The Public Mind: Edward Thomas's Social Mysticism

Abstract

According to Ms biographer R. P. Eckert, Edward Thomas was unaffected by the 'social changes that seemed to have sprung up, almost overnight, when Edward VII ascended the throne', preferring instead the work of Thomas Traherne (1637-74), 'of a past generation, out of place in the company of modern social theory'. Writing in 1936-7, at the height of the Popular Front, Eckert assumed that 'modern social theory' was a front organisation for communism. Certainly, Thomas was never a 'party politician' his phrase in the introduction to Richard Jefferies' The Hills and the Vale (1909) to contrast with Jefferies' 'revolutionary' commitment to the rural poor. He professed in The South Country the same year that 'Politics . . . reforms and preservations ... I cannot grasp; my mind refuses to deal with them'. But he also numbered himself in The Country (1913) among those 'not indifferent to movements affecting multitudes', who 'may even have become entangled in one or another kind of social net', and the circles in which he moved at Bedales school, where his wife Helen taught, were socialist, feminist and libertarian in a distinctively Georgian mode. Newly discovered in the 1900s, and edited from the original manuscripts by Bertram Dobell, Traherne's writings were reviewed by Thomas as they appeared. 1 They found a ready place alongside Blake, Whitman and William Morris in that amalgam of political, sexual libertarian and theosophical speculation that passed for avant-garde thinking in the decade before the War. For all his quietism during the Commonwealth, Traherne's thought had clearly been influenced by the antinomianism of its radical sects. What excited Thomas was not the outdatedness but the contemporaneity of Traherne's ideas: in particular a social phenomenology that reconciled individual consciousness with the community of other minds, through a shared material world, in a kind of visionary communism. In Oxford (1903) Thomas wrote of Traherne's 'characteristic ecstasy at the sight of common things', citing the passage about the corn as 'orient and