Choice of Life
The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Edited by Humphry House. Com- Manley Hopkins. Edited with an introduc- tion by Christopher Devlin, SJ. (O.U.P., 42s.) THE publication of these books is not a great literary event : indeed, their contents by and large are so boring as to force on the reader an `agonising reappraisal' of the reasons for reading anything of Hopkins. Certainly he matters as a poet, and one of the most solid achievements of modern criticism has been the rescue of his poetry from Bridges' complacent notes; but in the process (perhaps inevitably) the poetry has been overvalued. The young may still find Hopkins the most congenial of the Victorian poets, but the young, I suspect, do not know the best work of Tennyson or Arnold or Hardy. Even in his more important work the disproportion between the elaborate poetic technique and the real substance of interest is often much too high. There are things in his best poems which move the heart and fill the mind and which will, I believe, live for ever; but, as Mr. Yvor Winters pointed out in an otherwise very unfair essay, Hopkins is a poet of fragments, not of achieved masterpieces. The sheer force of his genius, his Shakespearian power over words, must always have an over- whelming first impact on the reader who has learned to appreciate it. But the pathetic facts must again be recorded, that that genius was expressed for the most part in Victorian nature- poetry given a religious application, and that the exceptions to this rule, though very significant, are very few. About the obvious reason for this, all that needs saying is said, by implication, when Hopkins writes to a friend : 'You know I once wanted to be a painter. But even if I could I would not, I think, now, for the fact is that the hightr and more attractive parts of the art put a strain upon the passions which I should think it unsafe to encounter.' Whether Hopkins's choice of life need have impoverished his poetry is quite another question and Father Devlin may well be right in judging that there was a masochistic strain in Hopkins's attitude to his own genius as a poet—that genius which he knew he had, and which he was prepared, with a heroism that wrings the heart, to defend in the most difficult conditions, in the face of the resistance and in- comprehension of an admired poet who was also a beloved friend. Hopkins seems to have believed that doing one's duty must necessarily require hurting oneself. What matters for criticism, then, is not what being a Jesuit need in general involve or not involve, but how Hopkins himself con- ceived that life-choice. And it seems to me that all we essentially want, in order to understand this, is contained in the poems and the letters.
All we essentially want : but of course there are a few useful biographical sidelights in these books, and the first contains some quite interest- ing Victoriana which is at least helpful as back- ground. But the late Humphry House, and Mr. Graham Storey, who has completed this new and augmented edition of the Journals and Papers, have overdone it. The notes and apparatus are much too bulky. The material, unlike the letters to Bridges, is not of classical value. The aug- mented edition, as far as Hopkins's part of it is concerned, consists very largely of enthusiastic amateur philology and lovingly accurate nature notes, together with a few undergraduate philo- sophical essays and things of that kind. The young Hopkins they reveal is an attractive figure, with his blend of intellectual strenuousness— ardent but curiously limited, sensuous estheticism and that anxious, taut moral preoccupation which overshadows all : he reminds us a little of Stephen Dedalus, but he is completely sincere and nothing of a poseur. There is a side of Hopkins, however, that one likes less, and an unfortunate result of digging up all this material is to remind us that he was a bit of a crank, and a Victorian- Oxford crank at that. In art and music, as in other matters, Hopkins was a talented amateur at most, and it harms the appreciation of his real genius to imply an exaggerated extension of its authority.
Father Devlin has done the specialised job he had to do extremely well. He cannot lay his hand on his heart and claim that the Society of Jesus did their best by Hopkins, and he does not pre- tend to. Hopkins had a miserable life, he felt himself a failure as a preacher and a scholar and no esoteric explanation is required for the frus- tration, impotence and misery that are voiced in the 'terrible' sonnets. But Father Devlin does bring out what a difficult personality he un- doubtedly was, and how hard it is to imagine what could have been his ideal fulfilment : one must remember this and check one's irony at the thought of how distinguished converts like Manning or Ronald Knox were 'looked after.' That Hopkins was not a successful preacher Was not mainly the fault of his crude congregations or insensitive colleagues. His odd mixture of inno- cent simplicity with intellectual super-subtlety- the innocence often comes out in the subtlety— can be touching or amusing, but it can also be painfully trying. 'I know the world and believe in GM,' said a great sixteenth-century writer: Hopkins did not 'know the world' as did Bossuet or Donne or even George Herbert and his religious writings suffer in consequence. The ,naive, sweet, boyish quality which appears even in his intellectualities is a refreshing con- trast to the atmosphere of Newman's writings, but Newman's mind is far subtler and his insights deeper. Hopkins's 'spiritual writings' and medi- tations, like the sermons, exhibit much that is odd and much that is endearing—together with a few things that are repulsive and that one wishes hadn't been published. Nothing, however, in either of these books detracts from the Hopkins we love and admire. He was a man of noble character, a sensitive, humane and compassionate spirit. And if there is something tragic about the story of his life, no reason has ever been pro- duced for the once fashionable view that his con- version was responsible for it. On the contrary, Father Devlin's volume and everything else sug- gest strongly that his faith was much less a cause of suffering to him than a source of strength.
W. W. ROBSON
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