New Names for Very Old Ideas: Theosophy and Vitalism in Algernon Blackwood’s "The Man Whom the Trees Loved"

By Timothy Grieve-Carlson / Edited by Rachael Petersen

He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential qualities. He understood them. He knew why in an oak forest, for instance, each individual was utterly distinct from its fellows, and why no two beeches in the whole world were alike. People asked him down to paint a favorite lime or silver birch, for he caught the individuality of a tree as some catch the individuality of a horse. How he managed it was something of a puzzle, for he never had painting lessons, his drawing was often wildly inaccurate, and, while his perception of a Tree Personality was true and vivid, his rendering of it might almost approach the ludicrous. Yet the character and personality of that particular tree stood there alive beneath his brush—shining, frowning, dreaming, as the case might be, friendly or hostile, good or evil. It emerged.[1]

So opens the British supernatural author Algernon Blackwood’s 1912 novella The Man Whom the Trees Loved.[2] The painter in the story is named Sanderson, the close friend of Mr. David Bittacy, who lives with his wife in the English countryside along the border of a large forest. Blackwood’s novella describes Bittacy and Sanderson’s intimate, escalating, and occult relationship with the oak, beech, holly, ash, pine, and larch trees that surround them, and the distress of Mrs. Bittacy, who believes their arboreal tryst is not only conflict with her evangelical Christian faith but is also pulling her husband away from her.

Supernatural communion with plants is one of the rarer subjects in twentieth-century speculative fiction, but Blackwood’s novella

 stands out as an exception both for his skill as a storyteller and his use of fiction as a vehicle for his own esoteric ideas and experiences. Blackwood’s fiction, I think, presents some of the most subtle and sophisticated depictions of supernatural phenomena in English literature. One admirer, H. P. Lovecraft, wrote, “No one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which [Blackwood] records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences.” In The Man Whom the Trees Loved, Blackwood careens past the apparent ordinariness of trees into a profound and uncanny description of the ways in which we can come to know them and be known by them. 

Blackwood’s ability to portray supernatural and occult experiences in fiction was not entirely the result of a gifted imagination. Literary theorist Susan Johnston Graf characterized him as an “omnivorous occultist” who both studied and practiced widely in a variety of esoteric milieus at the turn of the twentieth century.[3] Blackwood devoured occult literature and participated in groups like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society, which he joined during his time in Canada and again, later in life, in Britain. 

Blackwood’s esoteric eclecticism belied a lifelong religious interest, in his own words, in “Nature.” Blackwood described his devotion to nature in his memoir, Episodes Before Thirty: “By far the strongest influence in my life…was Nature…Bringing comfort, companionship, inspiration, joy, the spell of Nature has remained dominant, a truly magical spell.”[4] Blackwood’s fondness for the nonhuman world went beyond the aesthetic appreciation of Romanticism; his occultism was, first and foremost, a way of expressing a sense of the vitalism of the natural world, which he intuited through firsthand experience: “The early feeling was the everything was alive, a dim sense that some kind of consciousness struggled through every form, even that a sort of inarticulate communication with this ‘other life’ was possible.”[5] This experience of “inarticulate communication” with a nonhuman other is the subject of The Man Whom the Trees Loved, a work of fiction that nonetheless expressed Blackwood’s own deep convictions about the possibility of communion with a living world. 

In The Man Whom the Trees Loved, Blackwood depicts two men who know trees in a manner that is both intimate and occult and who are known by them in return. “Trees love you, that's the fact,” Sanderson says to Bittacy, “Your service to them all these years abroad has made them know you.” In Sanderson and Bittacy’s conversations with one another, they both gradually realize that the other shares the same strange sense of communion with trees. Sanderson expresses this intimacy in his painting, while Bittacy takes long, lonely walks in the forest. 

The conversations between Bittacy and Sanderson reveal Blackwood’s own thoughts on plant vitality and intelligence, which he formed from an amalgamation of scientific reasoning influenced by the legacies of German romantic Mesmerism and his overall occult sensibility. For example, Sanderson quotes a passage from the work of Charles Darwin’s son, the botanist Francis Darwin: “It is impossible to know whether or not plants are conscious, but it is consistent with the doctrine of continuity that in all living things there is something psychic, and if we accept this point of view, we must believe that in plants there exists a faint copy of what we know as consciousness in ourselves.”[6] For Blackwood and his characters, science, and occultism each confirmed, through distinct methods, what he already knew about the vitality of the natural world from firsthand experience. 

Bittacy and Sanderson’s gradual and intimate realization that they both share a secret love for the forest carries a subtle and subtextual homoeroticism throughout the story, especially in the tension that their relationship creates in Bittacy’s marriage. Bittacy and Sanderson’s closeness is based on their shared feelings of deep intimacy with trees, an intimacy that disturbs Mrs. Bittacy not romantically but spiritually: “David, dear,” Bittacy’s wife says to him of Sanderson, “I have a horrible uneasy feeling about that man… I mean—isn’t he a hypnotist, or full of those theofosical [sic] ideas, or something of the sort? You know what I mean—” Bittacy’s response does not exactly reassure her: “‘But there's no harm in that, even if he is,’ he answered quietly. ‘Those are only new names for very old ideas, you know, dear.’”[7] Bittacy’s response reflects Blackwood’s perennialist understanding of Theosophy and occultism generally: that they are new names for old things, traditions that each, in different ways, offered the same true reflection of the cosmos as it really is.

Blackwood portrays Bittacy’s communion with the forest as a deeply emotional and sensory form of knowledge: “His mind was charged with trees…He knew the effect of every wind upon them; the danger from the boisterous north, the glory from the west, the eastern dryness, and the soft, moist tenderness of a south wind upon their thinning boughs.” As Bittacy reaches out with his feelings to the forest, the forest reaches out to him in return.  In some particularly memorable scenes, even Mrs. Bittacy seems to witness the trees making a direct physical approach to her home and her husband: 

Mrs. Bittacy, rising with a violent abruptness from her chair, drew the attention of the others to something moving towards them across the lawn. It came silently. In outline it was large and curiously spread. It rose high, too, for the sky above the shrubberies, still pale gold from the sunset, was dimmed by its passage. She declared afterwards that it moved in “looping circles,” but what she perhaps meant to convey was “spirals.”

She screamed faintly. “It's come at last! And it's you that brought it!”[8]

Her husband, looking out the same window, tries to reassure her that she is seeing plumes of smoke rising from a nearby fire. Mrs. Bittacy is not portrayed as a fool (despite Blackwood’s choice to have her mix up the syllable order of “Theosophy”) but rather as an observer who is at once keenly aware and fiercely unsympathetic to her husband’s escalating communion with the natural world. 

Toward the end of the story, Mrs. Bittacy watches her husband move through the forest with a look of unfamiliar bliss on his face: 

With hands behind his back, and head uplifted, he moved quite slowly, as though absorbed in his own thoughts…Beyond this stealthy silence, just within the edge of it, the things of another world were passing. But she could not know them. Her husband knew them, knew their beauty and their awe, yes, but for her they were out of reach. She might not share with him the very least of them. It seemed that behind and through the glare of this wintry noonday in the heart of the woods there brooded another universe of life and passion, for her all unexpressed. The silence veiled it, the stillness hid it; but he moved with it all and understood. His love interpreted it.[9]

Blackwood’s story portrays the communion of Mr. Bittacy and the trees who love him with only the slimmest veil of supernatural horror through the experience of his wife. For Mr. Bittacy, the reader, and Blackwood, this communion with the trees is an unambiguously beautiful, rich, and profound experience. In stories like The Man Whom the Trees Loved and others, the cultural background of early twentieth-century science and occultism both served as vehicles to express Blackwood’s own sense of the natural world and the secret possibility of communication, however inarticulate, with the other beings who inhabit it. Blackwood was primarily an author of fiction, but he stated in memoir and other writing that his fiction was a vehicle for conveying his own experiences. As such, David Bittacy’s love for trees can only be read as an expression of Blackwood’s intimate communion with the vegetal world. 

The Welsh author of weird fiction Arthur Machen once wrote of Blackwood: “Tennyson, you remember, says, ‘the cedars sigh for Lebanon,’ and that is exquisite poetry, but Blackwood believes the cedars really do sigh for Lebanon.” The Man Whom the Trees Loved is both a startlingly uncanny and beautiful work of fiction and a record, I think, of the author’s own experience of deep emotional intimacy with plants. As the title suggests, it is ultimately a love story, a veiled memoir of the hermeneutic and epistemological potentials of love between humans and nonhumans.  

Recommended Reading: 

Algernon Blackwood, The Man Whom the Trees Loved in Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories ed. S.T. Joshi (Penguin: 2002).

Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (SUNY Press: 2015)

Francis Darwin, (1908). “The Address of the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science-I.” Science vol. 28, pp. 353-62. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1636207.

Timothy Grieve-Carlson is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. His first book, American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. He is currently working on a book about religion, ecology, and the paranormal in east Texas for Columbia University Press, titled Contact Zone: Supernature and Culture in the Big Thicket. 

[1] Algernon Blackwood, The Man Whom the Trees Loved in Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories ed. S.T. Joshi (Penguin: 2002). All page numbers refer to the Penguin edition of the text, corrected by S. T. Joshi. 

[2]The Man Whom the Trees Loved was first published in London Magazine, March 1912, and was later collected in his collection Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (MacMillan: 1912). 

[3] Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (SUNY Press: 2015) 81. 

[4]Episodes Before Thirty as quoted in S. T. Joshi’s introduction, Blackwood 2002. viii.

[5] Ibid. 

[6] Blackwood, 218. Sanderson is quoting Francis Darwin, (1908). “The Address of the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science-I.” Science vol. 28, pp. 353-62. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1636207. Blackwood added the italics himself. 

[7] Blackwood 235

[8] Blackwood 231-232

[9] Blackwood 260-262.