By Evelyn Underhill. London: Methuen and Co., Ltd. [1911.]
The Mystic Way. A Psychological Study in Christian Origins. By Evelyn Underhill. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. 1913. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Immanence. A Book of Verses. By Evelyn Underhill. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. [1912.]
The Miracles of Our Lady Saint Mary: brought out of divers tongues and newly set forth in English. By Evelyn Underhill. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1906.1
The primary object of this notice is to give some account of Miss Underhill’s “The Mystic Way,” in which she formally presents her views of the origin and nature of Christianity. We have associated with this book in the heading, however, the titles of such others of Miss Underhill’s publications that have come into our hands as are serious in form, in order that “The Mystic Way” may be seen in its setting. We should not like to suggest that Miss Underhill’s novels by which she has been previously known—“The Grey World,” 1904, “The Lost Word,” 1907, “The Column of Dust,” 1909—were written without serious purpose or are without significance as disclosures of her mind and of the direction of her studies. On the contrary they already reveal to us the intensity of her engagement with what is loosely called the mystical aspects of life, and no doubt embody, in an imaginative form, much of what she would consider symbolically at least wholesome instruction for our sense-preoccupied world. In “The Grey World” we are told how the neurotic son of a London tailor, dying in a hospital, catches a glimpse, as he passes through it to his next incarnation, of that “grey world” which lies behind this, and lived in consequence throughout his next earthly life with the curtain which hides that world from our view worn rather thin. It is a Dean’s son, who is the hero of “The Lost Word”; and we are shown in it how, brought into intimate contact from his earliest years with the symbolism and mysterious romance of a great cathedral, he found his way, despite the insistent pull of earthly passion, into dimly apprehended relations with an unseen permanent existence where he held communion with the great artistic spirits of the past. In “The Column of Dust” we learn how a bookseller’s clerk in London summons a spirit, who, however, refusing to be used by her, uses her rather, and how out of it all sacrificial love comes to its rights. In all three alike Miss Underhill seeks her inspiration in præternatural themes, and manifests a profound preoccupation with the supernatural, not to say the morbid, phases of life. From these novels alone we might assure ourselves that here is a writer who is ready to insist seriously that there are more things, not in heaven merely but here on earth, than are dreamed of in our starveling five-senses philosophy: and indeed that the most real things which surround us are not those which we touch with our clumsy fingers and gaze at with our dull eyes and taste with our gross tongues. It is not a matter of surprise that such a writer should come forward at length as a serious eulogist of Mysticism.
Among Miss Underhill’s serious writings we need not delay long over her little volume of verses. In the greater number of the pieces included in it an attempt is made to give expression to mystical moods. These do not seem to us the most successful. Strange to say Miss Underhill’s muse does not appear to move easily in such moods. We quickly gain the impression also that verse is not her most happy medium of expression. There are some lofty conceptions; there is much fine language; here and there a well-turned phrase meets us; we can smile at a conceit like that embodied in “The Idol”; we can respond to the stirring counsel of “Memento, Homo”; we can thrill with the grim lesson of “The Backward Glance.” But the volume leaves us cold—and uninstructed. Little more need be said of the collection of “The Miracles of Our Lady Saint Mary.” For all that appears on the surface, a purely literary motive might have presided over its production. Here is a byway of mediæval literature but little trodden by recent feet. Not merely students but amateurs “of mediæval manners and Christian mythology” may find interest in exploring it. Certainly Miss Underhill has done her work well and made this sufficiently dreary series of folk-stories and hagiographs as attractive as possible. There is a sentence near the close of the brief but competent Introduction, however, which may suggest that she may have had a deeper than a merely literary purpose in seeking to give new life to the Mary-legends. Speaking of the mediæval attitude towards the Virgin she remarks upon the “simple and familiar friendship, mystical adoration, and unfailing trust” which were given to “Goddes Moder and oures” by those who, as she phrases it, “were in every sense her children.” And then she adds that it is “the aim of this book” “to drag back,” not only the “literary expression” of this sentiment “from the shadow-land to which it has retreated,” but the “sentiment” itself. May we infer that Miss Underhill has had, then, a directly religious motive in seeking to revive the knowledge of the Mary-legends?