The Common Pursuit (7 page)

It is a strength that gives Hopkins notable advantages over Tennyson and Matthew Arnold as a 'nature poet'. This description is Mr Eliot's (see After Strange Gods, p. 48), and it is applicable enough for one to accept it as a way of bringing out how much Hopkins belongs to the Victorian tradition. Nature, beauty, transience—with these he is characteristically preoccupied:

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving ?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thought care for, can you ?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no, nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Here the disrincriveness and the idiosyncrasy might seem hardly to qualify the Victorian normality of the whole (though Bridges couldn't permit the second couplet—see the improved poem that, modestly claiming no credit, he prints in The Spirit of Man}. In

What heart heard of, ghost guessed,

where the heart, wholly taken up in the hearing, becomes it, as the * ghost' becomes the guessing, we have, of course, an example of a land of poetic action or enactment that Hopkins developed into a staple habit of his art. As we have it, this use of assonantal progression, here, its relation to the sensibility and technique of

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust

is plain. So too is the affinity between this last-quoted line and the 'bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees* in which the robust vitality of Keats's sensuousness shows itself in so un-Tennysonian, and so essentially poetic, a strength of expressive texture.

Hopkins was born—and died—in the age of Tennyson. This fact has an obvious bearing on the deliberateness with which Hopkins, starring with that peculiar genius, set himself to develop and exploit the modes and qualities of expression illustrated—the distinctive expressive resources of the English language ('English must be kept up'). The age in poetry was Tennyson's; and an age for which the ambition 'to bring English as near the Italian as possible' seems a natural and essentially poetic one, is an age in which the genius conscious enough to form a contrary ambition is likely to be very conscious and very contrary. That he was consciously bent on bringing back into poetry the life and strength of the living, the spoken, language is explicit—the confirmation was pleasant to have, though hardly necessary—in the Letters (to Bridges, LXII): *it seems to me that the poetical language of the age shd. be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike it, but not (I mean normally: passing freaks and graces are another thing) an obsolete one'. His praise of Dryden (CLV) held by Bridges to be no poet, is well-known: 'His style and rhythms lay the strongest stress of all our literature on the naked thew and sinew of the English language'. This preoccupa-

don, pursued by a Victorian poet intensely given to technical ex* periment, would go far to explain the triumphs of invention, the extravagance and the oddities of Hopkins's verse.

But this is not the whole story. His bent for technical experiment can be seen to have been inseparable from a special kind of interest in pattern—his own term was 'inscape'. Here we have a head of consideration that calls for some inquiry, though it can be left for the moment with this parenthetic recognition, to be taken up again in due course.

Meanwhile, demanding immediate notice there is a head the postponement of which till now may have surprised the reader. It is impossible to discuss for long the distinctive qualities of Hopkins's poetry without coming to his religion. In the matter of religion, of course, he differs notably from both Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, and the relevance of the differences to the business of the literary critic is best broached by noting that they lead up to the complete and staring antithesis confronting us when we place Hopkins by Rossetti. Here is Rossetti:

Under the arch of Life, where love and death, Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe

I drew it in as simply as my breath.

Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath, The sky and sea bend on thee—which can draw, By sea or sky of woman, to one law,

The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath.

This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise Thy voice and hand shake still—long known to thee By flying hair and fluttering hem—the beat Following her daily of thy heart and feet, How passionately and irretrievably, In what fond flight, how many ways and days!

This very representative poem illustrates very obviously the

of Beauty. Rossetti's shamelessly cheap evocation of a romantic and bogus Platonism—an evocation in which 'significance* is

vagueness, and profundity an uninhibited proffer of large drafts on a merely nominal account ('Life', 'love', 'death', 'terror', 'mystery', 'Beauty'—it is a bankrupt's lavishness)—exemplifies in a gross form the consequences of that separation of feeling ('soul'—the source of'genuine poetry') from flunking which the Victorian tradition, in its 'poetical' use of language, carries with it. The attendant debility is apparent enough in Tennyson and Arnold, poets who often think they are thinking and who offer thought about life, religion and morals: of Arnold in particular the point can be made that what he offers poetically as thought is dismissed as negligible by the standards of his prose. When we come to the hierophant of Beauty, the dedicated poet of the cult, predecessor of Pater who formulated the credo, we have something worse than debility. And there is not only a complete nullity in respect of thought—nullity made aggressively vulgar by a wordy pretentiousness (Rossetti is officially credited with 'fundamental brainwork'); the emotional and sensuous quality may be indicated by saying that in Rossetti's verse we find nothing more of the 'hard gem-like flame' than in Pater's prose.

Hopkins is the devotional poet of a dogmatic Christianity. For the literary critic there are consequent difficulties and delicacies. But there is something that can be seen, and said, at once: Hop-kins's religious interests are bound up with the presence in his poetry of a vigour of mind that puts him in another poetic world from the other Victorians. It is a vitality of thought, a vigour of the thinking intelligence, that is at the same time a vitality ofcon-creteness. The relation between this kind of poetic life and his religion manifests itself plainly in his addiction to Duns Scotus, whom, rather than St Thomas, traditionally indicated for a Jesuit, he significantly embraced as his own philosopher. Of the philosophy of Duns Scotus it must suffice to say here that it lays a peculiar stress on the particular and actual, in its full concreteness and individuality, as the focus of the real, and that its presence is felt whenever Hopkins uses the word 'self (or some derivative verb) in his characteristic way. Binsey Poplars provides an instance where the significance for the literary critic is obvious. The poplars are

All felled, felled, are all felled,

and Hopkins's lament runs:

O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew— Hack and rack the growing green!

Since country is so tender To touch, her being so slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve

The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene.

All the beauties Hopkins renders in his poetry are 'sweet especial scenes*, 'selves' in the poignant significance their particularity has for him. Time 'unselves' them;

Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair. Do what you may do, what, do what you may, And wisdom is early to despair.

The Victorian-romantic addicts of beauty and transience cherish the pang as a kind of religiose-poetic sanction for defeatism in the face of an alien actual world—a defeatism offering itself as a spiritual superiority. Hopkins embraces transience as a necessary condition of any grasp of the real. The concern for such a grasp is there in the concrete qualities that give his poetry its vitality— which, we have seen, involves an energy of intelligence.

These qualities the literary critic notes and appraises, whether or not he knows any more about Duns Scotus than he can gather from the poetry. There is plainly a context of theological religion, and the devotional interest has plainly the kind of relation to the poetic qualities that has just been discussed. But the activities that go on within this context, even if they make Hopkins unlike Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, and Swinburne,

don't do so by making him in any radical way like T. S. Eliot. It is a framework of the given, conditioning the system of tensions established within it, and these are those of a devotional poet. We can hardly imagine Hopkins entertaining, even in a remotely theoretical way, the kind of preoccupation conveyed by Eliot when he says :*...! cannot see that poetry can ever be separated from something which I should call belief, and to which I cannot see any reason for refusing the name of belief, unless we are to shuffle names altogether. It should hardly be needful to say that it will not inevitably be orthodox Christian belief, although that possibility can be entertained, since Christianity will probably continue to modify itself, as in the past, into something that can be believed in (I do not mean conscious modifications like modernism, etc., which always have the opposite effect). The majority of people live below the level of belief or doubt. It takes application and a kind of genius to believe anything, and to believe anything (I do not mean merely to believe in some "religion") will probably become more and more difficult as time goes on*. [The Enemy, January 1927.] The stress of the 'terrible sonnets'hasn't this kind of context. And Hopkins's habit is utterly remote from Eliot's extreme discipline of continence in respect of affirmation— the discipline involving that constructive avoidance of the conceptual currency which has its exposition in Burnt Norton. For Hopkins the truths are there, simply and irresistibly demanding allegiance; though it is no simple matter to make his allegiance real and complete (this seems at any rate a fair way of suggesting the difference).

His preoccupation with this frame is of a kind that leaves him in a certain obvious sense simple-minded:

Here he knelt then in regimental red.

Forth Christ from cupboard fetched, how fain I of feet

To his youngster take his treat! Low-latched in leaf-light housel his too huge godhead.

It is die simplicity of the single-minded and pure in heart. Its manifestations can be very disconcerting, and we are not surprised to learn that as a preacher he was apt, in his innocent unconsciousness, to put intolerable strains on die gravity of his congregation. It appears in the rime of the stanza immediately preceding that

just quoted (it will be necessary, because of the run-over of the sense, to quote the two preceding):

A bugler boy from barrack (it is over the lull There)—boy bugler, born, he tells me, of Irish

Mother to an English sire (he Shares their best gifts surely, fall how things will),

This very very day came down to us after a boon he on My late being there begged of me, overflowing

Boon in my bestowing, Came, I say, this day to it—to a First Communion*

It takes a Bridges to find all, or most, of Hopkins's riming audacities unjustifiable; they are often triumphant successes in that, once the poem has been taken, they become inevitable, and, unlike Browning's ingenuities, cease to call attention to themselves (that in the first of these two stanzas is a passable ear-rime). Nevertheless there are a fair number of the order of boon he on -communion, and it has to be conceded more generally that the naivete illustrated has some part in the elaborations of his technique.

To say this, of course, is not to endorse Lord David Cecil's view that Hopkins is difficult because of his difficult way of saying simple things. It is relevant, but hardly necessary, to remark that for Hopkins his use of words is not a matter of say ing things with them; he is preoccupied with what seems to him the poetic use of them, and that is a matter of making them do and be. Even a poet describable as 'simple-minded' may justify some complexities of 'doing' and 'being . And if we predicate simplicity of Hopkins, it must be with the recognition that he has at die same time a very subtle mind.

The subtlety is apparent in the tropes, conceits and metaphorical symbolism that gives his poetry qualities suggesting the seventeenth century rather than the nineteenth. He can be metaphysical in the full sense; as, for instance, he is, triumphandy, in the first part of The Wreck of the Deutschland, notably in stanzas 4 to 8, The radically metaphorical habit of mind and sensibility that, along with concrete strengdi from which it is inseparable, makes his 'nature poetry' so different from Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's, relates him to Herbert rather than to Eliot—it goes with the 'frame' spoken of above. It is a habit of seeing things as