The Common Pursuit (8 page)

charged with significance; 'significance' here being, not a romantic vagueness, but a matter of explicit and ordered conceptions regarding the relations between God, man and nature. It is an inveterate habit of his mind and being, finding its intellectual formulation in Duns Scotus.

Of course, to be seventeenth-century in the time of Tennyson is a different matter from being it in the time of Herbert, Hopkins's unlikeness to whom involves a great deal more than the obvious difference of temperament. He is still more unlike Crashaw: his 'metaphysical* audacity is the expression of a refined and disciplined spirit, and there is no temperamental reason why it shouldn't have been accompanied by something corresponding to Herbert's fine and poised social bearing. But behind Hopkins there is no Ben Jonson, and he has for contemporaries no constellation of courtly poets uniting die * metaphysical' with die urbane. His dis~ tinctiveness develops itself even in his prose, which has a dignified oddity such as one might have taken for affectationif ithadn't been so obviously innocent and unconscious.

Of the development of 'distinctiveness' in verse he himself says, in a passage that gives us the word:

But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive, and it is the vice of dis-tinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped. [See Poems, 2nd Edition, p. 96.]

Isolation, he might have added, would favour the vice. But the peculiar development of the interest in pattern or 'inscape' has, it may be suggested, a significance not yet touched on. We can't help relating it to a certain restriction in the nourishing interests behind Hopkins's poetry. It is as if his intensity, for lack of adequately answering substance, expressed itself in a kind of hypertrophy of technique, and in an excessive imputation of significance to formal pattern.

It may be replied that his concern for pattern in verse is paralleled by a concern for pattern (or 'inscape' we had better say, since the word associates the idea of'pattern' with Hopkins's distinctive stress on the individuality or 'self* of the object contem-

plated) in the sights—a tree, a waterfall, a disposition of clouds— that he renders from nature; renders in drawings as well as in verse and prose. But his interest in nature—to call attention to that is to make the same point again. In assenting, half-protestingly, to Mr Eliot's description of him as a * nature poet' one is virtually recognizing that a significant limitation reveals itself when a poet of so remarkable a spiritual intensity, so intense a preoccupation with essential human problems, gives 'nature'—the 'nature' of the 'nature poets'—so large a place in his poetry. What is revealed as limited, it will be said, is Hopkins's power to transcend the poetic climate of his age: in spite of the force of his originality he is a Victorian poet. This seems an unanswerable point. But even here, in respect of his limitation, his distinctiveness comes out: the limitation goes with the peculiar limitation of experience attendant upon his early world-renouncing self-dedication:

Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorl£d ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent.

Be shelled, eyes, with double dark And find the uncreated light: This ruck and reel which you remark Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

And, Poverty, be thou the bride And now the marriage feast begun, And lily-coloured clothes provide Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.

5 is the remainder of the 'Early Poem', The Habit of Perfection, from which, in the opening of this essay, stanzas were quoted in illustration of Keatsian qualities).

The force of this last point is manifest in the ardent naivet6

with which he idealizes his buglers, sailors, schoolboys and his England:

England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife To my creating thought. . .

Meeting him in 1882, his old schoolmaster, Dixon, says: 'In so far as I can remember you are very lite the boy of Highgate'. But this unworldliness is of a different order from the normalother-world-liness of Victorian poetry. Addressing Hopkins, Matthew Arnold might, without the radical confusion symbolized in his Scholar-Gypsy, have said:

For early didst thou leave the world, with powers Fresh, undiverted to the world without,

Firm to their mark, not spent on other tilings; Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt.. .

The 'firmness to the mark' is really there in Hopkins's poetry; the 'mark' is not a mere postulated something that, we are to grant, confers a spiritual superiority upon die eternal week-ender who, * fluctuating idly without term or scope' among the attractions of the countryside, parallels in his indolent poetical way the strenuous aimlessness of the world where things are done. To Hopkins it might have been said with some point:

Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire.

Yet this unworldliness, different though it is from Victorian poetical other-worldliness, does unmistakably carry with it the limitation of experience. And in his bent for 'nature' there is after all in Hopkins something of the poetical Victorian. It is a bent away from urban civilization, in the midst of which he spends his life, and which, very naturally, he regards with repulsion:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;. . .

And in The Sea and the Skylark he says:

How these two shame this shallow and frail town!

How ring right out our sordid turbid time, Being pure! We, life's pride and cared-for crown,

Have lost that cheer and charm of earth's past prime: Our make and making break, are breaking, down To man's last dust, drain fast towards man's first slime.

Towards these aspects of human life his attitude—he is very much preoccupied with them—is plain. But they have little more actual presence in his poetry than * this strange disease of modern life' has in Arnold's,

To come back now to his isolation—we have not yet taken full account of it. It is not merely a matter of his having had no support or countenance in accepted tradition, contemporary practice, and the climate of taste and ideas: he was isolated in a way peculiarly calculated to promote starvation of impulse, the overdeveloped and ingrown idiosyncrasy, and the sterile deadlock, lapsing into stagnation. As a convert he had with him a tide of the £lite (he could feel); as a Catholic and a Jesuit he had his communities, the immediate and the wider. But from this all-important religious context he got no social endorsement as a poet: the episode of The Wreck of the Deutschland —'they dared not print it* —is all there is to tell, and it says everything; it came at the beginning and it was final. Robert Bridges, his life-long friend and correspondent, confidently and consistently discouraged him with * water of the lower Isis': 'your criticism is... only a protest memorializing me against my whole policy and proceedings' (xxxvii). As against this we can point, for the last seven years of Hopkins's life, to the enthusiasm of Canon Dixon, a good and generous man, but hardly transmutable by Hopkins's kind of need (or Hopkins's kind of humility) into an impressive critical endorsement or an adequate substitute for a non-existent public.

To these conditions the reaction of so tense and disciplined an ascetic is the reverse of Blake's: he doesn't become careless, but— 'Then again I have of my self made verse so laborious' (LIE, to Bridges). (And here the following—from CLXVI—has an obvious

relevance: 'To return to composition for a moment: what I want there, to be more intelligible, smoother, and less singular, is an audience*.) With the laboriousness goes the anguish of sterility registered in this sonnet—one of his finest poems:

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners' ways prosper ? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end ?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me ? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes Now, leaved how thick! lac£d they are again With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

That there is a relation between this state of mind and his isolation, the absence of response, he himself knows: 'There is a point with me in matters of any size', he writes (CXXIX, to Bridges) 'when I must absolutely have encouragement as much as crops rain; afterwards I am independent*. The recurrence of the metaphor is significant, and the passage is clearly to be related to this other passage, itself so clearly related to the sonnet: 'if I could but get on, if I could but produce work, I should not mind its being buried, silenced, and going no farther; but it kills me to be time's eunuch and never to beget' (CXXX). And again, he writes (CLVII): 'All impulse fails me: I can give myself no reason for not going on. Nothing comes: I am a eunuch—but it is for the kingdom of heaven's sake'. About the failure of impulse we are certainly in a position to say something.

It seems reasonable to suppose that if he had had die encouragement he lacked he would have devoted to poetry a good deal of the energy that (for the last years of his life a painfully conscientious Professor of Greek) he distributed, in a strenuous dissipation that undoubtedly had something to do with his sense of being time's eunuch and never producing, between the study of music,

musical composition, drawing, and such task-work as writing a 'popular account of Light and Ether'. 1 For he was certainly a born writer. This is apparent in the Letters in ways we could hardly have divined from the poetry. Consider, for instance, the distinguished naturalness, the sensitive vivacity combined with robust vigour, the flexibility, and the easy sureness of touch of the representative passages that arouse one's anthologizing bent as one reads. 2

Actually, of course, Hopkins did 'produce': there is a substantial body of verse, a surprising preponderance of which—surprising, when we consider his situation and the difficulties in the way of success—deserves currency among the classics of the language. His supreme triumphs, unquestionably classical achievements, are the last sonnets—the 'terrible sonnets' together with Justus es f the one just quoted, and that inscribed To R. B. (who prints it with the unsanctioned and deplorable substitution of 'moulds' for 'combs' in the sixth line). These, in their achieved 'smoother style', triumphantly justify die oddest extragavances of his experimenting. Technique here is the completely unobtrusive and marvellously economical and efficient servant of the inner need, the pressure to be defined and conveyed. At the other extreme are such things as Toms Garland and Harry Ploughman, where, in the absence of controlling pressure from within, the elaborations and ingenuities of 'inscape' and of expressive licence result in tangles of knots and strains that no amount of reading can reduce to satisfactory rhythm or justifiable complexity. In between come the indubitable successes of developed 'inscape': The Wreck of the Deutschland (which seems to me a great poem —at least for the first two-thirds of it), The Windhover, and, at a lower level, The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo. Henry Purcell calls for mention as a curious special case. There can be few readers who have not found it strangely expressive, and few who could have elucidated it without extraneous help. It is not independent of the explanatory note by Hopkins that Bridges prints; yet when one approaches it with the note fresh in mind the intended meaning seems to be sufficiently in the

1 'Popular is not quite the word: it is not meant to be easy reading* (XXXV, to Dixon).

2 See ' The Letters of Gerard Maaley Hopkins' overleaf.

poem to allay, at any rate, the dissatisfaction caused by baffled understanding. 1

About Hopkins as a direct influence there seems little to say. The use of him by Left poets in die 'thirties was not of a kind to demand serious critical attention.

1944-

1 It may be worth comparing the note that Bridges prints in the Poems with the explanation given by Hopkins in Letter XCVII:

The sonnet on Purcell means this: 1-4. I hope Purcell is not damned for being a Protestant, because I love his genius. 5-8. And that not so much for gifts he shares, even though it shd. be in higher measure, with other musicians as for his own individuality. 9-14. So that while he is aiming only at impressing me his hearer with the meaning in hand I am looking out meanwhile for his specific his individual markings and mottlings, * the safces of him'. It is as when a bird thinking only of soaring spreads its wings ? a beholder may happen then to have his attention drawn by the act to the plumage displayed.—In particular, the first lines mean: May Purcell, O may he have died a good death and that soul which I love so much and which breathes or stirs so unmistakeably in his works have parted from the body and passed away, centuries since though I frame the wish, in peace with God! so that the heavy condemnation under which he outwardly or nominally lay for being out of the true Church may in consequence of his good intentions have been reversed. ' Low lays him' is merely * lays him low', that is/strikes him heavily, weighs upon him. . . It is somewhat dismaying to find I am so unintelligible though, especially in one of my best pieces. 'Listed', by the by, is 'enlisted*. *Sakes' is hazardous: about that point I was more bent on saying my say than on being understood in it. The * moonmarks' belong to the image only of course, not to the application: I mean not detailedly: I was thinking of a bird's quill feathers. One thing disquiets me: I meant ' fair fall' to mean fair (fortune be) fall; it has since struck me that perhaps ' fair' is an adjective proper and in the predicate and can only be used in cases like *fair fall the day', that is, may the day fall, turn out fair. My line will yield a sense that way indeed, but I never meant it so.