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Christ Calls

HERE IS THE GENERAL NARRATIVE of Hopkins’s religious conversion: born in England in 1844 into high culture and wealth, he would have been expected to pursue noble leisure and to worship as a conventional Anglican. That he was oppositional to authority as a schoolboy (sassing his headmaster) and strange as a child (forcing his little brothers to eat flowers) foretold a personality prone to real originality. His early practice of intense self-examination, of carefully recording in his commonplace book his slightest sins, prophesied his later moral scrupulosity. Leslie Higgins, general editor of the new Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, writes:

Hopkins was 20 and 21 during that “self-wrung, selfstrung” year between Lent 1865 and Lent 1866, yet many of the “sins” seem strikingly adolescent: looking up provocative words in the dictionary; noting keenly the bodies of other people; fixating on genitalia (in a statue, a painting, a dog); mooning over one’s first major unrequited crush.…

Initially, the lists of transgressions occupy two or three lines of the small diary. Within months, however, the near and actual occasion for “sins” is consuming both the page and the young man’s life. (As he later observed of his friend Geldart, Hopkins was “a selftormentor.”) Few aspects of daily existence were not jeopardizing, whether dining with friends, eating biscuits, staying in bed too long in the mornings, not going to bed early enough at night, gossiping, mocking his father’s mannerisms, being impatient with siblings. He also frequently chastised himself for “forecasting” a desire to convert (especially in autumn 1865). Ever the extremist, Hopkins seized the momentum of self-loathing all too avidly – a pattern that would be repeated throughout the next two and a half decades.⁷

Yet even with ample evidence of his unpredictability, his conversion to Roman Catholicism proved an unpleasant surprise to his friends and relatives.

First, some background on the entrenched phenomenon of anti-Catholicism in Victorian England: from the time of the ambiguously-named English Reformation, the public status of identifying as a Roman Catholic ranged from tolerance (during the reign of Mary Tudor, for example, 1553–58) to a sentence of high treason (during the reign of Elizabeth I, 1558–1604), punishable by public death by hideous torture. As decades passed, England loosened its religious prohibitions, but the Anglican Church, with its Thirty-Nine Articles and Book of Common Prayer, dominated the land and even the empire. There was no separation of church from state. As recently as the early twentieth century, Roman Catholics were viewed as undesirable outsiders. And for many decades after the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (which banished the pope and the doctrine of transubstantiation, among other basic Roman Catholic markers), Catholics had to hide as recusants, attend Mass in secret, stash their priests in closets, forego owning property, and abstain from travel beyond five miles from the place of their birth.

In seventeenth-century Ireland, Catholic priests were hunted down with horses and hounds and murdered. In England as well, Catholics were regarded as threats to the security of the Protestant nation, and the pope was considered a foreign enemy. After the passing of centuries without episodes of Catholic aggression, however, Parliament gradually relaxed, culminating in the Act of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. When Rome re-established a Cardinal, Henry Manning, at Westminster, London in 1850, though, crowds protested. There were anti-Catholic riots and burnings in effigy of Catholic bishops that recalled the Guy Fawkes affair of 1605 (remembered in England to this day every November 5). Of the forty thousand novels published under the long reign of Queen Victoria, many thousands included anti-Catholic themes.

In the year of the Great Reform Bill, 1832, a religious trend began at Oxford University, called the Oxford Movement (or the Tractarian Movement, because its participants published tracts). Members of both Senior and Junior Common Rooms joined in seeking to redeem the boredom and tepid flaccidity of Anglicanism by reintroducing some of the more interesting doctrines of the pre-Reformation past. Though initially identified with tracts on ecclesiastical subjects, the movement eventually included the rise of Gothic architecture and with it, medieval-style ceremony, the use of vestments, the practice of auricular confession, and the opening of Anglican religious orders. Historians generally mark the official “end” of the Oxford Movement at 1845 when its most famous leader – the former chaplain to Oxford University, John Henry Newman – went over to Rome, ultimately bringing a posse of Tractarians with him. After Newman’s departure from the university, however, the group was called “Puseyites,” after Dr. Edward Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew. When Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived at Oxford in 1864, he attended Sunday evenings with Canon Henry Liddon, a strong follower of Pusey and Tractarianism.

Had Hopkins stopped there, we would almost certainly not be reading about him right now. He would have spent Sundays with like-minded Anglicans, remained at Oxford, become a professor of Greek, and, presumably, sketched landscapes on his walking holidays. He might have gone on writing poems like “Heaven-Haven: A nun takes the veil.” Instead, he took a “veil” himself – on January 23, 1866 he wrote his famous diary entry, “For Lent. No pudding on Sundays…. No verses in Passion Week or on Fridays.” (So, in an ascetical resolution, he restricts his engagement with poetry.) On July 17, he noted in his journal “the impossibility of staying in the Church of England.” On October 15, he wrote to John Henry Newman about his decision to convert; one day later, in a letter, he announced his conversion to his father. When his father inquired if he had considered that this would alienate him from his family, Hopkins replied in the affirmative. On the other hand, for every loss, there was apparently compensation: he wrote to William Urquhart that he knew “the first complete peace of mind I have ever had.”

What happened next is legendary among those who know Hopkins’s biography – he wrote to Urquhart saying “my conversion when it came was all in a minute” (Letter of October 4, 1866). He then left Oxford to teach in Newman’s Oratory School in Birmingham. He strongly sensed an increasing conflict between his personal inclinations (poetry, for example) and his religious vocation. He burned his poems. In 1868, he joined the Jesuits. Like all new Jesuits, he undertook the demanding, life-changing Thirty-Day Retreat with The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. He completed two years of novitiate (1868–70), took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and put on the Roman collar. He studied for his philosophate at Stonyhurst (1870–73). His life as a Catholic stirred his compassion for the poor. One letter written from Stonyhurst (April 1871) to Robert Bridges has been called Hopkins’s “red” letter. In it he refers to himself as a “Communist”:

But it is a dreadful thing for the greatest and most necessary part of a very rich nation to live a hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delight, or hopes in the midst of plenty – which plenty they make.

During these years, he kept a journal filled with what he seemed not to have known was potential poetry. Many of the journal entries concerned the weather:

July 1 [1866]. Sharp showers, bright between. Late in the afternoon, the light and shade being brilliant, snowy blocks of cloud were filing over the sky and under the sun hanging above and along the earth-line were those multitudinous up-and-down crispy sparkling chains with pearly shadows up to the edges. At sunset, wh. was in a grey bank with moist gold dabs and racks, the whole round of skyline had level clouds naturally lead-colour but the upper parts ruddied, some more, some less rosy. Spits or gleams braided or built in with slanting pellet flakes made their way. Through such clouds anvil-shaped pink ones and up-blown fleece-of-wool flat-topped dangerous-looking pieces.

Hopkins’s journals, like his letters, contain the same jolting, irregular phrases which will spring into the rhythm of his mature poetry.

In 1874 Hopkins moved to St. Beuno’s College in Wales to pursue the theologate, and there he wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” His journal stopped. He then entered high gear as a poet who wrote ten major poems in less than one year, was ordained a priest (1877), left Wales, and did much apparently grueling parish work. In preparation for Final Vows, which Jesuits take thirteen years after First Vows, he made tertianship (1881–82) and another Thirty-Day Retreat, during which he experienced a nervous breakdown. After Final Vows, he moved to Dublin (1884) to teach at Newman’s failing Catholic University, sank into a five-year depression, wrote the “terrible sonnets,” wrote “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire” (1888), and died of typhoid fever at the age of forty-four in 1889.

This terse chronology omits the early triumphs that rested on Gerard Manley Hopkins like a bright mantle until he became a Catholic; after that, usually, when he undertook priestly work, he seemed doomed to profound exhaustion. Another convert, Evelyn Waugh, explains that there was nothing pretty about English Catholicism:

My readers outside England should understand that the aesthetic appeal of the Church of England is unique and peculiar in those islands. Elsewhere a first interest in the Catholic Church is often kindled in the convert’s imagination by the splendors of her worship in contrast with the bleakness and meanness of the Protestant sects. In England the pull is all the other way. The medieval cathedrals and churches, the rich ceremonies that surround the monarchy, the historic titles of Canterbury and York, the social organization of the country parishes, the traditional culture of Oxford and Cambridge, the liturgy composed in the heyday of English prose style – all these are the property of the Church of England, while Catholics meet in modern buildings, often of deplorable design, and are usually served by simple Irish missionaries.⁸

Arguably Roman Catholicism taught Hopkins more than private drawing lessons, prep school, or Oxford could have about being a great deviser of major art. His celebration of the nature he observed approaches but skirts the pantheism of his Romantic predecessors. The way he saw beauty caused lines like this to break from him: “The heart rears wings … / and hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.” His former schoolteacher Richard Watson Dixon, an Anglican clergyman, tried to console Hopkins into thinking of his verses “as a means of serving … religion.” But Hopkins replied that writing poetry was “a waste of time.” Surely no other major poet has ever thought of his own work as a waste of time.

In this fallen setting, Hopkins doubted himself. Never, however, did he seem to doubt his conversion. And the self-compression and self-restraint required by his vocation, the “holding of himself back,” would become the best hammer and anvil for his genius. He became, in the judgment of others, isolated, melancholic, and idiosyncratic. Yet his letters were energetic, his journal entries vital and inventive, and his relatively few mature poems fantastically ambitious. The preeminent detail about both Hopkins and his extraordinary body of writing is surely that he foregrounded theological considerations. For him, a world without a living God would have been unthinkable.

When Hopkins was young and merely a highly strung Anglican, he felt strong loves and delights: to his mother he wrote from Oxford (1864), “Except for much work and that I can never keep my hands cool, I am almost too happy.” He went to wine parties every day and was described as “popular with classmates.” Although within two years he would leave Oxford and abandon the future he surely would have enjoyed there, he never lost his gentleman’s loyalty to the place. In 1880, fourteen years after becoming a Catholic, he wrote to his Oxford friend Mowbray Baillie, “Not to love my university would be to undo the very buttons of my being.”

And yet, for all this zest and apparent joie de vivre at the time of his conversion, when he entered the passage in his diary, resolving “No pudding on Sundays” and other little foreswearings, he demonstrated a personality apparently born with a predilection for difficulty. Indeed, his brand of quaint asceticism was popular among the post-Tractarians at Oxford. Dr. Pusey himself kept custody of the eyes. But as Hopkins made his pious resolutions, he also wrote in his diary, “Grey clouds in knops” and “Eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves, gloves” – like the verbal virtuoso he was unconsciously rehearsing to become.

E. H. Coleridge, grandson of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was a religiously inclined classmate of Hopkins at Balliol. The day before Hopkins recorded his Lenten resolution to eschew pudding and so on, he wrote to young Coleridge an important credo which illuminates not only his sense of being “called,” but of being called to read the world through the lens of the Incarnation and of the sacramental view that constantly mirrors it: “I think that the trivialness of life is … done away with by the Incarnation.… Our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion etc., or the insults, as the mocking, blindfolding, spitting etc., but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity.”

Roman Catholicism in general, and the Jesuit order in particular, offered Hopkins elements that he craved constitutionally, and then provided him with the follow-through to become the self he was meant to be – an ingenious but hidden poet, a priest exhausted by his own scrupulosity, a “Jack, joke, poor potsherd” with bleeding hemorrhoids and failing eyesight, an “immortal diamond.” He was destined to realize his purpose in the doctrines of incarnation, transubstantiation, and resurrection; in the radical ascesis of The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola; and in the Mass itself.

When, as a boy, he made his little brothers eat flowers, this action proved predictive of his lifelong mind: he said he became a Roman Catholic mostly because the Sacrament of the Altar contained the real presence of Christ, and this he had to eat. He felt every step of the way a need to instress, to take in and gulp down, the proof of God’s presence. Whether he could also express that proof as a ministry to others was uncertain. Before taking holy orders, at age twenty-four, he wrote to Baillie: “I want to write still and as a priest I very likely can do that too, not so freely as I shd. have liked, e.g., nothing or little in the verse way, but no doubt what would best serve the cause of my religion.”

Eventually, he did produce great verse, and in all of it nature and theology blend like combustible chemicals producing a sparkling solution under the influence of high heat. His entire career, poetic and spiritual, launched a campaign against cliché and blur. He chose to suppress his instinct to write poetry to serve a “higher end,” and yet he managed to produce great art.