**4. Stein's Revised Correspondences: Human Nature and Human Mind**

Gazing out at the French countryside of Bilignin, Stein's visual field inspired in her a new way of making plays: "I found that since the landscape was the thing, a play was a thing and I went on writing plays a great many plays. The landscape at Bilignin so completely made a play that I wrote quantities of plays" (Stein 1967, p. 75). Stein's transformation of nature into art provides another example of how Stein revised metaphysical concepts explored by Emerson.

For Emerson, meditative engagement with the natural world could vault the individual into an experience of his or her own divinity. In *Nature*, he wrote: "Man is a god in ruins", but "the problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul". Once indivisible, man and nature now live estranged, but to awaken to this "kindred impression" between humanity and the natural world, to feel the "perpetual presence of the sublime", one need only "go into solitude", "look at the stars", and partake in the "wild delight" that "every season and hour yields" (Emerson 2004a, p. 11). In a famous sequence, Emerson related his own ecstatic encounter in nature: "Standing on bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God" (12). Emerson elsewhere described this kind of revelation through the ancient system of metaphysical correspondences linking the world and the individual human spirit as "an influx of the Divine mind into our mind", a "shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul" (Emerson 2004b, p. 193).

But beyond kinship and sublime wonder, Emerson described how nature might be used to restore to man a kind of divine power through beauty and language. Beauty is generative: "The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind", he wrote, "and not for barren contemplation but for new creation". Gazing at nature's beauty inspires in the artist a desire to create beauty herself: "Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man" (Emerson 2004a, p. 20).

In placing "the things that were there", as Stein states in *Plays*, into theatrical space, objects in nature similarly passed through her unique consciousness and transmuted into art. In Stein's re-formulation of Emerson, however, the purpose of transforming nature into art is not to connect the universal to individual souls through new creation, as Emerson says. What we shall see is that Stein, like many other Modernists—as Kastleman observed—secularized religious ideas, in this case replacing divinity with art as humankind's source of transcendence.

Stein further fleshed out the relationship between the mind and natural landscapes in her book *The Geographical History of America.* To understand her ideas, we first have to define some of her idiosyncratic terms. In *Geographical History* she describes her own version of correspondences between the macro and microcosmic spheres: rather than an Emersonian "influx of the Divine mind into our mind", Stein creates a unique but analogous set of categories and details the "relation" between what she terms "Human Nature" and "Human Mind". Human Nature, for Stein, translates to individual identity—the vicissitudes of individual existence. It is subject to time's flow, and acts as its own audience, self-consciously observing itself. As Thornton Wilder summarized about Stein's book: "Human Nature, in order to be sure that it exists, must employ audience and memory. Memory informs it that it was itself in the past, and audience reassures it that it is itself in the present". Human Mind exists outside of time. Not bound by continual shifting awareness from past memory to future projections, the Human Mind, in "every moment knows what it knows when it knows it". It rests in the present moment, and does not require an outside source of input to know itself (Burns et al. 1996, pp. 362–63). Kate Davy describes *Geographical History* as Stein's philosophical system and includes with her article a chart of correspondences drawn from Stein's text. Human Nature and Human Mind

are Stein's personal version of metaphysical, cosmological correspondences, and Davy's chart only furthers this point.

Rather than positing a smaller, more limited human consciousness in relation to a divine one, Stein offered two aspects of the human, which never need open to "higher" realms. The human being herself contains both entity and identity, both a timeless mind and a time-bound nature, and Stein repeatedly asserted that "there is no relation" between human nature and the human mind. Individual human nature does not evolve towards divinity as her metaphysical counterparts suggest. Instead, Stein secularizes these metaphysical models, closing what Charles Taylor calls the immanent frame, and eliminating the conduit to other realms entirely. We might understand Stein's vision of the mind moving entirely in a horizontal plane of existence, an endless sweep without vertical reach: "yes the flatter the land the more yes the more it has may have to do with the human mind" (Stein 1936, p. 113). And this horizontality manifests spatially in the span of the landscape stage.

*Geographical History* also further developed Stein's thoughts on the relationship between landscapes and national character. Her preference was for American geography because of its "flatness". She wrote: "That is what makes land connected with the human mind only flat land a great deal of flat land is connected with the human mind and so America is connected with the human mind. I can say I say so but what I do is to write it so. Think not the way the land looks but the way it lies that is now connected with the human mind" (ibid, p. 51). America's flatness had less to do with geography than cartography: she connected physical wandering to mental wandering, both provoked by "the straight lines on the map of the United States of America", which "make wandering a mission" (ibid, p. 57). Whatever America's actual geographic features, those peaks and ponds praised by Transcendentalists, Stein's America is "a country so big that it is divided one part from the other by ruled lines and it has to be flat" (ibid, p. 59). The American landscape's continuous horizontality, as viewed from a great distance or abstracted into the lines on a map, means that "the land has something to do with the human mind but nothing to do with human nature" (ibid, p. 81). And Stein's aim was not just to "say so" but "to write it so", to capture on the page this illimitable expanse, natural and mental, unbound by time and space.

Stein's true object of meditation in *Geographical History* revealed itself to be the nature and purpose of literary masterpieces. Why had *The Illiad* survived the centuries? Why do we still read Shakespeare or Jane Austen or the Bible? And moreover, what exactly makes them the enduring works that they are? She surmised, as Thornton Wilder wrote, that though such masterpieces may traffic in the sort of local details that comprise human nature, they are ultimately products of the human mind, the "principal expression" of which "is in writing and its highest achievement has been in literary masterpieces". In his introduction to *Geographical History*, Wilder tells us that encountering these masterpieces, the "vast multitudes of the world who [strive] to escape from the identity-bound and the time-immersed state, recognize that such a liberation has been achieved in these works" (ibid, p. 8). Wilder's language here evokes a particularly metaphysical soteriology with clear hints of Buddhist and Hindu influence. In general, the purpose of meditation, according to some Buddhist and Hindu doctrines, is to release the individual from *samsara*, a term shared by the two religions which denotes the endless cycle of suffering and rebirth to which all embodied (read: identity-bound and time-immersed) beings are subjected. Buddhists speak of *nirvana* and Hindus speak of *moksa*, both of which are often translated as "liberation" from *samsara* (Keown 2004; Johnson 2009). Here Wilder invoked the thread of Asian traditions that runs through metaphysical religion, without connecting it to any specific doctrine or lineage.

In *Geographical History*, Stein playfully revised the entire metaphysical project for a modern culture of doubt. "Human Mind" replaced "Divine Mind" as the timeless, boundless entity towards which the writer/devotee aspires. And while this is no devotional handbook, *Geographical History* suggests that the ultimate goal of "liberation", of escape from the limitations of human nature, could be attained through encounters with masterpieces of literature. Through her Modernist aesthetics, Stein articulated a deeply Romantic notion of the salvific nature of art. A masterpiece is a material manifestation of the human mind. Both are timeless—they "have no finishing in them"—and may on the surface engage with human nature but are ultimately removed from it (Stein 1936, p. 194).

Stein borrowed these relationships from the world of metaphysical religion around her, but she changed them in fundamental ways. And she changed the form of writing to reflect its content. The emotional peaks and rhetorical valleys of Romantic writing in general could never capture Stein's notion of American geography and its flat landscape or the horizontality of the modern social imaginary. For Stein, there is no Thoreauvean epiphany on Mount Ktaadn or a Jamesian "Walpurgisnacht experience" on Mount Marcy. There was no god of interest to Stein in heights or abysses. Stein's perception of the American landscape's perpetual flatness became a governing image for the timelessness and eternity of art rather than God. She recapitulates a Romantic religious upheaval in a modern register substituting the Human Mind for Emerson's Divine Mind and the "Master-piece" as the Human Mind's omega point. Her idiosyncratic prose style extends the experience of her Human Mind to her reader's Human Mind, forcing, through word-by-word attention, a simple resting in the timeless flow of writing. For all its difficulty, it is a generous style that allows the reader to share Stein's thought process through its perfect blend of form and content.

When Stein turned to the theater, she sought to create in her spectators a sensation similar to reading and writing. Her dramatic landscapes aim for the same by hovering always in the continuous present, a result of her distaste for syncopation. The sensation of reading Stein's writing and of viewing landscape dramaturgy in action both capture a kind of attention similar to the practice of meditation. In reading, the magnetic pull of her style continuously returns the eye to each word after individual word. In viewing, the eye similarly drifts from thing to thing to thing across the stage. And Stein's work consciously places the spectator in her subject position—that is, in the subject position of the meditator. It is this desire for an individual encounter with the work of art, with the masterpiece, that places Stein the continuum of American religion, which James called a fundamentally individual encounter with the divine. The mental magic of turning the vastness of nature into art is Stein's metaphysical operation leading to human "liberation" through literature: behold natural landscapes, transmute natural landscapes to an aestheticized vision, cultivate inner landscapes, place these inner landscapes on stage in the form of a masterpiece, and use them as vehicles for connection with the infinite (though not divine) source that is the Human Mind. The object of Stein's reformation of Emerson is salvation by masterpiece<sup>8</sup> .

In Wilder's introduction to *Geographical History*, he asks: "If then Miss Stein is writing metaphysics, why does she not state her ideas in the manner that metaphysicians generally employ?" He answers his own question, saying that in order to decouple previously used terminology from prior systems, metaphysicians must invent their own "private language". Second, Stein is an artist, a being far more engaged with poetry than theory, and she writes in a series of "metaphysical metaphors". Wilder's answers situate Stein in a continuum of thinking about metaphysics, modernity, art, and God that coalesce at the end of the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth centuries. As Charles Taylor observed, the advent of modernity brought about "new conditions in which belief and unbelief uneasily coexist" (C. Taylor 2007, p. 295). Stein invented her own terminology to describe the workings of her consciousness, but her terms borrow from several centuries of American metaphysical discourse. Stein removes the metaphysician's vertical axis connecting self and divinity (Emerson's "Divine mind into our mind") and turns it into an ever-expanding horizontality. She creates terms that share resonances with a belief system but strips them of belief, or at least casts a skeptical eye towards it, and renders the relationship between Human Nature and Human Mind a thoroughly humanistic one. Though Human Mind is timeless, without memory, without individual identity and appears to encompass Human Nature, it is also never associated, like its metaphysical analogues, with

<sup>8</sup> As Albanese wrote: "Emerson was connecting human will to a higher source of will and desire, and he was arguing for the release of the self into that vastness—a thoroughly metaphysical logic that would come to characterize some late-nineteenth-century American spirituality" (Albanese 2007, p. 167).

transcendence. Art enters the picture as a possible recourse to divinity, or if not divinity, something deeper in the world.

On the salvific nature of art, Charles Taylor shows how art, as a category, emerged in the Romantic era and served as a possible sphere for exploring and disclosing "very deep truths which in the nature of things can never be obvious, nor available to everyone, regardless of spiritual condition" (ibid, p. 356). Art was elevated to a space in which religious feeling was formerly the only occupant, and to art was bestowed the power to articulate a sense of mystery that may or may not stem from divinity. Unbelief need not lead to materialism, nor belief necessarily lead to religion. Rather, a spectrum of belief opened up—from an atheistic "mystery of anthropological depth" to religious orthodoxy, with nature, art, and the "spiritual" all offering various shades in between. Taylor credits art with filling the void left by the breakdown of received public doctrine. "Where formerly poetic language could rely on certain publicly available orders of meaning"—the Renaissance doctrine of correspondences or the Great Chain of Being, for example—"it now has to consist in a language of articulated sensibility"—that is, an idiosyncratic language issuing from the individual artist (ibid, p. 253). The Romantic period, Taylor argued, required "subtler language" to describe that which exists outside of the "pre-existing lexicon of references", and the artist provided that new language (ibid, p. 354). By way of example, Taylor offers Rilke's angels in the *Duino Elegies*: "We cannot get at them through a medieval treatise on the ranks of cherubim and seraphim, but we have to pass through this articulation of Rilke's sensibility" (ibid, p. 353). Stein similarly creates her own quasi-metaphysical terms, as Wilder states, her own subtler language, to nod to the metaphysical tradition she inherited, and she revised it to encompass a sense of skepticism.

## **5. Four Saints in Three Acts**

Metaphysical religion, landscape, and the elevation of art all coalesce in Stein's 1927 libretto for *Four Saints in Three Acts*, an opera she co-wrote with American composer Virgil Thompson. The prologue of the play, subtitled "A narrative of prepare for saints", tracks the mind of a writer engaged in the act of writing the very opera libretto we read on the page or view in performance (Stein 2016, p. 15). Stein stages the mind in action by assigning to a chorus of saints the various subjects that cross her mind as she prepares to write. Her wandering language skips from one thought to the next until she dutifully returns to the object of her meditation: the play she is writing. From the task of preparing for saints, she moves without transition into a short digression about "what happened today, a narrative", until she suddenly returns again to setting the scene of her opera: "Imagine four benches separately" (ibid, p. 15). *Four Saints* captures this continual process of thinking, disruption, and return. As Marc Robinson states, "In *Four Saints*, the work of prayer", its rigorous turning and returning to God, "stands in for the work of writing, and both are distinguished for their arduousness as much as their ardor" (Robinson 2009, p. 196).

In addition to saints and other images of religious piety, the play teems with nature imagery. The time that elapses across its many scenes and tableaux trace both a seasonal and mental thaw, moving from "April fools' day" to "June and June" (Stein 2016, pp. 19, 35). As early spring melts into summer in Avila, Stein slowly discovers how "Saint Teresa half in doors and half out of doors" will have finally, halfway through the play, "begun to be in act one" (ibid, pp. 19, 24). She seems to worry how exactly to get all of the saints on stage and how to rather unsymmetrically fit four of them into only three acts: "Four saints two at a time have to have to have to have to" (ibid, p. 16). But as the world begins to burst into bloom, suddenly there is "Saint Teresa advancing" along with Stein's own ideas (ibid, p. 21). In and amongst images of a cloistered garden, a tree, eggs, "pear trees cherry blossoms pink blossoms and late apples", magpies and pigeons in the grass, we find "St. Teresa II in ecstasy" and a "Vision of a Heavenly Mansion", two images associated with the real life Teresa's euphoric devotion (ibid, pp. 23, 29). But the play does not end with Teresa's religious apotheosis; it ends with Stein's secularized metaphysical one.

Robinson's gorgeous reading of *Four Saints* alongside St. Teresa of Avila's *The Interior Castle* compares the authors' individual journeys towards deep interiority: Teresa's goal is to unite with God in that innermost secret space of the self, but Stein desires to fully unite with her own process of thought, to make her way to the Human Mind, and capture the monumental work of writing a masterpiece. To describe the religious work the piece performs, I would suggest that perhaps Stein's saints have more in common with the sanctified loafing of Walt Whitman than with anything particularly Catholic about the rigors of Catholic mysticism. Though she writes that "saints are never idle", their placement in the landscape of the play invite audiences, too, to loaf, to behold. If for Whitman the ecstatic gazing at American panoramas engendered mystical union with spirit, for Stein, witnessing the moment-by-moment flow of thought, the image-by-image task of writing, engendered the liberating force of art.

In the "Prologue to Act IV", Stein returns to the question that she has turned over and over earlier in the play: "How many saints are there in it" (ibid, p. 27). But now she rephrases the question: "How many acts are there in it" (ibid, p. 34). She asks both, repeatedly until the answer arises, and she announces triumphantly: "Four acts. Act Four." And here Stein thrusts the saints into the celestial realm as she finds her way towards the play's completion. There is "no scenery but the sky, with tumultuous clouds and a sunburst. Saints in Heaven". This is not Bernini's Teresa in ecstasy with the looming angel ready to pierce her breast from above, nor is it the vertical expanse conjured by the image of the heavenly mansions. Stein's heaven here is the infinite horizontality of sky, of the Human Mind, and of the artistic masterpiece. She emphasizes this horizontality in the language as well as the mise-en-scène: "They have to be to see. To see to say. Laterally they may". And later, in a kind of blessing: "Saint Ignatius and left and right laterally be lined". Finally satisfied with what she has wrought, Stein declared the fourth to be the "Last act. Which is a fact" (ibid, p. 35).

Here Stein created a theater of ever-unfolding expansion, vast horizontal reaches without end, plotless and therefore timeless, as the spectator watches, with total absorption, her thoughts arising onstage. Stein's image of the celestial realm offers not a vision of an eternity to come but a taste of how transcendent realms may be accessible within the here and now—the continuous present—through gazing at worldly landscapes. Dydo writes that Stein rejected structures that were "vertical, hierarchical, and fixed. The landscape of Stein's world is horizontal, democratic, and fluid. In it all things and all words are of equal value; nothing is more important than anything else nor are words permanently attached to things. To call hers a comic world means that nothing is sacred but that everything is sacred, from small to large, from near to far, from word to word" (Dydo 2003, p. 57). This is not just true of Stein's world but of the larger shift away from the "vertical" and "transcendent" into the "closed" and "horizontal" "modern cosmic imaginary" Taylor described (C. Taylor 2007, p. 556).

So we have seen a way of thinking about Stein's most significant dramatic ideas that takes into account the particularly American religious background that surely helped form them. She adopted metaphysical language, but in the spirit of Emerson and James—as Richard Poirier suggested—makes that language less precise, more vague, at once permeable but more capacious, reflecting modernity's turn towards secularism. Stein opened metaphysical systems to doubt, leaving room for postsecular choice. Though a Modernist, Stein, like her Romantic antecedents, elevated artistic masterpieces to a third space, one that was no longer religious but not entirely secular. Her work and ideas carry the deep imprint of this particular metaphysical language, and though we may not call her work overtly religious, some trace of transcendence remains. Perhaps this is what Robinson meant when he described a searching quality in Stein's plays, a "mysticism aris[ing] from their placid surface", a "longing for more certainty" that "gives Stein's theater a strangely spiritual aspect" (Robinson 1994, p. 19). The progenitrix of the other American drama was formed in the same crucible as the other American religion.
