The Common Pursuit (9 page)

THE LETTERS OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

H E irony of the process by which an original genius becomes JL a classic has been exemplified with peculiar force in the recent history of Gerard Manley Hopkins (the history that did not start till thirty years after his death). For one thing, developments in the last few years have been so rapid. Haifa decade ago, though his name was pretty well known, to judge him the greatest poet of the Victorian age was a perverse and laughable eccentricity. It is not, perhaps, orthodoxy to-day but even in the academic world it is a debatable proposition; and an undergraduate, on the most solemn and critical occasion, might risk it without being defiantly foolhardy. At any rate, here areHopkins's letters 1 edited by a Professor of English Language and Literature and placed implicitly alongside those of Keats,

And once again, yet once again—this it is that so especially enforces the irony—Hopkins has an editor who betrays radical hostility to what Hopkins stood and stands for. To have said this without notable provocation would have been ungracious; one is grateful for the services that scholarship can perform. Professor Abbott goes out of his way to challenge plain speaking. Hopkins, he says (both the air and the graces are characteristic) *is accepted by the young as one of their contemporaries, and—a more doubtful privilege—he has even been affiliated to the Martin Tuppers of our day whose scrannel pipes have infected the field of poetry with mildew and blight.' Professor Abbott nowhere risks anything more specific than this, but the content and tone of the whole Introduction 2 make it quite impossible to hope that, in

1 The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges; The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon; edited by Claude Colleer Abbott.

2 See for instance the * petty and superfluous', the completely gratuitous, footnote on p. xxxviii: 'Petty and superfluous beside it is that clever and rootless verse of our own day which apes the discovery of kindred desolation/ Another footnote (p. xxvii), it may perhaps be in place to record here, runs (The Wreck

spite of the tropes in this unfortunate passage, he intends a critical discrimination—a discrimination against the derivative and insignificant. He leaves us no room for doubting that what he intends to discredit is the influence (the source of infection); that what he dislikes is the living force. It would be foolish to make a fuss whenever the academic mind behaves characteristically, but there is a classical quality about this instance—about Professor Abbott's use of Hopkins (whom as a contemporary he would so clearly have scorned) to bolster a self-importance that feels itself threatened by all that Hopkins represents: the disturbing new life, the stir of spirit that manifests itself in unfamiliar forms and does not permit, yet, the easy recognition—the flattering sense—of the placed and known.

The volume of letters to Bridges itself, apart from the Introduction, presents what should be a classical instance, and even without the editor's insisting as he does, there would have been no way of avoiding the unhappy theme. It is central to a consideration of the letters, and to deal with it honestly is a critical duty : history, * teaching by examples', will go on teaching and repeating itself, but it is certainly die business of criticism to get what general recognition it can for an example so obvious and impressive. And then there is justice to be done to the heroic quality of Hopkins's genius.

Hopkins had, we are told, to be kept waiting for publication till so long after his death because the time was not yet ripe. But in due course it ripened: 'In 1915, in his Spirit of Man, Bridges printed seven of his friend's pieces, 1 and it was the wide success and sale of this anthology both in England and America, and the knowledge that the time was now ripe, that led him to agree to Mr Humphrey Milford's wish for an edition of Hopkins's poems.' The world would appear to owe a very considerable debt to Mr Milford. But that is not Professor Abbott's point. After telling us

1 Those who check footnote 5 on p. xix will establish that four of these were pieces of pieces.

of the Deutschland being in question): 'Is it fanciful to hear behind his rhythm something of Campbell's Battle of the Baltic and Cowper's Loss of the Royal George 2*—And indeed we know for a fact that he had read Campbell's poem, and cannot doubt that he knew Cowper's.

that the poems in the edition of 1918 were 'read with eagerness by the "little clan" that knows "great verse"/ he goes on: 'How small this clan was can be seen from the publisher's figures for the edition, which was not exhausted for ten years. 1 They are figures that effectively kill the legend, invented in our own day, of a public panting to read poetry arbitrarily withheld. The taste of the "public" in such matters is always negligible/

The legend, if it existed, was negligible too. What may be smothered, but cannot be killed, is the fact that the little clan was, until 1918 (Hopkins having died in 1889), given no chance to show its eagerness; if time, during those thirty years, ripened, it did so without the help of the obvious procedure.

What are works of art for ? to educate, to be standards. Education is meant for the many, standards are for public use. To produce is of little use unless what we produce is known, if known widely known, the wider known the better, for it is by being known it works, it does its duty, it does good. We must then try to be known, aim at it, take means to it.

Hopkins wrote this to Bridges in 1886 (Letter CXXXVI), exhorting 'you and Canon Dixon and all true poets'. In the spirit of this, where Hopkins's own work was concerned, Canon Dixon had, on his first introduction to specimens, acted with generous and embarrassing impetuosity (see Via, VIb, Vllb, VIII, IX and X in the Correspondence), convinced that publication, even in the unlikely places open to him, would affect others as he had been himself affected, and begin the process of getting Hopkins known. If Bridges had believed in Hopkins, had seen what the poetry was, he would somehow have contrived to get it published, even if— or, rather because—'In tone and spirit this work was at a last remove from the characteristic verse and prose of the period.' But—'Bridges did not wish the book to drop unheeded, nor did he want his friend's name to be environed by the barbarous noise

Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs' (a thoughtlessly unkind way of referring to one's kind—to one's

1 750 copies were printed; 50 were given away; 180 sold in the first year; 240 in the second year; then an average of 30 a year for six years, rising to 90 in 1927. The last four copies were sold in 1928. The price was twelve shillings and sixpence.

C

predecessors in the cult of a * continuous literary decorum') 1 'Rightly he walked warily. In 1893 he persuaded A. H. Miles to give Hopkins a place in the well-known anthology, Poets of the XlXth Century: he himself wrote the introductory memoir to the eleven poems printed, a selection that gives a fair idea of die poet's range and wordi/ The 'eleven poems' were, a footnote tells us: 'part of 50, part of 73, part of 44, selected lines from 77, 3, 8, 9, 26, 31, 33, 51.' The reader who looks up these references in the Poems will find that 50 and 44, of which 'parts' were printed, and 77, 8, 9, 26 and 51, from which 'selected lines' were printed, are sonnets. This, then, was wary walking; there could be no more final exposure.

Bridges' attitude to Hopkins's poetry is, of course, made plain enough in the 'Preface to Notes' in the Poems. And Bridges' case no one could diagnose as one of uneasy self-importance. What he exhibits is a complete security; a complete incapacity to doubt his competence or to suspect that the criteria by which lie condemns, condones, corrects and improves may not be appropriate. Thus he can, sincerely intent upon doing his best for his friend and for English poetry, pick out from Hopkins's sonnets the best parts and lines for publication; leave out, when printing Margaret in The Spirit of Man, the second couplet; and even in the Poems print a completely unauthorized improvement of his own, having (see note to 51—the improved version of which sonnet has been perpetuated) 'no doubt that G.M.H. would have made some such alteration'. He was, aldiough he had behind him a history of sustained relevant controversy with Hopkins, truly incapable of the doubt. As Hopkins wrote to Canon Dixon (Correspondence, IX): 'people cannot, or they will not, take in anything however plain that departs from what they have been taught and brought up to expect: I know it from experience/ And Bridges is a superb example of what education will do for one; his expectations—his taste, his sense of Form and his love of a 'continuous literary decorum'—were uncompromising, incorruptible and completely sel&confident. His incapacity was of the same kind as that ex-

1 'For these blemishes in the poet's style are of such quality and magnitude as to deny him even a hearing from those who love a continuous literary decorum, and are grown to be intolerant of its absence.'—Robert Bridges, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

hibited by Johnson with respect to Lyddas (or Macbeth] ; though the positives behind the taste in which Johnson was trained had so much more body and vitality, and a classical education in his time was so much more solidly and intimately related to English tradition and contemporary life than in Bridges'. Decorum for Bridges had nothing like the Augustan correlations; it was a prim donnish conventionality. What, in fact, Bridges represents is essentially the academic mind, though with such confidence, completeness and conviction of authority as to constitute a truly memorable distinction.

All this is not said wantonly. To put it at the most obvious, we have, in following the letters, to divine what kind of thing Hopkins is answering and what kind of correspondent he is addressing (Bridges' letters are not given us; he is presumed to have destroyed them). There is plenty of evidence to put certain important matters beyond question. That the friend to whom Hopkins cherished a life-long attachment had admirable qualities we cannot doubt; but we have at the same time to note, in appreciating its strength, that the attachment persisted in spite of a constant incomprehension and discouragement, on the friend's part, of Hopkins's genius. This is not guesswork; the evidence is pervasive and conclusive—much more abundant than would suffice for certitude. Bridges' critical attitude, it is plain, remained all the way through essentially that which, at the outset in 1877, drew from Hopkins this (XXXVH):

You say you would not for any money read my poem again. Nevertheless I beg you will. Besides money, you know, there is love. If it is obscure do not bother yourself with the meaning but pay attention to the best and most intelligible stanzas, as the two last of each part and the narrative of the wreck. If you had done this you wd. have liked it better and sent me some serviceable criticisms, but now your criticism is of no use, being only a protest memorialising me against my whole policy and proceedings.

Hopkins was over-sanguine in supposing that familiarity would make the strange more acceptable to Bridges; that he would, guided by tips as to the approach, come to understand and sympathize sufficiently to be an intelligent critic. A year later Hopkins has to write (XLI): * As for affectation, I do not believe I am guilty

of it: you should point out instances but as long as mere novelty and boldness strikes you as affectation your criticism strikes me as —as water of the Lower Isis/ Criticism of that water was what Hopkins continued to get. For instance, we find him in 1882 (XC) explaining that The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo does not derive from Whitman: *I believe that you are quite mistaken about this piece and that on second thoughts you will find the fancied resemblance diminish and the imitation disappear.' . . . * The long lines are not rhythm run to seed: everything is weighed and timed in them. Wait till they have taken hold of your ear and you will find it so/ Nevertheless Bridges, apparently, went on tracing affinities. Three years later (CLII) Hopkins writes: 'when you read it (Harry Ploughman) let me know if there is anything like it in Walt Whitman, as perhaps there may be, and I should be sorry for that/ Clearly the account of Bridges' attitude given in an earlier letter (LXXVII) is not less than fair: 'I always think however that your mind towards my verse is like mine towards Browning's: I greatly admire the touches and the details, but the general effect, the whole, offends me, I think it repulsive/ Six months before the end Hopkins can throw out (CLXVTU), as a matter of accepted fact: 'now that you disapprove of my yei'os as vicious.. /

No guilt, it should hardly be necessary to insist, is being imputed to Bridges. Try as for friendship's sake he might, he could not make himself understand or like what he was incapable of understanding or liking; and his incapacity sets in a tragic light the heroic strength of Hopkins's genius. 'There is a point with me in matters of any size', he writes (CXXIX), 'when I must absolutely have encouragement as much as crops rain; afterwards I am independent/ We find nowhere much hint of encouragement besides Canon Dixon's, and everywhere die spirit expressed here (CXXVII): 'it is a test too: if you do not like it it is because there is something you have not seen and I sec. That at least is my mind, and if the whole world agreed to condemn it or see nothing in it I should only tell them to take a generation and come to me again/ It is, as a matter of fact, a musical composition that is in question here, and in music Hopkins was ordinarily conscious (though the expert, when consulted, thought him opinionated and stubborn) that he had everything to learn; but in poetry he

knew—he knew with this certitude what he had done and what he was doing, and was not affected in his knowledge by finding himself alone in it. That he nevertheless suffered (as a poet, that is, as well as in the obvious sense) from isolation, from lack of appreciation, he was well aware; 'To return to composition for a moment: what I want there, to be more intelligible, smoother, and less singular, is an audience/ (CLXVI.)

There is nothing of complacency about his sureness; it goes with the rarest integrity and clairvoyance—that is, with the rarest humility. The complacency is not HopkinsV, when he writes to Bridges (XXX), 'The sonnets are truly beautiful, breathing a grave and feeling genius, and make me proud of you (which by the by is not the same as for you to be proud of yourself: I say it because you always were and I see you still are given to conceit) . . .', we feel that he is in a position to say it. Mere playful intimacy, perhaps ? This at any rate is beyond question serious (LXXXV): 'It is long since such things [religious rites] had any significance for you. But what is strange and unpleasant is that you sometimes speak as if they had in reality none for me and you were only waiting with a certain disgust till I too should be disgusted with myself enough to throw off the mask. You said something of the sort walking on the Cowley Road when we were last at Oxford together—in '79 it must have been.' 'However/ he writes five months later (XCIH), having referred to the matter again, *a man who is deeply in earnest is not very eager to assert his earnestness, as they say when a man is really certain he no longer disputes but is indifferent. And that is all I say now, that to think a man in my position is not in earnest is unreasonable and is to make difficulties. But if you have made them and can solve them, by a solution which must be wrong, no matter/