Centuries of Meditations

In the winter of 1896-7, as the story is usually told, William T. Brooke, a hymn scholar, bought the two manuscripts from London bookstalls for a few pence. By his own later account he bought them separately, in April 1897. Brooke took them for Vaughan’s and told Grosart, who bought them, and so, it seems, bought back the manuscripts he had owned a quarter of a century before. Grosart wavered between candidates, trying the Puritan scholar Theophilus Gale and the alchemist Thomas Vaughan, Henry’s twin brother, before settling on Henry, and he had prepared an edition of Vaughan that included them when he died in 1899.

Grosart’s library was sold, and Bertram Dobell, a bookseller of Charing Cross Road and a man of letters, was allowed to examine the two manuscripts before he bought them. He soon doubted that they were Vaughan’s. The true name was found through a chain of clues. Brooke remembered a poem he had copied long before from the book of thanksgivings printed without a name in 1699, A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation of the Mercies of God, and Dobell judged its verses the work of the manuscript’s author. The book’s preface did not name its author, but it said he had been chaplain to the Lord Keeper, Bridgeman, and Brooke then found the chaplain’s name, Thomas Traherne, in Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses, the register of Oxford writers and their books. The last link, which Dobell called “proof positive”, was the poem the Centuries share with Christian Ethicks.

Dobell printed the poems in 1903 as The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, and in June 1908, from his shop at 77 Charing Cross Road, he published the Centuries of Meditations himself, with a second issue following in December. He was an unlikely champion. The son of a tailor, he had left school early, worked as an errand boy, built a bookshop from nothing, and become the friend and publisher of the pessimist poet James Thomson. He was a freethinker who said openly that he did not share Traherne’s beliefs, and the book owes its place in English literature to his judgement.

Its World

Traherne grew up in a cathedral city at war. Hereford changed hands more than once in the first Civil War, was besieged by a Scottish army in the summer of 1645, and in December of that year fell to Parliament’s troops, taken by surprise when soldiers disguised as labourers seized a gate. Traherne was about eight. The execution of Charles I in January 1649 fell in his twelfth year, and the Centuries keep a few traces of that world. Traherne promises his friend to advance her not “by the noise of bloody wars and the dethroning of kings” (I.4), and he calls the dead king “the Martyr” (I.61), as the Restoration Prayer Book did in its service for the day of his death.

The Oxford he entered in 1653 had been purged by Parliament and put under Puritan rule, with Cromwell as its Chancellor and John Owen, a stern divine who held that each congregation should govern itself, as its Vice-Chancellor. In the same years a club of experimenters met at Wadham College under its Warden, John Wilkins, and after the Restoration it grew into the Royal Society. A student of the 1650s could meet the sternest Calvinism and the newest science in the same streets, and Traherne’s book has something of both, the Puritan’s intensity and the natural philosopher’s delight in the frame of things. It belongs to neither.

His church was the Church of England as it was restored in 1660, ruled by bishops, bound to the Book of Common Prayer and national in its claims, after fifteen years in which the Prayer Book had been banned. Traherne had been approved as a preacher under Cromwell and ordained by a bishop before the law required it, a common path, and nothing in the Centuries looks back fondly to the Puritan years. The book’s language is that of the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version of 1611. It prays in the words of the Creeds and the Te Deum, the ancient hymn of praise sung at Morning Prayer, and it speaks of “the Holy Catholic Church” (I.79) in the Creed’s sense, not Rome’s. The one contemporary party it names is named to be refuted, the Socinians (II.33), followers of the Italian Fausto Sozzini, who denied that Christ was God.

The new science reached Traherne as it reached most educated men, as a widening of the world. The telescope had multiplied the stars, and Galileo, the Italian astronomer who turned it on the heavens, and Hevelius, the Danzig astronomer who charted the face of the moon, both appear by name in the Third Century, among the masters of human knowledge. The book takes no side on the motion of the earth. What it takes from the new picture of the heavens is scale. The Second Century can say of the universe that “whether it be infinite or no, we cannot tell” (II.21), and it draws from that open question a lesson about the soul.

The infinite divided Traherne’s contemporaries. Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan (1651) described man as a creature of appetite and fear, held that the mind can have no idea of anything infinite, since it knows only what the senses have shown it and all it can imagine is finite. Henry More, the Cambridge philosopher, argued that space would remain if all matter were taken away and must be something incorporeal and divine, and Traherne, who read More closely and quarrelled with him, stands far nearer to him than to Hobbes. “Few will believe the soul to be infinite,” he writes (II.81), and the Second Century sets out to prove it.