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Incompatible Excellences

AN INTRODUCTION

IN THE CATHOLIC CEMETERY called Glasnevin in Dublin, the Jesuit Father Hopkins was buried near Maud Gonne in the summer of 1889. A century later, in 1989, the gravekeeper at Glasnevin referred to the famous priest and poet as “the convert.” Although geographically he did not die far from the place of his birth, Gerard Manley Hopkins had traversed vast theological paradigms, revolutionized poetic language, and called down the thunder and lightning of God onto the written page.

Only after leaving the Anglican Church, to which his family was so bound, leaving Oxford University, where he was on track to spend his life, and entering the Jesuit order, known for its insistence on quasi-cadaver-level obedience, did Hopkins boldly take on the visceral Anglo-Saxon two-beat foot that runs through English speech, mix it prodigally with Welsh and Latin and French, mold his lines to Greek forms, and concoct stanza after stanza and sestet after octet of nerve-shocking genius. Arbitrary, stray, he innovated rhythmic power in his poetry. He cut sonnets at ten lines. He flatly rejected everyone’s attempts to correct him. His opinions and practices were stubborn to the verge of arrogance and compulsion; in other words, he was coherent. He did as he wished while cloaked in a mantle of obedience. The reader who arrives at the on-ramp to one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s masterpiece poems, or one of his letters or sermons or journal entries, will become the larger for having entered there.

As a Jesuit novice, age twenty-four, Hopkins made a Long Retreat with the extremely important manual called The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, composed by the Spanish/Basque priest Ignatius of Loyola in 1522–24, while the Lutheran Reformation simmered in the background. The Exercises provide essential guidance for Jesuits (and for anyone interested in directed contemplation). Hopkins would use the Exercises for the rest of his life. Perhaps the most influential moment in the Exercises occurs when the retreatant is invited to employ “compositio loci,” composition of place. Here the text instructs the person in prayer to visualize precisely and in naturalistic detail scenes from the life of Christ. Louis L. Martz, in The Poetry of Meditation (1976), characterizes “the composition of place” as essential in the religious poetry of seventeenth-century England. In Hopkins, this exercise influenced his sermons profoundly, and produced potential poetry.

Six months before he died, while on retreat at St. Stanislaus College in Tullabeg, the Jesuit novice-house in Ireland, Hopkins composed his most self-revealing material in his notes on Ignatius’s “First Principle.” St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit order, opened his manual of exercises with the line “homo creatus est laudare” – man is created to praise. These words had permanently affected Hopkins. They showed up in his incessant search for creative pattern that made his art form into an homage to the author of all form. Humphry House, early editor of Hopkins’s notebooks, wrote:

No single sentence better explains the motives and direction of Hopkins’s life than this: “Man is created to praise.” He believed it as wholly as a man can believe anything; and when regret or sorrow over anything in [Hopkins’] life comes to a critic’s mind, this must be remembered.¹

The specific instruction of the Jesuit Exercises clearly influenced the rigorous forms Hopkins chose for his poetry.

Gerard Manley Hopkins employed a sort of religious Expressionism, one certain of the divine and receptive to idiosyncrasy. Yet anthologies necessarily classify him as Victorian, since his short life spanned 1844–89. The Victorian period, 1837–1901, was the great age of teapots, three-volume novels, and piano legs wearing skirts. The Victorian sun never set on the Union Jack, and one out of three inhabitants of the planet was a British subject. Conventional style was heavy – windows hung with dark drapes, parlors densely ornamented. Women wore lace cuffs and men wore stiff collars. The short, stout Queen, ruling the empire with unfailing dignity for six and a half decades, raised terrier dogs. She bore eleven children. She oversaw such events as the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, the Crimean War, and the controversy over Darwin. She slept every night for twenty-five years with a copy of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” under her pillow.

Into the cream of this quirky age, Gerard Hopkins was born. Appropriately eccentric, a firstborn son, surrounded by gifted people, he was destined for success as a wealthy Anglican. His biographers have characterized him as frail, pale, anemic, short (5’2”), thin, too tired to wake up in the mornings, unpunctual, and inclined to wear little girls’ slippers with ankle straps. One anti-hagiographical critic claimed that his high-pitched voice conveyed the powerful stereotype of an affluent Englishman, and that his arched eyebrows and long nose conferred on him the appearance of a cartoon snob. A fellow Jesuit described him as “effeminate, with mouse-colored hair.” Saying Mass, he was apparently slow and scrupulous, jerking nervously at the slightest noise. When he taught school, the boys described his lessons as bearing “little marketable value.” He once foolishly told a group of high school boys that he regretted that he had never seen a naked woman.

But he was also independent and willful, wiry and athletic: his brother Cyril wrote of Gerard’s boyhood activities, “He was a fearless climber of trees and would go up in the lofty elm tree standing in our garden … to the alarm of onlookers like myself.”² At Highgate School, he fought stubbornly with his headmaster, Mr. Dyne. Hopkins, age seventeen, wrote in a letter to Charles Luxmoore, “Dyne and I had a terrific altercation. I was driven out of patience and cheeked him wildly and he blazed into me with his riding whip.”³

As a mature but unpublished poet, he refused to revise a single line of his work, calling his verses “grubs in amber.” He possessed unshakable certainties. In brief, he actually was equipped for success – born with numerous silver spoons in his mouth, academically accomplished, artistically sensitive, stoic in the English way. So how could a man who claimed that “the holding of himself back … is the root of all moral good” embody such creative fertility that he set a new table for poetry forever? Because of this obscure Victorian Jesuit, the subsequent century produced an enlarged and liberated poetry, including lines like these:

Never until the mankind making

Bird beast and flower

Fathering and all humbling darkness

Tells with silence the last light breaking

Dylan Thomas, from “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”

Hopkins’s conversion at age twenty-two to Roman Catholicism notoriously and quite entirely derailed any hope of secular success. He went straight from a Double First at Oxford to incompetently teaching grammar school in the industrial city of Birmingham. In 1868, he capped his apparent folly by entering the Jesuits. A fellow Jesuit wrote, “I have rarely known anyone who sacrificed so much in taking the yoke of religion.”⁴ When he decided on a religious vocation, he destroyed the sentimental and anxious poems he had written before age twenty-three. The next time he acted as a serious poet, at age thirty-one, having filtered and brewed a fresh poetic, he unleashed the power of nuclear fission in “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”

He had burned his early poems – he referred to this moment as his “slaughter of the innocents” – and by the time he wrote “The Wreck,” he was an experienced Catholic. He had already claimed that he became a Catholic because “two plus two makes four”; but also, and the poems of the 1870s demonstrate this, he said that he had converted because of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. “Religion without it,” he wrote, “is somber and illogical.” Having recognized the power of words at the consecration of the Eucharist – words which, Catholics believe, transform ordinary bread and ordinary wine into the real body and real blood – never again could language prove merely decorative. For him, a consecration made from human language reversed existential randomness and estrangement, the experience of which shadowed many of his contemporaries. Assuming that human language possessed this power, Hopkins went on to untie the bindings and stretch the known limits of poetry. He obliged his few readers to expand their receptivity.

During the later 1870s, Hopkins’s new voice would ring out in the nature sonnets: “God’s Grandeur,” “The Starlight Night,” “Spring,” “In the Valley of the Elwy,” “The Sea and the Skylark,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” “Hurrahing in Harvest,” “The Caged Skylark,” “The Lantern out of Doors.” One could say that Hopkins practiced transubstantiation in every poem. By mysterious talent, he changed plain element into reality sublime. He encountered a jumble of weather, birds, trees, branches, waters, blooms, dewdrops, candle flames, prayers, then instressed them and, delighted, wrote in his journal, “Chance left free to act falls into an order.”

Transubstantiation also, for Hopkins, reorganized molecular disorder: instead of losing heat, as the laws of thermodynamics indicate, Creation rebooted every time divine power zapped the altar with the sacred words hoc est corpus meum (this is my body). The localization of power into, onto, everyday elements like bread and wine added to Hopkins’s overall sense of compression, of the felt pressure, of the stressing inward, of religious meaning. And just as the determined and talented young boy Gerard had once forced his little brothers to eat flowers so that they would really understand flowers, the adult Gerard believed that only by eating the Eucharist could he “take in” (his word was “instress”) God. The Incarnation of Christ raised the energy of everything. And when Hopkins placed his conviction of this into poetry, he tended to mention electricity, lightning, fire, flash, flame. He wrote in his late, great poem, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the comfort of the Resurrection”: “In a flash, at a trumpet crash, / I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am and / This jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond.”

His posthumously collected poems were published in 1918, the final year of the World War which left western civilization gassed and devastated. All art would undergo transformation. Ironically, almost thirty years after his death, Hopkins’s slight volume encapsulated like an unexploded bomb the energetic proof that he had already transformed English poetry. Today, more than a century and a quarter after his death, he is universally recognized among the greatest English poets. And his greatest greatness, I think, lies in his appropriation of nature to establish religious meaning. Nature, as he idiosyncratically saw it, fastened him to God. He “instressed” an “inscape” (pattern), and this act energized him and whatever he looked upon. And though he would spend the final five years of his life plagued by “fits of sadness so severe they resemble madness,” Hopkins never abandoned the solution he had achieved through his reading of nature’s explosive titration with God.

The mid-Victorian period, with its legacy of Romantic poetry and painting, produced many amateur naturalists. Observers repeatedly described Hopkins as stooping down to study wet sand or blades of grass or little blue flowers. When he was eighteen, he drew an excellent likeness of weeds which he labeled neatly, “Dandelion, Hemlock & Ivy.” It was not unusual for nineteenth-century poets to associate nature with heightened emotional states, or even to bind it to the notion that God himself may have written nature like a book. This book could reveal the divine to those who had eyes to read. Keats had coined the phrase “egotistical sublime” to describe Wordsworth’s enhanced self-consciousness in the presence of nature. Hopkins, on the other hand, instressed the sublime to enhance his other-consciousness.

Hopkins grew up in Wordsworth’s and Keats’s poetic shadows, in a household filled with good artists, and in an era that encouraged the close study of natural phenomena. He was raised to fulfill the expectations of a milieu that privileged certain pursuits of noble leisure – drawing, poetry, piety. Hopkins was gifted at all of these pursuits. His siblings were also talented, and in their lifetimes more obviously accomplished than he: Lionel became an internationally renowned scholar of ancient Chinese; Arthur illustrated Thomas Hardy; Millicent, an excellent musician, became an Anglican nun. His mother loved Dickens and German philosophy. She was a descendent of the painter Gainsborough. His father, an insurance executive, published religious poetry. Everything about his family made it probable that Hopkins would pursue a path marked by art and an Oxford identity. Improbable, however, was his conversion at twenty-two to Roman Catholicism, the church of the unwashed and of a few rejected Oxford patricians like John Henry Newman and the younger Thomas Arnold.

The reactions of Hopkins’s parents and friends to his conversion were predictably negative. The poet’s father, Manley Hopkins, wrote to Canon Liddon:

Save him from throwing a pure life and a somewhat unusual intellect away in the cold limbo which Rome assigns her English converts. The deepness of our distress, the shattering of our hopes & the foreseen estrangement which must happen, are my excuse for writing to you so freely & so pressingly; but even these motives do not weigh with us in comparison of our pity for our dear son.⁵

This sentiment persisted among Hopkins’s associates for the rest of his life. A year after Hopkins died, Charles Luxmoore wrote to Arthur Hopkins: “Humanly speaking he made a grievous mistake in joining the Jesuits.”

There were other Catholic converts, of course, including five undergraduates in Hopkins’s class at Oxford. And there were other nature lovers, and other poets, like the Rossettis, drawn to a purer pre-Reformation past. But Hopkins eventually short-circuited all trends with his intrusive genius. You could say that he unintentionally spearheaded modernity in poetry. His closest friend, Bridges, buried Hopkins’s work for thirty years, and then presented it to a readership not quite ready; only after the second edition of the Poems came out in 1930, after Modernism and Imagism and free verse, did Hopkins’s confounding and game-changing contribution take off. It strutted the unabashed two-beat foot of common speech (“rash smart sloggering brine”) and Anglo-Saxonate kennings (wanwood, betweenpie, leafmeal). His new style reached all the way back, and all the way forward.

Hopkins’s legacy contains nagging contradictions: a master religious poet in the category of Donne and Herbert, he abandoned tradition by architecting wild verbal experiments. And then, he constantly protested his indifference to critical opinion and thus to poetic fame: he wrote to Robert Bridges, “You are my audience and I plan to convert you.” When accused of outwriting the wits of even this audience, he refused to give an inch: “I cannot think of altering anything. Why shd. I?” It seems, though, that while perhaps indifferent to fame, he certainly intended to broadcast something he kept seeing – that constant, recurrent presence of God. What indeed could anybody say?

By the end of his life, though he did not know he would soon die of typhoid (caused by antiquated plumbing in the Jesuit residence at 86 Stephen’s Green, Dublin), Hopkins complained in aggrieved sonnets, “Soul self, come poor Jackself, I do advise / You, jaded, let be” and “Birds build, but not I build; no, but strain / Time’s eunuch and not breed one work that wakes.” He felt far-flung, flattened, a failure. He was not destined to live long enough to reverse this feeling. If only he could have known that eventually Christians and literary critics alike would be ecstatic to claim him as their own: “Somewhat to their surprise … the public are being told by the best critics … that an English Jesuit who died over forty years ago must be regarded as one of England’s greatest poets.”⁶ Ultimately readers would find in Hopkins’s words a refreshing, liberating way of receiving and holding the body of God.

IN THE NEXT SECTION of this volume, “Christ Calls,” some of Hopkins’s early written material – poems, journal entries, and letters – will point the way to his later achievement. The poems express delirious idealism about religious life (“Heaven-Haven”), an early reflection on the sacramental possibilities of bread and wine (“Barnfloor and Winepress”), a sonnet written when he was twenty-one (“Myself Unholy”). His perceived unholiness also appears in scrupulously kept confessional notes, which include lists of sins such as oversleeping, talking too much, and looking at anatomical drawings in The Lancet. His scrupulosity was extreme, and it seems certain that Hopkins was a controlled, lifelong celibate.

The self-restraint he exerted from the time he decided on a religious vocation (1868) meant that he wrote no poetry for seven years; that same self-restraint created an ambitious, tempestuous, dramatic, iconoclastic, debut masterpiece in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1875–76), which he actually wrote under obedience. We will read this poem in Part III, “Reckoning with the Wreck.”

In 1872, three years before he determined that he was permitted to write poetry, Hopkins discovered the medieval Franciscan Duns Scotus’s commentary on Lombard’s Sentences (1250). Although his appropriation of Scotus (1266–1308) alienated his Jesuit examiners in the theologate (who preferred the teachings of the “Angelic Doctor,” Thomas Aquinas), Hopkins acquired both inspiration and consolation from Scotus’s special take on the well-worn medieval dialectic concerning universals and particulars. Hopkins’s sonnet “Duns Scotus’ Oxford” claims that the Franciscan “of all men most sways my spirit to peace.” For Scotus, individual things always resulted from a process he called “contraction,” by which universals contracted down into haecceitas, the “thisness” of particular concrete things. So affirmed by Scotus, Hopkins will write “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is me: for that I came.” Here Hopkins reveals what I consider his most significant contribution to the arts of living morally and of writing uniquely: the concept of “selving.” He cobbles it from an arcane point in Scotus’s commentary, runs with it, and from it springs the real originality of Hopkins’s opus. His idea of selving blends with a Victorian taste for precise detail. I believe that his discovery of Scotus enabled him to write the poems of the late 1870s, and determined how he would write them. We will read his nature poems in Part IV, “What I Do Is Me.”

The final section, “Wrestling with God,” will include writing from the last five years of his life (1884–89). Happiest as an undergraduate at “Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked” Oxford (1864–67), and then again during the theologate at St. Beuno’s “on a pastoral forehead” in Wales (1874–77), Hopkins proved ill-suited to working long, humble hours as a priest and academic examiner in the industrial slums to which his vocation sent him. Liverpool, Chesterfield, London, Glasgow, finally Dublin: the absence of larks and cuckoos compounded by his own apparent lack of talent in transacting his priestly assignments drained him. For most of his clerical career, he complained of extreme exhaustion and its handmaiden, depression. He described himself as “harried” and “fagged” and “gallied up and down.” None of us likes to do what we are not good at doing. Hopkins’s claim that his religious vocation “selved” him must have been often challenged. Still, even in despondency, he never quit but rather conducted an extremely robust if solitary conversation with the universe.