The Centaur was published by Macmillan in 1911. Terence O’Malley, an Irish journalist of intense imaginative sensitivity, is traveling by ship toward the Caucasus Mountains when he encounters a fellow passenger — a figure of enormous, primitive vitality who seems more force of nature than man. O’Malley is drawn to him with irresistible compulsion, and together they journey into the mountains where O’Malley experiences a mystical union with the Earth itself — a consciousness vaster and older than humanity, of which the centaur-figure is an emanation.
The novel is Blackwood’s fullest expression of his philosophical pantheism: the belief that the Earth is a living, conscious being — not metaphorically but literally — and that human beings, in their development of intellect and technology, have severed themselves from this planetary consciousness. The centaur represents the human being who has never made this severance — who remains connected to the Earth’s dreaming, wild intelligence.
This is not horror but rapture: O’Malley’s experience in the mountains is ecstatic, a dissolution of individual identity into something immeasurably larger and more ancient. The terror — such as it is — lies in the impossibility of return: once you have glimpsed the Earth’s consciousness, ordinary human life becomes intolerable. The novel is Blackwood’s most direct statement of the mysticism that underlies all his fiction.
Collecting The Centaur
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1911): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $200–$500
- Very good: $75–$200