The Hopkins Letters *
By BONAMY DOBRg E
THE publication of Hopkins' letters is an event of great importance in the literary world, the more so, some will think, because of the persons to whom they were written : those who think in this way will look forward still more eagerly to the promised correspondence with. Coventry Patmore, a poet with whom he was far more in sympathy, one gathers from the remarks on him-in these volumes, than with either Bridges or Dixon. Certainly the view given us of a group of poets, none of them greatly hitting the popular taste (except for Patmore in his worst poem), is very extraordinary and profoundly inter- esting, a view which is likely to be unique, and of undying fascination to anybody touched by poetry in any degree which can be called profound. One may say at once that Professor Abbott has produced a masterly edition, where everything is told us that we want to know, prefaced by revealing introduc tions. The books are beautifully produced, and one is thank- ful to say that the notes, conveniently full but never distended, are in the right place, that is, at the bottom of the pages.
But though the picture of an epoch of poetry is alluring, the chief incitement to reading the letters will, be to find out about Hopkins himself, a poet who, unknown till thirty years after his death, in less than ten years became an influence almost universally felt. There will be three main points of interest for us in such a collection : the further revelation of an exquisite personality ; his opinions upon poetry and upon other poets ; and the nature of his friendships. To take the last first, we see how essentially lonely Hopkins must have been, for even between him and Bridges, to whom much of his human affection went out, there was a gap it was impossible to close. Hopkins hated Bridges' attitude towards his religion, while Bridges could not abide Jesuitism. Neither whole-heartedly admired the other's poetry, ; Hopkins, how- ever, recognizing .a quality of genius in his friend (a quality he was always ready to acknowledge), while Bridges was frankly baffled by the other man's poetry, though he could not resist its strange originality and beauty. At the very end of his life we find Hopkins forced to explain the meaning of a sonnet which both Bridges and Dixon had struggled in vain to understand. Hopkins and Dixon were in many ways closer, the latter being able to write to Hopkins that the Jesuit was placed " so much. higher in ' Christ's Company ' than " he himself was. On the other hand, Dixon, much less of a poet than his friend, was much more ready to learn and to accept, seizing with avidity upon his explanations of " counterpoint," and perhaps arriving at a readier understanding of " sprung rhythm " than Bridges did, though the latter made attempts at it which did not provoke' Hopkins' loudest praise. What bound all three men together was a passionate love of poetry, a belief that to practise it was the highest of man's activities.
For Hopkins, of course, it was the highest only of man's secular activities : first and foremost came the vocation .before which everything had to give way, and which involved a surrender not arrived at without the -fiercest spiritual struggles a conflict visible in the later poems, but still more so in certain of the letters to Dixon. It was one of the most terrible struggles in the history of literature, one which we can only regard in horrified pity but have not the right to discuss, a struggle made all the more bitter in that even within his chosen fold Hopkins could not feel entirely at home, since while the Jesuits are Thomists, he gave his admiration chiefly to Duns Scotus. Everything was against his writing poetry, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges. The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon. Edited by Claude Colleer Abbott. (Oxford University Press. Two Volumes. 30s.) and perhaps it was a realization of this that made him turn more and more to music as time went on. But it cannot have been easy for him to say that " The life I lead is liable to many mortification but the want of fame as a poet is the least of them."
Of more general interest than the wonderfully elucidating discussions of technique which he carried on with his friends, discuisions which illuminate his own poems and which show how stern a discipline poetry was to Hopkins, will be the general critical remarks, on other writers, scattered throughout the letters. Hopkins had a remarkably fine critical intellect, always able to sift the gold from the clay. He never allowed a personal dislike to interfere between him and his admiration of good work, and he could admire even such poems of Bridges which he hated as regards their meaning. From the usual point of view his sympathies were too far narrowed by his creed, so that he regarded even Goethe as a scoundrel ; and it is with something of a shock that we read that he disliked the members of the Greek Pantheon because they were not ladies and gentlemen ! This is in a letter to Dixon : but when we read a letter to Bridges in which he defines the gentleman—. a definition not unlike Newman's—we see what he meant. In another place, discussing the beauty of people, he says, " And more beautiful than the beauty of the mind is beauty of character, the ' handsome heart.' " It is largely upon this that his criticism, when it went beyond technical criticism, was based. Tennyson's utter- ance was indeed " truly golden, but go further home and you come to thoughts commonplace and wanting in nobility." On the other hand so many of the English poets had every requisite except that of rhetoric, whenpe the lapses in Words- worth, the " great deal of dulness, superfluity, aimlessness, poverty of plan " (though when Dixon belittled the Immor- tality Ode Hopkins rounded on him) : for him the only stylist among those of the Lake school and their contem- poraries was " perhaps Landor." He did not care much for the literature of his day : he gave Carlyle " genius " in abundance, but hated his style, his ideas, the claims he made : " . . Browning [again] has, I think, many frigidities. Any untruth to nature, to human nature, is frigid. Now he has got a great deal of what came in with Kingsley and the Broad Church school, a way of talking (and making his people talk) with the air and spirit of a man bouncing up from table with a mouth full of bread and cheese and saying that he meant to stand no blasted nonsense. . . . A true humanity of spirit, neither mawkish on the one hand, nor blustering on the other, is the most precious of all qualities in style."
Indeed one is inclined to think that the great value Hopkins has for us, and will have for future generations, is the amaz- ingly high standard he set for himself, and others, in poetry, and wished for also in prose. For him, the greatest poetry was such as brought a shock of revelation. In defending the Immortality Ode, having mentioned Plato he goes' on : " . . . human nature in these men saw something, got a shock ; waverer in opinion, looking back, whether there-was anything in it or no ; but is in a tremble ever since. Now what Wordsworthiana mean is . . . that in Wordsworth when he wrote the ode human nature got another of those shocks, and the tremble from it is spreading.' This opinion I do strongly share ; I am, ever since I knew the ode, in that tremble."
Little has been quoted here to show the breadth of the interests touched upon in these volumes ; they will not yield the riches all at once : but there can be no doubt from the first that in them we have a permanent addition to litera- ture, and one which will be a ferment so long as the language is read.
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