Centuries of Meditations

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.