Critical Reception

On First Publication

The first sceptic. The Centuries were judged before anyone had read them whole. In August 1903 an unsigned reviewer in the Athenaeum, then the leading London literary weekly, took up Dobell’s edition of Traherne’s poems and refused the editor’s high ranking of them. The reviewer declared that “we really must not be asked to accept Traherne as a great poet”, called him “a pious soul, but an indifferent versifier”, and charged that his theme of the child’s first vision came straight out of Henry Vaughan’s The Retreate. It was a harsh start. Yet the same review, reading the extracts from the Centuries that Dobell had printed, guessed that Traherne might be “a better and more natural writer of prose than of poetry”, and asked for the meditations to be published in full. Few reviews have aged so well. The first critic of Traherne was thus both his first sceptic and his first prophet.

The editor as objector. Dobell’s own introduction of 1908 was the first extended criticism of the book, and an unusual one, since its author was a freethinker who admired Traherne without sharing his faith. “My own interest is rather in the man himself than in his beliefs,” he wrote. He found one blemish, the meditation in which hell is part of God’s kingdom and His prison (I.48), called it “so inhuman a belief”, and admitted that he would have left it out had his conscience allowed. He printed it all the same, on the ground that “Traherne, like Cromwell, is too great to need to have his blemishes concealed”. The first published objection to the Centuries thus came from their own editor, and so did the first refusal to censor them.

The warmest welcome. The unsigned review in the Spectator of 18 July 1908, which took its title, Profitable Wonders, from the book’s first page, gave the Centuries the welcome that fixed their reputation. It called Dobell’s find “surely one of the romances of bibliography” and heard in the prose “strange haunting cadences like Bunyan”, the Puritan author of The Pilgrim’s Progress. In verse, the reviewer thought, Traherne was monotonous, but in prose he seemed to “deserve rank with the great seventeenth-century masters”.

The same review contains one of the best sentences ever written about Traherne’s style, “What on other men’s lips is a platitude becomes on his a lyrical cry.” It named his “supreme merit” as his sense of the beauty of the natural world. Its one reservation was doctrinal, for it thought that his parallels between sacred mysteries and common things might “sound almost blasphemous to modern ears”. Praise and doubt were thus set side by side from the start, and they have stayed there.

The naturalist and the first book. W. H. Hudson (1841-1922), the naturalist and memoirist of an Argentine boyhood, read Traherne as a fellow worshipper of nature, finding in him and in Vaughan the only adequate expression of his own rapture as a child. He was frank about what he took from him, calling the poetry “distinctly animistic, with Christianity grafted on it”, a reading that keeps the rapture and discards the faith. Gladys E. Willett’s Traherne (An Essay) (1919), the first book on him, settled the early verdict in a phrase, “Traherne’s true medium was prose, not verse”. She also voiced the complaint that later readers kept repeating, that “The same ideas, the same words, the same imagery meet us over and over again.”

Since

The Platonist claim. W. R. Inge (1860-1954), Dean of St Paul’s and the most widely read English writer on mysticism of his day, gave the Centuries a place in the history of ideas in his Hulsean Lectures, The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought (1926). He set Traherne, “who may be said to have been recently discovered”, beside Vaughan in a Platonist school and quoted the Third Century on the riches of nature as a creed in prose. Later scholars would test that placing in detail.

The populariser. C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), the Oxford critic and Christian apologist, did more than any scholar to find the book its readers. In 1930 he was reading the Dobell edition a little every evening and admiring its “Lovely paper”. In a later letter to his friend Arthur Greeves he called it, in the words usually quoted, “almost the most beautiful book (in prose, I mean, excluding poets) in English”. In the preface he wrote in 1961 for The Screwtape Letters he lamented that modern taste would forbid a heavenly style, since “even if you could write a prose like Traherne’s, you wouldn’t be allowed to”. The praise stuck. The Centuries appear on more of the reading lists he sent to correspondents than any other book.

The perennialist and the biographer. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), the novelist, quoted the Centuries again and again in The Perennial Philosophy (1945), his anthology of the mystical wisdom he believed common to all religions. He grouped Traherne with Vaughan and Wordsworth as witnesses that the child grows out of its first awareness of the divine, and wrote that sacred nature cannot be known unless one “unlearns the dirty devices of adult humanity”, a phrase that echoes Traherne’s own. The year before, Gladys I. Wade’s Thomas Traherne (1944) had given him his first full biography.

Poets for and against. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was the cool sceptic. In a newspaper interview he allowed that Wordsworth, Vaughan and Traherne “had had some curious mystical experiences”, but insisted that mysticism is “a whole-time job”, not an episode in a writer’s life. Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), the novelist and translator of Dante, went to the opposite pole in an essay of 1958. “Dante, Blake and Traherne attained the goal, and carried their poetry with them,” she wrote, where Wordsworth had lost his along the way.

The scholars of 1964. Two books of 1964 set the terms for academic argument. Louis L. Martz (1913-2001), the Yale historian of devotional literature, read the Centuries in The Paradise Within as a structured meditation on the pattern of the Itinerarium mentis in Deum (The Mind’s Road to God) of St Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century Franciscan. The form, he argued, had a plan. He conceded that readers “may sometimes lay them aside in weariness or bewilderment”, but defended the famous repetitions as the method itself, since “Repetitions are, we might say, stepping stones”.

K. W. Salter’s Thomas Traherne: Mystic and Poet raised the doctrinal objection that has followed Traherne ever since, the charge of Pelagianism. Salter judged that “elements of the Pelagian heresy are present in his thought”, since the memory of a glorious childhood seemed to him to incline Traherne to believe that a man might live without sin, as Adam did. Defenders point to the pages on sin, the Fall and the Cross. The debate turns chiefly on III.8.

Sources and the new manuscripts. Carol L. Marks (later Sicherman) traced Traherne’s reading of the Cambridge Platonists and of the Hermetic books in two articles of 1966, and gave the Platonist claim the documentary footing Inge had lacked. From the 1960s onwards new manuscripts came to light, from the Select Meditations offered by a Birmingham bookseller in 1964 to the volume identified at Lambeth Palace Library in 1997, and the critics’ Traherne changed from a solitary mystic into a working theologian. Denise Inge’s Wanting Like a God (2009), whose title comes from I.44, made desire the key to his thought.

The essays edited by Elizabeth Dodd and Cassandra Gorman in 2016 set out to free him from the image of a “solitary thinker, ‘out of his time’”, and Kathryn Murphy has read him against Hobbes as a philosopher of realism. The Traherne of this criticism is a scholar in conversation with his age, reading the philosophers and the new science and answering them.

Richard Willmott, chairman of the Traherne Association, summed up the change in 2017, when he said that Traherne was “far from being the simple, pre-romantic poet of happiness” and was in truth a serious scholar. For the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2024 the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams gave the Association’s annual lecture, and a full critical edition from Oxford University Press is due to begin appearing in 2027.

Music and the calendar. Composers have been Traherne’s most faithful readers, and the Traherne Association counts some ninety who have set his words. The most influential, the English composer Gerald Finzi (1901-56), made the opening of the Third Century the text of the Rhapsody in his cantata Dies Natalis, first heard in 1940. He abridged Traherne freely and, in one scholar’s account, removed “almost all references to religion and the glorification of God”. The result is the Centuries as most listeners know them, a hymn to childhood with the theology taken out.

The churches have pulled the other way. The Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the United States now keep a day in his memory, so that a book first printed by a freethinking bookseller has become part of the Church’s own remembrance. The two Trahernes, the poet of rapture whom Hudson and Finzi loved and the teacher of doctrine whom the churches honour, still divide his readers, as they have since the first reviews.