1. Toward an Understanding of Decadent Ecological Communications

In The Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater offers perhaps the most famous decadent rendering of ecological engagements as extending through and beyond the individual and individual comprehension. In the essay “Leonardo da Vinci,” he states that the painter “weighted” his art “with more of nature and purpose of humanity . . . ; he brooded over the hidden virtues of plants and crystals, the lines traced by the stars as they moved in the sky, over the correspondences which exist between the different orders of living things, through which, to eyes opened, they interpret each other.”Footnote ⁵ Pater's notions of correspondences and mutual interpretation bring forward the co-reliant operations emphasized within a decadent ecology. Meanwhile, in his conclusion to The Renaissance, he more clearly extends the concept of “living things” to deconstruct the human into sub-elements as a means of affirming the view of the human itself as a sub-element of a larger network of exchanges: “Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them [natural elements]—the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us.”Footnote ⁶ Lee, in her essay collection The Enchanted Woods (1905), marks the unknowability of such networks as the very catalyst for eco-spirituality. “It is by the repetition of such moments of baffled longing,” she writes, “that the topographical imagination acquires its passionate power. . . . One recognizes vaguely, but with deep and permeating satisfaction, that since this is a reality, there must be more, much more of it, and that this especial character and loveliness is, in all probability, one of the many great modes of the world's existence.”Footnote ⁷ Blackwood brings us back around to Evans's model of immortal empathy when he depicts as ultimately unknowable how these modifications influence the psychological elements of humans’ relationships with other forces: “A tree that to one temperament ‘brings tears of joy,’ to another is but a green thing standing in the way. Yet the hidden causes that prompt this perception of the psychology of places rest upon something far more profound and subtle than the mere love of Nature—upon a million delicate decisions, probably, of ancestral and utterly primitive origin.”Footnote ⁸

As their penchant for artifice and surface would suggest, not all decadents engaged with such an ecological vision. Oscar Wilde, for example, summarily declares that, if “we regard Nature as the collection of phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own.”Footnote ⁹ But even here, despite Wilde's wish to offer a jarringly counterintuitive aphorism, he feels compelled to acknowledge that many do not consider “Nature” as external to the human. As with Pater, Lee, and Blackwood, it is more consistent among the decadents to recognize ecology as including one's perspective, what Lee insightfully refers to as the “topographical imagination.”Footnote ¹⁰ Their views reflect the decadent critical engagement with perspectives and imaginings outside of normative, culturally condoned attractions and values. More specifically, they propose that emotions are shaped by transhistorical, transspatial channels of integration operating beyond and without particular concern for human comprehension itself.

Within more recent scientific and eco-spiritual communities alike, the model of the biosphere as an entanglement of forces that continually alter toward a state of equilibrium was effectively reinvigorated by scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock's study Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979). Lovelock proposes that a reactive model of mutation, evolution, and re-mutation should be applied to the planet's ecological network at large as a singular organism. The atmosphere of the earth, he explains, is

This model of the planet's biosphere as a self-sustaining system of co-reactions is, for Lovelock, distinctly “not humanist” because, contrary to our tendency toward anthropocentric perspectives, the human species is “not the owner, nor the tenant, not even a passenger on that obsolete metaphor ‘spaceship Earth.’”Footnote ¹² This position is echoed in both the decadents’ and Evans's emphasis on a community of mutually reliant components and processes in which one may sense, in Robert Louis Stevenson's formulation, “a low form of consciousness” where one feels “dignified and longœvous like a tree.”Footnote ¹³

In their introduction to the special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture on “Open Ecologies,” Devin Griffiths and Deanna K. Kreisel note the challenges posed by nineteenth-century scholars to holistic models of the biosphere such as Lovelock seems to propose here. As Griffiths and Kreisel point out, the nineteenth-century “wave of ecological theory did not assume that these interactions were coherent, harmonious, or tightly integrated,” offering a “more mutable notion of ecology.”Footnote ¹⁴ Twentieth-century formulations such as Lovelock's “Gaia,” Richard Buckminster Fuller's “Spaceship Earth,” and Arne Næss's “ecosophy,” they argue, have imbued the ecological imagination with a problematic notion of harmonized organicism.Footnote ¹⁵ Meanwhile, Lovelock himself points out that his own model is rooted in Darwin and, moreover, not intended to be idealist in its vision. Lovelock has become increasingly critical in recent years of environmentalist visions such as Evans's, seeing such formulations as offering inadequate efforts, however well intended, to address issues such as pollution and natural-resource depletion. Arne Næss refers to human-framed approaches to planetary disequilibrium, such as the one suggested by Evans, as a “shallow ecology” conceived by the wealthy people of developed nations driven primarily by concerns regarding their own well-being and comfort. Writing in the 1970s, at roughly the same time that Lovelock first articulated his Gaia theory, Næss advocates for a model of “deep ecology” that recognizes the inherent value of all life-forms, offering a relational model of “organisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations.”Footnote ¹⁶ William Grey observes that, in fact, we can trace such decentering of humanity in scientific approaches to the physical, temporal, and biological back roughly two centuries: “We have found that the universe is much larger, and its history much longer and more varied, than was previously imagined. In fact the spatial and temporal magnitudes are far beyond those of experiential familiarity, and we can grasp them only by the use of scaling metaphors, such as the cosmic day or the cosmic kilometer.”Footnote ¹⁷ Similarly, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller has noted the ways in which Thomas Hardy uses both the size and life span of trees to “reinforce the smallness of the [human] individual within a wider, supra-human scale.”Footnote ¹⁸ In his most recent scholarship, Lovelock has declared that it is the difficulty in comprehending the magnitude of the situation without recourse to imaginary measures of comparison that has led to the current, insufficient environmentalisms. The co-reliant elements of the biosphere are all reacting to each other in ways beyond our understanding, and, therefore, Lovelock feels much greater interventions are required if there is to be any hope of humans ameliorating the current decadent state of the planet, its eco-social network crumbling into malfunctioning chaos while the wealthy, Nero-like nations fiddle with reusing, recycling, and eco-thoughtful vacation planning.Footnote ¹⁹

One of the most common tropes of decadence has been the depiction of societies and civilizations as imbricated processes of growth, decay, instability, mutation, and restabilization, processes that operate on a scale beyond that of sociopolitical comprehension, let alone that of the human individual. While one society is crumbling into rot, another benefits from this decay to develop into whatever it recognizes as a vibrant and valuable order, an order that yet some other ecology engages as refuse for cultivating its own health and well-being. This paradigm encourages us to recognize different scales of politics than the Western, human-centered one through which most of our analyses of decadent politics occur. In accord with many current environmentalists and eco-scientists, Victorian decadents were sensitive to both global and even grander visions of the mutations of civilizations and cultures such as that made familiar in Britain through works like Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). Moreover, decadent politics includes a range of sentient and insentient, known and unknown, mortal and immortal (in Evans's sense) contributors, the very obliqueness of such tangents raising the question of whether these disparate beings communicate feelings or whether, conversely, communicative intimacies compose interdependent life-forms. All of which leads to the question of how humans can even come to understand the communication of attraction and repulsion across species without colonizing others through the very discourses of our efforts at engagement.

Recently, scholars have made important headway in articulating how the human might engage over the terms of diverse ecological forces. Some have noted the anxiety people have often felt—what Sion C. Estok refers to as “ecophobia”Footnote ²⁰—in even considering the possibility of their own species’ limited agency. Dawn Keetley, for example, describes literature exploring vegetal agency as “plant horror” marking “humans’ dread of the ‘wildness’ of vegetal nature—its untameability, its pointless excess, its uncontrollable growth.”Footnote ²¹ Indeed, Karen Houle argues that ecology “does not begin with the presumption of individuals or isolated species but rather with sets of context-specific life forms that have co-evolved into a variety of partnerings.”Footnote ²² For Houle, in her work on vegetal ontology, individuals such as herself who rely on a philosophical approach and others who turn to empirical data are both often guilty of extensionism. “Very little attention has been devoted to imagining what these unique expressions of plant-livings might actually be,” she notes, encouraging the possibility of “our extension and ideas entering into composition with something else.”Footnote ²³ Decadents, like the gothic and horror writers addressed by Keetley, recognized the anxiety and fear humans feel when considering the possibility that nonhuman life-forms can and do communicate regardless of whether humans are invested. However, rather than simply affirming these states of anxiety and uncanniness as threats to a humanist ego, the decadent authors whom I address engaged such seemingly “pointless excess,” as Keetley puts it, as ontological tremors affirming transspecies conversations. The works of Lee and Blackwood are notable not only for their sensitivity to transspecies co-reliance but also for their animated exploration of transspecies attractions as modes of informational intercourse. These authors readily acknowledge that they are drawn to translate such communications into paradigms of desire or pleasure, but their works also suggest that such readings risk using a human value when these communications can at most be understood, with inevitable indeterminacy, as forms of openness and outreach.

2. Vernon Lee's Scrambled Affections

Vernon Lee (1856–1935) is unique among the authors and artists recognized as decadent for the extensive number of books she wrote on the position of humans as part of their ecology, often framing her analysis within a psychological discourse. Neither her many ghost and fantasy stories, nor her infamous critique of dandy-aesthetes in the novel Miss Brown (1884)—the key works that have marked her as a member of the decadent movement—can be fully appreciated without situating them within the context of her essays on travel and landscape aesthetics. “[T]he power of outdoor things, their mysterious affinities,” Lee writes in her essay “The Lie of the Land” (1897), “can change the values even of what has been and what has not been, can make one live for a moment in places which have never existed save in the fancy. Have I not found myself suddenly taken back to certain woods which I loved in my childhood simply because I had halted before a great isolated fir with hanging branches?”Footnote ²⁴ One recognizes Lee engaging here with the same conundrum of ecological communication explored by Houle. The aim of her essay, Lee explains, is “to talk about the something which makes the real, individual landscape—the landscape one actually sees with the eyes of the body and the eyes of the spirit—the landscape you cannot describe.”Footnote ²⁵ It is a landscape that, in her view, transcends not only space but also time and the very notion of existence itself—a landscape that demands one's acknowledgment of incomprehension.

Alex Murray, in Landscapes of Decadence (2016), conceives of both decadence and landscape as each “first and foremost a stylistic and aesthetic practice,” as “tactics, style in the service of politics, in this case a politics centred on the competing understandings of how we read, experience and inhabit specific places.”Footnote ²⁶ Murray emphasizes that landscape is not simply a geographic location but an artistically and ideologically configured notion of space and place. In accord with Murray's formulation, Lee spends considerable time analyzing landscape as an aesthetic—as well as psychological—innovation, but she also encourages a sense of it as engaging in a communicative relationship. For Lee, the elements of the landscape that Murray says humans render ideologically and politically are also in the process of rendering, experiencing, and even conceptualizing their own terrains. When Lee refers to “the landscape you cannot describe” as the “real, individual landscape,” she captures her sense of ecological existence beyond common notions of time and space—a subject that “happens to elude all literary treatment, and yet it must be treated.” Bringing to mind a central inquiry among scholars of posthumanism and vegetal ontology, Lee recognizes both the invitation for exchange from within her ecological network and the shortcomings of human tools of communication to capture it, let alone engage in it.

Throughout “The Lie of the Land,” Lee brings forward this disconnect between, on one hand, what is communicated to her by the environment and, on the other, her own frustrating discursive limits: “it is an unnamed mystery into which various things enter, and I feel as if I ought to explain myself by dumb show. It will serve at any rate as an object-lesson in the extreme one-sidedness of language and a protest against human silence about the things it likes best,” those seeming elements of a landscape that “reach home to our feelings.” The import of these elements, she elaborates, extends back to our “remotest ancestors” and, as an “instinctive preference for one kind rather than another, is among the obscure things inherited within our blood, and making up the stuff of our souls.” Bringing to mind Pater's notion of energy transmissions through both the human and the ecological body, described in his conclusion to The Renaissance, Lee's position differs in its less passive, less ambivalent efforts to capture the transhistoricity of these emotional and, she suggests, eco-spiritual engagements. “[T]here is such a thing as intercourse with fields and trees and skies,” she observes, “various commerce, or pleasure, curiosity, and gratitude, of kindly introduction of friend by friend, quite apart from the commerce of other human beings. . . . Words can just barely indicate the charm of this other place other time enriching of the present impression.” For Lee, the ecological exists as strong invitations to intercourse, which she understands as affectionate communication. There is, in her wording, a sense of an undeniable pressure or draw to reciprocate kindness.

In a piece of travel writing, “A Walk in the Maremma,” from The Enchanted Woods, Lee describes her “longing for closer acquaintance” with the environment, a sensual correspondence she ultimately attains when she begins “scrambling,” walking with some effort across difficult terrain, “the most intimate form of walking, the one bringing the most affectionate knowledge” (165–66). The humility in Lee's understanding is apparent in the ready acknowledgment of the limits of her imaginative engagements. “This country realizes something I have, so to speak, guessed at for years and years, and longed for,” she says. “I used to feel rather than think that certain bends of road of Villa Borghese—grass dells traversed by winding rows of oaks, thickets in holes, and wide swelling meadows in the sunshine, must be samples (even to their wooden fences and weather-stained farm-buildings) of something—how shall I say it?—well, something real, which existed, I knew not where” (167). Note her strategic self-interruption in this quotation; the reader first understands that “this country realizes something I have,” but then—following a hefty interjection—this idea of the landscape reaching out to her, finding something in her, shifts direction, with her reaching out to it, with the country realizing something she actually does not have but rather “something I have . . . longed for.” Unlike Pater in the conclusion, Lee in this essay exposes the emotional vulnerability that arises within her personally as she is compelled to want a connection she is unable to initiate. With a strong language of personal desire, Lee encourages an openness that marks her own outermost threshold of affection for this network.

In accord with Murray's discussion of the politically inflected landscape of the decadents, for Lee, these intimacies are marked by a politics that, in her nature writing, is actively engaged by elements of the ecological more broadly. A particularly vibrant representation of this engagement that foregrounds nonanthropocentric models of time and space can be found in another essay from The Enchanted Woods, “The Forest of the Antonines.” Early in the piece, Lee describes herself being drawn to the “heart” and “mysteries” of the forest: “The poignant sylvan smell of distant charcoal ovens mingled in the sweetness of wet leaves and moss and warm fir-resin. And from the bottom of the ravine rose the sound of the forest's secret, of the invisible stream. The sense of mysterious immanent presence was so great in that place that after a few minutes I turned round where I sat on the rocks to make sure that no one was behind me” (143–44). In the collection Genius Loci: Notes on Places (1899), in which Lee explores person/place relations as “friendships of the deepest and most satisfying sort,”Footnote ²⁷ she repeatedly articulates her view of nature as not exclusive from people or even from urban spaces, and the same awareness of the practical as well as philosophical presence of the human in any landscape is apparent in “The Forest of the Antonines,” captured in the commingled aroma of charcoal ovens and plant life. The cottage industry comes across as part of the most mysterious elements of the genius loci. In this Anthropocenic idyll, with its fusion of labor and languor, heart and mystery, body and spirit, the author senses a presence so visceral that she speculates on whether it has material form. The human as inseparable from the wilderness engages in an attraction made all the more intense by its transience and fragility.

Lee spends considerable time in “The Forest of the Antonines” questioning the monetary voracity behind the devastation of nature, but in the process she develops the notion of humans’ inner “longing for forests” and sense of reciprocal responsibility with them (145). “Italy has had her gods Sylvanus and Picus,” she writes, but in so much of the country the forests have dwindled if not disappeared (145, 146). “Heaven knows when the mischief began,” she declares in a practical turn stimulated by her environmentalist discontent. Recognizing that any clearing of vegetation that was required in order to make the land inhabitable and fertile for agrarian use had occurred “thousands of years ago,” Lee can only conclude that the sustained harvesting of the forests is the product of “greed and wastefulness.” She speculates that “the destruction of the forests of Italy kept pace with the decline of Italy's commerce and industry, idle and impoverished nobles turning everything they could to ready money; and the crushing taxation which has been the price of national independence sweeping away the last vestiges of woodland” (146). She goes on to recognize the extension of the devastation through cattle grazing and the harvesting of scrub for firewood.

Lee's love of the Italian landscape and culture, meanwhile, imbues the essay's environmentalism with an emotional poignancy, while at the same time, crucially, offering an economic formulation of transspecies longing and mutual respect through an image of ecological devastation as human self-destruction. The deforestation of the Apennine mountainside, she observes, had resulted in the creeks becoming torrents that then removed any roots, seedlings, and other bits of life, ironically even eventually destroying the small town of the foresters themselves. Giving this macabre twist an extra turn, the author describes the now unhindered waters torrenting down the mountain and sweeping away even the coffins of the local cemetery along with the soil in which they were buried. “This, then, was the Apennines’ revenge!” Lee declares. “And it was the coffins, very likely, of the self-same men who had cut down the forests which were dragged out of the ground and hurled along by those torrents of their own making” (150). The mix of death, irony, and skewed perspective in this closing scene reminds us that she was one of the best ghost-story writers of her time. The decadence of “The Forest of the Antonines,” meanwhile, operates on multiple registers; the principal aim of the piece is not to entertain through horror but to argue against resource exploitation by suggesting the roiling channels of emotional communication operating as much through humans’ psychological experiences as through physical chain reactions where ecological destruction becomes—or, more accurately, always already is—self-destruction. Within a decadent ecology, in which the human ego is understood as only a contribution to a nodule of confluences among engaged, transient forces, a forest is likewise but an aspect of a mutational biosphere whose actions are not revengeful but reactive. Blackwood's short story “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” from his collection Pan's Garden (1912), engages with a similar eco-political issue marked by sublime horror. Crucially, however, he presents it through the image of a forest driven, not by revenge, but by devotion and smothering affection.

3. Algernon Blackwood's “Query Marks Like Trees”

The ecological vision of Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) was derived in large part from his belief in an otherworldly, nature-invested spiritual force. Maude M. C. Ffoulkes—whom the author had introduced to “the horrors and the wild pagan joy” of Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1894)—described Blackwood as a man of “sympathy and kindness,” an “interpreter of Nature in the primitive, poetic-animistic sense,” and “the boldest interpreter of what I may call Super-Nature.”Footnote ²⁸ For Ffoulkes, Blackwood's friendship did no less than raise her to “a most exalted plane” that allowed her to see “the troubles of daily life in the right proportion.”Footnote ²⁹ As she makes clear, his work moves through the eco-weird channels of decadence in which Machen and Lee also both engaged.Footnote ³⁰ H. P. Lovecraft proclaimed him “the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere” whose works “evoke as does nothing else in literature an awed and convinced sense of the immanence of strange spiritual spheres or entities.”Footnote ³¹ Robert Macfarlane, recently writing in The Guardian, associates Blackwood with contemporary contributions to an “occulture” defined by an attitude toward nature marked not by horror but by “the eerie: that form of fear that is felt first as unease, then as dread, and which is incited by glimpses and tremors rather than outright attack.”Footnote ³²

The eco-spiritual potency that various people have recognized in Blackwood and his writing arose in part from his membership, starting in 1900, in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and then, when the original order dissolved, in A. E. Waite's offshoot, the Independent and Rectified Order. Decadence and the occult were extensively integrated at this time, with a number of members of the broader decadent community of the fin de siècle also being members of the order, including Machen, Florence Farr, William Sharp, Constance Wilde, and W. B. Yeats. Meanwhile, other decadents such as Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde were close acquaintances with many of the occultists. In addition, issues of interest to the decadents—from gender and nationalist identity politics to the otherworldly connotations of symbolism—were also central to the works of Golden Dawn members and their close affiliates. By 1915, Blackwood had risen to the Inner Order of Waite's group and, more than most members, envisioned his occultism through a mysticism deeply rooted in an awe and veneration of nature akin to the pantheism suggested in writings by other decadents such as Pater, Farr, Sharp, and Michael Field. These cross-influences and thematic interests are apparent in the description by Blackwood's biographer, Mike Ashley, of him as someone who “could see visions of the Mother Earth in the Caucasus, who could experience the ancient past of Egypt engulf him like a wave of time, who could sense the spirit world through his affinity with Nature.”Footnote ³³

As a member of the Golden Dawn, Blackwood took on the magical motto Umbra Fugat Veritas (Latin for “Truth flees from the shadows”). At the risk of overreading, one might interpret the motto as an articulation of his career-long analysis of the limitations of Truth (with a capital T) in the context of ecological forces operating beyond the conscripts of human intentionality. In “The Psychology of Places” (1910), Blackwood notes his effort to articulate his experience of such energy, lamenting: “I have watched its operation in a thousand cases; yet never found any satisfactory explanation outside the region of mystical theories upon which one may not draw to beg the question.”Footnote ³⁴ He describes observing a backwoodsman in “the trackless Canadian forests” taking into account such mysterious forces, “[a]lmost as though some places grow a crop of big invisible Query Marks like trees.” Like Lee, Blackwood is confident of the channels of communication across ecological forms but—despite his investment in the Golden Dawn, work for the Society for Psychical Research, and studies in Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and Buddhism—he declares his occult and other spiritual studies insufficient in offering a means by which to capture his experience of such energetic intimacies.

Among the many fictional works in which Blackwood attempts to capture his wonder and admiration in the presence of the unexplainable, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” is unique in its commingling of the more familiar human sense of fear of self-destruction with that of a forest's engagement with a human as a type of love. In this short story, Blackwood depicts David and Sophie Bittacy, a retired husband and wife who live in a rural community and define themselves increasingly by the seductive edge of a nearby forest—“the lips of this great spreading thing that covered so many leagues with its tangle of swamps and moors and splendid ancient trees.”Footnote ³⁵ In “The Psychology of Places,” Blackwood places exceptional emphasis on the anxiety-causing attractiveness of such liminality: “It's the moment of birth, of life, thrill, excitement. The pre-limenaries are over; you have entered the Unknown. And though a boundary line is, of course, a merely theoretic conception without actual existence, its invention is due to that fundamental need of human nature which seeks some kind of measurement by which to check its retrogression or advance.”Footnote ³⁶ It is this arbitrariness of boundaries that proves the key source of conceptual conflict within the story.

The spiritual and philosophical disruptions begin with a visit from an artist who specializes in portraits of trees, whom David has hired to create a painting of their Lebanese cedar. Sanderson draws the couple to consider the “mysterious agencies” of a “splendid Entity that manifests through all the thousand individual trees” (30). As he elaborates on the subject of plants: “They breathe, they eat, they digest, they move about, and they adapt themselves to their environment as men and animals do. They have a nervous system too . . . at least a complex system of nuclei which have some of the qualities of nerve cells. They may have memory too. Certainly, they know definite action in response to stimulus. And though this may be physiological, no one has proved that it is only that, and not—psychological” (31, ellipses in the original). Sanderson's ideas are Darwinian. In the decades at the end of his career, Charles Darwin explored the intentionality of vegetations’ self-propelled movements. The resultant work, The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), was co-written with his son Francis, who had helped with the experiments. Darwin argues that plants act in many ways akin to animals, and even can be said to have brains such as those of lower animals, raising the possibility of vegetal cognition. In Blackwood's story, the character David reads out a passage of a speech that Francis Darwin in real life gave to the Royal Society: “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” (14, the italics are David's, not Darwin's). Blackwood uses his character as a medium for his own views, offering a challenge to the perceived hard separation between humans and other species, the separation René Descartes tried to declare of humans from other sentient beings based on his view that our skills of cognition and communication are inherently superior.

In a pre-Lovelockian formulation, Sanderson goes on to propose that plants can be considered as one organism, as “some huge collective life. . . . It might merge and blend with ours under certain conditions, so that we could understand it by being it, for a time at least. It might even engulf human vitality into the immense whirlpool of its own vast dreaming life. The pull of a big forest on a man can be tremendous and utterly overwhelming” (30–31). The couple has a mixed response to the notion of “being” the multi-arboreal whirlpool rather than being themselves, with David finding it alluring while Sophie finds it threatening and sacrilegious. The demand that the forest puts on David's affections in particular arises, it turns out, from his previous employment with the Indian Forest Service; this shared history has resulted now in “a subtle sense of communion with them, born perhaps of those years he had lived in caring for them, guarding, protecting, nursing, years of solitude among their great shadowy presences” (4). The forests back in India, it appears, have communicated on the wind or through some other channels to trees in England; bringing to mind Evans's description at the start of this article of a tree as an ecological community, David praises how the forest “nursed the life they carried—insects, larvae, chrysalis—and when the skies above them melted, he spoke of them standing ‘motionless in an ecstasy of rain,’ or in the sunshine ‘selfpoised upon their prodigy of shade’” (20). Elizabeth Chang describes David's growing awareness of his “unexamined affinity to the trees as a colonial power” (173), this later reciprocal-colonization of the English countryside being a continuation of the relationship's initial design.

Sophie is the one who maintains most forcefully a conventional anthropocentric logic, one that is for her inflected with Christian values. To the argument that trees are alive, Sophie offers the refreshingly camp declaration, “It's only man who was created in His image, not shrubberies” (29). To which the visiting tree portraitist—whom the heroine calls “a hypnotist, . . . full of those theofosical ideas”—retorts, “I like to think that even in decay there's life” (39, 30). Nor are the neighbours, the Mortimers, of any help in her increasing sense of solitude, as they too appear to have shifted to an unconventional environmentalism; Mrs. Mortimer, we are told, “wore sandals [and] believed that nuts were the complete food of man” (87). The heroine is left to engage the trees alone and, ultimately, on their terms.

Suggestive of Lee's “The Forests of the Antonines,” David's gradual incorporation into the forest's amorous mutations is presented as the trees’ recalibration to the human “threat” of expansion. The plants having once “been moving things, animal organisms of some sort” with “no terror of the axe,” they are now under siege: “The roads were no longer glades of silent turf, but noisy, cruel ways by which men came to attack them. They were civilized, cared for—but cared for in order that some day they might be put to death” (9, 10). Both David and Sanderson recognize this as well, with the latter observing: “Is it not striking what a lot of the globe they cover . . . exquisitely organised life, yet stationary, always ready to our hand when we want them, never running away? But the taking them, for all that, not so easy. One man shrinks from picking flowers, another from cutting down trees. [. . .] Wood-cutters . . . those who take the life of trees . . . you see, a race of haunted men.” (33; all ellipses in the original, except the ones in square brackets). There exists an ongoing discussion in environmental studies—to which Lovelock, Ursula Le Guin, Gary Snyder, and many others have contributed—regarding the benefits, detriments, and naïve hubris in humans envisioning themselves as ecological stewards. In the story's scenario, however, Blackwood proposes a co-managerial model in David's relationship to the forests beginning in India, which is contrasted (as in Lee's essay) with a farming-for-harvest model driven by humans’ speciesist self-privilege. Behind this paradigm, as Blackwood articulates it, lurks the postcolonial discourse of claiming to civilize the locals for their own benefit, when the sole motivation of any such actions is the profit and reaffirmation of the colonizer.

While David is the key recipient of the trees’ munificence, it is the artist, Sanderson, who is most attuned to their communal intercourse, explaining it to the retired forester: “their love for you, their ‘awareness’ of your personality and presence involves the idea of winning you—across the border—into themselves—into their world of living. It means, in a way, taking you over” (27). In an analysis of arboreality, William Cohen argues that “tactile modality provides a point of entry into discussions of both affect and ecology, and for understanding the materiality of the human, whether that material is regarded in bodily terms or in terms of its non-differentiation from its environment” (2). All three of the main characters in Blackwood's story—David, Sophie, and Sanderson—similarly sense a modality of vegetal feeling that disturbs temporal, spatial, and identificatory separations among species. The ecological outreach that Blackwood portrays has the forest not simply touching (in the emotional sense more than the physical) but spreading its lips, offering the very site of communication as a point of access. Inevitably, it seems, David fully engages with the forest's suggestion of sustained, intimate correspondence. Even Sophie, in a moment of revelation, observes that, until now, “she had looked at them from her own point of view; now they looked at her from theirs. They stared in the face and eyes; they stared all over[,] . . . this awful and enormous sight all over her” (76–77). The sense of exposure, of nakedness before the observations of another species is, for one such as Sophie who has until now assumed her evolutionary authority, embarrassing and disempowering, fostering a feeling of “abject helplessness” (82). But as she makes clear, it is principally an issue not of a new authority but of a recognition of an alternative perspective than one's own; speaking of herself as an intrusion on the forest's efforts to absorb David, she notes that the “Collective Consciousness of the Forest strove to eject this human atom that stood across the path of its desire” (82). Recognizing the arboreal force as not operating from an ethical position, she cannot find her way to follow her husband in accepting such an ecological whirlpool. When David suggests she join him, the narrator notes, the “invitation on his lips was more than she could bear to hear. It seemed like asking her to hurry to her own execution” (86). And, in a sense, this is indeed what it is—taking the axe not to the trees but to human subjectivity. David is ultimately presented as already lost to a decadent ecology, himself now part of the forest's body politic, having become the lips of its invitation. He remains able to function within the domestic space, to follow the conventional patterns of daily human existence, and to communicate with his wife human-to-human, but he has also become part of a larger conversation, one in which he has no sense of control but which he finds more stimulating and liberating.