The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Gerard Manley Hopkins
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wd. have no attraction for me, and surely the happiness of my prospects depends on the happiness to me and not on intrinsic advantages. It is possible even to be very sad and very happy at once and the time that I was with Bridges, when my anxiety came to its height, was I believe, the happiest fortnight of my life. My only strong wish is to be independent.
If you are really willing to make the application to the Master, well and good; but I do not want you to put yourself to pain. I have written a remonstrance to him.
Many thanks to Arthur for his letter.
Hopkins’s parents quite quickly resumed contact with him after he became a Catholic. A semester later, Hopkins left Oxford to teach at Newman’s Oratory School. From there he wrote the following letter to Alexander William Mowbray Baillie, the son of an Edinburgh doctor. He and Hopkins had both qualified for a Balliol “Domus” scholarship from Oxford. Baillie’s rational mind was said to have been “a very valuable quality in him for those of his friends who possessed the artistic temperament.”9
To A. W. M. Baillie, February 12, 1868, from Edgbaston
My dear Baillie, … I must say that I am very anxious to get away from this place. I have become very weak in health and do not seem to recover myself here or likely to do so. Teaching is very burdensome, especially when you have much of it: I have. I have not much time and almost no energy – for I am always tired – to do anything on my own account. I put aside that one sees and hears nothing and nobody here. Very happily Challis of Merton is now here; else the place were without reservation ‘damned, shepherd’. (This is not swearing.) I ought to make the exception that the boys are very nice indeed. I am expecting to take orders and soon, but I wish it to be secret till it comes about. Besides that it is the happiest and best way it practically is the only one. You know I once wanted to be a painter. But even if I could I wd. not I think, now, for the fact is that the higher and more attractive parts of the art put a strain upon the passions which I shd. think it unsafe to encounter. 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 wd. best serve the cause of my religion. But if I am a priest it will cause my mother, or she says it will, great grief and this preys on my mind very much and makes the near prospect quite black. The general result is that I am perfectly reckless about things that I shd. otherwise care about, uncertain as I am whether in a few months I may not be shut up in a cloister, and this state of mind, though it is painful coming to, when reached gives a great and real sense of freedom. Do you happen to know of any tutorship I cd. take for a few months after Easter? as I am anxious to leave this place then and also not to leave it without having secured something to live upon till, as seems likely, I take minor orders.…
Believe me always your affectionate friend,
Gerard M. Hopkins
To Robert Bridges, August 2, 1871, from Stonyhurst
My dear Bridges, … I am afraid some great revolution is not far off. Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist. Their ideal bating some things is nobler than that professed by any secular statesman I know of (I must own I live in bat-light and shoot at a venture). Besides it is just. – I do not mean the means of getting to it are. 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. They profess that they do not care what they wreck and burn, the old civilisation and order must be destroyed. This is a dreadful look out but what has the old civilisation done for them? As it at present stands in England it is itself in great measure founded on wrecking. But they got none of the spoils, they came in for nothing but harm from it then and thereafter. England has grown hugely wealthy but this wealth has not reached the working classes; I expect it has made their condition worse. Besides this iniquitous order the old civilisation embodies another order mostly old and what is new in direct entail from the old, the old religion, learning, law, art, etc. and all the history that is preserved in standing monuments. But as the working classes have not been educated they know next to nothing of all this and cannot be expected to care if they destroy it. The more I look the more black and deservedly black the future looks, so I will write no more …
Believe me your affectionate friend,
Gerard Hopkins S.J.
Journals
(1864–1875)
Hopkins included relatively few personal notes in his journals, and those few reveal the quality of his own highly “stressed” character. Since he had forbidden himself his natural outlet of poetry, the journals became an outpouring of self-expression. Higgins describes them as “the counterpoint to days of study, whether academic or theological. There are times, however, when he slips back into the self-reporting mode, feeling emotionally bruised. Hopkins is, first and last, a textual being.…”10 The entries oscillate between ecstatic descriptions of natural phenomena and painful self-examination. After 1875, when he ceased keeping journals, the stress and compression that marked his nature took both form and content in his verse once again.
1864
January 27. Two swans flew high up over the river on which I was, their necks stretched straight out and wings billowing.
Note on green wheat. The difference between this green and that of long grass is that first suggests silver, latter azure. Former more opacity, body, smoothness. It is the exact complement of carnation.
Nearest to emerald of any green I know, the real emerald stone. It is lucent. Perhaps it has a chrysoprase [golden-green stone] bloom. Both blue greens.
It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world shd. know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither. Yet fr. time to time more men go up and either perish in its gullies fluttering excelsior flags or else come down again with full folios and blank countenances. Yet the old fallacy keeps its ground. Every age has its false alarms.
The poetical language lowest. To use that, wh. poetasters, and indeed almost everyone, can do, is no more necessarily to be uttering poetry than striking the keys of piano is playing a tune. Only, when the tune is played it is on the keys. So when poetry is uttered it is in this language. Next, Parnassian. Can only be used by real poets. Can be written without inspiration. Good instance in Enoch Arden’s island.11 Common in professedly descriptive pieces. Much of it in Paradise Lost and Regained. Nearly all The Faery Queen. It is the effect of fine age to enable ordinary people to write something very near it. – Third and highest poetry proper, language of inspiration. Explain inspiration. On first reading a strange poet his merest Parnassian seems inspired. This is because then first we perceive genius. But when we have read more of him and are accustomed to the genius we shall see distinctly the inspirations and much that wd. have struck us with great pleasure at first loses much of its charm and becomes Parnassian. – Castalian, highest sort of Parnassian. e.g. “Yet despair touches me not, Tho’ pensive as a bird Whose vernal coverts winter hath laid bare.”12 … Much Parnassian takes down a poet’s reputation, lowers his average, as it were. Pope and all artificial schools great writers of Parnassian. This is the real meaning of an artificial poet.
1866
May 3. Cold. Morning raw and wet, afternoon fine. Walked then with Addis, crossing Bablock Hythe, round by Skinner’s Weir through many fields into the Witney road. Sky sleepy blue without liquidity. Fr. Cumnor Hill saw St. Philip’s and the other spires through blue haze rising pale in a pink light. On further side of the Witney road hills, just fleeced with grain or other green growth, by their dips and waves foreshortened here and there and so differenced in brightness and opacity the green on them, with delicate effect. On left, brow of the near hill glistening with very bright newly turned sods and a scarf of vivid green slanting away beyond the skyline, against which the clouds shewed the slightest tinge of rose or purple. Copses in grey-red or greyyellow – the tinges immediately forerunning the opening of full leaf. Meadows skirting Seven-bridge road voluptuous green. Some oaks are out in small leaf. Ashes not out,