but provides no explanation in the text for her removal. 41 Rehearsing personal grievances may have seemed out of place in an account of far more serious suffering, of course, as Zegger suggests generously, but Sinclair may also have sought to minimize her own embarrassment. 42 Yet even with such conscious emendations, Sinclair seems sincere in her assertion that she avoided embellishing the journal, limiting corrections of errors, for example, to footnotes: “I have set down the day’s imperfect or absurd impression, in all its imperfection or absurdity, and the day’s crude emotion in all its crudity, rather than taint its reality with the discreet reflections that came after.” 43 The journal, especially as an after-the-fact effort to process the trauma of her unwilling early separation from the ambulance corps, actually exhibits a candor that is perhaps even more self-revealing than Sinclair intended. Zegger observes that “because she tried to record her impressions as honestly as she could, her own feelings of anger and resentment [about being removed from the corps] often appear,” causing some confusion since “the reader does not know the incident that provoked her feelings.” 44 Undercurrents of sexual jealousy emerge as well, along with patterns of mystic voyeurism, as the horrific events of war become a means to the end of creating an extraordinary experience for Sinclair. In the more daring genre of autobiography, therefore, Sinclair was already exhibiting the commitment to unmediated access to inner experience that would make her a willing practitioner of stream of consciousness. From the outset, then, Sinclair’s use of stream of consciousness and imagistic language suggests an indistinctness of any divisions separating individuals, periods of time, or categories of thought, dream and memory. Brought starkly home through her different approaches to autobiography, access to a character’s inner consciousness—especially when, as in the Journal, the character was herself—offered a vantage on the complexity of both an individual and her relationship to her environment. Although the story of a near lifetime of development, Mary Olivier reminds readers that infant impressions remain alive and present, if unconscious,

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in adult memories, and help shape a rich and multilayered self. Furthermore, that self is a continuously negotiated site of interdependence with and separation from other significant, often controlling selves, together with an external reality that is usually only partially and imperfectly perceived. Sinclair’s immersion in Freud and Jung is obvious in her construction of Mary as an autonomous character, but also apparent are the seeds of her eventual assertion that the integrity of the individual self can be threatened by intimacy that is too intrusive. Like Underhill, therefore, Sinclair held on to a “pre-modern” assumption of ultimate access to reality through mystic apprehension, but by approaching that apprehension through the framework of psychoanalytic theory and with the terms of cutting-edge literary technique, recognized the need to break out of traditional categories. And since, again like Underhill, Sinclair assumed that access to reality lay within what they both understood as an intuitive sensibility, specifically in opposition to discredited sensory data, she pursued the paradoxical project of tapping traditional constructs of mysticism to produce a solution to a modern epistemological problem. Sinclair wrote that the New Idealism she defended “must somehow contrive to reconcile the universe of things with the universe of thought.” 45 Underhill suggested something similar in her assertion that, while lodged in the conscious self, mystic perception offered the only true access to the objective world. Sinclair’s stance as a “mystic modern” thus incorporated elements of both margarine and butter, of the tangible and intangible, of the changeable and the enduring. 46 Young Mary Olivier’s first moment of mystic apprehension occurs as a heightened awareness of the particularly physical landscape around her. Much later, the mature Mary, in a flash of perception, can understand a mutuality existing between herself, natural reality, and God—a unity of “being,” in Underhill’s terms, despite the fluctuation of “becoming”: Catty had taken away the tea-things and was going down the four steps into the house. It happened between the opening and shutting of the door. She saw that the beauty of the tree was its real life, and that its real life was in her real self and that her real self was God. The leaves and the light had nothing to do with it; she had seen it before when the tree was a stem and bare branches on a grey sky; and that beauty too was the real life of the tree. 47

If something permanent and real could emerge out of a passing vision, then the constant change of modern life could itself reveal the world’s unchanging constancy. While Sinclair was willing to use the designation “God” in her discussions of that rarely perceivable reality, she reflected the speculative mood of her time as well in the open-ended framing with which she described what she sought. Despite the privileged access of intuition, just what the Absolute was was obscured in its very mediation through the uncertain evidence of sensory stimuli. Even so, Sinclair was convinced that

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reality could on occasion shine forth through the material world, imbuing the world with undeniable enchantment. NOTES 1. Zegger, May Sinclair, 25. See also Miller, Rebel Women, 201. 2. See Miller, Rebel Women, 199–200. Sinclair joined the militant Women’s Freedom League for a year in 1908 and had a longer relationship with the Women Writers Suffrage League, which published her pamphlet Feminism in 1912. She participated in a suffrage march with that group in 1910. Boll, Miss May Sinclair, 88–89, 251. Boll’s biography includes a photograph of Sinclair outside a “Votes for Women” shop in Kensington in 1910. 3. Sinclair published a biography of the Brontës in 1912, and wrote introductions for new editions of their works, as well as a novel, The Three Sisters, based on their lives. In describing Sinclair’s alter ego character, Mary Olivier, as “distinctly a creature of the second half of the nineteenth century,” Katha Pollitt observes that “her world—the stable, ceremonious, narrow, secretive, tedious world of upper-middle-class English families—is the one against which dozens of fictional New Women (and thousands of real ones) rebelled.” Pollitt, introduction to Mary Olivier: A Life, by Sinclair, xiii. 4. See Kinnamon, “Fiction of the Supernatural,” 15. Both of Sinclair’s books on idealism received favorable reviews, including from Bertrand Russell and R. G. Collingwood. On the basis of A Defence of Idealism, Sinclair was elected to the Aristotelian Society. Zegger, May Sinclair, 18–19. 5. Zegger, May Sinclair, 19. 6. See T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, esp. Book I, Ch. 1, “The Spiritual Principle in Knowledge and in Nature,” 13–62. 7. In Mary Olivier, for example, Mary does not feel she has received an adequate explanation of the doctrine of atonement until Christ’s death is explained in humanistic terms of self-development spurred by spiritual awareness: “He said it was a good thing for [the disciples] that he was going away. If he didn’t the Holy Ghost wouldn’t come to them; they would never have any real selves; they would never be free. They would set him up as a god outside themselves and worship Him and forget that the kingdom of God was within them, that God was their real self.” Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 368. 8. Zegger explains that Green’s non-theological humanism “effectively dealt with the problem of religious doubt by shelving theological issues in favor of good works within society. Instead of emphasizing belief in theological dogma, Green emphasized the virtue of self-development and the responsibility of society to foster it.” Zegger, May Sinclair, 20. See also Richard Ellman, “The Two Faces of Edward,” 198–200. 9. Sinclair, “Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism,” 703. See also Zegger, May Sinclair, 20. 10. Sinclair, Defence, 338–39. 11. See Kinnamon, “Fiction of the Supernatural,” 17. Organized in five books according to five stages of Mary’s life (Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence, Maturity, Middle Age), Mary Olivier can even be read as structured according to the “stations of the mystic way” that Underhill described. Zegger, May Sinclair, 106–7. 12. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 57, 58. 13. Sinclair, 109. 14. Raitt, May Sinclair, 129n78. See Zegger, May Sinclair, 105. 15. As with Mary Olivier’s experience, the insensitivity of others to any perception of the “real” contributes to negative characterizations. Agatha starts to point out the vividness of the landscape she is seeing to a companion, “when she remembered that he had eyes for the beauty of the earth, but no sense of its secret and supernatural light.” Sinclair, “Flaw,” 77–78. 16. Sinclair, “Concerning My Book.” 17. Sinclair, Journal, 10–11.

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18. Sinclair, 8. 19. Sinclair, “On Imagism,” 88–89. 20. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 292–93. 21. Sinclair, “Dorothy Richardson,” 451. See Zegger, May Sinclair, 96–97. Ellman, for example, describes the influence of T. E. Hulme on such imagist poets as Pound as the admonition to “place themselves ‘inside the object instead of surveying it from the outside.’” In the same way, “[t]his position was that which Yeats also insisted upon when he said that the center of the poem was not an impersonal essence of beauty, but an actual man thinking and feeling. . . . Henry James was also convinced that the ‘mere ruffled majesty of irresponsible “authorship”’ must be eliminated and entered the consciousness of his most sensitive characters so thoroughly as to make possible disputes over where he stood.” Ellman, “Two Faces of Edward,” 205–6. 22. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 132. See Zegger, May Sinclair, 100. 23. Zegger sees strong parallels between Mary Olivier and Richardson’s Pilgrimage series not just in their literary technique, but also in their inherent philosophical bents; she agrees with Babette Deutsch who wrote that in their assumptions of philosophical idealism both Mary Olivier and The Tunnel “read like a ‘fictional transcription of May Sinclair’s Defence of Idealism.’” Zegger, May Sinclair, 115. 24. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 206. See Raitt, May Sinclair, 214; Pollitt, introduction to Mary Olivier, xiii. 25. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 57. 26. Sinclair to Catherine Dawson Scott, 20 March 1920, Gen. MSS. 144, Box 1 fo. 22, Beinecke. Quoted in Raitt, May Sinclair, 215. 27. Sinclair, “Dorothy Richardson,” 57. 28. Zegger, May Sinclair, 95. See also Zegger, 98. 29. Raitt, May Sinclair, 217. 30. Kaplan, Feminine Consciousness, 51. 31. Boll, Miss May Sinclair, 240. 32. Pollitt, introduction to Mary Olivier, xii. 33. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 5. Kaplan makes a similar point, noting that Sinclair “does not try to capture the sentence structure and diction of the infant mind. Instead, it is a recreation through memory.” Kaplan, Feminine Consciousness, 51. Raitt notes the similarity of this description with the opening of Underhill’s The Gray World, in which a child also fixates on a brass knob of his cot. Raitt, May Sinclair, 236n75. 34. See Joyce, Portrait, 7. The opening sections of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first appeared in The Egoist magazine, which also published Sinclair’s work. Mary Olivier was also originally published “alongside Ulysses in the pages of the legendary Little Review.” Mary Olivier, back cover material. 35. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 5–6. 36. Sinclair, 5. 37. Sinclair, 6. 38. Sinclair, 11. 39. Sinclair, introduction to Journal, no page numbers. 40. See Raitt, May Sinclair, chapter 5 (e.g., 160). 41. Munro sent Sinclair back to England to raise funds for the corps, but then placed an embargo on her passport through the War Office to prevent her return to Belgium. Raitt speculates that Munro, one of the directors of the Medico-Psychological Clinic with which Sinclair was associated, included her in the team primarily to obtain her financial support, but then found the presence of an older, unskilled woman problematic. Raitt, May Sinclair, 154–55. 42. Zegger, May Sinclair, 83. 43. Sinclair, introduction to Journal. 44. Zegger, May Sinclair, 83. 45. Sinclair, New Idealism, 14. See also Raitt, May Sinclair, 234. 46. See Raitt, May Sinclair, 234–35, 240. 47. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 430.

EIGHT Deepest Desires Embracing Erotic Mysticism

As Sinclair’s use of language indicates, her texts are often imbued with an eroticism expressed in various permutations of desire for connection, both with other individuals and with the occasionally grasped fundamental force or reality. While the specifically sexual connotations of “eroticism” or “erotics” are appropriate associations for Sinclair’s writing, the broader application of the terms as encompassing a general desire for participation or union is equally useful. Since erotics may be operative whether fulfilled through union with the desired or not (and often especially when not), Sinclair’s eroticism may be understood as incorporating elements of the unsettling and frustrating, as much as of the completing and fulfilling. While arguably a tendency at least as old as the writings of the medieval mystics read by both Underhill and Sinclair, Sinclair’s eroticizing of mysticism represented a particularly modern response to anxiety about the role of the individual in an increasingly disrupted world. It also reflected her attention to contemporary psychoanalytic theories of libidinal forces, and to avant-garde movements toward freedom of sexual expression. An eroticized mysticism was, in other words, one aspect of Sinclair’s adaptation of old modes of thought into new channels, her version of translating butter into margarine, but also of her search for entirely new forms with which to negotiate new terrain. For all three authors, the engagement with questions of invigorating force dovetailed with considerations of sexuality, and specifically female sexuality, that linked individual libido to the deepest rhythms of existence. Philosophically, in a manner that would later be expressed through the Lacanian term of jouissance, all three approached the sexualities of their female characters as fundamental expressions of creative energy. 1 109

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Culturally, their consideration of sexuality as a force of agency reflected the episteme of their age in pushing the boundaries of traditional gender roles. In particular, their divergent answers to the advisability of marriage and procreation offered explicit commentary on the social mores of their day. 2 In her celebration of freely expressed romantic love, for example, Webb cast her characters in networks of personal and social influence that permitted her to examine both possibilities for and limitations on female autonomy. Sinclair, on the other hand, although respectful of, even awed by, sexuality’s force, saw ascetic self-denial as key to female creative potential. For both, sexuality merged with opportunities for tapping into pantheistically understood forces of nature that carried redemptive potential not just for their female protagonists, but for their societies as well. Underhill, meanwhile, may well have been making a move similar to Sinclair’s in setting romantic love as a hindrance to Paul’s perception of the perfect forms in The Lost Word, yet in The Column of Dust associates Constance’s openness to mystical truths with her willingness to engage in the unconventional sexual union leading to Vera’s illegitimate birth. While far from the “sexual magic” centered on explicit use of sexual acts that was a cornerstone of certain strains of occultism, the varied descriptions of sexuality by Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb joined in a prevailing fascination in their time with the potency of sexual energy. 3 Starting in the Victorian era, “increasingly, sexuality was identified as the innermost essence of human nature, as the secret of life and the body, and as the most important force in the health and productivity of modern capitalist society,” Hugh B. Urban recounts. 4 While the occult magus engaged in sexual magic in order to unleash magical power through the transgression of society’s boundaries, Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb were more attuned to the linking of especially heterosexual attraction with a general life force. 5 If they advocated transgressing values, it was primarily as the necessary outcome of properly mystical affiliation with that force. All three authors reflected their modernity’s increasing concern with sexual liberation as part of broader movements toward liberation of individual agency. 6 And all three played along the border between bourgeois endorsement of sexual union within safe and culturally approved bounds of marriage, and exploration of what was perceived to be dangerous expressions of that energy without such social channeling. 7 Webb, in particular, as we shall see, organized Gone to Earth around the opposition of freely expressed conjugal union and destructively indulged non-marital sexuality. Above all else, however, her treatment ends up elevating the idea of sexuality as a form of natural energy that must not be repressed. The same sense of energizing attraction could be associated with death as much as with active life. In her Journal, Sinclair relates her heightened sense of a need to experience “danger,” admitting that her ecstasy during the corps’s initial car trip into the war zone has as much to

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do with the approaching bodily threat as with the car’s exciting dash through a beautiful landscape. She rings changes on the phrase “the greatest possible danger,” using it ironically, even parodically, but also simply descriptively for the erotic lure that draws her, and, apparently, other members of the corps, to put their lives at risk. 8 While she speaks without specific reference to death, potential mortality lies at the base of an apprehension that is simultaneously anticipation: A curious excitement comes to you. . . . You have been drunk, very slightly drunk with the speed of the car. But now you are sober. Your heart beats quietly, steadily, but with a little creeping, mounting thrill in the beat. The sensation is distinctly pleasurable. You say to yourself, “It is coming. Now—or the next minute—perhaps at the end of the road.” You have one moment of regret. “After all, it would be a pity if it came too soon, before we’d even begun our job.” But the thrill, mounting steadily, overtakes the regret. It is only a little thrill, so far (for you don’t really believe that there is any danger), but you can imagine the thing growing, growing steadily, till it becomes ecstasy. 9

Sinclair’s description of her dejection during their later retreat plays on similar distinctions between safety and danger: “Your sense of safety grows intolerable. You never knew that safety could hurt like this.” 10 Calling Sinclair’s thrill at experiencing danger “an almost orgasmic form of pleasure,” Raitt notes that “descriptions of excitement like this were commonplace in men’s writings about the war, but for a woman to express such greed for adventure and for sensation was unusual. The war offered Sinclair a form of sexual, almost mystic fulfillment which she would have found it difficult to experience in any other setting.” 11 The mystical significance of her desire is captured particularly in the symbolism of her fetishized “turn in the road,” that physical point beyond which she cannot see. A force of external agency accrues to a nebulous expectation of what might almost be fate, as Sinclair’s description of the inevitability of passing that point takes on broadly religious tones: I do not tell him [the Commandant] that what I really want to do is to go out with the Field Ambulance, and get beyond the turn of that road. I know I haven’t the ghost of a chance; I know that if I had—as things stand at present—not being a surgeon or a trained nurse, I wouldn’t take it, even to get there. And at the same time I know, with a superior certainty, that this unlikely thing will happen. . . . It is as if something had been looking for you, waiting for you, from all eternity out here; something that you have been looking for; and, when you are getting near, it begins calling to you; it draws your heart out to it all day long. . . . It has nothing to do with your ordinary curiosities and interests and loves; nothing to do with the thirst for experience, or for adventure, or for glory, or for the thrill. You can’t “get” anything out of it. It is something hidden and secret and supremely urgent. Its urgency,

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The lure drawing Sinclair away from her position of frustrating safety is further eroticized by its coincidence with her sexual interest in the “Commandant,” or Dr. Hector Munro, the ambulance corps’s leader. The mystical enticement of danger takes on connotations of a different form of irresistible influence as she turns to language of “sin” and “temptation” in describing her jealousy of Ursula, the younger woman who regularly accompanies the Commandant. While couched in terms of danger—she is jealous because Ursula gets to experience the threat of being shot—her account reads simultaneously as sexual competition—she is jealous because the Commandant prefers Ursula’s company to hers: I can forgive the Commandant. I still think that he sinned when he took Ursula Dearmer to Termonde and to Alost. But the temptation that assailed him at Alost and Termonde was not to be measured by anybody who was not there. It must have been irresistible. Besides it is not certain that he did take Ursula Dearmer into danger; it is every bit as likely that she took him; more likely still that they were both victims of force majeure, fascinated by the lure of the greatest possible danger. And, oh, how I did pitch into him! ... Can it be that I was jealous of Ursula Dearmer, that innocent girl, because she saw a shell burst and I didn’t? I know this is what was the matter with Mrs. Torrence the other day. She even seemed to imply that there was some feminine perfidy in Ursula Dearmer’s power of drawing shells to her. (She, poor dear, can’t attract even a bullet within a mile of her.) 13

The erotics of Sinclair’s journal are also not always oriented to a particular individual. Her stark need to be exposed to danger, and her selfreflective disappointment that motivated publishing the Journal on her return to England, were driven primarily by a sense of exclusion from full participation in the ambulance corps’s activities. In certain disconcerting ways, she mingles the concrete desire to help with a more abstract desire to experience the war as a fully integrated member of the group. Her poem “Dedication,” offered as an epigraph, distills the journal’s basic thrust with repeated references to a failed dream. 14 Addressed to those she cannot call comrades, since they have accomplished “what I only dreamed,” the poem chides the corps members for having taken my dream, And dressed yourselves in its beauty and its glory.

A revealing petulance is balanced by her effort to honor the value of what she tried to do and what others did as they went

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[u]nder the thunder of the guns, the shrapnel’s rain and the curved lightning of the shells, And where the high towers are broken, And houses crack like the staves of a thin crate filled with fire.

By contrast, “only my dream follows you.” The enticing nature of the experience from which she feels left out is all too clear. Rather than focus on glory, or even the usefulness she craved, however, Sinclair again emphasizes danger: Your faces are like the face of her whom you follow, Danger, The Beloved who looks backward as she runs, calling to her lovers[.]

Sinclair, too, heard the call of the “Huntress” who “flung before me the curved lightning of her shells for a lure,” but when I came within sight of her, She turned aside, And hid her face from me.

On other occasions, however, Sinclair’s erotic mysticism played out in explorations of intimately mingled sensibilities. Her character Agatha’s uncanny ability to heal others in “The Flaw in the Crystal” supports a story of explicit sexual desire but also of union with a supernatural force expressed through a heightened spiritual connection between individuals. Sinclair set her story of mystic interrelation in the context of an infidelity, though one the participants initially refuse to admit even to themselves. Not actively sexual, the relationship of Agatha and Rodney still requires all the duplicity of an affair as Rodney regularly escapes his wife Bella, “a mass of furious and malignant nerves,” to spend weekends in the country with Agatha. 15 Bella understands that Rodney, whose “own nerves were not as strong as they had been, after ten years of Bella’s,” needs to take his weekends away to recuperate; she is unaware that he spends them with Agatha. “Still less,” Sinclair adds, “could she have compassed any vision of the tie—the extraordinary, intangible, immaterial tie that held them.” 16 The bond, though only Agatha knows it, is in part the remarkable healing effect Agatha has on Rodney, the product of what Agatha calls “the power, the uncanny, unaccountable Gift.” The erotic performance of her union with that power is both a channeling and an experience of being channeled: Agatha serves as the focusing vessel for an almost personified influence able to dispel mental distress, first from herself, then from others. Agatha treats Rodney, then Bella, and finally, and nearly disastrously, Harding Powell, a troubled acquaintance who, with his wife, intrudes on Agatha’s rural retreat in his own search for relief. Although not set in the terms of aesthetic appreciation of Catholic forms of art that Underhill advanced, Agatha’s mystic apprehension operates in a strikingly similar therapeutic way. The plague of “nerves”

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associated with modern urban life finds its relief in a return to the simpler pastoral life of the country. Just as Willie found repose within a church sanctuary that opened up his awareness to true reality beyond appearances, Agatha is able to offer rest to others through her own access to that reality. Agatha’s description of the healing process includes a hint of Underhill’s emphasis on “sacred” places, as well as a touch of Sinclair’s use of the designation “holy” in Mary Olivier, to be discussed later. Not exactly prayer, or as Agatha tells Harding’s wife Millie, “not anything you mean by it,” what Agatha does in channeling the Gift in some ways is prayer. “[O]nly it’s more, much more,” she says. “I can’t explain it. I only know it isn’t me.” 17 While she repeatedly distinguishes between prayer and what she does in attuning herself to the power, Agatha’s virgin saint namesake and references to the power as “divine” and dependent on Agatha’s “purity” introduce religious connotations. 18 In its own erotic imagery of dissolution, the power, Agatha stresses, “found her.” When her concern for Rodney had brought her to the verge of her own mental collapse, she had “flung out her arms across the bed in the supreme gesture of supplication, and thus gone, eyes shut and with no motion of thought or sense in her, clean into the blackness where, as if it had been waiting for her, the thing had found her.” 19 Bringing the power to bear on a person she wants to help involves a similar surrender or descent into what Lears would call the oceanic infinitude, while also drawing on contemporary technological imagery of tapping electricity: You could think of it as a current of transcendent power, hitherto mysteriously inhibited. You made the connection, having cut off all other currents that interfered, and then you simply turned it on. In other words, if you could put it into words at all, you shut your eyes and ears, you closed up the sense of touch, you made everything dark around you and withdrew into your innermost self; you burrowed deep into the darkness there till you got beyond it; you tapped the Power, as it were, underground at any point you pleased and turned it on in any direction.

The oceanic imagery is especially evident in the more detailed description Sinclair gives of Agatha’s process of interceding for Harding. Stretched out on her bed in the dark, “[i]t was now as if her being drank at every pore the swimming darkness; as if the rhythm of her heart and of her breath had ceased in the pulse of its invasion. She sank in it and was covered with wave upon wave of darkness. She sank and was upheld; she dissolved and was gathered together again, a flawless crystal.” 20 Into this floating stasis Agatha is able to draw the “innermost essence” of those she would cure, as when in her ministrations to Harding, “the walls of flesh were down between them; she had got at him.” 21 The possibility of intrusion or pollution, in fact, arises out of the intimate nature of Aga-

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tha’s application of the power, an application communicated through merging of “essences” and the operation of the Gift through conjoined sleeping. After extending the power to Harding in her first intercession, Agatha knows that “he would sleep; he would be all right as long as she slept. Her sleep, she had discovered, did more than carry on the amazing act of communion and redemption. It clinched it. It was the seal on the bond.” A form of sublimation that recognizes the erotic nature of the connection is at the heart of Agatha’s ability to make use of the Gift, as she purposefully denies her attraction to Rodney, and especially her ability through the Gift to control him. While part of her careful application of the Gift includes setting aside any thought that “there should be anything they had to hide,” the actuality of their desire for each other is the story’s steady undercurrent. As Agatha stresses, “She had always met him, and would always have to meet him, with the idea that there was nothing in it; for, if she once admitted that there was anything, then they were done for.” 22 Issues of human connection and denial of desire also infuse the treatment of perceptions of a higher reality in Mary Olivier. The bleak coincidences of Mary’s circumstances that eventually trap her in the parochialism of a rural village, keeping house for her manipulative mother, draw on Sinclair’s own service as companion and caretaker for her mother. In addition to rehearsing Sinclair’s perennial frustration with the limitations of bourgeois investment in respectability, the novel’s descriptions of mystic episodes highlight their connection with Mary’s desire for affection and approval. Mary’s initial childhood experience of the illuminated landscape, for example, is associated with her complex experience of love for and rejection by her mother. Arriving home still caught up in the rapture of her first vision, Mary ran to her mother and “hid her face in her lap. She caught Mamma’s hands and kissed them. They smelt of sandal wood. They moved over her hair with slight quick strokes that didn’t stay, that didn’t care.” 23 Mary’s impulse to reach out to her mother in her mystically inspired joy suggests that human relationship rather than separation as a single artist might have been the more natural association with her perception of the real, had a lifetime of familial denial not shaped her otherwise. Given her mother’s cold response, Mary’s moments of mystically heightened sensibility are juxtaposed ironically with references to her dysfunctional family as “sacred and holy”: “Mamma was sacred and holy. Mark was sacred and holy. Sarah [a cat] was sacred and holy, crouching under the chest of drawers with her eyes gleaming in the darkness.” 24 While in this particular passage Mary relates her positive feelings toward specific family members, it is in the context of alltoo-typical deprivation, in this case as she tries to obey her mother’s edict to curb her will and not want Sarah to be “her” cat. 25 Zegger observes that, “far from being holy,” the bourgeois family Sinclair describes “is destructive to its members; it is a trap that, through ties of affection and

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the weapons of religion and of conventional respectability and propriety, demands of its members unconditional surrender.” 26 The ironic tinge to “sacred and holy” is made even clearer in the desperate desire for genuine love that permeates Mary’s description of her mother’s garden. In contrast to the cuddly affection of Sarah and a pet rabbit, “the garden flowers wouldn’t let you love them. They stood still in their beauty, quiet, arrogant, reproachful. They put you in the wrong. When you stroked them they shook and swayed from you, when you held them tight their heads dropped, their backs broke, they shriveled in your hands. All the flowers in the garden were Mamma’s; they were sacred and holy.” 27 Yet Mary longs to infuse these words with something like their intended meaning, as when she revels in her father’s momentary kindness on her birthday: “Why couldn’t they see that crying meant that she wanted Papa to be sacred and holy every day?” 28 Perhaps even more important than the idealist intellectual framework that Sinclair constructed for her exploration of mystic sensibility, therefore, is the understanding she shared with Underhill of mysticism’s heightened perception as fundamentally instinctual and affective. 29 The energy invested in mystic perception overlaps, even merges, with libidinal desire, as Mary’s hunger for perception of the “real” echoes her need for “Somebody, Somebody, Somebody” to share her bed. 30 The association of Mary’s moments of mystic apprehension with the book’s organization by stages of female development further underscores the sexual element of periods of heightened spiritual awareness. 31 Even in the child Mary’s initial vision of the “queer white light,” the heightened perception occurs immediately after her vicarious involvement with her nurse Jenny’s sexuality. Having been out on a walk, she is left in the front shop of the cobbler Mr. Spall, Jenny’s fiancé, while Jenny and Mr. Spall “went into the back parlour to talk about Jesus.” 32 Mary experiences the first sudden illumination of the otherwise ordinary and familiar landscape on their way home. Raitt maintains that both Sinclair and Underhill “believed that the philosophy of mind should acknowledge our psychic, and libidinal, investment in the material world, and even in the world of our own fantasies.” 33 Both, however, were also aware that endorsing such close ties between sexuality and mysticism offered ammunition to those who would dismiss mystic impressions as no more than subverted sexual desire. Sinclair had responded to such claims in her 1912 pamphlet Feminism, where she wrote, “Whoever has known and can remember certain moments of heightened vision and sensation . . . will remain unmoved while the physiologist points out that these moments are most intimately associated with adolescence and the dawn of womanhood; . . . that they are part of the pageant of sexual passion.” 34 Sinclair argued that “women are especially prone to these experiences because they are transformations into ‘still higher and subtler energies’ of the ‘Life-Force of which

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Woman is pre-eminently the reservoir.’” Raitt writes that Sinclair found the roots of these feminine energies “in the special physiology of women,” but still argued that “through an operation akin to sublimation such energies can actually take women beyond the limits of their own bodies and draw them in to a field of force defined by something very like Bergson’s élan vital.” She adds: “In a proto-Lacanian formulation, Sinclair seems almost to suggest that sublimation works on women’s sexual energy to make them into mystics.” 35 The close links between mystic heights and erotic depths give Mary Olivier a candid, even ribald tone that invited criticism. Jane Miller observes that in being assimilated into Edwardian fiction, the “shocking sexual candor” of the new realism was “most often exhibited in explorations of male sexuality or of relationships,” while “explicit discussions or representations of female sexuality continued to be stigmatized.” 36 While Zegger sees Sinclair as being more careful than Dorothy Richardson in her use of the new narrative techniques, at the same time she suggests that Sinclair “censored her heroine’s stream of consciousness less.” 37 In addition to desire for men, Mary expresses hatred for her mother, jealousy, and selfishness. As a portrait of a girl’s physical and spiritual development, Mary Olivier also includes Mary’s reaction to the onset of menstruation, emphasized through foreshadowing references to her adolescence. 38 When reviewers complained about the novel’s explicit content, Sinclair’s oft-quoted response, included in a letter to H. G. Wells, was to assert that “it is not honest to leave sex altogether out of a ‘Life.’ But if you put so little of it in there are people who will not see or remember anything else.” 39 Such little bits included the oblique imagery of Sinclair’s own childhood memory of “faith-jumping” down a flight of stairs into her brother’s arms, a demonstration of trust that Kaplan notes “resembles religious faith,” but is also “the kind of faith necessary for sexual orgasm—the ability to let oneself go and trust in the other, to let oneself die.” 40 As Sinclair writes, Mary “let go the rail and drew herself up. A delicious thrill of danger went through her and out at her fingers. She flung herself into space and Mark caught her. His body felt hard and strong as it received her. They did it again and again.” 41 But it also included Mary’s choice as an adult to be her lover Richard Nicholson’s mistress, though not his wife. Visiting Richard in London for several days, and ensconced in his rooms while he sleeps in another apartment, Mary even makes the first move in inviting him to stay with her. 42 While the relationship is ultimately frustrated by Mary’s commitment to her mother, her willingness to join in a sexual liaison with Richard, and to be undeterred by public knowledge of the affair, marks an aspect of the selfhood she sought through the parallel achievement of mystic connection with greater reality. In contrast to her own willingness to at least “put so little of it in,” Sinclair starkly critiqued the repressed sexuality of bourgeois respectabil-

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ity, perhaps most devastatingly in her portrayal of Canon Chamberlain in A Cure of Souls. Chamberlain, who lacks any sensitivity to the mystic potential of the world, is also patently dishonest about his own sexuality. Rather than sharing Willie’s sense of the enlightening power of a church sanctuary and of art in Underhill’s The Gray World, Chamberlain reduces his morning devotions to the satisfaction of habit. As he kneels for prayer, art is invoked in the stark appearance of his crucifix, but only in the sense that it is attractive, not powerful: “A brief station at his preDieu under the ivory Christ on his ebony cross; a slight tension of constraint, his attitude before the Immaterial; not so enjoyable as he made himself believe. But like the discharge of any regular function, prayer gave relief.” 43 Sinclair’s sardonic description, “He was now spiritually ready for his day,” underscores how spiritually unprepared Chamberlain is likely to be for any day. A certain sophisticated sensuality underlies Chamberlain’s attention to the aesthetic aspects of the physical world: he appreciates good cooking, for example, and takes satisfaction in the magnificence of his church sanctuary. But given his self-involvement, Chamberlain’s sensuality closes in rather than opens out. Appreciative of the aesthetics of the sanctuary when it is being decorated for the harvest festival, Chamberlain “could still see the beauty of his church, and was proud of it, though he could no longer feel it. He was like a husband who has no more passion for his wife yet finds pleasure in watching her effect on other men.” 44 Sinclair’s novel is framed in part by Chamberlain’s movement from single to married life, but his courtship is pursued with his perennial concerns about comfort rather than romance paramount. Chamberlain’s enjoyment of freshly picked peaches, with its suggestion of erotic interest and intimate connection with other human beings, is ultimately a matter of his own physical pleasure: He liked to gather peaches straight from the wall, with the warmth of the sun on them, knowing that no hands but his had touched them. He liked to feel his teeth tearing the creamy peach-flesh from its crimson heart; to suck out of it the sweet-smelling juice. . . . He took pleasure in the thought that peaches eaten before breakfast would be good for him. 45

His willingness to part with “a small basketful for Mrs. Hancock” (a parishioner and potential love interest) that “would be hardly missed” given his garden’s abundance, is not an outpouring of generosity. 46 Still, his not entirely unconscious association of peaches and romance provides a safely external sphere of transference for one arena of the strong emotion he usually deplores. He avoids meeting with Cartwright, his energetic curate, in the garden lest Cartwright somehow intrude as a competitor for Mrs. Hancock’s affections: “Just in time he thought of his,

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of Mrs. Hancock’s peaches; he had a vision of ravishment, Cartwright’s unbridled youth.” 47 Chamberlain’s vision of comfort likewise includes reading French novels—“Dumas and Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant and Anatole France”—but in his hypocrisy he is careful to keep them hidden, ostensibly to avoid tempting his parishioners to do likewise. 48 His rationalization emphasizes not appreciation for or participation in the forbidden books’ sensuality, but his assumed iron-clad resistance: He disapproved of Flaubert, and enjoyed him. Disapproved so thoroughly that, reviewing the famous trial, his sympathies were all with the prosecution. He felt that his disapproval consecrated his enjoyment. Besides, he was safe. A man was a fool if at forty-three he had acquired no knowledge of himself. He had the just measure of his own integrity, and could trust it. Sane mind in sane body, invulnerable, immune. Apostolic immunity. If they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them. 49

Since for Sinclair the force of sexual energy might be profitably acknowledged and redirected, but not denied, Chamberlain’s characterization illustrates the spirit-deadening dangers of repression, rather than the enlightening potential of sublimation as pursued by Mary. Initially, Chamberlain is presented as fending off any possible entanglements, receiving visiting women in his drawing-room, which is “so perfect that it defied their approaches delicately; it seemed to say that all this refinement and this comfort had been achieved without feminine assistance.” 50 Sinclair uses sexual interest in Chamberlain to illuminate the characters of his parishioners as well. Miss Lambert’s infatuation with Chamberlain opens her up to his exploitation as a parish volunteer. Miss Wrinch, on the other hand, feels no attraction, and is therefore immune to taking on more parish chores. 51 Kitty Hancock has a similarly clear-eyed sense of Chamberlain, and, knowing he could never endure her children’s natural level of energy, allows the relationship to lapse. 52 He eventually marries the wealthy Molly Beauchamp, a person least likely to make demands on him, and, given her financial resources, most likely to preserve his comfort. Through characters such as Chamberlain and Agatha, Sinclair explored opposing facets of the interrelations between the mystical sensibility she sought to advance and the complexities of human interconnection she found so fascinating. Her interest was powered by healthy respect that bordered on unease for the self-shaping influences those connections might exert, an ambivalence that led to repeated explorations of the nature of the individual will and its role in preserving a coherent sense of self.

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NOTES 1. See Lacan, Feminine Sexuality. 2. See James J. Miracky, Regenerating the Novel, 69. 3. Urban, Magia Sexualis, 696. 4. Urban, 698. 5. Urban, 699, 705. 6. Urban, 713, 721. 7. Urban, 705, 712–13. 8. Sinclair anticipates experiencing the “greatest possible danger” during another car trip to Antwerp, but is disappointed to learn that the siege she expected to see was actually some distance away. “There was no more danger in the excursion than in a run down to Brighton and back; and I know no more of fear or courage than I did before I started.” Sinclair, Journal, 135. 9. Sinclair, 12–13. 10. Sinclair, 248–49. 11. Raitt, May Sinclair, 158. 12. Sinclair, Journal, 69–70. 13. Sinclair, 135–36. 14. Sinclair, “Dedication, March 8th, 1915,” Journal. See Thurschwell, Technology and Magical Thinking, 79, 67, for description of a similar desire of Henry James to feel included in an ambulance corps he served with. 15. Sinclair, “Flaw,” 81. 16. Sinclair, 82. 17. Sinclair, 135. 18. See Sinclair, 101. 19. Sinclair, 73. 20. Sinclair, 74. 21. Sinclair, 75. 22. Sinclair, 65. Rodney is less committed to the purity of their relation: Agatha “discovered in him a desire, an intention that up till now he had concealed from her. It had left its hiding-place; it rose on terrifying wings and fluttered toward her, troubling her.” Sinclair, 67. 23. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 58. 24. Sinclair, 19. 25. Mary gets to have Sarah, but as the result of accidentally falling and seriously hurting herself. While she calls it a “good and happy day” because of the attention she receives, the association of getting her way and its painful cost is intentional. Sinclair, 19–20. 26. Zegger, May Sinclair, 103–4. 27. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 21. 28. Sinclair, 23. 29. See, e.g., Underhill, The Mystic Way, 50. See also Raitt, May Sinclair, 237. 30. See Raitt, May Sinclair, 236–37. 31. Underhill, Raitt notes, times the likely onset of mystic awareness with “the ‘height of normal adolescence, about eighteen years of age, before the crystallizing action of maturity has begun,’ or at the ‘attainment of full maturity’ at age 30; Mary Olivier remembers that ‘It had come to her when she was a child in brilliant, clear flashes; it had come again and again in her adolescence, with more brilliant and clearer flashes; then, after leaving her for twenty-three years, it had come like this—streaming in and out of her till its ebb and flow were the rhythm of her life.’” Raitt, 237. 32. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 56. 33. Raitt, May Sinclair, 236–37. 34. Sinclair, Feminism, 30–31. Quoted in Raitt, May Sinclair, 237–38.

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35. Raitt refers to Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of The Woman,” “where Lacan argues that women experience a ‘jouissance which goes beyond’ analogous to the jouissance of the mystics” (147). Raitt, May Sinclair, 238n84. 36. Miller, Rebel Women, 193. 37. Zegger, May Sinclair, 117. 38. See Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 110, 145. 39. Sinclair to H. G. Wells, June 29, 1919, University of Illinois Library, Urbana. Quoted in Zegger, May Sinclair, 111. 40. Kaplan, Feminine Consciousness, 70. 41. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 68. 42. See Sinclair, 413. 43. Sinclair, Cure, 2. 44. Sinclair, 126. 45. Sinclair, 2–3. 46. Sinclair, 37. 47. Sinclair, 38. 48. Sinclair, 7. See also 14–15. Sinclair may have borrowed this description of hidden, forbidden books from what might have been her own childhood memory, related in Mary Olivier. There, the discovery that Mary has found the volumes of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetical Works on a curtained shelf in her father’s library leads to their removal. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 151–53. 49. Sinclair, Cure, 14–15 50. Sinclair, 26–27. 51. Sinclair, 27–29. 52. See Sinclair, chapter 6.

NINE Maintaining Control Will and the Boundaries of Self

In the true nature of erotics as expressing both attraction and disturbance, the positive elimination of boundaries through narrative style and Sinclair’s emphasis on mystical connection with some broader power (and potentially other humans) also included a negative aspect: the threat of violation and even destruction of selfhood. Much as Underhill attacked the rationalizations of “physico-chemical” theory, Sinclair championed an independent, individual self, defined through personal will, against the claims of materialists and scientific pragmatists who would reduce personal identity to purely biological functions. 1 She also resisted any external individual or group incursion on the self. As Raitt observes, Sinclair found her greatest affinity with the psychoanalytic image of the “psyche as a surface which could absorb and transform objects from the external world,” but it was an idea that “frightened as well as fascinated her.” 2 The convergence between new possibilities of communication and new threats of personal violation seem to have been part and parcel of the era’s confluence of technological advancement and paranormal experimentation. The forays of the Society for Psychical Research into extrasensory communication, especially when linked in the popular imagination with new theories of psychoanalysis and emerging telecommunication technologies, raised exciting but also potentially unnerving scenarios for unprecedented intimacy between individuals, whether alive or dead. Pamela Thurschwell reverses the usual opposition between modern technological advances and “enchantment” by pointing out the “magical” element in much of the technology that promised not just faster lifestyles, but new utopian achievements of freedom and connection. The mutually 123

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influencing spheres of communication, psychoanalysis, and psychic research were, she maintains, intertwined arenas for asserting, explaining, but also mystifying human agency: Consider the following series of scenarios: imagine that you can communicate with the dead; imagine that you can communicate with someone miles away through a telegraph or on the telephone; imagine that God is sending rays made of language into your body and that his lackeys are recording every one of your thoughts and utterances; imagine that two people in the enclosed space of an office, one of whom spews out uncensored language while the other listens, can come to some sort of understanding of, or cure for, the pathologies of the speaker; imagine that there is telepathy, that thought can be transmitted directly from mind to mind. 3

Each of these scenarios, which range from “what eventually becomes the most widespread and technologically banal” (the telephone) to the “most obscure and specific” (Freud’s description of a patient’s delusions), were all “related to the nexus of late nineteenth-century concerns about the shape and configuration of the mind, and the volition of the subject whose mind just may be under attack.” 4 The marvels of speed and even simultaneity associated with teletechnologies emerging from the midnineteenth century on seemed to overlap in particularly promising ways with the marvels of spiritualist claims, as “talking to the dead and talking on the phone both hold out the promise of previously unimaginable contact between people.” 5 Such newly coined words as “telepathy” specifically connected mental communication semantically with such increasingly ubiquitous terms and devices as “telephone” and “telegraph.” Contributing to the unnerving associations of the overlapping technological and psychic frontiers, however, was the intertwining of “cultural imaginings of technologically uncanny contact” with “an expanding sense of sex and gender flexibility,” Thurschwell adds. Even such prosaic tools as the telegraph and the typewriter could create “transgressive fantasies of access to others who would be otherwise inaccessible . . . because of gender and class barriers,” and so generate both new hopes and anxieties. 6 Conceptions of intimacy through paranormal communication, meanwhile, needed to accommodate new powers of interpersonal influence in a new “supernatural erotics of bodily and cultural transmission,” especially since “genealogically linked to the older concept of sympathy and the newer word empathy, telepathy is also related to love—the desire for complete sympathetic union with the mind of another.” 7 Yet, with such sexual implications came “fears of transmission,” leading to concerns about “what types of contact are people having and imagining having? What is exchanged during these contacts?” 8 Sinclair offers fictional representations of similar forms of psychic connections and violations in a number of her supernatural stories. In

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“The Flaw in the Crystal,” as we have seen, the permeability of Agatha’s consciousness, however therapeutic for the recipients of her care, dangerously compromises her mental integrity. The image of blessed, healing mutual sleep necessary for Agatha’s application of the Gift turns frightening once Harding imposes his will in return, holding on to the connection with Agatha despite her efforts to break it. 9 In a reversal of her earlier calm control of a spiritually therapeutic procedure, Agatha evinces signs of Harding’s madness through her inverted perception of the landscape as “violent and frightful.” 10 Rather than nature infused with beauty, “what she experienced now . . . was exaltation at the other end of the scale. It was horror and fear unspeakable. . . . She saw the world in a loathsome transparency; she saw it with the eye of a soul in which no sense of the divine had ever been, of a soul that denied the supernatural. It had been Harding Powell’s soul, and it had become hers.” Sinclair speaks specifically of violated boundaries, explaining that “in the process of getting at Harding to heal him she had had to destroy, not only the barriers of flesh and blood, but those innermost walls of personality that divide and protect, mercifully, one spirit from another.” 11 Not just insanity, but its identification as being someone else’s insanity heightens the sense of violation: “[T]o have a madness of your own would not be so very horrible. It would be, after all, your own. It could not possibly be one-half so horrible as this, to have somebody else’s madness put into you.” Strengthening the imagery of an uncontrolled spread of influence, the permeability is not limited to just Harding and Agatha, but, because of Agatha’s psychic connection with Rodney and Bella, encompasses them as well. In her New York Times article about the story, Sinclair asserted her belief in both the positive and negative potential of these connections, describing the apparently “natural” human relations in the story as “invented,” and all the “apparently ‘supernatural’” events as “true”: That there are such happenings is becoming more and more a matter of experience. . . . Whether they come under the head of psycho-therapeutics, Christian Science, the Higher Thought, or the New Mysticism, whether they can or can not be satisfactorily disposed of as cures by “suggestion” or “auto-suggestion,” they have this in common, that they presuppose a pull upon some utterly secret and mysterious and immaterial power, some way of communication between persons below or above the level of their ordinary consciousness. 12

On the basis of extended testimony by healers she interviewed, Sinclair defends in particular the danger of psychic intrusion: “Every one of them has told me that, until the healer knows how to protect himself, this uncanny transference is a fact.” In this complex dance of subjective volition with potentially invasive forces, Sinclair’s emphasis on the highly private endeavor of mystic ap-

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prehension echoed Underhill’s, especially in its elevation of a heroic assertion of will. As with Underhill, mysticism for Sinclair represented an ultimately solitary process, in her case not mitigated by Underhill’s efforts to incorporate communal support. Key to her conception of the self’s preservation was an at times self-sacrificial exercise of personal will brought, through disciplined sublimation, into alliance with a more general divine presence. But, reflective of Sinclair’s suspicion of external influences of any kind, she suggests that even attempting such a mystic connection with a greater power can be dangerous to the integrity of an individual self. So long as Agatha is able to maintain a state of simplicity, purity, and single-mindedness, the Gift is proof against any threat from the mentally destructive forces she intends to expunge. But any “flaw” in that purity leaves her vulnerable to the kind of attack she experiences from Harding. As Agatha explains to Milly: Goodness and purity are terrible. We don’t understand it. It’s got its own laws. What you call prayer’s all right—it would be safe, I mean—I suppose it might get answered anyway, however we fell short. But this—this is different. It’s the highest, Milly; and if you rush in and make for the highest, can’t you see, oh, can’t you see how it might break you? Can’t you see what it requires of you? Absolute purity, I told you, Milly. You have to be crystal to it—crystal without a flaw. 13

In relating the “real” experiences of practitioners in discussing the story, however, Sinclair admits one fabrication. A healer cannot actually transmit her own trouble to another as Agatha does, she explains: “The crystal with a flaw in it does no injury—it simply fails. It is no longer a vehicle of the mysterious Power.” 14 Agatha’s emphasis on purity rehearses the central distinction Sinclair draws between acceptable and unacceptable applications of personal will. In Mary Olivier, Mary’s release from her family’s imprisoning control and her negotiation of an autonomous self lies in her discovery of an exercisable will of her own, encouraged by her individually experienced moments of supernatural illumination. 15 Sinclair shapes Mary’s discovery of mystic access to a higher reality—her “true” supernaturalism in contrast to the bankrupt supernaturalism of her mother’s Christianity— as exactly the application of personal will her rigidly Protestant mother forbids. “‘God,’ [Mamma] said, ‘hates selfishness and self-will. God is grieved every time Mary is self-willed and selfish. He wants her to give up her will.’” 16 But Mamma misuses claims about God’s will as a cover for her own self-assertion: Mamma was not helpless. She was not gentle. She was not really like a wounded bird. She was powerful and rather cruel. You could only appease her with piles of hemmed sheets and darned stockings. If you didn’t take care she would get hold of you and never rest till she had

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broken you, or turned and twisted you to her own will. She would say it was God’s will. She would think it was God’s will. 17

Thus, even young Mary can recognize the value of preserving the boundaries of individuality through the exercise of the “right” will: “Happiness, the happiness that came from writing poems; happiness that other people couldn’t have, that you couldn’t give to them; happiness that was not good to Mamma, no good to anybody but you, secret and selfish; that was your happiness.” 18 Issues of the integrity of the individual self did not have to have supernatural provenance to preoccupy Sinclair, though they still retained elements of the irrational when she raised them in the context of social dynamics. In The Tree of Heaven (1917), Sinclair’s negative depiction of the propelling force of the suffrage cause she herself supported adds weight to Kinnamon’s and Raitt’s senses that she feared total commitment to movements that might prove impossible to resist. 19 Sinclair’s imagery draws on the school of Vorticism, an artistic philosophy she later visited in passing in The Rector of Wyck (1925). In that novel, the rector’s wife Matty finds herself out of her depth at a party where Vorticism is advanced by self-styled intellectuals, unsympathetically represented by Sinclair as effete and opinionated, and possibly drawn from real-life models at the salons she frequented. When painter Austin Mitchell explains that Vorticist art sought to represent unarrested motion—“what you ought to see is a quick march of forms through innumerable planes, abstract energies unloosed, continuous movement”—Matty sees “nothing but confusion.” 20 In this exchange Sinclair demonstrates her familiarity with Vorticism’s principles; she may well have found aspects of it congenial to her own interests, especially in its affinities to Bergson’s emphases on continuity and motion. Tellingly, the party conversation also includes discussion of Bergson’s theory of time. 21 In The Tree of Heaven, however, Sinclair mines Vorticism’s negative potential. In a section specifically titled “The Vortex,” Sinclair as narrator explains that Rosalind would always be caught and spun round by any movement that was strong enough. She was foredoomed to the Vortex. That was Dorothy’s fault. It was she who had pushed and pulled the slacker, in spite of her almost whining protest, to the edge of the Vortex; and it was Rosalind, not Dorothy, who had been caught and sucked down into the swirl. She whirled in it now, and would go on whirling, under the impression that her movements made it move. The Vortex fascinated Dorothy even while she resisted it. She liked the feeling of her own power to resist, to keep her head, to beat against the rush of the whirlwind, to wheel round and round outside it, and swerve away before the thing got her. For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex, as her brother Michael had been afraid of the little vortex of school. 22

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Raitt writes that Sinclair uses the concept of vortex as “a moral and psychological abyss,” as “an image of degeneration, of uncontrolled appetites—whether sexual or political—and of approaching chaos.” 23 The Tree of Heaven is stark in opposing individual energy with social influences, demonstrating a common association of crowds with baser impulses, but also relating the power of group mentality to the communal rush to war. 24 Sinclair felt torn between “her horror at the idea of collective action itself,” and “her fascination with the idea of the war,” demonstrated in her Journal, Raitt asserts. 25 While Sinclair gives a jaundiced reading of group behavior in her description of the London crowd greeting the declaration of war on Germany, she also sees members of the same crowd responding to a “sense of civic—and military—duty” that redeems them. “For Sinclair, war both draws out, and corrects, the regressive tendencies of the crowd. War’s crowds—of anxious citizens, of troops, of the wounded—are exempted from the oppobrium in which Sinclair generally holds mass movements.” 26 Also contributing was the paradox that this mass movement was “intimately marked by the separate investments and experiences of all those who had been through it.” 27 Significantly, and in spite of her eagerness to feel included in the ambulance corps’s camaraderie, Sinclair’s description of her experience of war in the end emphasized not a communal process but, as we have seen, a deeply personal engagement with individual mystic perception. Sinclair’s efforts to preserve the individual in the midst of the “mass” were certainly not unique. A front-page editorial in The Egoist in August, 1914, for example, lamented the group mindset that typifies the call to arms, not specifically as a criticism of the bellicose spirit per se, but of the loss of an “individual” pursuit of glory. 28 Like Underhill, Sinclair looks toward intangibles to defend such a potentially romantic theory of human selfhood against its dissolution in a non-distinctive mass, emphasizing in A Defence of Idealism evidence of what might be called enterprising agency. “There is too much talk about the Race,” Sinclair asserts, meaning the human species: The race is nothing but the sum of the individuals that compose and have composed it, and will compose it. Not only so, but, without the individuality, the very marked and eccentric individuality of individuals, races and the Race itself would not exist. It is the outstanding individuals, the “sports,” that have been the pioneers of evolution. They have enriched and raised the species by compelling it to adopt their characteristics. 29

The motivating impulse for the creative achievements of “outstanding individuals,” Sinclair asserts, is a fundamental “will-to-live,” apparently the same will-to-live that Underhill saw as necessary (but not sufficient) to explain human nature. In fact, while Sinclair bases her understanding of personal identity on an amalgam of memory, “self-feeling,” and will,

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she privileges will. 30 Will, she asserts, is fundamental in being “traceable in the lowest conceivable germ of Personality—the will-to-live, the need to appear, to grow, to reproduce the self, to gather experience and appear more and more.” As a result, “in a sense [will] is the stronghold of individuality,” either in preserving privacy, or in connecting with others. “For it is with his will that the individual fences himself off and asserts himself against other individuals. It is with his will, in the form of interest and love, that he draws near to them and is drawn, and so makes his personality greater through theirs and theirs through him.” Specifically, she adds, “it is his will as energy that, whether in resistance or obedience, knits him to the forces of the ‘real’ world outside himself,” and, perhaps most important, “it is his will that in submitting or aspiring, in adoration or in longing, links him to the immanent and transcendent Reality that he calls God.” Despite her sharp critique of Vitalism in A Defence of Idealism, Sinclair’s own understanding of will as a productive force under the direction of human consciousness thus continued to channel elements of Bergson’s élan vital. Sinclair’s “new idealism” bears “an intimate resemblance to Bergson’s dynamism,” observes Shiv K. Kumar. “Even where she succeeds in pointing out certain flaws in Bergson’s time-philosophy, the novelist in her succumbs to the philosopher’s influence.” 31 Something remained irresistibly attractive to her in Bergson’s celebration of life’s underlying pulse. Sinclair dismissed Vitalism as a modish fad that is already “going from us in the flower, you may say, of [its] youth,” 32 but she apologizes after a fashion for her critique: “What do a few logical dilemmas more or less matter in the work of a poet and a seer? I said just now that Vitalism is a robust philosophy. It is nothing of the sort. It is subtle, exquisite, fragile. To try to analyse it, to break through that texture of beautiful imagination, is to lay violent hands on a living, palpitating thing that endures only on the condition that you do not handle it.” 33 Sinclair remained, however, more directly aligned with Schopenhauer’s more strongly expressed “will,” which he describes as an enigmatic, all-encompassing force, the very ground for existence manifested in persons through the individual “will-to-live.” At the same time that the will carries a metaphysical, universal dimension, it also operates in what might be called a more traditional mode as a volitional force, or “instinct,” that drives the actions of individuals. Always on the horizon, however, and in seeming tension with this picture of a will intimately engaged in the specifics of human living, is that prior understanding of will as a fundamental life force. In a remarkable paragraph that mimics stylistically the unrestricted flow of the multifaceted will he describes, Schopenhauer claims essential continuity between such natural energies as the gravity that pulls mountain stream water downhill and the power of human volition:

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The language of continuity and universal participation in this ubiquitous “will” invites the analogous description of mysticism as a union (or reunion) of an individual self with some wider, greater flow. As Schopenhauer describes it, the ultimate human goal must be transcendence of the individual will-to-live, which he saw as limited and self-serving, through momentary “forgetting” in aesthetic appreciation of the “sublime,” or through the progressive abnegation of self. 35 Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb described a similar self-transcendence in advocating an individual agency that actively seeks its own dissolution through union with the greater will. Schopenhauer’s and Bergson’s emphases on an unquantifiable invigorating influence, both separate from and unified with individual will, therefore, offered Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb a usefully countering voice to the threat of Weber’s ultimate calculability. At the same time, their sweeping conceptions of a natural energy sought to explain the accelerating and seemingly uncontrollable forces of social and historic change that was the basis for Weber’s Entzauberung. Where Weber saw the march of modernity removing the vestiges of magical influences, these authors joined Schopenhauer and Bergson in seeing that progress as itself the product of a volitional force that, for good or ill, might be considered modernity’s enchantment. Despite her frequent presentation of will as a more general, even universal force in Schopenhauerian terms, however, Sinclair’s application of his thought, as with her use of Bergson’s, emphasized the will’s expression as personal volition, and, in fact, assumed a level of conscious control that Schopenhauer presumably would deny. Schopenhauer asserts that reason, intellect, or thought serve the pleasure of the will, so to speak, rather than vice versa. 36 Will, revealed through action, is prior to

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reason’s function of understanding the will through observation of those actions. In the traditional view, he states, the maintenance of an empirical freedom of will . . . is very closely connected with the assertion that places man’s inner nature in a soul that is originally a knowing, indeed really an abstract thinking entity, and only in consequence thereof a willing entity. Such a view, therefore, regarded the will as of a secondary nature, instead of knowledge, which is really secondary. The will was even regarded as an act of thought, and was identified with the judgement.

Quite to the contrary, and apparently dispensing with the soul in the process, Schopenhauer maintains that the will is first and original; knowledge is merely added to it as an instrument belonging to the phenomenon of the will. Therefore every man is what he is through his will, and his character is original, for willing is the basis of his inner being. Through the knowledge added to it, he gets to know in the course of experience what his is; in other words, he becomes acquainted with his character. Therefore he knows himself in consequence of, and in accordance with, the nature of his will, instead of willing in consequence of, and according to, his knowing, as in the old view.

The will, Schopenhauer asserted, is autonomous in preceding the effects of reason in that the will “knows no necessity; in other words, it is free.” 37 The role of reason in “coolly meditating on the pro et contra” for a particular course of action may give the appearance of a will being determined by reason; in actuality, however, “this distinct unfolding of the motives on both sides is all that the intellect can do in connection with the choice. It awaits the real decision just as passively and with the same excited curiosity as it would that of a foreign will.” 38 Indeed, the intellect “is unable to determine the will itself, for the will is wholly inaccessible to it, and . . . is for it inscrutable and impenetrable.” Perhaps most significant is the definition this understanding of will’s primacy gives to human character as essentially fixed: “Therefore he cannot decide to be this or that; also he cannot become another person, but he is once for all, and subsequently knows what he is.” 39 Without pursuing the quandaries Schopenhauer creates for himself in claiming such an absolute autonomy for the will, and then, by necessity, resurrecting a “semblance” of reasoned reflection as he later does, we can see something of the attraction his construction of an indomitable force driving human events might have for Sinclair. Her engagement with both Schopenhauer and Bergson was, in any case, a recognition on her part of an essential contiguity between the two that served her purposes. If Sinclair claimed wholeheartedly the intimations of some greater, wider force or power she found in their thought, she emphasized equally the individ-

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ual work that might, as with Agatha in “The Flaw in the Crystal,” align a properly attuned mystic sensibility with that power. In A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, Sinclair describes her own Agatha-like experience of that merger of “wills” when she is asked to sit up with a wounded soldier. A discontinuity between her insufficient physical strength and lack of medical training, on the one hand, and her assumed power of volition, on the other, makes the night a crystallizing moment. The experience can be read first as an exercise in incompetence. Sinclair admits that “[t]hat night I would have given everything I possess, and everything I have ever done, to have been a trained nurse.” 40 After rousing numerous staff to assist her, Sinclair realizes through their responses that “my case was not the only case in the hospital.” Yet, in Sinclair’s description, the night’s service was effective on an entirely different level, since her active willing apparently produced a measurable improvement in the soldier’s condition. She expresses the potential of the influence she wields in religious terms of prayer: There is nothing that I can do for him but to will. And I will hard, or I pray—I don’t know which it is; your acutest willing and your intensest prayer are indistinguishable. And it seems to work. I will—or I pray— that he will lie still without morphia, and that he shall have no pain. And he lies still, without pain. I will—or I pray—that he shall sleep without morphia. And he sleeps. . . . And because it seems to work, I will—or I pray—he shall get well. 41

Forced to prop the soldier’s lower back up with her arms, Sinclair describes her long vigil as physically but also spiritually exhausting, using embodied terms to relate the ordeal of willing, and making the weight on her arms a metaphor for the burden of concentration. Describing her sense that the time she has spent in the room caring for the soldier is not one night, but “months of nights,” Sinclair goes even further: “All my life I have known and cared only for the wounded man on the bed.” 42 Her willing, furthermore, she intimates, does seem to have had some effect: “About midnight . . . he wakes and tells me he has had a jolly dream. He dreamed that he was running in a field in England, running in a big race, that he led the race and won it.” The next day the solder is proclaimed improved by six doctors who “all say he is ever so much better. They even say he may live—that he has a good chance.” Furthermore, Sinclair herself has found the experience efficacious: “The night has not been so terrible, after all. It has gone like an hour and I have left him sleeping. I am not in the least bit tired; I never felt drowsy once, and my cough has nearly gone.” 43 Nonetheless, she is not disappointed when the soldier’s case is taken out of her hands: “Little Janet looks as if she were trying to soften a blow. But it isn’t a blow. Far from it. It is the end of an intolerable responsibility.”

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If the will was a central concept for Sinclair, its usefulness as an expression of agency was thus strongly associated in her mind with the expenditure of responsible and disciplined effort. Set in a social context of widespread psychic and magical experimentation, her emphasis on the exercise of a “super-normal” will was modern in its participation in the general impulse to endow human agency with extraordinary power. The popularity of Bergson’s theories as they built on Schopenhauer’s coincided with expectations that, through proper channeling or focusing, something of the human self could be projected as an influence, communicating thoughts, producing healing, or causing harm. The specific linking of this channeled agency with the psychologically charted libido, as explored by Jung, revealed associations with primal energy, the subterranean “life force” in Sinclair’s wording, and, not surprisingly for an age in transition from Victorian to modern values, raised critical issues of control. For Sinclair, that control could only come through the psychological process of sublimation. She sums up perhaps the essence of her philosophy of individual and species evolution in terms of this key concept, with obvious echoes of Green’s emphasis on the progressive realization of the self, when she concludes the litany about the will quoted earlier: “The perfect individual is the person perfectly adapted to reality through the successive sublimations of his will.” 44 While Freud and Jung are surprisingly absent from the lists of Sinclair’s favorite authors that she has Mary Olivier read, the text’s emphasis on dream images and family-generated complexes reveals Sinclair’s psychoanalytic orientation, while the core narrative arc of self-preservation through self-sacrifice foregrounds the psychological concept of sublimation. In Mary Olivier, Mary’s struggle for self-fulfillment in particular follows Sinclair’s emphasis on sublimation’s importance, to the extent that the novel was reviewed by the New York Medical Journal for its account of the psychological states of sublimation and repression. 45 In her 1916 “Clinical Lectures on Symbolism and Sublimation,” in which she commented on two chapters of Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, and in an unpublished text “The Way of Sublimation,” Sinclair worked through a shift in allegiance from the new and suggestive possibilities of Freud’s thought, to a preference for Jung, largely on the basis of Jung’s greater emphasis on sublimation. 46 Jung distinguishes between types of “deflection” of sexual libido into other functions, noting that “where this operation succeeds without injury to the adaptation of the individual it is called sublimation,” but “where the attempt does not succeed it is called repression.” 47 Kinnamon notes Sinclair’s preference for Jung’s understanding of “libido as ‘creative energy’” rather than “Freud’s equating it with eros,” 48 and claims that a theory suggesting the possibility of channeling sexual energy into alternative productive pursuits would be irresistible to Sinclair. “The unmistakable fact which emerges from her nonfictional writing is that she feared sexual passion, not an uncommon

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situation for a woman born as she was in the sexually repressive era of the late nineteenth century and living in a world that reaped the harvest of that repression.” 49 But even though Kinnamon qualifies her claim, suggesting that “it would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that [Sinclair] feared excessive passion (or anything excessive, for that matter),” she may still be overstating the case. It seems more in line with Sinclair’s apparent preoccupation with various permutations of desire and her concern about permeable personalities to say that she had a cautious respect for the implications of strong emotion and attachment. It may even be the case that she was, by nature, predisposed to welcome the protection of her privacy that avoidance of personal attachments provided. But rumors of her own possible affairs, 50 evidence of erotic interests in her Belgium journal, positive representations of married love in such novels as The Creators, and negative treatments of such non-passionate characters as Canon Chamberlain in A Cure of Souls, suggest that her interest in sexual passion may have been at the very least complex and not essentially negative. It may be more useful, in fact, to think in terms of Weber’s valuation, and to read Sinclair’s life choices as principally a matter of assigning primacy to the independent assertion of individuality through an artistic vocation. At least in representations of her singleness to herself and others, Sinclair was adamant that it served the purpose of her highest calling—to be a writer. In Mary Olivier, the somewhat ambiguous conclusion is open to at least one reading that finds Mary’s life-long course of selfdenial producing not only artistic success but a form of mystically induced “happiness and peace.” 51 Sinclair’s quest for release from restrictive gender roles and for fulfillment of an artistic vocation, in other words, was pursued through the channeling of her willful energy into creative pursuits that ultimately manifested in a heightened, even mystic perception. Just as Sinclair deviated from Schopenhauer in the degree to which she assumed conscious control of the will, she also reconceptualized Jung’s thought to support her notion of controlled sublimation. Where Sinclair called it “‘the conscious direction of the libido into higher channels,’ and the ‘conscious creative imagination,’” Jung “explicitly challenged the notion that people could deliberately choose sublimation as a means of psychic cure” or of non-sexual creativity, Raitt observes. 52 Sinclair was drawn to conscious control of the process as an expression of agency, “but also because this kind of ‘willing,’ . . . harmonized with the description of the ‘mystic way’ which she found in Rabindranath Tagore and especially in the work of her friend Evelyn Underhill.” 53 Specifically, “the idea of sublimation as a form of self-discipline allowed [Sinclair] to construct the self as, in the end, its own salvation. At the end of Mary Olivier Mary needs no one, not even an analyst.”

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Sinclair’s emphasis on sublimation is itself a paradoxical application of will through its surrender, as finding her self requires the denial of that self’s desires. In an echo of “The Flaw in the Crystal,” Zegger reads Mary’s development as a process of purification, which, according to Underhill in Mysticism, “involves detachment, abandonment of outward things that confine and ‘enchain the spirit,’ and mortification, ‘the death of the selfhood in its narrow individualistic sense’ and the ‘raising to their purest state of all that remains’ by a ‘deliberate recourse to painful experience and difficult tasks.’” 54 The program of supposedly productive self-denial reaches one apex in Mary’s decision to forgo a trip to France because her brother is sick. While Mary first feels anguish over giving up the trip, she is able to give up even the desire to go. After an open prayer for help, “if Anything’s there,” she achieves “a sense of exquisite security and clarity and joy” in a new certainty that “she was not going to Agaye. She didn’t want to go.” 55 Mary likewise puts her new-found will to the test in willing her mother’s recovery from a stroke, 56 but also gives her life’s narrative its dramatic close by willing an end to wanting her lover Richard and to his wanting her. The difficulty in reading Mary’s final “achievement,” therefore, may reflect the complex outcomes of this process of rejecting desire. To complicate things even further, as we have seen, the “queer happiness” that Mary first experiences as a child, and later identifies as a perception of transcendence, is dependent on a merging of wills, or of Mary’s sense of willing in concert with a greater will, which she identifies as God’s will, though described more broadly elsewhere by Sinclair as “reality.” 57 This is quite in contrast to the opposition between God’s will and personal will that Mamma asserts, as Mary explains: If you were part of God your will was God’s will at the moment when you really willed. There was always a point when you knew it: the flash point of freedom. You couldn’t mistake your flash when it came. You couldn’t doubt away that certainty of freedom any more than you could doubt away the certainty of necessity and determination. From the outside they were part of the show of existence, the illusion of separation from God. From the inside they were God’s will, the way things were willed. Free-will was the reality underneath the illusion of necessity. The flash point of freedom was your consciousness of God. 58

The specifics of her life are inconsequential, Mary asserts, except as potential barriers to the release required for achieving that “consciousness of God” in a unity of willing. While “praying would be willing,” and “there would be no such thing as passive prayer,” she explains, surrender was actually critical: “Not the surrender of your will, but of all the things that entangle and confuse it; that stand between it and you, between God and you.”

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In likening Mary’s mystic release into a “higher” will to an experience of death, Sinclair’s description again echoes “A Flaw in the Crystal”: “When you lay still with your eyes shut and made the darkness come on, wave after wave, blotting out your body and the world, blotting out everything but your self and your will, that was a dying to live; a real dying, a real life.” 59 In emphasizing release from desire, Sinclair’s description of the steps necessary to achieve this state reflects her interest in Eastern forms of mysticism. Specifically, Mary’s mature ability to hold on to her memory of mystic apprehension, of being “aware of it as one continuous, shining background,” depends on her realization that “for twenty-three years something had come between her and reality. . . . She had gone through life wanting things, wanting people, clinging to the thought of them, not able to keep off them and let them go.” 60 Thus, haunted by guilt at being glad her mother has died (a theme she would revisit in the short story “If the Dead Knew”), and miserable after attending a party also attended by her former lover Richard, Mary “found herself crying, incredibly crying; all the fear, all the boredom of her life gathered together and discharging now.” But the recognition of her life’s limiting factors brings with it the chance of release: “If I could get out of it all”—Her crying stopped with a start as if somebody had come in and put a hand on her shoulder. Everything went still. She had a sense of happiness and peace suddenly there with her in the room. Not so much her own as the happiness and peace of an immense, invisible, intangible being of whose life she was thus aware. She knew, somehow through It, that there was no need to get away; she was out of it all now, this minute. There was always a point where she could get out of it and into this enduring happiness and peace. 61

Despite momentary fear that this ability may be an illusion, Mary returns in the book’s final lines with the unequivocal: “This time it was clear, clear as the black pattern the sycamore makes on the sky. If it never came again I should remember.” 62 This is the successful achievement of autonomous solitude through sublimation and denial that Sinclair’s readers are invited to celebrate. Mary experiences this moment of release alone in a home procured through her own financial means, in which she successfully pursues her own artistic abilities as a writer. In other ways, however, it is simultaneously a disturbing displacement of desire, a spiritualization and distancing of disappointment that refuses, for whatever complex reasons, to pursue an alternative to that solitude. Asserting that letting go of Richard “had somehow done the trick” in bringing about her sense of the “real,” Mary presents a stark either/or: Could I give up this [for Richard]? If I had to choose between losing Richard and losing this? . . . If I had had to choose seven years ago, before I knew, I’d have chosen Richard; I couldn’t have helped myself.

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But if I had to choose now—knowing what reality is—between losing Richard in the way I have lost him and losing reality, absolutely and for ever, losing, absolutely and for ever, my real self, knowing that I’d lost it? . . . If there’s anything in it at all, losing my real self would be losing Richard, losing Richard’s real self absolutely and for ever. Knowing reality is knowing that you can’t lose it. That or nothing. 63

If unconvinced by Mary’s final certainty, readers may resonate more with the doubt in the actuality of the experience that she briefly entertains, recalling Underhill’s concern about the certainty of her own mystic sensibility: “Supposing there isn’t anything in it? Supposing—Supposing—” 64 At the very least, it may be difficult for a reader who knows the respective cruelties of Mary’s mother and father to share in Mary’s sentiment that while she is glad she gave up Richard, she is sorry for “not caring more for Papa, being unkind to Mamma, not doing enough for her, not knowing what she was really like.” 65 If nothing else, the personal cost, readers may observe, is not only to her but to Richard, who is left trapped in an unsatisfying marriage. 66 In a marked departure from the celebration of mystic sublimation that closes Mary Olivier, Sinclair experiments in The Cure of Souls with the mystic way gone wrong, as the efforts of the love-sick Miss Lambert to channel her infatuation into spiritual self-abnegation leads her into the mentally dangerous regions about which both Underhill and Sinclair warn. Chamberlain’s disastrous encouragement to Lambert to continue both her parish work and her mystic practices may match her desires but not her needs; he sets her on a course toward mental breakdown that Sinclair describes ironically and ominously: “[Lambert] looked at him. A long look of joy and satisfaction. Her face lit up, her eyes shimmered as if through tears: light of blessedness, shimmer of ecstasy.” 67 This ecstasy, Sinclair makes clear, is more sexual than mystical, a misalliance of the erotic power and preoccupation with mystical matters that she otherwise finds crucial. Chamberlain, for his convenience, sees in Lambert a “born mystic”; Dr. Lawson more realistically observes a “made fanatic” on the “verge of religious mania.” 68 Similarly, when Lambert turns to St. John of the Cross in her despair at Chamberlain’s preference for the widow Molly Beauchamp, it is obvious that Lambert suffers from nothing so noble as the “dark night of the soul” that St. John describes. 69 As Beauchamp asserts pungently to Chamberlain after a visit from the distraught Lambert, “It didn’t look like religion to me.” 70 In this instance, when Chamberlain dismisses Lawson’s “gross and material construction” of Lambert’s spiritual ideas as simply a medical doctor’s “scientific blindness,” Sinclair stands in allegiance with the pragmatic materialism she elsewhere eschews. 71 A certain practical grounding, not unlike her skeptical approach to paranormal phenomena, is represented by Lawson as he gives voice to Sinclair’s own observations in A

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Defence of Idealism about the dangers of misguided efforts at mysticism. Chamberlain denies that Lambert’s ideas are dangerous, claiming, “They are the ideas that every saint and mystic has had all the world over”; Lawson retorts: “Saints and mystics, all the world over, have been thoroughly abnormal people.” 72 Sinclair generally rejected the debunking of mysticism by psychologists, despite her own faith in psychoanalytic theory, but she was quite ready to explore representations of mysticism as disordered consciousness, and, in keeping with her own scientific bent, grants some value to modern critiques: The specialist in morbid psychology will tell you that the history of Mysticism is a history of neurosis. He will point, not in undue triumph, to the saints and mystics of the Salpêtrière. He will assure you that the great saints and mystics are in no better case; but that, on the contrary, the life of the religious recluse provides in a supreme degree all the conditions of the hysterical neurosis; its repressions are the classical repressions; its results the classical results. . . . And the sting of his observations will be in their truth. 73

Sinclair accuses most mystics of history, in fact, of being not just “morbid and unbalanced,” but arrogant: “The saint is exalted because she has won God’s love, because she is chosen above other women to be the Spouse of Christ. . . . You seldom hear of the other spouses, the other loves. . . . It would be interesting to know what Saint Teresa would have said to Lady Julian, or Saint Catharine of Siena to the Blessed Angela.” 74 At the base of such shortcomings, however, she argues, is a deficiency in the expression of mysticism, especially Christian mysticism, that insufficiently follows the necessary sublimation: So far from there being any way out and forwards in this direction, it would seem that the Mystic Way is the surest way backwards and in. For two reasons. First, because in the mystic longing and the mystic union Sublimation is still imperfect. The “libido,” although it is transferred from a human and bodily object to a divine and spiritual one, is not transformed. It is simply “carried over” in a more or less sublimated state. Secondly, because the mystic look is essentially an inward one. The mystic seeks God, for the most part, not in the outer world of art and science and action, but in the darkest and most secret recesses of his own soul. And it is precisely this darkness and secrecy that the psychoanalyst has the most reason to mistrust. 75

At the same time, Sinclair adds, “If anybody could persuade me that all was and is well with the mystics it would be Miss Evelyn Underhill. She does not blink the patent, and indeed blatant, fact of ‘mystical ill-health.’” Underhill’s explanation in Mysticism that “the sporadic beginning of a power, a higher consciousness, towards which the race slowly tends,” inevitably inflicts stress on nerves and organs not yet evolved to stand the strain “is, I think, broadly and roughly true,” Sinclair grants. “But it

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would be more closely and finely true to say that the mystic consciousness presents in a marked degree the pathological phenomena of ‘dissociation.’” 76 Calling dissociation, the process by which a group of mental activities separates from the “main stream of consciousness” and functions separately, a “very dangerous state,” Sinclair observes that “there is not one step of the ‘Mystic Way,’ from meditation, through illumination, introversion (contemplation and quiet) to deliverance and to ecstasy,” that does not tend in that direction. 77 The potential for development to a higher state of consciousness is real, therefore, Sinclair states, but so is the potential for degeneration: Let us suppose then that in his abnormal state the mystic has before him the entire range of the “Unconscious” and “Subconscious.” . . . [His psyche] may be the prey and the victim of powers, of instincts and of memories, which once served its development, and which have dropped from it by disuse; or it may be the experimenter with undeveloped powers of which it is by no means the master. At best it can only advance a little way, a very little way along the path it is ultimately destined to travel. But it can go back very easily down that well-trodden path by which it came. It can go a short way, or even a fairly long way and yet return. But if it goes too far it is lost; it is hopelessly estranged from itself and from the life of the normal living; it is (not to mince matters) mad. 78

Sinclair’s presentation of Lambert is one example of her common practice of depicting mirrored or even various images of certain principles or life stances she favored, both within works and between works. Mary Olivier, for example, was followed by her novel Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), which Sinclair herself described as an attempt to rewrite the Mary Olivier story with a protagonist who does not achieve a final sense of independent selfhood. 79 In the same way, Arnold Waterlow: A Life (1924) offered the Mary Olivier story from a male perspective. 80 Still, Sinclair returned on many occasions to presentations of the efficacious “self-emptying” that she had denied her character Lambert and that was so central to her and Underhill’s understandings of mystic sensibility, making it a key event in such other works as The Helpmate (1907), and in the extended poem The Dark Night (1924). 81 In the latter, in particular, Sinclair used the deprivation and heroic self-sacrifice of her characters to lead her readers to an experience of a true “dark night of the soul,” and the sought-after spiritual fulfillment. Much like Underhill, therefore, Sinclair approached pursuit of a mystical perception of reality as a life-long process of (hoped-for) gradual development that could yet lead to real disappointment and even danger. As a potential process of evolution, however, that lived experience of personal endeavor promised the possibility of real advances not just for an individual but for humans as a species, an aspect of Sinclair’s thought that resonated with other prevailing preoccupations of her time.

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NOTES 1. Sinclair was a regular contributor to The Egoist journal, billed as “an Individualist Review” when it began publication in 1914, having been reincarnated from the New Freewoman. 2. Raitt, May Sinclair, 171. 3. Thurschwell, Technology and Magical Thinking, 13. 4. Thurschwell describes the general process of psychoanalysis, but also refers to the specific case of Dr. Schreber related in Freud’s “Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (1911).” 5. Thurschwell, Technology and Magical Thinking, 3. 6. Thurschwell, 87. 7. Thurschwell, 4, 14. Frederic W. H. Myers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research, introduced the term “telepathy” in 1882 by combining “tele” and a reduction of “empathy” to connote “feeling at a distance” as a way to emphasize the emotional connection underlying mental communication. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible, 38, 81. 8. Thurschwell, Technology and Magical Thinking, 4. 9. Sinclair, “Flaw,” 97. 10. Sinclair, 95. 11. Sinclair, 98. 12. Sinclair, “Concerning My Book,” 1. 13. Sinclair, “Flaw,” 104. 14. Sinclair, “Concerning My Book,” 1. 15. See Boll, Miss May Sinclair, 242–43. 16. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 18. 17. Sinclair, 145. 18. Sinclair, 271. See also Raitt, May Sinclair, 231. 19. Kinnamon, “Fiction of the Supernatural,” 8. Raitt, May Sinclair, 171–72. 20. Sinclair, Rector, 202. 21. Sinclair, 205. 22. Sinclair, Tree of Heaven, 123–24. 23. Raitt, May Sinclair, 169–70. 24. W. (Wilfred) Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, published in 1915, and The Group Mind, a sketch of the principles of collective psychology with some attempt to apply them to the interpretation of national life and character, published in 1920 by William McDougall, a medical consultant for the Medico-Psychological Clinic, indicated contemporary preoccupations of psychology with the nature of group process. See Raitt, May Sinclair, 172–73. Freud cited McDougall’s work, and published his own “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” in 1921. 25. Raitt, May Sinclair, 171. 26. Raitt, 173. 27. Raitt, 174. 28. Dora Marsden, “Quid Pro Quo,” 302. 29. Sinclair, Defence, 36. 30. Sinclair, 67–68. 31. Kumar, Bergson, 39. 32. Sinclair, Defence, v. 33. Sinclair, vii. 34. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 117–18. 35. See Schopenhauer, 390. 36. Schopenhauer, 292–93. 37. Schopenhauer, 287. 38. Schopenhauer, 291. 39. Schopenhauer, 293. 40. Sinclair, Journal, 218.

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41. Sinclair, 219–20. 42. Sinclair, 221. 43. Sinclair, 223. 44. Sinclair, Defence, 69–70. 45. Zegger, May Sinclair, 106. 46. See Kinnamon, “Fiction of the Supernatural,” 24. 47. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, 150. See also Raitt, May Sinclair, 231. 48. Kinnamon, “Fiction of the Supernatural,” 24. See Jung, Psychology of Unconscious, 136ff. 49. Kinnamon, “Fiction of the Supernatural,” 23. 50. See Raitt, May Sinclair, 6–7, 82–83, 183n2, 190. To the extent that Mary Olivier is autobiographical, its narrative also suggests that Sinclair was romantically interested in a number of men. 51. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 432. 52. Raitt, May Sinclair, 232. A year after Sinclair’s “Clinical Lectures” appeared, Jung maintained in an essay that “instinctual forces” such as the libido cannot be sublimated by “free choice or inclination.” To the contrary, “the individual . . . must often learn in his life that so-called ‘disposable’ energies are not his to dispose.’” Jung, “On the Psychology of the Unconscious,” 153–54, 156. 53. Raitt, May Sinclair, 233. 54. Zegger, May Sinclair, 108. 55. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 300. 56. Sinclair, 404–5. 57. See Raitt, May Sinclair, 235. 58. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 434. See also Kaplan, Feminine Consciousness, 75. 59. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 434. 60. Sinclair, 435. 61. Sinclair, 432. 62. Sinclair, 437. 63. Sinclair, 436. 64. Sinclair, 437. 65. Sinclair, 433. 66. Sinclair, 432. See Kaplan, Feminine Consciousness, 60. 67. Sinclair, Cure, 234. 68. Sinclair, 225. See Boll, Miss May Sinclair, 281. 69. Sinclair, Cure, 251–57. 70. Sinclair, 281. 71. Sinclair, 226, 232. 72. Sinclair, 227. Cf., e.g., Sinclair, Defence, 259–60. 73. Sinclair, Defence, 252. 74. Sinclair, 256. 75. Sinclair, 257. 76. Sinclair, 258. 77. Sinclair, 259. 78. Sinclair, 260. 79. Raitt, May Sinclair, 242. 80. Boll, Miss May Sinclair, 282. 81. Sinclair, The Dark Night. See Boll, Miss May Sinclair, 281.

TEN Evolution’s Promise Consciousness, Species, Religion

Sinclair’s fictional explorations of the mystic process drew directly, if somewhat idiosyncratically, on the early twentieth century’s cultural engagement with evolution as an idea, hope, and concern. An assumption of teleological progress underlies her two book-length treatises on Neoplatonic idealism, and especially her first book, A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions (1917), written in the midst of war. Despite her affinity with Underhill, Sinclair’s understanding of evolutionary processes merged with the importance she placed on a properly sublimated will to blur some of the distinction between magic and mysticism that Underhill was at pains to preserve. Whatever the nature of the distinctions between the stages of mystic engagement, Sinclair’s fundamental assumption of an extra-rational consciousness that could be developed through discipline fed into an eclectic openness to various “more than natural” expressions of effective willing, or perhaps into expressions she understood to be quite natural, though more than “rationally” expected. Following Underhill in separating mysticism from “primitive and savage Magic (the humble origin of Mysticism with which it is reproached),” while still, like her, recognizing a tie between the two, Sinclair was less concerned about distinguishing magic’s and mysticism’s respective goals. Quoting Underhill’s formula that the difference between the two is between “wanting to get and wanting to give,” Sinclair counters that even mysticism’s “giving” is “a means to getting.” A mystic’s hope is to “get illumination, to get peace, to get deliverance, to feed on life and drink life—to eat His flesh and drink His blood—to get spiritual sustenance, the mana of the God.” 1 Sinclair saw the will-to-live expressed initially in the magically formulated “desire for fertility, the desire to live 143

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and to make live” that plays out through “the rites of tribal initiation, of adolescence, of marriage, the funeral rites of death itself,” coming to fulfillment eventually in the achievement of a mature mystic sensibility. 2 In her Neoplatonic construction, the development of human spirituality follows a trajectory from its roots in magical thought and concern with “the Lesser Mystery of the body” toward an eventual monism and appreciation for what she calls Ultimate Reality and “the Greater Mysteries of the soul.” 3 Her emphasis on mystic “self-transcendence” as the evolved epitome of sublimation’s creative potential shows the influences of Green, Bergson, and Schopenhauer. In this process, as “the sense of life becomes more and more the sense of the Unseen,” the “love of God becomes more and more the passion for the Absolute.” 4 Just as Sinclair believed pursuit of the mystic way could lead either to madness or enlightenment, however, mystic evolution might also slide back to the lower order of magic. “Mysticism may be no more tied to its ancient history than any other of our instincts and aptitudes,” she warns, “but it does betray a shocking tendency to revert.” 5 In addition to linking magic and mysticism, the extra-rational efficacy of will encompasses what Sinclair calls the “in-between” space of paranormal psychic phenomena, phenomena she expected to see explained with the same scientific dispassion as was applied to the human psyche by psychoanalysis. In an echo of Underhill, Sinclair asserts that a “dubious borderland” exists that is “the region of the so-called supernatural powers, of which the mystic himself cannot say whether they are magical or spiritual: the power of healing, of vision, of clairvoyance and clairaudience, of control over matter. This is the region where ‘miracles’ are said to happen; though neither the believer in magic nor the mystic know what is really happening.” Despite defending the basic validity of overlapping and interrelated fields of magic, psychic phenomena, and mysticism, Sinclair, like Underhill, was an intrigued skeptic when it came to some supernatural powers, striving to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate expressions as Schmidt describes. 6 Even as her membership in the Society for Psychical Research and her engagement with mysticism kept her open to possibilities that “realists” would reject as fantasy, she dismissed much that was perpetrated as occult sciences: “I feel (to be disgustingly egoistic) that any reputation I may have is already so imperiled by my devout adhesion to the Absolute that I simply cannot afford to be suspected of tenderness, or even toleration for the professors of the occult.” 7 Properly researching paranormal events can be tricky, however, Sinclair admits, since the undeniable validity of some psychic experiences tends to be offset by the fraudulent nature of others “claimed equally,” as she put it, “by scoundrels and saints.” Such potentially valid practices as “faith-healing, palmistry, clairvoyance, clair-audience, automatism, mediumship, and the rest,” she worried, “are still mixed up with such fraud and humbug and silliness, and with persons so disgraceful, so

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discredited, so absurd, that it is not easy to write about them in a work that is, at any rate, trying to be serious.” But her interest and skepticism mingle as she asserts that “both through the agency of mediums and otherwise, things happen; things that are not explainable by any trickery; things interesting enough, and even uncanny enough to charm the most fastidious lover of the occult. (Unfortunately, lovers of the occult are very seldom hampered in their researches by over fastidiousness.) The question is: What happens?” 8 Scientific study had, she maintained, established the reality of at least “some powers.” 9 Freud’s psychoanalytic interest in dreams brought their possible supernatural properties into serious consideration, for example. 10 Freud might have provided more specific legitimation for her theories of mystic evolution, she mused, by calling dreams “a piece of the yet unconquered life of the soul that is to be,” or “the repressed desire to transcend our normal powers, seeing that in our dream-consciousness we do transcend them.” Even so, the authorizing mantle of psychoanalysis was welcome. In addition, she observed, “[m]ost of us can remember the time when the existence of telepathy was not admitted by persons who had a scientific reputation to take care of, and ‘suggestion’ was on its trial.” 11 In Sinclair’s eyes, telepathy simply is “a fact; and whatever the precise limits and possibilities of telepathy may be, we have not yet discovered them.” 12 She makes the extraordinary argument that it may be impossible to prove the reality of communication with the dead, since communication believed to be between an “incarnate” subject and a “disincarnate” subject might actually be an instance of telepathy between two living people. Ensuring the proper test conditions that would eliminate “every possible source of suggestion from the living,” she points out sardonically, would require going to absurd lengths, namely the extermination of all human beings other than the test subject, “and then there will only be his word for it.” Sinclair’s willingness to seriously entertain the methodological hurdles involved in testing claims for communication with the dead, combined with her preoccupying concern over confusing one paranormal phenomenon for another, says much about the fluid horizon of science’s perceived scope during the decades in which she wrote. 13 In attempting to maintain careful boundaries around acceptable practices, Sinclair took specific aim at what she saw as the more disturbing variety of organized, and, perhaps more important, widespread spiritualisms, such as Theosophy and Christian Science. 14 She worried that although the Society for Psychical Research “may be trusted to deal appropriately with unorganized imposture,” organized groups might be harder to corral. Christian Science was “by far the more dangerous, though not the less dubious, of the two,” she maintained, “because of its successes.” Given Sinclair’s interest in preserving a scientific basis for her own supernatural theory, her choice to criticize Christian Science as being essential-

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ly “bad science” that undercut faith in medicine may be understandable. The refusal of its practitioners to admit the reality of contagious diseases, she complains, endangers public health, while the material success of the organization indicates that “though Christian Science despises appearances in the form of disease germs and the laws of nature, it does not despise them in the form of dollars and of goods.” 15 Her reaction to Theosophy recapitulates, ironically and humorously, her reaction to the self-righteousness of Christianity: “I hate it when a woman I disapprove of tells me that if I would only extinguish all my desires I should attain Nirvana to-morrow. I know it. But I do not want to attain Nirvana quite so soon.” She offers a more scholarly criticism of Theosophy’s misappropriation of Eastern texts: “I object to having the Bhagavad-Gîtâ and the Sutta of all the Asavas thrown at my head, as if they had been portions of Scripture appointed for the day, and specially applicable to my unspiritual case.” But, she adds, “I am really frightened when I am introduced to a female ‘adept’ who cannot walk through a churchyard without seeing what goes on in the graves, and who insists on describing what she sees.” In the end, however, Sinclair is unwilling to discount the powers of such practitioners entirely, admitting she believes that “but for my willnot-to-be-healed, a Christian Scientist could heal me.” 16 Any special abilities associated with paranormal practices may be no more than the force of “suggestion” that mostly creates convincing illusions, she suggests. “Their powers are not more interesting or wonderful than the powers of quite ordinary people who have never heard of a Mahatma, or else think it is the island New York City is built on.” Yet, taking a position similar to Underhill’s, Sinclair argues that even the force of suggestion holds the potential of true efficacy. Psychic healing, for example, she attributes in part to the actual power of suggestion as an extension of personal will. If suggestion “cannot move mountains, or even mole-hills, it can move molecules,” she asserts. In instances of healing, “there are certain clear and steady sequences that point to a definite and deliberate agency. . . . The selves can apparently exert an inward spiritual influence as strong as, or stronger than, an outside or material stimulus.” 17 Considering “suggestion” as “the power that immaterial beings have to make psychic events happen,” Sinclair continues to think in terms of a more than natural agency: In this sense we may say that [suggestion] covers all the ground of Magic and of Mysticism and the Borderland. It must have been used deliberately in primitive ritual and in all the Mysteries. It accounts for all the “psychic phenomena” of Mysticism: the miracles, the visions, the ecstasies, the sense of Union. It probably accounts for the efficacy of prayer. Prayer is one of our oldest ancestral instincts and habits; it is therefore one of the strongest engines of suggestion at our service. 18

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Just why and how suggestion works to create psychic events, however, is unknown, she admits. Still, “[i]f we say that its chief function is to create illusion, we are very far from the truth. Its chief and highest function is to create reality; to heighten the sense and sharpen the perception of reality; to restore the links with reality where they have been broken.” 19 Perhaps more important, its dismissal as “mere” suggestion fails to recognize the profundity of the spiritual quest served by the mystic impulse to seek for Ultimate Reality to which it eventually leads. 20 Discontinuities of type and focus that distinguished magic as a general category from paranormal phenomena such as telepathy and psychic healing, or from mystic apprehension, were ultimately subsumed, in her mind, by continuities along a line of linked evolutionary progression. Sinclair’s mystic preoccupations reflected the intermingling of psychoanalytic and spiritual theorizing that characterized her age, but also rehearsed quandaries about the nature of human development. Not only was mystic sensibility the highest expression of human evolutionary development, as Underhill would also claim, but mysticism itself could be seen as evolving in a way that highlighted modern understandings of an autonomous self: Thus, though we cannot say what the Mysticism of the future will be, we may be pretty sure what it will not be. It will not be sickly; it will not be morbid and hysterical, or sentimental. In exchanging God the Father for God the Absolute Self, it will have lost that irresponsible dependence which has kept men and women for centuries in a pathetic infancy. Sooner or later the mystic has to grow up like other people. He will know that he fulfils the absolute purpose best by trying to become, as far as possible, a self-determined being. 21

The potential for mystic apprehension of the greater reality, she assumes, lies in this evolving human racial consciousness, and in the personal evolution of the conscious individual, with proof to be found in the experiential data of those moments of heightened awareness she attributes to Mary in Mary Olivier, to Agatha in “The Flaw in the Crystal,” and to herself in her Journal. But for all that evolutionary themes provide an optimistic framework for Sinclair, such theories also raised troubling concerns about hereditary determinism. On the one hand, Sinclair embraced evolution’s potential not just for individuals but for the human race. 22 In her “Clinical Lectures” she asserts: Sublimation itself is the striving of the Libido towards manifestation in higher and higher forms. The history of evolution is its history. You might almost say offhand that the higher organism is the sublimation of the lower, the animal of the plant, the vertebrate of the invertebrate, the placental mammal of the reptile, the ape-man of the anthropoid ape, palaeolithic man of the Neanderthal and Heidelberg connecting

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On the other hand, she also wrestled with her fear of the force of heredity as a restriction on an individual’s independent development, a fear that contributed to her passionate investment in a potentially independent and triumphant personal will. Part of Mary Olivier’s mother’s cruel power devolves from Mary’s concern about inheriting family traits. It is a fear reinforced by the example of her uncle Victor, who refuses to marry in order to avoid passing on his sister Charlotte’s insanity, and by the apparent evidence of Mary’s brother Dan’s inheritance of their father’s alcoholism. When her mother discounts Mary’s budding sexuality as the first signs that she will follow Charlotte into an unbalanced fixation on men, Mary is predisposed to believe her. Her research into the largely mistaken theories of heredity prevalent at her time does little to dissuade her. At first Mary learns from reading Henry Maudsley and Thédule Ribot that instead of the independent selves of family members against whom she struggles, “there were no independent, separate entities, no sacred, inviolable selves. They were one immense organism and you were part of it; you were nothing that they had not been before you. It was no good struggling. You were caught in the net; you couldn’t get out.” 24 Since the members of her family could not help themselves, the realization offers a form of release, but not the release Mary needs, since it reinforces her capitulation to their cruelties and control. Instead of feeling “anger or resentment,” she decides, “[a]s long as you lived you could never feel anything but love for them and compassion.” 25 In reassuring Mary that “people don’t go off their heads because their aunts do,” however, and in correcting her picture of an undifferentiated progression of family traits, her mentor Mr. Sutcliffe returns her to the difficult but necessary struggle with those “independent, separate entities” in her family who could have lived their lives—and treated her—differently if they chose. 26 The lesson of individuality that Mary learns became a linchpin of Sinclair’s own philosophy, so that even in arguing for an inherited racial memory, she is careful to preserve the necessity of individuals. When she lays out what is essentially a theory of reincarnation, the collectivity of the human species is still not allowed to overshadow the person. In choosing against what she considers the “popular” understanding of karmic-directed reincarnation that jumps generations, Sinclair joined a conversation that not only seriously considered reincarnation but weighed the pros and cons of alternative formulations. 27 In a quirky treatment of evolutionary principles, Sinclair allied herself with the inherited memory theories of Samuel Butler, whose iconoclastic critiques of Darwinism contributed to evolution’s complicated reception. Taking a Lamarckian approach, Sinclair (following Butler and Bergson) argued that unconscious instincts, such as the ability to walk, are a result of what were first con-

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sciously pursued actions of previous generations of ancestors. Sinclair takes Butler to task, however, for leaving out the concept of “personal identity,” which she claims is essential if his theory is to work. Butler’s “entire theory of evolution is thus based on the simple truism that Practice makes perfect,” she explains. “When he finds an action performed with supreme perfection, a supreme unconsciousness, he concludes—not that these actions have always been unconscious, but—that ages of practice, of effort that has been conscious, have gone to the result.” 28 If Butler assumes, however, that “the experience of our parents and our ancestors [is] our experience just as much and in as much as our bodies are our bodies,” Sinclair adds, there must be some continuous consciousness or “self” passed from generation to generation. “[W]e cannot explain or account for the most ordinary facts of our life and consciousness without presupposing that we have lived and been conscious before,” at least in the forms of our ancestors. But, “unless the Individual carried through all his previous experiences some personal identity over and above that of his progenitors, their experience will remain theirs and be no earthly good to him. For he could not profit by it to the extent he has been proved to have profited, if, at every stage of his past career, he had not been capable of absorbing and assimilating it—of taking it to himself.” 29 Sinclair’s affinity for Butler also reflects the recurring tension in her thought between the universal and the particular, as there is in Schopenhauer’s thought between a single, all-encompassing force of will, and a personal, individual volition. The influence of Sinclair’s reading in Eastern mysticism is also again evident in her preference for an explanation that blurs the edges of a specific, delimited self that survives, even as she argues against Butler’s too facile assumption (she asserts) that no individual consciousness continues beyond death. In a seeming paradox, Sinclair’s “surviving self” is simultaneously one with the flow of ancestral heritage. Jungian assumptions of a “collective unconscious” seem to be at work; there is also at least a metaphoric relation to psychoanalytic assumptions about the role of parental and therefore ancestral influence in shaping the self. Kinnamon suggests that the idea of a “hidden self” mentioned in Mary’s explanation of atonement resembles the concept of the “subliminal” or “subconscious” self of psychologists, but, in Sinclair’s explorations of reincarnation, “also the ‘surviving self,’ as Frederick W. H. Myers called it.” 30 She adds that “[i]t even more closely resembles the doctrine of the Eternal Self, best expressed in the Sanscrit phrase tat tvam asi: ‘That art thou.’” In any case, from her earliest exposure to Spinoza’s pantheism, Sinclair seems to have remained enamored of such models of union between the individual and the universal, epitomized in the ultimate goal of union with God, or Underhill’s Unitive State. 31 Sinclair’s immersion in scientifically framed debates about evolutionary theory thus revolved equally around issues that were ultimately spiritual, so

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that deciding such biological issues as transmission of inherited traits had consequences for decisions about the viability of mysticism itself. In transporting the tension between restrictive inheritance and evolutionary development more specifically into the domain of religious practice, Sinclair set margarine against butter as an opposition of progressive vision with unimaginative traditionalism. In The Cure of Souls, the principal alternatives Sinclair offers to Chamberlain’s studied avoidance of physical or emotional effort lie not in more conscientious application of Christian dogma, but in secularized understanding of the church. Ironically, despite his conservatism, Chamberlain’s lack of any true participation in the mystic potential of the Christianity he espouses makes him peculiarly “modern” in his unwillingness to actually live within the sacralizing framework of the faith. While in The Rector of Wyck Sinclair treats what the character of a faithful, committed Christian priest might be, there is no such balancing image in The Cure. Instead the opposition lies between Chamberlain’s laziness and the muscular approach of a largely secularized social ministry. In recommending a new path for the church focused exclusively on service to the world, the curate Cartwright, in Sinclair’s estimation, has it partly right: with little else of true spiritual value to offer, the church should at least make itself useful. Introducing elements of the vigorous debate over social ministry that occupied Anglicanism after the First World War, Cartwright argues that “the people will be reconciled to the Church only if they see that the Church is identified with the common life and common interests. . . . Personal service and the increasing secularization of the Church’s outlook. Those are the great things.” 32 For Chamberlain, who “abhorred and feared philosophy and ideas,” Cartwright’s combination of “practical schemes” and “something like a philosophy of the priestly life” constitutes a dangerous challenge. While not ruling out the possibility that Christianity, rightly reconstructed, might offer spiritual nurturance and mystical insight, Sinclair is ready to turn elsewhere—as she herself did in rejecting it—for a spiritual philosophy more in keeping with her own inclinations. Her lack of faith in the established church’s ability to respond in any adequate way to the revealed evil of the war is made explicit in the spiritual anguish of the other curate, Jackman, who develops an alternative theology along the evolutionary lines Sinclair advocated, as a route to self-redemption after his military service. Jackman’s new philosophy, like Cartwright’s, represents a secularized religion of social service. As he explains to Chamberlain, the urban mission he has joined is “not what you would call religion. It has no creed beyond belief in love and man’s duty to man,” but still has “a very great mission,” which is “to feed and clothe the poor. To nurse them when they’re ill. To carry on their education where the State leaves it off. To give them wholesome amusement. To reclaim drunkards, prostitutes and young criminals. To fight every form of moral and physical

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evil. To go to the outcasts of society and bring them back into it by showing them the love of man for man.” 33 But Jackman goes a step further by refusing to consider his mission outside the church a godless religion, even though his own spiritual crisis was prompted by loss of belief. God is not “a past and present fact,” Jackman explains, but may be a “future event.” 34 Evolution lies at the heart of his vision of the future that circles from the despair of a determinist reductionism to a new and hopeful sacralizing teleology: “The world’s full of horrors. We’ve got to fight them all our lives, generation after generation, till there are no more horrors. After all, it’s the way of evolution. . . . My idea is that, as we’ve evolved from the ape, so God will be evolved from us as we rise upwards.” Sinclair made her discomfort with “God the father” obvious in Mary Olivier, where to associate God with the image of “father” is to paint God as angry, since Mary’s father is angry. Jackman offers an alternative construction of the concept as a projection of human need. Despite clear evidence from “the abominable state of this world” that the God on which humans are “abjectedly dependent” does not exist, “the longing for God, the need of God, is so obstinately fixed in the human heart that we can’t ignore it,” he explains. It “carries with it the secret of its own fulfillment. Such an ideal, from its very nature, is bound to be realized in time. It’s not the beginning, it’s the end, the end to which creation moves. If God hasn’t created us, we must create God.” If humans are the source for God, it is because “[h]e is hidden in us as the germ is hidden in the womb. The world’s pain is the pain of labour, of bringing forth God. You see, we’ve got to change the Christian idea of God-made man to the idea of man-made God. God is not the great I AM. He is the great I SHALL BE.” 35 For Sinclair, Jackman becomes the voice of a certain materialist or humanist Christianity that might reflect the sentiment of 1 John 4, with its stern emphasis on love for other humans. She later draws on 1 John 4 in the passing irony of having Chamberlain, too lazy to write a new sermon, select one of his old ones on “I. John, iv. 8. He that loveth not, knoweth not God; For God is love.” 36 Despite Chamberlain’s own lack of any true spiritual apprehension of his own, or of much love-inspired concern for his flock, he attacks what he calls Jackman’s lack of “love for God and faith in God,” unwilling to accept Jackman’s claim that his “love for man [and] faith in man” is “the same thing.” 37 Sinclair thus follows Underhill’s emphasis on the necessary element of “love” or compassion in an appropriate understanding of mysticism, though, at least in this instance, she reverses Underhill’s precedence of love of God over love of fellow humans. Significantly, her construction of the “power” that mystics like Agatha or Mary embody is a positive force operating specifically for the benefit of others. Not surprisingly, Jackman’s probing of greater spiritual depths represents a greater threat to Chamberlain’s complacency than Cartwright’s enthusiasm for a church of active service: “Cartwright only

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interfered with his body’s peace; Jackman, if he had let him, would have utterly destroyed his peace of mind.” 38 A fatal collision between early twentieth-century optimism about evolution’s progress toward some telos of cultural advancement, and the stark reality of the war, lies behind Cartwright’s and Jackman’s reconfigurations of status quo Christianity into reconstituted conceptions of social improvement. Given the war’s significant ramifications in almost every aspect of British life—including especially popular understandings of the nature of death—the war could not help but shape the creative and theoretical work of Sinclair, as well as of Underhill and Webb. NOTES 1. Sinclair, Defence, 249–50. 2. Sinclair, 243. 3. Sinclair, 244. 4. Sinclair, 244–45. 5. Sinclair, 249. 6. Sinclair, 251. See Schmidt, “Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” 290–91. 7. Sinclair, Defence, 263 8. Sinclair, 312. 9. Sinclair, 266. 10. Sinclair, 261. 11. Sinclair, 263 12. Sinclair, 312–13. 13. Sinclair was not alone in contemplating this quandary. The need to differentiate between the two psychic scenarios prompted interest in the book Phantasms of the Living (1886), which described occurrences of dying persons appearing to distant loved ones, Thurschwell writes. “Whether these crisis apparitions were telepathic transferences sent out by the person at the moment before death or actual appearances of someone after death was a crucial question for members of the Society [for Psychical Research].” Of the two possibilities, telepathic communication was considered the more “mundane.” Thurschwell, Technology and Magical Thinking, 24. 14. Sinclair, Defence, 263–64. 15. Sinclair, 264–65. 16. Sinclair, 266. 17. Sinclair, 266–67. 18. Sinclair, 267. 19. Sinclair, 268. 20. Sinclair, 267. 21. Sinclair, 289. 22. See Raitt, May Sinclair, 229. 23. Sinclair, “Clinical Lectures, II,” 142. See Raitt, May Sinclair, 230. 24. See Henry Maudsley, Body and mind as well as The physiology and pathology of the mind and Responsibility in mental disease. See Thédule Ribot, Heredity. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 331ff., 333. 25. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 333. 26. Sinclair, 338. 27. See Owen, “Occultism,” 77. 28. Sinclair, Defence, 16. 29. Sinclair, 22.

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30. Kinnamon, “Fiction of the Supernatural,” 15. See Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, I, 73. 31. Sinclair, “Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism,” 705. 32. Sinclair, Cure, 103–4. 33. Sinclair, 110–11. 34. Sinclair, 111–12. 35. Sinclair, 113–14. 36. Sinclair, 291. Sinclair extends the irony by having Chamberlain reject a sermon on confession, of which he is much in need, and select instead “the Sermon on Responsibility. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’” Sinclair, 292. 37. Sinclair, 116. 38. Sinclair, 116–17.

ELEVEN Modernity, War, and Death Mystic Responses

If sexuality represented a distillation of the individual energy that might be tapped in the expression of personal agency, the confluence of historical, political, and social forces that erupted in the First World War presented the darker potential of more broadly generated energy. Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb could hardly help but find their experiences of “modernity as change” advanced grimly by the war, even if the question of the actual role the war played as impetus for that change continues to be debated. At one end of that range of interpretations, decisions to date the onset of modernity to August, 1914, present the war as itself the abrupt, fundamental, and shocking shift from one conception of the cultural landscape to another. Such formulations stress the lack of precedent for the “Great Surprise” of mechanized carnage, a surprise that in turn ushered in a century of upheaval. 1 According to these emphases on disjunction, the First World War marked a sudden turn from positive values of stability and security to negative experiences of cynicism and turmoil. 2 Freud expressed this perception of the war as early as 1915 when he wrote that “no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possessions of humanity, confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest.” 3 In her 1929 retrospective A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf dates the death of romance to the first guns’ firing, and to the shock of seeing “the faces of our rulers in the light of shell-fire. So ugly they looked—German, English, French—so stupid.” 4 From that moment, romance was dead, or at least “the illusion that inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer.” 155

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The harsh newness of modernity encapsulated by the war might be further characterized specifically and negatively in Weberian terms as the disappearance of any assumed “moral imperative,” or as John Maynard Keynes observed, the lack of a “universal element” binding the world together. 5 In the senselessness of the war’s destruction, the possibility of “making sense” of the world, again in Weber’s terms, could seem a thing of the past. The ubiquity of what Fredric Jameson has called “ennui” and William James described as “soul sickness” was fed by the crisis in meaning that Weber identified, and was fatally accelerated by the war’s catastrophic irrationality. 6 In much the same language as Woolf used to describe Europe’s leaders, Freud observed that rather than reaffirm illusions about the civilized nature of European achievement, the war brought disillusionment with its uncivilized brutality: “Not only is it more bloody and destructive than any war of other days, because of the enormously increased perfection of weapons of attack and defence; it is at least as cruel, as embittered, as implacable as any that has preceded it.” 7 The war could also represent its own form of judgment on the perceived limitations of modernity. The Rev. Henry A. Reed called “the war’s holocaust of the nation’s noblest, bravest young manhood” the “greatest contributing cause to the widespread revival of mysticism,” because of the “frightful witness borne to the failure of the philosophy of materialism for the purposes of humanity.” 8 An alternative perspective, however, welcomed the war’s disruption as ushering in a new and necessary age. Language of progress joined expressions of fear at a new unpredictability. “Instead of moving from light to darkness, as many claimed, the world had moved from darkness to light,” Modris Eksteins observes of these readings. “Stability of the pre-1914 sort was a synonym for decay; transience and unpredictability, by contrast, were synonyms for vitality and life.” 9 Even Woolf continues in her assessment, “Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?” 10 An editorial in The Egoist journal of August 15, 1914, took this view when it noted the British public’s general “sense of pleasure and veiled enjoyment in the prospect of war itself,” which was seen as an antidote to prolonged peace. Society, the essay suggests, requires the cyclical invigoration of armed struggle: “So to a gospel of Peace there must be a gospel of War. Whenever a sudden lull in the Structure of Words allows instinct to speak, it becomes clear that the purpose of Peace is War, and that when War is tired it seeks Peace.” 11 At the beginning of the war, The Lancet medical magazine downplayed any danger of long-term mental problems for either British soldiers or civilians as a result of the conflict, predicting that the excitement of the war would diminish neuroses caused by boredom. 12 (Trudi Tate adds that once “civilians actually did imagine some of the horrible sights of the Great War, they became susceptible to war neuroses, as The Lancet found itself reporting only a few weeks later.”)

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Even the sense, underscored by the war’s growing incomprehensibility, of a loss of moral order, the suspicion that the “centre cannot hold,” in William Butler Yeats’s phrasing, or that the center was, in fact, absent altogether, could feed a broader, more positive spirit of innovation and invention. 13 Such a spirit also constituted modernity, not only in technological fields, but in both social institutions and creative enterprises. If traditional authorities were being undercut, in other words, other new and formerly marginalized voices—of women, as one example, but also of youth—were emerging. David Liu suggests that the rejection of authority—metaphysical or otherwise—assumed by Victorian society opened even greater possibilities for social involvement: “The disintegration of fin de siècle bourgeois society triggered . . . not only a dismantling of forms, but also a clearing of space for new paths, forms, and voices.” 14 One response to negotiations over cultural foundations was to look for purpose in the very events of disruption, pursued specifically through a spiritualization of the war’s carnage. While just a taste of the reality of war was sufficient to shake the allegiances of many to pre-war overvaluation of the “war experience,” others held on to idealized perceptions of the value of such wanton sacrifice. Particularly for elements of the radical right, the war could, in fact, be recalled as itself a spiritual experience. “As a result, they celebrated war as the highest form of human endeavour and tried to recreate their wartime effort in peacetime,” Eksteins notes, adding that Adolf Hitler called the war “the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly experience.” 15 Whether the war is perceived as exciting novelty or distressing shock, however, more encompassing descriptions of its disruptive power take into account elements of continuity, at least in seeing the exceptional quality of the war’s disruption being more of an order of magnitude than of kind. The war, in other words, was a qualitative, but much more a quantitative step on a journey already begun, the apogee of a more general novelty and increased pace of life lamented by some and celebrated by others. Eksteins writes that “in science, technology or the arts, [and, he adds, for the most part in politics] every major development during the 1914–18 war or in the postwar period has recognizable roots in the prewar world.” 16 Jose Harris argues that “in so far as there have ever been great chasms rather than mere subterranean murmurings in the deep structures of British Social history, . . . they occurred in the 1870s and 1880s, and then again in the 1960s and 1970s, rather than in the apparently more dramatic and cataclysmic happenings of either of the two world wars.” 17 Certainly the drumbeat of “firsts” that marked the decades surrounding the fin de siècle (the advent of automobiles and of powered flight being only two noteworthy examples) indicates an air of innovation that promised positive change. Echoing Thurschwell’s assessment of the cultural effects of new technologies, George L. Mosse notes that increased speed of travel and communication transformed the parameters

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of time and space itself, with associated potential for transforming social relations as well. 18 This was the increasing energy of modernity welcomed by such divergent movements as Italian Futurism and German Expressionism that saw it ushering in a much-needed release from outmoded social restraints. 19 While other movements, such as Cubism in France, pursued similar attractions to a sense of “simultaneity of experience,” Mosse maintains, Futurism and Expressionism exemplified a widespread mood shared by many educated and sensitive European youths, whether they expressed their mood publicly or through a private revolt: a love for what one German Expressionist writer called “uncertainty, hanging in the air, so to speak—frantic, raging life—the sensation of being in an express train which roars through a small station.” . . . The outbreak of war in August of 1914 was like a festival to many youths, an extraordinary event, a liberation from normal life.

And as both the Egoist’s philosophical acceptance of the shift to war and the Lancet’s initial optimism show, it was an attitude at least recognizable in countries other than Germany or Italy as well. 20 Welcomed or not, such theories hold, a sense of emerging change was unavoidable and ubiquitous even before—and possibly long before—the war. The war, with its social impact, is therefore understood in more of a clarifying or revealing role. As Alison Light puts it, “[T]he effects of the First World War made visible and precipitated further into the mainstream of English life what might otherwise have remained eccentric, sporadic and minority protests.” 21 There is another way, however, in which continuity needs to be figured into a reading of early twentieth-century modernity, and especially of the war, as adherence to the butter-like “old” or traditional played its role. Traditional values of craftsmanship had been finding systematic preservation through such trends as the Arts and Crafts movement since the late nineteenth century, and a burgeoning interest in the medieval sought to escape modern contexts altogether. 22 At the warfront, adherence to things past played out disastrously in outworn battle techniques, but also found expression in Britain’s prosecution of the war in defense of nineteenth-century values and a traditional understanding of England. “This England was one of honor and virtue and duty in which the aristocratic and middle-class view of the world had merged, in which empire and sport, honesty and social stability, were all part of an indivisible whole,” Eksteins writes. In posing a “revolutionary threat” to this society, the war “was a threat to the Wessex landscape of Hardy’s novels, to the Shropshire lad of A. E. Housman’s imagination, and to Mr. Badger of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, who had built his house on the remains of an ancient civilization.” 23 Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger emphasize this other side of the equation, asserting that the war

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was actually far less disruptive than usually imagined. 24 The Second World War, in any case, might be seen as a more critical break, they point out, than the First, “whose place in any assessment of modernity remains problematical.” Such narratives of continuity could be read as the product of semi-intentional efforts to obscure the elements of disruption, as “some contemporaries redoubled their efforts to preserve or recapture aspects of the past in order to anchor the present in history.” In ways that will be significant in considering Mary Webb’s writings, “‘[i]nvention of traditions’ often served a compensatory purpose by creating continuities between the past and the ‘modern’ present. The folk-song revival, idealizations of village life and the cult of the monarchy were at least in part motivated by a desire to forge connections between the present and imagined pasts.” If the period of the war itself marked a moment out of the ordinary, the impulse after the war’s end was often to get back to the interrupted normalcy as quickly as possible. Keynes expressed something of this mood when he commented in 1920 that “in England the outward aspect of life does not yet teach us to feel in the least that an age is over. We are busy picking up the threads of our life where we dropped them.” 25 To sum up, keeping the divergences and complexities of perspectives on the early twentieth century in mind argues at least for seeing the war as accelerating already existing trends toward change, from political configurations of nations to domestic configurations of such areas as the family, women’s lives, and standards of living. At the same time the war can be seen as reinforcing conservative impulses in those and other areas. All that was perceived to be new and shocking about the war was set in conversation with what was old and familiar. More important, the war’s disruption underscored the broader experience of unsettlement and the need identified by Weber for determining meaning not provided by the modern turn to the calculable. Such a concern for establishing “what is of value” was played out for Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb through their assessments of and participation in cultural aspects of their moment of modernity, and through their advocacy of particular expressions of a “new” mysticism. Much of that interplay between modernity and mysticism was worked out through their consideration of questions—raised especially by the war—of death and afterlife. If agonistic but often simultaneously experienced impulses both to reject foundations and to seek them were among the more paradoxical elements of the maelstrom of fear of/desire for change that marked early twentieth-century modernity, a burgeoning recognition—certainly heightened by the war—that the stakes were high, even matters of life and death, helped drive investment in causes that promised movement either forward or backward. Determining the meaning of modernity, it seemed, could require renegotiating the meaning of mortality, since the cultural frameworks for understanding the foundations for existence it-

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self had been opened to revision. Even apart from the war, the period required reconceptualization of attitudes toward death as medical advances promised improved life expectancy, but also produced unsettling knowledge about potential threats to life. “[L]ate nineteenth-century discoveries of ‘germs,’ ‘microbes,’ and ‘spirochetes’” fed “a widespread sense of psychological unease about the sinister invisible undercurrents of modern urban living,” Harris notes. 26 As medical authority often outstripped medical expertise, the inability of contemporary science to provide the mastery it promised over this increasingly complicated range of health issues could in itself have fatal consequences. 27 The force of disillusionment associated with war, Freud maintained, could also make impossible, or at least far more difficult, the kind of denial of death that is a natural defense against the pain of loss. Unwilling to consider the possibility of death for loved ones (or at least plagued with guilt when we do), and unable to imagine our own deaths, “we showed an unmistakable tendency to put death to one side, to eliminate it from life.” 28 If death is considered at all, he observed, “our habit is to lay stress on the fortuitous causation of the death—accident, disease, infection, advanced age; in this way we betray an effort to reduce death from a necessity to a chance event.” With the onset of war, however, “[d]eath will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it. People really die; and no longer one by one, but many, often tens of thousands, in a single day.” 29 Of course, he acknowledged, the new circumstances of war did mean that life at least has once again become “interesting,” since with the denial of death “life is impoverished,” losing in interest “when the highest stake in the game of loving, life itself, may not be risked.” 30 But, he added, there is a wider and more negative cultural impact: “The bewilderment and the paralysis of capacity, from which we suffer, are essentially determined among other things by the circumstance that we are unable to maintain our former attitude towards death, and have not yet found a new one.” 31 One aspect of that search for a new attitude, he suggested, is actually a resurrection of something old, even primeval—a belief in afterlife as a form of compromise in which first the prehistoric and then the contemporary human being “conceded the fact of his own death . . . , but denied it the significance of annihilation.” 32 In 1918, American author Winifred Kirkland published a book-length meditation on the effects a world at war had had on popular investment in life after death. In The New Death she argued that “by very wistfulness of grief, current thought is being influenced in practical ways by the possibility of immortality as never before in history.” 33 For once, she asserted, the “popular mind” was setting a direction for “accredited intellectual leaders” as common people “have become their own prophets.” Belief in personal survival, she argued, “is becoming so strong an influence in thousands of humble and bereaved homes that it would seem as if novelists and psychologists

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should reckon with it as an important phase of the contemporary, however little they accept it as a philosophy for themselves.” 34 In commenting on the popularity of spiritualism, Reed similarly observed that “when a woman has suddenly been bereaved of a husband and several sons, it is not to be wondered at that the held-out possibilities of yet holding converse with such a company of her beloved should become a vital part of her religious faith.” 35 At the same time, the sweep of technological advancement hinted at new abilities to understand the nature of life, but also of death, while dangling enticing promises of new possibilities of communication between the two. Underlying much of the anticipation surrounding new communication technologies, Thurschwell notes, lay the desire—furthered by Society for Psychical Research experiments, but even more by war-related grief—that the boundaries crossed might be more than just between previously unavailable bodies, but across the “more difficult to negotiate barrier between the living and the dead.” 36 Thomas Edison’s belief that his experiments with radio transmission might produce a means of communication with the spirit world was just one example of expectations that the astonishing results of modernity’s inventive spirit would include a technological answer to the pain of final separation. 37 The air of unlimited possibility also helped drive a new imaginative investment in non-technological alternatives for spiritual contact, creating a booming business for mediums, as well as the resurgence of interest in mysticism that Reed noted. Often the two impulses could be intertwined. If not a small step, it seemed at least a conceivable step that could be achieved between communicating with the dead at a séance and communicating with God or “the real.” Kirkland was, of course, far too sweeping in demarcating between popular and elite when it came to interest in life after death in the years defined by the war. 38 The losses of so many millions of mostly men touched households of all classes and degrees of intellectual sophistication. Jay Winter has shown, in fact, that mortality rates in the war were proportionately higher for members of the British male elite. 39 And while the number of war-related deaths heightened the urgency of such concerns exponentially, intellectual explorations of the question of “survival” were already common in the decades preceding the war. 40 Questions of afterlife fed popular engagement with immortality during and after the American Civil War, for example, a preoccupation channeled by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Gates Ajar series of spiritualist novels, and reflected in Victorian popularity of spiritualism and occult experimentation. 41 Communication with the departed, especially if that communication offered reassurance of the lost loved one’s continued well-being, promised comfort not always available through more traditional religious doctrines, or at least not always available through religious observances alone. Nineteenth-century spiritualism “provided the tremendous

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consolation of contact with dead loved ones and a comforting window into the timeless joys of the spiritual Summerland that beckoned beyond the grave,” Alex Owen observes. “These were tantalizing inducements during a period in which death remained a feared and frequent visitor to families high and low, and the voice of religious doubt began to infiltrate even the most pious of homes.” 42 Freud maintained that the original investment in some kind of afterlife was transformed by religion’s influence so that life after death became “the more desirable, the truly valid [life],” with physical life reduced to “mere preparation.” 43 With this replacement of what we might call “death as terminus” with “death as continuation in improved circumstances,” so popularized by Gates Ajar, Lears notes, “the modern euphemistic approach to death, by now a staple of our popular culture,” was firmly established. 44 “Aunt Winifred, the voice of wisdom in the novel, predicts that her hair will no longer be gray in heaven, that her niece Mary will have her favorite cookies to eat and a piano to play, and that heaven will look (at least to Winifred) like Kansas (her favorite state).” Another related response saw the dead themselves as purposeful, as guiding or at least influencing those not yet dead. Just as grief was a motivation for belief in afterlife, and for investment in spiritualist methods of communicating with the dead, so the dead themselves were enlisted in strategies to restore the meaning threatened by modernity’s rush. In popular imagination, the dead, and particularly the war dead, acquired heroic and supernatural ability that was both social and personal. Winter, for example, focuses on the evocative imagery in Abel Gance’s 1918–1919 film J’Accuse, in which dead soldiers rise from their graves to encourage dissolute French villagers to be worthy of their sacrifice. 45 Describing German fictional responses to the war, Mosse similarly recounts the predominance of ghostly tales in which resurrected war dead play a saving role. Walter Flex’s Weihnachtsmarchen (Christmas Tale), read to soldiers of his front-line regiment on Christmas Eve 1914, “tells of a war widow who out of despair drowns herself and her son. They are restored to life through an encounter with the ghosts of fallen soldiers.” 46 In this as in other renditions, Mosse suggests, “personal resurrection prefigures the more general mission of the fallen to redeem the nation,” a common pattern that interpreted the war between nations as redemptive of nations, even though fought by individuals. There was also an effort to enlist the same rationalizing forces that had contributed to the period’s crisis of meaning. The work of the Society for Psychical Research was concerned less with the potential for redemptive action by the dead, and more with simply establishing the fact of their continued existence beyond the grave. Even in this focus of research, however, there was an expectation that the dead fit within a purposeful system that might reflect divine direction. While the Society was ostensibly a forum for objective study of supernatural phenomena, its ultimate

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goal was to dispel the pessimism associated with strict materialism by allying the “claims of nineteenth-century positivist science with the older claims of religious faith,” Thurschwell maintains. 47 Spawned in part as a reaction to the disenchantment that accompanied a rigidly scientific worldview, the Society’s work sought self-justification in claims to scientific practice and standards that, in Sinclair’s terms, could distinguish “serious” from spurious examinations of the subject. Both Underhill and Sinclair began the war as its strong endorsers. Sinclair supported the volunteer ambulance corps with both her financial resources and her presence, and her novels featuring the war were marked by a propagandistic tone. 48 Moreover, as we have seen, her wartime journal evokes the near ecstasy of experiencing danger, even as she also relates the pathos of war’s suffering. But such a spiritualization proved ultimately unsatisfactory for Sinclair, and in both her philosophical and later fiction writing she foregrounds dire issues arising from war’s association with death. Underhill’s growing perception of the horror of warfare, meanwhile, led her to a vocal pacifist position by the onset of the next world conflict. Although for most of the duration of the first war she served in intelligence in the office of the Admiralty, one indication that the war’s catastrophic scope affected her is an unexplained reference in a letter to von Hügel. “During the war,” she wrote, “I went to pieces.” 49 In a 1917 letter to her spiritual advisee Margaret Robinson she offered a less personal assessment of war’s spiritual challenge. Responding to difficulty Robinson was experiencing in meditating, Underhill wrote: What has happened to you is happening in a greater or less degree to everyone. The present abnormal conditions are as bad for the spiritual life as for every other kind of life. We are all finding it frightfully difficult and most of us are failing badly. The material world and its interests, uproars and perplexities are so insistent that detachment is almost impossible. Some are utterly overwhelmed: others, as you say of yourself, take refuge in interest in little things. Transcendence of the here and now demands at present a strength of will and a power of withdrawal which very few possess. 50

As we will see, Mary Webb channeled her dismay at the war’s destruction into Gone to Earth’s dark sense of foreboding, and other oblique references to the violent backdrop of the time. In her poem “Autumn, 1914,” she addresses the tragedy of a soldier’s death through opposition to her privileged imagery of pastoral peace. Though “now he marches among the dead,” the former husband and farmer had been so good with his hands In the harvest field and the lambing shed. Straight ran his share in the deep plowlands— 51

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Another poem, “A Conqueror,” celebrates the irony that a powerful leader who incited war has died “with none to love him.” 52 The engagements of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb with death were not limited to reactions to the war. In The Gray World, illness, rather than violence, brings about that text’s two passings (the boy who becomes Willie, and Willie’s mother). Letty dies in The Lost Word of apparent heart disease, and in The Column of Dust the Watcher is released from his bondage in Constance’s consciousness by her self-sacrificial demise from broken health. Mary Webb’s poor health similarly gave her personal cause to be preoccupied with mortality, a theme she pursued on several occasions in what she called her “nature essays.” Sinclair lost all five of her brothers to different permutations of heart disease, and survived both of her parents. 53 As Kirkland and Freud noted, however, the war contributed to a broader cultural concern about mortality to which these authors responded, a concern closely tied to anxiety about the accelerating pace of modern change. Specifically, death was a sometimes stated, sometimes silent horizon helping to motivate their embrace of a mystic apprehension of some reality beyond the visible. In keeping with Freud in particular, and despite their considerations of life after death, all three women were concerned with the effect of death’s eventuality on questions of living, and especially on the exercise of personal agency. In addition to Kirkland’s “New Death,” in other words, their engagements with mysticism were ways of advocating particular forms of the “New Life” of modernity. To adapt Kirkland’s assertion somewhat, therefore, whereas the early decades of the twentieth century may not have been more concerned with issues of death and immortality than any other period of history, they were clearly no less so, and, from the war years on, with good cause. A Cure of Souls indicates the maturation of Sinclair’s view of the war, as her critiques of Chamberlain include his vindictive support of militarism. 54 Neither Sinclair nor her 1924 readers could have known that Chamberlain’s Tory views favoring harsh war reparations from Germany would help spark another world war, but Sinclair seems presciently attuned to at least the negative possibilities of his attitude. Still, her earlier investment in something of what Mosse calls “The Myth of the War Experience,” exhibited most explicitly in her Journal, is still evident as she sets her rector in the context of those who have been tested, as he has not, by the war. Cartwright is “drilled . . . , holding himself well, like a soldier, after five years in Kitchener’s Army, and hardened by trench life.” 55 Jackman, as already noted, communicates the darker side of war’s transformation: as stretcher bearer with a field ambulance, his war experience was “shattering,” his resulting philosophic adjustment more extreme. 56 By contrast, Chamberlain’s experience of the social reality of war-related loss is strongly tempered by his self-interest. When bringing peaches to

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Mrs. Hancock, he observes that “he was not sorry that her husband had died in Gallipoli, and that she had had seven years to get over it in.” 57 Sinclair uses her depiction of Chamberlain to once again push beyond the traditional limits of Christianity, as she explores the war’s spiritual legacy in recasting understandings of death, and, as an extension, even of the concept of sacredness. Chamberlain remains woefully out of step with prevailing culture when Sinclair embroils him in a controversy over the placement of a town war memorial, an episode that perhaps served as a way to bring her own experience of the war to some closure. Chamberlain insists that the memorial be constructed inside the parish church, instead of in the public square where it could be more easily accessed by parishioners and non-parishioners alike. As Lawson argues in opposing the plan, public feeling “is that a memorial in the market place would be their memorial and that a memorial in your church would be yours.” 58 Chamberlain’s baser motives are clear in his concern that, once having wrested the monument for his church, the aesthetics of the church building should still have first consideration. His directions for its design give precedence to the church’s period style and dictates that “if the War Memorial was to be admitted it must do no violence to the Parish Church.” 59 Chamberlain, in fact, resists considering the actual purpose of the memorial, to remember the town’s fallen soldiers. Having accepted the sculptor’s proposed estimate and design, “he dismissed the War Memorial from his mind. He didn’t want to think about the War Memorial: he didn’t want to think about the War and about the young men who had fallen in it. These things were very disturbing to his state of gentle beatitude.” More to the point, however, through Chamberlain’s stubborn, myopic selfishness, Sinclair again casts the weight of her story on one side of a simmering tension between what might be called “secular” religion and Christianity. At one level, the arena for the town’s contretemps over the memorial is intra-ecclesial between Established and Non-conforming churches. Chamberlain, as rector of the Anglican parish, lays claim to establishment’s privileges: “When the Baptist minister, deeply moved, sent a letter of protest to Canon Chamberlain, the rector, replying, turned a sentence very delicately to the effect that Nonconformity was Nonconformity, and that Mr. Binns should have weighed the consequences before he turned his back and the backs of his congregation on communion with the Church.” 60 But a broader issue explores the fluid definitions of what is “sacred” in a way that, like Chamberlain’s conversations with Cartwright and Jackman, sets the ecclesial world as a whole in tension with the non-ecclesial world. Where Chamberlain locates sacred space only within the bounds of the church, Cartwright, in advocating a memorial in the square, endorses the alternative possibility of an extra-parish “sacredness” generated by family members’ emotions: “To me, sir,” he

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argues, “the sacred thing is the feeling of all these people who’ve lost their nearest and dearest. It’s religion in itself.” 61 Sinclair here participates in the trend toward a “national religion” spurred by the “cult of the fallen” described by Mosse, among others. 62 Cemeteries, monuments, and memorials, whether set with Christian symbolism or not, generated a generic religious aura as sites of pilgrimage and foci of patriotic fervor. As Mosse points out, the new demarcation between military and civilian cemeteries signified as nothing else that by being associated with selfless sacrifice in a national cause, “the resting places of the war dead had become sacred” in a way that “contrasted the sacred with settled everyday life.” He continues: “The death of the fallen was quite different from the death of the bourgeois, not only in its meaning and significance, but also in the manner of dying. The death of soldiers in combat, much romanticized, was a prelude to their resurrection, but bourgeois death was private rather than public, without any national significance.” 63 Common Christian themes of sacrifice and resurrection infused the war-related deaths with special meaning: “The exclamation ‘Now we are made sacred,’ which was written by a volunteer in the First World War, implied an analogy of sacrifice in war to the Passion and resurrection of Christ.” But, Mosse points out, even such associations were born out of “Christianity as popular piety, that is, a faith outside the confines of organized religion.” Since “[s]oldiers seemed to have a rather low opinion of most clergy,” a “nonclerical, nonestablishment Christianity triumphed in this extreme situation—a popular piety which saw hope in suffering according to the Christian tradition.” 64 The opposition between Chamberlain’s investment in his own comfort and the war’s elevation of human suffering also illustrates the emphasis on suffering’s enlightening power that Sinclair shared with Underhill. As part of her Journal’s participation in the “mystique of war,” she describes a mystified experience of mingled desire for and fear of exposure to the pain of the wounded. Screwing up her courage to distribute cigarettes to soldiers recuperating in a hotel cum hospital, Sinclair is curiously ambivalent, claiming that “I don’t want to describe that ward,” and yet proceeding with an evocative account of the effect of those rows upon rows of beds, those rows upon rows of bound and bandaged bodies, the intensity of anguish suggested by sheer force of multiplication, by the diminishing perspective of the beds, by the clear light and nakedness of the great hall that sets these repeated units of tortures in a world apart, a world of insufferable space and agonizing time, ruled by some inhuman mathematics and given over to pure transcendent pain. 65

Something of the extraordinary reality that she sought in coming to Belgium is offered in the ward’s concentration of suffering, since “[i]t is

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utterly removed from and unlike anything that you have experienced before,” she observes. “From the moment that the doors have closed behind you, you are in another world, and under its strange impact you are given new senses and a new soul. If there is horror here you are not aware of it as horror. Before these multiplied forms of anguish what you feel—if there be anything of you left to feel—is not pity, because it is so near to adoration.” 66 While focusing on the release the encounter provides from concern for her own unhappiness, or even for herself at all, Sinclair simultaneously confronts the personal benefit she gains from her effort at altruism. Such an aestheticizing of suffering may invite the criticism of those who have found the Journal narcissistic, 67 but also contributes to the impression of candor Sinclair achieves as she traces her adventure’s personal impact in all its effects: If you are tired of the burden and malady of self, go into one of these great wards and you will find instant release. You and the sum of your little consciousness are not things that matter any more. The lowest and the least of these wounded Belgians is of supreme importance and infinite significance. You, who were once afraid of them and of their wounds, may think that you would suffer for them now, gladly; but you are not allowed to suffer; you are marvelously and mercilessly let off. In this sudden deliverance from yourself you have received the ultimate absolution, and their torment is your peace. 68

Not all her images are of such non-particularized pain, however. Whatever narrative structure Sinclair allows in her Journal reaches a certain climax in her finding a single wounded man in a village under threat of invasion by German troops. Again, the experience, this time merged with the broader psychological effect of imminent danger, creates a mystic moment of heightened perception of reality: There was something odd about that short stretch of grey road and the tall trees at the end of it and the turn. These things appeared in a queer, vivid stillness, as if they were not there on their own account, but stood in witness to some superior reality. Through them you were somehow assured of Reality with a most singular and overpowering certainty. You were aware of the possibility of an ensuing agony and horror as of something unreal and transitory that would break through the peace of it in a merely episodic manner. Whatever happened to come round the turn of the road would simply not matter. And with your own quick movements up the road there came that steadily mounting thrill which is not excitement, or anything in the least like excitement, because of its extreme quietness. This thrill is apt to cheat you by stopping short of the ecstasy it seems to promise. But this time it didn’t stop short; it became more and more steady and more and more quiet in the swing of its vibration; it became ecstasy; it became intense happiness. 69

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Sinclair’s reaction to finding the man marks the culmination of her long endeavor to be of real service to the wounded who were the ambulance corps’s raison d’etre, but also somewhat uncomfortably reveals the exploitative element in her experience of danger and suffering. “Her” wounded man “was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” she writes. “And I loved him. I do not think it is possible to love, to adore any creature more than I loved and adored that clumsy, ugly Flamand. He was my first wounded man.” 70 This highlighting of suffering as itself spiritually instructive and even transcendently significant brings Sinclair’s focus back to the issues of death and existence that undergird both the Journal and Mary Olivier. Her narratives are laced with themes of the dissolution or at least redefinition of life in death, suffering’s potential outcome, but even more of death’s mystical significance. In A Defence of Idealism, she summoned the testimony of those confronting death in battle as a warrant for the “certainty” of mystic apprehension: Almost every other hero knows it; the exquisite and incredible assurance, the positively ecstatic vision of Reality that comes to him when he faces death for the first time. There is no certainty that life can give that surpasses or even comes anywhere near it. And the world has been full of these mystics, these visionaries, since August, 1914. Sometimes I think they are the only trustworthy ones. 71

Sinclair here participates in the hagiographic spiritualizing of the significance of death in war that Mosse notes, though her elevated personages are not the memorialized war dead, but threatened soldiers. Theirs is also not a heightened ability to intervene on behalf of the living, as Mosse describes, but rather a heightened vision, though a vision imbued with rare insight simply by death’s proximity. Death’s significance for Sinclair rests in part in its importance for broader questions of existence at all. Young Mary, for example, shows her precocity in wondering about her own coming into being at the moment of her birth: When you were born you weren’t any age at all, not a minute old, not a second, not half a second. But there was eighteen sixty-two and there was January the twenty-third and the minute just before you were born. You couldn’t really tell when the twenty-third ended and the twenty-fourth began; because when you counted sixty minutes for the hour and sixty seconds for the minute, there was still the half second and the half of that, and so on for ever and ever. 72

As a result, “[y]ou couldn’t tell when you were really born. And nobody could tell you what being born was. Perhaps nobody knew.” While Mary outgrows her nearly paralyzing fear of the sight of funerals, sparked by a terrifying childhood visit to the City of London Cemetery, her ardent desire to discover the “Thing-in-Itself” seems driven in large part by the

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threat of non-existence, even as, paradoxically, death offers the tantalizing yet uncertain promise of ultimate answers. 73 In describing the tedium of enduring “Mamma’s disapproving, reproachful face,” Mary states: “Sometimes you felt that you couldn’t stand it for another minute. You wanted to get away from it, to the other end of the world, out of the world, to die. When you were dead perhaps you would know. Or perhaps you wouldn’t. Perhaps death would cheat you, too.” 74 Death within the Olivier family, however, is in some ways trivialized as an empty expression of dissatisfaction, as when young Dan threatens to kill their father in childish pique, and even more in Mary’s mother’s repeated refrain that she’d rather see someone in his or her coffin than have him or her do something she did not like. 75 Death’s uncertain reward of heaven is also enlisted regularly in the controlling emphasis on being “good.” 76 More sinisterly, the threat that misbehavior would cause someone’s death operates as a central weapon in controlling self-assertion. Mark maintains that he would “die rather than hurt Mamma,” yet has enough personal integrity to pursue a military career against her wishes: “Mark loved Mamma; but he was not going to do what she wanted. He was going to do something that would kill her.” 77 Death figures as well into Mary’s dissatisfaction with the atonement as the basis for Christianity, as the Christian God emerges as an angry figure like her father who kills people who are disobedient. The Passion, as Mary understands it, “meant that God had flown into another temper and that Jesus was crucified to make him good again.” 78 The crucifixion itself is depicted as a horrifying affair involving a fountain of blood: “It would be like the fountain in Aunt Bella’s garden, with blood in it instead of water. The goldfishes would die.” 79 Because of the association of God with an angry father, Mary sees her happiness as a cause for God’s disapproval, as she tells Mark, “If God knew how happy I am writing poetry he’d make the earth open and swallow me up.” 80 Pantheism, with its emphasis on God’s “oneness” with creation, attracted Sinclair at least in part because of its opposition to this vision of a remote, judgmental deity threatening death. Yet, for all of her exploration of death as a philosophical principle, mysterious limit, or macabre family cliché, Sinclair paints death as a painfully real horizon for Mary, as it had been for her. Given the uncertainty of Mary’s brothers’ health and the actual passing of members of her extended family, Mary understands death as the loss of access to something you wanted, the inconceivable extinction of her family’s members: “Supposing Mamma died? Supposing Mark died? Or Dank or Roddy? Or even Uncle Victor? Even Papa? They couldn’t. Jesus wouldn’t let them.” 81 Mary gets an early introduction in the death of the family dog, Tibby, and of a newborn lamb that had been promised to her. 82 Mary Olivier further relates the passing of the family maid Jenny, Mary’s father Emilius, brothers Mark and Roddy, Uncle Victor, and finally Mary’s

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mother. While not described, the deaths of Aunt Lavinia and Aunt Charlotte leave bequests that fund the final leasing of Mary’s house. 83 If Sinclair’s philosophical and spiritual musings, as well as her inquiries into the occult, were driven by concern about death, therefore, it was far from a merely theoretical motivation. Her assertions of reincarnation (even with the individual’s dissolution in the universal), her interest in communication with the dead, as well as her attraction to ghost stories, can all be read as understandable reactions to painful personal history. Her search for an alternative spiritual structure, a new mysticism to improve on Christianity’s shortcomings, emerges in part as a complicated response to her modern struggles to comprehend. NOTES 1. See Eksteins, “Cultural Impact,” 204–5. See also Daunton and Rieger, introduction to Meanings of Modernity, 5. 2. See, e.g., Eksteins, “Cultural Impact,” 201. 3. Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” 275. 4. Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 15. See also Light, Forever England, 2–3. 5. Keynes, Economic Consequences of Peace, 297. Quoted in Eksteins, “Cultural Impact,” 207. 6. Jameson, “The Vanishing Mediator,” 6. James, Varieties, lectures 6 and 7. See also Liu, “Modernism,” 1289. 7. Freud, “War and Death,” 278. 8. Reed, “New Mysticism,” 866. 9. Eksteins, “Cultural Impact,” 201–2. 10. Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 15. 11. Marsden, “Quid Pro Quo,” 301, 302. 12. Tate, First World War, 11. 13. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 99–100. 14. Liu, “Modernism,” 1290. See also 1289. See also Cuddon, “Modernism,” 551. 15. Eksteins, “Cultural Impact,” 202. 16. Eksteins, 204. 17. Harris, Private Lives, 251–52. 18. See Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 54–55. 19. Mosse, 55. 20. Eksteins, “Cultural Impact,” 206. 21. Light, Forever England, 18. 22. See Lears, No Place of Grace, 60–96, 142–81. 23. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 132. The code of sportsmanship translated by middleclass British soldiers from playing fields to battleground emphasized this fundamental valuation of “decency,” lived out dramatically in the fraternization of the 1914 Christmas Truce. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 120. 24. Daunton and Rieger, introduction to Meanings of Modernity, 5–6. 25. Keynes, Economic Consequences of Peace, 2. Quoted in Daunton and Rieger, introduction to Meanings of Modernity, 14. 26. Harris, Private Lives, 54–55. 27. Harris, 57. 28. Freud, “War and Death,” 290. 29. Freud, 291. 30. Freud, 290, 291. 31. Freud, 292.

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32. Freud, 294. 33. Kirkland, New Death, 7. 34. Kirkland, 6. 35. Reed, “New Mysticism,” 866. 36. Thurschwell, Technology and Magical Thinking, 87. 37. Thurschwell, 23. 38. Kirkland, New Death, 6–7. 39. Winter, Great War, 2. 40. Kirkland, New Death, 6. 41. See Phelps, Three Spiritualist Novels. 42. Owen, Enchantment, 19. 43. Freud, “War and Death,” 295. 44. Lears, No Place of Grace, 23–24. 45. Winter, Sites of Memory, 15. The filmed “witness of the dead” chillingly mingled fact and fiction, since many of the soldiers Gance used for the scenes later died in battle. 46. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 75. 47. Thurschwell, Technology and Magical Thinking, 15. 48. Sinclair drew on the war in several of her novels, including Tasker Jevons: The Real Story (1916), The Tree of Heaven (1917), The Romantic (1920), and Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922). 49. “This cryptic remark is the only direct evidence of her anguish during that time,” Greene writes. “What is clear is that the war, although not a direct cause of her anxieties, was the context in which she faced the limits of her ideas.” Greene, Underhill: Artist, 56–57. See also C. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, 158ff. 50. Underhill to M. Robinson, 9 November 1917, in C. Williams, Letters, 147. 51. Webb, “Autumn, 1914,” 117. 52. Webb, “A Conqueror,” 119. 53. See Raitt, May Sinclair, 23, 29, 44, 65, 82–83, 97. 54. Sinclair, Cure, 5–6. See also Tate, First World War, 150–51, 153. 159. 55. Sinclair, Cure, 38. 56. Sinclair, 53. 57. Sinclair, 68. 58. Sinclair, 19. 59. Sinclair, 14. 60. Sinclair, 13. 61. Sinclair, 44. 62. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 35. 63. Mosse, 91–92. 64. Mosse, 74–75. 65. Sinclair, Journal, 40–41. 66. Sinclair, 41. 67. See Tylee, Great War and Women’s Consciousness, 30. See also Raitt, May Sinclair, 164n43. 68. Sinclair, Journal, 41. See also 54. 69. Sinclair, 167–68. 70. Sinclair, 169–70; see ff. 71. Sinclair, Defence, 269. 72. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 54. 73. Sinclair, 62ff., 83–84. 74. Sinclair, 294. 75. Sinclair, 15. See 243. 76. Sinclair, 54. 77. Sinclair, 282, 71. 78. Sinclair, 59. 79. Sinclair, 88, 59–61, 51.

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Chapter 11 Sinclair, 90. Sinclair, 55. Sinclair, 16, 24–26. Sinclair, 429.

TWELVE Meeting the Dead Ghost Stories for Moderns

Sinclair’s supernatural short stories, especially those involving spirits of the dead, extended her foregrounding of death as a cultural and personal issue, and provided a laboratory for exploring ideas raised in her philosophical writings. With her stories of spirits who perform specific tasks among the living, Sinclair may have come closest to Mosse’s genre of ghostly resurrections of “war dead with a mission.” Instead of communal interventions by groups of dead, however, the ghostly missions in Sinclair’s stories are individually targeted and, in a manifestation of agency’s dynamic power, often eroticized. She also turned her imaginative powers to considering the nature of the afterlife as it might reflect patterns of human character and interaction during life. To an extent Sinclair was simply exploiting a different forum for her creative efforts while enjoying the challenge of writing “spooky” stories, as she put it, yet her supernatural stories are no less vehicles for serious speculations about the boundaries or lack of boundaries between life and death. 1 Uncanny Stories, published in 1923, collected tales Sinclair wrote or at least published after the war, with the exception of “The Flaw in the Crystal” (1912) already discussed. The book’s title suggests a connection, at least in conception, to Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay on “The ‘Uncanny’” with its focus on the unsettling uncertainty of not knowing whether something is a live human being. The Intercessor and Other Stories, a second collection of ghostly stories from the same period, again with one earlier exception of “The Intercessor” (1911), followed in 1931. Both collections display Sinclair’s abilities to interweave psychological, erotic, and supernatural themes. Although uneven in their complexity and execution, the stories offer a variety of illuminative formulations of contin173

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ued existence after death, and of the fluid division between physical and spiritual states. Paul March-Russell sees Sinclair’s stories falling into a moment of transition for English ghost stories toward concerns with more interior, psychic threats and with the dangers of “homely and familiar spaces,” exemplified by Henry James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898). 2 Sinclair’s spare style in the stories, he argues, points toward “Modernist distrust of linguistic excess and the need for a smooth, polished and clean language.” Her mostly minimal characterization and at times limited plot development may also reflect her primary interest in playing with ideas about the circumstances and motivations of the dead. Her philosophic interest in the possibility of personal identity surviving beyond the grave seems on occasion even to reduce the significance of the depicted deaths, ostensibly the stories’ cardinal events. Acquisition of knowledge or understanding, either through the dead spirit’s learning something or communicating something, is a key accomplishment in a number of the stories, raising epistemological issues Sinclair explored elsewhere. In “The Nature of the Evidence” from Uncanny Stories, dead first wife Rosamund returns to block consummation of her former husband Marston’s marriage to his second wife, Pauline. As the title of the story suggests, the narrative’s focus highlights the convincing evidence of experience, as the narrator presents the results of his committed research into “the facts.” While following a common ghost story convention of asserting its own independently verified truth, the story’s opening goes further in emphasizing science-like veracity placed within an interpretive but still purportedly trustworthy framework. “This is the story Marston told me,” the narrator announces. “He didn’t want to tell it. I had to tear it from him bit by bit. I’ve pieced the bits together in their time order, and explained things here and there, but the facts are the facts he gave me. There’s nothing that I didn’t get out of him somehow. Out of him—you’ll admit my source is unimpeachable.” 3 Unimpeachable, the narrator goes on to explain, because Marston wrote “an admirable work on ‘The Logic of Evidence.’” The authoritative witness of Marston is, in fact, just the kind of impartial observation without a prior “bias or anticipation” that Sinclair desired most in assessing reports of psychical occurrences. As we have seen, her turn to scientific grounding was not necessarily a turn away from the non-material, but rather an effort to be open to the potential “naturalness” of what others might dismiss as “supernatural.” When Rosamund dies, Sinclair’s narrator relates, Marston is devastated because “he had no consoling theories. He was one of those bigoted materialists of the nineteenth-century type who believe that consciousness is a purely physiological function, and that when your body’s dead, you’re dead.” 4 His logical recounting of his experience with his former wife’s ghost both affirms the importance of taking such an approach, and underscores its limitations, since neither Marston nor the narrator can explain what he has so logically described. “The ‘nature’ of the facts,

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then, is left in doubt and passed on to the reader to explain,” MarchRussell suggests. “The ordering of the narrative, though, effectively negates its own logical method and denies conventional logic as a reasonable explanation.” 5 Whatever Sinclair’s own uncertainties about what paranormal phenomena was legitimate, Marston is one of the thoroughly rational characters, such as Harding Powell in “The Flaw in the Crystal,” that she enjoys presenting with incontrovertible proof of a supernatural realm. Like Underhill’s knowledgeable Willie, Marston will, by the end of the story, be privy to a different level of reality, having been introduced to it by Rosamund’s specter. Although Willie has personally known disembodied existence as someone who was dead, Marston at least gets a taste of its possibilities. Not only does Rosamund’s spirit prevent physical contact between Marston and Pauline, it shows him why he should not be satisfied with merely physical sexual union with his new wife. 6 Sinclair’s evocation of a kind of “passion at all points of being” that Marston experiences with Rosamund’s ghost provides a titillating ending for her story, but also seems to explore in a different register her perennial interest in Underhill’s Unitive State. While hardly the elevated mystic condition of losing the self in union with “Reality,” Marston’s liaison with a disembodied spirit shows Sinclair exploiting the links between supernatural and sexual union. She also introduces a form of the extra-bodily merging of consciousnesses that underlay her fascination with telepathy, and, in its more sinister conceptions, fed her concern about the violation such mental intimacy might entail. The union, Marston reports, was “[m]ore penetrating than sight or touch. More—more extensive.” 7 Even the bodily image of the specter’s shape, the narrator suggests, may have been a limiting factor, holding Marston back from “the supreme moment of it, the ecstasy” until it dissolves into a more amorphous presence. A similar use of the conceit of intimate contact with a disincarnate individual operates in “If the Dead Knew,” though with regard to maternal rather than carnal love. Anguished after the death of his mother because he had wished her dead so that he could be free to marry, Wilfrid Hollyer is comforted by her summoned presence that brings her “closer than hearing or sight or touch could bring her; herself to his self; her inmost essence was there.” 8 Hollyer’s voiceless plea that his mother “Come—come—,” audible in the realm of the dead, models the spiritual communication that Sinclair wanted to be possible. Again, the dead person in this story communicates for a purpose. Hollyer’s mother first appears in order to express “an intense, a terrible reproach and sorrow” at Hollyer’s denigrating comments about her after her death. 9 Finally, in her second appearance and in the total moment of communion, “as she had once given him flesh of her flesh, so now, self to innermost self, she gave him her blessedness, her peace.” 10 The story’s central concern—the possibility that the dead hear what the living say—was considered in

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Mary Olivier when Mary wonders whether her mother knows of her relief that she is dead. 11 Even more than in Mary Olivier, however, in “If the Dead Knew” Sinclair plays out her twin preoccupations with the uncharted potential—both positive and negative—of psychological depths, and with the heightened intimacy of telepathic communication. Disincarnate spirits not only feel pain “infinitely sharper than any earthly pain,” Hollyer suspects, but also have access to the deepest recesses of the human mind: “The dead did know. She had come back to tell him that she knew. . . . She knew the thought he had hidden even from himself. She knew that she had died because, secretly, he had wished her dead.” 12 Although a usually unremarked-on trope of ghost stories, this twin assumption of a ghost’s enhanced supernatural knowledge and of the supernatural agency to act on it echoes characteristics Sinclair saw in the mystic state that might be perfected in death. They underlie the events in “The Nature of the Evidence” as well, as Rosamund, precisely because she is dead, knows that Pauline is not a mate she would approve for Marston, and is able to do something about it. 13 Even more central to “If the Dead Knew” and to Sinclair’s metaphysics, however, is the theme of the power of desire, a theme tied to her investment in the efficacy of “will.” Nurse Eden successfully wills Hollyer’s mother’s improvement, showing that willing can have healing or harming power, as was suggested in Sinclair’s own perceived influence on the wounded soldier in her Journal. Reflecting Sinclair’s preoccupation with the force of sublimation, the power of that will to either heal or harm is interpolated with the power of specifically sexualized libido, expressed first in the opening orgiastic account of the young couple’s experience of Hollyer’s organ playing, and later in Hollyer’s anticipation of the deferred marriage as, in particular, the opportunity to share a bed with Effie. 14 Conferring with Nurse Eden after his mother’s death, Hollyer realizes confused and contrary desires were at work in his inability to will his mother to live as the nurse had urged: A wish, even a hidden wish, could kill. In the dark, secret places of the mind your thoughts ran loose beyond your knowing; they burrowed under the walls that shut off one self from another; they got through. It was as if his secret self had broken loose, and got through to his mother and had killed her secretly, in the dark. His wish was a part of himself, but stronger than himself. The force behind it was indestructible, for it was a form of his desire for Effie; so that while he lived he could not kill it. 15

As in “The Flaw in the Crystal,” the mysterious nature of psychological depths produces the possibility of malignantly effective thoughts that in subterranean fashion breach the boundaries between “selves.” The threat she considers lies not only in that burrowing under the walls, but even more in the uncontrollable nature of the dangerous impulses, those “in-

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destructible” forces running “loose beyond your knowing” that emerge from sexual desire. The key, for Sinclair is once again the difference between proper sublimation and dangerous repression. Hollyer’s potential path of sublimation, in which he vows to give up Effie as Mary gave up Richard Nicholson, is forestalled by his mother’s unexpected demise. 16 Instead he is left with the guilty memory of a desire for her death that he had not fully admitted to himself: “There had been a moment when he was conscious of it. He could have destroyed it then. . . . [H]e should have dragged it out into the light and fought it. Instead, he had let it sink back into its darkness, to work there unseen.” 17 Not having been able to sublimate either his passion for Effie or his resentment, Hollyer’s redemption rests finally in his remorse, a form of “dragging into the light” that purges the fatal wishes from his psyche’s depths. Such uncontrolled desire or force of rampant libido would be a familiar threat to readers of Mary Olivier, in this case not infringing on artistic production as for Mary, but on mortal life. Readers might also recognize the theme of an adult child’s sacrificial commitment to a mother, complicated by a carefully nurtured sense of obligation. Presented as beautiful and kind, Hollyer’s mother is far from the cruelly manipulative destroyer of spirit that was Mary’s, but she still convinces Hollyer he is frail in order to keep him with her and grateful for her care. “He had been sacrificed to his mother’s selfishness,” Hollyer decides. “Nothing but that had doomed him to his humiliating dependence, his poverty, his intolerable celibacy.” 18 March-Russell notes that “[p]recisely because she does not demonise Mrs. Hollyer, Sinclair is able to emphasise that the balancing of self-interests between parent and child remains a precarious act—even in death.” 19 The ambiguous tone of the story’s conclusion touches as well on Sinclair’s other exploration of will as a chief factor in competition for control within families, especially between mothers and children. Despite the happy rapprochement Hollyer and his mother achieve, an unsettling air attaches to Mrs. Hollyer’s final observation that “[s]he knew she had him again; she knew she would never lose him.” 20 That competition of familial will is made explicit in “Heaven” (1922), from the Intercessor collection, in which a mother’s domination of her son, Mr. Sessions, draws him into her idea of heaven after both their deaths. Only when he stands up for himself is he able to escape her saccharine creation to reach his own heaven, and even then only with the assistance of a woman, Alice, also deceased, whom he realizes he loves. Sessions arrives at the heaven they will share because “[h]e wanted Alice’s beauty. He wanted Alice. Alice was truth. Alice was reality.” Yet, in the story’s concluding lines, Alice clarifies that the more foundational force is the will Sessions expressed through that desire. 21 Earlier in the story, Alice is revealed to have an “uncanny” ability to influence her sister, Rose,

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through her will. The benign nature of the ability, as compared to Sessions’s mother’s control, is established by Rose’s acceptance: “But [Rose] only laughed when he asked her what she was doing; it was ‘that Alice’ again, she said.” 22 And Alice disavows any interest in controlling Sessions, asserting that “to tamper with another person’s will,” is “the wickedest thing you can do.” Richard Bleiler notes the possibility that Sessions may still “go through eternity the pawn of others,” given the role Alice plays in his transposition to a more congenial heaven. 23 Sinclair’s depiction seems more along the lines of a saving partnership such as Agatha’s ability to merge her will with her patients’ wills in “The Flaw in the Crystal,” but Sessions’s need for Alice’s help does raise the specter of control. At the moment of his willed rejection of his mother’s heaven, “he was aware of something that was he and yet not he, greater than he, above and beyond him, invading his being from the outside, rising up in him in a clear jet, a soaring, thrusting column of pure will. Of resistance. Of rebellion.” 24 Whatever the case, Sinclair is clearly revisiting the efficacious and supernatural power of will when Mr. Minify, Session’s mother’s former suitor, echoes the equation of “praying or willing” that Sinclair herself offered in her Journal. 25 The story again allows Sinclair to consider existence after death as characterized by enhanced sight or knowledge, as both Sessions and Minify develop “singular clear-sightedness” or “formidable lucidity.” 26 She also parodies the anti-intellectualism of conventional Christianity, especially in its inability to appreciate the insights into evolution of such free thinkers as Ernest Haeckel, Charles Darwin, Aldous Huxley, and Herbert Spencer. In the mother’s heaven, such intellectuals are humbled before the stupid. Sinclair similarly dismisses spiritual quackery through the unflattering portrayal of Stanford Jones, a sanctimonious self-styled expert on the afterlife. Frustrated romantic desire and desire for knowledge both play roles in “The Token” from Uncanny Stories, when deceased wife Cicely reappears to discover whether her emotionally unforthcoming husband, Donald, actually loved her. And Sinclair’s own frustrated desire for motherly affection get aired again in “The Intercessor,” her first published ghost story, as neglected daughter Effy haunts her family, seeking especially her mother’s embrace denied her when she was alive. In both stories, narrators serve as intermediaries through heightened sensitivities to the spirits’ presence. In “The Token,” Cicely’s sister-in-law, Helen, is able to see Cicely’s spirit return because of her love for her. Donald, her brother and Cicely’s husband, is able to share her vision only after he destroys the “token,” a treasured paperweight given to him by author George Meredith, showing Cicely that he values her more than the object. With Helen’s assistance, the specter, in an echo of the joining of Marston and Rosamund’s ghost in “The Nature of the Evidence,” is then able to receive her husband’s embrace in the reassuring knowledge of his love, and, finally

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satisfied, disappears. 27 In a subtly introduced sub-theme, Donald’s egotism in being proud of the token is ironically emphasized by the paperweight’s shape as a figure of Buddha, whose teachings encourage abandonment of ego. Donald’s pride also stems from having received the token from Meredith, who is perhaps most strongly associated with his 1879 novel The Egoist, which portrays a self-absorbed character’s failures at romantic love. Historian Garvin, the “intercessor” of the story by that name, finds he can both hear and see Effy’s spirit not only because he pities her but because he feels no fear of her. Despite expressing a distaste for children, Garvin provides the intimate comfort the child’s ghost seeks by allowing it to climb into bed with him. In considering Sinclair’s frequent references to estranged families, March-Russell surmises that the specific motif of “dead children” in her fiction may indicate Sinclair’s “feelings of resentment and neglect,” especially if her mother idealized Sinclair’s older sister, who had died from scarlet fever. 28 Garvin ultimately resolves the dead child’s dilemma by helping her replace a stillborn baby in her mother’s arms. Here, various erotic forces converge through tension in the parents’ unhappy marriage, the father’s affair with a serving girl, and Effy’s need for parental touch. Sinclair’s most explicit fictional exploration of the unfathomed force of libido, however, comes in her story “Villa Désirée,” positioned as the concluding story in the Intercessor collection. 29 The ghostly presence that appears in this story is the projection of lust, as one young bride is frightened to death, and a second bride-to-be nearly so by the horrifying bedside appearance of a grotesque apparition of Louis Carson, their husband/fiancé. In this case what is frightful is explicitly not dead, though portrayed as more graphically disturbing than any of Sinclair’s ghosts. As Mildred, Carson’s fiancée, explains to her two friends after her flight from the encounter, “The ghosts of poor dead people don’t kill you. It was what he is. All that beastliness in a face.” 30 That beastliness gets “embodied” when expressed through the force of sexual desire, described through Mildred’s repeated use of the non-specific term “it.” “It” is Carson’s distinctly unsublimated libido, given quasi-concrete form through the power of willing that is “blind, parted from all controlling and absolving clarity.” 31 As Mildred tries to explain, Carson had been “waiting to go” to his first bride the night she was frightened to death, their wedding night. “‘And—last night—he was waiting to come to me.’ They stared at her, stupefied. ‘Oh, can’t you see?’ she cried. ‘It didn’t wait. It got there before him.’” 32 Only Mildred’s assertion of her own will by confronting the thing forces it to disappear. If nothing else, any lingering Victorian discomfort Sinclair felt about the sexual urges she sought to channel gets an unmistakable airing here. In addition to considering the possibilities and significance of communication between the dead and the living, Sinclair used her stories to

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explore what kind of a state death might constitute. In “If the Dead Knew,” Hollyer’s mother is described as returning to visit her son from her place among the “blessed.” This more benign assessment of death, at least in comparison to the frightful powers lurking in the depths of the living psyche, is laid out more baldly in “The Victim” in Uncanny Stories as Sinclair presents her philosophy of physical existence as the “lesser reality.” In a twist of expectations, Mr. Greathead’s post-death visit to his murderer Steven is not for the purpose of revenge but for thanks. Steven had throttled the elderly Greathead because he believed (mistakenly) that Greathead had convinced Steven’s fiancée, Dorsy, to leave him. Steven’s action, Greathead reports, removed him “from a state which had become unbearable to a state more delightful than you can imagine.” 33 At the base of this rosy portrayal of the advantages of dying is, as Sinclair puts, a question of perspective. As Greathead explains to Steven, “All you did, then, was to redistribute matter.” 34 For those with the proper perspective, those “minds no longer attached to flesh and blood,” in other words, “that horrible butchery you were so proud of, Steven, is simply silly. No more terrifying than the spilling of red ink or the rearrangement of a jigsaw puzzle.” Death, therefore, is of no lasting importance, is at most a distinction between two states, with the former by no means necessarily preferable. What is of lasting importance in Greathead’s system is the emotional force that impelled the act. “It’s not your laying fingers on me, it’s your hatred that matters,” he tells Steven. “If that’s done with, the whole thing’s done with.” 35 Similarly, the impetus that pushed Dorsy away was Steven’s “look of hate” while thrashing a perceived competitor for her affections, rather than the thrashing itself. Sinclair offers no explicit explanation in the story as to why emotional motivation should count so highly, but seen in context, “The Victim” is another rendition of the contrary powers of positive and negative psychic energy. With all forgiven, Steven can even have his estranged fiancée back if he will let go of hate and direct his energy into love. Sinclair begins her collection of Uncanny Stories with an inversion of this happy presentation of the afterlife, though she continues to draw in a similar way on the importance of mental states. In “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched,” failure to take the opportunity of a deathbed confession to expunge a tawdry and unhappy affair contributes to Harriott Leigh’s immersion in a hell-like eternity reliving it. Having participated in the relationship with Oscar Wade, a married man, after despairing of ever succeeding in the “spiritual” romantic love that seemed always beyond her grasp, Harriott’s punishment is to be trapped in the prison of “what you made of love,” as Oscar puts it, an ironic reversal of her own accusation to him. “For you love only means one thing,” she had said in their final break-up. “Everything that’s high and noble in it you dragged down to that, till there’s nothing left for us but that.” 36 Yet Sinclair suggests that Harriott never fully acknowledged her own investment in the sexual

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aspect of her affair with Wade, or of her later infatuation with her parish priest. As Oscar says, “I noticed that you were always very spiritual after you’d got what you wanted.” Similarly, what Harriott considers moments of “solemn holiness” in her friendship with the vicar involve being alone with him or the direct object of his attention. 37 Sinclair again emphasizes the power of intent and thought, as the priest, while giving Harriott last rites, explains that the “first state” following death “will depend very much on what we are thinking of at our last hour.” 38 As in other stories, Sinclair also plays with the power of memory—and the powerful urge to forget—as the dead Harriott attempts to flee into everearlier moments of her past, before she had met Oscar. In every memory, however, Oscar is waiting, as she finds herself again in the room where they held their trysts. “When you’ve got back to the farthest memory of all and there’s nothing beyond it—when there’s no memory but this—,” he explains. “In the last death we shall be shut up in this room, behind that locked door, together.” 39 In yet another mixture of Eastern and Western philosophies, this shaping of afterlife by the effects of lived choices and actions has a certain karmic sense to it, despite the absence of any possibility for rebirth and improvement, and despite Sinclair’s own suspicion of karmic theories. 40 She considers karma more directly, and draws again on the trope of Eastern magical abilities in “The Mahatma’s Story” and “Jones’s Karma,” both included in the Intercessor collection, and interrelated by common characters. Although not stories about ghosts, the paired tales investigate the nature of character and will in shaping life accomplishments. In “The Mahatma’s Story,” an Indian adept’s powers allow two couples to swap memories and situations, but not the inherent traits and abilities that had produced their success or failure. In “Jones’s Karma,” Sinclair returns to the idea that the moment of death holds significant power: by wishing at that moment, Jones is allowed to relive his life in order to change three choices that had revealed his weaknesses. Despite successfully resisting the three temptations in his second lifetime, he makes the same choices in other contexts. In the story’s conclusion, Sinclair undercuts the Mahatma’s proffered solution—adoption of an attitude of indifference—by suggesting that the Mahatma himself is far from indifferent. Offered a choice between a fine dinner and a bowl of rice, the Mahatma expresses no preference, but eats the fine dinner. The most didactic presentation of Sinclair’s metaphysical views, which is also the most direct intersection of her philosophizing and her literary interests in the two collections, comes in “The Finding of the Absolute,” the final story in the original edition of Uncanny Stories. 41 The heaven that Sinclair’s characters inhabit in this story stands in the extended tradition of personalized afterlives, and presents an opportunity to play out the ethical implications introduced in “The Victim” and “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched.” In this case, the protagonist Mr.

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Spalding’s preoccupation with “metaphysics” causes his wife, Elizabeth, to run off with Paul Jeffreson, a debauched Imagist poet. The plight of Spalding in some respects follows the pattern of Sinclair’s own development, though she presents him as a particularly flighty example of a philosophically minded seeker of ultimate principles: Mr. Spalding had a balanced mind; he mourned with equal sorrow the loss of his wife and the loss of his Absolute. A flaw in a metaphysical system may seem to you a small thing; but you must bear in mind that, ever since he could think at all, Spalding had been devoured by a hunger and thirst after metaphysical truth. He had flung over the God he had been taught to believe in because, besides being an outrage to Mr. Spalding’s moral sense, he wasn’t metaphysical enough. 42

What has tripped Mr. Spalding up in his philosopical musings is the messiness of real life, captured in his wife’s love affair with the poet. “The Finding of the Absolute” is more a discourse than a narrative, related primarily through conversations the deceased Spalding has with Elizabeth and Paul, and with the spirit of Immanuel Kant. Sinclair’s exposition echoes issues raised by Underhill and that she herself raised in A Defence of Idealism, as when Kant speaks of time in terms of space, and uses dreaming, telepathy and clairvoyance as examples of transcending self. 43 In framing an ethical system, Sinclair revisits the thought of hell as endless repetition of an unresolved sin, which she introduced in “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched,” but sets it aside in favor of the more libertarian ethic of “The Victim.” Like Harriott, Spalding finds his own sexual dalliances cause him momentary concern at the time of his dying, but neither it nor the adultery of Elizabeth and Paul are found to be significant in comparison to the larger values of passionate love or a commitment to beauty and truth. Surprised to find himself in heaven on the basis of his devoted search for truth, Spalding is even more surprised to be greeted there by Elizabeth and Paul. What gained the two of them admittance was Paul’s “love of beauty” and Elizabeth’s love of Paul, both of which are valued “in the eternal world.” 44 What does not function in this heaven are conventional notions of morality: “Your parochial morality doesn’t hold good here, that’s all,” Paul explains. “Why should it? It’s entirely relative. Relative to a social system with limits in time and place. Relative to a certain biological configuration that ceased with our terrestrial organisms. Not absolute. Not eternal. But beauty—Beauty is eternal, is absolute. . . . And love is eternal.” Perhaps understandably for a heavenly system designed by a writer like Sinclair, it is Paul’s skill at poetry, used to express his love of beauty, that admits him “into one of the best heavens, a heaven reserved exclusively for the very finest spirits.” 45 And also typically, while there does not seem to be a hell to balance out heaven, rejected souls who lack the requisite appreciation for eternal things, and who are characterized by

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“meanness and stupidity and nastiness,” are sent back to earth to “suffer damnably till they’d got some bigness and intelligence and decency knocked into them.” The pattern of reincarnation hinted at here matches Sinclair’s own Eastern-based allegiance to continual rebirth, at least in providing an accumulation of experiences. She also revisits her assumption about the power of will, as each person’s highly individualized heaven comes about “[b]y thinking of it. By wanting it. By imagining it.” 46 Sinclair concludes by having Kant introduce Mr. Spalding to three-dimensional time, which, in a moment of ecstatic co-creation, telescopes past, present and future, and connects him with the Bergsonian élan vital or Schopenhaurian force of life that undergirds Sinclair’s understanding of will: “[H]e was swept into the stream that flowed, thudding and throbbing, through all live things; he felt it beat in and around him, jet after jet from the beating heart of God; he felt the rising of the sap in trees, the delight of animals at mating-time. He knew the joy that made Jerry, the black cat, dance on his hind legs and bow sideways and wave his forelegs like wings.” 47 More than any of Sinclair’s depictions of continuing coherent and ghostly selves, in fact, Spalding’s concluding vision captures her speculation that post-death experience will consist of dissolution of the self in union with the Absolute: [T]he universe dissolved into the ultimate constituents of matter, electrons of electrons of electrons, an unseen web, intensely vibrating, stretched through all space and all time. He saw it sucked back into the space of space, the time of time, into the thought of God. Mr. Spalding was drawn in with it. He passed from God’s immanent to his transcendent life, into the Absolute. For one moment he thought that this was death; the next his whole being swelled and went on swelling in an unspeakable, an unthinkable bliss. 48

CONCLUSION Merging strains of nineteenth-century philosophy with reconfigured elements of psychoanalytic theory, and drawing on Underhill’s model of mystic endeavor, Sinclair worked within the syncretic spirit of her time to develop her own philosophy of the mystic potential of human will. Spalding’s final experience of union with absolute reality distills Sinclair’s understanding of the unitive state she believed a life discipline of sublimated energy might ultimately provide. In what might almost be termed her own “science of mysticism,” she used her conception of agency to negotiate the overlapping terrains of early twentieth-century speculation about the nature of consciousness, and the potential for access to alternative or higher realms of existence. While unusually sophisticated in her engagement with the philosophic principles underlying that negotiation, her interweaving of pragmatic skepticism and enthusiastic cre-

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dulity made her representative of her modern moment. With daily proof that almost anything was possible or discoverable, Sinclair joined in the wider cultural enterprise of putting the tools of calculation in service to map the incalculable. While seeking rational explanations for the irrational, however, Sinclair assumed a world touched with enchantment and a human consciousness marvelous in its ability to perceive a greater reality lying just beyond physical appearances. It was this same enchantment of the natural world that Sinclair’s compatriot, Mary Webb, took as an article of faith. NOTES 1. Sinclair to Annie Fields, December 9, 1910, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, FI 3819. Quoted in Raitt, May Sinclair, 129, and in Boll, Miss May Sinclair, 87. 2. March-Russell, introduction to Uncanny Stories, 11–13. 3. Sinclair, “Nature of the Evidence,” 113. 4. Sinclair, 114. 5. March-Russell, introduction to Uncanny Stories, 19. 6. Sinclair, “Nature of the Evidence,” 121–22. 7. Sinclair, 122. 8. Sinclair, “If the Dead Knew,” 139–40. 9. Sinclair, 137. 10. Sinclair, 140. 11. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 431. 12. Sinclair, “If the Dead Knew,” 271–72. 13. See Bleiler, “May Sinclair’s Supernatural Fiction,” 130. 14. Sinclair, “If the Dead Knew,” 123, 129. 15. Sinclair, 133. 16. Sinclair, 127. 17. Sinclair, 138. 18. Sinclair, 134. 19. March-Russell, introduction to Uncanny Stories, 21. 20. Sinclair, “If the Dead Knew,” 140. 21. Sinclair, “Heaven,” 110. 22. Sinclair, “Heaven,” 63. 23. Bleiler, “May Sinclair’s Supernatural Fiction,” 134. 24. Sinclair, “Heaven,” 107. 25. Sinclair, 101. See Sinclair, Journal, 219–20. 26. Sinclair, “Heaven,” 85, 102. 27. Sinclair, “The Token,” 56. 28. March-Russell, introduction to Uncanny Stories, 7–8. 29. “Villa Désirée” first appeared in The Ghost Book collection of short stories published in 1926, which included a story by Mary Webb. 30. Sinclair, “Villa Désirée,” 221. 31. Sinclair, 216. 32. Sinclair, 222. 33. Sinclair, 156. 34. Sinclair, “Victim,” 157. 35. Sinclair, 158. 36. Sinclair, “Fire Is Not Quenched,” 34. 37. Sinclair, 34, 35–36. 38. Sinclair, 36.

Meeting the Dead 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Sinclair, 44. See Sinclair, Defence, 317. Sinclair, “Finding of the Absolute,” 161–76. Sinclair, 161–62. Sinclair, 172. Sinclair, 164–65. Sinclair, 165. Sinclair, 167. Sinclair, 175. Sinclair, 175–76.

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Mary Webb’s Mysticism of Nature

Mary Webb (1881–1927) Source: Reproduction of the photograph of Mary Webb courtesy of Dr. Gladys Mary Coles from her Private Collection.

THIRTEEN Country Living Tales of Old and New

More than either Underhill or Sinclair, Mary Webb made the relationship of an individual with nature her primary arena for exploring access to mystically perceived reality, and the interaction of human will with a wider, more-than-human influence. Especially in her novels The Golden Arrow (1916), Gone to Earth (1917), and Precious Bane (1924), and the unfinished Armour Wherein He Trusted (1927), the works on which I will focus, Webb explores mystic apprehension as forms of sensitivity to an agency that enchants the natural world. Expressed in some instances as brooding fate, in others as a therapeutic benevolence (though with dark overtones), and finally in Armour Wherein He Trusted as the will of God, this generalized influence on human events, actions and states is her touchstone for revealing character. For Webb, to be in tune with that force of nature-expressed yet supernatural agency constitutes a preferred state of enlightenment that sets certain characters apart from both the limited vision of modern bourgeois life and the brutality of ignorant peasant superstition. 1 Set mostly in rural Shropshire, her fiction helped define modern life for her readers by presenting traditional, country living in contrast. By emphasizing rural practices, Webb simultaneously fed nostalgia for a departing past and delineated the distinctions that established the modern as different. In advocating freely expressed sexuality and individually determined ethics in her own complicated negotiation with modernity, however, she also participated in a modern impulse of neo-romanticism or “romantic rebellion” that privileged the spontaneous, instinctive, and natural. Both in her subject matter and approach, Webb channeled elements of her English Romantic forebears, especially in her devotion to 189

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symbolically rich narratives rooted in local English environs. 2 As we will see in considering Armour Wherein He Trusted, her last uncompleted work, she also, like Underhill, could tap into the medieval resonances of the earlier romantic movement. 3 With her emphasis on enlightened agency as a form of affinity and even partnership with nature’s life force, her pastoral subject matter also placed her in the vanguard of contemporary turns to “vitalist” theories, even if she did not engage them as directly as Underhill and Sinclair. Like the other authors, she was intrigued by the new language of psychology, and in essays and book reviews often referred to the importance of intuition and the subconscious in the creative process. 4 This focus on inherent functions of the human psyche helped move her away from Christian orthodoxy and toward a complex mix of Christian-tinged mysticism and pantheistically constructed religion of nature. As biographer Gladys Mary Coles observes, “[F]or Mary, nature was church, refuge, source of renewal.” 5 Webb’s highlighted values of compassionate engagement with others and communal cooperation critiqued the anti-naturalism and cruelty of modern capitalist excess. While, for the most part, she ignored agrarian social tensions spawned by nineteenth-century industrialization, her celebration of the traditional was at its heart progressive in questioning assumed economic practices and authoritative structures. At the same time, she recognized the precariousness of any form of existence that stood completely outside the bounds of social custom. Presaging the complex impulses that would feed post-war turns to both nature and domesticity, Webb’s female protagonists tend to match immersion in the natural world with immersion in home life. In a proper balance, caring for hearth and family could coexist productively with the independence of mystical communing with the life-force. In endorsing domestic life that is both free from the small-minded constraints of the bourgeoisie and sensitive to mystical aspects of the natural world, Webb offered her vision of a new modernity that might hold together the ordinary and the extraordinary. Peter Hansen’s description of a 1924 photograph of Tibetan Buddhist monks standing before a radio microphone offers one contextualizing example of the interplay of traditional and progressive elements during the period in which Webb wrote. 6 The photo caption, “Antiquity meets modernity,” Hansen suggests, asserts the modernity of recording technology in juxtaposition with the designated non-modern. The monks, members of a dance troupe that performed before the London screening of a film about the 1924 Mount Everest expedition, were viewed in opposition to the technologies of both the microphone and the film. “British consciousness of modernity was sometimes defined in contrast to ‘others’ who, like the dancing lamas, were considered non-modern, ancient, backward, primitive, traditional or superstitious,” Hansen explains. If so, then of our three authors, Webb’s work arguably offers the most complicated

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interrelation between old and new. Her stories of a traditional, vanishing, if not vanished, English peasant class fed readers’ nostalgia for bygone times, even as this fiction helped demarcate what was modern through its folksy depictions of the “not modern.” In a similar example of the defining function of opposition, Hansen notes that when British mountain climbers began to visit the Swiss Alps after the mid-1850s, “they considered the local population to be primitive peasants or superstitious seigneurs who would rather live at the foot of a mountain than plant their feet on its summit.” In contrast, “[b]y systematically climbing the Alps, [they] represented themselves as agents of a progressive modernity, in which their imperial masculinity conquered the space that indigenous superstition had left undisturbed for centuries.” 7 The presence of that traditional backdrop seemed as essential to the assertion of modernity as the actual effort of the climb. As such experiences grew harder to come by within an increasingly cosmopolitan Europe, in fact, mountaineers looked farther afield. The Rev. Walter Weston, an Anglican missionary to Japan dubbed the “Father of Japanese Mountaineering” by his British compatriots, touted the attractions of Japan’s mountains by emphasizing the “primitive” settings and the odd proximity of cultures to be found, as much as the climbing itself. 8 In the Playground of the Far East (1918), he wrote that he once “‘fell to meditating upon the strange contrasts suggested by this combination of the ancient and the modern—the science of today side by side with the quaint nature-worship of a thousand years of yesterday’ symbolized by a surveyor’s stone and the ruins of a shrine.” As Hansen relates, “At the summit of Fuji, [Weston] observed next to weather-forecasting instruments ‘some white-robed pilgrim take his stand to pay his devotions to the rising sun before he goes off to the post office, recently erected a few yards away, to dispatch to some 40 friends in far-off provinces the latest forms of picture postcards.’” For Weston, such scenes were “crucial in performing his awareness of his own modernity,” despite the absence of any apparent perception of incongruity on the part of the pilgrim himself. Blurred in Weston’s example, however, is any definitive distinction between the juxtaposed new and the old—meteorology and monasticism—as both are combined in the person of a pilgrim who mails postcards. Hansen likewise observes, in contradiction of the caption for the photo of monks with a microphone, that the dancing Tibetans had actually used similar microphones to make recordings of their chants, and in fact “appear to have interpreted radio and sound recordings—as they also interpreted film— not as white magic or the technology of an inscrutable modernity, but as a new medium for the transmission of their own missionary message to all sentient beings.” 9 Whether consciously or not, Webb conducted her own form of missionizing—and generated a similar intermingling of the modern and non-modern—with her treatments of a traditional past explored through

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progressive themes of agency. While rural nostalgia may not have been as developed in Britain in the post-war years as in other parts of Europe, Webb’s stories fed what investment in the English past was active. 10 As Eksteins asserts, it was a nostalgia profoundly heightened by the trauma of the war. Paul Fussell sees the war bolstering an already existent pastoralism that idealized the English countryside, especially as the location of simpler, traditional practices. Both literature and letters from the war include ubiquitous references to gardens and rural settings, used in ironic commentary, comforting contrast, or as representations of a threatened status quo. 11 Roses, for example, “were indispensable to the work of the imagination during and after the Great War, not because Belgium and France were full of them but because English poetry was, and because since the Middle Ages they had connoted ‘England’ and ‘loyalty’ and ‘sacrifice.’” 12 Raymond Williams finds such associations unsurprising, the modern manifestations of a penchant to contrast “the peace of country life” with “the disturbance of war and civil war” that extends back to classical literature. 13 Webb herself saw her work as resurrecting former days in pastoral terms. She opens Precious Bane’s 1924 foreword: “To conjure, even for a moment, the wistfulness which is the past is like trying to gather in one’s arms the hyancinthe colour of the distance. But if it is once achieved, what sweetness!” 14 Even stories, such as Gone to Earth, that she sets in times approximately contemporary to their writing manage to evoke a lamented, unrecoverable rural existence. 15 That perceived irretrievability increases the poignant sense of loss. As Webb put it, “The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious.” 16 In Webb’s case, temporal discontinuity, rather than juxtaposition of such contrasting images as meteorological equipment and pilgrims, supplies the primary opposition defining modernity’s parameters. As a reader compares the modern world in which she reads the narratives to the world recreated by the stories themselves, she might well prefer the old to the new. As compared to her contemporary D. H. Lawrence, who was also captivated by the “force of nature” but explored industrialization’s labor troubles in such works as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Webb introduces few obviously political or economic tensions into her texts. 17 She does not mention the significant nineteenth-century agrarian labor unrest, for example, beyond a vague reference in Precious Bane to “rumours” of social conflict. She similarly makes passing reference to a machine for “reaping and mowing” coming into use in the late nineteenth century, but not to its negative impact on employment. 18 Her yeoman farmer characters mostly own their family farms within stable communities. While Webb’s elevation of a mystical relationship with the phenomenal world assumes the foil of pervasively demystifying attitudes as described by Max Weber,

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she seems little interested in the cultural effects of technology per se. Through Precious Bane protagonist Prue Sarn’s appreciative descriptions of lost customs of mutual support and simple living, Webb instead offers a celebratory snapshot of a fading past that contains hints of hope for a utopian future of reformed capitalism. Not quite a socialism of shared means of production, the detailed recounting of the communal ingathering of the Sarns’ corn harvest in a “love-carriage,” for example, suggests a preferred economic model by evoking the best aspects of a time when folk could rely on one another, with “each man as busy about the planning of it all as if the harvest was hisn, and each man as glad of the grain as if he was to have the selling of it.” 19 Readers would have no indication from Webb’s books, in any case, that by the mid-eighteenth century, her rural Shropshire actually had emerged “spectacularly” as an early center of the industrial revolution. 20 Based primarily on iron production, that dominance went into decline by the early nineteenth century, Eric Richards reports, and “by the 1840s much of Shropshire’s economy was reconfirmed in its agricultural role.” 21 Still, for at least a time, he notes, Shropshire was one of England’s key sites of industrialization, and in both gaining that status and losing it experienced traumatic economic and demographic shifts that Webb largely ignores. Notable for the mining of lead from as early as the Roman period, as well as of copper, iron, and coal, Shropshire also was known for the sometimes complementary, sometimes competing economy of wool production. In The Golden Arrow, Webb puts one of her characters to work in the Ramsden lead mine, and other characters’ conversations make passing reference to choosing either to raise sheep or work as miners. Webb otherwise makes little mention of Shropshire ever having had anything but an agriculturally based economy. In one reading, therefore, the scenarios of Webb’s novels could be taken as disconnected from the turmoil of modernity, especially that turmoil associated with the mechanistic upheaval of war. John Buchan, in his introduction to the 1928 Jonathan Cape edition of Gone to Earth, distills this escapist attraction of her work in noting the book’s publication in the “dark days” of 1917. “It was the first of Mary Webb’s novels to come into my hands,” he writes. “I read it at a time when everything that concerned the soil of England seemed precious, and one longed for the old things as a relief from a world too full of urgent novelties.” 22 In another reading, however, Webb’s exposure of the limiting and at times tragic dimensions of traditional custom and superstition, and her advocacy of release through forms of personal agency and autonomy, could have reassured (especially) wartime readers that there might be reasons for appreciating their own modernity. Even Precious Bane exhibits elements of counter-pastoralism as Webb sets off its “past” with a progression of mostly welcome modern advances. A certain darkness to Webb’s vision also coalesces at times in treatments of country life’s harshness, as when in Precious Bane she targets the dangerous superstition that could

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turn communally supportive group-spirit into mob-like and murderous expulsion of an outsider. 23 Shifting and intertwined perspectives of tradition and modernity permeate Precious Bane’s study of the fluidity of history, as Webb sets up a tension between the ephemeral nature of the past, and the supposedly clear-eyed perspective of the present. 24 The story is presented as Prue’s first-person memoir of her youth, written at the advice of her parson: “Knowing of the lies that were told of me, [he] bade me write all I could remember in a book, and set down the whole truth and nothing else.” 25 Like Sinclair in her wartime journal, therefore, Prue is engaged in a project of explaining and justifying her own actions through an accounting of the past. Also like Sinclair she is careful to establish the credentials of her version, basing it on her diary from which “I was able to freshen my memory with the things I had put down Sunday by Sunday.” Her claims for veracity underscore paradoxically the malleability of history against which she guards, as do her musings elsewhere about the incompatibility of the “old” and the “true.” The family legend of Timothy Sarn, an ancestor reportedly struck twice by lightning, might be “too old to be true,” Prue writes, and even the physical existence of the village Sarn seems to blur from age: “The woods and the farm and the church at the other end of the mere were all so old, as if they were in somebody’s dream.” 26 “Old” thus becomes associated with the preciousness of what may lose, shift or gain meaning over time, and what is, even when still present, somehow intangible, while the careful description of Prue’s account promises to preserve by accurately reporting experienced events. In this way Webb mixes elements of romance and realism, assuming the value of realism’s fidelity in describing an evocatively portrayed and dreamlike past. In her opening paragraphs Webb has Prue’s eventual husband, Kester Woodseaves, draw a distinction between “true tales or romancings.” 27 Prue and Webb, however, appear to have written both. Webb’s descriptions of Prue’s mystic states and visions would be one chief reason not to consider Precious Bane “realist,” though J. A. Cuddon observes that “the mystical poems of St. John of the Cross, are realistic enough if we believe in God and the spiritual order.” 28 At the same time, there is little romantic about Webb’s depiction of the potential grimness of rural community life, or her focus on its everyday hardships. It seems safest to suggest that Webb uses realist techniques in telling a story that for a number of reasons—e.g., historical setting, assumption of the supernatural, description of certain extraordinary events, and inclusion of such “better than real” characters as Kester—exhibits elements of romance. Contributing to the sense that the past can be brought close and yet remain tantalizingly out of reach, the events of Precious Bane are set primarily in Prue’s young adulthood, but are presented through the narrative perspective of “a very old woman and a tired woman, with a task to do before she says good night to this world.” 29 The distinction of age

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follows the nostalgic pattern Raymond Williams observes in many works that identify the past (either rural or urban) with the experiences of childhood. As he explains, “[W]hat is at issue, . . . is a growth and alteration of consciousness. . . . What was once close, absorbing, accepted, familiar, internally experienced becomes separate, distinguishable, critical, changing, externally observed.” 30 That shift in perspective gives Webb cause to linger appreciatively over explanations of lost rural customs, as when she opens the novel with a reference to forgotten knowledge of country ways. In her first sentence Prue reports that she first met Kester at a “lovespinning,” adding, “[a]nd if, in these new-fangled days, when strange inventions crowd upon us, . . . if those that may happen will read this don’t know what a love-spinning was, they shall hear in good time.” 31 The book’s events are, furthermore, placed in the alluring distance of history twice removed from Webb’s post–First World War readers, since Prue as narrator is supposedly writing in the late nineteenth century about events that begin in that century’s early decades. 32 The fixing of those events in relation to a “knowable” historic event—the Napoleonic Wars—however, offers a point of orientation and connection, while Prue’s promise to explain the unfamiliar assures that that history will be reclaimed and incorporated within a contemporary frame of reference. The relatively unusual mention by Webb of historic world events actually reinforces the sense of insularity that is her primary goal in writing of Shropshire. Prue relates that after she pledged to help her brother Gideon work their family farm, “four years went by, and though a deal happened out in the world, nought happened to us. Rumours came to us of battles over sea and discontents at home. The French went to Russia and never came back, save a few.” 33 Yet a certain bridge is also created between the post-war period described in the text and the post-war period of Webb’s early readers. Presumably those readers resonated with Prue’s observation that “there were few young gentlemen about Lullingford at that time, what with some of them going to bide in London, and some never coming back from the wars.” 34 For all that the past setting suggests some distancing from the currently “real,” therefore, Webb makes that past seem accessible, even contemporary, by highlighting shared elements. Prue’s rural environs aid in that task, as Webb observes in her foreword: “When antique things are also country things, they are easier to write about, for there is a permanence, a continuity in country life which makes the lapse of centuries seem of little moment.” 35 She draws on her own immersion in Shropshire, where she grew up and mostly settled after her marriage, describing it as a place “where the dignity and beauty of ancient things lingers long.” Still, she also draws attention to the temporal disjunction involved, acknowledging her need to turn to authenticating sources, such as “the authors of Shropshire Folk Lore,” to verify certain customs. 36 At times she describes customs as part of a romanticized re-creation, and at others with the edge

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of a modern critical judgment. “Heaving the Chair,” a game in which a village’s prettiest girl selects a suitor; the practices of women’s gatherings, such as the “caking” party and “love-spinning”; and outdoor dancing to the accompaniment of men whistling are thus offered as antiquities from a simpler, happier time. 37 The realities of rural employment through “hiring fairs,” with their accompanying indignities, however, are more ambivalently presented, while Webb presents the sport of bullbaiting as positively vicious. 38 Overall, however, Webb, through Prue, revels in her production of a primer on Shropshire’s past, from explaining that dragonflies were once called “the ether’s mon or ether’s nild,” to describing a shepherd’s “kibba” or staff as “a stick of six foot or so, to walk with, held about the middle.” 39 If Webb privileges the perspective of the modern in explaining, even preserving the ephemeral past, the modern as the perennially new is itself a player in her presentation of times gone by. Developments in rural custom and fashion are shown to characterize the “new” moment of the early 1800s, again mingling senses of the new as both welcome advancement and poignant loss. With oxen “being a bit out of fashion,” Gideon is able to purchase them cheaply because fewer farmers are choosing them over horses for farm work, and Prue can delight in her “new mob-cap trimmed with little sausages made of sarsnet, very new-fangled.” 40 The introduction of corn tariffs, a novel idea to the residents of Sarn, supports Gideon’s bid for wealth but surprises even him: “‘Dang me!’ I says. ‘What?’ I says. ‘Make the furriners pay to lug their corn to us?’” 41 Prue combines the book’s various retrospectives for her contemporary readers when she compares the early and late nineteenth-century circumstances of Lullingford, describing it as “a quiet place, though not near so quiet as now. Folk go off to the cities these days, but when I was young they gathered together from many miles around into the little market towns.” 42 Even the Lullingford of her youth, however, showed signs of modernity, since it included a bakery and so “was well up with the times, since it wasna all towns could boast a baker in days when nearly everybody baked at home.” 43 The often comical presence of Grandfeyther Callard further establishes the story’s early nineteenth-century moment as “modern” by comparison to his looks back to the region’s even more ancient history. Thus, Callard “always said harroost, it being the old way of saying harvest,” Prue observes. 44 When Prue’s friend Jancis runs away from her indentured position, Callard can report that stricter customs once prevailed: “‘Nobody ever broke their time when I was a lad,’ said the old man. ‘They darstna. They’d have been put in the stocks.’” 45 Just his presence provides a point of reference. The drowning of Jancis and her baby represents a “tale as hadna been in our part of the country, where things go on middling quiet, een in the memory of Grandfeyther Callard.” 46

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But even his memory is not the limit of the backward reach of time, as Prue observes that the road to Lullingford was “a good road, and smoother than most. . . . Parson used to say it was made by folk who lived in the days when the Redeemer lived. Romans, the name was. They could make roads right well, whatever their name was.” 47 In at least one intimation that the ancient margarine of Roman innovation gets the nod over the butter of supposedly more modern practices, in fact, Prue favorably compares the Roman road to the roads of her youth, “for whatever the weather was, the road the Romans made was good going.” 48 Finally, Grandfeyther Callard draws all times together in sharing at least one inescapable similarity. At age 91, he remarks on the odd chance that though Jancis and the baby died so young, “I’ve so far missed to catch the plague that ravens through this bitter old world—the ancient plague of dying.” 49 As Callard notes, death, and the wars that are one particular cause, provide a key connective element for Webb, through the allusions in Precious Bane that bridge the Napoleonic and First World War, but even more through the allegorical subtext of Gone to Earth. There Webb uses a story of rural custom to explore the very contemporary yet primal forces a modern war had unleashed. Despite the absence of any direct reference to the actual war, the 1917 date of publication is only one of the factors supporting a reading of Gone to Earth as allegory for the fatal influences of the world struggle. 50 The lack of direct reference is not surprising. As already noted, Webb makes few references in any of her works to historical events outside the closely local spheres of her Shropshire characters. 51 Even more generally, Daniel R. Schwarz observes that “the Great War is the absent signifier in much of the literature and art from 1914 to well into the 1920s.” 52 In his examination of English popular fiction between 1914 and 1918, Harold Orel likewise seeks to “make sense of the fact that most writers during the war years avoided, as much as possible, confronting either the fact or the implications of the fact that an entire generation was being destroyed on the battlefields of Belgium and France.” 53 Orel, however, offers Webb’s first novel, The Golden Arrow (1915), as an example of work that while not treating the war directly, still reflected the atmosphere generated by the worsening conflict. The nihilism that overtakes the two lovers, Stephen and Deborah, he argues, “reflected a growing awareness in 1915, among all sensitive men and women, that values of decency, kinship and love were daily being damaged, and were ultimately to be radically changed, by the horrible war raging on the Continent.” 54 At least some authors, like Webb, therefore, entertained the possibility that “something had gone hugely, monstrously, and permanently wrong in the lives of fictional characters living in England, and the conditions of life across the Channel,” he writes. “Theirs was an awareness of, a sensitivity to, rumblings of thunder at a distance. And the

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novels frequently attempted to deal with anticipations of disaster by oblique, indirect, and often symbolic techniques.” 55 Given the circumstances of Gone to Earth’s creation in the summer of 1916, the time of the offensive on the Somme with its horrific, pointless loss of life, it is hard to imagine Webb’s writing not being influenced by the war. 56 In Chester, where Mary and her husband Henry were living during the week because of Henry’s teaching position, “hospital trains brought in hundreds of the wounded and the city welcomed them with poppies and other flowers,” Coles relates. Michèle Aina Barale notes that two of Mary’s brothers were serving in France, “and reports of the carnage on the Western Front were frequent and terrible.” 57 Mervyn, Mary’s youngest brother, would return with part of his jaw shot off. One source of conflict between Mary and her mother, Alice, in fact was “Alice’s utter lack of concern for the welfare of her sons in the war and continual comments that made clear her appalling lack of knowledge about the war.” While Mary and Henry’s weekends in The Nills, a cottage in Shropshire, offered some respite from the war’s immediacy, Barale notes, Chester “with its munitions factory, the returned wounded, and the daily newspaper, kept the war always before the eye.” Perhaps as a result, she observes, while not the only Webb novel to address the conflict of good and evil, Gone to Earth is by far the grimmest, and the one in which death and cruelty can be said ultimately to triumph. 58 As allegory, therefore, the story could have carried painfully contemporary resonances even for Webb’s urban readers, despite its depiction of pastoral life. The dangerous power of unbridled destruction presents a harsh horizon in the novel, embodied physically in the cruelty of protagonist Hazel Woodus’s seducer, Jack Reddin, and all those who hunt. More imagistically, it underlies Hazel’s superstitious belief in the Black Huntsman and his “phantom hounds” that “scoured the country on dark stormy nights.” 59 The conflict between Hazel’s almost unnatural sensitivity to the suffering of the weak, and the rapacious force of the mythical huntsman, gives vivid life to war’s calamity. Because Hazel is sure the phantom pack killed the mother of Foxy, her pet fox and alter ego, she associates the dogs with her own mother’s death as well. “Hounds symbolized everything she hated, everything that was not young, wild and happy. She identified herself with Foxy, and so with all things hunted and snared and destroyed.” 60 In highlighting the value she places on this identification with the weak, Webb elevates Hazel’s affinity for the benevolent aspects of nature to more than just personal idiosyncrasy: Night, shadow, loud winds, winter—these were inimical; with these came the death pack, stealthy and untiring, following for ever the trail of the defenceless. Sunlight, soft airs, bright colours, kindness—these were beneficent havens to flee into. Such was the essence of her creed,

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the only creed she held, and it lay darkly in her heart, never expressed even to herself. But when she ran into the night to comfort the little fox, she was living up to her faith as few do; when she gathered flowers and lay in the sun, she was dwelling in a mystical atmosphere as vivid as that of the saints; when she recoiled from cruelty, she was trampling evil underfoot, perhaps more surely than those great divines who destroyed one another in their zeal for their Maker.

Webb is typically unsubtle in prefiguring Hazel’s doom through premonitions of disaster, and, specifically, of some catastrophe associated with the deep quarry. 61 Within the first pages of the story, Webb draws on the mirroring relationship between Hazel and Foxy to set up the final inevitability in the “blood” stains of the sunset touching them both. 62 She repeats the image with the real rabbit’s blood that Hazel gets on her dress while freeing the animal from a trap—a stain given universal significance as a mark of both mortality and human culpability for evil: As long as she wore the dress it would be there, like the stigma of pain that all creatures bear as long as they wear the garment of the flesh. At last she burst into tears. “I want another dress with no blood on it!” she wailed. And so wailing she voiced the deep lament, old as the moan of forests and falling water, that goes up through the centuries to the aloof and silent sky, and remains, as ever, unassuaged. 63

A sorrowful sense of life’s transitoriness lies as well in less fraught associations with death. Watching her father, Abel, make a coffin, Hazel “thought of the active, angular old man for whom it was now considered an ample house. ‘It seems like the world’s a big spring-trap, and us in it,’ she said slowly.” 64 The sobering perspective offered by remembrance of death is also reiterated regularly through references to the graveyard adjoining the chapel and pastor’s cottage. In their first excitement of arriving at the chapel to perform, Hazel and Abel find their high spirits curbed by the solemnity of the graves. 65 The sadness that Webb emphasizes with the graveyard is the tragedy of young death, explicitly in Hazel’s final demise, and implicitly in the deaths of young soldiers in the war. When Hazel is “panic-stricken” by the sight of a young girl’s grave, she is not comforted by her fiancé Edward’s focus on the force of life that would sprout a tree from the site: “‘Ah! But her as went in hanna come out. On’y a new tree. I’ll be bound she wanted to come out.’” 66 In the end, however, death itself is not decried by Webb, but only the unbridled and purposeless destruction readers would associate with the war and, by extension, with its modern context. Reddin, in his hunter’s cruelty, is the physical expression of that carnage, mimicking in his actual hunt the Black Huntsman’s progress as “the embodiment of the destructive principle, of cruelty, of the greater part of human society—voracious and carnivorous—with its curious callousness towards the nerves of the rest of the world.” 67 As Webb explicates,

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Chapter 13 It is not the killing that gives horror to the death-pack so much as the lack of the impulse not to kill. One flicker of merciful intention amid relentless action would redeem it. For the world is founded and built up on death, and the reality of death is neither to be questioned nor feared. Death is a dark dream, but it is not a nightmare. It is mankind’s lack of pity, mankind’s fatal propensity for torture, that is the nightmare. 68

Part of Hazel’s maturation as a character involves reaching a more measured understanding of that necessity of death. Where once she brought wild bees indoors before they froze in winter, she finally recognizes the need for bees and other creatures to die: “But they’ve seen good times,” she says. “It inna so bad for folks to die as have seen good times.” 69 In the work of Abel, Webb points again to the interrelation of life and death, as he uses scraps of the coffins he builds to construct beehives. Bees are associated with death through the country custom of “telling the bees” whenever a family member dies, but also because of the contrast of their busy liveliness. After informing the bees about Hazel’s mother’s death, Abel “had put his ear to the hive and listened to the deep, solemn murmur within; but it was the murmur of the future, and not of the past, the preoccupation with life, not with death, that filled the pale galleries within.” 70 Webb goes so far as to emphasize the potentially positive aspects of death in The Spring of Joy, a collection of what she called her “nature essays,” published in 1917, the same year as Gone to Earth. With her own death from untreated Graves’ disease, pernicious anemia, and other complications still a decade away, the experience she had already had with chronic illness seems the basis for her meditations on life’s end. Someone who is ill may “see death looming like a black chasm across his days,” yet find comfort in observing the rhythms of nature, she writes in her essay “You whom care in prison keeps, and sickness doth suppress”: But when he has dwelt for a time between the green and the blue, when he has looked long at the broad skies and considered the punctual return of life after death in spring, it may be that he will come to the consciousness of Mystery brooding over the world; and because intuition tells him that death will take him a step nearer to this Mystery, he will cease to think of it as a chasm, and regard it rather as a gate on the skyline. 71

This understanding of death’s (in)significance as neither “the supreme disaster or the supreme desire, but an incident” might even constitute a heightened mystic apprehension for those who are ill: “He begins to link himself with the Beauty that lies in and beyond the beauty of earth, like light in a flower; an intuition begins to dawn in him that this Beauty, or Love, is not only above all things, but in them, permeating them; that he

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and the very germ of disease that destroys his body abide in it as inevitably as the world abides in the invisible air.” 72 If the war represented unbridled and unnatural forces of destruction, a total and negative release of the kinds of passions that drove Reddin, Webb nonetheless found a potential balance in the natural rhythms of life and death. To embrace those rhythms was to be in tune with nature’s permeating energy. Reflecting the complexity of her era’s responses to its own energy, however, she also celebrated a different expression of unbridled passion played out in spontaneous response to the natural stimuli of fecund life, a response that resonated with the oddly modern movement of romantic rebellion. NOTES 1. See Webb, “Sense and Sensibility,” 79. 2. See Casaliggi and Fermanis, Romanticism, 107. 3. See R. Williams, “Romantic,” Keywords, 274–75. See also Furst, Romanticism, 12. 4. See, e.g., Webb, “The Core of Poetry,” and “The Wing of Psyche.” 5. Coles, introduction to Collected Prose and Poems, xiii. 6. Hansen, “Modern Mountains,” 186. 7. Hansen, 187. 8. Hansen, 189–90. 9. Hansen, 185. 10. Hansen follows Peter Mandler in downplaying late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nostalgia for rural tradition in Britain precisely because of British interest in the peasant tradition elsewhere. British vacationing in Europe “idealized the peasantry, but not a ‘British’ peasantry, since the peasantry by then had all but disappeared in Britain.” Hansen, 191. See Mandler, “‘Against ‘Englishness’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940.” Raymond Williams also notes “a very early disappearance of the traditional peasantry” in Britain as a result of the Industrial Revolution. R. Williams, Country and the City, 2. Still, he counters Mandler’s assumption, claiming that “English attitudes to the country, and to ideas of rural life, persisted with extraordinary power, so that even after the society was predominantly urban its literature, for a generation, was still predominantly rural.” 11. Fussell, Great War, 236. 12. Fussell, 244. 13. R. Williams, Country and City, 17. 14. Webb, Precious Bane, 13. 15. Published in 1917, Gone to Earth describes events in 1909. 16. Webb, Precious Bane, 13. 17. See Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 18. Webb, Precious Bane, 17. See R. Williams, Country and City, 193. 19. Webb, Precious Bane, 230. 20. Richards, “Margins of Industrial Revolution,” 210. 21. Richards, 206. 22. Buchan, introduction to Gone to Earth, 7. 23. See R. Williams, Country and City, 13–34. 24. R. Williams lays out a similar juxtaposition of associations, though between country and city rather than tradition and modernity: “On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful

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hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation.” R. Williams, 1. 25. Webb, Precious Bane, 20. 26. Webb, 23. 27. Webb, 17. 28. Cuddon, “Realism,” 773. 29. Webb, Precious Bane, 21. 30. R. Williams, Country and City, 297. 31. Webb, Precious Bane, 17. 32. Prue notes that Gideon was born in the year the war with France began, and early in the tale the Sarn villagers receive word of the English victory at the 1815 Battle of Waterloo. Webb, 22, 77. 33. Webb, 77. 34. Webb, 277. The references to an earlier, more comprehensible war may have reinforced Precious Bane’s air of nostalgia. To even call the engagements of the First World War “battles,” suggests Fussell, “is to imply an understandable continuity with earlier British history and to imply that the war makes sense in a traditional way.” Fussell, Great War, 9. 35. Webb, foreword to Precious Bane, 13. 36. Webb, 15. 37. Webb, Precious Bane, 305–6, 113–28, 240. 38. Webb, 149–63, 165ff. Webb reiterates her abhorrence of blood sports involving animals not only in her fiction but in her essays and reviews. See, e.g., “Contrast,” a review of works by Donn Byrne and Geoffrey Moss, 56. 39. Webb, Precious Bane, 214, 228. 40. Webb, 79. See also 96, 57. 41. Webb, 78. Gideon refers to tariffs associated with protectionist Corn Laws of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s.v. “Corn Law,” published March 20, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/event/Corn-LawBritish-history. 42. Webb, Precious Bane, 86. 43. Webb, 88. 44. Webb, 227. 45. Webb, 207. 46. Webb, 292. 47. Webb, 41. Webb conducted research into the Roman as well as the medieval periods in Shropshire, writing the two-part paper “Glimpses of Old Shropshire” for the March 16, 1923, meeting of the Caradoc and Severn Valley Field Club. See Coles, Introduction to Collected Prose and Poems, xi, and Webb, “Glimpses,” 27–30. 48. Webb, Precious Bane, 85–86. 49. Webb, 293. 50. While Webb did not tend to refer to the war in her novels, she made a soldier’s experience of war a central factor in her short story “The Sword,” a dark psychological study of the power of focused will. She also refers to the horror of the war in her reviews and essays. See, e.g., “The Wayfaring Tree,” 89. 51. One exception, other than Precious Bane’s references to the Napoleonic Wars, is the backdrop of immigration or at least travel to the United States, mentioned in The Golden Arrow. Armour Wherein He Trusted also assumes the context of the medieval Crusades. 52. Schwarz, Reconfiguring Modernism, 3. 53. Orel, Popular Fiction, 3. 54. Orel, 115. 55. Orel, 107. 56. Coles, Mary Webb, 79. Fussell describes the offensive by eleven British divisions as a catastrophe of unimaginative planning: “The Somme affair, destined to be known

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among the troops as the Great Fuck-Up, was the largest engagement fought since the beginnings of civilization.” On the first day, “out of the 110,000 who attacked, 60,000 were killed or wounded.” Fussell, Great War, 12, 13. 57. Barale, Daughters and Lovers, 62. 58. Barale, 63. 59. Webb, Gone to Earth, 17. Webb makes passing reference to the Black Huntsman in at least one other book. See Precious Bane, 259. 60. Webb, Gone to Earth, 17. 61. See, e.g., Webb, 54–55. 62. Webb, 14. 63. Webb, 51. 64. Webb, 49. 65. Webb, 59. 66. Webb, 136–37. 67. Webb, 169. 68. Webb, 185. 69. Webb, 271. 70. Webb, 18. 71. Webb, “You whom care,” 219. 72. Webb, 220–21.

FOURTEEN Agency and Choice Romanticism, Mysticism, Capitalism

The resurgent and reactive elements of romanticism that, together with the contrasting cultural orientation toward the technical and rational, colored the broad landscape of early twentieth-century modernity, provided yet another impetus toward mystical experimentation. Such abstract artists as Vasili Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich built on modernism’s preoccupation with depicting the inner life of the self by expressing what they understood as specifically spiritual concerns, Peter Gay relates. At its core, the shift to abstraction “was an instructive illustration of, and tribute to, the individualism that lies at the core of modernism, with its passion for the thrilling and the shocking and its sovereign disregard of conventions.” 1 In addition, however, each of these artists “accomplished the task of undressing his heart (in Baudelaire’s phrase) in obedience to a mystical sense of reality.” Their compulsions to escape strictures of the past in search of what Mondrian called “pure reality” in their art reflected their participation in the era’s widely expressed hunger for mystical experience beyond the limits of established religion. 2 The three artists were “intent upon constructing, and displaying, a religious worldview that would help to repair the spiritual losses generated by the materialistic culture they were forced to live in.” 3 Kandinsky specifically believed, “much as the German Romantics had done a century before,” that “[t]he modern world . . . had lost its soul and desperately needed to be re-enchanted.” 4 In the world of dance, the scandalous innovations of the Ballets russes de Diaghilev in Paris, and especially the erotic and evocative “L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune,” which premiered in 1912, and “Le Sacre du printemps,” which premiered in 1913, stand as commonly referenced touch205

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stones for what Eksteins describes as the period’s broad “revolt against rationalism and a corresponding affirmation of life and experience.” 5 However they might be achieved, “[v]itality, spontaneity, and change were celebrated. Anything was preferable to stultifying conformism, even moral disorder and confusion.” 6 In contrast to abstractionism’s rejection of nature, therefore, the works of impresario Serge Diaghilev showed that the romantic rebellion could also embrace nature as the site of what is unmediated, raw, and uncivilized. Within this context, Bergson, as we have seen, “developed his idea of ‘creative evolution,’ which rejected the notion of ‘objective’ knowledge: the only reality is the élan vital, the life force.” Even Weber, in his cautious embrace of “enthusiasm,” and in his recognition of the mystifying aspects of science itself, would have at least understood the contours of this modern rush to embrace alternative rationalities or even irrationalities. 7 A poster child for such spontaneity, Gone to Earth’s Hazel dancing in total abandon to her father’s harp might have been the model for the unrefined exuberance sought in Nijinsky’s choreography. In his unselfconscious naiveté and the “venturesomeness of his imagination,” Nijinsky in “L’Après-midi d’un faune” “was the faun, a wild creature temporarily trapped by society,” his champions proclaimed. 8 Hazel similarly steps on the stage of Webb’s novel closely identified with the natural setting of the Welsh borderlands, and more allied with natural creatures than with her fellow humans. From the outset, she is depicted through animalistic imagery, especially in her pairing with Foxy, as a creature of the nature in which she is most comfortable: “Hazel had her mother’s eyes, strange, fawn-coloured eyes like water, and in the large clear irises were tawny flecks. In their shy honesty they were akin to the little fox’s. Her hair, too, of a richer colour than her father’s, was tawny and foxlike, and her ways were graceful and covert as a wild creature’s.” 9 Buchan interprets Hazel as “at once the offspring of the mysterious landscape, and the interpretation of it”; she is “wild and shy as a wood nymph.” 10 If romantic values privilege Hazel’s innocent wildness and easy resonance with mystified nature, Webb’s novel still exhibits Weberian-like ambivalence by lamenting a transition it presents as necessary. For all her singularity, and singular devotion to her own freedom, Hazel’s development into the more complicated benefits of human relationship embodies more universal experiences of progression from girlhood to womanhood. With poignancy similar to that of her contemporaries J. M. Barrie or A. A. Milne, Webb in Gone to Earth treats the mingled gains and losses of outgrowing childhood. Hazel may be free of many concerns of social convention, but the novelist also recognizes her social inexperience and lack of guile as forms of ignorance that leave her vulnerable. A Hazel wiser in the ways of the world might have resisted Reddin’s ploys that keep drawing her away from Edward to meet him. Tellingly, when Hazel hides from Reddin in the room of his manservant, Andrew Vessons,

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Webb describes her as “[curling] up to sleep in the creaking house, thoughtless as the white mice, defenceless as they, as little grateful to Vessons for his protection, and in as deep an ignorance of what the world could do to her if it chose.” 11 Although Webb places the outcomes of her narrative within the frame of an overarching destiny seen as itself a force of nature, Hazel dies, in one sense, because the agency of other characters, and her own lack of worldly wisdom, conspire to confuse her understanding of her options. In exploring Hazel’s naiveté, Webb plays with questions of agency on several levels, beginning with Hazel’s own repeated and admirable assertion, especially in the face of efforts to possess and control her, that she “dunna want to take after anybody but myself.” 12 Hazel’s efforts to make her own choices in response to the decisions and actions of others play out dismally, however, in part because on another level her worldview is limited by misguided attribution of authority to non-existent powers. Just as Underhill and Sinclair found themselves parsing distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable forms of mystical apprehension, Webb’s advocacy of a relationship to a supernatural force depended in part on establishing what that force was not. She privileges Hazel’s natural spirituality, but she grants the folk superstitions to which Hazel subscribes no more credence than she does Christianity’s empty rituals. While Edward’s resolve to replace Hazel’s faith in folk charms with “a sane religion” demonstrates the narrow scope of his initial Christian philosophy, Webb is equally cognizant of the danger of Hazel’s uncritical reliance on those charms. Although she admits some ambiguity in other references to folk magic, as we shall see, here Webb seems willing, even eager, to give up such magic to the demystifying force of Weber’s calculability, in order to preserve as mystified her preferred engagement with a truly enchanted nature. In her simplicity, Hazel puts great store in three charms she works to decide whether or not to meet Reddin for the disastrous liaison in Hunter’s Spinney. While all three results indicate that Hazel should go, each, Webb indicates, stems from rationally explainable coincidence. The sound of fairy harping is simply Hazel’s father playing on his way home, the vision of an angel is a phosphorescent tree trunk, and Hazel herself unknowingly drops the blue flower petal she is to put under her pillow to guide her dreams. 13 Such chance events may play a part in a tangled web of fate that constitutes life, but it is indeed “chance” rather than “magic” that is the vehicle. As Webb expounds, for example: “She never knew that the harper was her father returning by devious roads from one of the many festivals at which he played in summer-time, and having frequent rests by the way, owing to the good ale he had drunk. Her bright galaxy of faery was only a drunken man. Her fate had been settled by a passing whim of his, but so had been her coming into the world.” 14 Whatever the charms indicate, in any case, the erotic pull to meet Reddin is a deeper

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and more personal motivator, as Hazel reveals her true desire through her typical ploy of displacing the decision onto Foxy: “The signs say go. I mun go. Foxy wants me to go.” 15 Similarly, Precious Bane’s treatment of the folk myth associated with Prue’s harelip makes it clear that Webb’s explorations of agency offer more than blindly nostalgic praise for rural customs. There is no indication that Prue as narrator understands the deformity as a medically explainable birth defect, even with the benefit of old age. Webb, however, relies on her twentieth-century readers to accurately judge the prevailing explanation at the time of the story—that a hare crossed Prue’s mother’s path when she was pregnant with Prue. The physical effect of this supposed crossing, devastating as it is to Prue’s expectations for marriage, and nearly fatal in the superstitious assumptions that it spawns, prompts theological musings about the hare’s motives: “I wondered why it cursed me so. Was it of its own free will and wish, or did the Devil drive it? Did God begrutch me an ‘usband and a cot of rushes, that He’d let it be so?” 16 Even as she believes the hare story, however, Prue as a young woman has no doubt about the absurdity of the further conclusions other villagers draw. The object of stares, she relates that all on a sudden I knew that all these folks, the grand ones within and the old fellows without, were staring at my hare-shotten lip. They were thinking, according to their station and their learning— “Here’s a queer, outlandish creature!” “This is a woman out of a show, sure to goodness!” “Here be a wench turns into a hare by night.” “Her’s a witch, an ugly, hare-shotten witch.” 17

Webb’s representation of the self-proclaimed “wizard” Beguildy is an exercise in debunking. Epitomized by the manufactured “raising of Venus” that is no more than the hauling of a naked Prue up through a trapdoor, all of Beguildy’s charms and spells are spurious. Even Beguildy’s wife has “no faith at all in her good-man’s spells, though she never said so, except to me and a tuthree she knew well,” Prue reports. 18 With delicious undercutting, Missis Beguildy acquiesces only after a fashion when Beguildy touts his abilities: “Dunna I snare souls like conies, and keep em from troubling the lives of men? Canna I bless, and they are blessed, curse, and they are cursed? Canna I cure warts and the chin-cough and barrenness and the rheumatics and tell the future and find water, though it be in the depths of the earth? Dunna the fowls I bless beat all other fowls in the cock-fighting? Ah, and if I chose, I could make a waxen man for every man in the parish, and consume them away, wax, men, and all. Canna I do all that, woman?” “So you say, my dear.” 19

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In an echo of Underhill’s and Sinclair’s linkings of magic and mysticism, however, Webb suggests that the underlying impulse to seek out guidance for action, and the assumptions about the existence of an active agency that might supply it, may cross any boundaries between witchcraft and folk charms to religion. When Edward, with Webb’s intended irony, is too busy with a sermon on prayer to respond to Hazel’s questions about the efficacy of charms, Webb observes, “Some people would have found it hard to decide which was the more superstitious, the more pathetic.” 20 To disavow the superstition of charms or prayer, however, is not to disavow the existence of some form of supernatural agency. As already mentioned, Webb is heavy-handed in foreshadowing disaster associated with the quarry into which Hazel ultimately falls. Webb is, at least in this novel, vague about a possible source or agent for this foreordination. But, as in many of her essays, she closely links fate with the supernatural “reality” that is accessible in nature to those who, like Prue, are perceptive enough to sense it. Even Beguildy, presented as a charlatan, sees his predictions about the future of Gideon curiously come to pass, though as the direct result of merely human (including Beguildy’s) actions. “Hanna I cursed ye by fire and by waters?” Beguildy tells Gideon when he finds him in bed with his daughter Jancis. “Hanna I told ye you were born under the threepenny planet and canna keep money? Hanna I said you’ll be poor in life and die in the water?” 21 Gideon commits suicide by drowning, the end result of losing all his accumulated wealth when Beguildy sets fire to the Sarns’ corn crop. And, given the years of selfstinting required to produce that wealth, followed by his misery after murdering his mother and causing the deaths of Jancis and her child, Gideon could well be described as “poor in life” in more than economic terms alone. Webb may simply be playing with the coincidence, or may be suggesting, as in Gone to Earth, that human character—and human choices—can conspire to fulfill some preset destiny. While the force of fate, so foregrounded in Gone to Earth, is less apparent in Precious Bane, a certain inevitability still plays itself out, once Gideon’s nature sets first steps in motion. A force beyond Beguildy’s control—even God’s will— may be active, Prue suggests: “We are His mommets that made us, I do think. He takes us from the box, whiles, and saith, ‘Dance, now!’ or maybe it must bow, or wave a hand or fall down in a swound. Then He puts it back in box, for the part is played. . . . So the evil mommets do His will as well as the good, since they act the part set for them.” 22 Equally mysterious are the tendencies of particular personalities willing to cooperate with the supernatural force that infuses the natural world. Not a witch as ignorant villagers claim, Prue’s participation in something supernatural takes the form of intuitive perception that Webb could have borrowed from either Underhill or Sinclair. Certainly the other two authors, with their glimpses of some greater reality shining through physical reality,

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would understand Prue’s sensitivity to the “marvelous” effects of nature. Such sensitivity would be there for the asking for those willing to pay attention, they would argue, but also, as with Prue, Underhill’s pioneering mystics, or James’s religious geniuses, coalesces with inexplicable potency in certain individuals. Such sensitivity, all three authors would also agree, responds to the effects of particular spaces or places, effects that in Webb’s formulation merge the evocative influences of indoor and outdoor. In this regard, Prue’s description of the first moment of mystical elevation she experiences in her attic warrants an extended quotation: So, it being very still there, with the fair shadows of the apple trees peopling the orchard outside, that was void, as were the near meadows, Gideon being in the far field making hay-cocks, which I should have been doing, there came to me, I cannot tell whence, a most powerful sweetness that had never come to me afore. It was not religious, like the goodness of a text heard at a preaching. It was beyond that. It was as if some creature made all of light had come on a sudden from a great way off, and nestled in my bosom. On all things there came a fair lovely look, as if a different air stood over them. . . . I cared not to ask what it was. For when the nut-hatch comes into her own tree, she dunna ask who planted it, nor what name it bears to men. For the tree is all to the nut-hatch, and this was all to me. Afterwards, when I had mastered the reading of the book, I read— His banner over me was love. And it called to mind that evening. But if you should have said, “Whose banner?” I couldna have answered. And even now, when Parson says, “It was the power of the Lord working in you,” I’m not sure in my own mind. For there was nought in it of churches nor of folks, praying or praising, sinning nor repenting. It had to do with such things as bird-song and daffadowndillies rustling, knocking their heads together in the wind. And it was as wilful in its coming and going as a breeze over the standing corn. It was a queer thing, too, that a woman who spent her days in sacking, cleaning sties and beasthousen, living hard, considering over fardens, should come of a sudden into such a marvel as this. For though it was so quiet, it was a great miracle, and it changed my life; for when I was lost for something to turn to, I’d run to the attic, and it was a core of sweetness in much bitter. 23

The iconic image of Prue writing in her attic, selected as the cover art for Precious Bane’s first illustrated edition, emphasizes the central importance of that space to her heightened sensibility. 24 For Prue, to be in her attic with its open window is still to be connected with the natural world beyond, echoing the connection Underhill forged between Willie’s church and nature, and, as with Willie’s church, underscoring the seeming removal of certain spaces from time and history. Issues of past and present dissolve entirely as Prue’s mystic moments draw her away from

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contemporary events. “The taste of it was in the attic all the while,” she reports. “I had but to creep in there, and hear the bees making their murmer, and smell the woody, o’ersweet scent of kept apples, and hear the leaves rasping softly on the window-frame, and watch the twisted grey twigs on the sky, and I’d remember it and forget all else.” 25 Underhill might quarrel with the distinction Webb draws between this form of mysticism and Christian practice. Webb also focuses on the “natural” prompts to Prue’s sensitivity to a greater extent than even Sinclair does in describing Mary Olivier’s or Agatha’s heightened perceptions of the physical landscape. Still, the similarities are clear. In resonance with the post-war turn to the domestic, furthermore, Prue’s attic moves the mystical provenance of Hazel’s exuberant engagement with the outdoors at least partially indoors. While Prue appreciates the evocative beauty of nature in a country life lived largely outside, and experiences moments of supernatural “sight” elsewhere than the attic, her most singular connection with the greater reality she perceives occurs when she is in her attic looking out. The attic thus presents a liminal space, rooted in the personal interiority that Gaston Bachelard attributes to living in houses, yet simultaneously opened up to the immensity of all outdoors. With the attic’s comforting privacy, Webb draws on the sense of “protected intimacy” associated with memories of first homes that Bachelard seeks to assess, but in making the attic a portal to the “most powerful sweetness” beyond the scope of even Prue’s country Christianity, Webb also expresses the sense of “intimate immensity” that forests or the night sky inspire for him. 26 While Prue enjoys performing such domestic tasks as baking in the communal areas of the Sarn house, the attic holds special power for her because of its solitude that fosters daydreaming. As Bachelard writes: “Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone.” 27 While the associations with nature strongly connect Prue’s mystic experience with her particular rural setting, moreover, Webb incorporates that sensibility within her general portrayal of Prue and her desire for education as “enlightened,” even “modern” in ways her fellow villagers are not. As Bachelard connects attics with rationality, in contrast to the irrational, subterranean depths of cellars, the site of Prue’s spiritual revelation is also the place where she works on her lessons in reading and writing, and where she writes in her journal. 28 The mystic perception prompted by the attic’s privacy thus mingles what Bachelard calls the “secret psychological life” with rational activity, an interdependence underscored by the even more intimate closed space of the locked chest in which Prue stores her books and writing tools. 29 The enclosed spaces of such furniture as chests and wardrobes, especially when locked or fastened, suggest undisclosed and highly personal mysteries, Bachelard maintains, in this case an association merged with Prue’s highly personal

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quest for education. 30 The secrets contained in the yet more enclosed “space” of her books are mysterious to those who lack the ability to read them, creating a further connection between book knowledge and spiritual perception, especially as they generate Prue’s own perceptions as to why she, “one that worked with my hands always,” should have such experiences: “But I was so lonesome, and had such a deal of time for thinking, and what with that and the book-learning I was getting, all sorts of thoughts grew up in my mind, like flowering rushes and forget-me-nots coming into blow in a poor marshy place, that else had nought.” 31 Education and mysticism thus form intertwined strands of Prue’s enlightenment, as when she denies having “the second sight,” but rather “only a bit of sense,” and yet also asserts that “if I’d got any wisdom it was never book-learning as gave it to me, but just the quietness of the attic.” 32 To possess a mystic vision, in Webb’s equation, therefore, is to possess a form of enlightened wisdom, a connection she reinforces by attributing supernatural sight to Grandfeyther Callard. For all his foolishness, Callard is wise with years, and so at the sight of Jancis holding his grandchild can announce prophetically, “I see two babbies in her arms, ours, and hers as is to come!” 33 An investment in human connection is equally key to, or perhaps the fruit of, this balanced enlightenment. Even though Beguildy is a fake, and despicable both in his treatment of Jancis and in his pivotal act of destroying the Sarns’ hard-earned hope for prosperity, Prue still presents him sympathetically as potential—and possibly even mystic potential—gone wrong. Though a “very queer old man,” she suggests that with a good education “he met have been one of these great men we all think so much of. A great scholar he could have been, or a music-man, or a rhymer, or a preacher. And maybe if all of his mind had been used proper, he wouldna have brought ruination on hisself as he did. Ah! And on more than hisself.” 34 With the suggestion that Beguildy’s fault may lie in misdirected intellectual curiosity, Webb follows Sinclair and Underhill in commenting on the quasi-intellectualism of occult experimentation. “Not that Beguildy was wicked,” Prue clarifies, “but only empty of good, as if all the righteousness was burnt out by the flame of his fiery mind, which must know and intermeddle with mysteries.” When she remarks in her addition, “As for love, he did not know the word,” she sets Beguildy on the wrong side of a comparison with her own compassionate interaction with family and community. 35 “Because I had no lover,” Prue observes, “I would lief have been the world’s lover—such world, that is, as I could reach.” 36 Lacking such compassion by contrast, Beguildy is “empty” in a way that removes him from participation in Webb’s mix of values. “Oh, there’s not much harm in Beguildy, nor yet good,” Prue summarizes. 37 As a character, Beguildy seems of a type with another father of a pretty daughter, Eli in Webb’s The Golden Arrow. Rigidly and retributively Christian, Eli is not “preached against,” as is Beguildy. His misguided engagement with the supernatural is through his own over-zealous

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preaching against others. 38 Yet he is like Beguildy in having “no honey in his heart.” As Mrs. Arden sums him up: “Eli’s walking as determinedangry as ever. Making up sins for other folks to repent of till he canna see anything in the ‘orld.” 39 Compared to Webb’s own idealized relationship with her father, or even the hands-off but fond caretaking of Abel for Hazel, the cruelty of Beguildy and Eli to their respective daughters places them beyond the pale for Webb. 40 Beguildy, for example, assumes a pimp’s control of Jancis as a sexual commodity: he sets her in a window to entice passersby, plans to have her play the role of a naked Venus to impress Camperdine, the young squire, and proposes Camperdine and other men might pay to lie with her. 41 Abel may regret not being able to accept Reddin’s offer of fifty pounds for Hazel, but Beguildy actively refuses Gideon as a suitor for Jancis because he wants to “bide for a higher bidder.” 42 In addition to failing Webb’s critical test of compassion, however, the failure to “see anything in the ‘orld,” as Mrs. Arden says of Eli, constitutes a further damning accusation. In a manner similar to Hazel’s, Prue’s mystic vision consists of seeing the true “reality” of the natural world that comes from being appreciatively immersed in it. While Beguildy’s laziness contrasts him to Gideon, who is guilty of the opposite fault of too great a dedication to work, both share the failing of insufficient attention to what Webb claims are the truly important elements of their community and natural environment. Reveling in the beauty of the landscape through which she and Gideon ride, Prue likens the universe with its natural mysteries to a book written in a secret script. 43 Gideon, however, is dismissive: “‘Book?’ he says. ‘Why, no, I see no book. But I see a plenty of good land running to waste, as might be under corn.’” To which Prue responds: “So we see in the script of God what we’ve a mind to see, and nought else.” Prue herself exhibits no specifically magical abilities, but her ability to “see” what others miss in nature expands to other supernatural forms of vision as well. While playing cards with other women at the caking and love-spinning, “a sort of waking dream” gives her a preview of the story’s nearly fatal final scene. 44 On another occasion, while watching Jancis beg Gideon to take her back, Prue hears ethereal voices singing a song that Jancis had just mentioned, a “very long way off.” 45 Prue also senses approaching evil in a fated moment that, as with Hazel’s premonitions about the quarry, is typical of Webb. Finishing up what had been a deeply satisfying day of gathering the corn harvest, Prue still feels uneasy: “Why did a cold boding horror stir in my heart, where all was gay and warm, as a catch of frost will strike in your garden plot of an autumn evening . . . ?” 46 Despite her visions and premonitions, however, Prue is unable to see the ghosts of her own mother, Jancis, and the baby that fatally haunt Gideon. While indicating that the visitations are real enough to Gideon to

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lead him to suicide, Webb fosters an ambiguity that would permit a psychological interpretation as well. Guilt and latent grief could easily be the source of Gideon’s projection of the specters. Too late, Gideon recalls his earlier love for Jancis. “I like a fair woman. Little. With blue eyes. A woman like may and milk,” he says in despair after her death. 47 There is physical evidence of the ghosts, to be sure: Prue can see the wet spots on their cottage floor that Gideon says were left by the drowned Jancis. But natural causes are possible for these as well, with the weather an additional stressor for Gideon’s already troubled mind. “Hot and dank,” the weather causes the farmhouse walls to run with water, “so that the whitewash shone as if with the tracks of many snails,” Prue reports. On the mere, “[s]ometimes a wreath of mist would be drawn out like a scarf, and other times it would stand up in the shape of a woman, but wavering upon the air. It seemed to me it might well be one of these ghosts of mist that Gideon had seen.” 48 Webb leaves the truth of the matter unresolved: on the one hand she reinforces Prue’s modern sensibility as being unsusceptible to common superstitions of ghosts; on the other she endorses the possibility of ghostly supernaturalism as another element of an enchanted world. As Prue observes, “I was beginning to believe all Gideon said, which was not so very different, after all, from many a tale of frittening we’d heard.” 49 At the least, Prue’s experience of hearing singing suggests that, as Sinclair might put it, “something” is happening. In any case, the eerie “frittening” adds to the horror of the untimely deaths. Unlike the murder of Sinclair’s Mr. Greathead, there is no question that the passings in Precious Bane are to be mourned. The sharp contrasts Webb paints between the perspectives held by Hazel and Prue, and more limited perceptions of reality held by others, are perhaps typified most strongly in her characterization of Gideon. In Precious Bane, Webb offers her most fully developed critique of something like the modern economic model Weber would call bourgeois entrepreneurship, as Gideon destroys himself and others through avaricious pursuit of a capitalist dream. In a sense, what Weber describes is yet another form of mistaken engagement with a “mystified” reality, with entrepreneurship forming an all-encompassing worldview or understanding of absolute value. Driven by a “spirit of capitalism” that is not explainable as simple avarice, Weber’s new type of modern entrepreneur is motivated by an internalized sense that the goal of business advancement is an essential “good.” By “modern,” in this case, Weber is not limiting his discussion to his contemporary period, but turns to the aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin as encapsulating a defining way of life. In Franklin’s texts, “the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital” is “assumed as an end in itself,” Weber notes. “Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic. . . . It is not mere business astuteness, that sort

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of thing is common enough, it is an ethos.” 50 In using the term “ethos,” Weber returns to his focus on totalizing codes for the “conduct of life.” In describing this modern system of capitalist meaning, Weber seems particularly fascinated with the interplay of the “rational” and “irrational.” On one level, the “earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life,” is “thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational,” he writes. “Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs,” a reversal that is as much an assumed capitalist principle “as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.” 51 Yet there are mitigating elements to this new understanding of business, as Franklin’s true point brings the motivation down an additional level, so to speak, to the even more fundamental drive toward “proficiency in a calling” (Beruf), and particularly a proficiency linked to a certain standard of “virtue” in its execution. 52 Although neither a commitment to business as business, nor dedication to “proficiency in a calling,” Gideon’s single-minded drive to achieve financial dominance nonetheless displays an irrational obsession with that dominance for its own sake. Gideon is not dedicated to the work of improving the Sarn farm as a moral end in itself, nor even to the wealth that that work may provide, but more precisely to the position of power and prestige money may buy. Baffled, Prue admits her inability to understand his motivation: “If you were land-proud, I could. But it do seem so queer to spend every bit of time and strength on the land, like a mother with a child, and then not love it. It’s as if the mother cared nought for the child, but only cared to sell it.” “Ah, that’s the size of it, Prue. I dunna care a domm for the land. Nor yet I dunna care for the money. Not as money.” “Well, what is it you do care for?” “To get me teeth in summat hard and chaw it. To play Conquer till there inna a cob nor a conker left but mine. To be king-o’-the-wik and the only apple on the bough.” 53

Gideon’s characterization is a prime negative example of the weight Webb places on the exercise of agency toward specific ends. As Webb’s epigraph from Paradise Lost suggests, wealth, and what it brings, is hardly value-neutral in the sense of Weber’s Wertfreiheit: Let none admire That riches grow in Hell: that soyle may best Deserve the precious bane. 54

When Gideon proclaims, “I’m well content to reap what I sow,” Prue cautions, “But not if it’s the bane, Gideon? Not if it’s the precious bane . . . ?” 55 With Webb’s customary use of binaries, there is no question

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where her preferences lie in this narrative, between enjoying the satisfaction of a loving wife and child, and sacrificing that wife and child to a misguided dream of economic gain; between a simple, homey cottage, and a grand house that is frighteningly dark and melancholy; between advancing the pleasure and well-being of others, and destroying wellbeing and even life in the pursuit of revenge. 56 To the extent that Gideon’s character represents a modern entrepreneur, therefore, it is a form of modernity that Webb rejects as decisively as she rejects ignorant superstition, largely as a refusal of the particular investment in power that that character entails. Praised for his devotion to work, a quality that wins him community respect, Gideon fails in Webb’s eyes for lacking either Prue’s compassion or her mystic perception of the world. 57 Gideon possesses “charisma” in Weber’s terms, as in his handsome self-assurance he draws the kind of communal attention that would follow a “charismatic leader,” yet it is an unsettling force. 58 When he was still a youth, Prue relates, “Everybody looked at him, tall in the doorway, with a kind of power in him. And it seemed to me that everybody drew away a bit, as if from summat untoert.” 59 Whatever the value or deficiencies of such a charismatic presence, it lacks a critical balance: He was ever a strong man, which is almost the same, times, as to say, a man with little time for kindness. For if you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path. So when folk tell me of this great man and that great man, I think to myself, Who was stinted of joy for his glory? How many old folk and children did his coach wheels go over? What bridal lacked his song, and what mourner his tears, that he found time to climb so high? 60

Gideon also possesses a modern entrepreneur’s devotion to high standards for work that to some extent echoes the positive associations Underhill attributed to careful craftsmanship: “It was impossible to him to do anything ill. What he did, whether it was to be seen or not, whether it was done once in a way or every day, must be done as if his life was on it. He’d have no makeshifts.” 61 But though Gideon seems to be competing for the approval of some invisible judges, Prue sees the proper attitude to work lying in a communal lack of self-interest that she finds modeled by the birds: Then I’d come to myself and see only the tall clouds, that hadna stirred, the tall hedges with meadow-sweet below, the woods, and the hills and the sweet blue air with larks hanging in it. . . . Not a bit did they care who won the prize, nor which of them sang best or loudest, so long as all sang, so long as none lacked nest or cropful, drink of dew and space to sing in. 62

Just as Underhill moved from the singular elevation of aesthetic temperament to a superseding emphasis on devotion to others, Webb bal-

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ances the value of workmanship with the necessity of compassionate connection. Gideon may be blamed for his single-minded pursuit of his goal; yet in his possible inability to act in any other way, Webb explores the inexplicable power of personality, drawing, like Sinclair, on themes of psychological and hereditary determinism. As Gideon asserts on several occasions, it is perhaps true that he cannot be other than he is. 63 Yet, much as with the possibilities of change Sinclair allows her Canon Chamberlain, who on occasion demonstrates enough self-awareness to question his own actions and motivations, Webb questions Gideon’s absolutism, shaping her story’s narrative tension in part around the chance that he might act differently. Strongly attracted to Jancis, for example, but afraid that marrying her before he acquires his wealth would derail his plans, Gideon shows signs of being tempted. “Times, he’d mutter, ‘No, no!’ and shift his shoulders as though from a weight, and bestir himself, and be more of a driver than ever,” Prue recounts. 64 Even his excursion to show Prue the house he covets seems motivated by the threat to his resolve: “I thought maybe the plan to show me the house he wanted was to comfort himself and strengthen his will, because he was afraid of giving in. He wanted to give in, mind you, for he was sore set on Jancis, only he was fixed, and when he was fixed he couldna let himself give in, not if it was ever so.” 65 As Prue observes, watching Gideon struggle in his commitment to his dream, “It was if he’d give all to be as he could never be; as if his soul in that hour, away from Sarn and all its ancient power, wrostled mightily to be free of itself.” 66 The enticing hints of possible change, however, seem forestalled by suggestions of the irresistible power not only of character, but of heredity. Gideon stands in a line of obstinate, sullen Sarn men, Prue reports, made even more “queer” by the double lightning strikes that hit ancestor Timothy Sarn. Now with Gideon, she suggests, “It seemed to me that the mighty hand was upon him, striving with him to make him go widdershins to what he was, to what Father had made him, and Grandad, and all of them, back to Timothy, that had the lightning in his blood.” 67 History, or at least family history, therefore, plays a determining role for the future. And yet history can also be struggled against in an effort to turn character “widdershins.” Gideon’s struggle with his own nature demonstrates Weber’s mystery of how to determine “which is God for him and which is the devil,” or perhaps Freud’s mapping of the mysterious counter-forces of the psyche. 68 Whether that struggle can ever be successful, Webb leaves unanswered. For Gideon, at least, heredity wins out. In his last chance to redirect events, he remains hard of heart, rejecting Jancis and their child as he sat “in our old kitchen, so quiet, yet so full of whispers, so full of the remembrance of all the Sarns that had been here, from Tim, with the lightning in his blood, to Father, passing out from life in a dark snoring after a fit of anger.” 69 And yet the shock of seeing Jancis

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and her baby drowned finally does overcome his dream of power: “Summat went out of it when I did see ‘em in the water,” he mourns. 70 In both Gone to Earth and Precious Bane, Webb leaves her complex interweavings of potential influences on agency and action largely unresolved. If there is an ultimate and overarching force shaping events, it would be fate or destiny, revealed to characters with particular vision in moments of uncanny apprehension. Yet any inevitability is itself a function of myriad other forces shaping human choice. Underlying them all, however, Webb places the determinative force of more or less accurate understandings of just what kind of enchantment shapes the world. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Gay, Modernism, 130. Gay, 133. Gay, 141–42. Gay, 131. Eksteins, Rites, 27–30. Eksteins, 31. Weber, “Science as Vocation,” 136. Eksteins, 35. Webb, Gone to Earth, 13. Buchan, introduction to Gone to Earth, 7–8. Webb, Gone to Earth, 42. Webb, 20. Webb, 175–87. Webb, 176–77. Webb, 187. Webb, Precious Bane, 61. Webb, 92. Webb, 45. Webb, 64–65. Webb, Gone to Earth, 181. Webb, Precious Bane, 248. Webb, 181. Webb, 71–72. Jonathan Cape’s 1929 edition of Precious Bane was illustrated by Rowland Hilder. Webb, Precious Bane, 72. See Bachelard, Poetics of Space, chapter 8. Bachelard, 184–89, 189–90. Bachelard, 17–18. Webb, Precious Bane, 73. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 82. Webb, Precious Bane, 83–84. Webb, 100, 101. Webb, 283. Webb, 181. Webb, 20. Webb, 105. Webb, 114. Webb, Golden Arrow, 18; Webb, Precious Bane, 44–45. Webb, Golden Arrow, 18.

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40. Both Coles and Barale note Webb’s close relationship with her father, who served as a model for her positively presented male characters. See, e.g., Coles, “1881–1902: Child of Spring” in Mary Webb; and Barale, “Author as Daughter” and “The Golden Arrow,” in Daughters and Lovers. 41. Webb, Precious Bane, 28, 110. 42. Webb, 110. 43. Webb, 156. 44. Webb, 126. 45. Webb, 282–83. 46. Webb, 242. 47. Webb, 297. 48. Webb, 299. 49. Webb, 300. 50. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 51. 51. Weber, 53. 52. Weber, 54. 53. Webb, 139–142. 54. Milton, Paradise Lost, 1: 690–92. 55. Webb, Precious Bane, 152. 56. Gaston Bachelard lays out the psychological significance of the comparison Webb uses in emphasizing the homey associations of seeing a light in the window of a house. Confronted with the dark image of the grand house Gideon hopes to buy, Prue says, “I’d lief there was a light,” but Gideon scoffs at the unnecessary expense. Webb, Precious Bane, 97. See Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 31–37. 57. Webb, Precious Bane, 237. 58. Weber, “Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” 245. See also Weber, “Social Psychology of World Religions.” 59. Webb, 45. 60. Webb, 102. 61. Webb, 106. 62. Webb, 106–7. 63. Webb, 142. 64. Webb, 80. 65. Webb, 83. 66. Webb, 103. 67. Webb, 103. 68. Weber, “Science as Vocation,” 148. 69. Webb, Precious Bane, 282. 70. Webb, 297.

FIFTEEN Acting Naturally Christianity, Sexuality, Agency

Even though she identified as Christian, in her fiction Webb wove together Christian and non-Christian associations in pantheistic treatments equating the senses of union with nature and of union with the divine. More important than the distinction between Christian and non-Christian for her was this sensitivity to a somewhat generically understood divinity and appreciation of an associated, almost antinomian moral code focused on humane compassion. In her own way, she seems happy to meld together what her English Romantic predecessors, with their own deep focus on nature, found in often unsettling opposition. Where Samuel Taylor Coleridge in “The Eolian Harp” backs off from his pantheistic musings about nature animated by “one intellectual breeze/At once the Soul of each, and God of all,” returning to more conventional Christian ground, Webb gives her underlying “force of nature” a fluid identity that draws on but is not limited to Christian conceptions. A clearer affinity between the modern romanticism with which Webb sympathized and at least some aspects of the earlier Romantics may be demonstrated by her pointed critiques of bourgeois, and especially bourgeois Christian, culture. 1 A form of nostalgia, her romanticism simultaneously eschewed nostalgia, at least as understood as conservative attachment to established social custom and practice. In Gone to Earth, Reddin poses the most explicit personal danger to Hazel, but the aunt whose moralistic rectitude puts her out into the snow, and therefore on the path to meet Reddin, just to avoid having her spend the night in the same house as her son, is presented as more despicable, especially in her subsequent refusal to admit responsibility. 2 Hazel’s aunt 221

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is matched in her negative portrayal only by the greedy hypocrisy of the church deacon Mr. James, who combines the failings of avarice and class bias. 3 A member of the church delegation sent to confront Edward over Hazel’s behavior, James is the only one crude enough to voice the rumor that Reddin had paid Edward for Hazel’s sexual services. Less extreme expressions of unimaginative legalism include the originally circumscribed Christian piety of Edward, and even more of his mother, Mrs. Marston, which Webb sets in sharp contrast to Hazel’s explicitly “uncivilized” spiritual identification with nature. Edward’s development as a character, and the story’s temporary hope for a happy ending, lies in his final intuitive allegiance to a self-legitimating morality that is perverse when viewed from the perspective of Christian custom he leaves behind. His loyalty to Hazel after she is impregnated by Reddin is presented didactically by Webb as simply the right thing to do. Where society and congregation see straightforward adultery, and are quick to leap to the worst possible interpretations of Hazel’s behavior, Edward recognizes Hazel’s innocence as standing outside society’s ethical constructions altogether. Having rejected Christianity, Edward finds the seeds of a new system of meaning in Hazel’s love for him. In terms of its contrasts, in fact, his nihilism and self-defined moral construct closely echo the comparison drawn by Leslie Stephen between the modern freedom of mountain climbing and the modern banality of middle-class existence. In Edward’s case, the pure mountain on which to express his modernity is love of Hazel’s wildness and faith in her essential goodness. Similarly, in Precious Bane, if Webb set Prue’s mystic sensibility on an entirely different plane from Beguildy’s pretended occult practices, she also set it apart from the village’s Christianity. Prue does not question the Christian framing of her rural existence, which infuses common activities with such practices as hymn singing. She learns to read in part out of a desire to be able to read the Bible for herself, and, as we have seen, struggles with issues of theodicy raised by her harelip. Still, Webb uses Prue’s story to point out some of Christianity’s less attractive aspects. Notably, Prue and Gideon’s escape from the boredom of a church service initiates the story’s chain of events when Prue’s father, about to punish them, is knocked down by Gideon and dies in a fit. Prue’s ambivalence about the church is connected in particular with the limitations of the Sexton and his family as the church’s representatives. In the village crowd’s final rush to drown her as a witch, Prue does wish the Sexton was there, saying, “[H]e was a fair-minded man, and I think he’d have stood for me.” 4 But otherwise, as the purveyor of institutional Christianity, the Sexton exhibits no connection with the nature religion that Webb elevates: “When Sexton spoke, the four walls of the church seemed to grow up round you, and you could smell the damp, musty smell of it, and hear the flies plaining in the windows.” 5 His preaching likewise tends to be judgmental as when he uses the funeral of Jancis and her baby

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to condemn both Beguildy as “the devil’s oddman” and Jancis as “no better than she should be” (i.e., sexually promiscuous), since she was Beguildy’s daughter. 6 When Gideon invented a sermon text to fool his father about having skipped church, the verse “Burning and fuel of fire” is a revealingly safe bet, since “it was one of the texts the Sexton was very fond of saying over.” 7 Sammy, the Sexton’s son, is annoying in his habit of spouting Christian verses, including that one, but emerges in more positive light when his versifying slips into sympathetic mode as he is viewing the bodies of Jancis and her baby, and when he is a key help in fighting the corn fire. 8 Tivvy, the Sexton’s daughter, however, who is pregnant with Gideon’s child, attempts to blackmail Gideon into marrying her, and incites the crowd against Prue by accusing her of witchcraft and of undercutting Tivvy’s supposedly promised marriage to Gideon. 9 Given Tivvy’s villainy, Webb uses the self-righteousness of the community’s premier Christian family to ironic advantage when another chief instigator, Mr. Grimble, endorses her: “Her brother can mouth a text, her father’s Sexton, her mother’s Sexton’s married wife, so it stands to reason she’s a good young woman.” Webb seems more interested in Christianity when she finds it mingled with folk religion that opens the possibility of supernatural provenance beyond Christian bounds. While emphasizing the absence of any validity in Beguildy’s “magic” or in specific application of local superstitions, Webb allows for the possibility of an agency only hinted at by such limited constructions. When Prue wants to seek a magical cure for her harelip by entering the mere “dressed in a white smock” at the periodic “troubling of the waters,” for example, she is dissuaded not out of doubt about the act’s efficacy, but by Gideon’s prohibition and her own modesty. To be cured on the model of the Pool of Bethesda (John 5:2–9), “[y]ou must go down into the water fasting, and with many curious ancient prayers. These I could learn, when I could read, for they were in an old book that Parson kept in the vestry. Not that he believed it, nor quite disbelieved it, but only that it was very rare and strange.” 10 In a curious juxtaposition of the incalculable and calculable, Gideon does not argue against the possibility that such magic might work, yet does assume that the alternative to the healing water is medical treatment: “Folk ud say, ‘There’s Sarn’s sister douked into the water like poor folk was used to do, because Sarn’s too near to get the Doctor’s mon, let alone the Doctor.” 11 Similarly, Webb presents the custom of “sin-eating” as a mixture of superstition and Christian assumptions about sin and final judgment. Though incorporated into a Christian burial service, the practice is a form of appeasing ghosts: “Now it was still the custom at that time, in our part of the country, to give a fee to some poor man after a death, and then he would take bread and wine handed to him across the coffin, and eat and drink, saying—I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man, that ye walk not

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over the fields nor down the by-ways. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul.” 12 Webb explores the commodification of individuals, or in this case, of an individual’s soul, as Gideon offers to serve as Sin Eater for his father in exchange for the family farm. While Gideon considers it harmless “to drink a sup of your own wine and chumble a crust of your own bread,” others, including Prue, will relate his bad fortune to this forfeiting of his spiritual well-being. 13 In the ongoing consideration of what is of value, the exchange plays out as Faustian, as Gideon might be said to lose both his soul and the farm. When drawing on Christian imagery or associations, Webb still privileges the spirituality she associates with affinity to nature. As in other essays in her collection The Spring of Joy, Webb’s “Vis Medicatrix Naturae” echoes Underhill and Sinclair in asserting that “a man who holds direct intercourse with the cosmic life through his heart and mind knows a glad comradeship with cloud and tree; there dwells with him a consciousness of surrounding splendour—of swift currents, marvels underfoot and overhead; . . . he clings to the beauty of earth as to a garment, and he feels that the wearer of the garment is God.” 14 Elsewhere Webb would gaze “with love and wonder into the complex life of nature, which is the life of God.” 15 On occasion she raises the pastoral specter of the not quite Christ-like “Flockmaster, ” as in The Golden Arrow where John Arden refers to the Welsh legend of “Cariad, the Flockmaster, the won’erful one,” in a moment of mystic vision. Named with the Welsh term for love or affection, the Flockmaster is a Christ figure who “calls ‘em—all the white sinners and the stained mighty ones, and even the little blue fishes in the hill streams,” though described with an air of wildness that suggests aspects of Pan: “Sometimes, when the music of earth is most arresting, we seem to hear through it an unknown personality, far off in the terror of great beauty, summoning us poor wanderers in tones reassuring as a herdsman’s call to his cattle on the mountains—simple and homely.” 16 Particularly in her essay on “The Beauty of Form,” Webb sees a crossing over of natural and religious symbolism, suggesting that in the “occult script” of signs found in nature, the world might find a new bible of spiritual enlightenment—a writing, not in fire upon tables of stone, but in subtile traceries on young leaves and buds. Have not all symbolic artists, children, and priests of new religions some intuition of this? For the thought—so dim and so dear— that all fine contours are a direct message from God, is rooted deep in the minds of the simple-hearted, who are the Magi of the world. 17

At times the Christian connotations of her pantheistic observances are explicit: “Not once only, but every year, the fair young body of the wild rose hangs upon the thorn, redeeming us through wonder, and crying across the fetid haunts of the money-grubbers with volatile sweetness— ‘Father . . . they know not what they do.’” 18 Webb suggests, however,

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that any Christian associations are secondary; in a reversal, it is the natural symbol that reveals the more fundamental, inherent significance. Christianity, in fact, “has [merely] interpreted it for us, the significance of the cross—that monogram of Christ and cote-armure of pity, built up somewhere in the branches of almost every tree, stamped in the centre of almost every flower.” Humanity, she asserts, “had learnt to make the cross long before that mild night when the flocks cried across the slopes of Bethlehem and their keepers whispered of visions. It may be that if Christ had not died, the meaning of the cross would have been revealed in some other way.” 19 In Gone to Earth, the Christian implications of the text are clearest when, like many of Webb’s preferred characters, Hazel is identified with Christ through her impulse toward compassion. Hearing of the fall of a cow into the quarry, Hazel bursts into tears: So she did always at any mention of helpless suffering, flinging herself down in wild rebellion and abandonment so that epilepsy had been suspected. But it was not epilepsy. It was pity. She, in her inexpressive, childish way, shared with the love-martyr of Galilee the heartrending capacity for imaginative sympathy. In common with Him and others of her kind, she was not only acquainted with grief, but reviled and rejected. In her schooldays boys brought maimed frogs and threw them in her lap, to watch, from a safe distance, her almost crazy grief and rage. 20

Despite this association, however, Webb leaves Hazel’s religious experience ambiguous. Where Hazel fails in her identification as a Christian, at least in the eyes of Mrs. Marston, is precisely in possessing that deep compassion for the helpless that Webb considers Christ-like. As they look at religious pictures in a shop, Hazel finds all except the portrayals of sheep with a shepherd unsettling, and even then takes a country girl’s knowledgeable umbrage at the poor depiction of sheep, but then she came to one of the Crucifixion, a subject on which the artist had lavished all the slumbering instincts of torture that are in so many people. “Oh! What a drodsome un! I dunna like this shop,” said Hazel tearfully. “What’m they doing to ‘im? Oh, they’m great beasts!” Perhaps she had seen in her dim and childish way the everlasting tyranny of the material over the abstract; of bluster over nerves; strength over beauty; States over individuals; churches over souls; and fox-hunting squires over the creatures they honour with their attention. 21

When Mrs. Marston attempts to explain the necessity of the crucifixion, Hazel refuses to accept Christ’s death as related to her, while adding a premonitory interpretation of her own death as somehow salvific, if only for herself. The similarity to Sinclair’s questioning of the doctrine of

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atonement suggests similar consequences of their attempts to develop more generic, or at least less doctrinal spiritual philosophies: “Oh!” said Mrs. Marston wonderingly, “that’s nothing to get vexed about. Why, don’t you know that’s Jesus Christ dying for us?” “Not for me!” flashed Hazel. “My dear!” “No, what for should He? There shall none die along of me, much less be tormented.” “Needs be that one Man die for the people,” quoted Mrs. Marston easily. “Only through blood can sin be washed white.” “Blood makes things raddled, not white; and if so be any’s got to die; I’ll die for myself.” 22

At the same time, Hazel, more than any other character including Edward, is moved to prayer from internal impulse and need, though she is far from sure just what it is she prays to. In her uncertainty on her first night at Undern, Reddin’s estate, she prays to what might be God or just the darkness. As Reddin spies on her from below her window, “the night received her prayer in silence. Whether or not any heard but Reddin none could say.” 23 Again, at a moment when Mrs. Marston is sharing with Edward her consternation over Hazel’s refusal “to be died for,” Hazel is upstairs praying at her window with a naturalness that Webb sanctions. In its material accoutrements, her bedroom expresses Edward’s provenance of the abstract care that Hazel prays for, pointing toward the frustrated opportunity for happiness denied them: “[I]f there’s anybody there, I’d be obleeged if you’d give an eye to our Foxy, as is lonesome in tub. It dunna matter about me, being under Ed’ard’s roof.” Hazel had never felt so like a child in its mother’s lap. Her own mother had not made her feel so. . . . But now she felt cared for as she looked around the low room with its chair-bed and little dressing-table hung with pink glazed calico. There was a text over the fireplace: “Not a hair of thy head shall perish.” 24

Despite the biblical source of the text, the impulse to expect that care, rather than the source, seems most important. Hazel, furthermore, draws no distinction between the provenance of “faery” or “God.” On an outing to reconnect with the natural world she was missing, she brings Edward’s Communion bag to collect mushrooms, since “to her, mushrooms were as clean as the Lord’s Supper, no less mysterious, equally incidental to human needs. In her eyes nothing could be more magical and holy than silken, pink-lined mushrooms placed for her in the meadows overnight by the fairies, or by someone greater and more powerful called God.” 25 The uncertainty of just what force might hear prayers or leave mushrooms is left open by the expressed agnosticism of Webb’s narrative voice:

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Among the pillars of the night is there One who listens and remembers, and judges the foolishness of man, not by effects, but by motives? And does that One, in the majesty of everlasting vitality and resistless peace, ever see how we run after the painted butterflies of our desires and fall down the dark precipices? And if He sees and hears the wavering, calamitous life of all creatures, and especially of the most beautiful and the most helpless, does He ever sigh and weep, as we do when we see a dead child or a moth’s wing impaled on a thorn? Our heavy burden is that we cannot know. For all our tears and prayers and weary dreaming, we cannot know. 26

Still, through Hazel’s spiritual impulse, Webb offers a sense of some immeasurable “something” that Hazel felt must be beyond the pleasant sound of falling water, so small and transitory; beyond the drip and patter of human destinies—something vast, solitary, and silent. How should she find that which none has ever named or known? Men only stammer of it in such words as Eternity, Fate, God. . . . The wistful dreams of men haunt this theme for ever; the creeds of men are so many keys that do not fit the lock. 27

The possibility of that controlling force being frightening occurs to Hazel, one of several intimations by Webb that, quite apart from the explicit hostility of the Black Huntsman, the forces shaping existence are not necessarily benevolent. 28 As Hazel and Reddin consider a flower with twin stamens to be a microcosm of their own position, standing together under a tent of tree branches, their light-hearted conversation turns solemn: “I’m thinking there be somebody somewhere out t’other side of that there blue, and looking through like us through this here flower. And if so be he likes he can tear it right open, and get at us.” Reddin looked round almost apprehensively. Then, as the best way of putting a stop to superstition, he caught her to him and kissed her again. “That’s what tents are for, and what you’re for,” he said. But he felt a chill in the place, and Hazel had frightened herself so much that she could not be lured from her aloofness. 29

The sense of the world as unsettling contributes to early intimations that Edward, for all his initial reserve, possesses the seeds for change. He is tracked into Christian ministry by parental precedent (his father was also a minister), but his inherited faith is mingled with darker depths. The extremes of nature exhibited on God’s Little Mountain leave him uneasy, whereas they cause no difficulty for Mrs. Marston’s “comfortable” faith: He had always been naturally religious, taking on trust what he was taught; and he had an instinctive pleasure in clean and healthy things. But on winter nights at the mountain, when the tingling stars sprang in and out of their black ambush and frost cracked the tombstones; in

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While listening to Hazel sing, Edward gets a perception of mortality neither he nor Hazel can yet grasp. He wonders whether it is “mystical longing or a sense of sin that cries out in her voice,” but Webb’s narrative voice asserts: “It was neither of those things; it was nothing that Edward could have understood at that time, though later he did. It was the grief of rainy forests, and the moan of stormy water; the muffled complaint of driven leaves; the keening—wild and universal—of life for the perishing matter that it inhabits.” 31 Mrs. Marston, on the other hand, is unable to perceive the significance injected into life by death. She interprets her husband’s dying as his “falling asleep”: “Not that Mrs. Marston did not feel it. She did, as deeply as her nature could. But through layers of convention. Now, at her age, to find out that life was not so pleasant as she thought would be a little short of tragedy.” 32 The suggestion throughout the novel of some general, and potentially awe-ful supernatural force at work, repeated in references to Hazel’s premonitions of disaster, becomes explicit in the dramatic conclusion at the quarry. In the moment after Hazel and Foxy fall, there was silence on God’s Little Mountain for a space. Afterwards a voice, awful and piercing, deep with unutterable horror—the voice of a soul driven mad by torture—clutched the heart of every man and woman. Even the hounds, raging on the quarry edge, cowered and bristled. It echoed in the freezing arches of the sky, and rolled back unanswered to the freezing earth. The little cleric, who had pulled a PrayerBook from his pocket, dropped it. Once again it rang out, and at its awful reiteration the righteous men and the hunt ceased to be people of any class or time or creed, and became creatures swayed by one primeval passion—fear. They crouched and shuddered like beaten dogs as the terrible cry once more roused the shivering echoes: “Gone to earth! Gone to earth!” 33

For all the over-stated horror of the moment, and the frightening personification of the mystic force in a voice, with the portentous use of the hunting call that means the prey has safely reached a burrow Webb suggests that that force moves out of concern for its own. Hazel’s death becomes the inevitable fulfillment of her mystical and natural wildness; tragic as it is, her death releases her from continued vain attempts to fit into a world to which she is not suited. As Buchan observes, Hazel, “suffers because she is involved in the clash of common lusts and petty jealousies, but she is predestined to suffer since she can never adjust herself to the strait orbit of human life. She is a creature of the wilds, with

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no heritage in the orderly populous world. In the end she is ‘gone to earth,’ as she has come from it.” 34 The vehicle that might, despite Buchan’s appraisal, have brought Hazel into “the strait orbit of human life,” namely sexual union with a protective and domesticating partner, is denied her. The twisting of that promise in her impregnation by the possessive and self-absorbed Reddin contributes instead to her demise by slowing her escape from the hounds. That irony underscores the importance of sexuality to Webb’s project, as a Sinclair-like expression of the natural force associated with mystic sensitivity, as an indicator of character, and, finally, as a commentary on the social mores of both modernity and tradition. A story about many things, Gone to Earth is at least largely about the power of sexual desire and the danger of denying it. Webb’s study of erotics plays in the foreground of her examination of social custom and mystic perception, fueling the narrative’s other considerations. Much like Weber’s science, sexuality seems to operate in a dual mode: it provides a rationally explicable motivation for actions, on one hand, and yet introduces its own mystifying element, on the other. Hazel’s initial innocence is an important aspect of her “state of grace” as a child and creature of nature. But sexuality, Webb suggests, is as inevitable and undeniable a power as the final fox hunt sweeping over the hills. Without adopting the more explicit psychological terminology of Sinclair, Webb’s coming-of-age story nonetheless follows Sinclair in emphasizing the importance of sublimation and the danger of repression. Webb’s juxtaposition of Reddin and Edward as objects of Hazel’s desire suggests that the creative potential of sexuality’s mysterious, subterranean force is bound to seek destructive channels if ignored. Hazel is threatened not so much by her transition to womanhood as by the necessity of making the passage without guidance, as well as by the circumstances that make Reddin the agent of her sexual awakening. When Webb first introduces her, Hazel’s affinity with nature is linked with a childlike lack of concern about sex. 35 Hazel is “sexless as a leaf,” Webb writes, referring to awareness of sexuality as an eventual “spiritualization” that would infuse a new consciousness of her own attractiveness. She is enough aware, however, to be enticed by the thought of an evening out with Albert, her infatuated cousin, though the thrill has more to do with a sense of event than with physical desire: “She would see the streets of the town in the magic of lights. She would walk out in her new dress with a real young man—a young man who possessed a gilt watchchain.” 36 The realization that sexuality might have something to do with her, and might open up wider possibilities of life, must wait for the stronger effect of Reddin. Hazel’s inkling of new horizons is prompted by an overheard argument between Reddin and his servant Vessons, who cautions his master against taking “this girl’s good name off’n her—.” Hearing that,

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Chapter 15 suddenly something happened in Hazel’s brain. It was the realization of life in relation to self. It marks the end of childhood. She no more saw herself throned above life and fate, as a child does. She saw that she was a part of it all; she was mutable and mortal. She had seen life go on, had heard of funerals, courtings, confinements and weddings in their conventional order—or reversed—and she had remained, as it were, intact. . . . Girl friends had hinted of a wild revelry that went on somewhere— everywhere—calling like a hidden merry-go-round to any who cared to hear. But she had not heard. 37

Having introduced the element of sexuality, Webb dissects its various positive and negative permutations. In refusing to allow Hazel to spend the night in order to forestall an eventual Albert–Hazel coupling, Hazel’s aunt reflects misguided propriety that is vigilant against the threat of sex without having the honesty to speak its name. 38 When the aunt is horrified at her own slip in suggesting that Albert and Hazel might share her room after her death, it falls to Albert to reassert the prim social order: “‘If such a thing comes to pass,’ laboured Albert, ‘they’ll come decent, that is, they won’t be spoken of.’ He voiced his own and his mother’s creed.” 39 Later, as Hazel struggles with her desire for Reddin, Webb lays some of the blame for her difficulties at the door of “the attitude of civilization and the Churches towards sex” that guarantees conflict between “innocence and instinct, ignorance and curiosity.” Even though “approving of, and even insisting on, children,” bourgeois society treats “with a secrecy that implies disapproval the necessary physical factors that result in children.” 40 As a driving force, Webb also suggests, sexual desire can be perverted into the brutality of such sad creatures as the Clomber sisters: The younger still hunted, painfully compressing an overfed body into a riding-habit of some forgotten cut, and riding with so grim a mouth and such a bloodthirsty expression that she might have had a bloodfeud with all foxes. Perhaps, when she rode down the anxious redbrown streak, she thought she was riding down a cruel fate that had somehow left her life vacant of joy; perhaps, when the little creature was torn piece-meal, she imagined herself tearing so the frail unconquerable powers of love and beauty. Anyway, she never missed a meet, and she and her sister never ceased in their long silent battle for Reddin, who remained as unconscious of them as if they were his aunts. He was, of course, beneath them, very much beneath them—hardly more than a farmer, but still—a man. 41

For all her faults, Mrs. Marston at least has a sense of the value of married life in producing children. In the mirroring of the Marstons’ chapel and cottage on God’s Little Mountain with Undern House in the lowland, she is set opposite Vessons, the celibate bachelor, in whom “monasticism had found in a countryside teeming with sex, one silent but rabid disciple.” 42

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Fond of referring to himself as “maiden,” Vessons is of ambiguous gender; he is adamant about preserving Undern as a male sanctuary, yet occupies himself with the “feminine” tasks of cooking and making cheese, and with the aesthetic satisfactions of clipping the estate’s yews into animal shapes. 43 Webb notes: “If Vessons ever felt the irony of his own presence in a breeding stable, he never said so. He went about his work with tight disapproving lips, as if he thought that Nature owed him a debt of gratitude for his tolerance of her ways.” 44 Mrs. Marston, on the other hand, comes to terms with Edward’s intent to marry Hazel out of pleased anticipation of grandchildren. 45 Edward’s desire for Hazel is seen as natural, especially in connection with procreation. His well-intentioned decision not to consummate their marriage, therefore, is a failure to follow nature’s prescription. Out of protective concern for Hazel’s innocence, Edward pledges to permit her to live with him as his “little sister” until she chooses to take on her full role as “wife.” But “the whole wide morning seemed to contradict his scheme—the mating birds, the sheep suckling their lambs, the insistent neighing and bellowing that rose from the fields and farms, the very tombstones, with their legends of multitudinous families, and the voice that cried to man and woman, not in words, but in the zest of the earth and air, ‘Beget, bring forth, and then depart, for I have done with you!’” 46 In attempting to protect Hazel, Edward fails to assist her in moving to an adult understanding of sexual love, and leaves her vulnerable to the lesser enticement of merely sexual allure that Reddin offers. In this, as in other moments, Webb acknowledges the dangerous naiveté of Hazel’s natural innocence that she otherwise celebrates; she also reveals the shortcomings of Edward’s disembodied spirituality. As Webb’s narrative voice underscores, “the irony was that if he had listened to sex—who spoke to him with her deep beguiling voice, like a purple-robed Sibyl—if he had for once parted company with his exacting spiritual self, Hazel would have loved him. We cannot love that in which is nothing of ourselves, and there was no white fire of spiritual exaltation in Hazel.” 47 Webb continually contrasts “Reddin the destroyer, and Edward the saviour” in order to lay out the opposing characteristics that—when balanced—she deems desirable, even necessary, in a woman’s relationship with a man (and which combine finally when Edward develops into his more assertive though nihilistic self). 48 In this balancing, and in making clear just how Hazel could find Reddin’s ruthless virility attractive, Webb almost undercuts the claims for female autonomy she otherwise makes. The final brief idyllic pairing of Hazel and Edward requires that Hazel assume the role of submissively domestic housewife. Indeed, their relationship began with intimations of wife-beating, when her father encourages Edward to “give her one for herself”:

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Chapter 15 She looked at him under her lashes, and wondered if he would. There was something not altogether unpleasant in the idea. She felt that to be ordered about by young lips and struck by a young man’s hand would be, as business men say, “quite in order.” She appraised Edward and decided he would not. Had she been able to decide in the affirmative, she would probably have fallen in love with him there and then. 49

Even more than with the momentous act of Hazel’s rape, Webb is concerned with the conflicting instincts that feed Hazel’s ambivalence toward Reddin, and that, while making the rape no less a rape, propel her first to meet him at Hunter’s Spinney, and then to succumb to his assault. 50 As the Clomber sisters realize, Reddin is (as Webb underscores) a man, and a man who is willing to assert virility that Edward dangerously withholds. With Vessons’s help, Hazel safely escapes from her first visit to Undern, but as she drives off in the cart, the hook has been set: “She wondered how she would feel if Reddin suddenly appeared at his window. And a tiny traitorous wish slipped up from somewhere in her heart. She watched the windows till a turn hid the house, and then she sighed. Almost she wished that Reddin had awakened.” 51 A similar concern with the nature of manhood preoccupies Precious Bane, where the elements of virility and kindness divided between Reddin and Edward are brought together in one apparently perfect man. Offered as counterpoint to Gideon in particular, but to the less enlightened elements of the village in general, the weaver Kester Woodseaves may be Webb’s most romantically idealized male character. His largerthan-life persona, introduced at the love-spinning amid hymns, supports Barale’s recognition of strong Christ-images in many of Webb’s male protagonists. 52 These Christ-images, however, inspire more swooning than spiritual devotion. Kester’s willingness to risk his life to save a bull from bull-baiting, his resolute goodness, and his boldness in resisting evil are enough to suggest the Christ connection, but Prue makes the association even stronger by couching her rhapsodies over him in scriptural terms. She links Kester particularly with the verse, “His banner over me is love” (Song of Sol. 2:4), associated with the mystic comfort of her attic. Prue describes his arrival: It was getting on for time to stop spinning when Mother said should we sing— “The Lord’s my Shepherd,” and afterwards I spoke for having— “He brought me to His Lordly House, His Banner it was Love.” And just as we were singing that, and the wheels going like churnowls, there was a quick footfall without, and a rush of fresh air, and a long ray of sunshine from the door to me, and he stood there in the light looking upon us. “He,” I say, as if you’d know him out of the world as I did.

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He stood in the doorway, and I rose up from my seat in the shadows at the back of the room, as if he was my own bidden guest. 53

The specific persona of Christ as “shepherd,” evoked by the first hymn, connects Kester with Webb’s allusions to the Flockmaster. The Song of Solomon’s themes of longing seem further referenced in the novel’s celebration of Kester as “lord,” and in Prue’s dismay at the apparent impossibility of achieving her love: “I sat down farther back in my corner, and a faintness came over me. For here was my lover and my lord, and behold! I was hare-shotten.” 54 Prue goes on to intertwine other aspects of divine being and human desire, wondering, “Did Magdalene, that was like Felena, know, when she lay at the feet of the only man she ever loved yet never loved, whether the carpenter’s son featured his mother or not, whether He was big or little in stature? Shall we know, when we be come into His presence that made us, what outward seeming His majesty has?” If Felena, the promiscuous wife of a local shepherd, is like Mary Magdalene, Prue likens herself to the mother of Jesus in her desire to protect Kester: “There’s none so fierce as a loving woman, and it always seemed a strange thing to me that the Mother of Jesus could keep her hands off the centurion, and it could only have been because her Son had given orders afore. But indeed if it had been me, I think I should have forgot the orders.” 55 Kester seems possessed of a persona with its own mystical presence, Prue observes, “for indeed he was a wonder to me then and always, not for his looks nor for anything that he did, but for the silent power of what he was, the power gathered up in him, as tremendous as a great mountain on the sky, that you couldna measure nor name, but only feel.” 56 Her private appreciation of Kester’s aura is matched by the reactions of the other women in the room: “Tivvy and Polly gaped in wonder, finger on lip. Moll and Sukey leaned forrard as you lean to a fire in winter, and their mother gathered them to herself jealously. Missis Sexton spread her flounces, and Jancis coloured up and said ‘O!’ and set one of her ringlets straight, and said ‘O!’ again. Mother smiled at him, and Felena—well, Felena’s eyes settled on him as a brown owl drops to its prey.” 57 Ultimately, this perfect man is perfect mostly in the manner of a romantic hero. Both strong and sensitive, Kester is a champion wrestler who arrives in the nick of time to save Prue from her tormentors, and almost survives his own encounter with danger because of his friendships with the dogs set to attack him. In keeping with both Underhill’s and Webb’s preference for creative, manual labor, Kester, although educated, prefers to work with his hands as a weaver, turning down a job clerking for the squire. 58 As Prue exudes, “A man it was. And if there be any meaning in that word as I hanna thought on, let them that read put it in. Let them put the strength and the power, the kindness and the patience, the sternness

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and the stately righteousness of all good men into that word, and let him wear it.” 59 Prue is far more savvy than Hazel about romance and relationship, and yet, because of her harelip, she is no less frustrated initially in her hopes for a fulfilling partnership. As she herself observes, her kind nature makes ill treatment at the hands of others all the more poignant: “I was like a maid standing at the meeting of the lane-ends on May Day with a posy-knot as a favour for a rider that should come by. And behold! The horseman rode straight over me, and left me, posy and all, in the mire.” 60 Prue’s references to the similarity between her mystic moments and “being with your dear acquaintance” also suggest a specific linkage between such spirituality, Prue’s “loving” nature, and sexuality. Like Mary Olivier’s desire for “Somebody, Somebody, Somebody” in her bed, furthermore, the greatest attraction to Prue of having Kester weave for the Sarns is the promise of his presence in the very space associated with her mystic visioning. “I fell into a dream, for if Kester was going to weave for us he’d have to come into the attic, walking to and agen round the weaving frame, looking out of my little window, making the place his place, so I should have him there for ever after.” 61 Like Gone to Earth’s references to wife beating, however, Prue’s repeated references to Kester as the “maister” may add to the Christ associations, but draws on unsettling assumptions about male-female relationships that complicate a reading of their interaction. On one hand, Prue’s fantasies, frustrated by her deformity, project a submissive and subservient relationship to Kester as her imagined husband: “For it is a strange thing, and very strange, when the maister is come, and you would lief fetch him in and bring out the best, fresh butter and cheese in large dishes, and new milk, even to the top of the big stean, and when you’d put on your Sabbath gown and a posy, and smile at him with a yes for all his askings, and behold! all is nothing, for you have a hare-shotten lip, being under the ban of witchcraft.” 62 On the other hand, the success of Webb’s construction of Prue as an appealing character draws directly on Prue’s combination of strength and initiative. If she seems too ready to be ordered about by Kester, it is at least as her own person that she attracts his attention. Often described as similar to a man in her ability to work, Prue’s dramatic intervention to save Kester’s life involves killing a dangerous dog with a knife and ordering the townspeople to act quickly to treat Kester’s wounds. The ways in which she pushes the bounds of female gender roles contribute to her characterization as capable but also to her vulnerability to social attack, as she comes under suspicion in the village for her unfeminine, although unchosen, state of independence. 63 She grows tall and strong through hard work, to the point that “Mother began to show signs of wringing her hands about that, too. For being little herself, and Missis Beguildy and Jancis and most of the women

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about being little, it seemed meet to Mother that a woman should be small.” 64 At the same time, Prue is clearly female in the formulation of her desire for Kester, and, more generally, in her wish to be a wife and mother. As the spectacle of “raising Venus” also underscores, her female body is attractive: “Two men would have been my lovers that night if I’d willed it so. And as I saw the squire’s shoulders stooped forrard with the weight of his longing I knew for the first time that, whatever my face might be, my body was fair enough. From foot to shoulder I was as passable as any woman could be.” 65 The singular scene of Beguildy’s “raising Venus” also highlights Prue own sexuality, despite her shame. While the staged “magic” of raising a naked Prue through a trapdoor is intended just for the squire’s son, Prue is mortified to find that Kester is there as well. All the same, she admits, “I couldna but rejoice to have given my body in this wise to the eyes of him who was maister in the house of me, for ever and ever.” Not quite the central issue that it was in Gone to Earth, sexuality is thus still present in Precious Bane as the undercurrent of romantic desire, as the motivation for marriage, and as yet another aspect of the earthiness of country living. As in The Golden Arrow, where Deborah agrees to live with Stephen without being married, or in Seven for a Secret, where Gillian shares an inn room with Elmer, the possibility of sex before marriage is admitted, and even on occasion condoned. Gideon’s desire for Jancis, which he cannot wait for their wedding to pursue, is as much an expression of jealousy and possession as it is of sexual attraction. It also constitutes one piece of the mosaic of actions that creates catastrophe, providing the final straw that sends Beguildy to burn the corn. But the openminded enabling by Prue and Jancis’s mother in making those trysts happen reflects a matter-of-factness about sex that contrasts positively with more prudish opinions. Prue’s assessment of the unnamed man who tells Beguildy about Gideon and Jancis is a terse “interfering meddlers, folks be!” And at the love-spinning, lascivious Felena is more sympathetically drawn than the oxherd’s wife, who “was so respectable and high-minded that she never spoke of anything between banns-up and baptism if she could help it, and took no notice of young couples during that time.” 66 As an essential aspect of Webb’s celebration of life, sexuality, and more importantly the specific form of its expression, thus becomes a central arena for the exercise and testing of agency. In a manner again reminiscent of Sinclair, moreover, the interconnections Webb draws between sexuality and agency are simultaneously interconnections of agency with gender. Hazel’s repeated assertions of selfhood and autonomy are made in the face of possessive desires by both Edward and Reddin, among others, that can be read as colonial, with the locus of colonial power associated specifically with maleness. These hints of colonial as-

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cension over native populations with trinkets and promises of material improvement are extended by the detail, mentioned in passing, that Mrs. Marston’s wealth was inherited from her father, who earned it by having “travelled for Jeremy’s green tea (and very good tea it was, and a very fine flavour, and a picture of a black man on every container).” 67 It is Mrs. Marston’s money that is expended for Hazel’s trousseau, and that therefore helps draw Hazel into the bondage of Marston expectations. Webb links Reddin’s brutality with his political support for imperialism, and expresses both in his obsession with Hazel. If it is not Hazel’s land that is to be possessed, it is at least her body and her self as a desirable wild creature of exotic difference. Economics also lie at the base of the acquisition of Hazel, negotiated by the men in her life—her father, and her two suitors. As mentioned earlier, Reddin offers Abel fifty pounds for Hazel, a sum Abel refuses to accept only because he has already agreed that Edward may marry her. 68 Indeed, as an issue of gender roles, Webb suggests, the manner of possession matters less than the fact of possession itself. The boorishness of Reddin’s desire to have Hazel is ugly and obvious, but Edward’s effort to possess her is no less suspect. The expectation that Hazel as a woman could serve as a source of children, also possessions, is likewise not limited to the grandmotherly interests of Mrs. Marston. Reddin sees the inevitable child as “a good thing,” since “two possessions are better than one, and he could well afford children.” In Webb’s critique, however, she points out that “it never occurred to [Reddin] to wonder whether Hazel would like it, or to be sorry for the pain in store for her. He felt very unselfish as he thought, ‘When she can’t go about, I’ll sit with her now and again.’” 69 That Edward’s desire for possession is benignly inspired, however, to Webb’s mind, makes it only slightly less unacceptable: The white calm of unselfish love wrapped Edward, for he felt that he could make Hazel happy. As he fell asleep that night he thought: “She was made for a minister’s wife.” Reddin, leaning heavily on the low wall, staring at the drunken tombstones and the quiet moon-silvered house, thought: “She was made for me.” Both men saw her as what they wanted her to be, not as she was. 70

Even Hazel’s inability to resist Reddin has, in part, economic foundations, since an aspect of his attractiveness is his potential as a provider. Here her own interest in possession—of both a sexual partner and of material benefits—responds to the enticements Reddin offers. 71 Hazel’s agreement to marry Edward is also negotiated in terms of the symbols of middle-class comfort and safety he would provide. Through the proffering of “things,” Hazel herself is won as a “thing.” When Mrs. Marston considers the potential benefits of Edward’s marriage to Hazel, “it was

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characteristic of Mrs. Marston’s class and creed, . . . that she did not consider Hazel in the matter,” Webb points out. Hazel’s point of view, personality, hopes and fears were non-existent to her. Hazel would be absorbed into the Marston family like a new piece of furniture. She would be provided for without being consulted; it would be seen to that she did her duty, also without being consulted. She would become, as all the other women in this and the other families of the world had, the servant of the china and the electro-plate and the furniture, and she would be the means by which Edward’s children would come into the world. 72

The elevation of things over persons, and especially over females, to which Hazel is doomed, Webb suggests, has a long history, rehearsed yet again in Mrs. Marston’s eagerness for a chance to use her more treasured objects. The wedding, Mrs. Marston decides, would be an opportunity for using the multitude of things that were stored in every cupboard and never used, being thought too good for every day. Mrs. Marston was one of those that, having great possessions, go sadly all their days. It is strange how generation after generation spends its fleeting years in this fetish-worship, never daring to make life beautiful by the daily use of things lovely, but for ever busy about them. Mrs. Marston’s china glowed so, and was so stainless and uncracked that it seemed as if the lives of all the beautiful young women in her family must have been sacrificed in its behalf. 73

But Hazel’s unhappiness is prompted in the most part by her spunky unwillingness to be so possessed. In one of numerous exchanges, this one with Reddin, she repeats her self-asserting refrain: “Folk allus says I’m theirs. I’d liefer be mine.” Even with Edward, her immediate reaction to suggestions that she belongs to him is “‘Ed’ard inna my master. None is.’ A hot indignant flush surged over her.” 74 Caught in the web-like strategies of others, she still finds tactical opportunities to exercise her will. In response to Mrs. Marston’s claim that to be a lady is to be “quiet,” and that “it doesn’t signify very much” what Hazel actually wants, she shook her shoulders as if she wanted to get rid of a yoke. They fell into silence, and as Mrs. Marston dozed, Hazel was able to fulfill her desire that had sprung into being at the moment of seeing Mrs. Marston’s hat—namely, to squash one of the very round and brittle grapes. Her quick little hand, gleaming in the sun, hovered momentarily above the black hat like a darting dragon-fly, and the mischief was done—bland respectability smashed and derided. 75

Her autonomy is asserted specifically in terms of resistance to the ties of matrimony, first in response to her aunt’s suggestion that she and Albert would marry, 76 and then to her attempted seduction by Reddin: “It was not a question of marrying or not marrying in Hazel’s eyes. It was a matter of primitive instinct. She would be her own.” 77 While Webb ex-

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tends the hope that Hazel and Edward could make domestic life what it was intended to be, her premise returns repeatedly to the belief that Hazel is too distinctive to fit with either man: “Edward? But he had not the passion of the greenwood in him, the lust of the earth. He was not of the tremulously ecstatic company of wild, hunted creatures. If Reddin was definitely antagonistic, a hunter, Edward was neutral, a looker-on. They were not her comrades. They did not live her life. She had to live theirs.” 78 The final vision of compromise that would draw Hazel’s wildness into willing domesticity is still set as an assertion of her independence as Edward joins her in her outcast status. While not quite able to share her particular identity with nature, he at least rejects the limiting restrictions of socially determined Christianity. Self-assertion thus is linked with a self-determining understanding of what it means to be in relation with a greater reality not encompassed by the limited values or the limited spirituality of the bourgeoisie. Despite the celebration of Hazel’s empathy with nature, therefore, Webb points Hazel toward a desired but finally frustrated compromise of partially tamed domesticity. In this Webb reflects the complexity of social forces represented in the novel, and at play in the period of the text’s early reception. The rural settings of Webb’s work, and the tension she establishes between natural “wildness” and romanticized domesticity, fed into the second stream of modernity that Light identifies as an attachment to the quotidian, if not to the bourgeois, as a way of reacting to the trauma of the new. 79 In particular, Hazel’s penchant for woodland rambles (mirroring Webb’s own predilection) predicted in fictional form the outdoor avocations pursued by a post-war population. As Hansen argues, the increasing popularity of such outdoor recreations as “rambling, hostelling, scouting, orienteering, and climbing” contributed to the trend toward a re-established yet newly interpreted domesticity: “These activities drew on traditions of liberal middle-class culture, working-class respectability, rational recreations, self-improvement and natural history in new ways that appealed to men and, significantly, to women, from a variety of social groups. . . . Outdoor recreations in the English landscape became important ways for men and women to assert their citizenship and modernity through the ‘arts of right living.’” 80 The tragically truncated future that Webb dangles before Hazel and Edward was to be an idealized form of such a life, separated from real concerns about economic conditions or social standing. Edward is ready to “break rocks” to be with Hazel, since he must give up his position and livelihood as a minister. And for their final few days of bliss, Hazel seems to have forgotten her wild ways, reveling instead in wifely ministrations to Edward as they contemplate the kind of quiet, mutually absorbed life for which returning soldiers hungered. 81 Before that final moment of almost accomplished happiness, however, the domesticity of Hazel’s married circumstances interferes with her access to nature, and under-

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cuts her essential grounding as well as her sense of personal autonomy. It therefore seems hard to imagine Webb advocating any final domestic situation that did not include Hazel’s continued engagement with the natural world that characterized her life. Hazel’s own description of her hoped-for existence with Edward combines “cooking the breakfast” with “going out of a May morning, you and me—and maybe Foxy on a string—and looking nests, and us with cobwebs on our boots.” 82 Much like Webb herself, therefore, Hazel would have sought to balance kitchen and forest in that alternate future cut short by her death. NOTES 1. Peter Gay points to Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley as examples of “[c]elebrated—or notorious—Romantics” who “set a tone for rebellious nonconformity,” but also to a more general romantic belief that “the middling orders had robbed the world of enchantment, which it was the supreme duty of creative spirits to restore.” Modernism, 5, 7. 2. See Webb, Gone to Earth, 281. 3. Webb, 309. 4. Webb, Precious Bane, 315. 5. Webb, 236. 6. Webb, 292. 7. Webb, 32. 8. Webb, 292, 256. 9. Webb, 313. 10. Webb, 68. 11. Webb, 69. Faith in the doctor is similarly misplaced, however, since what Gideon and Prue would purchase is medicine or “simples” to cure what would require surgery. Webb, 69, 49, 51, 57. 12. Webb, 42–43. 13. Webb, 47. 14. Webb, “Vis Medicatrix Naturae,” 132–33. 15. Webb, “You whom care,” 221–22. 16. Webb, Golden Arrow, 32. Webb, “Joy of Music,” 152. See also Barale, Daughters and Lovers, 48. 17. Webb, “Beauty of Form,” 173–74. 18. Webb, “Joy of Fragrance,” 160. 19. Webb, “Beauty of Form,” 174. 20. Webb, Gone to Earth, 55. 21. Webb, 99–100. 22. Webb, 99–100. 23. Webb, 39. Webb expresses a similar sentiment about prayers inspired by the Anglican prayer book: “Some people, . . . pray like a man sending a telephone message from one definite place to another. He and the recipient know about the message, and the desired result is achieved. Others pray like someone launching a wireless message into space. Where it will go he cannot guess. . . . But does his message fail to be heard on that account? Surely not! Whoever is waiting for it will get it.” Webb, “Poetry of the Prayer Book,” 45. See also Bachelard’s musings on contemplating the night sky, especially given similarities between Hazel’s window prayer and indoor/outdoor aspect of Prue’s attic. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, Ch. 8, 183–210. 24. Webb, Gone to Earth, 102–3. 25. Webb, 162. 26. Webb, 75–76.

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27. Webb, 53. 28. She explored this perception a bit more acidly through the depiction of Christianity in Armour Wherein He Trusted. Elsewhere she criticized those who think of nature in exclusively benevolent terms: “If you are a child of earth you are not ‘fond’ [of nature] but impassioned, devastated, recreated by these things. You are often terrified, your soul faints within you, you are driven into the wilderness. It is not an easy way. Nature is not a kind mother, and whom she loves she chastens.” “Contrast,” 55. Another book of nature studies she reviewed was overly sentimental, she complained. “It is as unwise to be sentimental towards Nature as it would be to sonnetize in her presence the rosy lips of a cannibal queen.” “Sense and Sensibility,” 79. See also Webb, “Birds, Beasts and Trees,” 71. 29. Webb, Gone to Earth, 171. 30. Webb, 56. 31. Webb, 62. 32. Webb, 65. 33. Webb, 288. 34. Buchan, introduction to Gone to Earth, 7. 35. Webb, Gone to Earth, 16. 36. Webb, 21. 37. Webb, 36. 38. Webb, 21–23. 39. Webb, 23. 40. Webb, 175. 41. Webb, 30. 42. Webb, 31–32. 43. Vessons’s incessant activity shaping nature, rather than allowing it to grow freely, is one sign of Undern’s unsuitability for Hazel. 44. Webb, Gone to Earth, 31–32. 45. Webb, 91. 46. Webb, 77. 47. Webb, 178–79. 48. Webb, 287. 49. Webb, 84. 50. Webb, 192. 51. Webb, 44. 52. Barale, Daughters and Lovers, 2. Cf., e.g., Michael Hallowes in The House in Dormer Forest and Robert Rideout in Seven for a Secret. 53. Webb, Precious Bane, 118. 54. Webb, 119. 55. Webb, 174. 56. Webb, 136. 57. Webb, 119. 58. Webb, 130. 59. Webb, 164. 60. Webb, 105. 61. Webb, 148. Kester’s last name of “Woodseaves” further links him to the attic’s inside/outside space. 62. Webb, 130–31. 63. Webb, 312. 64. Webb, 78. 65. Webb, 136. 66. Webb, 117. Cf. 115–16. 67. Webb, Gone to Earth, 92. 68. Webb, 123. Cf. 132. 69. Webb, 215. 70. Webb, 124–25.

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71. Webb, 159. 72. Webb, 92. 73. Webb, 90–91. 74. Webb, 169. 75. Webb, 97–98. 76. Webb, 23. 77. Webb, 40. 78. Webb, 201. 79. Light, Forever England, 8. See also Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War. 80. Hansen, “Modern Mountains,” 192. 81. Light, Forever England, 8–9. 82. Webb, Gone to Earth, 271.

SIXTEEN Other Ways to Think? The Puzzle of a Medieval Turn

Webb’s endorsement of a liberated spiritual stance for her female heroines in Gone to Earth and Precious Bane makes the apparent reversal of some of her central assertions in her last attempt at a novel puzzling. In the completed portion of Armour Wherein He Trusted, still in progress when she died in 1927, Webb pushed her historical horizon back, not as far as the time of the road-building Romans so admired by Prue, but to the medieval era of the first Crusade. The chronological distance helps her revisit and in some cases invert earlier themes and characterizations, especially as they relate to competing valuations of Christianity and alternative supernatural systems of meaning. Instead of the false accusations of witchcraft against Prue in Precious Bane, for example, Nesta in Armour Wherein He Trusted actually is a half-witch from the magical realm of “Faerie.” Instead of an assumption that claims to magical powers are no more than the silly subterfuges of a false wizard, the reality of fairy magic is accepted as a given. Most striking is the reversal of Webb’s earlier elevation of a primarily female-gendered, spontaneous, and somewhat lusty philosophy of nature-related mysticism independently formulated largely outside the bounds of a Christian ethic. In Armour Wherein He Trusted, Webb seems to be constructing a cautionary tale that on several levels advocates obedience, self-denial, and specifically male control of self and others within the strictures of an at times harshly portrayed Christianity. As we have seen, sympathy for and identification with Christianity, at least as Hazel and Prue indicate a true Christianity should be, was present in other of Webb’s works of fiction and essays, despite Christianity’s often critical representation. In her final narrative of Sir Gilbert, abbot and former 243

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knight, however, the rigorous requirements of living a strictly Christian life take center stage. While Barale and Coles see continuities between the character of Gilbert and Webb’s earlier female protagonists, especially in Gilbert’s experience of mystic visions, neither comments on the difference in the contours of that mysticism. In some respects, the representation of Gilbert—initially devout but conflicted in his dedication to his Christian faith—builds on and intensifies the characterization of Gone to Earth’s Edward. But otherwise, the values Gilbert eventually professes as a dutiful officer of the church represent a marked departure from Edward’s final nihilism. Like Sinclair’s opposition of Mary Olivier with Life and Death of Harriett Frean, Webb may simply have been trying out a reversing variation on an earlier argument. Her presentation of the apparently triumphant Christianity also remains ambivalent in this final text. Yet, even with that ambivalence, the invitation to the reader to identify with Gilbert’s perspective prevails. If, as I have argued, Webb’s depictions of Hazel and Prue expressed her understanding and advocacy of a particular kind of mystic modernity, then Gilbert’s form of traditionalism is an odd retreat. Even though Webb apparently had plotted the story to its conclusion, the fragment’s incompleteness makes any discussion of her intentions in Armour Wherein He Trusted largely speculative, yet speculation is difficult to resist. It is speculative, for example, to assign personal motivation for Webb’s shift in direction, yet easy to imagine that her own sense of mortality gave her urgent cause for the text’s unusual focus. A quasi-invalid for most of her life, Webb suffered especially in her final years from the effects of her Graves’ disease. In the face of her own “philosophic and existential despair,” in Jameson’s terms, was Webb turning to the “imposed coherence of a Christian metaphysic” that Weber maintained was denied modern, disenchanted culture? For Weber, Jameson contends, “it is as though the meaningfulness of the world remained intact only so long as some portion of that world—an imperfectly dominated Nature, a blindly theocratic and hierarchical social tradition—hung beyond human reach.” 1 While in most of her writing Webb seems dedicated to holding on to “an imperfectly dominated Nature,” her final text is unusual in its entertainment of that second element of “a blindly theocratic and hierarchical social tradition.” Webb’s treatment of Christianity in this fragment certainly raises the stakes. Instead of such banal concerns as boring church services, or even the hypocrisy of self-righteous Christians, Gilbert wrestles with the complete claim of Christ on his life, which forces a choice between his love for Nesta and service to the Crusade. His supernatural experiences are not Prue’s indeterminate mystical connection with a deeper reality in nature, but clear visions of the commanding figure of Christ. To an extent, Webb’s choice of a medieval setting dictates the form of spiritual language she could use for exploring a mystic sensibility. But it at least

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seems possible that as Webb neared the end of her life, coming to terms with just what supernatural order actually might hold sway, and how, became a vital task. If the book’s title refers to Gilbert’s choice of where to place his “trust,” Webb could have been engaged in a similar internal debate. Sorting out the mingled influences of Christianity and nature religion that informed her spiritual philosophy, or even just reaffirming their mingled validity, may have been a not entirely conscious but still essential project. Significantly, no hero’s kiss and escape into domestic bliss within a pantheistically understood mystic sensibility resolves this story. Instead, through her starkly conflicted engagement with Christianity, Webb seems to have been wondering just what spiritual circumstances would be sufficient to resolve her own. And yet her exact relation to the theocratic tradition she presents is left unclear. If her explorations of a proper Christian life are an effort to make death meaningful, as Weber might describe it, her fraught representation of that life suggests that something of her earlier uncertainty about Christianity still survived. If so, then Armour Wherein He Trusted is a particularly appropriate text with which to conclude this study of how Webb, Underhill, and Sinclair approached pivotal questions of death, agency, and value. On a more mundane level, the choice of historical setting itself invites speculation. It is of course possible that Webb’s excursion into the eleventh century was prompted by no more than the long fin de siècle’s burgeoning interest in things medieval. 2 The resurgent influence of romanticism, with its inclusion of medieval themes, might also have played a role. The fragment’s core circumstance of a mortal’s troubled love for a fairy echoes, for example, the subject of John Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” 3 Whatever the reason, Webb’s preparations for writing the novel shared in the era’s turn to the exoticism of an earlier age. In order to create language with a medieval flavor she steeped herself in “Piers Plowman and other medieval poetry,” Coles notes, but also reread the mystics, “in particular Dame Julian of Norwich whose influence is seen in the descriptions of Sir Gilbert’s ‘visitations.’” 4 The setting of the Crusades would also have been timely, again whether Webb was conscious of it or not, in its resonance with the “crusading” mentalities that had marked the recently completed war. Mosse describes Germany’s penchant for wrapping the conflict in Christian symbolism as a holy war fought on behalf of a holy nation, but similar constructions shaped the self-perceptions of other combatant nations as well. 5 As mentioned earlier, such associations lingered after the armistice, preserved in a cult of the fallen generated by new military shrines of national worship. In her fragment, Webb signals her strong reaction to current events. While she does not address the violence of war in the stark terms with which she presented Hazel’s Black Huntsman, she still paints the call to join the Crusade darkly. In using a medieval setting to consider the efficacy of magic she mostly denies elsewhere, Webb may also follow Prue’s suggestion that some

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things are “too old to be true.” 6 The “other worldly” aspect created by such a distance in time may have allowed her imaginative space to experiment with the fictional possibilities of considering magic “real.” The medieval setting might also help explain Webb’s atypical approach to Christianity as something other than just the assumed cultural context for her preferred system of nature-based mysticism. The alien experience of a medieval male who is both a knight and a monk, in other words, could have provided Webb opportunity to explore more fully an expression of Christian faith she herself would not naturally adopt. Like Prue, the knight cum abbot Gilbert narrates the story of his youth in old age at the suggestion of an ecclesiastical figure left off-stage, in this case the Pope. Given Webb’s ambivalence about Christianity, this reliance on institutional endorsement of her protagonists’ tales of wonder is perhaps revealing of her own need not to stray too far in the end from a Christian purview. Even more than in Prue’s case, however, age for Gilbert has brought a shift in perspective and perhaps in character. “Nor will a man well stricken in years hear the same music as a lad,” he observes. 7 Gilbert predicts, in fact, that he will be dead within the year, with death both a welcome form of freedom and an anguishing loss. He likens the release of dying to birds being freed, but also relates Christ’s warning that he should treasure his final days: “And He that was and is my friend has said: ‘Look long on the apple-blow, for you will not see it agen. Listen well to the mavis, for come a year I shall have invited thee to my house.’” 8 Coles assumes an understandable engagement with death in the fragment, given Webb’s poor health. “There is a muted urgency, a yearning undertone in the narration, which is Mary Webb’s own voice,” Coles writes. “As she felt her hold on life weakening, her love for the beauty of earth was never greater, but there is now the ache of wistfulness, the knowledge of imminent departure from physical life.” 9 Along with that wistfulness, however, goes an effort at a more expansive vision, one less bound to the pleasures of even the natural world Webb so adored, and at the same time even more attuned to the transcendence she found there. Yet another possible reading of her choice to write about the medieval period is as a way to obscure distinctions of modern and traditional altogether, to overcome the distance of “now” and “then,” as Gilbert puts it, with an even more explicit turn to the eternal. The fragment might in that case be another approach to the removal from time Prue experiences in her attic. Riding home, happy in his betrothal to Nesta, Gilbert muses on the tension Webb might also have felt between the charm or distress of the fading moment, and the hopeful comfort of something more enduring: What thought had I, with a good horse under him, gleeful and healthful in that pleasant Now, so long gone by? And how strange a thing it is that we feel in this Now, when it is pleasant, like a creature in a ball of

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crystal, safe housed and shut away. But when it is grievous, we say, “The bubble Now is but water.” Yet if we think right, there is no Now or Then, no wall of glass or of water, no hour shut away, but all, whether sad or merry, spent in Eternity, there lapsing, there renewed. 10

The individual moments of Now may point to eternal realities, but still are fleeting, as is life. As Webb sensed herself, Gilbert is cautioned in a dream that he must “hasten” to complete his story in the time he has remaining.” 11 Perhaps because it was difficult for Webb to write, hastening or not, Barale dismisses the fragment of Armour Wherein He Trusted as Webb’s “weakest novel,” calling it a failed repetition of ideas better presented elsewhere. 12 On Webb’s return to London from her customary summer in Shropshire in 1927, she attempted to destroy the manuscript: “Too weak to tear it, though she initially tried, she threw it into the fire. For better or worse, Henry rescued it; Coles conjectures that she felt relief that it had been saved, but I am not so certain.” 13 Coles indeed calls Armour Wherein He Trusted Webb’s “most intriguing” novel, and feels the medieval setting particularly fitting for Webb’s “recurrent and timeless themes, more sharply drawn . . . than in any of her other novels except perhaps Gone to Earth.” 14 Exploring enduring questions of “love and carnality” as well as betrayal, Coles maintains, Webb had turned again to what Weber might call a search for appropriate value, and what Coles calls “the striving of an individual to find, and be true to, his own soul.” If Gilbert is in any way a masculine Prue, as Barale claims, Coles appreciates Webb’s ability to explore her own ideas while inhabiting the medieval male consciousness of a character who is “convincing as a sensual young knight, spontaneous in his behaviour and emotional responses, tortured in his thoughts and love for Nesta; and equally credible as a son, in his relationships at [his family’s castle] Polrebec with his father and mother.” 15 Given the unfamiliar terrain of language and custom, Webb’s ability to sketch distinct and engaging characters within the limited bounds of the fragment is admirable. Even though Webb’s medieval characters at times sound indistinguishable from her early nineteenth-century farmers in using such language as “liefer” and “new-fangled,” Martin Armstrong complains that “the theme, the period, and the antique style” that Webb chooses “seriously limit the rich and profound sense of the country which gives to all her other books their unforgettable atmosphere.” 16 Still he finds that with a bit of truncation the fragment is complete and satisfying as a “perfectly rounded tale.” 17 Ignoring, like Coles and Barale, the new treatment of Christianity, Martin Armstrong describes the shift in Armour Wherein He Trusted as primarily one of style, calling it a “brief excursion into a narrower and more self-conscious form.” 18 Unlike Webb’s usual broad canvas, he suggests, her last novel “is a carefully wrought tapestry, its designs highly artificial and full of calligraphic detail.”

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Whatever the lack of critical consensus on the quality of the work, among the numerous reasons to wish that Webb had finished her final novel is curiosity about the nuances she might have adopted in resolving the central spiritual conflict. Webb goes beyond even Gone to Earth in positing an opposition between a demanding Christianity that motivates the Crusades, and pagan forces, this time not just of nature but of the magical realm of Faerie. The potential for life-sustaining, saving love that is romantic yet spiritual, played out through Gilbert and Nesta’s relationship, seems a particular point of contention between these two domains. With Gilbert’s final identification as an abbot, and his apparent satisfaction at having made a great but unspecified sacrifice involving Nesta, Christianity seems to have won out in the end. Given the often contradictory representation of both Christianity and Faerie within the fragment, however, readers are left to wonder just what complexities Webb may have planned in order to arrive at that conclusion. Where Webb’s earlier female characters found themselves the unfair targets of Christian judgment, moreover, in Armour Wherein He Trusted such judgments seem to be allowed some credence. As a daughter of Faerie, Nesta is described by a monk as lacking a soul, though with the potential to be a “great angel” if she acquires one. 19 And in a vision of Christ warning him not to marry Nesta, Gilbert is told that “her folk are not my folk. Her soul was all pied and streaked with evil while yet she was a poor babe in cradle.” A “great ransom,” namely Gilbert himself, must be paid to redeem her, and apparently, through his sacrifice, is paid. 20 The cost of obeying Christ’s directive, however, is high—Gilbert mentions the irksome fact that whatever he did benefited his rival Ranulf Jorwerth, perhaps even permitting Jorwerth to win Nesta. At the same time, the sacrifice seems to have accomplished Nesta’s salvation. And, despite withdrawing into celibacy, the aging Gilbert still treasures his love and looks forward to death as a promised reunion with Nesta in heaven. This specifically Christian context for the goal of fulfilling love that is so central to Webb’s other works is curious. The qualities of Nesta that seem most outside the pale of Gilbert’s Christian philosophy—her sensuality, affinity with nature, and engagement with an alternative supernaturalism—are the qualities most strongly associated with Hazel’s earthiness, for example. Similarly, though Gilbert and Nesta’s early married life is marked with the domestic pleasure Prue found in a life with Kester, and Hazel was approaching with Edward, ultimately that pleasure must be postponed until heaven. 21 As Christ tells Gilbert in calling him to be a Crusader, “If you see her not afore, you will see her in heaven-town, coiffed and wimpled by my own mother. But thou canst not have her now.” 22 It may be that this difficulty in resolving—even for her own mind—the true context for a privileged affection contributed to Webb’s unhappiness with the work. It is also tempting to surmise that her grow-

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ing dismay over her husband’s dwindling affections and blatant infidelity helped shape a perspective no longer able to write easily of the earthly accomplishment of connubial happiness. Henry was openly involved with a young student he brought to stay with him and Mary in Shropshire. Coles notes that at the time Webb attempted to destroy the manuscript, “Henry’s callous attitude towards her was observed by people at Hampstead, including their immediate neighbour Ethelbert White, who said that he was ‘witness to a tragedy.’” 23 Within the tension established before the fragment breaks off, the possibility for the satisfaction of love either within or apart from Christianity is dubious. On the one hand, the call of Christian service that pulls Gilbert away from his happy marriage to Nesta is a grim affair. On the other hand, despite their true enjoyment of each other before the Crusade’s stark intrusion, Nesta threatens from the beginning to be a problematic partner. While within the fragment Nesta displays no extraordinary powers, she is clearly intended to be seen as different from Gilbert in unsettling ways. Her mother, she reports, is a descendant of Merlin, and she herself is of elf-lineage from “faery ground.” 24 Nesta’s ululation as Gilbert rides home with her after the wedding—and the answering call from “deep in the forest”—are the first of several references to witch-like behavior. 25 During Gilbert’s absence at the Crusade, Nesta steals away “and returns in her own good time,” Gilbert’s mother writes. “[Family servant] Gudrun says there is some necromancy in it and that when she returns there is a still green light about her and a taint of wizardry. But I know not, she seemeth a simple enough creature, loving to sing and dance and play ball in the court and go hawking when they father can a while to take her.” Even so, she adds, “She hath brought back . . . a little yellow witchwoman to be her tiring-maid. She is most strange, and I am feared of her.” 26 At home in the garden of Gilbert’s castle, Gilbert observes that “Nesta bloomed in the shadow, white, rare, transparent as a shell. She spoke as birds speak. When she laughed I thought the tall lilies by the wall had given tongue. As for her thoughts, they were simple, childish and clear, like flowers you see through.” But at times, “like the licking of a litel flame, would come a touch of craft, like a lizard in the crevices. Then I was ill at ease. But soon it passed and I was happy once more.” 27 Gilbert is boorishly lustful, and Nesta sensually desirable, yet her fairy blood makes her shun sexual contact, even though, in a possible revisiting of the Hazel–Reddin scenario, her flirtation with Jorwerth in Gilbert’s absence is obviously brewing trouble as the fragment breaks off. 28 Perhaps as an expression of her hybrid nature as “half-witch,” as Hazel is the daughter of a gypsy mother, and so “half-gypsy,” her own desires are conflicted as she is both drawn to Gilbert and cognizant of the cost. Whatever her predilections, Nesta’s beauty makes her dangerous, Gilbert claims. Describing how her clothing emphasized her figure, Gilbert adds that though God “tempts all women,” God “has snares for such as Helen

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of Troy Town which he will not waste on many. And Nesta was of Helen’s breed.” 29 Something of Prue’s, but especially of Hazel’s identification with nature underlies Nesta’s threat: “I suppose she drave more men to madness and damnation than any woman in our country this many a year. Yet not Nesta only, but the wild earth of which she was made, red rock and roaring waters, the desires of many hearts a long while dead, bright wine in foaming cups, and blood precious as wine, and fierce hurting kisses and the influences of the stars.” Like Hazel, therefore, Nesta is attractive to a world in which she does not belong, different in part because of her strong affinity to natural forces. Whereas Webb negotiates Hazel’s brief transition into a more socially acceptable engagement with married love that still retains vestiges of her connection with nature, Nesta’s identity with nature is presented as ultimately dangerous and off-putting, perhaps costing her life. From a feminist perspective, Webb might be accused of undercutting her celebration of Hazel’s uniqueness, and turning her endorsement of social deviance into another cautionary tale, when she destroys Hazel at the end of Gone to Earth. But Webb’s primary targets are the bourgeois society that is unable to accommodate Hazel’s free spirit, as well as the destructive forces associated with the war that make her so vulnerable. With Nesta’s fate, Webb’s position is harder to determine, especially since the fragment does not describe the circumstances of her death. The fragment leaves the distinct impression, however, that Webb is shaping a story that will place significant blame on Nesta herself for some of the same characteristics that made Hazel most attractive. Webb’s presentation of Christianity, which ranges from appealing to frightening, reveals some of the “betweenness” of Webb’s own sense of Christianity’s value. A brief reference to a story about a huntsman’s pious decision to spare a stag that was marked with a cross on its forehead associates Christianity with pity for natural creatures and the helpless. 30 The monk who writes out the words Gilbert wants engraved on a ring for Nesta suggests maternal connotations for Christ’s call as his eyes follow Gilbert, “mocking kindly, as a mother mocks her climbing babe, so unruly, so high-stomached, going here, going there—but see, all the while the mother’s arms are about him.” 31 And Gilbert himself, from his aged perspective as abbot, refers frequently to Christ as “my Friend,” though a friend who provides much-needed discipline. Christ’s parental patience in correcting wayward followers, in Gilbert’s description, shows wise restraint in letting those followers learn from the cost of their own mistakes. 32 And even the grim and stingy Crusade leader Peter Hermit is depicted as possessing charismatic power and influence as he draws a great following from all walks of life. 33 In other contexts, Webb’s image of Christ is associated with the even more distressing figure of Peter’s emissary, who summons Gilbert to the Crusades. The emissary’s call to obey Christ is incompatible with Gil-

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bert’s love for Nesta, but also with the domestic contentment of the family castle. While the castle even in winter “seemed a place whose peace only the last trumpet, pealing from the tower of heaven, could break,” the stranger who collapses at the door disrupts it by his presence and his demand that Gilbert leave with him. 34 “His caverns of eyne were hollow, and his voice as he now uplifted it was hollow also, and rolled around the silent place like lost winds blowing from the crypts of empty night where yet God has created nothing. There was, as it were, no yea in him. His word was a nay-word. His rule was denial.” 35 Prue finds the world a book of secret messages about God’s intent and Gideon sees it as a source of revenue, but as Gilbert looks into the emissary’s eyes, “it seemed to me that he had looked on all the world and found it waste and wilderness.” 36 The responsibilities Gilbert carries toward Nesta or his aging parents are nothing to his greater responsibility to serve Christ, the emissary asserts. In response, Gilbert’s father complains, “The ways of God be past finding out, and indeed it seemeth at times as if He was our chief ill-wisher.” 37 Gilbert’s decision to obey the emissary’s summons, though ostensibly a decision to fulfill Christian duty, is likewise an unremittingly sad affair, and extends the direness of the overlapping portrayals of the emissary and Christ: So, turning anywhere to save me from his eyes, that caught me and lured me into a spell of terror, I looked toward the Christus on the wall. And behold, a dreadful marvel! For even as I looked, the image shuddered and two tears rolled down the face, and He did bat His eyes at me. And when I saw the Lord God so shuddering and weeping upon our wall, and when, in the manner of some poor babe denied of some sweetmeat of some revel, He did so bat His eyes and droop His head, I knew that I must go, and my heart turned in my side and my soul uttered a cry, and I forgot myself, falling on darkness. 38

With Christ likened to an unhappy and manipulative child, the request for Gilbert’s services becomes a child’s whim, as in the morning light “the Christus on the rood wept no more, nor batted His eyes, but seemed more at ease, satisfied as a child at some promise long withheld but at last given.” Yet it is a whim pursued by God operating as a “chess-player” who, stretching out a hand “for a pawn,” leaves Gilbert “without will or wish.” 39 Yearning for home during seven years in the Crusade, Gilbert feels powerless as “a dumb beast driven hither and thither.” This same issue of inescapable duty emerges even when Gilbert sought out the monk for help with Nesta’s ring: “It irked me to meet thus again with God, for I was willing to avoid his path. I was as a man who has not paid his tithe, and seeing the tithe man coming down the ride of the woods he will turn aside and go by a roundabout way. Yet in the end he mun pay his tithe.” 40

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Christ’s call is set in particular opposition to sexual desire in Gilbert’s meeting with the monk, highlighting the conflict between duty to Christ and romance, while revealing young Gilbert’s immature nature: “‘You came, little son, to offer thee to God?’” the monk asks. “‘No, father,’ I answered roughly, ‘but to ask of thee a posy for a ring. And a posy for a ring I will have,’ I shouted, stamping about the room like an unbroken colt.” 41 The dark imagery of the crucified Christ that colors the emissary’s visit also impinges on the joy of Gilbert and Nesta’s wedding, as the interior of the chapel contrasts sharply with the bustle of life outside. Inside, “upon the dark wooden rood the Christus, cunningly carven out of wood, did writhe in pain and sweat big drops most dreadful to see. So sharp the thorn, so sharp the nail! Woe’s me, but I could smell the vinegar reeking upon the sponge, and the blood mingling with the heavy sweat. . . . I shut my eyne, and so got through in some fashion.” 42 As soon as the service concludes, though, Gilbert seizes Nesta and rushes out, where “there was life and light and a trembling of young leaves, chirping of fledglings, all the servants and riding-tenants gathered to give us joy, children and dogs, horses neighing, beggars giving blessings for alms, maidens strawing flowers, and the sumpter mules, laden with Nesta’s apparel and jewels from Tochswilla, squealing and humping their hindquarters as mules will.” As though he “clomb from the cave of the roodtree,” Gilbert literally grabs for the antidote of sensuality, carrying Nesta into the forest where “I set a hand on either breast, for this I had hungered to do so long.” 43 Yet, in an echo of Reddin’s assault on Hazel, that sensuality is undercut by Gilbert’s self-described descent into violent “carnality,” set again in opposition to Christianity by linking the suffering Nesta and her outspread arms to Christ: Then she wanned more and more, and closed her eyne fast, and the sweat stood upon her face and the tears mingled with it. Yet could I not leave moulding and crushing of her breasts for the joy and content of it. I could see the black bruises beneath the thin stuff, but cared not, laughing out in triumph. Then, as she lolled so wanly on the tree, arms out, head hanging, all dabbled in tears and sweat, it was if the Crucified hung there. 44

At the same time, Webb suggests some positive associations between Christianity and Gilbert’s love, as in the monk’s approving appraisal of the text of his posy. “[I]f you are come to the stair ‘I love thee,’ you be not far from the topmost rung of the ladder,” the monk tells him. In that “little posy,” he adds, “you seize the whole world and put it into the small roundness of your ring.” 45 Curiously, neither Gilbert’s penchant for violence nor Nesta’s discomfort with sex is carried further in later presentations of their relationship. Gilbert himself assesses his rough behavior as caused by the “wiles” of Satan, who “catches our feet with wrathes of love and lust, and tumbles us in all our youthful pride.” 46 He

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is distressed when Lady Powis beats Nesta, in contrast to the villain Jorwerth who “would lief have beat her himself, for already he lusted after her.” 47 Beyond this association of lust with violence, Jorwerth also compares negatively with Gilbert’s efforts at abstemiousness by crudely joking about asserting the right of a Lord to first bed Nesta as newly married bride. 48 Holiness, meanwhile, is associated with chastity and abstinence, as when Gilbert’s later happiness is contrasted with carnal desire. 49 Earlier, Gilbert envies a bottle of Christ’s tears he gave Nesta to wear because of “how close it must be pressed between those white round breasts.” But against even this temptation to simply “rest where the little bottle was,” Gilbert states, “Christ kept me.” 50 Similarly, Christ “would touch me on the shoulder when I leaned over the drawbridge to jest with the scullion wenches washing themselves in the moat, and He would say, inside my heart, ‘Not that way, boy. No day-spring is there.’” 51 Beside the contrast set up with carnality, however, Gilbert’s positive description of the state of serenity he has achieved through his self-denial—his sense of being in a “quiet land where no storm comes”—would be a significant indicator of Webb’s own hope, whether she expected to find that serenity through a Gilbert-like Christian devotion or elsewhere. 52 In whatever case, given Webb’s life-long inclinations, and despite the complicating elements of Nesta’s characterization, presumably something of the natural world would play a part. Despite Martin Armstrong’s observation that the narrative is not situated in a rural setting, the natural world is still present, as the text exhibits Webb’s perennial technique of using natural surroundings to illuminate both her characters and the supernatural frameworks in which she places them. With her hybrid nature, Nesta introduces a theme of border spaces as points of meeting or conjunction. As Nesta explains to Jorwerth, who is an Escheator, the faery land from which she comes must escape his excises since it “lies betwixt Salop and Radnor. It lies also between life and death. It is betwixt and between all things.” 53 Coles points out that Nesta contributes significantly to the story’s focus on “a symbolical borderland between the spiritual and physical values by which [Gilbert] is divided, and between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the mysterious.” 54 Webb described her attraction to Sinclair’s writing as based, in part, on admiration of Sinclair’s ability to also write of places as though “they are in the Border Country that merges into the Beyond.” 55 Her own creation, the medieval geography through which Gilbert rides and has his visions, seems particularly porous in revealing the proximity of spiritual realities. The association of nature, Webb’s primary indicator of positive value, with both Christianity and fairy power, however, further confuses any definitive reading of their relative merits. At first, Webb repeats her customary identification of nature as a locus of enchantment as the young knight Gilbert hears “the voices of faeries,

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lively and mocking and beguiling” from the forest as he rides. 56 Gilbert’s love at first sight for Nesta within a forest grove is itself depicted as enchantment: “‘It is a wichen-house,’ I said. ‘I shall be put in a spell’” 57 Webb continues to associate Nesta, and thereby fairyland, with nature, as her laugh is “high and brisk, yet with a sound of rain going in the trees,” and her face, “that was pointed like one of the Small People’s faces, seemed even more pointed, like some forest creature—a scurrel, say, or a fox-babe or a vole.” 58 Nature also plays a role in love as May echoes Gilbert’s mood on his ride home after his betrothal, an association set in contrast to Christianity: “And methinks, times, it is great peace to turn away from all this lust of loveliness to the chilly call of winter, where is nothing to keep our thoughts back from Him.” 59 In Gilbert’s vision of Peter Hermit calling his followers, Webb similarly sets the starkness of Christian service against the homely associations of nature by juxtaposing images of wood animals in their dens with the biblical reference to the Son of Man’s lack of a home. 60 The Christian call, in fact, seems to function to upset nature: “God be with all of us poor men whom He leads in ways undreamed, making darkness for day, winter for spring, silence for music, till all bemused and dumbfoundered we fall upon our knees, crying, ‘Where bin my Father?’” 61 At the same time, the grove in which Gilbert first sees Nesta is also marked by a Christian aura amid oaks that he thinks seem to be remembering Christ’s birth, so that “I was glad I was dressed in my best green coat and my hat with a grey goose feather, for it was as if I went to the Easter Supper.” 62 In his resistance to Christ’s call, in fact, Gilbert later finds the strength of the grove’s Christian aura unsettling: “So being but just come into the glory and heyday of the world since I saw Nesta, I was lief to keep it and I was feared of the solemn grove where all was awhispering—‘Christus natus est.’” 63 But where Gilbert originally expected a Christian altar he had found Nesta ensconced as though in a shrine, “a small bower woven of wattles and decked out with bunches of early flowers—marigolds and the flowers of young hyacinthus, and the day’s eye. Small, nimble birds made clawmarks in the soft earth about it, and the merles sang as if none but faeries ever came there.” 64 The grove, therefore, becomes a place of mingled influence recognized as “holy” by Nesta as well, and containing both “Christ-thorn and the sparse gold of the fading mistletoe.” 65 In a linking similar to Underhill’s association of the Madonna with the Goddess of Nature in The Gray World, Gilbert also sees the Virgin Mary in Nesta, especially as depicted in art: “So a man coming on a dark night to a church with a bright painted window such as they have in Rome, seeing the Mother of God done in lovely blues and raddles, would say ‘Ah me! when was the Flower of the West in holy Italy?’” 66 As the site of Gilbert and Nesta’s betrothal, the grove serves as the point of formal joining of their opposing worlds of Christianity and fairy, marked again with mention of mistletoe and Christ-thorn, and with

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a direct reference to the conflict between Nesta’s elfish nature and Christianity: “‘Why, by your looks, you might be an elf maid, feared of all Christian things!’ I cried. ‘And so it is,’ she answered solemn. ‘For I come from elf housen, from the land of Betwixt-and-Between.’” 67 The interweaving of Gilbert’s demanding world of Christian calling with Nesta’s ties to fairy magic highlights once again Webb’s recurring issues of will and choice, as the decision to pursue their love probes again the muddied realm of agency. In exerting their “wills” by marrying, the two may be “wilful” in denying the call of Christ (on Gilbert’s part) and the indicators of Nesta’s incompatible nature (on Nesta’s part). It is possible, in fact, to read less than noble influences for that choice, as Webb intimates economic motivation similar to the desire for the trappings of middle-class life that attracted Hazel to marriage. Gilbert entices Nesta with his description of his castle garden, prompting her to include love for “thy litel grey garden” in the same breath as love for him, just as she links love for the ring he offers “and thee.” 68 She is also motivated by a desire to escape her circumstance as a lady-in-waiting—“I’ll put no more stitches in for cross mistresses, a-pricking of my finger, and the tears falling”—and by anticipation of dressing up for the wedding: “I shall shine so!” 69 Yet the force of their emotional connection simultaneously reveals a limit to their ability to do otherwise. Much like Prue’s love of Kester at first sight, Gilbert is driven by instant desire as Nesta peeks out of her bower: “[B]ehold! It was my love. I knew it was my love, though I had never seen her afore, and I was bewildered, standing like an oaf, looking upon her under the leaves.” 70 Gilbert uses the same language to describe being in love as he had of being led like a beast by God’s will, bowing his head “as a beast before the butcher” on first seeing Nesta, despite his misgivings. 71 As in Precious Bane, the influence of personal character in determining agency likewise suggests a limit to the ability to act differently. In an echo of Weber, Jorwerth’s unsavory nature, for example, is established by what “devil he lodged,” Gilbert explains. “I judged him not an ill man, but not a good man neither. God was not there, so into the house of his soul any strayed devil limping home to hell might lodge for as long as it might please him.” 72 Similarly, like Gideon, Gilbert inherits his impetuous “suddenness” from his father, while Nesta “always she loved ease.” 73 But some form of extra-human agency is also operative, though whether it is best considered Christian or a force of Faerie, or both or neither, is left unclear. More than in her other texts, however, Webb is at least willing to suggest that the external force might specifically be God’s will. When Nesta admits her fear that in accepting Gilbert’s bottle of Christ’s tears she might end up a nun, he replies, “It is as God wills, what you are. . . . We are His that made us. We follow His sweet piping up hill and down the cwms.” 74 Gilbert’s visions of Christ calling him to service in the Crusade, of course, present a dramatic and unmistakable commu-

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nication of divine direction, with ultimate happiness dependent on responding obediently. At the same time, paradoxically, Webb indicates that individual responsibility follows individual choice, despite the influences of character or divine will. Gilbert manages for a time to resist God’s call and the warning not to marry Nesta, despite the professed inevitability of God’s will prevailing. Webb’s opening paragraph also transposes to her medieval setting the tension between the need to assert individual agency (to know one’s own soul, in Coles’s terms) and accepted social assumptions that she had explored elsewhere. Not unexpectedly for Webb, the metaphoric context is again a natural setting—a forest, in which there are “many voices, and no man riding under the leaves hears the same voice as his companion. For they are diverse as the steep winding paths up into Heaven-Town, to which no man can come by any other way than that his own torch shows him.” 75 Coming full circle, agency is thus set even in this text within the contested terrain of enchantment. It is both a matter of allegiance with a properly understood supernatural influence, and a matter of self-definition and personal choice in how to respond. CONCLUSION With Prue, Webb presented perhaps her most fully developed characterization of a supernaturally perceptive individual in tune with a nondoctrinal mysticism such as we find described by Underhill and Sinclair. With Hazel, she explored a slightly different, though even more primal sensitivity to nature’s inexplicable energy. A powerful evocation of the traditional past, Webb’s stories of these two women’s unlikely or thwarted loves could still incorporate those varied mysticisms within a modern form of enlightened engagement with the world. Without admitting the efficacy of what Underhill would call the willed force of magic, and similarly critical of the shortcomings of a small-minded Christianity, Webb endorses a more expansive spiritual connection with an orderproviding supernatural force that combined elements of both. Weber would call such a move illegitimate, but through Hazel’s and Prue’s sensitivity to this supernatural element, Webb sought to rationalize or make sense of the world, in Weber’s terms, by pointing toward a modern system of meaning based on values of compassion, affinity with nature, and, if not scientific rationality, then at least an informed freedom from ignorant superstition. In demonstrating their cooperative relationship with the natural world and their sensitivity to the suffering of others, Hazel and Prue are contrasted with negative portrayals of modernity in the form of male assertions of power and economic exploitation. Although not an approach to rationalization that Weber would admit as modern, therefore, Webb offered her mystic character-

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izations as models for what she asserted was a modern womanhood capable of both strength and passion. In both these novels, it is true, unquestioned privileging of heterosexual love as the desired end for these independent females curtails the liberating scope of Webb’s vision. Hazel’s happiness would lie in consummated marriage to Edward, while Prue is rewarded with the special love of an exceptional man. For all that she elevates the traditional model of domestic marriage, however, Webb relinquishes Hazel’s natural independence reluctantly, and describes Kester’s choice of Prue as an affirmation of her particular qualities as a self-possessed and resourceful woman. The novels’ female protagonists are clearly modern “agents,” in other words, or at least moving toward being so. Webb’s surprising reversal of key elements of this construction in Armour Wherein He Trusted raises intriguing questions about her uncompleted work. Reflective of the author’s own preoccupations with her own mortality, the text’s grim portrayal of the demanding call of Christian discipleship expresses Webb’s continued ambivalence about the institutional structure she seemed drawn to reconsider at the end of her life. Wrestling even then with competing modes of spiritual self-definition, she brought her engagement with mystic perception and individual autonomy within the narrative borders of a male worldview. If not representative of her work as a whole, therefore, her final novel was still typical in its foregrounding of agency and enchantment. It continued to revolve around questions of how to properly be in the world, and what necessary role mysticism might play in that “being.” Like Underhill and Sinclair, therefore, Webb was responding to her particular moment of modernity as both problem and opportunity by investing her characters with something that might be called an “enlightened spirituality.” This spirituality was generic, universal, and intuitive; it developed in dialogue with rather than allegiance to institutional religion, and it reverberated with a modern romantic rebellion. Such spirituality was, in many ways, as much modernity’s gift as it was its antidote. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Jameson, “Vanishing Mediator,” 10. See Coles, Mary Webb, 135. Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Norton Anthology, 658–59. Coles, Mary Webb, 137. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 34–35. Webb, Precious Bane, 23. Webb, Armour, 19–20. Webb, 38–39. Coles, Mary Webb, 137. Webb, Armour, 75–76. Webb, 38. Barale, Daughters and Lovers, 142.

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13. Barale, 147. 14. Coles, Mary Webb, 139, 135. 15. Coles, 137. Barale, Daughters and Lovers, 142. 16. See, e.g., Webb, Armour, 68. M. Armstrong, introduction to Armour, 12. 17. He suggests ending the fragment with Gilbert’s departure to join the Crusade. M. Armstrong, introduction to Armour, 11. 18. M. Armstrong, 13. 19. Webb, Armour, 63. 20. Webb, 86–87. 21. Webb, 40. 22. Webb, 85. 23. Coles, Mary Webb, 146. 24. Webb, Armour, 32, 47. 25. Webb, 98. 26. Webb, 131. 27. Webb, 101. 28. Webb, 68. 29. Webb, 29. 30. Webb, 56–57. Though not identified, this is the legend of St. Hubert, which also plays a role in Underhill’s The Lost Word. 31. Webb, 64. 32. Webb, 26–28. 33. Webb, 58–69, 128–29. 34. Webb, 116–18. 35. Webb, 120. 36. Webb, 123. 37. Webb, 122. 38. Webb, 123–24. 39. Webb, 126. 40. Webb, 61. 41. Webb, 62. 42. Webb, 94–95. 43. Webb, 95–96. 44. Webb, 96. 45. Webb, 62. 46. Webb, 97. 47. Webb, 52–53. 48. Webb, 73. 49. Webb, 99. 50. Webb, 34. 51. Webb, 58. 52. Webb, 100. 53. Webb, 47. 54. Coles, Mary Webb, 138. 55. Webb, “Knowest Thou the Land?” 62. 56. Webb, 20. 57. Webb, 22. 58. Webb, 23. 59. Webb, 78. 60. Webb, 58–59. 61. Webb, 84. 62. Webb, 21–22. 63. Webb, 57. 64. Webb, 22. 65. Webb, 56. 66. Webb, 24.

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67. Webb, 67. 68. Webb, 70. The fragment breaks off as it raises the issue of mothers-in-law and treasured objects with a sentiment opposite that expressed in Gone to Earth. Here, Webb sympathetically renders the perspective of a mother-in-law concerned about her daughter-in-law’s lack of consideration for precious objects. Where Hazel is appropriately irreverent in using Edward’s Communion bag to gather mushrooms, Nesta is inappropriately irreverent in using the “Roman goblet” and “other treasures and relics” of the family to entertain Jorwerth and his company. Webb, 132. 69. Webb, 70. 70. Webb, 22. 71. Webb, 30. 72. Webb, 43. 73. Webb, 26, 34. 74. Webb, 34. 75. Webb, 19.

Conclusion Connections and Crossings

A time of crisis and contradiction, the modern moment in which Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb wrote was as infused with promise as it was with trauma. As the social influence of Christian institutions continued to ebb, or at least was redefined, in the face of new pluralism and new challenges from rival intellectual systems, the breathtaking pace of technological advances strengthened claims for scientific rationalism. At the same time, those technological marvels seemed to extend science’s scope deep into the realms of the irrational. Emerging theories of psychoanalysis in particular promised to explain subterranean influences of the human psyche, while such paranormal phenomena as telepathy and communication with the dead seemed appropriate subjects for scientific examination. While some, like Weber, argued that there was, as never before, the possibility of a rational explanation for everything, the marvelous aspect of so many technological advances, combined with the esoteric terrain being probed, obscured as much as delineated the boundary between science and the supernatural. In their own contributions to this complex blurring, Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb refused to accept a divorce between modern rationalism and the possibility of a transcendent reality. They pursued their understandings of mystic perception by drawing on contemporary developments in psychological experimentation, scientific exploration of expanded consciousness, and the warrants of individually authenticated experience. Their particular formulations of New Mysticism were efforts to “make sense” of the world, in Weber’s terms, by exploring suprarational epistemologies within a calculating age’s frame of reference. Their mysticisms, in other words, both asserted the continued relevance of the incalculable supposedly banished by scientific method, and adopted the premises of scientific method itself. For all that it might suggest a recalcitrant anti-modern turn to the anti-empirical, therefore, mysticism was for them a bridging or encompassing orientation that could hold the butter and margarine of a changing world together. All three authors constructed their mysticisms around conceptions of a life force that helped them define mystic sensibility in dynamic terms reflecting their era’s transformative spirit of progress. To exercise agency as mystics was to participate in the invigorating force that propelled their 261

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evolving world on multiple levels. Underhill’s disciplined self-becoming to reach the “unitive state,” Sinclair’s active and efficacious “willing,” and Webb’s alliance with fecund nature all joined them with an intuitively experienced energy that could manifest as specifically as libido and as generally as modernity’s march toward new invention. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, orienting oneself properly with the supernatural “other” was a way to maintain a certain separation, or at least balance and perspective, amidst force fields of social, historical, and intellectual influences. Personal agency, in other words, could be engendered by mystical perceptiveness and exercised as a form of self-defining resistance against cultural forces that would otherwise undercut autonomy. Moreover, agency developed as part of a process of discovery that sought ever-better understanding of an appropriate partnership with what was mystically perceived. For Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb, mystic perception might be approached through the evidence of personal experience, but it was still perception of something pre-existent and absolute. As a result, their described allegiances with their “greater reality” represented a subtle balance—empowering and liberating, but also determining and defining. Mystical relationship with this broader reality thus intersected with, shaped, and ultimately underscored the importance of their projects of individual identity-formation. Directly experiencing the boundless other, the protagonists of their fiction are usually denied reliance on the prescribed formulas of either social or religious institutions, and so find themselves tasked with self-invention. The efforts of all three authors to establish independent standards that might describe both acceptable social conduct and acceptable pursuits of mysticism indicate the extent to which they recognized a challenge in the wide-open horizons they otherwise welcomed. As comforting boundaries and established norms fell victim to the exciting but unsettling spirit of infinite potentiality, Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb used their fiction to seek guiding principles of action and behavior that would endorse “this” rather than “that” path through the landscapes of cultural change. In their search for a modern mystical orthodoxy that could map a new course through the plethora of spiritual possibilities, the three gave voice to their age’s intermingled impulses for revolution and reassurance. Chroniclers of the individual human spirit, they became chroniclers of a Zeitgeist. That Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb diverged even as they overlapped in their approaches reveals their participation in an increasingly diffuse understanding of spiritual orientation that marked their era and continues today. Strongly situated in their particular moment of modernity as they were, the three authors can seem surprisingly contemporary to twenty-first-century readers still engaged with elements of the modern life they confronted. While expectations of telecommunications have changed vastly since the early incorporation of the telegraph and tele-

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phone, differences in the cultural implications of heightened connectivity remain more a matter of degree than of type. The ubiquity of cell phones, as just one example, knits the world together with a new (yet old) immediacy that shows evidence of the same technological magic and blurring of personal boundaries our authors encountered. In more somber aspects, they might also recognize the common uneasiness over the daily potential for random, catastrophic occurrences, accustomed as they were to the possibility that something dramatic and dire could happen at any moment. The questions of empowerment and agency related to gender that they addressed must be reformulated in light of new understanding of gender’s diversity, but certainly have not disappeared. In the “now” of the twenty-first century, the terms, aspirations, and stakes of their mystic responses to modernity may be markedly relevant. If nothing else, there will always be a need to ask their overarching question about what values are valid to pursue in the context of unsettling change. The strongest connection, however, may lie in the continued pursuit of self-generated spiritual systems outside the bounds of traditional religious practice, and, in the West, specifically outside the bounds of Christianity. Christopher Partridge’s two-volume study, The Re-enchantment of the West, acknowledges the validity of secularization theories that see the roles of traditional religions diminishing. The process is far from universal, as numbers of adherents to such historical faiths as Christianity continue to grow in such regions as sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. 1 Still, Partridge asserts, secularization’s basic assumptions of Christianity’s decline, especially in Europe, “cannot seriously be questioned.” A 2015 Pew Research Center survey identified a similar decline in Americans identifying as Christian over the preceding decade, even though the proportion of Christians in the United States remains high. 2 Partridge’s main claim, however, is that even in such European settings as the United Kingdom, a supposedly secularized or secularizing landscape is infused with spiritual experimentation that elevates non-institutional, self-authenticating approaches to apprehending a greater reality. Through a “confluence of secularization and sacralization,” fed by popular culture, he maintains, other “[s]piritualities are emerging that are not only quite different from the dying forms of religion, but are often defined over against them, and are articulated in ways that do not carry the baggage of traditional religion.” 3 His term for this “essentially non-Christian religio-cultural” or “occult ‘milieu’” is “occulture,” by which he means the “vast spectrum of beliefs and practices sourced by Eastern spirituality, Paganism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, alternative science and medicine, popular psychology, and a range of beliefs emanating from the paranormal.” As a reflection of the fluidity of categories, in which even boundaries between Partridge’s occulture and traditional religious identities blur, Pew Research in 2018 presented a new typology of religious nomenclature that divides both traditional and non-traditional identities

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across a range of seven groups from highly religious to non-religious. 4 While particular identities may be strongly represented within particular typologies, “none of the typology groups is religiously uniform, and every major religious tradition is represented within multiple typology groups.” Although Partridge claims that alternative spiritualities are flourishing in part because they are perceived as different, in many ways the new air of experimentation hearkens back to spiritual terrain negotiated by Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb. The situation, Partridge notes, “may be less one of secularization and more one of the relocation of religion,” an apt description of their experience as well. 5 While the reduction in the number of Americans who identify with a specific religious tradition has been offset by an increase in the number of “nones,” or those who claim no religious or spiritual orientation at all, “[s]ubstantial portions of the unaffiliated—particularly among those who describe their religion as ‘nothing in particular’—say they believe in God or a universal spirit,” a 2012 Pew Research Center survey observes. Of those unaffiliated, the survey revealed, 18 percent still identify as “religious,” while 37 percent describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” 6 As the list of spiritual movements Partridge includes under occulture’s umbrella indicates, the new forms may be as eclectic as those that composed the early twentieth century’s New Mysticism, and may, in some cases, be later incarnations. The continued reliance on forms of popular culture as vehicles for constructing and expressing spiritual identities is also noteworthy, given our authors’ explorations of mystical philosophy through popular literature. Following Clifford Geertz’s understanding of religious symbols as “models for and of culture,” Partridge argues that “popular culture is both an expression of the cultural milieu from which it emerges and formative of that culture, in that it contributes to the formation of worldviews and, in so doing, influences what people accept as plausible.” 7 Virginia Nelson similarly observes that “[w]hereas religion up to the Renaissance provided the content for most high visual art and literature, art and entertainment in our secular era have provided both the content for new religions and the moral framework for those who practice no religion at all.” 8 She examines ways in which “larger mainstream culture, via works of imagination instead of official creeds, subscribes to a nonrational, supernatural, quasi-religious view of the universe: pervasively, but behind our own backs. Consuming art forms of the fantastic is only one way that we as nonbelievers allow ourselves, unconsciously, to believe.” Lynn Schofield Clark offers specific evidence of such processes through her research on how late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century American teenagers use media depictions of supernatural phenomena to shape spiritual identities. In From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural, she describes varying degrees to which teenagers

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react to and/or draw on films, television shows, and books they consume in adopting beliefs about such supernatural phenomena as ghosts, angels, and aliens that are not necessarily dependent on any traditional religious identities they might hold. 9 In the creative amalgamation of these influences, teens’ codes of belief often play along the same boundaries between specific religious traditions and a general spirituality that engaged our three authors. Teens are often willing to attribute some reality to the kinds of phenomena described in the media they consume, Clark found, while at the same time understanding such presentations as entertaining fiction. For a significant number, the presentations of supernatural reality by such shows and books contributes to a sense that there is something “spiritual” in life. There is, of course, a danger of comparing apples and oranges—adult British producers of novels and short stories with Clark’s American teenaged consumers of mostly occult and science fiction movies and television shows—not to mention a century’s difference in time. Even so, Clark’s research provides one useful window on how the projects of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb might inform understanding of contemporary practice. More specifically, her teenagers offer a particular point of comparison in their concern for forming identities within their current modernity through the assertion of autonomous agency. If such narratives as those of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts are corollaries to the supernaturally oriented fictional creations of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb, the roles these stories play as new models for agency within a generalized conception of spirituality could be particularly interesting. The teens Clark interviewed are attracted to the examples offered by supernatural adventure dramas as indicators that they, too, might possess the agency to overcome forces they fear are beyond their control. 10 Often an expression of rebellion, the construction of alternative spiritualities out of popular media can also be one form of resisting what they perceive to be socially assumed and limiting religious systems. Especially given widely mediated associations of religion with modern fanaticism, “[t]oday’s young people do not come to notions of religion with an empty slate; religion is not seen by them as an unquestioned good,” Clark observes. 11 The teens’ experimentation likewise incorporates questions about the interrelation of science and belief in the supernatural. The abilities of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb to bridge Weber’s claimed chasm between the calculable and the incalculable finds echoes in assumptions that “evidence” and scientific “proof” can provide warrants for even unusual claims of supernatural fiction. In addition to reflecting the teens’ cultural location within certain post-Enlightenment assumptions shared with Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb, the turn to evidence is itself another element of rebellion, as teens use science to bolster their resistance to a perceived societal status quo. Clark notes, for example, that from the earliest reports of flying saucers, “stories of aliens have been defined in

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terms of debates about evidence (with the issue of the credibility of witnesses a central aspect), and in relation to mistrust of the government and military and its presumed ‘cover-up.’” 12 Undergirding this fluidity of unaffiliated spiritual identification is a common assumption about the primacy of individual choice in determining religious (or non-religious) identity that, in turn, points to continued cultural investment in the centrality of the self, and in the empirical authority of personal experience. As Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb found, investment in the primacy of individual choice can create its own tensions with conceptions of the communal. Partridge draws on a formulation of “mysticism” or “mystical religion” by Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), who, in his 1912 Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches), expanded on Weber’s distinction between “churches” and “sects” with a third category for “radical religious individualism.” 13 This “mysticism,” he summarizes, was concerned only with “direct interior and individualist experience of the divine.” 14 Unlike “church” and “sect,” each understood as forms of social organization, “mysticism” had “no desire for organized fellowship,” Troeltsch wrote. “[A]ll it cared for was freedom for interchange of ideas, a pure fellowship of thought. . . . The isolated individual and psychological abstraction and analysis become everything.” 15 Such an emphasis on interiority found echoes in the thought of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb, as we have seen, but also, Partridge notes, “presciently and helpfully describes emergent spirituality in the West. Indeed, it is very difficult to read Troeltsch’s comments on mysticism without at the same time thinking of the ‘self’ religiosity of the ‘New Age.’” As we have seen, however, it is dangerous to assume that the emphasis on interiority by mystic theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries necessarily precluded engagement with communally addressed social issues or concerns. As Schmidt noted, the conception of individualized access to a universal form of mystical apprehension actually fed hopes for increased communal interaction across the boundaries of religious traditions. 16 Mystic engagement also frequently powered social engagement: “[Octavius] Frothingham’s counsel that ‘genuine spirituality goes into the street’ was to be taken seriously,” Schmidt relates, “and much of the liberal writing on mysticism came to focus precisely on activism, on the ‘fusion of mystic communion with ethical passion.’” 17 Similarly, William James, whose definition of religion emphasized “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude,” 18 was “actually energetically activist, impatient with any equation of mysticism with a gospel of repose” and did not understand “‘mysticism’ or ‘religious experience’ as categories divorced from social ethics and publicmindedness.” 19 Even so, a multileveled emphasis on individualism characterizes the teens’ approach “to the relationship of self, society, and the realm be-

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yond,” with implications Clark finds troubling. 20 A teenager who describes a personal encounter with or expresses interest in paranormal phenomena in each case “experiences (or fears, or hopes for) a powerful intervention that is benign, malevolent, or positive for the individual.” Usually missing both from media narratives, and from the teenagers’ self-constructions using them, is translation of the relationship with the supernatural to a broader social context. For example, “the supernatural beings of television and film who ‘come down to help in some way,’ as one teen put it, are generally not represented . . . as effecting social change toward a less oppressive situation.” Likewise, the supernatural beings depicted in media are themselves concerned primarily with individual purposes, driven often by personal interests of their own. 21 Improved individual situations rather than social or collective advancement, therefore, are goals for both the assisting and the assisted. 22 At the same time, Clark’s teens are attracted to the images they consume out of a desire to break out of pure individualism into modes of connection with at least a small group of others. Teen heroes frequently balance individual prowess with reliance on select friends. 23 “Today’s young people want to be a part of something that is bigger than themselves,” Clark observes. “They want a destiny, a calling, a challenge that is ultimately worthy of their time and energy. And they realize they cannot fulfill this calling alone.” 24 The varied individualistic versus communal orientations of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb in constructing their mysticisms, combined with their varied investments in forms of human connection, raise similar questions about the ethical significance of particular approaches to generalized, self-constructed spirituality. To what extent, for example, is engagement with systemic social issues relevant in evaluating contemporary representations of spiritual orientation, and if relevant, what shape might any engagement take? Would any disconnection between mysticism and social engagement point to an inherent downside to replacing commitment to a particular faith community—especially one with a tradition of social activism—with a more individually defined spirituality? Or do Schmidt’s observations about the cross-cultural bridging made possible by diverse, individualized investments in generically understood forms of spirituality suggest potential for alliances across religious boundaries that could be more effective in generating social movements? In bringing the dialogue of enchantment with disenchantment into contemporary times, scholars such as Jane Bennett are finding continued efforts to assess the “rationality” of modernity useful in considering such ethical implications of agency. An appreciation for surprise and newness is central to Bennett’s association of enchantment with cultural practices that mark “the marvelous erupting amid the everyday.” 25 In The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossing, and Ethics (2001), she describes being enamored by what she calls “crossings,” or moments of metamor-

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phosis that indicate the possibility of unprecedented change—an emphasis that recalls the novelty of modernity that so influenced the three authors. 26 She mentions such crossings as “primate toward other primate, terrestrial toward solar, silicon toward carbon, living toward dead—and toward new formations exterior to the relation between each of these sets of terms.” 27 As she explains, Contained within this surprise state are (1) a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter and (2) a more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition. The overall effect of enchantment is a mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness, a sense of having had one’s nerves or circulation or concentration powers tuned up or recharged—a shot in the arm, a fleeting return to childlike excitement about life.

Establishing a proper approach to this enchantment, Bennett asserts, is not just an academic exercise in assessing the tenor of the times; it has practical implications. She wonders if “the very characterization of the world as disenchanted ignores and then discourages affective attachment to that world,” undercutting an important impetus for ethical engagement. “You have to love life before you can care about anything,” she writes. “The wager is that, to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.” 28 Although those moments of joy-inspiring enchantment can be—and usually are—experienced by individuals, the associated “mindfulness” comes with demands to be socially engaged, while avoiding a “mindlessness” that would “forget about injustice, sink into naivete, and escape from politics.” 29 In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), Bennett builds on this earlier exploration of enchantment and social engagement to consider “the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things.” 30 Through her efforts to “give voice to a thing-power” in building a theory of “vital materiality,” Bennett asks, “How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies?” 31 Her use of “vitality,” she explains, refers to “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” 32 Her goal is to draw attention to the complex ecology of influences involved in the interrelation of humans with and as elements of the material world of which they are a part. The result is a fundamentally democratic or horizontal (rather than vertically hierarchical) understanding of existence. Rather than consider the material world as an “environment that surrounds human culture,” Bennett invites her readers to “pic-

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ture an ontological field without any unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable, or mineral. All forces and flows (materialities) are or can become lifely, affective, and signaling.” 33 This blurring and even elimination of lines of distinction draws her to “emphasize even more how the figure of enchantment points in two directions: the first toward the humans who feel enchanted and whose agentic capacities may be thereby strengthened, and the second toward the agency of the things that produce (helpful, harmful) effects in human and other bodies. Organic and inorganic bodies, natural and cultural objects (these distinctions are not particularly salient here) all are affective.” 34 Her motivation for such an encompassing understanding of vital matter is a “hunch” that “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.” 35 In affinity with Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb, Bennett draws intriguingly on Henri Bergson, and his contemporary Hans Driesch, as “critical vitalists” who “opposed the mechanistic model of nature assumed by the ‘materialists’ of their day.” 36 Their vitalisms “fascinate me,” she reports, “because we share a common foe in mechanistic or deterministic materialism,” but also because “the fabulously vital materiality of which I dream is so close to their vitalism” (63). As we have seen for Bergson, and also for Driesch, “[n]ature was not a machine, and matter was not in principle calculable: something always escaped quantification, prediction, and control.” Still, she qualifies, “they stopped short: they could not imagine a materialism adequate to the vitality they discerned in natural processes,” making her project a more radical attempt to rethink the nature of material itself. Yet Bennett is particularly impressed with “[t]heir efforts to remain scientific while acknowledging some incalculability to things.” Bennett also connects with the romantic impulse to consider the enlivening element of nature that so defined Webb’s work. She notes the traditional distinction between natura naturans or “the uncaused causality that ceaselessly generates new forms,” and natura naturata as “passive matter organized into an eternal order of Creation.” 37 As Bennett observes, “[A]n active becoming, a creative not-quite-human force capable of producing the new, buzzes within the history of the term nature.” 38 Natura naturans was the focus of “English Romantics and American transcendentalists” who “sought to refine their senses” so as to be better able to detect it through “a special sensitivity” necessary because “as Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted, the productive power is ‘suspended and, as it were, quenched in the product.’” 39 While Bennett is most concerned to describe the engaged response elicited by vibrant material, along the lines of Coleridge (and our three authors) she advocates fostering a particularly attuned sensibility. Even if, as Bennett believes, “the vitality of matter is real, it will be hard to discern it, and once discerned, hard to keep focused

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on. It is too close and too fugitive, as much wind as thing, impetus as entity, a movement always on the way to becoming otherwise, as effluence that is vital and engaged in trajectories but not necessarily intentions.” 40 In Weber’s terms, we might expect Bennett’s intertwined themes of social conscience and heightened perceptivity to find a meeting point with “mystic” sensibility, resulting in a “this-worldly” ethics or practical engagement with the needs of the world. In a sign of just how encompassing the concept of “enchantment” can be, however, and in a point of departure from the various formulations of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb, Bennett carefully distances herself from spiritualized constructions of the vital agency she is describing, especially in resisting traditional ideas of “soul.” 41 In her recast materialism, she asserts, “it is both possible and desirable to experiment with the idea of an impersonal agency integral to materiality as such, a vitality distinct from human or divine purposiveness.” 42 In a telling restatement of the same Nicene Creed on which Underhill expounded, she offers a counter-litany for “would-be vital materialists”: I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp. I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests. 43

Even with Bennett’s carefully recast materialism, however, points of convergence with the concerns of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb suggest that they were pursuing something like her ethical project as they used their more religiously formulated understandings of enchantment to determine what is of value. In their various ways, they, too, were describing relationships with an enchanting reality in order to establish why one should care. And just as Clark speculates that teens may identify as spiritual or religious “as a means of identifying themselves as moral and good people,” Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb appear to have been similarly occupied. 44 Sinclair’s Agatha Verrall found her efforts to heal caught in a Manichaean struggle between positive and negative forces. Underhill set her mysticism in opposition to bourgeois materialism and aesthetic philistinism. And Webb arrayed her protagonists’ agencies against a threatening impulse to destroy, but also against banal indifference to pursuing what was right. For all three, to be spiritually engaged was to be, as Clark puts it, by some measure, “good,” or as Bennett describes, socially concerned. Whatever their successes in establishing workable parameters for their new mysticisms, and however their formulations may or may not

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have been emulated, the efforts of these authors indicate just how deeply invested they were in the significance of the mystic experiences they sought. Underhill elevated the goal of achieving the “unitive state” with God to be humanity’s highest potentiality. Sinclair shaped her life as an artist around her commitment to perceiving the epiphanies of the real that solitude helped accomplish. And Webb’s sensitivity to the mystic resonance of pastoral nature took on aspects of cooperation with or resistance to controlling destiny or fate. In seeking to establish what was of value in their modern world, their complex explorations of mystic sensibility were pursuits that truly mattered. It is true, as Clark observes of her teens, that the three authors’ ethical engagements most often generated personal ends of care for specific others, rather than for systemic change. Yet the strong themes of social commentary in their fiction suggests calls for worldviews shaped and motivated in new ways. Steeped in evolutionary thought as Sinclair was, her anticipated mystical progress of the human species incorporated moral progress as well, an expectation echoed in the emphases of Underhill and Webb. Exactly what shape that progress might take seems to have been as subject to construction by the three authors as their self-designed mystical frameworks. Still, it seems safe to assume that Underhill might apply Christian symbolism to assess social advances in terms of the various aesthetic responses of her protagonists, balancing the committed withdrawal from society of Willie against the committed self-sacrifice of Constance. Presumably Webb would more readily embrace a community governed by the sensibilities of Prue than of Tivvy, and of Hazel than of Mr. James. And all three would welcome societies with broader opportunities for other-than-masculine self-determination. At the very least, their efforts to “make sense” of the world, or of what the world might be, through forms of mystic sensibility, offer potentially orienting examples for anyone seeking to shape her own new spirituality of agency and enchantment. NOTES 1. Partridge, Re-enchantment of West, 1:3. 2. Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” May 12, 2015. 3. Partridge, Re-enchantment of West, 1:4. 4. Pew Research Center, “From the Solidly Secular to Sunday Stalwarts, a look at our new religious typology,” Aug. 29, 2018. The seven typologies are: (highly religious) Sunday Stalwarts, God-and-Country Believers, Diversely Devout; (somewhat religious) Relaxed Religious, Spiritually Awake; (non-religious) Religion Resisters, and Solidly Secular. 5. Partridge, Re-enchantment of West, 1:39. 6. Pew Research Center, “‘Nones’ on the rise,” October 9, 2012. 7. Partridge, Re-enchantment of West 1:123. Partridge references Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 90–91. 8. Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets, vii. 9. Teenagers who strongly identify with particular religious traditions (dubbed Traditionalists by Clark) tend to distinguish their faith constructions from the paranormal

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phenomena described in such popular culture expressions as television shows, and even avoid such programs. Others find little or no conflict between a range of religious beliefs and media presentations of the supernatural. Acknowledging that the distinctions are approximate and at times overlapping, Clark identifies four other groups: “Resisters” actively reject organized religion, yet are interested in supernatural legends; “Mystical Teens” are likewise not involved in organized religion, but are not hostile to it, yet remain interested in supernatural phenomena; “Experimenters” associate with some kind of religious organization while actively engaging supernatural realms; “Intrigued Teens” are committed to a religious practice but, unlike Traditionalists, are also interested in mystical or supernatural phenomena not necessarily related to their religious traditions. 10. Clark, From Angels to Aliens, 63. 11. Clark, 56–57. 12. Clark, 93. 13. Partridge, Re-enchantment of West, 1:21. Partridge references Troeltsch, Social Teachings, 1:377. See Weber, “Social Psychology of World Religions.” 14. Partridge, Re-enchantment of West, 1:20–21. 15. Troeltsch, Social Teachings, 377. Quoted in Partridge, Re-enchantment of West, 1:21. 16. Schmidt, “Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” 290. 17. Schmidt, 292. Schmidt references Frothingham, “Mystics and Their Creed,” 229, and Peabody, “Mysticism and Modern Life,” 476. 18. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 31–32. 19. Schmidt, “Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” 292. 20. Clark, From Angels to Aliens, 232. 21. Clark, 231–32. 22. Clark, 233. 23. Clark offers the example of Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who, while the designated “slayer,” is assisted by friends. Clark, From Angels to Aliens, 69–72, 234. Certain themes in Buffy and other contemporary media, such as the empowerment of young women, of course could be considered influences for systemic change. 24. Clark, 69. 25. Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, 8. 26. Bennett, 17. 27. Bennett, 5. 28. Bennett, 4. 29. Bennett, 10. 30. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, ix. 31. Bennett, 2, vii, viii. 32. Bennett, viii. 33. Bennett, 116–117. 34. Bennett, xii. 35. Bennett, ix–x. 36. Bennett, 63. 37. Bennett, 117. 38. Bennett, 118. 39. Coleridge, Literary Remains, 2:341. Quoted in Bennett, Vibrant Matters, 117. 40. Bennett, Vibrant Matters, 119. 41. Bennett, 81. 42. Bennett, 69. 43. Bennett, 122. 44. Clark, From Angels to Aliens, 230.

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Index

Adams, Henry: Esther: A Novel, 41 agency, ix–x, xii, xvi, 4, 7, 8–9, 11, 19, 20, 26, 27, 110, 124, 130, 164, 261–263. See also Bennett, Jane; Clark, Lynn Schofield; Sinclair, May; Underhill, Evelyn; Webb, Mary Armstrong, Christopher, xvii, xviiin17–xviiin18, 20, 26–27, 32n2, 32n6, 61n11, 67, 68, 83, 92n46 Armstrong, Martin, 247, 253 Armour Wherein He Trusted (Webb): and Christianity, 243–246, 248–249, 250–253, 258n30; medieval setting of, 245–247; and nature, 253–255; possessions in, 259n68; reception of, 247–248; sexuality in, 249–250, 252–253 Arnold, Matthew: “Dover Beach,” 13n41 Arts and Crafts movement, 6, 21, 45, 158 atheism, 3. See also Underhill, Evelyn

34n48, 34n55, 39, 41, 65, 67, 81, 130; influence on Sinclair, 96, 100, 117, 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 144, 148, 183; influence on Webb, 130. See also Bennett, Jane Bleiler, Richard, 178 Boll, Theophilus, xvii, 102, 107n2 Buchan, John, 193, 206, 228–229 Butler, Cuthbert, 60n3 Butler, Samuel. See Sinclair, May

Bachelard, Gaston, 211, 219n56, 239n23 Barale, Michèle Aina, xv, xvii, 198, 219n40, 232, 244, 247 Barrie, J. M., xi, 206 Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 205 Benavides, Gustavo, ix, xviin1, 3, 13n32 Bennett, Jane : agency in, 267, 268–271; on Henri Bergson and vitalism, 17, 268–269, 270; on modern enchantment, 267–268, 269; on materialism, 268–270; on romanticism, 269; on secularization, 4; on social engagement, 267–270 Bergson, Henri: and romantic rebellion, 206; influence on Underhill, 18, 26–30, 31–32, 32n4,

Catholicism, Roman, 2–3, 37–39; Protestant interest in, 40–42. See also The Column of Dust; The Gray World; The Lost Word; Underhill, Evelyn Chadwick, Owen, 2 Clark, Lynn Schofield, 266, 270–271, 271n9, 272n23; agency in, 265; on teen use of popular media, 264–266, 266–267 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 221, 269 Coles, Gladys Mary, xvii, 190, 198, 219n40, 244, 245–246, 247, 249, 253, 256 The Column of Dust (Underhill), 17, 22, 32n7, 61n11; aesthetics in, 45–46, 58–59; death and afterlife in, 20, 22, 23–24, 164; gender roles in, 19, 85–86; literary assessment of, 32n6; nature in, 45–46, 98; occultism in, xiii, 8, 22, 23–24, 33n17, 55, 56, 85; ritual in, 55–56; Roman Catholicism in, 55; sacred space in, 40, 45; selfsacrifice in, 58–59, 164; sexuality in, 19, 86, 91n37, 109; social class in, 8, 84–85; suffering in, 57, 68 Cropper, Margaret, 49n1, 83 Crowley, Aleister, xii, xviiin15, 33n23 Cuddon, J. A., 5, 13n24, 194

285

286

Index

A Cure of Souls (Sinclair), 97; First World War in, 164–166; mysticism in, 137–138; sacredness in, 165–166; sexuality in, 117–119; social engagement in, 97–98, 150–152 Daunton, Martin, and Bernhard Rieger, 12n20, 158–159 A Defence of Idealism (Sinclair): on idealism, 97, 98, 108n23; on individual agency, 128–129; on mystical evolution, 143–147, 182; on mystical perception, 98, 168; on mysticism as mental disorder, 137–139; significance of, xi, 96, 107n4; vitalism critique in, 26 DiBattista, Maria, 6 disenchantment, 2–4, 11–12, 163, 244, 267–270 Doyle, Arthur Conan, xi The Egoist journal, 108n34, 128, 140n1, 156, 158 Eksteins, Modris, 156–157, 158, 170n23, 192, 205–206 élan vital.. See vitalism; Bergson, Henri Eliot, T. S., 6; Underhill influence on, xi; Sinclair influence and support of, xi, 96 Ellman, Richard, 108n21 First World War: and crisis of meaning, x, 156–157; as crusade, 245; and death and afterlife, xi, 60n1, 159–163, 171n45, 199; destructive force of, 197–198, 201, 202n56–203n57, 250; as disruption, 155–158, 197–198; and elevation of war dead, 162, 165–166, 173, 245; and modernism, 5, 6, 155–159; and mystic perception, 168; public support for, 9, 128, 140n24; and spiritualism, xi, 160–162; and suffering, 166–168; and tradition, 158–159, 191–192, 193, 195, 202n34. See also Underhill, Evelyn; Sinclair, May; Webb, Mary; A Journal of Impressions in Belgium

“The Flaw in the Crystal” (Sinclair), 107n15; healing in, 113–115, 124–126; perception of reality in, 99; sexuality in, 113, 114–115; threat of psychic intrusion in, 124–126 Forster, E. M., xi Friedman, Alan Warren, 5, 13n24 Freud, Sigmund, 217; on death and war, 24, 155–156, 160, 162, 164; on group psychology, 140n24; Dr. Schreber case, 124; influence on Sinclair, 96, 106, 133, 140n4, 145; “The ‘Uncanny,’” 173 Frothingham, Octavius Brooks, 266 Fussell, Paul, 192, 202n34, 202n56 Gay, Peter, xi–xii, 2–4, 4, 5, 10, 25, 205, 239n1 Geertz, Clifford, 264 The Golden Arrow (Webb), xixn34; representation of fathers in, 212–213; Christian imagery in, 224; historical references in, 202n51; sexuality in, 224; Shropshire economy in, 193; war’s influence on, 197–198 Golden Dawn, Hermetic Order of the. See Underhill, Evelyn The Golden Sequence (Underhill): on mystic way as heroic journey, 75–76; on relationship with God, 73–76; reception of, 73 Gone to Earth (Webb): Christianity in, 222, 225–228, 238; death and violence in, 198–200, 203n59; destiny in, 199, 207–208, 209, 218, 227, 228; domesticity in, 231, 237–239; folk superstition in, 207–208, 209; gender in, 231–232, 235–238; Hazel’s innocence in, 206–208; historical setting of, 201n15; modernity and tradition in, 7–8, 192, 193; and nature, 206, 211, 222, 226–229, 237–239; nihilism in, 222, 238, 244; possession in, 235–238, 259n68; and romanticism, 208; sexuality in, 229–232; social custom in, 221–222; war’s influence on, 197–200

Index Gordon, Gen. Charles George, 82, 91n14 The Gray World (Underhill), xviiin16, xixn34, 17, 20, 20–21, 98, 108n33; aesthetics in, 20, 21, 45; art and artisanship in, 20, 21, 40, 44–45, 58; Christianity in, 40; death and afterlife in, 20–21, 23, 164; nature in, 46–47; occultism in, xiii, 23; paganism in, 46–47; Protestantism in, 43–44; reception of, xiv–xv, 32n6; reincarnation in, 20–21, 33n11; Roman Catholicism in, 42–44; sacred space in, 40, 42–43, 118; sexuality in, 87, 88; influence on Sinclair, 98; social class in, 21, 87–88 The Grey World. See The Gray World Green, T. H., 97–98, 107n8, 133, 144 Greene, Dana, xvii, 32n6, 54, 61n12, 83–84; on Modernism (theological), 38, 49n3; on Underhill’s mystic philosophy, 48, 64, 67, 68; on Underhill spiritual journey, xviiin17, 33n23, 44, 80, 81, 171n49; on Underhill/Sinclair relationship, xviiin21 Hansen, Peter, 10, 190–191, 201n10, 238 Harris, Jose, 3, 12n12, 157, 160 Harvey, David, 4, 6 imagism, 96, 100–101, 108n21 James, William, xv, 28, 34n55, 156; on heroic mysticism, 80, 82, 210, 266; on materialism, 18; on religious feeling, 25, 266 Jameson, Fredric, 11, 156, 244 Jones, Rufus, 60n3, 73, 80, 82 Josephson-Storm, Jason Ā, xviiin15, 3 A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (Sinclair), 108n41; attraction to danger in, 110–113, 120n8; literary technique of, 96, 101–102, 104–105; perception of reality in, 99–100; sexuality in, 110–112, 133; Sinclair sense of exclusion in, 105, 108n41, 112–113, 120n14; and suffering, 166–168; willing in, 132

287

Joyce, James, 6, 103, 108n34 Jung, Carl: on collective unconscious, 149; influence on Sinclair, x, 96, 105, 133; on sublimation and libido, x, 133, 134, 141n52 Kaplan, Sydney Janet, 102, 108n33, 117 Keats, John,: “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” 245 Keynes, John Maynard, 156, 158 Kinnamon, Rebecca Ann, xi, 127, 133–134, 149 Kipling, Rudyard, xi Kirkland, Winifred, 160, 161, 164 Kollar, Rene, 60n1, 60n2 Kripal, Jeffrey J., xviiin13, xviiin20, 140n7 Kronfeld, Chana, 5 Kumar, Shiv K., 34n48, 129 Lacan, Jacques, 109, 117, 121n35 The Lancet, 156, 158 Lawrence, D. H., 96, 192 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 40–42, 43, 50n42, 79–81, 87, 114, 162 Lechner, Frank J., 2, 12n11 Light, Alison, 10, 158, 238 Liu, David, 12n3, 157 The Lost Word (Underhill), ix, 17, 258n30; aesthetics in, xiii, 6, 20, 40, 47–49, 88–89, 99, 110; art and artisanship in, 47–48; death in, 22–23, 164; domesticity in, 88–89; Masonry (fraternal order) in, 55; paganism in, 47; Protestantism in, 48; reception of, 32n6; ritual in, 55; Roman Catholicism in, 47–48; sacred space in, 40 Mandler, Peter, 201n10 March-Russell, Paul, 174–175, 177, 179 Marschall, John P., 49n3 Maudsley, Henry, 148 Mary Olivier: A Life (Sinclair), 96–97, 101–103, 107n11, 108n33–108n34, 139, 147; death in, 168–170, 175–176; family relations in, 115–116, 121n48, 126–127; heredity in, 148; image of God in, 151; memory in, 102–104,

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Index

108n33; perception of reality in, 98–99, 106–107; point of view in, 101–103; sexuality in, 116–117, 120n31, 141n50; sublimation in, 133–137; willing in, 126–127, 135–136 McDougall, William, 140n24 medievalism. See modernity Menzies, Lucy, 83 Meredith, George, 178–179 Miller, Jane Eldridge, 117 modern: definition of, ix, xviin1, 1 modernism: definition of, 4–5, 13n24; as artistic movement, 4–7, 6–7, 13n24, 96–97, 100–102; literary techniques of, 6–7, 174; and romanticism, 21, 87, 189–190, 205–206, 221; and subjectivity, 10, 25, 96, 205. See also imagism; stream of consciousness Modernism (theological), 19, 37–39, 49n3, 89 modernity: and anxiety, 113–114; and bourgeois culture, 10, 19, 20–21, 43–44, 44–45, 189, 221–222; and capitalism, 214–216; and change, 106, 155–158, 159, 164; and Christianity, 2–3, 4, 12n11, 12n12; and death, 159–163, 165–166, 171n45; definition of, ix, 1, 12n5, 12n20; and disenchantment, ix, 1–4, 11–12, 13n41, 13n43, 28, 130, 214, 244, 261; and domesticity, 10–11, 238; energy of, x, 9, 27, 41, 155, 261–262; and First World War, 155–163, 165–166, 193; and gender, 79–82, 84–85, 85–86, 109–110; and idealism, 20; and individualism, 18–19, 45, 56–57, 76, 95–96, 109, 147, 205, 266–267; and medievalism, 40–44, 45, 50n42, 190, 245; and mysticism, xi–xii, 3–4, 52–53, 60n3, 256–257, 261–262; and rationality, 89, 211–212, 215, 256, 261, 267; and secularity, ix, 1–4, 12n8, 12n11, 12n12, 56, 150; and sexuality, 109–110; and social class and custom, 19, 86–89; and technology, 123–124, 262–263. See also tradition

Mosse, George L., 157–158, 162, 164, 166, 168, 173, 245 Myers, Frederick W. H., 140n7, 149 mysticism: literary interest in, xi; and social engagement, 266–267 Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (Underhill), xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, xviiin22, xixn34, 17, 20, 37, 48, 61n12, 135, 138; on being and becoming, 65–66; on epistemology, 25–29; on magic, 53–55, 56–57, 61n11, 64; (see also Underhill, Evelyn); on mystic way as heroic journey; (see Underhill, Evelyn); on mysticism and ordinary people, 64; revision of, 69–70; vitalism in, 18; (see also Bergson, Henri) The Mystic Way: A Psychological Study in Christian Origins (Underhill), 18, 67–70; reception of, 68 Neff, Rebecca Kinnamon. See Kinnamon, Rebecca Ann Nelson, Virginia, 264 New Mysticism, ix–x, xi, xv, xviin5, 19, 53, 125, 261, 264 occultism, x, xi, xii, xviiin13, 3, 52–54, 110, 161, 263; May Sinclair views on, 144–145; Evelyn Underhill views on, xiii, 20, 31, 52, 61n11, 96; and Mary Webb, xiv. See also The Column of Dust; The Gray World occulture. See Partridge, Christopher Orel, Harold, 197 Otto, Rudolf, 31 Owen, Alex, 1, 3, 4, 12n5, 12n8, 33n23, 162 paranormal phenomena, xi–xii, xviiin13, 123–124, 261, 263, 267; May Sinclair views on, xiv, 95, 123, 137, 143–147, 170, 175; Evelyn Underhill views on, xiii, 24–25, 31, 51–52; and Mary Webb, xiv, 51–53 Partridge, Christopher, 263–264, 266 Patmore, Coventry, 26 Pew Research Center, 263, 264, 271n4

Index Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart: The Gates Ajar, 161 Pollitt, Katha, 102, 107n3 popular culture, 263, 264–265 Pound, Ezra, 5, 96, 100 Precious Bane (Webb): and capitalism, 214–217, 219n56; and Christianity, 222–224, 232–234; death in, 214; destiny in, 209; domesticity in, 211; economic disruption in, 192–193; folk superstition in, 208, 223–224; gender in, 232, 234–235; heredity in, 217–218; historical context of, 195–196, 202n32; human connection in, 212–213; magic in, 208; occultism in, 212, 222; mystical vision, 213–214; and nostalgia, 192, 195–196, 202n34; perception of nature, 209–211, 213, 216; sexuality in, 232–235; significant space, 210–212, 219n56; tradition versus modernity, 193–197; war’s influence on, 195, 197, 202n34 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 29, 34n55 Raitt, Suzanne, xi, xvii, xviiin11, xviiin17, 102, 105, 108n33, 108n41, 111, 116–117, 120n31, 123, 127, 128, 134 Reed, the Rev. Henry A., xviin5, 53, 156, 161 reincarnation, 3. See also Sinclair, May relationship of Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb, xiv–xv, xviiin21, xviiin22, 253 Ribot, Thédule, 148 Richards, Eric, 193 Richardson, Dorothy. See Sinclair, May romanticism, xiv, 5, 21, 87, 128, 189–190, 205–206, 221, 239n1, 245, 257, 269–270 Sackville-West, Vita, xi Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 52–53, 60n3, 80, 81, 144, 266, 267 The School of Charity (Underhill): on incarnation of Christ, 70–71; on communal church, 72–73; on mystic way as heroic journey, 72–73; on

289

Nicene Creed, 70 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 25 Schwarz, Daniel R., 6, 12n2, 13n24, 197 Schopenhauer, Arthur, xvi, 26, 29, 31, 96, 100, 129–131, 133, 134, 144, 149 secularization, ix–x, 2–4, 12n5, 12n8, 12n11, 12n12, 56, 150, 165, 263–264, 271n4 Sharf, Robert H., 25–26, 29, 34n55, 34n60 Sinclair, May: afterlife in, 173–183; agency in, 95, 111, 133, 134, 146–147, 173, 175, 183; Arnold Waterlow: A Life, 139; on Samuel Butler, 148–149; and Christianity, xiii–xiv, 39, 59–60, 68; “Clinical Lectures on Symbolism and Sublimation II,” 133, 141n52, 147; critical reception of, xv, xixn33; The Dark Night, xi, 139; The Divine Fire, xiv, 96; and Dorothy Richardson, 96, 100, 101, 108n23, 117; “The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism,” 97; Far End, xv; “The Finding of the Absolute,” 181–183; response to First World War, 128, 163, 164–168, 171n48; interest in T. H. Green, 97–98; “Heaven,” 177–178; The Helpmate, 139; heredity in, 147–150; “If the Dead Knew,” 175–177; imagism in, 96, 100–101, 105; and individual subjectivity, 123, 128–129, 130, 131–132, 140n1, 148–150; “The Intercessor,” 178, 179 The Intercessor and Other Stories, 173–183; “Jones’s Karma,” 181; Life and Death of Harriet Frean, 96, 139, 244; “The Mahatma’s Story,” 181; and modernism, 6–7; “The Nature of the Evidence,” 174–175; The New Idealism, 96, 97, 106; and nonChristian religions, xi, xviiin11, 68; on perception of reality, 98–99, 106–107, 107n15; The Rector of Wyck, 127, 150; views on reincarnation, 148–150, 170, 183; sexuality in, 96, 109–110, 116–117, 141n50; membership in Society for Psychical

290

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Research, xiv, 144; stream of consciousness in, xiv, 6, 96, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105–106, 117; on sublimation, x, xiii, 133–135, 141n52, 147–148; and suffrage movement, 96, 107n2, 127; interest in telepathy, 145, 147, 175; The Three Sisters, 107n3; “The Token,” 178–179; The Tree of Heaven, 127, 128, 171n48; Uncanny Stories, 97, 173–183; Underhill’s influence on, 134, 137; “The Victim,” 180–181; “Villa Désirée,” 179; and Vorticism, 127–128; “The Way of Sublimation,” 133; “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched,” 180–181. See also Bergson, Henri; A Defence of Idealism; “The Flaw in the Crystal”; A Journal of Impressions in Belgium; Mary Olivier: A Life; Schopenhauer, Arthur; paranormal phenomena Society for Psychical Research, xiv, xviiin20, 31, 52, 53, 83, 123, 140n7, 144, 145, 152n13, 161, 162–163 spiritualism. See paranormal phenomena spirituality (contemporary), xii, xiv, xvi, 262–266, 267, 271 Stephen, Leslie, 10, 19, 21, 63, 222 Strachey, Lytton, 91n14 stream of consciousness, xiv–xv, 6, 96, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 117, 138–139 Styers, Randall, ix, 52 Tagore, Rabindranath, xviiin11, 68; “The ‘Gitanjali’: Or Song-Offerings of Rabindranath Tagore,” xi; influence on Sinclair, 134 Tate, Trudi, 156 Taylor, Charles, 1–2 Thurschwell, Pamela, 33n17, 34n49, 120n14, 123, 124, 140n4, 152n13, 157, 161, 163 tradition, 7–11, 13n31, 13n32, 158–159, 170n23, 190–192, 193–194, 195–197, 201n10, 201n24, 202n34, 229, 243–244, 246 Troeltsch, Ernst, 266

Trotter, Wilfred, 140n24 Underhill, Evelyn: agency in, 31, 63, 83, 89, 110, 128; interest in Arts and Crafts movement, 6, 45; early atheism and theism, xiii, 23; transition to Christianity, xiii, xviiin17, 20, 39, 48, 61n11, 70; on Christ’s incarnation, 90; (see also School of Charity); on communal church, 70; (see also School of Charity); “A Defence of Magic,” 54; epistemology of, 18, 23, 25, 33n10, 34n60; response to First World War, 82–83, 163; “The Future of Mysticism,” 70; and gender roles, 80–83; (see also Column of Dust); participation in Golden Dawn, 23, 33n23, 52, 65; “A Green Mass,” 50n44; Italy visits, 40, 44, 49n30; The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, 64; on magic, 53–56; on mystical evolution, 32, 37; “Mysticism and the Corporate Life,” 70; The Mystics of the Church, 90; on mystic way as heroic journey, x, xiii, 17, 63–67, 80–83; (see also School of Charity; Golden Sequence); and nature, 46; and non-Christian religions, xi, 60, 68; “The Poetry of the Prayer Book,” 239n23; Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People, 64; reception of, xv, 19, 32n6; and religious ritual, xiii, 54–56; interest in Roman Catholicism, xiii, 19, 30, 37–40, 45, 46, 49n1, 81, 113; and social class, 83–84; (see also The Column of Dust); on Society for Psychical Research, 52; as spiritual guide, xiii, 51, 64–65; on stations of the mystic way, 107n11; and stream of consciousness, xiv–xv, 138–139; on suffering, 57; on unitive state, x, 19, 31; universalism of, xiii, xiv, 18, 20, 26, 28–30, 46, 60, 68, 70–72, 90–91; sense of unworthiness of, 90, 92n46; writing process, 19–20, 32n7. See also Bergson, Henri; The Column of Dust; The Golden Sequence; The Gray World;

Index The Lost Word; The Mystic Way; Mysticism; paranormal phenomena; The School of Charity Urban Hugh B., 110 Viswanathan, Gauri, 3 vitalism, 3, 17–18, 26, 32n2, 65, 129, 269. See also Bergson, Henri Vorticism. See Sinclair, May Waite, A. E. (Arthur Edward), 23, 32n1, 33n17, 33n23 Webb, Mary: agency in, 189–190, 191, 193, 207–208, 209, 215, 218, 223, 235, 255–256; “The Beauty of Form,” 224–225; butter versus margarine in, 7–8, 13n31; and Christianity, xiv, xvi, 59, 221, 224–225, 239n23; “Contrast,” 240n28; critical reception of, xv, xixn34; views on death and violence, 164, 200–201, 202n38; destiny in, x; representation of fathers, 212–213, 219n40; response to First World War, 163–164, 195, 197–198, 199–200, 201, 202n34, 202n50, 202n56–203n57; and folk religion, xiv, xvi; “Hark, how the Birds do Sing!” (Webb), 13n31; health and marriage, xvi–xvii, 164, 244–246, 256; The House in Dormer Forest (Webb), 240n52; life force in, 27, 34n48; literary technique of, xv, 194; and modernism, 6–7; modernity versus tradition, 8, 9, 10–11, 189–194, 202n34; and nature, xvi, 46, 189, 224–225, 240n28; and

291

romanticism, 189–190, 221; “Sense and Sensibility Out of Doors,” 240n28; Seven for a Secret, 240n52; sexuality in, 110; and social class, 88; The Spring of Joy, 200; “The Sword,” 202n50; Vis Medicatrix Naturae, 224; “The Wayfaring Tree” (Webb), 202n50; “You whom care in prison keeps, and sickness doth suppress,” 200–201. See also Armour Wherein He Trusted; Bergson, Henri; The Golden Arrow; Gone to Earth; Precious Bane Weber, Max, 206, 216, 266; on ethical neutrality (Wertfreiheit) and absence of meaning, 6, 11–12, 13n41, 13n43, 21–22, 41–42, 134, 156, 159, 217, 244–245, 247, 255, 256–257, 270; on disenchantment (Entzauberung) and calculability, ix, xviin2, 1–2, 17, 28, 130, 192, 207, 229, 261, 265; on modern capitalism, 9, 214–215 Weston, the Rev. Walter, 191 Williams, Charles, xixn33, 32n6, 40, 65, 66, 69 Williams, Raymond, 13n32, 192, 194–195, 201n10, 201n24–202n25 Winter, Jay, 161–162, 171n45 Woolf, Virginia, xi, 6, 10, 155–156 Yeats, William Butler, xi, 33n23, 108n21, 157 Zaleski, Carol, 68, 82, 84 Zegger, Hrisey Dimitrakis, xvii, 97, 101, 105, 107n4, 107n8, 107n11, 108n23, 115–116, 117, 135

About the Author

James H. Thrall directs the religious studies program at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he is the Knight Distinguished Associate Professor for the Study of Religion and Culture. He studies religion primarily as a social phenomenon, especially as communicated through cultural products of literature, film, and other media. He earned his doctorate in religion and culture at Duke University, and also completed a Master of Arts in Religion degree in theology at Yale Divinity School. Before pursuing an academic career, he worked as a newspaper journalist and in communications for the Episcopal Church. He divides his time between Galesburg and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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