Gerard Manley Hopkins

Angus Easson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136854682
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Gerard Manley Hopkins was among the most innovative writers of the Victorian period. Experimental and idiosyncratic, his work remains important for any student of nineteenth-century literature and culture.

This guide to Hopkins' life and work offers:

• a detailed account of Hopkins life and creative development
• an extensive introduction to Hopkins' poems, their critical history and the many interpretations of his work
• cross-references between documents and sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Hopkins' work and seeking not only a guide to the poems, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.

1
Life and contexts

Introduction

Gerard Manley Hopkins was acclaimed in the twentieth century as amongst the greatest modern poets: his language and his poetic experiments spoke to a time, after the First World War, that rejected Victorian attitudes, Victorian poetry and Victorian poetic language. Yet, paradoxically, Hopkins had died in 1889, over a decade before the Victorian age ended and he was in many respects a true Victorian. In his life he was known as a promising student who became a Catholic and a Jesuit priest who, as he himself was all too aware, seemed to have achieved little and to have served God to little purpose, a man virtually unknown as a poet, his work unpublished until thirty years after his death. His poetic language and forms, his integration of nature, that great Romantic force, with the strict doctrines of Catholicism, made a new poetry, unlike that of Tennyson, Browning or Matthew Arnold. Hopkins indeed was compared to Walt Whitman, whose loose rhythms sought, like Hopkins’s experiments, to forge new poetic forms. Accepting the comparison with the American poet, Hopkins also saw himself as startlingly like the man – a pity, he remarked, since Whitman was ‘a very great scoundrel’ (L, 1.155). That wry recognition of the ruffian in his own nature hints at Hopkins’s sense of humour and a vein of self-deprecation in a man who saw himself clearly (not always quite liking what he saw). Outwardly, Hopkins’s life is not obviously eventful, yet each phase proved deeply significant for his poetry, not least the long interval (1868–75) when he renounced poetic creation.

Three aspects in particular intertwine: friendship; conversion and priesthood; aesthetic theories and poetic achievement. Friendship helped on his conversion, gave him critical support in his poetry, and developed an emotional life that found poetic expression. Conversion led to Catholicism and the Society of Jesus; to the tension between God and poetic creativity; and in the poetry itself both to the reconciliation of God with Nature and to an anguished sense of exclusion from God. Aesthetic theories and poetic development produced the astonishing representations of Nature and of God in Nature and the daring experiments in language and rhythm that baffled those of his contemporaries who ever knew them and caused this Victorian to be proclaimed a Modern in the twentieth century and to sustain him as a truly great poet in the twenty-first.

Early years 1844–63

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born 28 July 1844 in Stratford, East London. His father, Manley Hopkins, was in marine insurance; his mother, Catherine, had married Manley Hopkins in 1843 and Gerard was the first of nine children. Eight years later, the family moved to Oak Hill Park, Hampstead (the house was destroyed in 1961). His family offered Gerard material and emotional comfort, stability, interests in music and drawing, and a firm grounding in religion. The family were High Church Anglicans, whose beliefs and worship were based on the Oxford or Tractarian Movement of the mid-nineteenth century [p. 10], which had rediscovered the truth of Catholic doctrines. Such doctrines were linked to ceremonial and ritual in church. High Anglicans also insisted upon the validity of Anglican orders, that is, that their ministers were endowed in unbroken line of succession from St Peter and the Apostles with the powers of the priest. This very closeness to the Catholic Church often led to extreme hostility, with accusations against those who became Catholics that they were ‘perverts’ to Romanism (the ‘Roman’ Catholic Church, so designated to identify it with the Pope of Rome and his claim to supreme and exclusive authority). This doctrinal security made Hopkins’s conversion easier, when the time came, but also increased the bitterness and sense of alienation for him and his family when he made his decision.

At first, though, Hopkins’s life was on the surface an ordinary middle-class one. After tuition and private school, from 1854 he went to Sir Roger Cholmley’s School, Highgate, where despite the incompetence of the headmaster, Dyne, a witless flogger, he got on well with other boys, was nicknamed ‘Skin’ (L, 3.394), and followed the usual kind of curriculum – the Classics, emphasis being laid on translation to and from Latin and Greek and the writing of verse in those languages; mathematics; and a modern language – Hopkins read and spoke French fluently. Amongst his masters, briefly, was Richard Watson Dixon, ten years his senior, already a poet, whose poetry Hopkins came to admire greatly and with whom, from 1878, he was to maintain a friendship through correspondence. Later, Dixon remembered ‘a pale young boy, very light and active, with a very meditative & intellectual face’ (L, 2.4) – Hopkins’s own description (1887) adds hazel eyes and lightish brown hair. While active in games, he was already thoughtful, with an inward streak, curious about his own nature and that of others, what he described as the ‘taste of myself … incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: What must it be to be someone else?)’ (S, 123). If he could not enter readily into other natures, his meditations were to lead into the world’s mystery and the darker side of his own nature.

At Highgate school he showed an obstinacy, developed as determination, that was to be evident even at his lowest ebb. Hopkins bet another boy that he could abstain from all liquid. His tongue and lips black, he won the bet, only for the headmaster to intervene, beat both boys, and require Hopkins to return his winnings. Hopkins protested unavailingly: he had won, even if he were to be punished, while the other boy lost nothing. The strength of will demonstrated by liquid deprivation was seen by others: a fellow Jesuit recalled Hopkins as having ‘a strong manly will of his own’, adding that if ‘somewhat eccentric in his views and ways’, these ways were pleasing and many of them original (J, 421). And if Hopkins’s ‘eccentricity’ could put him at odds with his superiors, the strength of will carried him crucially his own way. At times, Hopkins’s self-assessment could be harsher than that of others: he is a scoundrel like Whitman or feels himself a blackguard (L, 1.139). Yet here and in his moments of blackness brought on by morbid self-scrutiny, it is important to recognise the edge of humour in such judgements or, with the late Retreat notes, their private nature. Certainly, such strength of character, obstinacy even, was necessary when he had to face his family at his conversion, to face the choices of priesthood and entry to the Jesuits, to face for the rest of his life the consequences of these decisions.

Outside school, Hopkins developed his interests in drawing, music, and language. Music developed his interest in rhythm and stress, while his Aunt Maria took him out sketching on Hampstead Heath. Though never a distinctive artist, the influence of Hampstead’s artistic communities and even more of John Ruskin, the great if eccentric critic of art and architecture, made him observe natural forms in detail. Under Ruskin’s insistence that we should ‘go to Nature in all singleness of heart … having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning … rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing’ (Ruskin 1897: 448), Hopkins looked intensely and strove in his Journals to capture the particularity of things, by which their essence might be known. Ruskin’s command did not deny beauty even amidst the ordinary and the excluded, so that later Hopkins, while a Jesuit novice at Roehampton, noted how the ‘slate slabs of the urinals even are frosted in graceful sprays’ (J, 196). Ruskin’s beauty was not merely a general impression, which cast its eye aside from the sordid, but an intent scrutiny, and Hopkins followed him, though he was to perceive a very different power or charge within nature. Ruskin too helped point Hopkins towards a technical vocabulary with which to describe with precision what he saw. Directed by Ruskin’s fascination with Gothic architecture, Hopkins consulted glossaries of architectural terms and found words that he used later – bay, boss, canopy, crest, cusp – for his own purposes (White 1992: 21).

Hopkins at school was already writing poetry. He won a school prize in 1860 for the subject set, ‘The Escorial’ [pp. 44–5], on Philip II of Spain’s great palace. Hopkins drew on his architectural interests, siding with Ruskin and ‘Gothic grace’ against the ‘monstrous’ regularity of the palace, while he adopted conventional anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish prejudices, against ‘those who strove God’s gospel to confound’. While a highly finished piece for a teenager, two other poems can be placed more readily in Hopkins’s poetic development. ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ [pp. 45–6] was written out below a circular drawing (J, plate 3) and is exuberant in its sensory detail – ‘spikes of light | Spear’d open lustrous gashes, crimson-white’ – as the poet observes mermaids sporting, diving so that ‘the argent bubbles stream’d | Airwards, disturb’d’. More restrained, more aware of language’s ability when spare, is ‘Winter with the Gulf Stream’ [pp. 46–7], notable also for being Hopkins’s only poem published in popular form before his death: it appeared in Once a Week, a magazine of fiction and poetry, in February 1863.

University 1863–67

In January 1863, Hopkins won a place at Oxford (White, 1992: 35, 39–41) and in April (academic years were not so set as now), he went up to Balliol College. On moving to Oxford, Hopkins of course did not put his family behind him and he reported eagerly back to his mother on his rooms in College, a bedroom and a sitting room in the roof (later more convenient ones on the ground floor), and set out the routine of his day, later declaring ‘I am almost too happy’ (L, 3.69, 82, 79). But other influences began to work upon him as he grew up and grew away from the family and here at Oxford he was to make the greatest decision of his life, followed by three other crucial decisions – he decided, though not without doubts and not until 1866, to become a Catholic. He then successively settled on the priesthood and on entry to the Jesuits, coupling these with a decision to abandon poetry.

Oxford when Hopkins arrived was an ancient city dominated by the University. Twentieth-century industry, notably cars at Cowley, transformed it, even while dividing Town and Gown, city and university going their own, often diverse, ways. In the nineteenth century, however, the townspeople, though liable to insult or rowdyism from the undergraduates – described vividly in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown at Oxford (1861, ch.XI) – were largely dependent on the University through trade and services. Oxford, meaning the University, saw itself as a bastion of the Anglican Church and a powerhouse of ideas on religion, politics and social issues, in serious journals and magazines influential far beyond their circulation figures. Oxford, however strange and old-fashioned it may seem now and to many, particularly outsiders, perceived itself then as a power in the modern world, insignificant though that power might prove once you were beyond its influence.

The University in the 1860s was enjoying a period of comparative stability after the excitement and shake-up of the Oxford Movement. On the educational side, much was still to be reformed – female students were not admitted until the late 1870s, while in 1863 the University had only recently admitted Dissenters (including Catholics), though individual colleges were not required to follow this lead – fortunately for Hopkins, as it turned out, Balliol had. Fellows of colleges were clergymen of the Church of England and the curriculum was restricted – Classics (including philosophy), theology, and mathematics covered most studies. Yet the educational reorganisation earlier in the century had brought a new concern to teach, while many students showed a new seriousness. Oxford was now not simply a place for a young man to spend a few years sowing his wild oats, making friends and useful acquaintances, playing games or rowing, drinking, and fighting the town roughs. True, such students still existed into the 1860s. Cuthbert Bede’s hero in The Adventures of Verdant Green (1853), an innocent, attends a friend’s ‘wine’ evening, becomes thoroughly drunk, sings a song, makes an incoherent speech, and is found next morning lying on his carpet ‘embracing the coal-skuttle’ (Pt.I, ch.VIII). Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown at Oxford, set in the early 1840s, has wine evenings and betting, but also a new seriousness, in study and in the purpose of life.

Oxford was a religious foundation and although the grip of the Church of England was being loosened, its religious life was coloured by the Oxford Movement, sparked in the 1830s by a group of people concerned with England’s ignorance of Anglicanism. John Keble had voiced the alarm of many when he spoke of ‘National Apostacy’, of the Church being controlled by politicians who did not believe in her doctrines or teaching, and betrayed by its members through indifference. Keble, and with him others, notably John Henry Newman, began publishing a series of pamphlets or tracts (hence the alternative title of the Tractarian Movement), which looked at the articles of belief of the Church of England, retrieving their historical origins and giving a new spiritual and mystical meaning to them, that contrasted with the social dullness of Anglican preaching and automatic church attendance: ‘As they listened, men became strangely aware of the marvels of glory and awfulness amid which human life is passed’ (Vidler 1974: 51). Newman in 1841 published Tract XC, the last as it proved, examining the 39 Articles, the basis of belief and discipline in the Church of England, of which students entering Oxford had then still to declare their acceptance, Articles that seemed clearly to reject Catholicism and Roman (Papal) authority. Rather than finding a reforming Calvinistic doctrine in the Articles, Newman argued that far from condemning, they allowed many Catholic practices and means of grace (Vidler 1974: 53–54).

Yet a puzzle remained. If the Church of England, in accepting Catholic doctrines, was indeed a part of the Universal or Catholic Church, how did one stand with regard to the Pope’s authority, as a direct descendant of St Peter, to whom Jesus had given the power of supreme head on earth? After lengthy examination of the origins and development of Catholic doctrine, Newman embraced logical necessity and in 1845 became a Catholic. The Oxford Movement consolidated itself in the Church of England in Oxford and beyond in a revival of ‘Catholic’ doctrine and practices (altars, mass, candles, incense, veneration of Our Lady and the Saints, taken to extremes in ritualism’s ‘bells and smells’), and in an emphasis upon social work and reform, allied with a new urgency to bring the Church to the people in industrialised England. By the 1860s, its novelty gone, the Oxford Movement’s achievements were familiar to Hopkins before he arrived at University and he, like others, came increasingly at Oxford to accept ‘the idea of the Church as a sacred mystery, a holy fellowship, and in particular the seriousness’ of its ‘sacramental ordinances’ (Vidler 1974: 158). But the end of his journey was to take Hopkins out of the ‘middle way’ (the via media) that the Church of England claimed to be.

Hopkins in 1863 was one of ninety or so undergraduates at Balliol, a college with an already established reputation for intellectual – and athletic – seriousness. He attended lectures in the college, where the set classical texts, Latin and Greek, were gone through, with translation and commentary (on linguistic matters, generally, rather than critical discussion). More important, more stimulating, were the weekly essays, alternately written in English and Latin, for his tutor. Hopkins’s tutor was Benjamin Jowett, later Master of Balliol and the translator of Plato, but already remarkable in Oxford for his learning and suspect for his liberal theological views. To Hopkins he was a strange mixture, since ‘when you can get him to talk he is amusing, but when the opposite, it is terribly embarrassing’ (L, 3.73). Successfully passing his preliminary examinations in 1864, Hopkins went on to study classical literature, ancient history, and philosophy. Throughout his life, the Classics were important to Hopkins; he taught them and he thought of writing on Homer, on the Greek lyric metres and, importantly for his own poetic ideas, on the counterpointing, the interplay, between overt and covert meanings in the imagery of the choruses in Greek drama. Beyond comments in his letters, nothing of this was written, but the philosophical basis of his study, the meaning and, further, the rhythms of poetry, led him to think about the subtle interrelationship of language and thought – an undergraduate essay explores the crucial nature of rhythm and how sound can parallel meaning (J, 84–85). Language was no mere fancy decoration. Since to ‘every word … belongs a passion or prepossession or enthusiasm’ (J, 125), the poet must strive to startle the reader with a clarity and precision that make that particular passion a revelation.

To Hopkins at Oxford, the natural world became increasingly a preoccupation, not simply because it seemed, as to the Romantics, to possess a power, but increasingly because that power was God’s. If Jesus shared the world with us by becoming man, then the world, created by God, is to be celebrated, in all its concreteness. This discovery developed from the sensory and sensual delight Hopkins found in nature, his sight trained by his drawing and by Ruskin’s ‘great principle’, that ‘art should be made, not by learning from general ideas or words, but by looking at natural objects’ (White 1992: 75), intensity of gaze and accuracy of observation, w...

Table of contents

• Routledge Guides To Literature
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and referencing
• Introduction
• 1 Life and contexts
• 2 Work
• 3 Criticism
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index