The Common Pursuit (10 page)

Hopkins's earnestness could be doubted by no one capable of reading the poetry. Indeed, the question has been raised whether admirers of the poetry have not some grounds for lamenting that the earnestness was so complete. The letters provide excuse for raising some question; but the better one knows both the letters and the poetry the less ready is one likely to be to say anything, one way or the other. It becomes, injEact, difficult to know just what the question is. 'I cannot in conscience spend time on poetry/ he writes to Bridges in 1879 (LIU), 'neither have I the induce-

ments and inspirations that make others compose. Feeling, love in particular, is the great moving power and spring of verse and the only person that I am in love with seldom, especially now, stirs my heart sensibly and when he does I cannot always "make capital" of it, it would be a sacrilege to do so. Then again I have of myself made verse so laborious.'

The delicacy of the issues is fairly suggested here. The critic inclining to venture that a Hopkins who had escaped being converted at Oxford in the eighteen-sixties might have devoted his life to cultivating more profitably than he actually did a poetic gift essentially die same in its strength, but less hampered and thwarted, would do well before pronouncing to reflect upon the case of Yeats. Yeats, the one major poet of his own generation, was 'free', in a sense, to devote his fife to 'poetry'; but was he content to be free—did he, indeed, feel himself to be essentially free ? and if he had done, would he have been a major poet ? Yeats's best work too, one may note, is full of a bitter sense of thwarting, of sterile, issueless inner tension. And—

The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart.

'Then again I have of myself made verse so laborious.' The laboriousness of die art was in neither poet a wantonly strenuous indulgence, a kind of cross-word addiction—something apart from the general quality and deeper concerns of their lives. Neither could at any time have sung widi Bridges (whose interest in technique goes with his interest in spelling):

For a happier lot Than God givcth me, It never loath been Nor ever shall be.

That Hopkins was far from happy stands out as plainly in the letters as in the poetry. His characteristic dejection and fatigue, it is plain too, were associated with a sense of frustration. (See for example the extracts quoted from Letters CXXX and CL VII on

p. 56.) About the nature of the conflict behind, or beneath, this state he is explicit enough to Canon Dixon (for whom, from reading the volume containing his letters, we come away with affection and esteem and, for Hopkins's sake, gratitude):

The question for me then is not whether I am willing (if I may guess what is in your mind) to make a sacrifice of hopes of fame (let us suppose), but whether I am not to undergo a severe judgment from God for the lothness I have shown in making it, for the reserves I may have in my heart made, for the backward glances I have given with my hand upon the plough, for the waste of time the very compositions you admire may have caused and their preoccupation of the mind which belonged to sacred or more binding duties, for the disquiet and the thoughts of vain glory they may have given rise to. A purpose may look smooth from without but be frayed and faltering from within. I have never wavered in my vocation, but I have not lived up to it. (Correspondence, XXI.)

This says all that need be said. At least, I do not think that any attempt to go behind, or explain further or deeper, would bring any essential enlightenment to admirers of The Windhover, Spelt from Sybil's Leaves and the 'terrible sonnets'. It does not, however, by itself suggest the play of energy, the force and distinction of personality, the genius, apparent in the letters written from 'that coffin of weakness and dejection in which I live, without even the hope of change' (CXXVH). The heroic strength and distinction come out in descriptions of the dejected state itself:

To-morrow morning I shall have been three years in Ireland, three hard wearying wasting wasted years. (I met the blooming Miss Tynan again this afternoon. She told me that when she first saw me she took me for 20 and some friends of hers for 15; but it won't do: they should see my heart and vitals, all shaggy with the whitest hair.) In those I have done God's will (in the main) and many examination papers.

The astringent vivacity of this is in keeping with Hopkins's characteristic humour—the humour in which his quality manifests itself as much as anywhere. It is plain that this humour was uncongenial to Bridges and often offended his sense of fitness and decorum: 'But alas! you will have been sickened by the vulgarity of my comic poems, I am afraid; especially of " the Church of

England" . . . But I have in me a great vein of blackguardly and have long known I am no gentleman; though I would rather say this than have it said' (LXXIV). This episode reverberates a good deal 1 :

Dearest Bridges,—Let us talk sense. (A) There is no need to c beg my pardon* for giving me the best advice you have to give, but (B) if you must beg my pardon it takes all the sweet out of it to say 'consistent with*, etc.—which nevertheless you had to say: the upshot is that you should not beg pardon. Now about these blessed verses... my brother Lionel once wrote that somebody's joke was 'strictly funny*... Now staggered as I am and ought to be by your judgment, still the feeling of innocence, the sense of integrity, the consciousness of rectitude have returned and I cannot help thinking, though with hesitation and diffidence, that those verses or some of them are strictly funny ... I have a little medical anecdote that might amuse you. But I am afraid we arc not in agreement about the strictly funny. (LXXVI.)

The distinctly ungendemanly quality of Hopkins's humour asserts itself in the letters more than once at Bridges' expense. 2 That, on the other hand, Bridges should, in his turn, suffer the following rebuke is all in keeping:

There is a good deal of nonsense about that set, often it sickens one (though Rossetri himself I think had little of it); but still I disapprove of damfooling people. I think it is wrong, narrows the mind, and like a

1 Cf. 'I have it now down in my tablets that a man may joke and joke and be offensive/ (CLXXI.)

a Cf. this commentary on the first line of Prometheus the Firegiver (*From high Olympus and the domeless courts'): 'Coum can never be domed in any case, so that it is needless to tell us that those on Olympus are domeless. No: better to say the Kamptuliconless courts or Minton's-encaustic-tileless courts or vulcanis^d-india-rubberless courts. This would strike a keynote at once and bespeak attention.. And if the critics said those things did not belong to the period you would have (as you have now with domeless) the overwhelming answer that you never said they did but on the contrary, and that Prometheus, who was at once a prophet and as a mechanician more than equal to Edison and the Jablochoff candle and Moc-main Patent Lever Truss with self-adjusting duplex gear and attachments, meant to say that emphatically they had not got these improvements on Olympus and he did not intend they should. But if you cannot see your way to this " frank " treatment and are inclined to think that fault might be found with ctomeless, then remember that that fault is found in your fast line. 9 (XCVL)

'parvifying glass* makes us see things smaller than the natural size. And I do not like your calling Matthew Arnold Mr Kidglove Cocksure. I have more reason than you for disagreeing with him and thinking him very wrong, but nevertheless I am sure he is a rare genius and a great critic. (XCVEI.)

Hopkins's humour is the humour of a disinterested, mature, perfectly poised and completely serious mind, and has in it-nothing of defensiveness, superiority or donnishness. 1 It appears often as clarity of critical perception and direct force of expression, as here (CXXIII): * Swinburne, perhaps you know, has also tried his hand—without success. Either in fact he does not see nature at all or else he overlays the landscape with such phantasmata, secondary images, and what not of a delirium-tremendous imagination that the result is a kind of bloody broth: you know what I mean. At any rate, there is no picture.' It would be possible to multiply illustrations of this kind, showing the critic; but if anything further is to be given it had better be chosen to show the artist, the born creative writer, who is so apparent in the letters:

There was a lovely and passionate scene (for about the space of die last trump) between me and a tallish gentleman (I daresay he was a cardsharper) in your carriage who was by way of being you; I smiled, I murmured with my lips at him, I waved farewell, but he would not give in, till with burning shame (though the whole thing was, as I say, like the duels of archangels) I saw suddenly what I was doing. (LXXXV.)

That 'cardsharper', perhaps, expresses in its innocent way an

1 * It was too bad of you to think I was writing to you to tell you you were no gentleman; that you should be saying, like Mrs Malaprop, whom I saw amusingly played lately, " Me, that means me, Captain Absolute." It is true, remarks of universal application must apply even to present company and one cannot well help remarking that they do; I cannot say " all must die" and politely except my hearers and myself; but beyond this I did not aim at you. No, if I had wanted a conspicuous instance of a blackguard I should have taken myself, as I was going to do and to tell a good story too thereanent, but refrained because I diought it might look as if I wanted to draw a faint protest from you and because humility is such a very sensitive thing the least touch smutches it and well meant attempts to keep it from jolting, like the Ark when the cattle shook it, do more harm than good; but all the same I shd. have been sadly sincere and sadly truthful/ (C.)

verse, which ought to be stronger, not weaker, into "Idshed birch-rod" or something ?' Of Dryden, upholding him against Bridges who did not think him a poet (see CLXII), he says (CLV): 'he is the most masculine of our poets; his style and rhythms lay the strongest stress of all our literature on the naked thew and sinew of the English language/ His own verse, he reiterates, is for the ear rather than for the eye, for performance rather than mere reading. * Sprung rhythm', and his views on rhythm and metre generally, he explains in a letter (XII) to Canon Dixon far more satisfactorily than in the essay that stands as Preface to the Poems.

If this survey has seemed to comprise an inordinate amount of quoting, that has not been through any ambition of making an exhaustive anthology, but rather to suggest what remains unquoted. In spite of die letter-writer's repeated complaints of weakness and dejection the effect is of rich and varied vitality. Hop-kins's energy was certainly very remarkable. Not content with being as completely original a poet and as extraordinary a technical innovator as the language has to show, he aspired to compose music and devoted himself to the study of musical technicalities ; we even find him drawing; he was for the last years of his life a Professor of Greek; he sent communications to Nature and he lets out in a letter to Canon Dixon (XXXV) that he is writing a 'popular account of Light and Ether' ('Popular is not quite the word; it is not meant to be easy reading.') 1

The letters do not produce the constant overwhelming impression of genius that Lawrence's do, but greatness is unmistakably there. A classic is added to the language; and it is indeed matter for rejoicing, especially in times like these, to be admitted to intimacy with a spirit so pure, courageous and humane.

1 'The study of physical science/ he writes in die same letter, 'has, unless corrected in some way, an effect the very opposite of what one would suppose. One would think it might materialise people (no doubt it does make them or, rather I should say, they become materialists; but that is not the same thing: they do not believe in the matter more but in God less); but in fact they seem to end in conceiving only of a world of formulas, with its being properly speaking in thought, towards which die outer world acts as a sort of feeder, supplying examples for literary purposes. And they go so far as to tbjmk the rest of mankind are in the same state of mind as themselves/

THE IRONY OF SWIFT

SWIFT is a great English writer. For opening with this truism I have a reason: I wish to discuss Swift's writings—to examine what they are; and they are (as the extant commentary bears witness) of such a kind that it is peculiarly difficult to discuss them without shifting die focus of discussion to the kind of man that Swift was. What is most interesting in them does not so clearly belong to the realm of things made and detached that literary criticism, which has certainly not the less its duties towards Swift, can easily avoid turning—unawares, and that is, degenerating— into something else. In the attempt to say what makes these writings so remarkable, reference to the man who wrote is indeed necessary; but there are distinctions. For instance, one may (it appears), having offered to discuss the nature and import of Swift's satire, find oneself countering imputations of misanthropy with the argument that Swift earned the love of Pope, Arbuthnot, Gay, several other men and two women: this should not be found necessary by the literary critic. But the irrelevancies of Thackeray and of his castigator, the late Charles Whibley—irrelevancies not merely from the point of view of literary criticism—are too gross to need placarding; more insidious deviations are possible.

The reason for the opening truism is also the reason for the choice of tide. To direct the attention upon Swift's irony gives, I think, the best chance of dealing adequately, without deviation or confusion, with what is essential in Ins work. But it involves also (to anticipate an objection) a slight to the classical status of Gulliver's Travels, a book which, though it may represent Swift's most impressive achievement in the way of complete creation— the thing achieved and detached—does not give the best opportunities for examining his irony. And Gulliver s Travels, one readily agrees, hasn't its dassical status for nothing. But neither is it for nothing that, suitably abbreviated, it has become a classic for children. What for the adult reader constitutes its peculiar force— what puts it in so different a class from Robinson Crusoe —resides for the most part in the fourth book (to a less extent in the third).