Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: A Heart in Hiding (Studies in Major Literary Authors, V. 27)

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND VICTORIAN CATHOLICISM

MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS VOLUME 27

STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS

edited by William E.Cain Wellesley College

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES: THE PUSHER AND THE SUFFERER An Unsentimental Reading of Moby Dick Suzanne Stein HENRY JAMES AS A BIOGRAPHER A Self among Others Willie Tolliver JOYCEAN FRAMES Film and the Fiction of James Joyce Thomas Burkdall JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE ART OF SACRIFICE Andrew Mozina TECHNIQUE AND SENSIBILITY IN THE FICTION AND POETRY OF RAYMOND CARVER Arthur F.Bethea SHELLY’S TEXTUAL SEDUCTIONS Plotting Utopia in the Erotic and Political Works Samuel Lyndon Gladden “ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE” Dramatic Sensibility in Mary Shelley’s Novels Charlene E.Bunnell “THOUGHTS PAINFULLY INTENSE” Hawthorne and the Invalid Author James N.Mancall SEX THEORIES AND THE SHAPING OF TWO MODERNS Hemingway and H.D. Deidre Anne (McVicker) Pettipiece WORD SIGHTINGS Visual Apparatus and Verbal Reality in Stevens, Bishop and O’Hara Sarah Riggs DELICATE PURSUIT Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton Jessica Levine GERTRUDE STEIN AND WALLACE STEVENS The Performance of Modern Consciousness Sara J.Ford LOST CITY Fitzgerald’s New York Lauraleigh O’Meara

iv

SOCIAL DREAMING Dickens and the Fairy Tale Elaine Ostry PATRIARCHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS Sexual Politics in Selected Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy Joanna Devereux A NEW MATRIX FOR MODERNISM A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham Nelljean McConeghey Rice THE MACHINE THAT SINGS Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body Gordon Tapper T.S.ELIOT’S CIVILIZED SAVAGE Religious Eroticism and Poetics Laurie J.MacDiarmid THE CARVER CHRONOTOPE Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver’s Fiction G.P.Lainsbury THIS COMPOSITE VOICE The Role of W.B.Yeats in James Merrill’s Poetry Mark Bauer PROGRESS AND IDENTITY IN THE PLAYS OF W.B.YEATS Barbara A.Seuss CONRAD’S NARRATIVES OF DIFFERENCE Not Exactly Tales for Boys Elizabeth Schneider

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND VICTORIAN CATHOLICISM A Heart in Hiding

Jill Muller

ROUTLEDGE New York and London

Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (TK) Muller, Jill. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: a heart in hiding/by Jill Muller. p. cm.—(Studies in major literary authors; v. 27) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96707-4 (Print Edition) (Hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1844–1889—Religion. 2. Christianity and literature—Great Britain— History—19th century. 3. Catholic Church—England—Doctrines—History—19th century. 4. Christian poetry, English—History and criticism. 5. Catholics—England—History—19th century. 6. Anglo—Catholicism—History—19th century. 7. Anglo—Catholicism in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR4803.H44Z7218 2003 821’.8–dc21 2003006146 ISBN 0-203-48942-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57875-9 (Adobe eReader Format)

In Memoriam Jonathan Tee 1950–2000

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ix

ENDNOTE ABBREVIATIONS

x

INTRODUCTION

1

CHAPTER ONE

NEWMAN, HOPKINS, AND “HEAVEN-HAVEN” A Literary Conversion

8

CHAPTER TWO

ONE “FETCH” IN HIM Hopkins’s Ultramontane Vision in The Wreck of the Deutschland

27

CHAPTER THREE

“THESE THINGS WERE HERE AND BUT THE BEHOLDER WANTING” Hopkins’s Nature Sonnets and the Victorian Catholic Response to Evolution

50

CHAPTER FOUR

“THE LOST ARE LIKE THIS” Victorian Catholic Eschatology and Hopkins’s Dublin Poems

73

NOTES

100

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

120

INDEX

128

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful for the advice and encouragement of all who read and commented on my manuscript, and for the support and affection of friends and family who sustained me through the writing of it. Many of the ideas and questions that framed my Hopkins dissertation first took shape in an undergraduate tutorial with Professor Dorothy Oberhaus at Mercy College. I am grateful to Professor Oberhaus for sponsoring my application for the Mellon Fellowship that allowed me to pursue graduate studies at Columbia, and for her continuing interest in my work. Among the many debts of gratitude I have accumulated at Columbia, I owe particular thanks to Professor Wayne Proudfoot for introducing me to the academic study of religion, and for directing my reading in nineteenth-century religious thought. I thank Professor Carole Slade for providing me with an opportunity to develop my ideas on Hopkins and St. Gertrude in an MLA paper in 1996. I also thank Professor George Stade for his advice on matters of scholarship and style, and for his unfailing generosity of spirit. My deepest gratitude goes to Professor John Rosenberg, wisest and most patient of mentors, for inspiring me with the scope of his scholarship, the lucidity of his prose, and the kindness of his friendship. Professor Tom Werge, at Notre Dame, gave valuable advice and support at all stages of this project, and published an early version of chapter two in Religion and Literature. My thanks go also to Paul Johnson, my editor at Routledge. Among those whose friendship has kept me afloat through this endeavor and other ups and downs of life, I offer especial thanks to Sherlin Hendrick, Luisa Ospina, Patricia Owens, Taylor Pape, Elisabeth Rust, and Rachel Wetzsteon. I also thank Mike McCoy for helpful books and great conversation. To my daughters, Vanessa and Sophie, I offer heartfelt thanks for believing in me, laughing with me, and keeping me (almost) sane. I owe daughters, book, and all my truest happiness to my husband, Claud. We dedicate this book to the memory of Jonathan Tee, alpha librarian and best of friends.

Endnote Abbreviations

L1 L2 L3 J Poems S

The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.W.Dixon Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (4th Edition) The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Introduction

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844, seven years after the coronation of Queen Victoria. When he died, in 1889, the British queen still had eleven years left to reign. Hopkins’s letters and journals contain numerous references to Victorian cultural and political events. He studied at Oxford under Jowett and Pater. He was an acquaintance of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, an admirer of Ruskin, and an astute critic of Tennyson and Browning. He visited the Royal Academy and the Crystal Palace. He grieved over the death of General Gordon at Khartoum and raged against Gladstone for “weakening the bonds of a worldwide empire.”1 As a Catholic convert, he joined the only major Christian denomination to expand in population and influence during Victoria’s reign. Yet, perhaps because publication of the Poems was delayed until 1918, critical studies of Hopkins long failed to acknowledge the fastness of his moorings in Victorian culture. In the 1920s and 1930s, William Empson, I.A. Richards, and F.R.Leavis championed Hopkins as a modernist ahead of his time. Describing the Victorian Jesuit as “one of the most remarkable technical innovators who ever wrote,” Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry declared that Hopkins “is now felt to be a contemporary and his influence is likely to be great.”2 According to Leavis, Hopkins bore “no relation…to any nineteenth-century poet.”3 Apparently the only critics to notice the poet’s Victorian affinities were those who found him less impressive. In After Strange Gods, T.S.Eliot dismissed Hopkins as a minor, though “agile,” nature poet, comparing his “technical tricks” to those of Meredith.4 Yeats, in his controversial introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, likened him to the “Rhymers” of the 1890s, viewing his poetic style as a sterile overelaboration in which subject is sacrificed to technique: His meaning is like some faint sound that strains the ear, comes out of words, passes to and fro between them, goes back into words, his manner is a last development of poetic diction. My generation began that search for hard positive subject-matter, still a predominant purpose.5 For Eliot and Yeats, as staunch modernists, relegation of Hopkins to the nineteenth century was an expression of distaste for his prosody rather than an appreciation of his Victorian roots. For almost half a century, admirers and critics alike were too dazzled, or irritated, by Hopkins’s linguistic and metrical experiments to pay much attention to the literary and religious context of his work. In 1953, John Pick, an early biographer, reiterated the, by now, stale point that Hopkins was “more modern than the moderns.”6 As late as 1961, W.H.Gardner claimed that Hopkins was not pre-eminently a “period” writer. Not more than two or three of his poems were directly inspired by events or circumstances which were peculiar to the nineteenth-century; his poetry has, in fact, a timeless quality.7

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GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND VICTORIAN CATHOLICISM

The prevailing mid-century view of Hopkins as a dislocated modernist was challenged for the first time in a 1945 essay by Arthur Mizener in Gerard Manley Hopkins by the Kenyon Critics. In “Victorian Hopkins,” Mizener compared Hopkins to Tennyson, reading both as heirs of Keats and concluding that the “basic sensibility” of Hopkins’s poetry is Victorian.8 However, the myth of a “timeless” Hopkins did not come under sustained attack until the publication of Wendell Stacy Johnson’s Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Poet as Victorian in 1968 and Alison Sulloway’s Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Temper in 1972. These pioneering works have since been built upon by other studies of Hopkins’s Victorian context, notably Jude Nixon’s 1994 Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Contemporaries: Liddon, Newman, Darwin and Pater. Yet, in spite of Hopkins’s much quoted remark to A.W.M.Baillie that religion “enters very deep; in reality it is the deepest impression I have in speaking to people, that they are or that they are not of my religion,” studies of Victorian Hopkins have focused almost exclusively on the influences of his pre-conversion Oxford years, largely overlooking his complex responses to his Catholic contemporaries.9 Only Hopkins’s interest in Newman, whose influence was most intense before his conversion, has received serious critical attention. By choosing to become a Catholic, and, worse, a Jesuit, Hopkins, it is implied, disqualified himself as a bona fide Victorian. After the poet’s conversion, Franco Marucci argues, “a decided prevalence of antiVictorian, medieval codes” began to “assert itself” in his writings.10 According to Bergonzi, when Hopkins became a jesuit he “moved out of the mainstream of English society” and into a “subculture” that seemed “exotic and even sinister to most Englishmen.”11 Surprisingly, the poet’s Catholic readers have been no more willing to explore his Victorian Catholic identity than their secular counterparts. While Hopkins’s modernist critics, influenced, perhaps, by Bridges’s disapproval of his friend’s “efforts to force emotion into narrow and sectarian channels,” regarded his Catholicism as irrelevant, if not positively harmful, to his poetic gifts; Jesuit scholars such as David Anthony Downes, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of His Ignatian Spirit (1959), and Walter J.Ong, in Hopkins, the Self, and God (1986), have focused their investigations of Hopkins’s spirituality on the poet’s responses to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and to the writing of the thirteenth-century Franciscan, Duns Scotus.12 Neither Downes nor Ong addresses the possibility that Hopkins’s reading of medieval and Counter-Reformation theologians may have been mediated by the experience of being Catholic in a particular time and place, Victorian England. Among Catholics, too, the myth of a “timeless” Hopkins has prevailed. Yet, as Newman points out in his contrast of “real” and “notional” assents in his 1873 Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, the exercise of Catholic faith in a predominantly Protestant, and historically antiCatholic, society, such as Victorian England, requires a very different quality of religious commitment than the “credence” of a medieval Catholic or a nineteenth-century citizen of Portugal or Spain.13 For Newman and his fellow English converts, including Manning, Ward, Faber, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the decision to join the Church of Rome was an act of self-definition through dissent. It was a Romantic and individualistic rejection of religious tradition, national identity, and paternal authority in favor of an idealized submission to the far stricter, though more distant, authority of an international Church and an infallible Holy Father. Once inside the Catholic fold, many English converts discovered that the independent and self-assertive qualities of mind that had facilitated their religious change were a real impediment to obedience in their new faith. Many would grapple all their lives with efforts to reconcile their religious and national identities. Hopkins’s unique poetic voice gave form to a far from unique Victorian Catholic dilemma. Hopkins was both a Catholic and a Victorian. The religious sensibility that suffuses every one of his poems is mediated at all times by his cultural moment. By converting to Catholicism in 1866, only sixteen

INTRODUCTION

3

years after the restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy, the poet joined a rapidly expanding religious minority many of whose members looked forward to the conversion of England before the century was over.14 In choosing to join an active rather than a contemplative religious order, the highly disciplined Society of Jesus, Hopkins expected to take his place in the vanguard of Catholic efforts to win back his native land to her ancient faith. Like many of his Oxford contemporaries, he associated the restoration of Catholicism with a return to the idealized paternalistic and agrarian society extolled by Carlyle and Ruskin. His poems, particularly during the great Welsh period, describe a sacramental landscape, Catholic at its source, like St. Winefred’s Well, though “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil” (“God’s Grandeur” 6). As a Catholic poet who abandoned poetry for seven years after his conversion and began again only at the request of a jesuit superior, Hopkins was determined to use his gifts in the service of his religion. Those twentieth-century critics who have exalted his formal experimentation at the expense of his Catholic message ignore the earnest Victorian question asked, and answered, by the poet in a letter to Bridges: “What are works of art for? To educate. To be standards.”15 To R.W.Dixon, he explained, “Our society values, as you say, and has contributed to literature, to culture; but only as a means to an end.”16 When he broke his poetic silence to describe, in The Wreck of the Deutschland, the sinking of a German ship, the visionary experience of a Franciscan nun, and, by implication, the fate of godless countries, Hopkins was endeavoring to answer the call, put out by both Newman and Manning, for Victorian Catholics to create a literature of their own. Cardinal Manning’s influential 1863 article, “The Work and Wants of the Catholic Church in England,” acknowledges the vital role of Catholic writers in bringing about conversions. Newman’s 1852 sermon, “The Second Spring,” celebrates the end of the Church’s long English winter by urging Catholic “voices, grave and musical” to renew “the old chant, with which Augustine greeted Ethelbert in the free air upon the Kentish strand.”17 In The Idea of A University, Newman identifies “the formation of Catholic literature in the English language” as one of the “special objects” of Catholic higher education.18 Since the seventeenth century, Newman laments, all great English literature has been infused with the voice of Milton, “breathing hatred to the Catholic Church.”19 Although he believes that it is too late to rival the acknowledged classics, English Catholics, Newman suggests, should create an alternative literature for their own consumption. Hopkins, I shall argue, took Newman’s suggestion very much to heart. His poetry, even after he had given up all hope of publication, consistently addressed an imagined audience of his Catholic contemporaries. Even his metrical experiments, as Walter J.Ong first noted in 1949, made use of a rhythm inherited from Old English as one of the bases of verse until the ‘reform’ and ‘smoothing’ of English numbers, principally under the influence of Edmund Spenser and his followers.20 Hopkins’s celebrated “sprung rhythm” is an attempt to dismiss the Elizabethan statutes in poetry as well as religion. Like many other great Victorians, he was a deeply conservative revolutionary. Although there was still no significant Victorian Catholic poetry in 1875, when the Deutschland ran aground on the Kentish sands, the preceding twenty-five years had seen a renaissance of Catholic writings of other kinds. During the 1850s and 1860s, Catholic novels, saints’ lives, and translations of devotional classics proliferated; Faber’s All for Jesus (1863) and Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) became bestsellers, and a growing choir of Catholic voices found their way into print in periodicals such as The Month, The Dublin Review, The Tablet, and The Rambler. As both student and scholar, Hopkins had access to libraries at the Jesuit teaching institutions of Manresa House, St. Beuno’s, and Stonyhurst through most of the 1870s and early 1880s. The holdings of these libraries (the former two are now housed at Heythrop College, London) and the lists of refectory readings collected by Alfred Thomas, in Hopkins the Jesuit: The

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Years of Training, testify that Hopkins was exposed to a mass of contemporary Catholic theology, fiction, devotional tracts, scientific treatises, and periodical articles. The poet’s letters and journals attest to his familiarity with writings by Manning, Newman, Faber, and St. George Jackson Mivart, along with a host of lesser-known Catholic intellectuals such as Henry Coleridge, Richard J.Clarke, and the Rickaby brothers. Although his Jesuit career was outwardly unsuccessful and often deeply lonely, and despite the fact that his poems did not find the Victorian Catholic audience he hoped for, Hopkins was not a dislocated modernist writing in a cultural vacuum. Nor is it entirely true, as Sulloway and others have argued, that he had absorbed all of his significant influences by the time of his conversion. My purpose in this study of Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism is to restore the poet to his full intellectual and literary context by exploring his responses, in the poems and other writings, to the largely forgotten, but once noisy and contentious, culture of his Catholic contemporaries. Drawing on historical studies of Victorian Catholicism, such as Edward Norman’s The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century, J.Derek Holmes’s More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century, and Mary Heimann’s invaluable Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, along with Hopkins’s own writings and those of other nineteenth-century Catholics, I shall show how the preoccupations, dramas, and disappointments of the poet’s life often reflect the experience of his co-religionists and how, indeed, the trajectory of his career mimics the deflation of Catholic hopes during the second half of Victoria’s reign and the turn within the Roman Church in England from a triumphalist rhetoric of conversion to a more introverted and insular spirituality. Although Hopkins undoubtedly possessed psychological traits that contributed to his personal and poetic frustrations, many of the difficulties of his Catholic career were caused or at least exacerbated by the deep social and intellectual divisions within Victorian Catholicism. Any attempt to read Hopkins in a Catholic context must begin by recognizing that the chorus of English Catholics dreamed of by Newman in “The Second Spring” was in fact a cacophany of warring voices. There were at least two Victorian Catholicisms, with many local complexities and variations even within the dominant factions. While Newman and his followers attempted to establish an English Catholicism in keeping with native “habits of mind…manner of reasoning, …tastes, and…virtues,” an Ultramontane faction, represented by Manning, Faber, and Ward, sought to standardize devotional practice and centralize authority within the Roman See.21 Where Newman and his supporters endeavored to establish dialogue with the Protestant mainstream, many Ultramontanists preferred an aggressively separatist position. The struggle between the Ultramontanists and the more liberal Newmanites was further complicated by hostility between converts and “old Catholics” or recusants, and by suspicion and misunderstanding between an intellectual priestly class (many of whom were Oxford converts) and a lay population increasingly made up of working-class Irish immigrants. Hopkins’s generation of Oxford converts, drawn to the Anglo-Catholic reaches of the Church of England by the Tractarians, Liddon, and Pusey, and then beckoned to Rome by Newman’s urbane and reasonable Apologia Pro Vita Sua, were prepared neither for the factionalism within the English Catholic Church nor for the virulently anti-intellectual and reactionary papacy of Pius IX. As Christopher Hollis observes, in The Jesuits: A History, highly educated Victorian converts were compelled to live a hobbled life. Their sense of loyalty and their rules compelled them to pay an attention to the discipline imposed upon them from Rome, which Rome, as it was then, did not really deserve, and their minds were inhibited constantly by the need to express a respect…which they could not truly feel.22 Throughout the nineteenth century, Rome rejected efforts by Catholic intellectuals to accommodate social change or scientific advances. While Newman maintained a precarious orthodoxy, his more liberal

INTRODUCTION

5

followers were frequently at odds with the Roman authorities. The Rambler, a liberal review founded by Oxonian converts, including Richard Simpson and Sir John Acton, and briefly edited by Newman, was forced to cease publication in 1864. The Catholic biologist, St. George Jackson Mivart, a former colleague of Darwin, was excommunicated by Leo XIII. Meanwhile, Ultramontanists like Manning steadfastly ignored conflicts between science and doctrine, while Faber and his followers embraced folk spirituality and pious ritual with a defiant suspension of disbelief. Leo XVIII’s late-century revival of Scholasticism, intended to reassert the rational basis of Catholic doctrine, did little to heal the breach with secular intellectual culture. Like his mentor, John Henry Newman, Hopkins had little acquaintance with Catholics when he entered the Roman Church. The personal and spiritual drama of his religious change was patterned on the experience of Newman as it is described in the Apologia and in an earlier conversion novel, Loss and Gain. Hopkins’s adolescent rebellion, sexual guilt, aesthetic medievalism, and hunger for an antidote to secular philosophies of “flux” and “arbitrariness” made him a responsive reader of Newman’s paean to the saving powers of dogma.23 Letters and journal entries written by Hopkins at the time of his conversion reveal Newman’s influence on every page. Justifying his religious change to family and friends, the younger convert makes careful use of Newman’s representation of conversion as a gradual evolution of religious opinion, deliberately submerging the personal crises that may have prompted his attraction to Catholicism. While other studies of Newman and Hopkins have suggested that Newman’s influence persisted unchanged throughout Hopkins’s Catholic life, I shall argue that the poet’s early Catholic years were marked by a strong rejection of Newman and an embrace of Ultramontanist social, political, and devotional concerns. My reading of The Wreck of the Deutschland pays particular attention to the influence of Frederick Faber on this most ambitious and confident of Hopkins’s poems. Gertrude of Helfta, a medieval German mystic invoked by Hopkins to signify the spousal and visionary spirituality of the tall nun, was familiar to Victorian Catholics through Faber’s devotional writings. The influence of Faber, a former Oratorian who attacked Newman’s moderation and restraint and promoted a more sentimental and theatrical devotional style, is also evident in The Wreck’s retelling of Hopkins’s conversion experience. Hopkins had a disastrous tendency to support the losing side in an argument, as is shown by Alfred Thomas’s record of his voting in the debates at St. Beuno’s. He was also, despite his interest in rhetoric, a poor judge of an audience. Henry Coleridge, the editor of The Month, an Oxford convert and a friend of Newman, a man who was known for his distaste for flamboyant spirituality, was an unpromising reader for The Wreck of the Deutschland. It is uncertain whether Coleridge was more repelled by Hopkins’s highly emotional account of his own conversion, by his claim that the dying Franciscan nun was visited by Jesus, or by the complexities of sprung rhythm. Coleridge’s refusal to publish the poem, followed by an equally terse rejection of “The Loss of the Eurydice,” caused Hopkins to abandon his hopes for a Victorian Catholic readership. While Hopkins made no further attempts to publish his poems after the failure of The Wreck, he continued to write in concert with other Catholic voices. Poems such as “Pied Beauty” and “Hurrahing in Harvest,” inspired by the landscapes surrounding the Jesuit theologate at St. Beuno’s, Wales, were written against a backdrop of Scholastic debate about man’s relationship with the rest of creation. Contrasting Hopkins’s response to Darwin, Mivart, and Tyndall with that of Jesuit colleagues such as Herbert Lucas and John and Joseph Rickaby, I shall show that the poet’s enthusiasm for the sacramentalist theology of Duns Scotus pointed him towards a reconciliation of Christianity and evolutionism that was unavailable to his more orthodox contemporaries. Unfortunately Hopkins’s adoption of Scotism also coincided with a period of rigid Thomism in Jesuit theological studies and cost him his career as a theologian.

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Exiled to a dreary teaching job in Dublin for the last five years of his life, Hopkins found himself the butt of Irish Catholic prejudice against effete Oxford converts. His precarious synthesis of religion and patriotism was shattered by his discovery that the Catholic Church in Ireland was actively involved in the struggle for Home Rule. Depressed and isolated, Hopkins became increasingly preoccupied with Catholic teachings about death and the afterlife. In his Dublin poems, particularly the six sonnets of desolation, the poet compares himself to “the lost,” using eschatological imagery to describe feelings of claustrophobic solipsism and rejection by God. Ironically, it was during this late period of estrangement that Hopkins’s theological interests were most compatible with those of his Jesuit colleagues. His rejection of the liberal eschatology of Newman’s Dream of Gerontius and his embrace of Liguorianism coincided with conservative Jesuit efforts to shore up belief in the eternal torments of hell. My reading of the late poems will explore verbal echoes and allusions to Newman’s Dream, Richard J.Clarke’s eschatological articles in The Month, Hopkins’s own spiritual writings, and the lurid teachings on hell and damnation ascribed to his Jesuit colleagues by their turn-of-the-century student, James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Even the disillusionment and solipsism of Hopkins’s final years mirror a parallel movement in Victorian Catholicism. By the end of the nineteenth century, English Catholics no longer expected to see a wholesale conversion of their native land. Although there was a continuing steady flow of converts, much of the Church’s energy was directed toward combating an ever more secular mainstream culture and preventing “leakage” from the faith. Catholicism became increasingly insular, more concerned with inculcating correct doctrine in the children of the faithful than with rewriting English literature. Hopkins’s inability to locate a public voice and his turn inwards were mirrored in the Catholic writing of the 1890s. Yeats, in his Autobiography, describes the Catholic poets Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson as members of a “tragic generation” who “more and more must make all out of the privacy of their thought”24 In “The Windhover,” written in 1877, at the height of his Scotist enthusiasm, Hopkins uncannily prophesies not only the failure and “sheer plod” (12) of his Jesuit career, but also the collapse of the triumphalist aspirations of Victorian Catholicism. The poem’s rapturous octet describes a sudden encounter with a soaring bird of prey: I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,-the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Hopkins, who dedicates the sonnet “To Christ Our Lord,” likens the magnificent falcon to Jesus in its physical beauty, power, and “mastery” (8). His Scotist belief in a univocity of being, according to which all creatures possess a unique identity (haeccitas) but all also partake in the identity of the incarnate Christ, enables him to “meet” and “greet” the Son of God in the regal bird. Seeing, in this sonnet, is an act of communion. The poet’s heart is “stirred for a bird” (8) and poet and bird, or poet and God, are suspended for a moment, “High there” (4) in “ecstasy” (5), before the bird swoops, the image shatters, and creaturely perfections breaks down into elemental earth and fire:

INTRODUCTION

7

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion. While the masterful bird of the octet reflects Hopkins’s early view of Christ as a “hero,” a “warrior,” and a “conqueror,” the “blue-bleak embers” (13) of the sestet look forward to a later and more melancholy vision of the Son of God as one whose “brute beauty” (9) must “Buckle!” (9) and “fall” (14), one who is “doomed to succeed by failure.”25 Creaturely “pride” (9), the poem warns, must give way to sacrifice; worldly aspirations must be dashed before souls can shine “gold-vermilion” (14). The windhover’s soaring flight and precipitous descent are “caught” (1) and interpreted by a solitary watcher, the poet as “heart in hiding” (7). In the pages that follow, I shall read Gerard Manley Hopkins, a disappointed Jesuit and, as he laments in “To seem a stranger,” a poet “unheard” (13) in his own lifetime, as the “heart in hiding” of Victorian Catholicism.

CHAPTER ONE Newman, Hopkins, and “Heaven-Haven” A Literary Conversion

In the autumn of 1866, when his twenty-two-year-old son, Gerard, a brilliant Oxford undergraduate known as the “star of Balliol,” was on the verge of converting to Roman Catholicism, Manley Hopkins wrote an anguished letter to Henry Parry Liddon-an Anglican of ultra-High Church sympathies and Gerard’s confessor-begging him to use his influence to save the young man from entering the “cold limbo” of Catholic life in mid-Victorian England.1 Manley Hopkins employs theological language to express the very secular fear that by deserting the established Church his gifted son will exile himself to the margins of English society. The writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the months leading up to his conversion suggest that he shared his father’s view of Catholicism as an afterlife. For Gerard, however, the rewards of a secular career held little attraction and Rome was not limbo but heaven. In a letter to his father written on the eve of his conversion, Gerard resoundingly rejected Manley Hopkins’s worldly hopes: “The positions you wd. like to see me in wd. have no attraction for me, and surely the happiness of my prospects depends on the happiness to me and not on intrinsic advantages.” To his friend, E.H.Coleridge, he insisted that only the compensations of eternity could “correct and avenge the triviality of this life.”2 Gerard Manley Hopkins was eager to throw the world away. The writings of his Oxford years chart an increasing preoccupation with vocation and ascesis. Poems such as “Easter Communion” and “The Habit of Perfection” explore extreme states of renunciation and mortification. The nun in “Heaven-Haven” has already embraced eternity: I have desired to go Where springs not fail, To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail And a few lilies blow. And I have asked to be Where no storms come, Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, And out of the swing of the sea. The nun has desired an end to desire, a world without weather. Instead of drawing on the traditional Christian trope of conversion as a new or second birth, Hopkins consigns his convert to silence and stasis. The existence she has chosen conforms closely to mid-Victorian representations of the afterlife in hymns and devotional manuals in which heaven is conceived in static rather than dynamic terms as an eternal sabbath in a temperate realm.3 The nun’s tone of calm finality, of self-assertion at the moment of self-surrender, is

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heard again in Hopkins’s letter to his father announcing his conversion to Rome: “I am most anxious that you should not think of my future.”4 Father and son are alike in their representation of conversion to Catholicism as the end of personal history. Both were undoubtedly influenced by John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, first published in seven pamphlets from April 21 to June 2, 1864.5 That summer Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote the first drafts of “Heaven-Haven” in which the nun’s desire to pitch her faith “out of the swing of the sea” echoes Newman’s description, in his spiritual autobiography, of conversion as “like coming into port after a rough sea”6 Since the Apologia is not explicitly mentioned in Gerard’s letters or diaries, it is impossible to say precisely when he first encountered it. However, Newman’s “history of his religious opinions” caused such a stir among Oxford Tractarians that it seems probable that Hopkins had read it by the autumn of 1864. In September of that year he assures his friend, A.W.M.Baillie, that in religious argumentation, Newman, usually considered “the extremest of the extreme,” is in fact “a moderate man.”7 By the time of his conversion, Hopkins’s poems and letters contain unmistakable verbal echoes of the Apologia. Meanwhile, Manley Hopkins’s letters to Liddon and to Gerard indicate that, whether or not he had read Newman’s autobiography, by 1866 he was certainly familiar with the public debate that surrounded it. Indeed, the painful drama enacted between Manley Hopkins and his son sometimes appears to have been scripted by John Henry Newman. Newman’s Apologia is the central text in the mythology of Victorian Catholic conversion. It is the narrative by which many later converts, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, interpreted and patterned their experience. The Apologia was responsible for winning gifted and zealous converts to Rome. Some of these converts had disappointing and frustrating lives, an out come for which the Apologia should also be held partly responsible. Although he became a Victorian celebrity, Newman himself was always a Catholic outsider. As a Catholic controversialist, he can take credit for much of the erosion of anti-Catholic prejudice in English society in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But the very characteristics that gained him the respect of the Protestant mainstream—his urbanity, subtlety, and intellectual independence— engendered suspicion in his own communion. His theology was long considered suspect and his piety insufficient. His recognition by Rome was grudging and late. Nor were his opponents, particularly Henry Edward Manning, altogether wrong in their mistrust of him: Newman’s brand of Catholicism, although deeply attractive to Anglicans of a certain temper, was not well-attuned to the pastoral needs of England’s growing Catholic population. Furthermore, Newman’s Catholic critics were rightly uneasy about his efforts to make converts among the younger generation of Tractarians at Oxford. The Catholicism he preached to them was to some extent a faith of his own defming, dangerously enmeshed in the cult of personality. As Wilfrid Ward acknowledges, in his Life of John Henry Newman, “For hundreds of young men, Credo in Newmanum was the genuine symbol of faith.”8 The Apologia is more convincing as a painstaking dismemberment of the Anglican compromise than as a defense of Catholicism. It leads converts to Rome without telling them what they will find there. The Catholic position that Newman outlines in his final chapter includes a view of doctrinal evolution that was not shared by Roman authorities, as well as an ill-timed attack on the authoritarian and anti-intellectual Ultramontanes, the most powerful political force in nineteenth-century Catholicism. The English Catholic Church in which Newman’s “habits of mind…manner of reasoning…tastes, and virtues” find “a place and thereby a sanctification” is a mythological institution.9 The Catholic Church in Victorian England never did find good use for Newman’s abilities, still less for those of his most brilliant convert, Gerard Manley Hopkins.10

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In viewing Hopkins as to some degree a victim of Newman’s rhetoric, I am not suggesting that Hopkins’s conversion was a spiritual or artistic mistake. I am, however, arguing that some of his undoubted problems in finding his place in the Catholic Church and his voice as a Catholic poet come from unrealistic expectations engendered by Newman’s Apologia. The Apologia was not the only source of the Catholic fantasies of Hopkins’s Oxford days. Like many of his contemporaries, he was also attracted by Romantic medievalism. In addition, his own contrary nature probably led him to find encouragement for his Catholic leanings in the profuse anti-Catholic literature of mid-Victorian England. Nonetheless, it was the Apologia that provided the blue-print for Hopkins’s conversion. Newman’s autobiographical writings, notably the Apologia and the novel, Loss and Gain, played a crucial role in the formation of Hopkins’s view of Catholicism, encouraging him to view conversion as an end rather than a beginning and leaving him singularly ill prepared for the social and political realities of the mid-Victorian Catholic Church. The Apologia promotes the belief that to be Catholic is to be in “Heaven-Haven,” and that conversion is the end of history. It is ironic that while Newman’s theological writings support an organic model of Church history and represent Catholic doctrine as a continually evolving form, his Apologia leaves many readers with the impression that his own conversion to Catholicism marked a cessation of personal development.11 The final chapter in Newman’s history of his religious opinions is entitled “Position of My Mind since 1845” and begins with the startling assertion: “From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate.” He claims to have been in “perfect peace and contentment” with “no variations to record” and “no anxiety of heart whatever.”12 Although Newman goes on to affirm the value of “willful intellects and wild passions” and to describe Catholic history as “a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide,” the sense remains that, in his own case, Catholicism was a haven, “out of the swing of the sea.”13 The Apologia’s ending has a fairy-tale finality that even the knowledge of Newman’s Catholic failures and controversies cannot entirely dispel. The Apologia reached a wide audience. Public curiosity, sparked by Kingsley’s attack and the expectation of further controversy, was fanned by advance newspaper advertisements giving an outline of Newman’s intentions and including a list of famous Oxford figures as dramatis personae. Reviews in the secular press were predominantly favorable. Not only did Newman succeed in crushing Kingsley’s accusations of dishonesty and disloyalty to Church and nation, but, as C.F.Harrold observes, “his Apologia placed Newman at once among the great and influential Victorian public figures.”14 Even a reader as philosophically opposed to Newman’s dogmatic principle as George Eliot could respond to the Apologia as “the revelation of a life-how different in form from one’s own, yet with how close a fellowship in its needs and burdens.”15 Tellingly, Catholic opinions of the Apologia were less favorable. Indeed, the response of some of Newman’s co-religionists to the final chapter in which he claimed that conversion was like “coming into port after a rough sea” offers clear enough evidence that his Catholic afterlife was a stormy one. Newman’s Catholic opponents disliked his disparagement of the power of unaided human reason to arrive at religious truth, and his characterization of supporters of unlimited Papal authority as “a violent ultra party, which exalts opinions into dogmas, and has it principally at heart to destroy every school of thought but its own.”16 Herbert Vaughan, the future Cardinal, professed himself disgusted by the Apologia’s “egotism” and W.G.Ward, editor of the Dublin Review, forced the resignations of his two assistants, Edward Healy Thompson and Henry Coleridge, rather than allow a favorable review.17 Manley Hopkins’s fears that conversion to Catholicism would doom his son to “cold limbo” were surely kindled by the dispiriting facts of Newman’s Catholic career. These same facts no doubt encouraged Gerard’s idealization of a man who had surrendered friends and “prospects” for the sake of belief. By emphasizing

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his nostalgia for the snapdragons and misty spires of Oxford, Newman’s Apologia reminds a new generation of Oxford Tractarians of all that they love and that he has lost. But in reminding them, too, that his sacrifice of spires and snapdragons was made because he “loved honesty better than truth, and truth better than dear friends,”18 he provides youthful idealists and wavering adherents of the Anglican “via media” with a heroic myth of renunciation. Stories of Newman’s unpopularity in orthodox Catholic circles only increased his heroism in the eyes of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In 1866, Hopkins lamented to his Oxford colleague, E.W.Urquhart, that “Dr Newman is like no one else for the frequency and wrongness of the rumours he is the subject of”19 Although he may not have experienced a single “doubt” in a theological sense, Newman felt frequent, and justified, dissatisfaction with his life as a Catholic. A few months before Kingsley provided the occasion for his Apologia, he confided to his journal: “As a Protestant, I felt my religion dreary, but not my life-but as a Catholic, my life is dreary, not my religion.”20 Newman’s achievements in the years following his conversion were modest and unreported while his failures acquired public notoriety. The community of Oratorians (followers of the Rule of the Counter-Reformation saint, Philip Neri), which he established in Birmingham in 1847, was soon riven with bitter personal feuds and disputes over devotional practices and the precise nature of the order’s pastoral mission. Eventually, Newman’s opponents, led by Frederick W.Faber, established a London Oratory with the support of Cardinal Wiseman and the Roman College of Propaganda.21 Further problems with Wiseman arose in 1852, when Newman became involved in a humiliating libel trial after denouncing the clerical and sexual misconduct of the former Dominican, Giovanni Giacinto Achilli, in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. The source of Newman’s information was an article by Cardinal Wiseman in the Dublin Review, but the Prelate failed to come to his aid.22 Newman’s attempts to improve the intellectual condition of the Catholic laity ended in controversy and disappointment. In 1859, his efforts to preserve The Rambler as a forum for the exchange of ideas by an educated Catholic laity after the forced resignation of its controversial editor, Richard Simpson, resulted in the fiasco of his delation to Rome by Bishop Brown of Newport over the supposed heresy contained in his article, “On Consulting the Laity in Matters of Doctrine.” The offending article discussed the role of the laity in preserving dogma and pointed out that in the years following the Council of Nicaea, it was they who had guarded the orthodox tradition while the bishops had supported Arianism. Newman’s opponents objected to his implied attack on ecclesiastical authority and his suggestion that Church government should adapt to the circumstances of history instead of attempting to preserve an unchangeable tradition.23 Meanwhile, Newman’s plans to use his position as Rector of the new Catholic University of Ireland to create a Catholic institution of higher learning to rival Oxford and Cambridge were dashed by poor funding, the opposition of Archbishops Cullen and MacHale, and the highly practical economic and political aims of his Irish students, who preferred “useful” to “liberal” knowledge.24 From the start, the Irish bishops were divided over the mission of the Catholic University. The Ultramontanist Archbishop Cullen promoted a narrowly denominational curriculum that would support his efforts to bring Irish Catholics under tighter ecclesiastical control and to bring devotional and liturgical practices more into line with the rest of Europe. He was naturally suspicious of Newman’s desire to impart an Oxford-style “liberal education.” Meanwhile Archbishop MacHale, a supporter of Irish nationalism, disliked Newman’s alleged English Toryism and opposed his appointment of English faculty. Three decades later, Hopkins spent his last unhappy years teaching at the Catholic University. Like Newman, he would find his efforts to reconcile Catholicism and patriotism sorely tested in nationalist Dublin. The success of the Apologia encouraged Newman in his most cherished plan for Catholic education in England, the establishment of a Catholic college at Oxford. In August 1864, he was sufficiently confident to

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purchase a prospective site on Walton Street. But, although he had the support of many English Catholics, including Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham, whose diocese contained Oxford, Newman’s scheme was opposed by Cardinals Wiseman and Manning. In “The Work and Wants of the Catholic Church in England,” first published in the Dublin Review of July 1863, Manning had mustered a twelve-fold argument against Catholic attendance at Oxford or Cambridge. While conceding that “a higher literary and scientific education for our laymen” is a “great want” of the Church, he argues that the Anglican universities pose too much of a danger to Catholic youth, who may “cast themselves willingly, or be drawn unconsciously, into the stream which is evidently carrying English society every year more and more decidedly and perceptibly towards worldliness and rationalism.”25 Manning’s opposition to mixed education reflected the traditional attitude of the Holy See, but many Catholic supporters of the Oxford scheme believed he was “more bent on keeping Newman away from Oxford, than on keeping young men away.”26 Manning’s mistrust of Newman’s tolerance of “willful intellects and wild passions” was fueled by what he regarded as the conciliatory tone of the Apologia toward Oxford and Anglicanism. In a private letter to George Talbot at the College of Propaganda in Rome, in February 1866, he expressed the fear that Newman had become the center of those who hold low views about the Holy See, are anti-Roman, cold and silent, to say no more, about the Temporal Power, national, English, critical of Catholic devotions and always on the lower side…. It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary Oxford tone transplanted into the Church.27 On August 6, 1867, Propaganda issued the ruling that any Catholic attending Oxford or Cambridge would knowingly place himself in danger of mortal sin. Although the Catholic Hierarchy had been restored in 1850, the English Church continued to be regarded as a “mission” under the jurisdiction of the Sacred College of Propaganda until 1908. Newman blamed Propaganda for the many frustrations of his career: in an 1863 letter to Emily Bowles, later matron at the Oratory School, he characterized the institution as “a quasi military power…rough and ready. It does not understand an intellectual movement. It likes quick results…scalps from beaten foes by the hundreds.” Newman concluded that Propaganda was “too shallow to wish to use such as me.”28 Newman had his own way of collecting scalps. Rather than amassing converts “by the hundreds,” he sought to capture an intellectual elite. In his 1856 novel, Callista, the heroine, a third-century Christian convert and martyr, observes that “a new religion begins by appealing to what is peculiar in the minds of the few.”29 In the Apologia, Newman confirms that “deliverance is wrought, not by the many but by the few, not by bodies but by persons.”30 While Manning and Wiseman nurtured the growth of English Catholicism as a separate and self-sustaining body, Newman envisaged a religiously pluralistic English culture in which Catholics could play a full intellectual role. His first task, as he saw it, was to make Catholicism palatable to others like himself. Newman’s account of his conversion is carefully designed to appeal to a new generation of Oxford Tractarians. While paying tribute to the Anglican Church as “a time-honoured institution of noble historical memories, a monument of ancient wisdom, …a great national organ,” he carefully sets out to prove that her theology and ecclesiology are untenable and that there is “no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity.” The urbanity of his tone masks his persuasive intent. By exposing the history of his “most private thoughts,” he flatters his readers with his confidence and invites their identification. As Samuel Wilberforce shrewdly observed in The Quarterly Review, Newman is “never more a controversialist than when he avoids controversy. There is more force in the burning words he drops, impregnated with the fire of his own inner life, than in the closest of his studied arguments.”31 Newman himself had declared, in “The

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Tamworth Reading Room,” that “man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal” for whom “logic makes but a sorry rhetoric.”32 The genius of the Apologia is in its combination of painstaking argumentation with an emotional appeal to the rebellious and otherworldly yearnings of an undergraduate audience.33 The young Gerard Manley Hopkins, with his ritualistic religious tastes, literary sensitivity, and eagerness to throw off paternal control, was Newman’s ideal reader. Even in his Tractarian days, Newman had been aware of the immense power of literature to effect religious change. In an article on “The State of the Religious Parties,” written for The British Critic in 1839, he discusses the role of literary Romanticism in creating “a reaction from the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching of the last generation, or century.” Southey and Wordsworth are praised for their “high principles and feelings,” and the poetry of Coleridge is said to have advanced “the cause of Catholic truth.” Newman’s highest praise is reserved for Walter Scott, who reacted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, …and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.34 Yet it was the very literariness of the Oxford Movement that became a major cause of Newman’s discontent with it. While he admired John Keble’s Christian Year for the “new music” of its deft conflation of Wordsworth’s “types and symbols of eternity” with Christian sacramentalism, he recalls in the Apologia that Keble’s theology, with its hazy reliance on sentiments of “faith and love” as a basis for conviction, left him dissatisfied: “It was beautiful and religious but it did not even profess to be logical.”35 As a response to the religious and aesthetic yearnings of a generation raised on literary Romanticism, the Oxford Movement was more successful in restoring the trappings of belief-in creating a religious “mood” —than in stimulating belief itself. By 1841, Newman could argue, in “The Tamworth Reading Room,” that literature alone neither “provides a source of moral strength, nor leads man to spiritual salvation.” He concludes that attempts to “effect moral improvement” through literature will produce only “mawkish, frivolous and fastidious sentimentalism.”36 Much of Newman’s post-conversion Catholic writing explores the relationship between the intellectual and emotional components of religious assent. While acknowledging the power of literature to create an emotional climate favorable to Catholicism, Newman argues that true conversion requires a rea soned assent to Catholic dogma. Always the consummate rhetorical strategist, he employs complex literary allusions and connotations in support of his argument against literary religiosity and in favor of rational and theologically based assents. Newman’s 1848 novel, Loss and Gain, conceived as a rebuttal of Elizabeth Harris’s account of disaffected converts in From Oxford to Rome, attempts to establish a hierarchy of motives for religious change. Constructed almost entirely of dialogue between fictional representatives of Oxford’s contending religious parties, the novel is a minor satirical masterpiece. Some of Newman’s fiercest scorn is directed at Tractarians, such as White and the Misses Bolton, whose Catholic sympathies are the product of a vacuous aestheticism: “You know, Charlotte…there’s a great reform going on in England in ecclesiastical vestments.”37 The seed of assent cannot grow in the shallow soil of fashionable medievalism or Romantic sentiment. Characters whose emotions are stirred by the aesthetic and sensuous appeal of Roman ritual make precipitous and ill-judged conversions or fall victim to the sensuous distractions of the world. Good conversions are those in which the heart’s promptings are confirmed by an intellectual investigation of Catholic teachings. Charles Reding, the novel’s hero and a thinly veiled portrait of Newman himself, feels

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the aesthetic and emotional appeal of Catholicism but knows he must “go by reason.” Yet reason alone cannot complete the process of assent. Certitude requires the “venture” of faith, an “act of the will.”38 Newman’s Apologia charts the process of his own conversion in which the spiritual intimations of his earliest childhood were translated into assent to Roman Catholic dogma. As in Loss and Gain, he insists on the role of reason in the production of Catholic belief, repeatedly reminding his readers of his determination to “go by reason, not by feeling.” Yet he confesses: I had a secret longing love of Rome…. And it was the consciousness of this bias in myself, if it is so to be called, which made me preach so earnestly against the danger of being swayed in our religious inquiry by our sympathy rather than by our reason.39 Although Newman insists that he has “no romantic story to tell,” the first chapter of his autobiography establishes the source of his Catholic sympathies in the “unknown influences” of earliest childhood. His account of an early belief in angels and mistrust of the material world is shaped by a Wordsworthian conviction-first explored in his 1835 sermon, “The Minds of Little Children,” and most perfectly articulated thirty-five years later in the Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent—that every child has “that within him which actually vibrates, responds, and gives a deep meaning to the lessons of his first teachers about the will and providence of God.”40 Newman’s childhood intimations of an unseen world exert a decisive influence over the sub sequent evolution of his religious opinions. At critical stages in the development of his beliefs, the validity of doctrines is established by their conformity, or otherwise, to his earliest predispositions. For example, Newman records that the teachings of Clement and Origen on the economy of the visible world, crucial to his acceptance of the Patristic tradition, “came like music to my inward ear, as if in response to ideas which, with so little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long.” Even Newman’s embrace of dogma as the “fundamental principle” of his religion is presented as a confirmation of “childhood imaginations” about the insignificance of the material world.41 One cannot escape the conclusion that Newman’s long intellectual travail is a search for affirmation of his hope that “probabilities which did not reach to a logical certainty, might suffice for a mental certitude.” Certitude, when it is eventually achieved, is not a product of reasoned inquiry but a willful repudiation of “unaided” reason as it “acts in fact and concretely in fallen man” as ever tending towards “simple unbelief in matters of religion.”42 The Apologia employs the vocabulary of rational argumentation but fails to establish a rational basis for assent. Religious argument can lead us to the brink of assent but certitude cannot be achieved without a heroic act of the will. Newman eschews the linearity of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, or even Augustine’s Confessions, in order to present conversion to Catholicism as a willed recovery of innocence.43 In the terms of the Apologia, Catholic theology serves to guide “the wild, living intellect” of fallen man back to the “visionary gleam” of pre-rational infancy.44 Newman’s Catholic afterlife is both an end of history and a recovery of prehistory. Determined to preserve the foundations of religious belief from a rising tide of positivism and skepticism, Newman took refuge on the higher ground of an infallible Church. Yet his Catholicism, as Manning shrewdly recognized, is a thoroughly literary creed. The Apologia Pro Vita Sua acknowledges the power of Romantic texts in forming Catholic predispositions. Indeed, the very narrative structure of Newman’s autobiography is shaped by the Wordsworthian assumption that “the Child is Father of the Man.” Not surprisingly, Newman found his most receptive audience among those whose own early reading had succeeded in “setting before them visions,…and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.”45 One such reader was Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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By the time Hopkins read the Apologia, he was already strongly attracted to Roman Catholicism. It was an attraction formed in adolescence from a compound of aesthetic medievalism, spiritual hunger, and rebellion against paternal authority. Newman’s autobiographical writings offered Hopkins a carefully reasoned theological argument for conversion, while subtly affirming the promptings of his heart. Like Newman, who attributes his childhood fascination with crucifixes and rosaries to his reading of Gothic romance, Hopkins was first drawn to Catholicism by the aesthetic appeal of the Gothic.46 In his exploration of the poet’s early life in Hopkins: A Literary Biography, Norman White suggests that Hopkins’s Catholic sympathies can be traced back to the acquisition, on his thirteenth birthday, of Parker’s Introduction to the Study of Gothic Architecture. According to White, Parker’s defense of the Gothic Revival “became perhaps the most lastingly influential book in his early education, responsible for forming tastes which went well beyond architecture.”47 Hopkins’s interest in Gothic architecture is certainly evident in his Highgate school-prize poem of 1860, “The Escorial,” as is another element in his later Catholic leanings, a seemingly erotic interest in the gruesome details of torture and martyrdom. “The Escorial” combines references to “the rod/Of forc’d persuasion” and to the martyred Saint Lawrence’s “crack’d flesh… hissing on the grate,” with a lesson in Gothic design: “flowing tracery” and “foliag’d crownals” reveal how “the ways/of art best follow nature.” Although Hopkins appears to echo his chief sources, Richard Forde’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845), William Prescott’s History of the Reign of King Philip the Second (1859), and Thomas Carlyle’s description of Philip II in The Life of Frederick Schiller (1825), in expressing a hearty English Protestant horror of Catholicism “forc’d” upon the “free” Flemings, his description of the “barren rigour” and “frigid gloom” of the convent of the Escorial mingles fascination with disapproval. The “staunch” and “pious” ascetics of “The Escorial” anticipate the “pure fasted faces” and “serged fellowships” of “Easter Communion.”48 Meanwhile, as a student at Highgate School, Hopkins was pursuing his own early experiments in ascesis. His friend C.N.Luxmore recalled how Hopkins once abstained from all drink for three weeks in order to win a ten shilling bet and prove human powers of endurance. His reward was a birching from the headmaster, John Bradley Dyne, whom Hopkins would describe in a letter to E.H.Coleridge as the “Patriarch of the Old Dispensation.”49 Dyne joined Manley Hopkins as a focus of Gerard’s ambivalent responses to paternal authority. A gifted pedagogue who gave his students a “fine training in the elements of language, and the expressive and rhythmical powers of poetry,” Dyne was also, even by the standards of the time, a harsh disciplinarian.50 Dyne taught Hopkins to appreciate the intricacies of the Pindaric ode, a genre which provided the formal structure of The Wreck of the Deutschland. He also lashed the boy savagely with a riding whip in punishment for minor verbal infractions.51 Dyne’s unpredictable displays of “mastery” and “mercy” no doubt contributed to the painful combination of rebellion and devotion that characterized Hopkins’s later relationships with patriarchal figures, including John Henry Newman. Reminiscences by Hopkins’s contempo raries at Highgate attest to Dyne’s readiness to use the birch. Edmund Yates wrote that Dynes “believed thoroughly in the virtues of corporal punishment” and was “not overburdened with tact, judgment or impartiality.” Other reminiscences echo Hopkins’s conflation of Dyne with Biblical patriarch and even with God. One former student described Dyne’s gospel classes as “a formidable catechism in the Awful Presence.”52 Dyne’s “awful presence” is surely discernible in the opening stanzas of The Wreck of the Deutschland Where God, the “giver of breath and bread” (1), wins the submission of Hopkins’s soul with “lightning and lashed rod” (2). There is no evidence that Dyne possessed Catholic or even Tractarian sympathies. Indeed, the religious temper at Highgate must have been sympathetic to Protestant Evangelicalism since two Venn brothers, from the well-known Clapham Sect family, were boarders in 1846. When Hopkins went up to Balliol, his medievalist interests were still largely confined to architecture. His journal of the period is decorated with

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sketches of Gothic vaulting and Gothic tracery and he records visits to the latest Gothic Revival churches. Yet although Franco Marucci claims that through the early years at Oxford, Hopkins’s medievalism remained “epidermic and outward, merely a fashion, inaugurated by Keats and taken up by the Pre-Raphaelites,” the evidence of the journals suggests otherwise.53 An entry for June 1864 contains notes for an essay on “Some Aspects of Modern Medievalism” in which Hopkins plans to relate the medieval interests of his contemporaries to something “deeper than a mere return to middle age forms.”54 The essay was never written. Hopkins’s unexecuted or unfinished projects often provide important insights into his emotional and religious dilemmas. Perhaps the essay on medievalism was abandoned because it threatened to point him too firmly in the direction of Rome. By this time, Hopkins was an avid reader of Ruskin and was certainly aware of his claim in “The Nature of Gothic” that Gothic architecture “possesses a higher nobility still, when considered as an index…of religious principle.”55 While Ruskin himself resisted the temptation to embrace the creed that gave rise to Gothic art, his contemporary, the architect and Gothic polemicist, Augustus Welby Pugin, was a Catholic convert whose (1836) Contrasts: Or a Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and the Corresponding buildings of the Present Day, was a key document in the mid-century English Catholic renaissance.56 Pugin’s zeal for the conversion of England was accompanied by a passionate determination to reintroduce Catholic art and architecture. He supported the revival of plain chant, the use of incense, and the manufacture of stained glass. With the support of the Earl of Shrewsbury, he embarked on a frenzied program of church building which contributed to his mental collapse and early death in 1852.57 Newman, who showed little interest in architecture but, judging from his choice of design for the University Church in Dublin, preferred Italian Baroque to Gothic, scorned Pugin’s preoccupation with the aesthetic and theatrical elements of Catholicism.58 Hopkins’s 1879 poem, “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” would echo Pugin’s Contrasts in its comparison of “cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed” medieval Oxford with its “base and brickish” descendant, suggesting that he knew and appreciated the Catholic architect. Within months of his arrival at Balliol, Hopkins had gravitated towards the Anglo-Catholic party centered around Liddon and Pusey. Engaged in a desperate effort to defend the principles of Tractarianism from the combined onslaught of Evangelicalism and unbelief, the Anglo-Catholics of the 1860s combined conservative theology with ritualism and self-conscious piety. At this stage in his spiritual evolution, Hopkins was a Tractarian aesthete of the type Newman had satirized in Loss and Gain. He might very well have sympathized with Willis’s feelings of “sensible pleasure at the sight of a Gothic arch,” or even with White’s appetite for Catholic ritual: “The Catholic Church alone is beautiful. You feel it is really a worshipping; every sense, eyes, ears, smell, are made to know that worship is going on.”59 Poems such as “Easter Communion” and “The Habit of Perfection,” composed in 1865 and 1866 respectively, illustrate Hopkins’s acute awareness of the sensuous satisfactions of asceticism. Indeed, Robert Bridges’s staunchly anti-Catholic preface to the 1918 Poems would cite “The Habit of Perfection,” and especially Hopkins’s description of the nostrils’ “relish” of incense “along the sanctuary side,” as an example of the poet’s lamentable “perversion of human feeling” in his “efforts to force emotion into theological or sectarian channels.”60 More recently, in A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Julia Saville has noted that “ascetic practices that appear to mortify the flesh in the interests of spiritual invigoration may paradoxically prove sensually and erotically satisfying too.”61 Hopkins might have remained in the Church of England all his life, one of many mid-century Oxford graduates with aesthetic interests and Anglo-Catholic leanings, were it not for the spiritual and emotional crisis he experienced in the early months of 1865. At this time, as his diary attests, Hopkins’s impulses toward asceticism found sudden and rigorous expression in the Anglo-Catholic practices of confession, fasting, and possibly self-flagellation. White, Saville, and others attribute Hopkins’s increased religious

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ardor and his preoccupation with penance and mortification to a crisis brought about by his intense homoerotic feelings for the young poet, Digby Mackworth Dolben. In Dolben’s ostensibly religious poetry, asceticism and eroticism are impossible to disentangle. His death by drowning at the age of nineteen prevented his long-planned conversion to Catholicism.62 Hopkins met Dolben only once, in February 1865. One effect of the meeting, which would haunt Hopkins all his life, was a rush of feelings of personal unworthiness and sexual guilt. In March, Hopkins began to keep a notebook in which he prepared for confession by scrupulously listing his daily sins. Subjects for self-reproach included “going on with a letter to Dolben at night agst. warning” and engaging in conversations that broached “forbidden subjects” such as “questions about Dolben.” Even thoughts about his friend were regarded as “dangerous”63 Hopkins’s reading list for the Easter vacation included E.B.Pusey’s “Sermon on Everlasting Punishment, and on the Remedy for Sins of the Body.” Anglo-Catholic devotional practices offered Hopkins a means of dealing with his homoerotic impulses through discipline and sublimation. In his introduction to The Early Poetic Notebooks and Manuscripts of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Norman MacKenzie speculates that the “unruliness” of Hopkins’s passions may have been the “hidden emotional spur” to his “determination to devote his whole being to God.”64 Dellamora observes that while there is “reason to admire the sincerity and seriousness of Hopkins’s religious commitment, it does also permit him to conserve and to celebrate a considerably more troubling difference-namely his attraction to other males.” He later suggests that “life as a religious promised to valorize masculine desire by focusing it on Christ while folding Hopkins into a range of ‘safe’ male homosocial relations.” According to Saville, “Translating his love for men into a devotion to Christ (and imitation of his acquiescence to suffering) became the principle issue in Hopkins’s management of conflicting libidinal…and aggressive… impulses.”65 Hopkins was not alone in turning to religious ritualism to express and suppress unconventional sexuality. In a 1982 article in Victorian Studies, David Hilliard suggests that for many homosexual men in the late nineteenth century, the rituals and institutions of Anglo-Catholicism provided a code by which they could express their sense of difference in an oblique and symbolical way. He notes that the Oxford Movement was characterized by intense and demonstrative male friendships, citing Newman’s close attachments to Hurrell Froude and Ambrose St. John.66 While acknowledging that many Anglo-Catholics “sublimated” or “consciously disciplined” their homoerotic impulses, Hilliard claims that “the heart of the correlation between Anglo-Catholicism and homosexuality” was “an affinity in outlook between a sexual minority and a minority religious movement within the established Church.” Both were “at variance with entrenched beliefs” and both “outraged the older generation.”67 The existence of a “homosexual sensibility” among nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholics is also discussed in John Shelton Reed’s Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. However, Reed points out that until late in the Victorian era homosexuality was regarded as an “act” rather than a “condition.” While conceding that the movement’s “concerns with ornament and attire and music” appear to have “attracted and nourished young men who were indifferent to or repelled by the Victorians’ rigorous standards of manliness,” he concludes that “the fact that the movement’s critics did not regard homosexuality as a condition makes the too-easy equation of male effeminacy and sexual inversion even less reliable for the nineteenth century than our own.”68 Hopkins possessed many of the characteristics ascribed to homosexual Anglo-Catholics in Hilliard’s article. He was unquestionably attracted by the ritualist emphasis on tradition, dogma, and aestheticism in worship, and his confession notebooks offer unassailable evidence that his religious rebellion was associated with resistance to parental authority. Time and time again he admits to provoking his parents by airing Catholic sympathies. Notebook entries from the autumn of 1865 record “foolishness at Grandmamma’s with talk abt.

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Catholicism”; “getting into an argument abt. the saints etc. with Mamma wh. brought her to tears”; and “talking about Dr. Newman at dinner etc. in a foolish way likely to produce unhappiness and harm.”69 Yet Hopkins differed from Hilliard’s Anglo-Catholic subjects in once crucial way: he converted to Rome. Like Jane Eyre, Hopkins might very well have claimed: “I know no medium. I never in my life have known any medium…between absolute submission and determined revolt.”70 Both impulses played a role in his conversion to Catholicism. Although the decision to embrace an unpopular, minority religion was a clear rejection of Manley Hopkins and his social ambitions for his gifted son, Gerard Manley Hopkins was not long content to remain father-less. His deeply conservative and authoritarian nature led him to replace the limited jurisdiction and ambiguously defined beliefs of the Church of England with the universal and infallible authority of Rome. Against the paternal claims of Manley Hopkins was pitted the spiritual paternity of John Henry Newman and, by implication, the Holy Father himself. Hopkins’s craving for absolutes allowed him no rest in the “via media.”71 Unlike the protracted deathbed agonies of Newman’s Anglican faith, Hopkins’s religious deliberations were compressed into little more than a year. A journal entry for July 17, 1866, laconically records: “It was this night I believe but possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England.”72 Hopkins shared neither Newman’s taste for subtly shaded ambiguities nor the predilection of Pater, a tutor and friend of his Oxford years, for “a world of fine gradations…shifting intricately as we ourselves change.”73 In “The Probable Future of Metaphysics,” an essay written only months after his conversion, Hopkins calls for the reintroduction of stan dards, fixed points, and archetypes to counteract the prevailing mid-century climate of relativism. In another Oxford essay, written for Pater in 1865, he declares that “in morality the highest consistency is the highest excellence.”74 He would argue in “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” that there were but “two flocks, two folds-black, white; right, wrong” (12). Unlike Hilliard’s Anglo-Catholic and homosexual subjects, Hopkins was unwilling to inhabit a borderland of blurred sexual and religious self-definition. Believing his sexual nature to be irredeemably sinful, he sought a religious vocation that would demand the ego’s absolute surrender. Newman’s recourse to Catholicism as a bulwark against the social and political consequences of unrestrained liberalism is reproduced in microcosm in Hopkins’s interior contest with the unregenerate self. Only the teachings of an infallible Church could counter the “overpowering,…disproportioned sense of personality” that Hopkins identified, in “The Probable Future of Metaphysics,” as the “stiffness or sprain” that hung upon the moral philosophy of his age.75 Only Roman Catholicism, Hopkins became convinced, offered a system of moral discipline strong enough to overcome human “sordidness.”76 Coupled with inflexible morality, Hopkins’s acute, Paterian sensitivity to every nuance of physical and emotional experience produced feelings of bitter self-contempt: “I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree/ Bitter would have me taste; my taste was me.”77 By offering a model of divine selfhood in which the fallen self could participate and be saved, the Roman Catholic doctrines of the Incarnation and of Christ’s continuing rebirth in the Eucharist permitted Hopkins to keep such feelings at bay, at least until the bleak depression of his Dublin years. Hopkins left no apologia, no history of the change in his religious opinions. Indeed the account of his conversion in The Wreck of the Deutschland suggests that it was not a process—“a lingering-out sweet skill” (stanza 10) —as with Newman and Augustine, but a sudden “crash” of revelation like the conversion of Paul: I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod;

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Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God; Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night (stanza 2) As we shall see later, Hopkins’s self-presentation in The Wreck was part of an attempt to shed the old Anglican, patristic, literary influence of Newman and to recreate himself as a spokesman of the more floridly emotional Ultramontanist party of Manning and Faber. Nonetheless, the evidence of Hopkins’s letters and journals suggests that his embrace of Catholicism was a personal and emotional choice, deeply entangled with the crisis over Digby Dolben, from which a narrative of reasoned theological assent, heavily influenced by the writings of Newman, was later constructed to confound Manley Hopkins and Tractarian mentors and friends such as Liddon and Urquhart. The most revealing personal narrative of Hopkins’s emotional and spiritual travails during the eighteen months between his meeting with Dolben and his decision to join the Church of Rome can be traced through the extraordinary abundance of poems that crowd his notebooks of the period. The months before his conversion were among the most productive in Hopkins’s life. The cloudy “Parnassian” language of his earlier poems was sharpened and compressed as he developed greater mastery of the sonnet form.78 Martin isolates “Easter Communion,” written in March 1865, as the first poem in which we enter “recognizable Hopkins territory…both in style and in the characteristic sense of transformation, even transfiguration, of the physical into the spiritual.”79 The series of poems that follow “Easter Communion” chart a narrative in which unrequited and sinful human love is refined into spousal union with Christ. In spite of the potentially reductive pitfalls of reading poetry as autobiography, the parallels between Hopkins’s 1865 journals and his poetic themes are too striking to be ignored.80 The nineteenth-century Oxford undergraduate who employed the figure of a medieval alchemist to symbolize the sterility of earthly desire was himself engaged in a more successful alchemical transformation of physical into spiritual love. The “sceptic disappointment” (12) of the third sonnet in “The Beginning of the End” and the “cumbrous shame” (18) of “The Alchemist in the City” are resolved in “Myself Unholy” by a decision to serve “no other/Save Christ; to Christ I look, on Christ I call” (13–14). In the October 1865 sonnet, “Let me be to Thee as the circling bird,” Hopkins discovers the one “authentic cadence” (9) in God’s “changeless note” (4) and dedicates himself to Christ, the “dominant of my range and state” (13). “Let Me Be to Thee” is an exultant poem of victory over self-contempt through loving obedience to an incarnate God. “Let Me Be to Thee” appears in Hopkins’s journal below an inscription of “Lead, kindly Light,” John Henry Newman’s Tractarian hymn of self-dedication and triumph over past willfulness. Imagery and vocabulary drawn from his reading of Newman permeate Hopkins’s writing about his conversion. The poetry and personal letters echo Newman’s Tractarian sermons, whereas Hopkins’s more carefully worded and impersonal explanations to his father and Liddon are clearly influenced by Newman’s Catholic polemics, most notably the Apologia, Loss and Gain, and Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teachings. The parallels between Hopkins’s extreme scrupulosity and asceticism in poems such as “Myself Unholy” and “Easter Communion” and Newman’s similar preoccupations in such pre-conversion sermons as “Secret Faults,” “Sins of Ignorance and Weakness,” and “The World Our Enemy” have been elucidated by Michael D.Moore in his dissertation on Hopkins and Newman. Moore observes that the pessimistic poetry written by Hopkins in the early part of 1865 echoes the insistence of Newman’s Anglican sermons that the only remedy for human “deformity” is in obedience through habitual strictness of life, exactness in religious duty, and jealous adherence to Anglo-Catholic orthodoxy.81 Hopkins’s letters of the same period also suggest a

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familiarity with Newman’s Tractarian thought, or at least a congruity of mind. His claim, in a September 1865 letter to Baillie that only the Catholic doctrine of the “real presence” can overcome the “unmixedly painful” facts of human “sordidness” bears a notable resemblance to Newman’s description of the purgative powers of Catholicism in “John Keble”: Now what is the Catholic Church, viewed in her human aspects but a discipline of the affections and passions? What are her ordinances and practices but the regulated expression of keen, or deep, or turbid feeling, and thus a “cleansing” as Aristotle would word it, of the sick soul.82 It is more surprising, in view of Newman’s later reputation for intellectualism and emotional restraint, to discover that Hopkins’s blissfully exuberant “Let Me Be to Thee” contains clear verbal echoes of Newman’s Tractarian sermons. In “The Thought of God the Stay of the Soul,” Newman declares that “One alone can give us tune and harmony” and exhibits an affective spirituality more often associated with his fellow Oratorian, F.W.Faber, or with Hopkins himself, in his insistence that “our real and true bliss [is] not to know, or to affect, or to pursue; but to love, to hope, to joy, to admire, to revere, to adore.” Hopkins’s metaphor of spiritual attunement may have been inspired by Newman’s claim, in “The Cross of Christ the Measure of the World,” that “the death of the eternal word of God made flesh” is “the tone into which all the strains of this world’s music are ultimately to be resolved.”83 The more sober tone of Newman’s post-conversion writings and their insistence upon “the danger of being swayed in our religious inquiry by our sympathy rather than by our reason” was perhaps dictated by his desire to provide a counterweight to the extravagant emotionality of the Ultramontanists.84 While many of his Tractarian pronouncements seem designed primarily to provoke, the purpose of Newman’s Catholic writings was to win intellectual converts and especially Oxford men. As Newman was well aware, the midcentury religious debate at Oxford was conducted on strictly rational and impersonal terms. Emotional argumentation carried the taint of “enthusiasm” associated with Methodism and other forms of Dissent.85 During Hopkins’s residence at Oxford, the rationalist tenor of religious debate was heightened by the recently published and still controversial Essays and Reviews, advertised as an attempt to rescue an “essential” Christianity from accretions of dogma and tradition. Benjamin Jowett, author of the most influential essay, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” was a Fellow of Balliol and Hopkins’s personal tutor. Henry Scott Holland dismissed Jowett’s religious stance as “just Platonism flavoured with a little Christian charity,” opining that “Christianity is gutted by him…there is not one atom of the feeling of prayer, of communication with God, of reliance on anyone but self” His view was shared by other Anglo-Catholics and led Pusey to instigate unsuccessful charges of heresy against him in the University Vice-Chancellor’s Court. All the same, Jowett’s call for Christianity to be reconciled with the demands of a scientific age was a challenge the Anglo-Catholics could not ignore.86 Hopkins shared Newman’s “great dread of going by my feelings,” or at least of appearing to do so. His anxious efforts to present a rational basis for conversion and to deny or forestall accusations of “enthusiasm” are evident in his letters and journals. On March 12, 1865, he confided to his journal that “Addis says my arguments are coloured and lose their value by personal feeling. This ought to be repressed.”87 In a September 1865 letter to Baillie, he apologizes for writing “unreservedly and effusively” and fears that he might seem to “have more of the effervescence and enthusiasm given by noble principles than of their moral and essential parts.” He expresses anxiety that his “extravagances” and “pugnacity” might prejudice Baillie against his opinions. His attempts at self-restraint only heighten the letter’s painful intensity. He concludes, “I am teeming with thoughts.”88

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In a letter to Liddon, written only days after his reception into the Church of Rome, Hopkins strenuously denies Liddon’s accusation that he has acted too hastily on the misguided belief that he has received a “special visitation of the grace of Our Lord,” or a “call from heaven.”89 Liddon’s tone is sarcastic and patronizing; for Oxford Anglo-Catholics, as we have seen, talk about divine “calls” or “illuminations” carried the taint of uneducated Dissent.90 Hopkins retorts that he has “never said anything to the effect that a wide subject involving history or theology or any turning-point question in it has been thrown into light for me by a supernatural or even unusual access of grace.” Instead, he claims that his conversion has the cool rationality of an equation: “I can hardly believe anyone ever became a Catholic because two and two made four more fully than I have.”91 In the same letter to Liddon, Hopkins argues that his apparently hasty conversion had come after a long struggle in which he had thought it his duty to “resist the doubts of the English Church wh. were always assailing me.” The postscript of a September 1866 letter to Urquhart makes the same point: …although my actual conversion was two months ago yet the silent conviction that I was to become a Catholic had been present to me for a year perhaps, as strongly, in spite of my resistance to it when it formed itself into words, as if I had already determined it.92 The words into which Hopkins’s “silent conviction” formed itself were frequently those of John Henry Newman. Describing Newman as Hopkins’s “model” and “arbiter,” Robert Bernard Martin observes that as he drew closer to conversion, “time after time Hopkins seems to have been deliberately stepping like a dutiful child in Newman’s tracks.”93 Newman supplied the language with which Hopkins would interpret his religious change. Perhaps the availability of Newman’s paradigm shaped the very change itself. Hopkins’s writings of the mid-1860s convey an extraordinary familiarity with both the Apologia and Loss and Gain.94 The metaphor of assent as an equation, employed by Hopkins in his letter to Liddon, is first articulated in Loss and Gain when Charles Reding assures the Anglo-Catholic, Carlton, that his decision to convert came “like two and two make four.”95 Hopkins’s account, to Liddon and Urquhart, of the slow process of his conversion is an echo of Reding’s insistence to Carlton, in the same chapter of Loss and Gain, that “I have come to my resolution with great deliberation. It has remained on my mind as a mere intellectual consideration for a year or two; surely now without blame I may change it into a practical resolve.”96 Meanwhile, Hopkins’s description of his struggle against the “silent conviction” that he was to become a Catholic has close parallels with Newman’s confession, in the Apologia, of “a secret longing love of Rome” which led him to “preach so earnestly against the danger of being swayed in our religious inquiry by our sympathy rather than by our reason.”97 Like Newman, Hopkins invokes the mystical authority of “unknown influences” to support his theological inquiries. Unlike Newman, however, he insists that the doctrinal arguments for conversion are sufficient in themselves. While Newman’s Apologia and Loss and Gain are deliberately inconclusive about the precise proportions of reason, will, and emotion involved in an act of assent, Hopkins, always more inclined to see things in black and white, assures his father that his conversion was the product of “simple and strictly drawn arguments” and “common sense.”98 The defense of his religious change contained in Gerard’s last preconversion letter to Manley Hopkins bears out the claim, in his letters to Urquhart and Liddon, that his Roman Catholic conviction had been present for at least a year. Hopkins cites his belief in the real presence of Christ in the consecrated host as the doctrinal basis of his conversion, adding that only the Roman guarantee of infallibility protects this dogma from charges of “gross superstition.” Drawing on arguments contained in the Apologia, he presents the debate over the real presence in characteristically absolute and apocalyptic terms. Anglo-Catholics can claim

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no infallible authority for their sacramental beliefs. Without infallibility there can be no assurance of the real presence; without the real presence there can be no “life of the soul” and no stay against atheism. Hence, Hopkins finds the Tractarian position “broken to pieces under my feet”99 The core of Hopkins’s Roman Catholic argument was already present in “The Half-way House,” a poem completed shortly after “Let Me Be to Thee” in October 1865. The speaker of “The Half-way House” recalls his search for a tangible sign of that “Love” to which he had dedicated himself in the earlier poem. In the course of the pursuit, the pilgrim’s “national old Egyptian reed” must give way before his hungry soul can find satisfaction in the Catholic teaching that “He is with you in the breaking of the bread.” The poem’s title presumably alludes to Newman’s description, in the Apologia, of Anglicanism as a “halfway house” on the road to Rome. Later in the same passage, Newman discusses the “breaking to…pieces” of the Anglican “via media” — Hopkins’s “national old Bgyptian reed” —following his recognition that the authority of the Anglican Communion is schismatic and invalid.100 Newman’s “halfway house” argument, which claims that “there are but two alternatives—the way to Rome, and the way to Atheism,” with Anglicanism as the halfway house on one side, and Liberalism on the other-hovers behind Hopkins’s typically outspoken threat to his father that should he lose his belief in the “real presence,” he would “become an atheist the next day.”101 Indeed, the very language Gerard uses to convey to Manley Hopkins his belief that the “least fragment” of the consecrated Host is the “whole Body of Christ born of the Blessed Virgin, before which the whole host of saints and angels…trembles with adoration,” is reminiscent of a description of the mass by Willis, a Catholic convert, in Newman’s Loss and Gain: …it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble.102 Hopkins’s efforts to convince his father of the attractions of Roman Catholicism, “its consolations, its marvellous ideal of holiness,…its consistency and unity, its glowing prayers, the daring majesty of its claims, etc etc,” also appear to paraphrase Newman, this time in Discourses to Mixed Congregations where he describes “the beauty, the majesty, the completeness, the resources, the consolations of the Catholic religion.”103 However, Newman’s love of Catholic doctrines and traditions was accompanied by a fastidious horror of many aspects of popular Catholic devotion. In “Religious State of Catholics no Prejudice to the Sanctity of the Church” in Anglican Difficulties, Newman concedes that many Catholic practices are “utterly out of taste, and indescribably offensive to any person of ordinary refinement.” In Loss and Gain, the Tractarian, Carlton, warns Charles Reding that an “English clergyman is a gentleman; you may have more to bear than you reckon for, when you find yourself with men of rude minds and vulgar manners.” Hopkins, although he knew few Catholics who were not Oxford converts at the time of his conversion, echoes Newman’s complaints in his rebuttal of his father’s charges that “fancy and aesthetic tastes” had prompted his religious change. He informs Manley Hopkins that “bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism.”104 The sternest words in the letter to Manley Hopkins are those in which Gerard refuses his father’s pleas to defer his reception. After explaining that he cannot continue to receive sacraments in the Church of England because to do so would be to “fight against God Who calls me to His Church” and thus, should he die still unconverted, his soul would be “forfeit,” he adds, defiantly, “you do not understand what is involved in asking me to delay and how little good you wd. get from it.” Hopkins’s words, if not his tone, are once

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again derived from the writings of his mentor, in this case from a letter quoted in the Apologia, in which Newman struggles on the brink of conversion: The simple question is, Can I (it is personal, not whether another but can I) be saved in the English Church? Am I in safety, were I to die tonight? Is it a mortal sin in me, not joining another communion?105 Newman’s stark individualism blends almost seamlessly into Hopkins’s brittle adolescent rebellion: “surely the happiness of my prospects depends on the happiness to me and not on intrinsic advantages…. My only strong wish is to be independent.”106 Hopkins’s letter paraphrases Newman’s Catholic arguments in order to create a wall of words between his father and himself. His tone veers between chilly impersonality and shrill defiance. He expresses a controlled regret over the “estrangement” from his family but emphasizes his allegiance to a new authority whose “permission” must be sought before he can obey his parents’ request to visit his siblings without proselytizing. His pious observation that his parents could “put an end to estrangements for ever” if they would only cast themselves into “His sacred broken Heart and His five adorable Wounds” is clearly hostile rather than conciliatory. Catholic devotions to Christ’s corporeality were anathema even to moderately High-Church Anglicans like Kate and Manley Hopkins. An anguished Manley Hopkins would report to Liddon, “He writes in an impassioned style about ‘adoring the five blessed wounds’ &c, & speaks with perfect coldness of any possible estrangement from us.”107 In truth, Hopkins had as yet no wish for reconciliation with his parents. His willful plunge into the “cold limbo” of Catholicism was the culmination of years of stifled rebellion against the worldly and heterosexual prescriptions of his ambitious father.108 Hopkins’s younger brother, Lionel, who survived until 1952, observed, in an interview with Humphry House, that although his parents were initially distressed at Gerard’s conversion, “the way they later became reconciled even to his being a Jesuit Priest argued great tolerance, charity, and, above all, love for Gerard.”109 Perhaps Hopkins’s evident desire to model his conversion as closely as possible on that of his mentor even extended to reproducing Newman’s near total estrangement from his relatives. Newman saw his sister Jemima only once after his conversion; his sister Harriet and brother Charles broke with him completely. The experience of Charles Reding in Loss and Gain reflects Newman’s own rejection by his family and provides future converts with a model of heroic renunciation: “Yes, I give up home, I give up all who have ever known me, loved me, valued me, wished me well; I know I am making myself a byword and an outcast.”110 Hopkins’s romantic, even erotic, fascination with persecution, exile and martyrdom was already evident, as we have seen, in his schoolboy poem, “The Escorial,” and would continue all his life, reflected in such poems as “Lines for a Picture of St. Dorothea,” “St. Thecla,” “Margaret Clitheroe,” “St. Winefred’s Well,” and, most notably, The Wreck of the Deutschland. Although, in reality, Hopkins remained in close and affectionate contact with his family to the end of his life, it seems likely that, at least in imagination, the fate of a “byword and an outcast” would have seemed to him an attractive one. Hopkins’s conversion was a harsh blow for his parents and a setback for the Anglo-Catholic cause at Oxford. His reception into the Church of Rome closely followed that of three of his friends: Addis and Garrett of Balliol, and Wood of Trinity. The four conversions were part of a wave of Anglo-Catholic “defections” to Rome in the mid-1860s. In an October 1866 letter to Florence Nightingale, Benjamin Jowett likened the current “Ecclesiastical storm” to a “commercial panic,” implying that the Essays and Reviews controversy had weakened Anglo-Catholic stock.111 Fears engendered by Essays and Reviews had been subtly nurtured by the Apologia. As Newman had predicted, the ground seemed to be shrinking under the Anglican “halfway house.”

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Although it was John Henry Newman who received Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church, he was not directly involved in the younger man’s conversion until the late summer of 1866. In his first letter to Newman, requesting a meeting to discuss the formalities of conversion, Hopkins explained, “I do not want to be helped to any conclusions of belief, for I am thankful to say my mind is made up.”112 He visited Newman in Birmingham in September and was received by him on October 21. Newman’s only direct intervention in Hopkins’s plans was to counsel him to remain at Oxford and finish his degree. Indeed, in his letters to Hopkins both before and after he joined the Church of Rome, Newman’s is always a voice of compromise and moderation. While offering Hopkins refuge at the Oratory for the first Christmas after his conversion, he reminds him that “if you can be at home with comfort, home is the best place for you.” In the same letter, Newman advises Hopkins not to “hurry decision” on his vocation but to remember that his “first duty is to make a good class.” Urging Gerard to do the “plain duty” that lies before him, Newman slips effortlessly into Manley Hopkins’s role.113 In directing such close attention to the role of Newman in Hopkins’s conversion, I have not purposed to oversimplify or discount any of the complex cultural and psychological causes of religious change. Nor would I presume to disregard the belief of Newman and Hopkins themselves in the divine origin of their spiritual convictions. I do, however, proceed on the assumption that religious experience, whatever its source, is always mediated by available cultural concepts and practices. As Wayne Proudfoot has observed in Religious Experience, traditional narratives of religious experience “which are allegedly descriptive and theoretical actually serve to constitute or evoke the experience they purport to describe or analyze.”114 Hopkins’s close reading and memorization of Newman’s Catholic writings may not have been the most significant factor in his conversion, but they did shape his interpretation of it, both to himself and others. In Loss and Gain, Newman describes the landscape of religious and political ideas as they appear to Charles Reding’s eager but uneducated mind: When…men for the first time look upon the world of politics or religion, all that they find there meets their mind’s eye as a landscape addresses itself for the first time to a man who has just gained his bodily sight. One thing is as far off as another; there is no perspective. The connection of fact with fact, truth with truth, the bearing of fact upon truth and truth upon fact, what leads to what, what are points primary, and what secondary-all this they have yet to learn.115 This metaphor must have appealed to Hopkins, whose own search for principles of coherence would blend the spiritual and the material, the “mind’s eye” and the “bodily sight,” in the concepts of “instress” and “inscape.” During the Oxford years, when Hopkins’s religious ideas were still unformed, it was Newman’s spiritual narrative that showed him “what leads to what” and taught him to discriminate between “points primary” and “secondary” in religious argument. Using Newman’s history of his religious opinions as a template, Hopkins naturally attached significance to those of his ideas and experiences that conformed to Newman’s prescription and disregarded aspects of his religious sensibility that did not. Later, Hopkins would rebel against Newman, or, rather, against the stern, paternal authority he had so determinedly vested in him. His rebellion would take the form of a rediscovery and celebration of the emotional and sensuous elements of religious experience from which Newman’s fastidious nature and conciliatory rhetoric recoiled. The most serious immediate consequence of Hopkins’s reliance on Newman to form his Catholic expectations is that he converted to Rome without any significant knowledge of the social and political conditions of the English Roman Catholic community. For Hopkins, as for Newman, Catholic doctrine in the abstract was more persuasive than the living reality of Catholic devotion. Shortly before his conversion,

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Newman had written, “I have no existing sympathies with Roman Catholics; I hardly ever, even abroad, was at one of their services; I know none of them, I do not like what I hear of them.” Charles Reding, in Loss and Gain, embraces Roman dogma although he has “never seen a Catholic priest, to know him, in his life.” Encouraged by Newman to view his conversion as an end to spiritual struggle rather than as a new beginning, Hopkins seemed positively proud of his ignorance of Roman Catholicism. Describing to Urquhart the growth of his “silent conviction,” he insists that “to see or hear ‘Romanising’ things wd. throw me back on the English Church as a rule.”116 For both Newman and Hopkins, religion was primarily a relationship between God and the individual soul. Although Newman’s Apologia pays lip service to the value of “visible religious community,” his most convincing articulation of a personal credo is stunningly oblivious of the public context of belief: I am a Catholic by virtue of my believing in God; and if I am asked why I believe in God, I answer that it is because I believe in myself, for I find it impossible to believe in my own existence…without believing also in the existence of Him, who lives as a Personal, All-seeing, All-judging Being in my conscience.117 Newman’s writings encouraged Hopkins to view conversion as an escape from the Established Church and from the rigid social prescriptions of mid-Victorian England. In heaven-haven, where self-will and God’s will are one, the desireless soul lives in proud rejection of all form of community. Hopkins, like the majority of Oxford converts, did not adjust easily to the realities of mid-nineteenthcentury English Catholicism.118 The Church in which he found himself had little immediate use for his intellectual gifts and none for his stubborn individuality. The most pressing task confronting the newly restored Catholic Hierarchy was to create cohesion among the widely disparate elements of England’s Catholic population. The old Catholic, or “recusant,” community which had traditionally pursued a policy of conciliation towards the Protestant mainstream felt their privileged social position threatened by the waves of Irish Catholic immigrants who had flooded into England’s major cities in the wake of the Great Hunger of the 1840s. Both groups resented the intellectual arrogance of the Oxford converts. The converts, few of whom had any experience outside an academic environment, found themselves pressed into service as priests and teachers in the slums. Their Anglican sensibilities were often repelled by the exuberant and sentimental devotional practices advocated by foreign missionaries and supported by the Irish poor. The rate of attrition was high.119 The anti-intellectual character of the English Church mirrored the situation in Rome. Hopkins’s conversion occurred during one of the most reactionary decades in modern Papal history. Threats to the temporal power of the Papacy had created a siege-mentality from which Pius IX lashed out against all forms of modernity in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, an index of condemnations of so-called “perverse” ideas, including the propositions that men could make religious choices based on reason, that religions other than Roman Catholicism could lead to salvation, or that the Church could ever be subject to national governments.120 Throughout Europe, the Pope’s reactionary measures drew support from Ultramontanist Catholics like Henry Edward Manning, who announced in “The Work and Wants of the Catholic Church in England” that We are firmly convinced that in twenty years Rationalism will inundate England. Instead, therefore, of implicating ourselves in a sinking wreck, it is the prudence of common sense, as well as the obligation of Catholic duty, to keep ourselves free, not only from all entanglements with it, but as far as possible from the vortex which it makes in going down.121

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Although both were Oxford converts, Newman and Manning represented opposite poles of English Catholicism. Manning, whose highest priorities were pastoral, mistrusted Newman’s intellectualism, his lack of social concern, and his “servile and petty eagerness” to win acceptance from the Protestant mainstream. He viewed the Apologia’s harvest of Anglo-Catholic converts with suspicion, warning them, in “Work and Wants,” that “no amount of intellectual culture or social advantage can be weighed in the scale against the least measure of fidelity to the Catholic faith.”122 The “Catholic faith,” for Ultramontanes, required absolute obedience to papal authority and uncritical acceptance of all aspects of popular piety.123 Conversion was not “like coming into port after a rough sea,” nor was Catholicism a refuge where “no storms come.” The reward of “heaven-haven” was not to be won on earth, as Hopkins would acknowledge in The Wreck of the Deutschland. Far from sheltering him from the “swing of the sea,” conversion plunged Hopkins into the tumult of a deeply divided community. His allegiance to Newman, as he quickly discovered, left him at odds with the dominant party in English Catholicism and confined him to the backwater of the Birmingham Oratory. The years of poetic silence that followed his conversion were a time of intense spiritual development and anxious political realignment, in which Hopkins struggled to shed the literary and theological influence of Newman and to reinvent himself, in The Wreck of the Deutschland, as the poetic voice of English Ultramontanism.

CHAPTER TWO One “Fetch” in Him Hopkins’s Ultramontane Vision in The Wreck of the Deutschland

Hopkins’s longest and most ambitious poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland was inspired by newspaper reports of the foundering of a German ship in the mouth of the Thames on December 7, 1875. Among the casualties of the wreck were five Franciscan nuns, exiled from Germany by Bismarck’s anti-Catholic Falck Laws.1 For Hopkins, the nuns were martyrs and the shipwreck a reminder of the violent intervention of Divine Providence in human lives. Hopkins, like many Catholics, viewed martyrdom as an opportunity to share in the redemptive suffering of Christ. Seven years earlier, commenting to his mother on the exile of the Jesuits from Spain, he had observed that, “to be persecuted in a tolerant age is a high distinction.”2 Behind the human losses of the wreck, Hopkins found reassurance of divine order and ultimate human triumph. The Wreck of the Deutschland challenges Victorian confidence in social progress and selfimprovement, insisting upon humanity’s utter dependence upon an all-powerful Creator whose love must be experienced as “mastery” as well as “mercy” before it can be understood. Hopkins shaped the chaos and destruction of the Deutschland’s foundering into a highly wrought poem in which private and public destinies merge and complex theological ideas are conveyed as immediate religious experience. The Wreck of the Deutschland, a torrent of language breaking seven years of selfimposed poetic silence, is Hopkins’s exuberant reply to calls by Manning, in “The Work and Wants of the Catholic Church in England,” and Newman, in The Idea of a University, for a new Catholic literature to celebrate and promote the restoration of the Church in England. The poem represents Hopkins’s single heroic effort to wrench public significance from personal experience and to put his creative impulse to the service of his religion. It is his only attempt to evangelize an audience without compromising his aesthetic concerns. It is the high watermark of Hopkins’s confidence, proclaiming his still buoyant hopes for the conversion of Britain and his intent to join, and even to dominate, the chorus of Catholic “voices, grave and musical” invoked by Newman in his 1852 sermon, “The Second Spring.”3 In Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Language of Mystery, Virginia Ellis aptly describes The Wreck as “an early and triumphal concentration of Hopkins’s central vision, recurrent themes, ‘authentic cadence.’”4 All of Hopkins’s later, shorter poems, whether earnest, ecstatic, or despairing, are prefigured in this first great ode. After The Wreck’s rejection, the center no longer holds, the vision is fragmented and the themes dissipate. The poems that follow are sometimes finer, sharper in focus, more consistent, more exquisite, but all are born of disillusionment. At the triumphant finale of The Wreck, Hopkins becomes the bardic voice of English Catholicism: in the later poems, he speaks as a solitary watcher, a solitary sufferer, a “heart in hiding.”5 When the Jesuit periodical, The Month, turned down The Wreck, Hopkins made no attempt to find a secular publisher. The poem was intended first and foremost for an audience of his Catholic contemporaries; it addresses specific doctrinal and devotional issues and assumes a readership familiar with scripture and hagiography. In addition to the “triumphal” tone of individual poetic mastery, recognized by

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Virginia Ellis, The Wreck also contains a, sometimes shrill, triumphalist rhetoric generated by Hopkins’s newfound Ultramontanist sympathies. It can safely be assumed that The Month’s editor, Henry Coleridge, a classical scholar and a disciple of Newman, would have disapproved of the poet’s impassioned plea for the conversion of England and his unsupported claim that the tall nun was a visionary. The Wreck’s Ultramontane associations may have doomed the poem as decisively as the eccentricities of its “sprung rhythm.” Hopkins, who was received into the Church by Newman and confirmed by Manning, was torn between two Catholic camps from the very beginning. His conversion occurred when relations between Newman and the Ultramontanes were at their lowest ebb. Pius IX’s 1864 encyclical, Quanta Cura, and the accompanying Syllabus of Errors, had confirmed Manning and his fellow Ultramontanes in their intransigent opposition to liberal theology and secular statehood. Ultramontane propagandists, both in England and abroad, were quick to invoke the doctrine of papal infallibility to support Pio Nono’s stunningly reactionary utterances. In 1866, the year of Hopkins’s conversion, W.G. Ward, a staunch supporter of Manning, published his Authority of Doctrinal Decisions, which claimed infallibility even for the Pope’s private letters. Newman, always eager to placate rather than provoke the Protestant majority, had reluctantly submitted to the Syllabus but denied its infallibility. Blaming the Ultramontanes for a revival of anti-Catholic prejudice in the popular press, he observed that, “we are shrinking into ourselves, narrowing the lines of communion, trembling at freedom of thought, and using the language of dismay and despair.”6 To the Ultramontanes, unity with their fellow European Catholics was more valuable than amicable relations with English Protestants. For Manning, Rome was “our Father’s house, where the nations forget their limits and their rivalries, and are conscious only of their unity in the kingdom of God.”7 While Newman’s Apologia struggled to prove that Catholicism and patriotism were not incompatible, Manning went to Rome to voice his support for the temporal power of the papacy and his contempt for the “low vulgarity of national egotism.”8 While the Apologia sought to change public perceptions of Catholicism through its appeal to English traditions of tolerance and fair play, Manning insisted, in his eulogy for Cardinal Wiseman, that, “Englishmen do not understand compromise.”9 Meanwhile, Manning persistently thwarted Newman’s plans to establish an Oxford Oratory and Bishop Herbert Vaughan condemned the Apologia for “views…which I abhor, and which fill me with pain and suspicion.”10 The political differences between Newman and the Ultramontanes were reflected in their divergent approaches to spirituality and devotional practice. Originating in France in the aftermath of the revolution, Ultramontane Catholicism was an anti-intellectual and highly authoritarian reaction to encroaching secularism. In Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, Mary Heimann describes the movement as the effort of a beleaguered Church to “foster the mentality of inflexible resistance appropriate to a besieged army.”11 In keeping with their political support of the Pope’s temporal power, Ultramontanes placed heavy emphasis on ritualism and obedience to priestly authority in their devotional lives. At the same time, their fear of modern intellectual inquiry led to an emphasis on popular and folk-based devotions and a revival of interest in local shrines and pious legends. According to Ralph Gibson, in A Social History of French Catholicism 1789–1914, nineteenth-century French Catholics “developed a taste for flamboyant ceremony appealing to the heart rather than to the head. Piety ceased to be a matter of severe duty, and became an emotional experience.”12 Theatrical religious observances supplied a common language and a meeting ground for Catholics of different social classes. Belief in miracles and visions united Catholics of varying educational backgrounds in a gesture of defiance to rationalism and the new religion of science. Like their continental counterparts, English Ultramontanes favored frequent communion and participation in the more flowery and public aspects of Catholic worship such as the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the following of the Stations of the Cross, the recitation of the rosary, processions, pilgrimages,

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litanies, novenas, the veneration of relics, and devotions to Mary, the Saints, and the Sacred Heart. In order to sustain the faith of a religious minority in an often hostile environment, Ultramontanes encouraged frequent church attendance and public demonstration of Catholic unity and pride. Newman’s more conciliatory brand of Catholicism drew support from Oxford converts and from the “Old Catholics” or recusants. Neither of these groups wished to antagonize a Protestant ruling class with whom they had close social or familial ties. The English recusants, whose political and devotional identity owed much to the early nineteenth-century theologian John Lingard, were sympathetic to Lockean ideas of religious liberty, contractual government, and a secularized state.13 Their religious practices, centered for several generations around Bishop Challoner’s prayerbook, The Garden of the Soul, were deliberately nonconfrontational. Like Newman and many former Anglo-Catholics, the recusants were repelled by Ultramontane anti-intellectualism and viewed the introduction of florid continental devotions with dismay, regarding these practices as unnecessarily provocative and incompatible with traditional English practicality and reserve. A rare point of agreement between Newman and the Ultramontanes was their shared desire to foster the growth of a Catholic literary culture. English Catholics of all shades of opinion had long been aware of the power of literature to counter anti-Catholic prejudice and to encourage cultural cohesion among Catholics themselves. Recognizing the role of periodicals in disseminating ideas to a mass audience, Nicholas Wiseman, Daniel O’Connell, and Charles Russell of the Dublin seminary at Maynooth had co-founded The Dublin Review in 1836. As a forum for the political and social concerns of the newly emancipated English Catholics, The Dublin Review was a rival of the Whig Edinburgh Review and the Tory Quarterly. Other influential Catholic periodicals included The Tablet, founded in 1840 by the Quaker convert, Frederick Lucas, and later acquired by Herbert Vaughan; The Rambler, the ill-fated liberal mouthpiece of Richard Simpson and Sir John Acton, briefly edited by Newman in 1859; and The Month, founded in 1864 by Fanny Margaret Taylor, a companion of Florence Nightingale in Crimea, and afterwards acquired by the Jesuits.14 An ardent reader of Scott’s Waverley novels, Cardinal Wiseman had been quick to recognize the polemical possibilities of historical fiction. In 1854, he had established a “Popular Catholic Library” whose first volumes were his own Fabiola and Newman’s Callista, both tales of early Christian martyrs. Later volumes such as Mrs. Ogden Meeker’s Fortune’s Football (1864) and Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Constance Sherwood (1865) also described Catholic per secution and martyrdom, this time in sixteenthcentury England. Meeker and Fullerton created swashbuckling Catholic heroes to counteract the portrayals of lecherous priests and diabolically cunning Jesuits in Protestant novels such as William Sewell’s Hawkstone and Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!15 Attempts to revive Catholic poetry were less successful. Norman H. MacKenzie’s comment that “Victorian religious magazines often filled their interstices with mediocre poems in which both the piety and the imagination seem suspect” is as true of Catholics as of other denominations.16 Newman’s discussion of Catholic literature in The Idea of a University is strikingly pessimistic about poetry. He is suspicious of the sterile pleasures of language used for its own sake, arguing that a true poet is one who acquires “style,” as it were, by accident: “when his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament.” The utterances of such a poet, Newman claims, “pass into proverbs among his people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tesselated with the rich fragments of his language.” Immortality of this kind, Newman concludes, bleakly, is not available to Victorian Catholic poets because the great literature of England is already written— “we have well nigh seen the end of English classics” —and it is Protestant: “So tyrannous is the literature of a nation; it is too much for us. We cannot destroy or reverse it; we may confront and encounter it, but we cannot make it over again.”17 All the same, mid-century Catholic poets (including Newman himself) were prolific, if seldom inspired.

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By 1866, Cardinal Manning could observe, in his “Inaugural Address to the Academia,” that, “religious art, religious literature, and religious poetry…in their highest Catholic forms, are to be found throughout England.” The spread of Catholic literature, he claimed, was responsible for “the disproportionate influence exercised by the Catholic Church in England upon society, when compared with the narrow material presence of the Church.”18 Three years later, in the preface to Mrs. Gerald’s Niece, Georgiana Fullerton remarked that nowadays “scarcely a book of any sort is published which does not take sides for or against our religion.”19 The Jesuit periodical, The Month, was an important document in the Catholic literary revival. Father Provincial Weld, who acquired the magazine for the Society of Jesus in 1865, has been described by the Jesuit historian,J. H.Pollen, as a “zealous and far-sighted patron of literature.”20 Henry Coleridge, The Month’s first Jesuit editor, was an Oxford convert, a former fellow of Oriel. Like Newman, Coleridge was anxious to prove that Catholics could be loyal Englishmen. The Month’s earliest articles discussed the English martyrs and the recusant tradition in English history. The first edition contained Coleridge’s defense of Mary, Queen of Scots, “A Few Words for Mary Stuart,” a serial story by Georgiana Fullerton, and poetry by Aubrey de Vere. Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius appeared in the summer of 1865. To Hopkins, The Month seemed the obvious destination for The Wreck of the Deutschland. As Norman White observes, it “was not just one possible place of publication, as it would have been to a non-Jesuit; it represented the sanctioned orthodoxy.”21 When his mother suggested a secular publisher for The Wreck, Hopkins reminded her sharply that, “we have a magazine of our own, The Month.” 22 The appearance of The Wreck in the literary magazine of the Society of Jesus would have won Hopkins the respect of his Jesuit contemporaries and established him as an important Catholic writer. Hopkins knew Henry Coleridge from the Birmingham Oratory, where he had given the Holy Week retreat in 1868. Bernard Bergonzi speculates that Coleridge may have been the first Jesuit Hopkins had ever met.23 It is likely that he influenced Hopkins’s decision to enter the Society of Jesus in September 1868. Hopkins shared Coleridge’s patriotism and his interest in the English martyrs. Coleridge’s writings about Edmund Campion may have inspired the younger man to compose an ode to the sixteenth-century Jesuit and martyr, a project first discussed in a letter to Bridges in 1881 and referred to several times in his correspondence, though apparently never carried out.24 Hopkins’s intense, if ambivalent, attraction to paternal figures may have caused him to overestimate Coleridge’s interest in his career. The Wreck of the Deutschland was completed in the spring of 1876. In May, Hopkins wrote to Henry Coleridge, describing the poem and offering it for publication. Hopkins, who did not enclose a copy of The Wreck at this time, warned Coleridge that he would probably dislike the poem but that he was to consider “not his own tastes but those of The Month’s readers.”25 Coleridge invited Hopkins to submit The Wreck, observing that he had heard of a new American poetry that neither rhymed nor scanned nor construed and suggesting that he would view Hopkins’s experiment open-mindedly. Hopkins dispatched his poem with high expectations that it would appear in The Month’s July edition. After a long delay, he received a letter requesting him to “do away with the accents that marked the scanning.”26 In spite of Hopkins’s compliance, The Wreck of the Deutschland was not published. Coleridge’s refusal to print The Wreck has been too readily interpreted as evidence of Jesuit philistinism. Critics, even Jesuits, have been swift to accept the claim, first made by the poet himself, that Hopkins’s two vocations were incompatible.27 Hopkins’s first editor, Robert Bridges, who has been described by Elisabeth Schneider as “an outspoken man” who “detested Jesuits” and “deplored, in Hopkins, what he regarded as a wasted and unhappy subjection of himself to their rule at the expense of his creative powers,” set the tone for future critics.28 Even Bergonzi, one of the few Hopkins scholars to acknowledge the existence of a Victorian Catholic literary culture, fails to recognize the extent of Jesuit participation in it. He makes the

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highly contestable claim that, had he not become a Jesuit, “Hopkins might have found a prominent place in the expanding literary circles of the nineteenth century, together with such co-religionists as Coventry Patmore and Alice Meynell.”29 Norman White’s 1992 biography represents Hopkins as a “compulsive poet” repressed by a “severely ascetic moral culture.”30 Charges of Jesuit philistinism do not provide a sufficient explanation for the collapse of Hopkins’s selfconfidence after his failure to publish The Wreck. Nor do they account for his lifelong ambivalence toward the creative impulse. The evidence of Hopkins’s letters and journals indicates that his compositions were already a source of guilt and anxiety before he became a Jesuit, or even a Catholic. A journal entry for January 15, 1866, records “self-will in writing down corrections in ‘The Nightingale’ agst. warning. Effect possibly physical. Temptation. Dwelling on poems.”31 Writing from the Birmingham Oratory to Baillie in February 1868, Hopkins explains his renunciation of art and predicts that poetry will prove incompatible with the priesthood: You know I once wanted to be a painter. But even if I could I wd. not, I think, now, for the fact is that the higher and more attractive parts of the art put a strain upon the passions which I shd. think it unsafe to encounter. I want to write still and as a priest I very likely can do that too, not so freely as I shd. have liked, e.g. nothing or little in the verse way, but no doubt what wd. best serve the cause of my religion.32 Hopkins’s bonfire of his early verses, an event described in his journal of May 11, 1868, as the “slaughter of the innocents,” was not required by the Jesuits. Nor was his decision to keep nearly seven years of poetic silence after entering the order in September 1868. It was Hopkins who proposed the motion that “a theological student should eschew all literature not bearing on his studies” at the Sunday night debating club at St. Beuno’s. Although the proposition was carried, it was by a narrow majority.33 Hopkins’s puritanical view of literature was not shared by his Jesuit superiors. His entry into the Society of Jesus occurred only three years after the founding of The Month and coincided, as we have seen, with efforts by Weld, Coleridge and others to establish a Jesuit literary community. Hopkins’s novice-master, and friend, at Roehampton, Father Peter Gallwey, was remembered as a man who “did a great deal to encourage literary or musical talent among the younger men.”34 The Wreck of the Deutschland was written at the suggestion of the Rector at St. Beuno’s. Besides the editor and subeditor of The Month, The Wreck of the Deutschland was read by only three Jesuits during Hopkins’s lifetime. Cyprian Splaine found the poem “unreadable” and Clement Barraud described The Wreck as “rough and often rudely grotesque,” confessing that he “could hardly understand one line of it.” Francis Bacon, however, “expressed a strong admiration …which was certainly sincere.”35 Bacon was the only one of Hopkins’s nineteenth-century readers, within the Society of Jesus or outside it, to give The Wreck his unqualified support. Barraud’s complaint that Hopkins should have “condescended to write plain English” (a view apparently shared by the editor of The Month) is no more insensitive that Bridges’s initial comment that he would not “for any money” read The Wreck of the Deutschland a second time.36 The truth is that Henry Coleridge’s rejection of The Wreck only confirmed Hopkins’s already deep suspicion that his poetry was the product of sinful self-assertion. As John Robinson observes in In Extremity: A Study of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hopkins “did not trust himself at certain crucial places, one of these was his own creativeness.”37 His early association of poetry with homoerotic fantasy developed into an Arnoldian distrust of the “dialogue of the mind with itself?” Like his Protestant contemporaries, Arnold, Tennyson, and Browning, Hopkins’s mature poetry grew from a rejection of Romantic solipsism. His seven years of poetic silence compare with the crisis in Browning’s poetics after Pauline and with Arnold’s seminal

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decision to exclude Empedocles in Aetna, a poem in which “suffering finds no vent in action,” from the Poems of 1853.38 Hopkins’s shift of focus from private experience to communal vision in The Wreck of the Deutschland parallels a similar effort by Tennyson to wrest public significance from personal suffering in In Memoriam. Unlike Tennyson, however, Hopkins chose to articulate his public vision in an archaic verse form and a highly individualized diction that amounted almost to a private language. Although he would later insist to Bridges that sprung rhythm was “the native and natural rhythm of speech,” the immediate effect of its use in The Wreck of the Deutschland was to deny Hopkins the public voice he craved.39 Any attempt to explain the frustrations of Hopkins’s career, both literary and priestly, must begin with his extraordinary inability to assess the mood of an audience. His theoretical interest in rhetoric, a subject he taught in the novitiate at Roehampton, was unaccompanied by practical skills. As a teacher, he “never really won the confidence and affection of his pupils.” He was “aloof” and often spoke as though in “a reverie of his own.” His students in Dublin recalled his inability to maintain order and his obsessive attention to minutiae.40 The same faults plagued his preaching. His selection of topic was seldom appropriate for his audience. His sermons in Liverpool were too densely written and indirect in tone to hold the attention of his working-class listeners. In Mayfair, he offended his refined and fashionable congregation by describing the Church as a milch-cow and the sacraments as her udders. Perhaps his worst failure was at St. Beuno’s, where he preached a sermon on the feeding of the five thousand to his fellow students of theology. In a misguided attempt to give Christ’s miracle more immediacy, Hopkins embarked on a lengthy geographical comparison of Galilee with the Valley of the Clwyd. His sermon notes record that “people laughed prodigiously, I saw them roll over in their chairs with laughter.”41 Hopkins was equally maladroit in judging his literary audience. In The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought, his study of Hopkins’s rhetoric, Marucci asserts that “the involvement and the sympathy of the receiver are in Hopkins not only the ultimate end toward which several textual practices converge, but also, …the motivation tout court of the act of writing.”42 In an 1882 letter to Bridges, Hopkins explains that poetry must employ the rhetorical art of “bidding”: I mean the art or virtue of saying everything right to or at the hearer, interesting him, holding him in the attitude of correspondent or addressed or at least concerned, making it everywhere an act of intercourse—and of discarding everything that does not bid, does not tell.43 Yet the urgency of the poet’s need to communicate, to bid and tell, was not matched by any willingness to adapt his message to his audience. Although Hopkins seems to have believed that The Wreck would find an enthusiastic readership in the Society of Jesus-he urged Henry Coleridge to consider not “his own tastes but those of the “The Month’s readers” —it is more likely that other Jesuits would have echoed Cyprian Splaine’s view that the poem was “unreadable.” Writing from a mid-twentieth-century, new critical perspective, Edward Hutton observes that Victorian Catholic writers produced little “pure literature.”44 Hopkins himself never doubted that poetry should have a missionary purpose: “What are works of art for? to educate, to be standards?”45 He differed from his contemporaries only in his sense of the means by which poetry can teach. Marucci accurately describes Hopkins’s poetic method as an attempt to “fire successful sparks against the listener’s sensibility and interiority, rather than to present a theoretical and scientific contribution on the mystery of faith.”46 Hopkins chose to immerse his readers in the violent immediacy of religious experience. Participation in the poem’s emotional energy must precede intellectual understanding. Indeed, The Wreck of the Deutschland purposely hinders the overly cerebral reader. Defending The Wreck in a letter to Bridges, Hopkins concedes that the

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poem is “obscure” but claims that he was “not over-desirous that the meaning of all should be quite clear, at least unmis-takeable.”47 Hopkins’s insistence that God’s mystery can be “instressed, stressed” (stanza 5) but never fully explained would have been anathema to his scholastically minded Jesuit colleagues, for whom, as Marucci points out, “obscurity…[was] a downright strategic incoherence and, what is worse, a moral vice.”48 Furthermore, Hopkins’s efforts to create a new language for Catholic poetry represented an unacceptable challenge to Newman’s view that the age of innovation in English literature was past and that Catholic writers “must be content to serve their generation…though their names are to have little weight, and their works are not to last much beyond themselves.”49 Even if Henry Coleridge had succeeded in penetrating The Wreck’s obscurity, he would have found little to please him. The poem’s devotional style was vehemently Ultramontanist. For Hopkins, whose initial attraction to Catholicism had been tied to his craving for absolutes— “two flocks, two folds— black, white; right, wrong” —and to his distaste for the “sharp and sided hail” of Oxford theological debate, the discovery of rivalry and rancor within the Catholic fold was a primal shock whose reverberations can be traced in the many fault lines that run through his Catholic writings. His initial response to the feuds within the English Catholic Church was to take refuge in the absolute authority of Rome. The years preceding the composition of The Wreck saw the gradual waning of Hopkins’s filial attachment to Newman and his growing sympathy with the Ultramontanes. After graduating from Oxford in the summer of 1867, Hopkins had taken up Newman’s offer of a teaching post at the Birmingham Oratory School. He stayed there only eight months. He disliked his colleagues, whom he described as “the dregs of Great Britain,” and found the school’s daily routine uncongenial: “Fancy me getting up at a quarter past six: it is however done with a melancholy punctuality nearly every morning.” His typically grandiose plan to “read almost everything that was ever written” was thwarted by long hours of teaching and supervision. He complained to Urquhart that “with reading the class books and looking over exercises (which take a long time) I find all my time occupied.” After only two weeks of teaching, he was musing about his chances of finding other employment: “I wonder if there is anything I cd. do, though the income were less, wh. wd. give me more time, for I feel the want of that most of all.” He found teaching “very burdensome.”50 Hopkins’s decision to leave the Oratory and enter the Society of Jesus came as no surprise to Newman: You are quite out in thinking that when I offered you a ‘home’ here, I dreamed of your having a vocation for us. This I clearly saw you had not, from the moment you came to us. Don’t call the Jesuit discipline ‘hard,’ it will bring you to heaven.51 Newman had once invoked Thucydides’s comparison between Sparta and Athens to describe the difference between Jesuits and Oratorians: We are Athenians, the Jesuits Spartans. Ours is in one respect more anxious and difficult—we have no vows, we have fewer rules, yet we must live together—we require a knowledge of each other, which the Jesuits do not require. A Jesuit is like a soldier in the phalanx, an Oratorian like a legionary.52 Hopkins’s ascetic yearnings and his hunger for glory were more Spartan than Athenian. According to Norman White, “there was something too tame for Hopkins in the secular priesthood of the Oratory.”53 John Robinson comments that “great decisions and great sacrifices were congenial to Hopkins’s mind, but littlenesses wore him down.”54 Impatient with the everyday drudgery of teaching, he longed for an opportunity for heroism, even martyrdom. News of the persecution of Jesuits in Italy and Spain only fed his fervor. The

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anti-Jesuit hysteria of the Protestant Press and popular perceptions of the order as “a crafty, intriguing, unscrupulous, desperate, murderous, and exceedingly able body of men” would have lent the Society of Jesus an added luster in Hopkins’s eyes.55 He expected the Jesuits to be instrumental in the conversion of England and looked forward to playing his part in it. Although letters between the two men remained cordial, Hopkins’s departure from the Oratory marked a turning point in his relationship with Newman. Newman’s proximity and his association with unwelcome tasks and uncongenial routines had caused him to replace Manley Hopkins as the target of Gerard’s filial rebellion. Newman had an unfortunate history of attracting disciples who craved paternal authority in the abstract but who balked at any actual interference with their spiritual self-expression. The early years of the Oratory had been marked by a bitter feud between Newman and his former convert, Frederick Faber. Faber, whom Newman had placed in charge of the London Oratory, became the center of an extremist Ultramontane faction that introduced controversial Italianate devotions and plotted against Newman with Wiseman and Manning. In a typically effusive letter to George Talbot of the Roman College of Propaganda, Faber had declared, “Rome must really govern, animate and inform things with its own spirit. Bless us and save us! We don’t want another dose of Anglicanism with Tridentine doctrine; we want to be sensibly and perceptibly Roman.”56 As a loyal son of the Pope, Faber insisted that he had no choice but to rebel against Newman’s cold and insular Catholicism. The two Oratories became independent in 1855. Meriol Trevor’s assessment of Faber and the London Oratories is equally true of Hopkins’s Ultramontane rejection of Newman some thirteen years later: “It is significant …that these converts, in their successful revolution against their ‘Father’ were revolting in favor of a much stronger paternal image, but a much more remote paternal fact”57 During his early Jesuit years, Hopkins’s letters grew increasingly critical of his former mentor. Writing to Urquhart in December 1867, he condemned a pro-Newman article in the Liberal Catholic Chronicle for accusing the Ultramontanes of “extreme and stupid dishonesty” in their efforts to abort plans for an Oxford Oratory.58 Zonneveld’s extensive analysis of this deliberately opaque letter, concludes that Hopkins was “not displeased at Newman’s failure to found an Oxford Oratory” and, above all, that “he was resolute in following the Ultramontane line of Manning.”59 In July 1868, Hopkins informed the disaffected Oratorian, Father Ignatius Ryder, that he had no respect for “Christian antiquity.” His statement is a clear rejection of Newman, whose writings make constant recourse to the Early Fathers and who had declared, in the Apologia, that “my stronghold was Antiquity.” In the same letter, Hopkins announced his intention to prepare an article for the fiercely Ultramontane Dublin Review.60 By 1873, Hopkins could complain to Edward Bond that Newman’s Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent was “heavy reading,” faulting the work for its “narrow circle of instance and quotation…and a want, I think a real want, of brilliancy.”61 Hopkins and Newman differed most strongly in their views of the social mission of the Catholic Church. For Newman, whose writings promote the Lockean ideal of a religiously neutral state, politics was not a legitimate concern of the Church.62 In his opinion, the Church’s role was not to reform society but to save individual souls. His almost gnostic contempt for a world already irretrievable lost led him to assert, in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans, that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremist agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, though it harmed no one, or steal one poor farthing without excuse.63

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Hopkins’s 1866 poem, “Summa,” in which he laments that the lives of the faithful must so often be worn away by “sordidness of care and crime” suggests that even in the months preceding his conversion, when Newman’s influence was strongest, his view of the Church’s social mission was closer to that of Manning. Henry Edward Manning combined a “deep and passionate sympathy for the victims of this earthly life” with a pragmatic desire to stop “leakage” from the faith by addressing the social problems of his predominantly poor and immigrant Irish flock.64 His “Work and Wants of the Catholic Church in England” insists that The Church has a twofold work to do for mankind. Its first and primary, indeed, is to save souls, to lead men to eternal life. Its second but no less true, is to ripen and elevate the social and political life of man by its influences of morality and law.65 Manning defended the Church’s involvement in politics by arguing that “the moral laws which govern man as an individual govern him if he be the member of a community; be it the community of a household or the community of a state.”66 He publicly identified himself with the rights of workers, cam paigning in 1872 for improvement in the wages and housing conditions of agricultural laborers. In 1874, Manning turned his attention to the plight of the industrial workforce, arguing, in an address to the Mechanics’ Institute in Leeds on the “Dignity and Rights of Labour,” that the “principle of free trade: must be “met and checked by a moral condition.”67 He was instrumental in the founding of Catholic charitable organizations such as the St. Vincent de Paul Society, whose mission included “finding employment for Irishmen, reclaiming prostitutes, and assisting emigrants and delinquents.”68 In January 1867, Hopkins sent a copy of Manning’s The Last Glories of the Holy See Greater than the First to Urquhart, whom he was endeavoring to convert. The book expresses strong opposition to the concept of a religiously neutral state and defends the Ultramontane view that Rome should hold sway over the actions of Catholics in the social and political sphere. Four years later, Hopkins’s notorious “communist letter” to Bridges seems to preempt Manning’s speech to the Mechanics’ Institute in declaring that “it is a dreadful thing for the greatest and most necessary part of a very rich nation to live a hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delight, or hopes in the midst of plenty—which plenty they make.”69 Hopkins’s sympathy with Manning’s social concerns was shared by many of his fellow Jesuits. Indeed, his “communist letter” and even his decision to join the Society of Jesus may have been influenced by a spate of articles on the plight of the poor and the dangers of revolution that had appeared in The Month in the spring and summer of 1867. Recognizing the injustices of capitalism but fearful of socialism, Jesuit social critics argued that social problems would be solved only by the revival of a medieval “corporatist” economy.70 Frederick Hathaway described the destitution of the Irish poor and urged Catholics to redouble their charitable efforts. Henry Coleridge warned of the threat posed to society by a hungry underclass.71 Coleridge’s belief in the necessity of Catholic political involvement, both to protect the interests of the Church and to promote the social teachings of the gospels (as he interpreted them), was his single significant area of disagreement with his friend and mentor, John Henry Newman. The English Jesuits were more ambivalent in their response to Manning’s Ultramontane teachings on papal infallibility and the “vulgarity of national egotism.”72 Unlike other English Catholics, the Jesuits were exposed to cosmopolitan ideas by the presence of European professors at the Philosophate and by frequent influxes of refugees. In the second year of Hopkins’s novitiate, the Jesuits at Roehampton sheltered thirtyeight Italian scholastics, driven from Rome. Three years later, at Stonyhurst, Hopkins met a group of German exiles from Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.73 At the same time, the English Jesuits attempted to defuse Protestant prejudice by emphasizing their patriotism. Edward Cruise defined the atmosphere of Victorian Stonyhurst as “inescapably and almost aggressively English.”74 Even The Month, described by Mary

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Heimann as a “strongly pro-infallibilist journal,” bore a cover design of St. George and the Dragon.75 According to Christopher Hollis, the majority of English Jesuits supported a “moderate definition of infallibility.”76 Although Hopkins’s writings contain no clear statement of his stance on infallibility, a journal entry for December 1874 praises Manning’s defense of the Ultramontane position in The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance as “dignified throughout.”77 Hopkins’s interest in Manning’s political ideas would become apparent in The Wreck of the Deutschland. Zonneveld observes that “in the Wreck, the notions of Ultramontanism are not noticeably different from those which Manning voiced in his Vatican Decrees”78 The poem echoes the anti-German rhetoric of Manning’s “Caesarism and Ultramontanism” and “Christianism and Anti-Christianism,” two essays of 1874. Like Manning, Hopkins attributes Bismarck’s persecution of Catholics to the legacy of Luther, the “beast of the waste wood” (20). Using the doomed ship to represent the fate of a godless nation— “Deutschland, double a desperate name!” —Hopkins, echoing Manning’s predictions of an impending “time of Antichrist,” issues an apocalyptic warning to a “world wide of its good” (20). In the years following his conversion, Hopkins’s increasing sympathy with Ultramontanist social and political views was accompanied by a growing interest in pious legends, visions, and shrines. A journal entry for August 29, 1867, relates, with evident fascination, a tale from William Henderson’s recently published Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders in which an old woman is visited by a roomful of white doves with blood falling from their beaks, and then by a vision of Christ and his five wounds. Ten days later, Hopkins records a conversation with Kenelm Vaughan in which Vaughan, after telling a series of anecdotes about the extraordinary piety of the Italian poor, describes his own miraculous cure from consumption after drinking water from St. Winefred’s Well.79 Hopkins’s interest in miracles and shrines was shared by many of his Jesuit colleagues. In October 1870, his journal reports that a “wonderful aurora,” seen in the sky over Stonyhurst, was interpreted by the community “as a sign of God’s anger” at Garibaldi’s seizure of Rome. In 1872, he describes a visit by a group of Jesuits to a “bedridden factory girl at Preston who has been for years living on no food but the Blessed Sacrament, which she receives once a week.” On October 8, 1874, Hopkins and Barraud made an excursion from St. Beuno’s to St. Winefred’s Well. The reminder of Catholic tenacity and resilience offered by the “strong unfailing flow of the water” and the “chain of cures from year to year” left a lasting impression on the poet’s mind.80 Lists of texts read aloud in the refectories at Roehampton and Stonyhurst indicate that the theological training of Hopkins’s early Jesuit years was augmented by extensive readings from saints’ lives, martyrologies, and contemporary accounts of visions and miracles. Ultramontane devotional writings introduced Hopkins to a new spirituality in which ecstatic experience was valued more highly than intellectual assent. It was a spirituality that seemed to permit, and even encourage, the effusive emotionality that Newman held suspect and Hopkins had long endeavored to suppress. In a journal entry for December 1869, Hopkins describes his tearful response to a reading from Anne Catherine Emmerich’s Dolorous Passion: One day in the Long Retreat…they were reading in the refectory Sister Emmerich’s account of the Agony in the Garden and I suddenly began to cry and sob and could not stop…. I stood in a manner wondering at myself, not seeing in my reason the traces of an adequate cause for such strong emotion — the traces of it I say because of course the cause in itself is adequate for the sorrows of a lifetime.81 Emmerich was a nineteenth-century French stigmatic who claimed to have shared Christ’s passion and witnessed the main events of his life in a series of visions.82 The barely submerged eroticism of her

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descriptions of Christ’s physical sufferings had a cathartic effect upon Hopkins. Tears of recognition flowed with the “stress…and abundance” of a long pent-up underground spring.83 For the fiercely ascetic young Jesuit who had denied himself an artistic outlet because of “evil thoughts slightly in drawing a crucified arm,” and then made a bonfire of his verses out of fear that poetry, too, would “put a strain upon the passions which I shd. think it unsafe to encounter,”84 Anne Catherine Emmerich was “a sister calling.” She summoned Hopkins from his roots in English Puritanism and Calvinist iconomachy to a Catholic tradition of spousal mysticism and erotic religious art. To Hopkins, whose fear of the senses, and especially of visual delight, had driven him, only months earlier, to undertake a half-year penance of the eyes, Emmerich’s visions offered a new justification for looking: a promise of heaven for the purified gaze, the “single eye.” The French nun pointed Hopkins toward a new poetics and served as a model for the visionary heroine of The Wreck of the Deutschland. It was in the refectory at Roehampton that Hopkins first encountered the writings of a still more significant influence on his Ultramontanist poetic voice, Frederick Faber. A man of florid piety and a highly credulous approach to the miraculous, Faber was the author of eight devotional bestsellers published between 1853 and his death ten years later. His mission was to popularize the medieval and counterreformation mystics and to encourage the spread of Italian and French devotions. It was Faber who had introduced English Catholics to Emmerich’s Dolorous Passion in his spiritual treatise, The Foot of the Cross (1858). Faber’s impassioned preaching was described by Manning as “the overflow of a mind perpetually fed from its own inward sources, and pouring forth with an exuberance of which we have no known example.”85 Crowds flocked to hear him at the London Oratory. Like Manning, Faber was concerned about the problem of the working-class “leakage” from the faith. Arguing that “the solemn tones of the Divine Office, sung in choir” were less effective in reclaiming the illiterate than the “vernacular hymn set to the tune of a drinking song, or a procession with an image in petticoats,” his efforts to popularize piety sometimes went to unorthodox lengths. It was the Christian missionary’s duty, he claimed, “to get the masses to gather, to bring them within earshot of his vulgar sermons, to excite them to a feverish sorrow for sin by any spiritual claptrap he can hit upon.”86 Yet the appeal of Faber’s theatrical spirituality was not confined to the uneducated. The London Oratory attracted fashionable and aristocratic converts, among them the bestselling Catholic author, Lady Georgiana Fullerton. In All for Jesus, subtitled “The Easy Ways of Divine Love,” Faber promises to teach his genteel readers “a number of easy and interesting practices” which will enable them to serve “the interests of our dear Lord…in the pleasantest manner possible.” Saintliness, he reassures his “Poor Belgravians,” does not require asceticism: “I want to beguile you to serve Jesus out of love, and so I want you to enjoy yourselves and follow your bent in your devotions.”87 Although his effusiveness and sentimentality have not endeared him to most twentieth-century readers, Faber’s crucial role in shaping Victorian devotional culture should not be underestimated. His writings earned a wide readership among Catholics of all social classes. In an 1856 letter to Cardinal Wiseman, the Jesuit Provincial, Father Waterworth, had complained that Faber’s baroque spirituality caused him “much pain, much trouble and much anxiety.”88 Yet by the time Hopkins entered the Society of Jesus in 1868, Faber’s books were among the most popular choices of refectory reading. According to lists compiled by Alfred Thomas in Hopkins the Jesuit: The Years of Training, no fewer than five works by Faber were read aloud during Hopkins’s years at Roehampton and Stonyhurst. In the same period, readings from Manning comprised four or five tracts and pastoral letters. Only two sermons by Newman were chosen. Faber and his former mentor, John Henry Newman, represented the opposite extremes of Victorian Catholic devotional style. While Newman believed that piety could not be judged by outward signs and that “to be

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excited is not the ordinary state of mind, but the extraordinary, the now-and-then state,” Faber claimed, in the conclusion to Growth in Holiness, that “fervour is the state of the saints on earth…it ought to be the normal state of all who are aiming at perfection.”89 While Newman attributed his lack of devotional fervor to a “strange imprisonment, as if a chain were around my limbs and faculties, hin dering me doing more than a certain maximum,” and described himself as “an instrument which cannot be played on except in a certain way,” Faber assured the readers of All for Jesus that “moderation is baseness, fraud and infidelity where God is concerned.”90 Newman’s distaste for religious enthusiasm and his frequently expressed determination to “go by reason, not by feeling” in matters of faith were countered by Faber’s exclamation, in All for Jesus, that “it is just possible that enthusiasm may not be the monster evil of the world; or at least, we have not suffered much from its ravages here in England.”91 The few existing studies of Victorian Catholic influence in The Wreck of the Deutschland have focused on Hopkins’s response to Newman. Newman’s greater efforts to reach a non-Catholic audience, coupled with his outstanding gifts as a literary stylist, have ensured that he continues to be read, at least by scholars of the Victorian period, while the writings of his Catholic contemporaries are largely forgotten. Yet some of those other Catholic voices also contributed to Hopkins’s development as a religious poet, sometimes in ways that directly countered the influence of Newman. Michael Moore’s dissertation on Hopkins and Newman correctly claims that “Newman…was probably the first Catholic writer with whose books Hopkins became intimate. Initial impressions are lasting.” But his assertion that by 1875, Hopkins’s “analogical habits of mind were all the more attuned to Newman’s from having undergone years of wide Catholic study and training” is much more questionable.92 As we have seen, Hopkins’s Jesuit training brought him into contact with political ideas and devotional styles that were very different from those of his former mentor. Sjaak Zonneveld’s recent exploration of Hopkins’s social thought, The Random Grim Forge, is the first study to acknowledge The Wreck’s allusions to political writings by Manning. Hopkins’s affinities with Faber and the numerous echoes of Faber’s Ultramontane spirituality in The Wreck of the Deutschland have been almost entirely ignored.93 Hopkins resembled Faber in many aspects of his history and temperament. Both Hopkins and Faber combined willful individualism with a deep craving for paternal authority. Both men were converted by Newman and began their Catholic lives at the Birmingham Oratory. Both rejected Newman’s conciliatory politics and devotional restraint. Both were strongly attracted to the “yoke of St. Ignatius,” although only Hopkins proved willing to bear it.94 Both Faber and Hopkins were more interested in religious experience than in intellectual assents. Both men were poets who struggled to reconcile their literary interests with their religious lives.95 Both battled to suppress and sublimate erotic impulses toward other males.96 Both viewed their relationship with Christ as a passionate affair of the heart. After Faber’s death, his Anglican brother, Frank, recalled his “unusually affectionate” nature and a “disposition to overcolour which affected him through life.”97 He might have been describing Hopkins. There was much to attract Hopkins in Faber’s spirituality. In The Creator and Creature, a book chosen for refectory reading at Roehampton in December 1869, and again in 1873, Faber expresses an appreciation of the natural world which contrasts sharply with Newman’s almost gnostic contempt for creation and foreshadows the exuberance of Hopkins’s Welsh sonnets: The inanimate and irrational creatures glorify God by the very splendour of the beauty in which He has clothed them…. Their abundance in their kinds, and their many kinds,…is another glory of their Creator, by being in some sort a picture of His copious magnificence. They glorify Him, also, by bearing on themselves the seal and signet of his Divinity, and even of His Trinity in Unity, and their degree of goodness depends on the degree in which they adumbrate the divine perfections.98

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More than two decades before Hopkins’s discovery of the “Subtle Doctor,” Faber had found theological support for his romantic view of nature in the writings of Duns Scotus. It is possible that Hopkins’s own interest in the thirteenth-century Franciscan was first aroused by the Scotist thesis of The Creator and Creature. Scotus, an opponent of Aquinas, had argued that individual substances make up one vast hierarchy of being with the incarnate Christ at their summit. His belief that the Incarnation was planned before the creation of man and was primarily an expression of God’s love rather than a necessary act of redemption, conferred upon nature a sacramental value that legitimized the convert poets’ Wordsworthian impulse to see “God’s perfections…everywhere written in hieroglyphs over the world.”99 Scotus’s argument that every creature possesses a unique character (haecceitas), but all partake of the univocity of Being allowed Faber and Hopkins to revel in nature’s abundance and variety as expressions of a creator “past change.”100 The theology of Duns Scotus also offered support for Faber and Hopkins in their emphasis on the role of the affective will in religious assent. As Rudolf Otto points out in The Idea of the Holy, Scotus battled for the “God of ‘willing,’ as opposed to the God of ‘being,’ and for the validity of volition as an essential in religion, as opposed to cognition.”101 Faber echoes Scotus, in his insistence, in The Creator and Creature, that “rational creation” does not simply know God by intellection but “by its will it loves Him, and with its love enjoys Him.” Hopkins’s 1881 essay, “On Personality, Grace and Free Will,” also pursues the Scotist argument that God’s gift of grace must be freely accepted by the arbtirium, or will: For there must be something which shall truly be the creature’s in the work of corresponding with grace: this is the arbitrium, the verdict on God’s side, the saying Yes, the ‘doing-agree’ (to speak barbarously)….102 Hopkins’ own “verdict on God’s side” is dramatized in the second stanza of The Wreck of the Deutschland: I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod; Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God… By the time he began work on The Wreck in December 1875, Hopkins was acquainted with the writing of Duns Scotus at first hand. A journal entry for August 1872 records his discovery of Scotus’s Scriptum Oxoniense super Sententiis in the Badeley library at Stonyhurst. Hopkins describes his find as “a mercy from God” and comments that he was “flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm.” An 1873 journal entry refers to a Scotist conversation, apparently one of many, with a jesuit colleague, Herbert Lucas. In 1874, Hopkins records a visit to the London Oratory and discussions with David Lewis and Brande Morris, whom he supposed to be “the only two Scotists in England.”103 Both men had been friends and associates of Frederick Faber. Faber’s influence on The Wreck of the Deutschland is evident in the heightened emotional tone of the poem’s very first stanzas. Although Hopkins insisted to Bridges that “what refers to myself in the poem is all strictly and literally true,”104 The Wreck’s account of his conversion differs markedly from his descriptions of the same event ten years earlier. In his letters of 1865–66, Hopkins had presented his religious change as a gradual process of self-discovery and deepening assent to Catholic dogma patterned on Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. In The Wreck of the Deutschland, conversion is God’s sudden, violent, once-and-for-all interruption of human space and time:

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Thou knowest the wall, altar and hour and night: The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod Hard down with a horror of height: And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.(2) Michael Moore has argued that Newman’s influence on Hopkins’s poetry is most clearly manifested in “motifs of personal trial and conversion, in the psychology of religious belief”105 In my view, the very opposite is true. It is in his representation of religious experience that Hopkins shows the most affinity with Newman’s Ultramontane opponents. In “The Blissful Agony of Hopkins: Notes of a Neo-Reactionary,” Trevor McNeely comments that Hopkins’s aesthetic is “emotional rather than intellectual.” He aptly observes that Hopkins is attracted to “spiritual violence” and links him stylistically, and even morally, with the “baroque eccentricities of younger contemporaries like Francis Thompson and Lionel Johnson.”106 However, McNeely fails to recognize that all three writers were influenced by the mid-century excesses of Faber. The erotically charged language of the opening stanzas of The Wreck is quite unlike anything written by Newman but bears close resemblances to Faber’s accounts of spiritual struggle. In an 1846 letter to M.Watts Russell, Faber describes a “swoon of the heart” which followed several weeks of soul-searching over his possible Jesuit vocation: The unbroken silence and the long hours of solitary meditation of the Retreat have been more than I could bear; and I suffered considerable mental anguish in my general confession, and an intensity of doubt, terror and uncertainty about my present vocation, and as to whether I was not called to be Jesuit. I am afraid therefore that I shall shock you little when I say that after battling with a burning brain all yesterday, I took to bed,…my whole body was paralysed but my head…. I received absolution and extreme unction, and lay in the arms of God in excessive happiness; from this it was His Will that I should recover, for after half an hour or so I got life back, and then was convulsively paralysed, all but my head; my mind was clear and calm…. I seemed to pass thro’ death. God was all around: I was inexpressively happy, till I heard an inward voice…say I was to return to life; and I mourned… Oh! The happiness of being a Catholic!107 For Hopkins and Faber, God is encountered through physical sensations and affective states. In The Wreck of the Deutschland, God’s continuing presence is expressed through the medium of touch: “Over again I feel thy finger and find thee” (1). In The Creator and Creature, Faber describes the “close embrace and tingling presence of His omnipotence.”108 Both Hopkins and Faber describe emotions of fear and dependence evoked by direct experience of God and by contemplation of “the dread exorbitance of His sovereignty, the realities of His minute vigilance,…of His particular providence, of His hourly interference.”109 Although religious experience may lead to intellectual insights and rational assents, the single, necessary response to the workings of grace, as Faber and Hopkins stress repeatedly, is the voluntary submission of the human will, the “saying Yes.” In The Idea of the Holy, Otto argues that the “deepest and most fundamental element in all strong and sincerely felt religious emotion” is a sense of awe and dread that he names “mysterium tremendum.” Otto observes that, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, such emotions are often inspired by Old Testament accounts of the “wrath of Yahweh.” The wrath of the Hebrew God, Otto notes, often has no concern with “moral qualities”; it is “incalculable and arbitrary” like “stored up electricity discharging itself upon anyone who comes too near.” Human experience of “mysterium tremendum” penetrates “to the very marrow, making

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the man’s hair bristle and his limbs quake.” Awareness of God’s awful power leads to “creatureconsciousness,” feelings of “submergence” and “nothingness” which recur in all forms of mysticism everywhere.”110 It is this “creature-consciousness” which Faber and Hopkins sought to revive among Victorian Catholics through their accounts of personal struggle with a “mastering” God. The religious experience described by Hopkins in the earliest stanzas of The Wreck of the Deutschland conforms closely to Otto’s definition of “mysterium tremendum.” The Wreck’s opening lines are a declaration of absolute submission to a God who is both creator and destroyer: Thou mastering me ...................................... Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing… Later in the poem, Hopkins attempts to evoke the same emotion in his readers by describing God’s seemingly arbitrary explosion of wrath in the storm and the wreck. Following Faber’s efforts to translate theology into popular forms, Hopkins endeavors to manipulate his audience through the familiar iconography of contemporary ballads and sentimental verse. His account of the shipwreck shares many features of Longfellow’s immensely popular “The Wreck of the Hesperus” (1839) and echoes some of the more sentimental passages of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, employing crude personifications and heavy use of assonance and internal rhyme: Hope had grown gray hairs, Hope had mourning on, Trenched with tears, carved with cares, Hope was twelve hours gone; And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day.(15) Yet although Hopkins deliberately draws on popular literature for much of the language and tone of his account of the wreck, the poem never loses sight of its didactic purpose. By interrupting the narrative of human tragedy to express his own awed acceptance of providential design, Hopkins seeks to direct and shape the response of his readers: “I admire thee, master of the tides,/Of the Yore-flood, of the year’s fall” (32). Hopkins’s own surrender to his “adored King” (10) is echoed and magnified in the tall nun’s call to Christ to “come quickly” (24); both actions model the submission to a Catholic God and his Infallible Church which Hopkins longs to see in Britain. Hopkins was not alone in his call for a renewed recognition of God’s mastery. Victorian Catholics of all shades of political opinion agreed that failure to acknowledge divine sovereignty was the besetting heresy of the age. Newman’s sermons, both Tractarian and Roman Catholic, repeatedly emphasized God’s majesty and warned of the consequences of human pride. In “Omnipotence in Bonds,” he reminded his congregation of their dependence upon on all-powerful God: “He can make, He can unmake, He can decree and bring to pass, He can direct, control and resolve, absolutely according to His Will.”111 In “Tolerance of Religious Error,” he called for a return to “knowing the terror of the Lord” and “proclaiming His wrath as a real characteristic of His glorious nature.”112 To Manning, for whom God’s will was expressed through his Infallible Church, the conflict of national governments with the papacy was a collective return to the first

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disobedience, willful human challenge to the sovereignty of God. In “Caesarism and Ultramontanism,” he argued that “the antagonist of the Church has always been Caesarism, or the supremacy of the civil over the spiritual” because “it puts man in the place of God as the supreme legislator, the fountain of authority, liberty, law, and right.”113 Faber, like Manning, attributed nationalist assaults upon the temporal power of the papacy to a widespread human disregard for God’s sovereignty: “Since the balance of power was substituted for the central unity of the Holy See, we have come more and more to act as if the world belonged to us.” He complained that “ideas of liberty, progress, independence, social contracts, representative government, and the like colour our views of God,” creating a tendency “to turn religion into a contract between parties” and to “revolt from any appearance of exclusiveness, supreme will and unaccountable irresponsibility, which there may be in His conduct toward us.” Commenting on the widespread acceptance of humanism, even among his co-religionists, he lamented that “theories of progress and perfectability throw so much dust in their eyes, they do not see that they are creatures.” In Faber’s view, contemporary literature served only to encourage myths of man’s self-sufficiency: “subordination and a subject spirit are not virtues, neither in works of fiction do the meek inherit the earth.” He complained that “in our poetry” man is everywhere “his own end, and the master if his own destiny…. There is neither wreck nor ruin about him.”114 Yet Faber differed from Newman and Manning in his seemingly greater confidence that the rise of secular humanism could be checked. For Newman, the tide of secularism could be held back only by “real” and individual assents to Catholic dogma, one soul at a time.115 For Manning, the political events of the age heralded the apocalypse. In an 1871 article in The Tablet, “The Pontificate of Pius IX,” he described the nineteenth-century as “the century of revolution, the century of the upheaving, the shaking and dissolving of the foundations of Christian society” (772). Faber, writing in the heady years immediately following the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy, expressed assurance that a renewed emphasis on miracles, prophecies, and other supernatural elements in popular religion would rekindle the fervor of English Catholics and add converts to their numbers. In The Creator and Creature, Faber identified “two views of the world which the Christian may take”: the “gloomy view” and the “bright view.” While supporters of the first view regard the world as “irredeemably lost,” proponents of the second see “all creation lying before them with God’s benediction on it.” While those who hold the “gloomy view” serve God primarily out of fear and duty, the “bright view” inspires a “personal love” for the Creator. Faber explicitly associated the “bright view” of religion with support for Ultramontane preoccupations such as saints’ lives, “miracles…popular devotions…apparitions, pilgrimages, taking vows, and other supernatural things.”116 Faber’s optimistic spirituality reflected a widespread change in religious sensibility in nineteenth-century Europe. Catholic preoccupations with God’s sovereignty and power were increasingly accompanied by emphasis on the loving and nurturing aspects of the divine, expressed by Christ and through the intercession of Mary. Ralph Gibson traces a gradual change in nineteenth-century Catholicism from a “religion of fear” to a “religion of God’s love.” Thomas Kselman describes “the sentimentalization of Catholic piety, and a particular emphasis on affective bonds between the devotee and the object of his or her devotion.” Ultramontane interest in affective spirituality brought about a rediscovery and popularization of the medieval and counter-reformation mystics, particularly those who claimed to have experienced Christ’s tenderness and mercy. In Spiritual Conferences, Faber declared that “there is something vulgar and plebeian in ascetical books; we must have the larger, more airy, less regimental system of the mystics.”117 Faber’s All for Jesus, a bestselling devotional manual for adherents of the “bright” view of Christianity, drew on the teachings of the mystics to provide readers with examples of joyful piety.

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Faber was instrumental in introducing English Catholics to Ultramontane devotions to Christ’s Sacred Heart. In Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, Mary Heimann comments on the increasing emphasis on reparations to the Sacred Heart in Catholic prayerbooks and manuals of devotion from about 1875. Manning published his Glories of the Sacred Heart in 1875, the year in which Hopkins began The Wreck of the Deutschland. The Sacred Heart was venerated as the source of divine compassion and the last recourse of sinners. Heimann attributes the English popularity of this devotion to the acute scrupulosity that seems to have been characteristic of many Victorian Catholic converts.118 The coupling of apocalyptic anxiety about personal and collective sin with florid and sentimental devotion to Christ, Mary, and the saints is responsible for the manic-depressive temper of much Victorian Catholic spirituality, including that of Hopkins himself. The Wreck of the Deutschland is structured by multiple oppositions: the tempestuous North Sea and pastoral Wales, shipwreck and harvest, apostasy and faith, God’s “mastery” and God’s merciful love. While The Wreck’s depiction of God’s mastery reflects a variety of Victorian Catholic influences, the poem’s assurances of God’s ultimate mercy contain direct echoes of Faber’s affective and optimistic spirituality. The early stanzas of The Wreck employ language of a concentrated and explosive intensity to describe a wrathful God who batters hearts to submis sion with “lightning and lashed rod” (20) and enacts vengeance on the faithless by flood, tempest and “white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow” (13). This early emphasis on the frowning “face” (3) of God has encouraged critics to identify the poem’s mood as “apocalyptic” and “calamitarian.”119 Yet such readings over-emphasize the poem’s dark side and neglect the powerful consolations offered by Hopkins in The Wreck’s resolution. The poem’s shift from a “gloomy” to a “bright” view of God’s relations with humankind begins with a seemingly insignificant reference to the thirteenth-century mystic, Gertrude of Helfta, in stanza 20. Hopkins draws on erroneous biographical information to claim that Gertrude and Martin Luther were “two of a town,” both natives of Eisleben in Saxony. In fact, Gertrude’s birthplace is unknown; Hopkins’s sources confused Gertrude the mystic with another Helfta nun, the Abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn. At first reading, Gertrude’s significance in The Wreck of the Deutschland seems slight: Gertrude, “Christ’s lily,” and Luther, “the beast of the waste wood,” are but one among many structuring oppositions in Hopkins’s ode. Yet an examination of the saint’s role in the devotional writings of Faber, coupled with evidence of Hopkins’s attentive reading of her Life and Revelations at about the same time as his composition of The Wreck, suggests that the reference to Gertrude marks a pivotal point in the poem. For Victorian Catholic readers, Gertrude’s presence in The Wreck of the Deutschland would have signaled Hopkins’s Ultramontane allegiances and provided powerful clues for interpreting the experience of the tall nun. It is Gertrude of Helfta who provides the spiritual antidote to The Wreck’s calamitarian mood. The reference to Gertrude in stanza 20 initiates a slow shift in the poem’s emphasis from mastery to mercy. The stanzas immediately following are strewn with echoes of the saint’s characteristic sweetness: “dearest” (22), “loveable” (24), “lovely” (25), and “heaven of desire” (26). After the introduction of Gertrude, “Christ’s lily” (20), “storm flakes” become a bridal bouquet of “lily showers” (21) and beyond the “hurling and horrible airs” (15) we glimpse “sweet heaven” (21). Gertrude’s is the shape that looms behind the later stanzas of The Wreck of the Deutschland, providing a model for the visionary nun and embodying Hopkins’s attempt to impose a pattern of consolation on the apparent chaos and tragedy of the Deutschland’s foundering. Gertrude of Helfta, who was born in 1256 and died in 1302, belonged to a Benedictine convent famous for its scholars and mystics. Among her contemporaries were Mechthild of Hackeborn, author of The Book of Special Grace, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, who described her mystical experiences in The Flowing Light of the Godhead.120 Gertrude’s particular appeal for Victorian Catholics may be attributed at least in part

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to the ready conformity of her spousal spirituality with the nineteenth-century ideal of feminine domesticity and piety. While her near contemporaries, such as Hildegard von Bingen, used the visionary stance to offer opinions on public events and criticism of Church officials, Gertrude’s spirituality was affective and domesticated, focusing on personal intimacy with Christ. Christ appeared to her first as “a youth of sixteen years, beautiful and amiable” and afterwards as a loving spouse.121 The primary emphasis in Gertrude’s spirituality was on divine compassion. Her deepest devotion was to the Second Person of the Trinity and especially to Christ’s heart, in which his human and divine natures are joined in hypostatic union. Gertrude’s Life and Revelations recounts an experience of union with Christ by means of a golden tube issuing from his heart to hers. Christ explains to the saint that creatures are drawn to God by the Sacred Heart.122 Although the formal practice of devotion to the Sacred Heart was initiated in the seventeenth century by St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, Gertrude’s role in the prehistory of this devotion was a significant cause of her popularity with Ultramontane Catholics. Faber’s frequent references to Gertrude in his best-selling devotional primers established the saint as an important icon in Victorian Catholic religion of the heart and an exponent of the “bright view” of Christianity. In All for Jesus, Faber used Gertrude to exemplify the rapturous personal relationship with Christ for which every devout soul should strive. Faber praised the “liberty of spirit” that enabled Gertrude to put her whole faith in Christ’s loving kindness rather than in legalistic devotional formulae. He recounted the endearments exchanged between Gertrude and Christ in tones of reverence and awe and seemed to feel no discomfort in citing highly erotic passages such as that in which Christ presses Gertrude to his side as “soothing ointment for His wounds.”123 All for Jesus invited English Catholics to make Gertrude a subject of “special study.”124 The popularity of Faber’s book created demand for an English edition of Gertrude’s writings. The Life and Revelations of St. Gertrude, Virgin and Abbess of the Order of St Benedict was translated in 1865 by an Irish order of Poor Clares. It is likely that Hopkins’s first encounter with Gertrude was mediated by Faber. In The Creator and Creature, a book with which, as we have seen, Hopkins was certainly familiar, Faber draws on the writings of Gertrude to illustrate Christ’s compassion for sinners at the hour of death: Listen to this beautiful story from the revelations of St. Gertrude. She heard the preacher in a sermon urge most strongly the absolute obligation of dying persons to love God and repent of their sins with true contrition founded on the motive of love. She thought it a hard saying…and she murmured within herself that if so pure a love were needed, few indeed died well. But God Himself vouchsafed to speak to her and dispel her trouble. He said that in the last conflict, if the dying were persons who had ever tried to please Him and live good lives, He disclosed Himself to them as so infinitely beautiful and desirable, that love of Him penetrated into the innermost recesses of their souls, so that they made acts of true contrition from the very force of their love of Him.125 During his period of study at St. Beuno’s, probably within a year of beginning The Wreck, Hopkins attempted a verse paraphrase of the same passage from Gertrude: To him who ever thought with love of me Or ever did for my sake some good deed I will appear, looking such charity And kind compassion at his life’s last need That he will out of hand and heartily

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Repent he sinned and all his sins be freed.126 The Poor Clares’ translation of Gertrude’s Life and Revelations was available to Hopkins in the library at St. Beuno’s.127 Indeed, his mistaken belief that Gertrude and Luther shared the same birthplace, an error that proved fortunate for the shaping of The Wreck of the Deutschland, was derived from incorrect information in the early pages of this edition. However, Hopkins’s initial interest in the writing of Gertrude and especially in her revelation about final contrition was almost certainly inspired by readings of Faber’s Creator and Creature in the refectory at Roehampton. Gertrude’s reassuring message of Christ’s compassion for sinners must have soothed Hopkins’s fears that his unconverted family, friends and compatriots were headed for perdition. While many of his Catholic contemporaries were willing to follow Manning’s advice to detach themselves from the “sinking wreck” of secular society, Hopkins’s intense patriotism caused him persistent worry over the fate of his countrymen.128 In The Wreck of the Deutschland, the poet’s heart bleeds for the “comfortless unconfessed” (31) among the ship-wreck’s victims and, by implication, among the Protestant population of Britain. The fate of the German ship— “Deutschland, double a desperate name!” (20)–is clearly intended to serve as a warning to anti-Catholic nations. Hopkins’s desire to shock his compatriots into conversion and thus to make of the “shipwreck” a “harvest” (31) would have been encouraged by a passage in Gertrude’s Life and Revelations, in which Christ explains his refusal to answer the saint’s prayer for good weather during a tempest: “I design by the terrors of this tempest to conquer some who rebel against My will, and at least to oblige them to seek Me by prayer, since they only come to Me when they have no other resource.”129(23). Although Hopkins plainly intended his grim narrative of the wreck to be a warning to Protestant Britons, it was not primarily by threats that he sought to “startle the poor sheep back” (31). Instead he made use of Gertrude’s association with visionary and spousal mysticism to support his claim that the tall nun was visited by an apparition of Christ. Gertrude’s Life and Revelations records that at the hour of her death, “our Divine Lord appeared to St. Gertrude under the form of a spouse of exceeding beauty, and extended His arms to her, as if to invite her to Himself?’ In The Wreck of the Deutschland, Hopkins claims that the tall nun’s cry, “O Christ, Christ come quickly” (24) was prompted by a vision of Jesus coming to her across the waters and that her final moments were spent in blissful union with him. He speculates that the appearance of Christ to the nun might also be a gift of “lovely felicitous Providence” (31) to the Deutschland’s other passengers. He conjectures that her ecstatic cries might “be a bell” to call the “comfortless unconfessed” to answer their lives’ last need and making of the “shipwreck” a “harvest” (31). The conquering Christ of The Wreck’s resolution is a “rose,” a “prince,” and a “hero” who bears more resemblance to the “beautiful and amiable” youth of Gertrude’s visions than to the stern “master” of the poem’s early stanzas. Choosing Faber’s “easy ways of divine love,” and seeming to draw on Gertrude’s experience rather than his own, the conversion Hopkins envisages for his fellow countrymen is not a “lightning of fire hard-hurled,” but the more “kind” and temperate baptism of a “released shower” (34). The tall nun’s experience of Christ at the moment of her death is the climax of Hopkins’s narrative. From this miraculous union, the poet fervently hopes will come the miraculous reunion of “rare-dear Britain” (35) with the Church of Rome. Yet, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its overarching significance, the precise character of the nun’s experience is not explained. The poet projects himself into the nun’s consciousness— “make me room there” (28)—but, when he is confronted with the Incarnate Word, words fail him and syntax falls apart. The fractured language of The Wreck’s climax has left many readers uncertain whether to interpret the nun’s experience as a natural, though grace-filled, moment of intellectual and emotional recognition— “heart-throe, birth of a brain” (30)—or as a miraculous apparition.

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Proponents of the apparition theory argue that the ambiguous “it” of stanza 28 refers to “the Master,/Ipse, the only one, Christ,” crossing the waters to claim the nun. In The Dragon in the Gate, Elisabeth Schneider insists that the drift of this stanza…clearly is that the nun saw Christ’s very self; and it seems to me equally clear that what is implied is a supernatural event, not an ambiguous ‘Vision’ or a hallucination. If it were either of these, the preceding stanzas would be an absurd building up to an anticlimax and much that follows would be pointless or very nearly meaningless.130 Schneider finds additional textual support for her reading in Hopkins’s statement that the tall nun had “one fetch in her” (19). She points to Hopkins’s use of the word, “fetch,” in an archaic sense meaning “to call up spirits,” in an 1881 meditation on the Apocalypse: “At any rate, I suppose the vision of the preg nant woman to have been no mere vision but the real fetching, presentment or ‘adduction’ of the persons, Christ and Mary, themselves.”131 Schneider’s interpretation of the tall nun’s experience, difficult as it has been for subsequent readers to accept, becomes more plausible when The Wreck is examined in a Victorian Catholic context. Hopkins’s Ultramontane contemporaries were highly receptive to accounts of supernatural occurrences. Nineteenthcentury Catholics encountered and conversed with apparitions in extraordinary numbers. The celebrated appearances of the Virgin Mary at La Salette (1846), Lourdes (1858), Pompeii (1871), and Knock (1879) are remembered because they received official endorsement from Rome. Hundreds of other such sightings did not. Apparitions seem to have been a symptom of popular Catholic reaction against political and economic upheaval. In Germany, a spate of Marian apparitions and other miraculous events followed Bismarck’s antiCatholic Falck Laws.132 Ultramontane clergy were well aware of the power of visions and apparitions to strengthen popular piety. In England, Manning encouraged pilgrimages to the French apparition sites and Faber’s devotional works displayed a seemingly limitless credulity towards both medieval and contemporary accounts of supernatural occurrences. Even Newman conceded that miracles can happen “in any age of the Church, though not for the same purposes, or in the same number, or with the same evidences, as in Apostolic times.133 As we have seen, Hopkins’s own fascination with reports of supernatural events is recorded in numerous journal entries and letters from his Jesuit years. Hopkins’s interest in the miraculous, and that of his Catholic contemporaries, was perhaps less a symptom of credulity than an act of defiance. In arguing for divine intervention in the life of an anonymous Franciscan nun, a refugee from the Falck Laws, Hopkins defied both German persecution and British indifference. His representation of the tall nun as a visionary and a mystic upheld the value of individual religious experience in a gesture of resistance to an increasingly rationalistic and secular European culture. Yet Hopkins’s claims for the tall nun were controversial even within a Victorian Catholic context. His interpretation of the nun’s behavior was at odds not only with reports in the secular press but also with the Church’s version of events, voiced by Cardinal Manning at the funeral mass. Manning had contradicted claims in The Daily News that the nuns were “terror-stricken” by asserting that the “good sisters were so resigned in the tranquility of their confidence in God that they showed not the smallest sign of agitation or fear.”134 While Manning’s funeral oration represented the nuns as virgin-martyrs, dwelling on the resistless serenity of the five corpses in their lily-strewn coffins, Hopkins, inspired by his readings of the medieval mystics, favored a more active model of female spirituality. The tall nun is a “lioness” and a “prophetess” (17). She is no exemplar of resignation but an active intercessor on behalf of endangered souls.

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In his study of conflicting reports of the wreck, Philip Martin surmises that Manning’s account was “largely the product of a devout imagination.”135 So, too, was that of Hopkins. Indeed, in stanza 24 of The Wreck, the poet concedes that during the nuns’ last agony, he was “away in the loveable west,/On a pastoral forehead of Wales.” All his information about the fate of the Deutschland and her passengers was obtained from newspaper cuttings sent by his mother. Hopkins’s journals suggest that he was an occasional recipient of private revelations. During the Long Retreat in 1873, he records that his prayers were answered with “a great mercy about Dolben.”136 Perhaps he also had a revelation about the fate of the tall nun. More probably, Hopkins’s retelling of the events of the wreck was an attempt to “make capital” of the tragedy as a means of strengthening faith and stimulating conversions. Like Faber, he had great faith in the power of “miracles,…apparitions,…and other supernatural things” to bring about conversions. In an 1879 sermon on the healing of Jairus’s daughter, Hopkins explains that “what Christ aimed at in his miracles was to breed faith in him or it being bred to nurse it…both in the receiver of the miracle and in all who should witness it or hear of it”137 In making the tall nun’s miraculous vision the subject of his ode, Hopkins intends to “breed” or “nurse” the faith of his readers. Although the religious experiences described in The Wreck of the Deutschland are intimate and personal, the poem’s deepest concerns are public and communal. In The Wreck’s closing stanzas, Hopkins utters his understanding that the mystery of “Our passion-plunged giant risen” (33) operates throughout human history and not merely in his own conversion or in the epiphany of the dying nun. The visionary sister is now a guardian of England’s shores. Hopkins, speaking as a priest and representing the English Catholic community, calls upon her to intercede with Christ for the conversion of the entire nation: Dame, at our door Drowned, and among out shoals, Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the reward: Our King back, Oh, upon English souls! Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimsoncresseted east, More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls, Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest, Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord. (35) In The Wreck’s dizzy and breathless final stanza, Hopkins’s competing vocations of priest and poet are fleetingly reconciled. The poem that began with Hopkins’s conversion ends with his triumphant conflation of bardic and sacerdotal authority. Yet, even as he was writing it, Hopkins must have recognized The Wreck’s audacity. Two years later, he would tell Dixon that The Month “dared” not print his poem.138 The explosive intensity of The Wreck of the Deutschland is caused by multiple collisions, among which that of the ship and the sandbank sometimes seems a mere bump in the night. Fittingly, in a poem that urges us to confront our human powerlessness, only some of The Wreck’s colliding forces are under Hopkins’s conscious control. Chief among the many oppositions that structure the poem is the tension between self-effacement and exuberant self-assertion in the poet’s voice. Hopkins began The Wreck with vaunting ambition, eager to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy by using his poetic gifts to further the Roman cause. After seven years of self-imposed silence, words “gather[ed] to a greatness” and burst from him like juice from a “lush-kept

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plush-capped sloe” (8), like water from an underground spring, like the tears that had surprised him when he first heard Sister Emmerich’s account of Gethsemane and that melted him again when he began to write about the tall nun. Ignoring Newman’s pronouncement that Catholic writers should aim at “edification,” paying attention to composition “only so far forth as the style is necessary to convey and recommend the matter,” Hopkins put his words to a new rhythm that had long been “haunting” his ear. Sprung rhythm, which Hopkins would assure Bridges was “the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms,’ was not an innovation but a return to origins; it was the rhythm of Chaucer and Piers Ploughman, of Pre-Reformation English verse.139 Just as Hopkins’s poem called for a return to medieval faith, long hidden but never extinguished, like St. Winefred’s Well, so in his prosody he sought to return to the accents of PreReformation England.140 Unlike Newman, who argued that “we have well nigh seen the end of English classics,” Hopkins, in the heady days of The Wreck’s conception, seems to have believed that English Catholic poetry could drink again from the language’s very source.141 Soon after the composition of The Wreck, Hopkins’s nerve failed him. Perhaps it was a moment of shock, perhaps a “lingering-out” (10) process of recognition. By the time he sent the poem to Henry Coleridge, he was already on the defensive. Hopkins recoiled from the audacity of his claims for the tall nun and from his own grandiose ambitions. The miracle that was to have prompted Britain’s conversion was told ambiguously so that only sympathetic souls would understand. Hopkins would explain to Bridges that he “was not over-desirous that the meaning of all should be quite clear, at least unmistakable.”142 The poem lays a trail of clues, a series of allusion to scripture and devo tional texts, designed to be read by a Catholic audience who, like the tall nun herself, knew how to “read the unshapeable shock night” and recognize “the who and the why” (29). The Wreck of the Deutschland postulates an ideal Catholic reader who combines detailed knowledge of scripture and theology with openness to miraculous claims and avant-garde prosody. Few such readers could have existed in the Society of Jesus or anywhere else in Victorian England. Hopkins’s eccentric diction and his use of sprung rhythm would have deterred even the most highbrow secular audience. His Catholic contemporaries, although by no means hostile to literature, were admittedly conservative in matters of style. In spite of Hopkins’s claim that sprung rhythm was “the native and natural rhythm of speech,” to readers of The Dream of Gerontius, The Wreck was poetry in an alien tongue. In the end, Hopkins’s attempt to win souls to the Ultramontanist Catholic cause failed even to reach the converted. Like the tall nun, Hopkins had only “one fetch” (19) in him. His Miltonic effort to “rear” himself to “divine ears” and “call” to his fellow countrymen “over the storm’s brawling” (19) was not repeated. Never again would Hopkins reach for the triumphant public vision of The Wreck’s final stanzas. In a second shipwreck poem, “The Loss of the Eurydice,” he looks backward to a lost age when England was “so at home” to Christ’s “truth and grace” (100), but offers little comfort to his “fast foundering own generation” (88). Hopkins’s triumphs, from now on, would be the private epiphanies of a “heart in hiding.” Reverting to the Puritanism of his earliest Jesuit years, he grew increasingly suspicious of his creative impulse. In an 1881 letter to Bridges, Hopkins offered a mature reappraisal of his shipwreck poems: “I think the best lines in the Deutschland are better than the best in the other. One may be biased in favour of one’s firstborn though. There are some immaturities in it I should never be guilty of now.”143 Robert Boyle speculates, in “‘Man Jack the Man is’: The Wreck from the Perspective of The shepherd’s brow’,” that one of the “immaturities” to which Hopkins refers may have been his willingness to present himself “as an object of heroic stature, a character, really, in the inspired epic of a Catholic Milton.”144 Writing on the Apocalypse later in the same year, Hopkins described the song of Lucifer as “an instressing of his own inscape,…a hymn in his own praise.”145 His late sonnets articulate the fear that all poetry is a product of the self’s echo chamber in which “selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe and shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in

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groans grind” (“Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” 14). Be it the heady wine of self-celebration or the acid of selfcontempt, self-taste is always on the poet’s tongue. The Wreck of the Deutschland had seemed to celebrate the subjugation of self; the opening line made clear that the “me,” though still potent, bows to the mastering “Thou.” Yet, by the second stanza, the self is reasserted as protagonist: “I did say yes/O at lightning and lashed rod.” Hopkins’s late sonnet, “Carrion Comfort” recoils from The Wreck’s self-congratulatory tone, concluding bleakly that the poem’s real hero was not Christ, after all, but “me that fought him” (13).

CHAPTER THREE “These things were here and but the beholder wanting” Hopkins’s Nature Sonnets and the Victorian Catholic Response to Evolution

Throughout the summer of 1876, Hopkins waited, with fading hopes, for the Month to publish his Wreck of the Deutschland. His anxiety overshadowed the season’s modest literary successes. In July, he contributed three poems, in English, Latin, and Welsh, to an album presented by the Jesuits of St. Beuno’s to Bishop Brown of Shrewsbury on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his consecration.1 The Bishop arrived at St. Beuno’s on Hopkins’s birthday, July 28, and stayed to celebrate the Feast of St. Ignatius on July 31. On the final evening of the visit, Hopkins’s “Silver Jubilee” was performed after dinner by the St. Beuno’s choir. Gerard reported to his father that the poem had been “set effectively by a very musical and very noisy member of the community and was sung as a glee.”2 At the Bishop’s request, Hopkins’s poem was included in a commemorative pamphlet printed by Burns and Oates, Britain’s largest Catholic publishers. “The Silver Jubilee” was the first work Hopkins had published since his conversion and the only Catholic poem he would ever see in print. He would later disparage the poem to Bridges as a “popular” piece “in which I feel myself to come short,” although he conceded that it “hit the mark it aims at without any wrying.”3 “The Silver Jubilee” and its companion pieces, “Ad Episcopum Salopsiensem” and “Cywydd,” are interesting chiefly as indicators of a new direction in Hopkins’s poetry after The Wreck of the Deutschland. The Jubilee poems suggest that even before the disappointment of The Wreck’s rejection, Hopkins was beginning to retreat from the mood of Ultramontanist optimism which had suffused that poem’s exultant conclusion. While The Wreck had echoed the triumphalist rhetoric of Cardinal Wiseman’s “Letter from the Flaminian Gate” and Faber’s All for Jesus in its vision of a Catholic future for “rare-dear Britain” (stanza 35), the Jubilee poems look back over the twenty-five years since the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy and take a more melancholy view of the Church’s actual achievements. The low rate of conversions among the Welsh and the apathetic response, even by Catholics, to Bishop Brown’s Jubilee provoke the first stirrings of a strain of pessimism that would soon lead Hopkins to bitter denunciations of his “fast foundering own generation.”4 In all three Jubilee poems, though most markedly in the Welsh language poem, “Cywydd,” Hopkins expresses disappointment in human responses to Catholic truth and suggests that “Nature’s round” offers a more heartening reminder of God’s presence in the world. In “The Silver Jubilee,” Hopkins laments popular indifference to the Bishop’s celebration. In PreReformation times the arrival of a bishop or an abbot at a place under his jurisdiction would have been heralded by the pealing of church or cathedral bells. Now, although “five and twenty years have run” (5) since the return of Catholicism to Wales, no “high-hung bells” (1) or “braggart bugles” (2) ring in the Bishop’s jubilee. Only nature’s “sacred fountains” (6) and the poet’s “chime of a rhyme” (17) utter celebration. “Ad Episcopum Salopsiensem” congratulates Bishop Brown for his part in the revival of England’s “ancient Faith” but suggests that the Bishop’s successes remain mere “forerunners of events so desired.” In “Cywydd,” one of only two complete poems to be written by Hopkins in Welsh, the poet grieves that while the natural beauty of Wales offers “faithful testimony” of God, “man bears no such

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witness.” The “old earth in its appearance shows an eternal share of virtue,” but the “human element” is “backward” and “faulty.”5 The contrast between virtuous nature and unregenerate man, drawn for the first time in “Cywydd,” would become a recurrent theme in the sonnets of Hopkins’s final year in Wales. In a May 1877 poem, “In the Valley of the Elwy,” the poet praises the “woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales, all the air things wear that build this world of Wales” (10–11), observing sadly that “only the inmate does not correspond” (12). Later in the same month, after visiting the Welsh resort of Rhyl, Hopkins would write “The Sea and the Skylark” in which the purity and energy of the roaring waves and soaring lark are contrasted with the “shallow and frail” (9) seaside town: On ear and ear two noises too old to end Trench-right, the tide that ramps against the shore; With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar, Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend. Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend, His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeined score In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend. 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. The poet grieves that man, who should be “life’s pride and cared-for crown” (11), has squandered his share in the “cheer and charm of earth’s past prime” (12) and must decay into “dust” and “slime” (14). Although Hopkins attributes human estrangement to original sin, he does not regard the Fall as a distant historical event. In “sordid turbid” (10) Victorian Britain, he laments, man’s first disobedience is continually re-enacted in urban and industrial consumption of nature. Yet the “old earth,” however threatened by man, still retains “the dearest freshness deep down things” (“God’s Grandeur” 10). In the sonnets of Hopkins’s Welsh years, nature is still “Eden garden” (“Spring” 11) and, though “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil” (“God’s Grandeur” 6), remains a potential source of grace for those who know how to “glean our Saviour” (“Hurrahing in Harvest” 6) in her vitality and design. Hopkins’s turn to nature as a source of religious and poetic inspiration was at once an ecstatic response to the beauty of Wales and a mark of his increasing inability to find spiritual nourishment in Catholic, and specifically Jesuit, institutions. Records of his three years in the theologate at St. Beuno’s indicate a gradual withdrawal from community life. Even in the St. Beuno’s Debating Club, of which he was an enthusiastic member, his participation dropped from eighteen speeches in the 1874–75 session to a mere seven in 1876– 77.6 His letters reveal increasing weariness and dissatisfaction with his theological studies. In April 1877, after being requested by the Rector to honor the visit of the famous Dominican theologian, Thomas Burke, with a “presentation piece” along the lines of “The Silver Jubilee,” Hopkins produced an angry Latin poem, “Ad Reverendum Patrem Fratrem Thomas Burke O.P. Collegium S.Beunonis Invisentem,” in which he assaulted the sterile tradition of Thomist theology taught at St. Beuno’s:

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[Burke is] one skilled at interpreting the oracular words of Thomas Aquinas, if indeed there is still anything obscure in the utterance of him…who has already long endured countless interpreters, and whom each man twists, without hesitation, to suit his own conceptions.7 When poems were collected to honor a group of Franciscan visitors to St. Beuno’s the next month, Hopkins was not invited to contribute.8 As he approached the climax of his long training as a Jesuit theologian, at the very time when he should have been fully immersed in the legacy of Thomism, Hopkins chose instead to turn his back on Aquinas and Suarez and to search for God in the mountains and valleys of Clwyd. His experience of God’s immanence in nature found expression in a series of exuberant sonnets that marked the spiritual and artistic height of his career. Hopkins’s prolific final year at St. Beuno’s produced such poems as “God’s Grandeur,” “Spring,” “The Windhover,” and “Pied Beauty.” To many of his late-twentieth-century readers, the nature sonnets of 1877 are the most rewarding and accessible of his writings. Yet Hopkins apparently believed that his experience of the divine in nature was so much at odds with Scholastic theology that it would be fruitless, or even dangerous, for him to seek an audience among his Jesuit contemporaries.9 While other nineteenth-century Catholics, and Christians of all denominations, found their faith threatened and undermined by Darwin’s challenge to Biblical accounts of creation, Hopkins’s conviction of God’s presence in all of nature’s inscapes and patterns armed and consoled him against scientific assaults on theology. The nature sonnets of 1877 are an optimistic response to Darwinism, an alternative to the rejection of nature that characterized nineteenth-century Scholastic theology, and an attempt to integrate Catholic sacramentalism with Romantic sensibility. Yet although Hopkins’s celebration of an immanent God earned him a temporary respite from poetic inhibition, it also contributed to his failure as a Jesuit theologian and laid the groundwork for the despair and alienation of his later career. In the powerful sonnets of his Welsh annus mirabilis, Hopkins calls his audience away from seminary theology and the sterile conflict of science and Scholasticism; instead he urges them to experience God directly in nature. The climate of late Victorian Catholicism, whether expressed in the official pronouncements of Rome or in the localized culture of periodicals and devotional books, was entirely hostile to his endeavor. Hopkins’s sacramental approach to nature had its origins in his youthful immersion in the writings of Ruskin. Alison Sulloway has commented that Hopkins’s intellect was “saturated” with Ruskin’s work. In Modern Painters, Ruskin had insisted that “the truth of nature is a part of the truth of God,” and that to “see clearly,” with an “innocent eye,” is “poetry, prophecy, and religion-all in one.”10 Inspired by Ruskin, Hopkins first turned to nature for evidence of divine order during the religious confusion of his Oxford days. The detailed descriptions of nature in his early journals reveal his sensitivity to pattern and his frustration when sensory experience failed to submit to meaningful design. An entry for May 6, 1866, describes a disappointing boat-trip to Godstow in which “the warm greyness of the day, the river, the spring green, and the cuckoo, wanted a canon by which to harmonize and round them in— eg. one of feeling.”11 Ten weeks later, Hopkins records his triumphant discovery of “the law of oak leaves”: It is of platter-shaped stars altogether; the leaves lie close like pages, packed, and as if drawn tightly to. But these old packs, which lie at the end of their twigs, throw out now long shoots alternately and slimly leaved, looking like bright keys. All the sprays but markedly these ones shape out and as it were embrace greater circles and the dip and toss of these make the wider and less organic articulations of the tree.12

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The “law” Hopkins sought in nature was at once moral and aesthetic. His concept of inscape, first employed in the Swiss journal of 1868, offered both an orderly arrangement of visual detail and reassurance of a purposive creation. Although Hopkins’s idea of inscape would be charged with new meaning after his encounter with the philosophy of Duns Scotus, his earliest use of the term appears to denote the distinctive pattern of energy that makes a being uniquely itself while defining its relationship with the rest of creation. The term “instress,” used sometimes as a noun and sometimes as a verb, also makes its first appearance in Hopkins’s Swiss journal. He describes the Lake of Brienz as “opaque green modulated with an emotional instress to blue.”13 In its earliest uses, “instress” seems to describe an affective energy present at once in both inscape and observer.14 Hopkins’s discovery of dynamic form in nature answered a yearning, expressed most urgently in his Oxford essay on “The Probable Future of Metaphysics,” for guiding principles or archetypes to counter a prevailing Darwinian “philosophy of flux” and “arbitrariness” that filled him with dread.15 Unlike Newman, Hopkins could not dismiss “the sight of the world” as a source of “desolation,” nor could he accept Newman’s view of a transcendent God who was “infinitely separated from everything, and absolutely incommunicable and unapproachable, and self-dependent in his own glorious essence.”16 As a product of Oxford’s first post-Darwinian generation, Hopkins’s intellect would not allow him to rest content with the reassuring arguments of a purposeful creation offered to previous generations of undergraduates by Paley’s Natural Theology. He would spend much of the rest of his life trying to integrate nineteenth-century findings in the natural sciences with his conviction of God’s immanence in nature.17 Hopkins’s spirituality was grounded in the experience of the senses. Even his flirtation with asceticism in pre-conversion poems such as “The Habit of Perfection” is primarily a substitution of sacred for profane sensation: Palate, the hutch of tasty lust, Desire not to be rinsed with wine: The can must be so sweet, the crust So fresh that come in fasts divine! His initial attraction to Roman Catholicism had grown out of his emotional need to regulate and justify his intense delight in the material world. Only months before his conversion, Hopkins observed to E.H.Coleridge that “the trivialness of life” was “done away with” by the “incredible condescension of the Incarnation.”18 Christ’s real presence in the blessed sacrament changed the incarnation from an historical event to a continuing guarantee of divine immanence in the world. This doctrine, Hopkins assured his father, was “the life of the soul” and the cornerstone of his Catholicism.19 Roman Catholic assurances of Christ’s presence in the communion wafer fed Hopkins’s longing to find religious justification for his hungry delight in nature’s “juice” and “joy” (“Spring” 9). Christ’s assumption of a natural body and his eternal return to the world of matter in the bread of the altar were a sign that all creation was potentially sacramental. Throughout his life, bursts of misguided Puritanism would cause Hopkins to recoil from the eroticism of his sacramental vision. Immediately after his conversion, his zeal to avoid all activities that might be a cause of “strain upon the passions” led him to undergo a half-year-long penance of the eyes.20 There is no evidence that his Jesuit superiors required this particular act of self-denial. Indeed, Denis Meadows’s Obedient Man, an early twentieth-century memoir of life in the Jesuit novitiate at Roehampton, records that novices frequently sought, and were denied, permission to engage in immoderate penances.21 Hopkins’s refusal to allow himself to look at willows or primroses shares the masochistic flavor of his “slaughter of the innocents” and his resolution, at the height of his guilty infatuation with Digby Dolben, to “give up all

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beauty.”22 In any case, Hopkins could not long suppress the ardor of his gaze. Within a year or two of becoming a jesuit, he was once again filling his journals with minute descriptions of natural phenomena. After his conversion, Hopkins’s writings about nature are suffused with a new conviction that the world is “word, expression, news of God.” In May 1870, he confides to his journal, “I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.” Four months later, upon seeing the Northern Lights for the first time in the sky above Stonyhurst, he records that “this busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years…was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear.” In a journal entry for February 1873, he exults that “all the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose: looking out of my window I caught it in the random heaps of snow made by the case of a broom.”23 Hopkins found Catholic authority for his sacramental view of nature in his discovery of the writings Duns Scotus. His excited response to the philosophy of Scotus is recorded in a journal entry for August 1872, in which he com ments that he is “flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm” and that the theories of the medieval Oxford schoolman may prove to be “a mercy from God.” He notes that “just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus.”24 Scotus’s teachings on the primacy of intuition over reason and on the univocity of all being challenged many of the core doctrines of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and created deep fissures in the monolithic structure of medieval Scholasticism.25 Although Scotism was briefly embraced by English Catholics such as Frederick Faber and David Lewis in the middle years of the nineteenth century, Rome held the teachings of the “Subtle Doctor” in increasing disfavor during the late century Neo-Thomist revival. Scotus’s belief that the Incarnation was always potential in the mind of God, and was primarily an act of pure love for creation rather than a necessary act to secure human redemption, undermined the traditional Christian distinction between spirit and substance by implying that nature was sacramental by design. For Scotus, the Incarnation expressed God’s participation in nature and established Christ as the head of a great chain of univocal being. Immanent in all phenomena, which are redeemed by his presence, Christ was both the ultimate model or pattern for creation and the guarantor of specificity.26 Scotus confirmed Hopkins’s belief in Christ’s presence in the inscapes of nature while permitting him to reconcile his delight in individual patterns and beings with his faith in a transcendent God “whose beauty is past change” (“Pied Beauty” 10). By sharing the belief of Scotus that the Incarnation “rides time like riding a river,” preceding the Fall and occurring altogether outside human history, Hopkins could embrace the possibility that salvation would occur in this world and that humans could be restored to a right relationship with the rest of creation if they would only recognize that God is “under the world’s splendour and wonder,” though “His mystery must be instressed, stressed” (The Wreck, stanza 5). In Scotus’s theory of intuitive cognition, Hopkins found a Scholastic approximation of his concept of instress. Allan B.Wolter’s definitive Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus argues that Scotus’s distinction between abstractive and intuitive cognition is his most important contribution to medieval epistemology. According to Scotus, abstractive cognition is the process of recognizing types or species while intuitive cognition is a holistic grasp of an individual haeccitas. Abstractive cognition depends causally upon some naturally prior intelligible species that goes proxy for the object it represents. By contrast, intuitive cognition has the thing itself, rather than a symbol or category, interacting with the mind or soul to cause actual knowledge of itself. Scotus attributes abstraction to the “phantasy,” or sense imagination, and intuition to the external sense of sight. Intuitive cognition, achieved by humans only in rare flashes, transcends reason and approximates more closely to the beatific vision granted to angels.27

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Hopkins records such moments of intuition, or instress, in The Wreck of the Deutschland: “For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand” (stanza 5). Hopkins’s Scotist vision of nature was most intense during his years at St. Beuno’s. His aesthetic response to the “wild beauty” of Wales was heightened by his Scotist conviction that her “pastoral forehead” (The Wreck, stanza 24) bore testimony to an immanent Christ and that from her springs and fountains flowed “the beautiful prime good” (“Cywydd”) of “earth’s sweet being in the beginning” (“Spring” 10). Saddened by Jesuit failure to make any headway in converting the intractably NonConformist Welsh, Hopkins found consolation in combing the landscape around St. Beuno’s for traces of an Edenic Pre-Reformation Wales. A journal entry for October 8, 1874, describes the powerful feelings engendered by his first visit to the shrine of Holywell: The strong unfailing flow of the water and the chain of cures from year to year all these centuries took hold of my mind with wonder at the bounty of God in one of His saints, the sensible thing so naturally and gracefully uttering the spiritual reason of its being (which is all in true keeping with the story of St. Winefred’s death and recovery) and the spring in place leading back the thoughts by its spring in time to its spring in eternity: even now the stress and buoyancy and abundance of the water is before my eyes.28 According to a twelfth-century legend, St. Winefred’s Well marked the spot where the saint’s head had fallen when she was decapitated by her pagan suitor, Caradoc. Winefred was subsequently restored to life by her Uncle Beuno, became a nun, and “lived for another fifteen years with no sign of a wound except for a white scar round her neck.”29 The medieval shrine escaped destruction under Henry VIII, becoming a haven for persecuted Jesuits and a focus of recusant spirituality. After the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy, Holywell became a popular pilgrimage site spawning numerous tract and pamphlet accounts of cures.30 For Hopkins, the underground spring and curative waters were at once a potent symbol of Catholic resilience and persistency in Post-Reformation Britain and an ahistorical reminder of the “freshness” of unfallen nature. The well was a metaphor in Hopkins’s Scotist reading of the Incarnation: it was a corridor through time, flowing from “a hidden source” into “the sight of men,” issuing news of Christ’s sacramental presence in the world.31 The poet’s preoccupation with the well and its legend is expressed in a fragmentary Latin elegiac, probably composed for St. Winefred’s feast day on November 3, 1874, a six-line English poem, “On St. Winefred,” and an unfinished verse drama to which Hopkins returned several times between 1879 and 1885. In the Jubilee poem “Cywydd,” Hopkins extends the “sweet healing” powers of Holywell to other springs and streams in the vale of Clwyd. “Weak water” is a secret bearer of the “nourishment of religion” even where the human population is obdurate. From recognizing the evangelical power of “many a fountain,” it was a short step for Hopkins to decide that other inscapes of “wild Wales,” interpreted correctly, might also bear witness to Catholic truth. As early as 1872, Hopkins had recorded his sorrow that the “beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.”32 His failure to find an audience for the Ultramontane message of The Wreck, coupled with his fading hopes for an imminent English restoration of the civitas dei, gave a new urgency to his desire to “call out” the news of God’s presence in nature. In the poems of 1877, his Welsh annus mirabilis, Hopkins set out to teach his readers to see. In eight sonnets, written in less than eight months, he reproduces nature’s inscapes and models the process by which Christ can be instressed in them.

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In Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi,” the poet takes the fifteenth-century Italian artist as a mouthpiece for his belief that We’re made so that so we love First when we see them painted things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better painted-better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; God uses us to help each other so, Lending our minds out. (300–306) Although Hopkins had little regard for Browning, his Welsh sonnets give poetic expression to Lippi’s argument. In poems such as “The Starlight Night,” “Pied Beauty,” and “Hurrahing in Harvest,” Hopkins’s painterly descriptions of nature’s inscapes endeavor to keep “warm/men’s wits to the things that are” (“To what serves Mortal Beauty?” 3–4) and to remind them that the world “means intensely and means good” (“Fra Lippo Lippi” 314). Yet Hopkins differed from Browning, and from most of his fellow Victorians, in his confidence that intimations of the sublime and the beautiful in nature could be translated into Catholic dogma. For Hopkins, representation of nature’s inscapes was never an end in itself. Bernadette Waterman Ward comments that in “The Starlight Night,” he “invites us to inhabit his very particular and peculiar way of seeing the stars, to trust him; in his wild metaphors to take a taste of the things he is seeing. And the invitation, he ultimately makes clear to us, is a moral one.”33 The exuberant tone of the sonnet’s opening lines— “Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies” (1)—is succeeded, in the octet, by a more authoritarian voice reminding us that the instress of Christ in nature must be purchased by “prayer, patience, alms, vows” (9). The structure of “The Starlight Night” is repeated in Hopkins’s later Welsh sonnets: “God’s Grandeur,” “Spring,” “Pied Beauty,” and “The Windhover” all begin with exclamations of delight in nature’s inscapes. In each poem, the end of the octet signals an abrupt shift to interpretation of natural phenomena in terms of Catholic doctrine. The rhetoric of the nature sonnets seems to belie Hopkins’s assertion, in an 1877 letter to Bridges, that “I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.”34 As Daniel Harris astutely observes, in Inspirations Unbidden, the “intricate vision of Christian history in ‘God’s Grandeur’ or the reliance upon Catholic iconography in ‘Spring’…do not appear conceived to convert a man as hostile to orthodoxy as Bridges.” Like The Wreck of the Deutschland, Hopkins’s nature poems seem to address an audience of his Catholic contemporaries. Harris comments that many of the sonnets fuse lyricism with “homiletic” tendencies, moving from exposition of a natural “text” to moral exhortation: “Praise him” (“Pied Beauty” 11). Their purpose, it appears, is less to convert than to “deepen and enrich the religious understanding” of those who have already accepted Catholic teaching, urging them to fresh efforts to convert their obdurate countrymen and offering the consolation of Christ’s immanence in nature.35 Yet the audience Hopkins addressed with so much passion and urgency remained “fictive” or “implied.”36 Despite the entreaties of Dixon and Bridges, Hopkins adamantly refused to submit his Welsh sonnets for publication. In an 1879 letter to Bridges, he insisted that “when I say that I do not mean to publish I speak the truth…. All therefore that I think of doing is to keep my verses together in one place-at present I have not even correct copies-that if anyone shd. like, they might be published after my death.”37 In the same year, he assured Dixon that “I have no thought of publishing until all circumstances favour, which I do not know that they ever will, and it seems to me that one of them shd. be that the suggestion to publish

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shd. come from one of our own people.”38 Hopkins knew very well that there would be no Catholic invitation to publish his sonnets. After the Jubilee poems, there is no evidence that he ever showed any of his writing to his colleagues at St. Beuno’s. Hopkins’s biographers have conventionally attributed his unwillingness to publish the nature sonnets to his intense disappointment following Henry Coleridge’s refusal to print The Wreck of the Deutschland. Although he was quick to assume a mask of indifference to the poem’s fate, instructing his mother to “‘sigh no more,’ I am glad now it has not appeared,” The Wreck’s rejection was undoubtedly a wound from which Hopkins never recovered.39 His diminished confidence contributed to a train of other failures and rejections that left him ever more alienated from the community he had chosen. In The Wreck of the Deutschland, Hopkins had attempted to dramatize the collapse of boundaries between God and the self, between one human self and another, between private experience and public performance. The poem’s failure, as Norman White observes, began to set up the barrier between Hopkins’s central self and the public image, which in Dublin would have become so alienating that he would be forced to express it in the loneliest of poems, written for himself and seen by no one else while he lived: ‘To seem the stranger lies my lot. My life/ Among strangers.’40 Yet although the fate of The Wreck dealt a crushing blow to Hopkins’s confidence as a poet, it did not put an immediate end to his hopes of publication. In April 1878, he would send the Month a second shipwreck poem, “The Loss of the Eurydice.” It too would be rejected. Free from the syntactical complexity of The Wreck or the shrill denunciations of “The Loss of the Eurydice,” the 1877 sonnets have seemed to many twentieth-century readers the most accessible of Hopkins’s poems. Since the nature sonnets are so evidently addressed to a Catholic audience, and since Hopkins had not yet dismissed the possibility of publishing further poems, why did he recoil from sharing his sacramental vision of nature with his fellow Jesuits? Hopkins’s reticence becomes more understandable when the 1877 sonnets are examined in the context of nineteenth-century Catholic attitudes towards nature and, in particular, the Catholic response to Darwinism, viewed first in broad outline and then within Hopkins’s specific religious milieu. Hopkins’s good news of Christ’s immanence in the “instress and charm” of Wales was singularly ill timed.41 So was his enthusiasm for the incarnationalist theology of Duns Scotus. In supporting Scotus’s theories of the primacy of intuition over reason and the univocity of all being, Hopkins was sailing against the current of the late nineteenth-century Catholic revival of Thomism and placing himself at odds with his teachers at St. Beuno’s. His adherence to Scotist doctrines in an era when Scotus was regarded as, at best, a “dangerous maverick” was to capsize his career as a Jesuit theologian.42 His unseasonable insistence that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” (“God’s Grandeur” 1) and that nature is still “Eden Garden” (“Spring 11) compelled him to remain a “heart in hiding” (“The Windhover” 7) with poems to “hoard unheard” (“To seem the stranger” 13). T.S.Eliot’s claim, in After Strange Gods, that Hopkins belongs to the tradition of “English nature poets” and cannot properly be termed a “religious poet” because he does not “apply religious feeling to the world”, is viewed by most readers as one of his more absurd critical pronouncements. Yet Eliot’s disdain reflects the reception Hopkins’s nature sonnets would almost certainly have met from his fellow Jesuits. An AngloCatholic and a self-conscious religious conservative, writing less than fifty years after Hopkins’s death, Eliot was strongly influenced by the politics of late nineteenth-century Catholicism. He supports his relegation of Hopkins to the rank of mere “devotional poet” with the argument that “from the struggle of our time…to renew our association with traditional wisdom;…the struggle, in a word, against Liberalism, from all this

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Hopkins is a little apart, and in this Hopkins has little aid to offer us.”43 For Eliot, as for most late Victorian Catholics, the struggle against Liberalism, whether in the guise of social emancipation, scientific rationalism, or post-Kantian metaphysics, was best fought from an impregnable stronghold of Neo-Thomist theology. Like many of Hopkins’s Catholic contemporaries, Eliot scorned Romantic reverence for nature and viewed the mortal condition as a tedious round of “birth, copulation, and death.”44 To the disciples of NeoThomism, theories of God’s immanence in the created world smacked of dangerous Pantheism and threatened to further erode the distinction between Church and laity, the natural and the supernatur al, theology and science, that were already so deeply threatened by nineteenth-century Liberalism. Victorian Neo-Thomists held that only faith in a transcendent God, utterly distinct from creation, revealed in scripture and mediated by the Church, could stem the tide of secularism. Although Hopkins consistently pronounced himself an opponent of Liberalism in both politics and religion, the spirituality of his nature sonnets reflects a “privatized” approach to religion which is associated by the sociologist Anthony Russell with “advanced urban” and predominantly secular societies.45 If, as Eliot suggests, the primary focus of religious poetry should be corporate and ecclesial, then Hopkins’s nature sonnets do unquestionably stand “a little apart.”46 Poems such as “The Starlight Night” and “Hurrahing in Harvest” renew our association with a different form of “traditional wisdom,” that of the mystic. It was a tradition with little support in the beleaguered late Victorian Church, and still less in the quasi-military Society of Jesus. For Hopkins’s Catholic contemporaries, nature was a wasteland in which no trace of a benevolent deity was to be found. Darwin’s Origin of Species had paralyzed the argument from design, seeming to the “average believer” to be not simply “promulgating a new scientific theory, but destroying the foundations of belief”47 “I cannot persuade myself,” admitted Darwin, “that a beneficent and omnipotent god would have designedly created the Ichneuminidae [a species of flies] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”48 The theory of natural selection argued that nature, and not God, determines what survives and what perishes. And nature, it seemed, was “red in tooth and claw.”49 In the early part of the nineteenth century, Catholic intellectuals had made strenuous efforts to reconcile scientific discoveries with religious orthodoxy. Pius IX began his pontificate by encouraging the study of science in Catholic seminaries. In 1836, Nicholas Wiseman published Twelve Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion in which he attempted to “show the correspondence between the progress of science and he development of Christian evidences,” and to prove that the Christian religion can have no interest in repressing the cultivation of science and literature, nor any reason to dread their general diffusion, so long as this is accompanied by due attention to sound moral principles and correctness of faith.50 After the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, Catholic optimism about the compatibility of science and dogma became increasingly difficult to maintain. The second half of the century saw a retreat into fundamentalism. In 1863, Pius IX sent a sharp rebuke, the Munich Brief, to the liberal German theologian Johann Von Dollinger, whose lecture “The Past and Future of Theology” had proclaimed the dawning of a new era of Catholic intellectual freedom. Dollinger’s announcement was premature. The Munich Brief emphatically asserted the claims of Scholasticism and the Roman Congregations over the speculations of Catholic scientists.51 A year later, Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors, which condemned many of the principles upon which nineteenth-century science and bible criticism were founded. It concluded by

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condemning the proposition that “the Roman pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”52 The Vatican Council of 1869–70 was convened by a papacy beleaguered by nationalistic threats to the Church’s political influence and by scientific challenges to her intellectual domain. It was the largest gathering of Church leaders since the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent. Just as the Council of Trent had rallied the Church against Protestantism in the sixteenth century, so Pius IX intended the Vatican Council to create a nineteenth-century doctrinal bulwark against secularism and rationalism.53 The Council’s dominant Ultramontanist faction succeeded in passing two dogmatic constitutions: Pastor Aeternus, on the juridical primacy and infallibility of the papacy, and Dei Filius, on the relationship between reason and faith.54 Lamenting that “the minds of many have lapsed at length into the depth of pantheism, materialism, and atheism,…denying the rational nature of man and all law of justice and right,” Dei Filius ruled that “all faithful Christians are not only forbidden to defend, as legitimate conclusions of science, such opinions as are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith,…but are altogether to account them as errors which put on the fallacious appearance of truth.”55 Scientific investigation of “divine mysteries,” Dei Filius argued, was in itself a futile enterprise, since such mysteries “by their own nature so far transcend the created intelligence that, even when delivered by revelation and received by faith, they remain covered with the veil of faith…and shrouded in a certain degree of darkness.”56 After the First Vatican Council, the Church was left in a virtual state of war with secular liberal society-a Kulturkampf by no means confined to Bismarck’s Germany. In England, the ruling on papal infallibility provoked a political furor. Gladstone’s The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance declared that the Vatican Council had made Catholics the political slaves of the Pope, so that in secular matters they owed allegiance to the Vatican and not the Queen.57 As usual, it was Newman who attempted to mediate between Catholicism and the cultural mainstream. His reply to Gladstone, in A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk on the Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation, carefully defines the limits of papal power, arguing that the Pope “who comes of Revelation, has no jurisdiction over Nature” and can only claim infallibility when speaking ex cathedra on doctrinal issues.58 The position outlined in Newman’s Letter reflects that of the moderate third party at the Vatican Council, who styled themselves “Inopportunists.” While Catholic liberals, such as Dollinger and Acton, had firmly opposed Pastor Aeternus on theological grounds, the Inopportunists asserted that although they did not deny the doctrine of limited papal infallibility, they considered its imposition unwise in the present pastoral and intellectual climate. Newman’s approach to the Vatican’s attempt to suppress scientific inquiry might also be classified as inopportunist. Claiming to feel the utmost confidence that science and religion would eventually prove compatible, he argued, in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, that the rapid scientific developments of his era required Catholics to “be patient” and avoid “dangerous steps.” Acknowledging that “the enlargement of the circle of secular knowledge just now is simply a bewilderment,” he counseled his co-religionists to refrain from “undignified” efforts to reconcile centuries of theology with every ephemeral hypothesis of contemporary science.59 Meanwhile, he tried to avert a collision between science and theology by insisting that they were two entirely separate spheres. In an 1858 letter to Pusey, Newman had expressed the wish that “divine and human science might each be suffered in peace to take its own line, the one not interfering with the other. Their circles seem scarcely to intersect each other.”60 His essay on “Christianity and Physical Science” in The Idea of a University argued that “the two worlds and the two kinds of knowledge respectively are separated off from each other; and…therefore, as being separate, they cannot on the whole contradict each other.”61 Theology, Newman

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explained, was grounded in revelation; its methodology and purpose were entirely different from those of the physical sciences. Having relegated science and theology to their separate spheres, Newman was apparently able to confront the Origin of Species with equanimity. He had never looked to “natural religion” as a basis of faith. Discounting the revelation of nature in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, he observes: “Not only is the Creator far off, but some being of malignant nature seems, as I have said, to have got hold of us, and to be making us his sport.”62 Darwin’s account of a ruthless and mechanistic universe only confirmed his observations. The dynamic and gradualist view of history set forth in the Origin of Species also seemed to echo Newman’s beliefs. Fourteen years before Darwin published his theory of evolution, Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine had represented Christianity as a living, organic unity, subject to growth and change. New doctrines, Newman had argued, are constantly arising, but only the fittest, those that mediate most effectively between revelation and human understanding, survive. In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman had employed an evolutionary model to describe the process of his own religious change.63 Newman, as usual, occupied a precarious middle ground of his own making. Other English Catholics who tried to accommodate evolutionary theory would find it impossible to satisfy an increasingly hardline Roman orthodoxy. For his efforts to synthesize the truths of biology and religion, St. George Jackson Mivart earned the hostility of adherents of both. Mivart, a Catholic convert and a close friend of Darwin, was Professor of Comparative Anatomy at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School. His On the Genesis of Species, published in 1871, sought to reassure his co-religionists that evolution “need alarm no one, for it is, without any doubt, perfectly consistent with the strictest and most orthodox Christian theology.”64 Combining scientific analysis with Catholic apologetics, On the Genesis of Species contained a series of citations from the Church Fathers, allegedly proving that their views were not incompatible with biological evolution, and a careful exposure of the inconsistencies in Darwin’s theories.65 While accepting the theory of natural selection, albeit as only one of a number of natural laws “as yet undiscovered” that govern evolution, Mivart maintained that behind the phenomena of the physical universe, there was an unknowable intelligence, in which all natural laws had their origin: An internal law presides over the actions of every part of every individual, and of every organism as a unit, and of the entire organic world as a whole. It is believed that this conception of an internal innate force will ever remain necessary, however much its subordinate processes and actions may become explicable.66 Mivart’s teleological evolutionism insisted upon an absolute distinction between man and other species: “To those who accept the belief in God, the soul and moral responsibility…the placing of non-moral beings in the same scale with moral agents, will be utterly unendurable.”67 He denied that human intelligence and the capacity for moral judgment had evolved as part of a general physical process, arguing that biological evolution was accompanied, in human terms, by a parallel spiritual process which continued even after death. His work received enthusiastic reviews in the Catholic press.68 Mivart’s efforts to reconcile Catholic theology with Darwinian theory received a harsh blow with the publication of The Descent of Man. Published only months after On the Genesis of Species, Darwin’s latest thesis argued that man had developed, through the forces of natural selection, from non-human ancestors. This new claim was devastating for Mivart. It was entirely incompatible with traditional Christian teaching on creation and with his own theory of a separate, spiritual evolution in human lives. Abandoning his attempt to refute Darwin’s theories on biological grounds, Mivart responded to The Descent of Man by issuing dire warnings of the social implication of Darwinism. Reviewing Darwin’s thesis for The Quarterly

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Review, he associated the toppling of man from his favored position in creation with the rise of socialism and the impending collapse of all social and political hierarchies, predicting that Darwin’s “identification of thought with sensation” would lead to political horrors “worse than the Paris Commune.”69 Darwin’s supporters, enraged by their former friend’s treachery, assaulted his scientific reputation and even tried to have him expelled from his London clubs. Huxley denounced the Catholic Church as “the vigorous and consistent enemy of the highest intellectual, moral, and social life of mankind.”70 Meanwhile, the Church showered Mivart with honors. In 1876 his reputation as England’s leading Catholic scientist was acknowledged by Pius IX, who awarded him a pontifical doctorate. In the same year, he was appointed to the Chair of Biology at the Catholic University College in Kensington.71 However, Mivart’s energetic mind soon challenged the limits on Catholic intellectual inquiry imposed by Dei Filius. In 1877, Bishop Bagshawe of Nottingham demanded his resignation from University College, arguing that the opinions expressed in his recently published Contemporary Evolution did not conform to Catholic teaching. This time Cardinal Manning intervened successfully on his behalf, but the controversy was the first in a series that would end with his estrangement from the Church. In Contemporary Evolution, Mivart shifted the main focus of his attention from science to religion, exploring the implications of his belief that human spirituality was subject to a divinely guided process of evolution. He argued that since Catholicism was the one true faith, it was inevitable that God would eventually lead all humanity to acceptance of the Catholic religion. Rival systems and doctrinal errors may flourish for a time but all would eventually perish through natural selection. Confident of an eventual triumph, the Catholic Church should confine itself to moral exhortation and example, allowing free play to human reason. Mivart’s vision of a “reconstituted Catholicism reconciled with reason” was, as Jacob W.Gruber acknowledges, “nineteenth-century liberalism in full flower.”72 His confidence in the power of individuals to arrive at religious truth by unaided reason was an obvious assault on the magisterium of the Church. His inflammatory claim, in an 1876 article in The Dublin Review, that “no authority can be accepted in defiance of Reason” (563–64) was followed, in the 1880s, by ventures into higher criticism, and, in the 1890s, by arguments against the Catholic doctrines of hell and purgatory.73 He was excommunicated in 1900. In a bitter letter to Cardinal Vaughan, published in the Times shortly before his death, Mivart observed that “it is now evident that there is a vast and impassable abyss between Catholic dogma and science.”74 The late nineteenth-century revival of Scholasticism was an attempt to answer the craving of Catholic intellectuals like Mivart for a faith that satisfied the mind as well as the emotions. Pius IX had endeavored to combat secularism by reviving the devotional life of the Church, encouraging the expression of popular Catholic culture in sentimental veneration of Mary and the saints. His successor, Leo XIII, aimed to reinvigorate Catholic scholarship by ensuring that future priests were educated in a unified philosophical method. Dei Filius had defended the possibility of assent based on reason; however, it did not specify any definite argument through which the existence and nature of God could be established. The 1879 encyclical, Aeterni Patris, established the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as the foundation of Catholic theological studies.75 The encyclical required that the writings of Aquinas and his Scholastic successors should be taught in all seminaries and that academies for scholarly research in Thomism should be established. In Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method, Gerald A.McCool describes Aeterni Patris as “the magna carta of official neo-Thomism in Catholic philosophy and theology.”76 Hopkins’s English Jesuit contemporary Joseph Rickaby would justify Aeterni Patris with the claim that Aquinas’s arguments are “fraught with mighty and invincible strength for the overthrow of those principles of new-invented law, which are plainly perilous to the order of society and the public safety.”77 In his 1908 defense of Scholasticism, Rickaby comments that “modern philosophy is a philosophy of change, of

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phenomena, of perpetual flux. Scholasticism is the philosophy of permanent substantial being.”78 Hopkins’s Oxford essay “On the Probable Future of Metaphysics” had described Darwinism as a “philosophy of flux” and “arbitrariness.”79 Scholasticism offered an antidote, but at a high price. The Scholastic revival was primarily an attempt to combat scientific rationalism. Rationalism, a legacy of the Protestant Reformation, had made unaided human reason the sole judge of truth and certitude. In its empirical and scien tific form, rationalism held that individuals could establish truth about the universe only through inductive reasoning based upon sensory data. Thus, since the Christian mysteries are available only through faith, rationalism excluded Christianity from scientific debate. Scholasticism offered an alternative system also based on reason. Although the speculative theology of Aquinas was an Aristotelian metaphysical science whose first principles came from revelation, Thomas’s Summa Theologica posited a series of philosophical proofs by which natural reason could establish the existence of God and the divine attributes. In his 1877 essay “Evolution and Involution,” the scientist and neo-Thomist theologian John Rickaby asserted that From the mere analysis of the idea of an infinite, self-existent God, His other attributes are deduced by a process as strictly logical as that by which from geometrical axioms and postulates Euclid deduces the several propositions of his system.80 The neo-Thomists denied that they were hostile to scientific inquiry. According to Aeterni Patris, the natural sciences would derive distinct advantages from the revival of Scholasticism, for “the scientist must rise to a higher order than the order of the natural sciences in order to truly understand the nature and ordering principles of the universe.”81 In an 1878 article in The Month, John Rickaby reminds his fellow Jesuits of Aquinas’s argument, in Summa Contra Gentiles, that every created being is a fragmentary and analogous likeness of its creator: Every single rock, plant, or brute beast, is and can be what it is, only in as much as it shadows forth some perfection of the Divine Essence. God is not matter; but all of the perfections of the material world have their exemplar in God.82 His brother, Joseph Rickaby, protests, in Scholasticism, that “it is a calumny on that philosophy [Scholasticism] to say that it is opposed to the advance of the physical sciences. The Schoolmen… everywhere taught…that only by sensible things is the human intellect raised to the knowledge of things incorporeal and immaterial.” Echoing Mivart, Joseph Rickaby argues that Scholasticism was not necessarily hostile to evolution. He points out that Aquinas, with Aristotle, believed in the ontogenetic evolution of the human embryo from mere vegetative life to the life of an animal, and thence to the life of a rational being. He observes that Aquinas does not discuss phylogenetic evolution, but ventures that he “could have had no strong philosophical prejudice against the possibility of an evolution of species.”83 Scholastic philosophy was a highly objective discipline. It purported to provide a realistic epistemology and a conceptual framework in which new information about the world would always find its place, its relation to the whole, and its origin in the divine will. Indeed, McCool observes that according to the nineteenth-century neo-Thomists, Scholasticism was “unaffected by the personality and cultural milieu of individual thinkers. Differences in time, historical outlook, and cultural expression were accidental.”84 Intricate and self-sufficient, Scholasticism was a closed system, equally hostile to mystical and historicist alternatives. By providing the late nineteenth-century Church with a centralized and homogenous foundation for theological study, Aeterni Patris replicated the juridical achievement of Pastor Aeternus. But

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while Aeterni Patris provided a common language for Catholic intellectuals, it also contributed to their marginalization. Hopkins’s Jesuit training spanned the 1870s, a decade described by Gerald McCool as one of the most “momentous and troubled” in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.85 Although his letters contain relatively few references to events in Rome, presumably because his surviving correspondence from this period is addressed exclusively to Protestants, Alfred Thomas’s study of Hopkins’s Catholic milieu in Hopkins the Jesuit: The Years of Training leaves no doubt that he was well-informed about the political and doctrinal debates of the decade. Lists of refectory readings at Roehampton and Stonyhurst in 1869–70 attest that Hopkins and his fellow novices received news of proceedings at the First Vatican Council both from The Tablet and from Cardinal Manning’s The Vatican Council and Its Definitions: A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy. Records of the debating society at St. Beuno’s show that Hopkins and his Jesuit contemporaries were alarmed at Gladstone’s suggestion that allegiance to an infallible Pope was impossible for loyal Britons. In December 1874, Hopkins spoke in support of the tortuous motion that “the following formula— ‘The position of Catholics has been in no wise changed by the decrees of the Vatican Council’ —being liable to misrepresentation cannot safely be adopted in the political contest between Gladstone and Rome.” It was one of the rare occasions on which Hopkins supported the winning side.86 Although Hopkins completed his theological training almost two years before Aeterni Patris, the course of studies at St. Beuno’s reflected an unbroken tradition of Jesuit emphasis on the writings of Aquinas and his Counter-Reformation interpreters. The principal architect of Leo XIII’s neo-Thomist encyclical was the German Jesuit Joseph Kleutgen. Catholic historians are unanimous in their negative portrayal of Thomist studies in Victorian seminaries. James Finn Cotter remarks that “the Scholastic tradition as preserved in nineteenth-century seminary training had little intellectual life left in its sclerotic system.” He reports that “the method of instruction was one of standardized handbooks, lecture notes, set disputation and reviews”87 According to McCool, the theological textbooks of the era were characterized by “verbalism, caution, and excessive recourse to the authority of the Angelic Doctor.” Their purpose was “the clear exposition of safe, ‘received’ Thomistic doctrine rather than the stimulation of original thought.”88 Ong comments that “for most of Hopkins’s Jesuit contemporaries, as for Catholic seminary students in nineteenth-century Europe generally, the potential of theology and related seminary philosophy to interact positively with increasingly articulate self-consciousness of the age were realized very little.”89 Accounts of the academic climate at St. Beuno’s in the 1870s and 1880s are dispiriting. Nicholas Zagovsky reports that “the teaching at St. Beuno’s was particularly dry in this period.”90 Describing Herbert Thurston’s sojourn in the theologate, Joseph Crehan comments that the “sacred science” at St. Beuno’s was “at a low ebb.”91 In most of the textbooks used at St. Beuno’s, the writings of Aquinas were mediated by the bleakly systematic sixteenth-century theologian Francisco Suarez. Although Finn Cotter speculates that “Hopkins probably read some of the Angelic Doctor’s works directly,” Devlin asserts that “Suarez and Suarez only was taught at St. Beuno’s in Hopkins’s time.”92 Hopkins gives his opinion of Suarez in an 1881 letter to Canon Dixon: Suarez is our most famous theologian; he is a man of vast volume of mind, but without originality or brilliancy; he treats everything satisfactorily, but you never remember a phrase of his, the manner is nothing.93 In the acerbic 1877 Latin poem, “Ad Reverendum Patrem Fratrem Thomas Burke O.P.Collegium S.Beunonis Invisentem,” Hopkins displays equal scorn for Gudinus (Antoine Goudin), Godatus (Pedro de Godoy), Gonetus (Jean Baptiste Gonet), and Cajetanus (Tomasso di Vio), all eminent medieval and

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Counter-Reformation Thomist scholars, all mainstays of the St. Beuno’s curriculum, whom he accuses of twisting the words of Aquinas for their own purposes.94 It is impossible to disagree with the conclusion of David Downes, in “Hopkins and Thomism,” that “Hopkins had the greatest reservations about the Scholasticism he was taught, and what Thomism he could identify was no more attractive to him.”95 His letters home from St. Beuno’s suggest that he found little nourishment in his theological studies and that he viewed the academic routine as a wearisome treadmill. Writing to his father in 1874, he described “hours of study very close-lectures in dogmatic theology, moral ditto, canon law, church history, scripture, Hebrew and what not.” In March 1877, he complained to his mother that “going over moral theology over and over again is wearisome work.”96 A few weeks earlier he had confided to Bridges that “the close pressure of my theological studies leaves me time for hardly anything: the course is very hard, it must be said.” In the same letter, he observed that “it was with sorrow I put back Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the library some time ago feeling that I could not read them now and so probably should never.”97 Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss St. Beuno’s as an intellectual desert. Records of daily life at the Jesuit theologate indicate that Hopkins and his contemporaries found outlets for their intellectual curiosity in an essay society, a debating society, and, most significantly, in their contributions to The Month. In 1877, members of the essay society read papers on evolution, the nebular or star-cluster theory of creation, and the “claims of primitive man to an earlier age than Adam.”98 Topics discussed by the debating society during Hopkins’s years at St. Beuno’s included the future of the Welsh language, the spiritual value of music and art, the position of Catholics at secular universities, the place of women in higher education, and the desirability of compulsory education for children of all classes. Hopkins seems to have spoken most frequently on educational topics, though he also argued unsuccessfully in support of the Welsh language and against the use of Jesuit lands for commercial farming. His academic frustrations found expression in his support for a motion that “every Scholastic of the Society should have assigned to him from the end of his noviceship some branch of study in which he could labour to excel.” The motion was carried.99 In his illuminating study of Hopkins’s intellectual context, Hopkins in the Age of Darwin, Tom Zaniello describes the poet’s association with a group of Jesuit scholars known as the Stonyhurst Philosophers. The principal members of this group were Richard F.Clarke, Herbert Lucas, and the brothers John and Joseph Rickaby. All four were friends and contemporaries of Hopkins at St. Beuno’s or Stonyhurst. All had long and prolific careers, contributing a combined total of nearly 250 articles to The Month between 1870 and 1930. Although they were Scholastics, all were surprisingly successful in avoiding the aridity and inflexibility that characterized much neo-Thomist scholarship. During the 1870s, Richard F.Clarke, an Oxford convert who would succeed Henry Coleridge as editor of The Month in 1881, was principally occupied in exploring Thomist theories of the analogical relationship between God and creation. His article “On Analogy” appeared in the February 1874 issue of The Month. In the same decade, Herbert Lucas was writing about the conflict between scientific determinism and the Christian doctrine of Free Will. He published articles in The Month in July 1874 and in February, April, and June 1878. Joseph Rickaby, who, as we have seen, would later become a noted exegete of Aquinas, published reviews of Mivart’s On the Genesis of Species and Lessons from Nature in June 1871 and April 1876, and critiques of Tyndall and Mill in 1874, 1875, and 1876. His brother, John Rickaby, was represented in The Month by an attack of post-Kantian metaphysics, entitled “The Reign of Mist,” in November 1876, and a series of essays on science and religion in 1877. The Stonyhurst Philosophers’ writings on science are surprisingly unconstrained by Dei Fitius. Zaniello surmises that they may have “had enough intellectual muscle to maintain some independent liberal views on controversial topics. They were, after all, some of the most brilliant converts of the 1850s and 1860s.”100

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All four men were dedicated to proving that Catholicism was not incompatible with rational thought or scientific progress. Hopkins’s open-minded response to Victorian science was undoubtedly nurtured by his association with the Stonyhurst Philosophers. John Rickaby’s “Evolution and Involution” follows Mivart in recognizing “the action of evolution” and in conceding that “natural developments” are not necessarily the direct actions of God, but may represent God’s will through secondary, or even “millesimary,” causes. Yet, like Mivart, Rickaby denies that evolution is an “independent, self-existent power” and insists on the presence of an unseen “Law-Giver.”101 Rickaby shares Mivart’s view that human intellectual and spiritual development follows a higher law than the mechanical processes of evolution. Indeed, Rickaby argues that while species in nature proliferate according to the laws of evolution, the development of the human mind follows a process of “involution,” from “incoherent heterogeneity to coherent homogeneity.” The highest intelligence, he claims, are characterized by “rapid intuitions” and “the power of grasping a multitude of things under the aspect of a single whole.” Thus, the “involutionary” process of human development, John Rickaby concludes, brings man closer to God, who “knows all things by one single act, which act is not really distant from the Divine Substance.”102 Hopkins’s colleague Joseph Rickaby also embraced many of the findings of Darwinian science. But, like his brother, he posited an absolute distinction between man and the rest of creation. Reviewing Mivart’s Lessons from Nature, a rebuttal of The Descent of Man, Joseph Rickaby insists that “man’s consciousness of his own consciousness and his free will” cannot be explained by the theory of evolution because they are “different not in degree, but in kind from any faculties that belong to the nature of animals.”103 His critique of Tyndall’s atomistic materialism hinges on the same objection.104 In Professor Tyndall’s Inaugural Address,” he allows that it is “quite in keeping with faith” to suppose that the universe is formed of atoms, created by God but acting under natural laws. However, he goes on to argue that man differs from the rest of creation in that he alone is also subject to the supernatural law of God’s grace. Supernatural grace, Joseph Rickaby explains, fits man for his “higher destiny” of “contemplation of the Divinity face to face.”105 The guarantor of man’s ability to contemplate God is his ability to recognize and contemplate the self. The Rickaby brothers shared Mivart’s confidence that the truths of Catholicism were accessible to human reason. Unlike Mivart, they accepted the Scholastic premise that reason must be guided by revelation and by the tradition of the Church. Yet the Scholasticism of the Stonyhurst Philosophers was tempered by Newman’s dislike of “paper logic” and his insistence that the ological insights are “the expression of individual minds.”106 Their writing shares much of Newman’s urbanity and deceptive suppleness of tone. Like Newman, they mistrusted enthusiasm. Indeed, John Rickaby’s “St. Augustine and Scientific Unbelief” attempts to turn the tables on those who associate science with reason by accusing Huxley and Tyndall of “passionate hostility” to the rational proofs of Catholic doctrine.107 John and Joseph Rickaby were Hopkins’s contemporaries at St, Beuno’s, and the poet’s journal records walks and conversations with them. He would certainly have read their articles in The Month. Although, as Zaniello observes, “we do not know the extent to which he exchanged views on Darwinism, Tyndall’s speech, or atomism with the Stonyhurst Philosophers,” it is significant that Hopkins’s most revealing discussion of Darwinism, in a September 1874 letter to his mother, was written only days after he and Joseph Rickaby had hiked to the summit of Maenefa, in the Clwydian Hills.108 At this time, Rickaby had recently completed his critique of atomistic materialism in “Professor Tyndall’s Inaugural Address.” Hopkins’s discussion of Darwin and Tyndall is remarkable coolheaded. He informs his mother that Tyndall’s Belfast Address was “interesting and eloquent” but that it failed to clarify either the “obscure origin” of humans or their destiny. His sternest criticism is addressed to Tyndall’s method, rather than to his ideas. He complains that Tyndall “has no sense of the relative weights of authority”:

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He quotes Draper, Whewell and other respectable writers for or against Aristotle, Bacon etc. as if it were just the same thing and you were keeping at the same level-the Lord Chief Justice rules this way, his parlourmaid, however, says it should be the other, and so on.109 Like Newman, Hopkins could seldom separate the ideas from the man. His critique of Tyndall concludes with an acknowledgment of the scientist’s generous treatment of Hopkins and his friend, Edward Bond, when they had met in Switzerland in 1868. Hopkins remarks, plaintively, that “I fear he must be called an atheist but he is not a shameless one: I wish he might come around.” In the same letter, Hopkins discusses Darwin’s theory of human origins. His admission that he does not know if Darwin had really said that “man is descended from any ape or ascidian or maggot” indicates that he had not read The Descent of Man. Nonetheless, he seems to view the possibility of man’s non-human ancestry with extraordinary equanimity. Suggesting that humans may be descended from “the common ancestor of apes, the common ancestor of ascidians, the common ancestor of maggots, and so on,” he concludes that “these common ancestors, if lower animals, need not have been repulsive animals.” He advises his mother to read Mivart, recommending the Catholic scientist as an evolutionist who “combats downright Darwinism and is very Orthodox.”110 Hopkins goes further in his acceptance of Darwinism than either Mivart or Rickaby. Only a month before writing to his mother on Darwin and Tyndall, he had observed the action of waves striking the seawall on the South Devon coast, noting in his journal that the laps of running foam striking the seawall double on themselves and return in nearly the same order and shape in which they came. This is mechanical reflection and is the same as optical: indeed all nature is mechanical, but then it is not seen that mechanics contain that which is beyond mechanics.111 During his Welsh years, Hopkins’s intense experience of inscape as a hidden principle of order and unity, a “freshness deep down things,” enabled him to confront Darwinian onslaughts on natural theology without distress. Walter Ong remarks that he “appears everywhere singularly free of hostility or even uneasiness regarding Darwin’s or other discoveries that were reshaping the cosmic scenario.”112 Unlike Mivart, or the Stonyhurst Philosophers, Hopkins did not insist upon an absolute distinction between humans and the rest of creation. He was willing to acknowledge the possibility of man’s descent from nonhuman animals and therefore, presumably, to accept that at least some human behavior was ruled by mechanical nature. While Mivart and the Rickabys claimed that man is lifted above degraded nature by God’s supernatural gift of grace, Hopkins, in poems such as “God’s Grandeur” and “In the Valley of the Elwy,” mourns that it is man who often cuts himself off from the grace that resides in non-human creation. Zaniello’s reading of Hopkins as “an important, if relatively unpublished,” member of the Stonyhurst Philosophers fails to acknowledge the many areas in which Hopkins’s preoccupations and beliefs were markedly at odds with those of the Rickabys, Lucas, and Clarke.113 Although Hopkins shared the Philosophers’ interest in contemporary scientific developments, he did not share their taste for Aquinas, or their confidence that neo-Thomist philosophy offered the Church a useful defense against Darwinism. In an 1885 letter to Dixon, he would complain that the problem with science was not that it made people believe “in matter more but in God less,” but that it caused people to conceive “only of a world of formulas… toward which the outer world acts as a sort of feeder.”114 The reductive formulae of Scholasticism were as objectionable to Hopkins as those of Victorian science. While the Stonyhurst Philosophers presented Scholastic proofs of a transcendent God, Hopkins described encounters with a deity immanent in nature:

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“the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder” (“Hurrahing in Harvest” 9). For Hopkins, at least during his Welsh years, the “lovely behaviour” of the natural world was not a threat to faith, but the very foundation of it. The intellectual and spiritual distance between Hopkins and the Stonyhurst Philosophers is best illustrated by a comparison of their literary activities during the years of the theologate. In June 1876, Joseph Rickaby published a Scholastic critique of John Stuart Mill. In the same month, Hopkins’s unfinished “Moonrise” recorded a direct experience of divine immanence in “the prized, the desirable sight” (6) of the midsummer moon. In March 1877, The Month printed John Rickaby’s “Evolution and Involution,” in which he asserted that man differs from the rest of nature, “not in degree, but in kind.” Only days earlier, Hopkins had composed two ecstatic celebrations of God’s presence in nature: “God’s Grandeur” and “The Starlight Night.”115 In September 1877, Hopkins’s “Hurrahing in Harvest” exulted in the “barbarous beauty” (1) of summer’s ending, while readers of The Month digested Herbert Lucas’s “Climate and Time,” a neoThomist appropriation of the new earth science. Written only four months after Hopkins left St. Beuno’s, John Rickaby’s “On Man’s Attitude to Nature” mounts a scathing attack on “nature worship.” Blaming the “wild enthusiasms” of Romantic poets such as Keats, Wordsworth, and Emily Bronte for a contemporary failure to “keep Nature in her proper place,” Rickaby reminds his Catholic readers that they must not “insult the Creator by equaling the creature with him. For Rickaby, the lure of “nature-worship” is clearly a seduction of the flesh. The nature-worshipper, he warns, is likely to experience “a sort of abdication of the reasoning faculty in favour of a complete surrender of the senses to all that streams in upon them, till the whole man is lost in a sort of sensuous, voluptuous trance.”116 The critique of Romanticism in “On Man’s Attitude to Nature” is a continuation of Rickaby’s more general attack on post-Kantian philosophy in “The Reign of Mist.” Identifying “mistiness” as the “prevalent distemper of the present age,” Rickaby’s 1876 article had set out to preserve the Church’s absolute distinction between nature and grace by invoking the abstract proofs of neo-Thomism as a counterweight to the intuitive epistemology of Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson. Insisting that the “one thing needful for the development of a sound mind…is the most rigid adherence to fact, to commonsense, and to reality in all things, Rickaby had accused Romantic poets and philosophers of a disastrous conflation of dogma and aesthetics, spirit and substance.117 His attack on “mistiness in the domain of literature” suggests that he would have had little sympathy with Hopkins the poet: Many poems are nothing short of very difficult conundrums. You are expected to read them three or four times over before you hit upon the main drift, and then successive readings will disclose the details, more or less, and often rather less than more. I confess there is some satisfaction at the end, when you think you have unraveled the mystery; but I cannot believe the general adoption of this obscure mysticism is compatible with a healthy spirit, or even with the highest style of poetry.118 As a worshipper of God in nature and a poet in search of excellence “higher than clearness at first reading,” Hopkins was in many ways an embodiment of the Romantic tradition that Rickaby held in such disdain.119 Although he claimed to have little interest in German philosophy, Hopkins’s formulation of religious mystery as an “incomprehensible certainty…the unknown, the reserve of truth behind what the mind reaches” owes little to the rigorous proofs of neo-Thomism and much to Romantic metaphysics.120 His experience of instress— “I kiss my hand/To the stars, lovely asunder/Starlight, wafting him out of it” (The Wreck of the Deutschland, stanza 5)-echoes Wordsworth’s “correspondent breeze” rather than Aquinas’s theory of nature as a pattern of fixed analogies. The spirituality of Hopkins’s nature sonnets derives from a

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tenuous but potent reconciliation of Romanticism with Catholic doctrine. Such a reconciliation was made possible for Hopkins by his discovery of the rebel Scholastic, Duns Scotus. Hopkins’s attraction to the theology of Scotus must be attributed, at least in part, to the medieval Franciscan’s pre-Kantian awareness of the limitations of pure reason and his insistence that religious faith is always, finally, an act of the will. Scotus also offered Hopkins Scholastic support for his Wordsworthian and Ruskinian sense of nature as dynamic form. Scotus’s incarnationist belief in a univocity of being was highly compatible with Romantic theories of an organic universe of interrelated substance and spirit. Bell Gale Chevigny’s discussion of Hopkins’s Romanticism, in “Instress and Devotion in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” concludes that, as with Coleridge and Wordsworth, “the quest for climactic meetings of energies or wills is for Hopkins a recurrent passion and a major theme in his aspirations.”121 Scotist Christology allowed Hopkins to view nature as a core of pent-up divine energy, needing only the greeting of instress to “flame out like shining from shook foil” (“God’s Grandeur” 2). Hopkins’s meeting with an immanent God released his poetic energy in a profusion of sonnets whose creation “all in a rush/With richness” (“Spring” 7–8) seems to mimic the coming of spring to the Vale of Clwyd. In the May 1877 poem “Spring,” Hopkins celebrates the fruitfulness of nature in “racing lambs” (8), pear blossom, and thrush eggs like “low heavens” (3). The poet’s awed question, “What is all this juice and all this joy?” (9), refers as much to his own sudden creative renewal and potency as to the fertility of the land. “God’s Grandeur” and “The Starlight Night” were written on two consecutive days in late February 1877. Six months later, “Hurrahing in Harvest,” as Hopkins explained to Bridges, was “the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the Elwy.”122 It is painful to imagine Hopkins’s strenuous public repression of these private ecstasies. To his colleagues at St. Beuno’s, such “enthusiasm” for nature would have linked him with despised Romantics such as Keats and Emily Bronte. Several of Hopkins’s nature sonnets directly challenge the neo-Thomist views of his Jesuit instructors. For example, “The Starlight Night” is a deliberate substitution of immanence for transcendence, a literal manipulation of “point of view”: Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! — Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize. Buy then! bid then! —What? —Prayer, patience, alms, vows. Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! These are indeed the barn; withindoors house The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows. Although the poem opens with an urgent invitation to “Look at the stars!” (1), the octet presents a “reading” of the night sky in which starlight can only be encountered through the jeweled metaphors of human myth and fairytale. The imagery of “circle-citadels” (3) and “diamond delves” (4) provides an economy of the

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sublime that is comparable to the systematized proofs of Thomist theology. The beauties of creation, Hopkins seems at first to suggest, are no more than fragmentary figures of the beatific vision, reminders of the gift of eternal life that is to be purchased with “Prayer, patience, alms, vows” (9). Yet just as the poem abruptly twists our angle of vision from “up at the skies” (1) to “Down in dim woods” (4), so, too, the fey metaphors of “fire-folk” (2) and “elves’-eyes” (4) are suddenly replaced by down-to-earth images of barnyard and orchard. In the sestet it is no longer clear whether the natural descriptions of trees in “Maymess” (10) and “March-bloom” (11) are still to be read as figures of the night sky or whether Hopkins intends us to envision the trees themselves, seeming to bloom with starlight. John Rickaby would undoubtedly have dismissed “The Starlight Night” as a work of “obscure mysticism” whose precise meaning fails to yield even to “successive readings.”123 Even as sensitive a reader as Elisabeth Schneider concedes that the poem can be “read quite plausibly in two different and incompatible ways.”124 I think the ambiguities of “The Starlight Night” are quite deliberate. As Virginia Ridley Ellis observes in Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Language of Mystery, the effect of the poem’s dizzying reversals of perspective is to “create an uncertainty in our minds as to whether we can still distinguish between human and heavenly perspective, between literal and metaphorical description.”125 The urgency of “The Starlight Night,” I believe, is Hopkins’s exhortation to his fellow Catholics to set aside metaphysical theorizing and open themselves to the “shocks” (13) of Christ’s immanence in nature. Divinity, Hopkins insists in the poem’s final lines, resides within the objects of our gaze. Echoing The Wreck of the Deutschland, Hopkins suggests to his readers that they can experience Christ’s real presence in earthly creation if they earn the ability to “read” the “unshapeable shock night” and know “the who and the why.” Transcendence and immanence can be reconciled by those who possess “a heart right” and a “single eye” (The Wreck, stanza 29). A key element in Hopkins’s religious quest, as we have seen, was for a “law” that would stabilize the disturbing “flux” and “arbitrariness” that he perceived in himself and in the world, while at the same time validating the freedom and distinctiveness of selves. The theology of Duns Scotus promised Hopkins a longer-for reconciliation of authority and free will, univocity and individuality. In Scotus’s Trinitarian theory of haeccitas, according to which every creature is unique but each is at the same time a total image of its creator, Hopkins found not only a Scholastic justification for his fascination with nature’s inscapes but also a model of God as the common ground and hidden resolution of the conflicting theories and beliefs born of the human intellect. At its height, Hopkins’s Scotism allowed him to accept many of the mechanistic theories of nineteenth-century science without compromising his conviction of God’s immanence in creation. “Pied Beauty,” written in the high summer of 1877, is Hopkins’s Scotist manifesto: Glory be to God for dappled thingsFor skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

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Praise him. In its celebration of multiplicity and variety, the poem rejects the unifying and systematizing impulse of late Victorian neo-Thomism, mounting a direct chal lenge to the claim of Aquinas, in Summa Contra Gentiles, that because in that roof and crown of all things, God, we find the most perfect unity, and everything is stronger and more excellent the more thoroughly it is one; it follows that diversity and variety increase in things, the further they are removed from Him who is the first principle of all.126 The God of “Pied Beauty” is the origin of difference and the supreme example of piedness. He is a deity who contains and validates “All things counter, original, spare, strange” (7) including, of course, Hopkins himself. The landscape of the Divine, the poem argues, is not a featureless snowscape in which all contrasts are erased but a “plotted and pieced” patchwork of “fold, fallow, and plough” (5) in which oppositions and contradictions are encompassed and embraced. God, who is “past change,’ “fathers-forth” (10) each being in its uniqueness, containing and reconciling all the world’s bewildering variety in Himself. Even man’s relationship with nature, a sour note in Hopkins’s other poems of this period, is presented optimistically in “Pied Beauty.” While “God’s Grandeur” had lamented that the world is “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil” (6), and “The Sea and the Skylark” had contrasted the “cheer and charm” (12) of wild nature with “shallow and frail” (9) civilization, “Pied Beauty” depicts human “trades, their gear and tackle and trim” (6) as valuable components in the divine scheme. Skillfully juxtaposing the human and the nonhuman in his sonnet’s dappled design, Hopkins offers an explicit rebuttal of the claim of his neoThomist contemporaries that man “differs not in degree but in kind” from the rest of nature. In “Pied Beauty” Hopkins reached a visionary reconciliation of God and man, man and nature, poet and priest. His spiritual and creative triumph was short-lived. The Scotist beliefs that suffused Hopkins’s great hymn to creation led to his downfall as a theologian. On July 22, 1877, he failed his final examination at St. Beuno’s. His failure, which would drastically reduce his career possibilities within the Jesuit order, had as its immediate consequence his disqualification from further theological study and his departure from Wales. Less than a month after his ordination to the priesthood on September 23, 1877, Hopkins was dispatched to Mount St. Mary’s College in Derbyshire. He described his new job in a dispirited letter to his parents: “The work is non-descript-examining, teaching, probably with occasional mission work and preaching or giving retreats attached”127 It was the first in a series of unfulfilling positions that would culminate in his final, disastrous posting to Dublin. Although Joseph Feeney’s article “Grades, Academic Reform, and Manpower: Why Hopkins Never Completed his Course in Theology” cites a number of practical considerations that may have influenced the decision of Hopkins’s Jesuit superiors to curtail his studies at St. Beuno’s, there seems little doubt that his Scotist views were the main cause of his failure as a theologian. Writing to G.F.Lahey, Hopkins’s earliest biographer, Joseph Rickaby recalled that “in speculative theology [Hopkins] was a strong Scotist and read Scotus assiduously. That led to his being plucked at the end of his third year: he was too Scotist for his examiners.”128 A group of Hopkins’s Irish colleagues recorded that his “obstinate love of Scotist doctrine… got him in to difficulties with his Jesuit preceptors who followed Aquinas and Aristotle.” They concluded that “the strain of controversy…had marred his earlier years.”129 Lahey remarks that Hopkins “was often embroiled in minor duels of intellect,” and Alfred Thomas notes that “since he was examined orally any differences between him and his teachers would have been more likely magnified than diminished.”130

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The fiasco of Hopkins’s failure in speculative theology seems to have been a characteristic act of selfsabotage. Hopkins was undoubtedly aware of his examiners’ neo-Thomist proclivities and of their disapproval of Scotism. He was sufficiently conscious of his own unorthodoxy to refrain from showing his Scotist sonnets to any of his Jesuit contemporaries. Yet in the examination that would determine the future course of his career, he apparently courted failure by adopting an intransigently Scotist stance. It was an expensive act of filial rebellion. His examiners awarded him two low positive and two negative votes. He needed at least three positive votes to continue in the theologate. In his preface to Hopkins’s Sermons and Devotional Writings, Christopher Devlin observes that Hopkins was “wounded three times in his expectation of a full and useful life; first as a scholar, secondly as a preacher, and thirdly as a writer.”131 Finn Cotter describes Hopkins’s failure in theology as a “tragedy, if we look at the effect on his whole career.”132 The defiant impulses that capsized Hopkins’s future as a theologian achieve a more successful expression in “Hurrahing in Harvest,” the final sonnet of his “Welsh days…salad days.”133 It is his most ecstatic poem and his most self-assertive: Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies? I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips gave you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies? And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very violet-sweet! — These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet. Here the poet is no mere onlooker, no “heart in hiding,” but a suitor in search of his beloved: “I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,/Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour” (5–6). As in “The Starlight Night,” Hopkins “hurls” (14) the reader through dizzying changes of perspective: Christ dwells “down” in the things of the earth as well as “up” in the heavens. But the beauties of corn stooks, “azurous hung hill” (9), and gathering clouds are not to be purchased with the “prayer, patience, alms, vows” of “The Starlight Night.” The yearning that impels this poem is “wilder, wilful-wavier” (3) and its raptures more “barbarous” (1). The Christ whom Hopkins greets as a lover is virile, muscular, and “majestic” (10). He is a “stallion” (10) and the Clwydian hills are his “world-wielding shoulder” (9). The poem describes a highly eroticized encounter with Christ that is not unlike the tall nun’s experience in The Wreck of the Deutschland. Yet here Hopkins needs no proxy. “Hurrahing in Harvest” celebrates the prize, the encounter with an immanent Christ, that Hopkins found in wild Wales. Made reckless by impending loss— “Summer ends now” (1)-the poet’s heart steps out of hiding, “rears wings bolder/And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet” (13– 14). The extraordinary synthesis of Scholasticism and Romanticism that made possible Hopkins’s great nature sonnets did not survive his departure from Wales. Drained by demoralizing work in drab cities and no

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longer able to instress Christ in the inscapes of his everyday world, Hopkins rapidly lost faith in nature’s restorative “freshness” and in the resilience of his own inspiration. After leaving Wales, he was never again so prolific. Never again were poems born “all in a rush” of “juice” and “joy” (“Spring” 7, 9). Indeed, Hopkins’s later years were dogged by fears of creative sterility. “Feeling,” he explained to Bridges, “love in particular, is the great moving power and spring of verse and the only person I am in love with seldom, especially now, stirs my heart sensibly.”134 The great nature sonnets were inspired by ecstatic experiences that he interpreted as direct encounters with an immanent God. Separated from an environment in which such experiences were possible, he could not sustain his confidence that God was always present in the natural world and “but the beholder/Wanting.” Hopkins’s Scotism was at its height in Wales because the incarnationalist theories of Duns Scotus provided confirmation and validation of his own immediate religious experience. When Hopkins could no longer find “word, expression, news of God” in the inscapes of Wales, his enthusiasm for the teachings of Scotus waned.135 The 1879 poem “Duns Scotus’s Oxford” echoes Pugin’s Contrasts in its comparison of thirteenth-century Oxford with its Victorian counterpart and in its nostalgic depiction of a lost medieval harmony between “poised powers” of town and gown, church and state, man and nature. Scotus, the poem implies, was the inhabitant of an Eden that is now forever lost. His writings are a lullaby that “sways” Hopkins’s “spirit to peace” (11), comforting but largely irrelevant to the daily life of a harried priest laboring in the “graceless growth” (7) of a modern city. In an 1883 letter to Coventry Patmore, Hopkins confided that he “used to” read Scotus “with delight.” His description of the misunderstanding and neglect in which Scotus was held by his fellow Scolastics suggests that he felt considerable identification with the “Subtle Doctor”: He saw too far, he knew too much; his subtlety overshot his interests; a kind of feud arose between genius and talent, and the ruck of talent in the Schools finding itself, as his age passed by, less and less able to understand him, voted that there was nothing important to understand and so first misquoted him and then refuted him.136 According to Marucci, “Hopkins felt such a kinship for Scotus that we may safely speak of selfidentification at all levels.”137 Not without reason, Hopkins blamed his failure as a theologian and his isolation as a poet on the rigidity and lack of imagination of the Scholastics of his own era. In the last decade of his life, Hopkins took an increasingly bleak view of nature. As the spiritual insights of his Welsh days faded, he came to share the post-Darwinian anxieties of his Catholic contemporaries, finding it ever more difficult to retain a vision of “that which is beyond mechanics” in the relentless cycles of growth and decay of a seemingly mechanical universe.138 Bereft of his Edenic vision, Hopkins viewed nature’s impermanence as a sinister reminder of mortality. In “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection,” a poem written less than a year before his death, Hopkins redraws the cloudscape of “Hurrahing in Harvest” as a nightmarish revelation of creation’s headlong rush toward entropy: “Million-fueled, nature’s bonfire burns on” (9). The law of inscape has surrendered to Darwinian flux. The eternal present of the real presence has fallen into time. In a resounding rejection of the experience of his Welsh years, Hopkins turns from an immanent to a transcendent God, exchanging his faith in sacramental nature for the comfort of dogma: “Enough! the resurrection” (16).

CHAPTER FOUR “The Lost are like this” Victorian Catholic Eschatology and Hopkins’s Dublin Poems

After years of short-lived appointments, of “ginger-bread permanence; cobweb, soapsud, and frost-feather permanence,” Hopkins received the final posting of his Jesuit career in February 1884.1 Writing from University College, Dublin, he informed Bridges that he had “been elected Fellow of the Royal University of Ireland in the department of Classics.” Although he recognized that the appointment was “an honour” and “an opening,” he feared that the work would prove too burdensome: “I am not at all strong, not strong enough for the requirements, and do not see at all how I am to become so.”2 Two weeks after his arrival in Dublin, he recorded a persistent feeling of “unfitness which led me at first to decline the offer made me and now does not yet allow my spirits to rise to the level of the position and its duties.”3 He complained to Bridges that “Dublin itself is a joyless place and I think in my heart as smoky as London is; I had fancied it quite different”4 Hopkins’s Catholic career ended, as it had begun, in the shadow of John Henry Newman. University College was the ramshackle remnant of Newman’s great mid-century experiment in Catholic education. By the time Hopkins arrived in Dublin, the former Catholic University was, as he reported to his mother, “poor, all unprovided to a degree that outsiders wd. scarcely believe.”5 From the first, Newman had struggled to reconcile dreams of rivaling Dublin’s Protestant Trinity College, or even the ancient universities of England, with the reality of miserably inadequate funding. After his resignation from the rectorship of 1858, the institution had languished until meager support from the British government was secured by the 1879 Universities Bill. Now renamed University College, and under Jesuit administration since 1883, the Catholic University was required to offer vocational training and to prepare students for examinations set by an external governing body, the Royal University. Amid all the changes of mission, governance and name, only the institution’s chronic financial troubles remained the same.6 Writing to inform Newman of his new position, Hopkins bemoaned the “dinginess and dismantlement” of the college’s once elegant Georgian buildings. The old Catholic University, he reported sadly, had become “a sort of ruin or wreck.” It soon became clear to Hopkins that the Cardinal’s pedagogical ideas were as little preserved as the crumbling plaster “flutes and festoons and Muses” on the walls.7 Just as “prickly horsehair chairs” had replaced the College’s Chippendale and Hepplewhite furniture, so the ideal of imparting “knowledge for its own sake and nothing else,” propounded by Newman in his Idea of a University, had been set aside in favor of more utilitarian aims.8 University College served a rising Catholic middle-class for whom education was primarily a passport to careers and respectability. James Joyce, who arrived at University College in 1898, only nine years after Hopkins’s death, described his fellow students in the autobiographical novel Stephen Hero:

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I found a day school full of terrorized boys, banded together in a complicity of diffidence. They have eyes only for their future jobs: to secure their future jobs they will write themselves in and out of convictions, toil and labour to insinuate themselves into the good graces of the Jesuits.9 Such students were unlikely to appreciate the “Star of Balliol,” or to esteem the originality and “curiously delicate perception” attributed to Hopkins by his former Oxford tutors, Benjamin Jowett and R.L.Nettleship.10 Indeed, Hopkins’s gifts were of dubious value in a job that consisted mainly of grading vast numbers of elementary Latin and Greek translations and in giving lectures that were little more than lessons. Had he only been less dazzled by Hopkins’s Oxford recommendations and by the financial advantages of appointing a Jesuit fellow, Rector Delany might have stopped to inquire about Hopkins’s performance in the classroom. His dismal record as a teacher at Stonyhurst did not bode well for his work in Dublin. As it was, Hopkins set out for Ireland with the humiliating knowledge that none of the parties in the “Irish row” that preceded his election had really wanted him.11 Although Rector Delany had been eager to enhance the prestige of University College by acquiring a prominent English classicist, Hopkins had not been his first choice. It was only after he had failed to secure Herbert Lucas or Joseph Rickaby that he had turned to their lesser-known Stonyhurst colleague as a possible candidate. Hopkins’s Oxford references were impressive, but the tepid letter of recommendation supplied by Edward Purbrick indicated that, in the Provincial’s view, he was no great asset to the English Jesuit community: I have the highest opinion of his scholarship and abilities—I fancy also that University work would be more in his line than anything else. Sometimes what we in community deem oddities are the very qualities which outside are appreciated as original and valuable.12 When Delany hesitated, James Kavanagh, a Royal University senator, who was well aware of the financial needs of that hard-pressed institution, urged, “Take Hopkins if you cannot get a better. The £400 a year, you will find useful, being an S.J.” Despite the opposition of Dr. William Walsh, President of Maynooth, and Father James Tuite, the Irish Jesuit Provincial, both prominent nationalist sympathizers and supporters of J.E.Reffe, the Irish candidate, the senators of the Royal University elected Hopkins to the Fellowship in Classics by twenty-one votes to three. Money was the decisive issue in his election. As a Jesuit, his salary would revert to the university.13 Opponents of Hopkins’s election pointed to the poor record of Newman’s English Catholic faculty, composed almost entirely of upper-class English converts, in establishing rapport with their Irish students. Citing Newman’s unwillingness to employ Irish-born professors as “the first cause of the failure of the Catholic University,” James Tuite was anxious not to see the mistake repeated at University College. Tuite warned that “English converts…are sometimes…well let us say…unsuited to this country and its thoroughly Catholic people.” He urged Delany not to provoke “national prejudices.” Among the prejudices that Hopkins would encounter was an Irish view of Oxford converts as aloof, aesthetic, and effeminate. It was an opinion he would do nothing to dispel. As White observes: Many of his characteristics—appearance, way of talking, Newmanite conversion, shyness and reclusiveness, educated upper-class Englishness and Oxford mannerisms, scrupulous habits, interests in music and the visual arts, poetic composition-appeared typical facets of an English aesthete.14

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Hopkins’s colleagues remarked on his “delicacy” and unsuitability for the “pioneer roughness of the college. According to his students, he was fussy and pedantic, “unable to cope with discipline,” and subject to constant disrespect. Katherine Tynan, an Irish poet who met Hopkins several times in Dublin, recalled in her Memories that he was “an English Conservative of the old-fashioned sort and they ragged him. With his strange innocent seriousness he would have invited ragging, though I don’t like to think of it as a manifestation of Irish patriotism. Apparently he held his classes in an uproar.”15 Martin speculates that some of the hostility Hopkins encountered in Dublin was “sexual antipathy.”16 Hopkins made little effort to share in the communal life of University College. Father Joseph Darlington recalled that he never seemed to regard the institution as “anything but a mere joke: he never seemed to take any serious interest in the aims and purposes of things.”17 Even in England, Hopkins had been viewed by his Jesuit colleagues as an eccentric; in Ireland he seemed to take a perverse delight in being “counter, original, spare, strange.” The contrariness that had impelled him to defy Dr. Dyne at Highgate School, to revel in the anticipated social ostracism of his conversion, and to take the part of Duns Scotus against his neo-Thomist examiners in theology, now led him to provoke his Irish colleagues by haunting the English parade grounds in Phoenix Park and wearing a red rose in his buttonhole on St. George’s Day. Hopkins’s opposition to Irish nationalism was the most significant cause of his unhappiness and failure in Dublin. By the 1880s, as Desmond Keenan has shown in The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, most of the Irish Catholic hierarchy was openly supportive of the nationalist cause. Catholicism was held to be an indispensable component of Irish identity, a religious expression of opposition to Protestant England and the Anglo-Irish ruling class. In the words of the Irish Dominican, Thomas Burke, “Take an average Irishman— I don’t care where you find him-and you will find that the very first principle in his mind is, ‘I am not an Englishman, because I am a Catholic.’”18 For English Catholics, sympathetic to their co-religionists but eager to disprove Protestant claims that the Roman faith was incompatible with patriotism, the “Irish problem” presented a real conflict of loyalties. Cardinal Manning, whose democratic ideals were blended with a pragmatic desire to appease the immigrant Irish majority among England’s Catholic population, took a consistently sympathetic stance toward Irish grievances. His 1868 “Letter to Earl Grey” conceded that “to our hurt, we have made the English name hateful in the past, and now we must bear the penalty till we have repaired the wrong.”19 According to J.Derek Holmes, Manning “supported the Irish on the disestablishment of the Irish Church, denominational schools, Land Acts, etc.,” although he “did not originally favour the policy of Home Rule.”20 Even Newman, who had asserted his patriotism in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua and his Toryism in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, took a surprisingly tolerant view of the Irish cause, pointing out in an 1887 letter to Hopkins that the “Irish patriots hold that they have never yielded themselves to the sway of England and therefore…have never been rebels.” He added, “If I were an Irishman, I should be (in heart) a rebel.”21 Hopkins was incapable of any such open-mindedness. Irish nationalism was an assault on his very identity and sense of purpose. As Franco Marucci has observed, “the first and most prominent feature” of Hopkins’s political ideas was “a strong patriotic feeling, a strenuous loyalty.”22 From the very outset of his Catholic career, he had been haunted by an urgent desire to put his faith to the service of Britain’s imperial enterprise. His decision to become a jesuit was undoubtedly influenced by his expectation that the order would play an active role in the conversion of England. As both priest and poet, he believed that his life’s mission was to hasten the return of England to the Roman fold and to see her confirmed as the center of a worldwide Catholic empire. Long after he had relinquished his own ambitions as a Catholic bard, he praised the literary successes of his friend and fellow convert, Coventry Patmore, as “a good deed done for the Catholic Church and another for England, the British Empire.” According to Hopkins, “the great end of Empires before God” was “to be Catholic and draw nations into their Catholicism.”23

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In his first year in Dublin, Hopkins confided to his spiritual notebook a fervent wish to crown Christ “king of England, of English hearts and of Ireland and Christendom and the world.”24 Instead, he found himself engaged, albeit unwillingly, in a Catholic scheme to educate the future rulers of an independent Ireland. He made occasional efforts to persuade himself that, for the Irish, “religion hangs suspended over…politics as the blue sky over the earth, both in one landscape but immeasurably remote and without contact or influence”; but, in more sanguine moments, he described life in Ireland as an “open or secret war of fierce enmities of every sort.” In March 1885, he told his mother: the grief of mind I go through over politics, over what I read and hear and see in Ireland about Ireland and about England is such that I can neither express it nor bear to speak of it.25 To Bridges, he complained that “One archbishop backs robbery, the other rebellion; the people in good faith believe and will follow them.”26 His concession, in an 1887 letter to Baillie, that Home Rule would “deliver England from the strain of an odious and impossible task” was evidence not of enlightenment but of despair.27 Beginning his last retreat at Tullabeg in January 1889, Hopkins attempted to explain the depressionverging at times, he wrote, on “madness” —which had afflicted him ever since his arrival in Ireland: I do not waver in my allegiance. I never have since my conversion to the Church. The question is how I advance the side I serve on…. Meantime the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Irish Province in it and our College in that are greatly given over to a partly unlawful cause, promoted by partly unlawful means, and against my will my pains, laborious and distasteiul, like prisoners made to serve the enemies’ gunners, go to help on this cause.28 Catholic spirituality differentiates between the life of the soul in the world and the inward life of contemplation. In many of the saints, interior consolations have flowered most prolifically when the world offered least encouragement. For Hopkins, however, ambivalence and discouragement in his public role produced wholly negative feelings of impotence, emptiness, and failure. John Pick argued in an early biography, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest and Poet, that “many of Hopkins’s Irish poems were a reaction to circumstances plainly uncongenial” and derive “from something external to the man.”29 In Inspirations Unbidden, Harris dismisses this view as “a kind of environmental determinism” which is too insensitive to the “inner patterns of the imagination.”30 My own exploration of the development of Hopkins’s Catholic poetics suggests that the “inner patterns” of Hopkins’s imagination were themselves structured by his Romantic belief in a residual English Catholicism, retained “deep down” in the landscape, if not in the culture of his “sordid, turbid time.” These “inner patterns” could not survive confrontation with an anti-English Catholicism. In Dublin the “melancholy” from which Hopkins had suffered all his life became, he complained, “more distributed, constant and crippling.”31 The politics of Irish nationalism and the prejudices of his colleagues at University College placed an intolerable strain upon the fragile synthesis he had woven from the warring contraries of his nature and calling. Separated from the inscapes of “rare-dear Britain” and pressed into service by her enemies, Hopkins could no longer sustain the absolute identification of English and Catholic interests that had informed his poetry since The Wreck of the Deutschland. His removal to Ireland was a fall into polarities: priest and poet, Catholic and Englishman. Inevitably, for a poet who had charged himself to write only “what wd. best serve the cause of my religion,” Hopkins’s vocational crisis provoked a serious loss of creative confidence. His Dublin letters

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persistently bemoan an inability to “get on” with poems. Writing to Baillie in May 1885, he describes notebooks full of “the beginnings of things…ruins and wrecks.” A year later he complains to Dixon that “a fagged mind and continual anxiety” make it impossible for him to write anything “unless a sonnet, and that rarely.” To Bridges he protests, “if I could but produce work I should not mind its being buried, silenced, and going no further; but it kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget.”32 Yet it is one of the chief ironies of Hopkins’s life that the cheerless Dublin years were in fact among his most prolific periods as a poet. Among the “ruins of wrecked past purpose” (“Patience” 7) there remains a large body of completed work. In 1885, for example, Hopkins’s notebooks indicate that he was working on “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” “To what serves Mortal Beauty,” “The Soldier,” “Carrion Comfort,” “No worst, there is none,” “To seem the stranger,” “I wake and feel,” “Patience,” “My own heart,” “Ashboughs,” “What Shall I Do?” and Caradoc’s soliloquy from “St. Winefred’s Well.” Even though some of these poems were to remain unfinished, Hopkins’s 1885 output is comparable to that of his Welsh annus mirabilis, 1877. At no time in Dublin did Hopkins experience a prolonged “writer’s block” in the conventional sense. His feelings of thwarted creativity were not caused by a failure to write per se but by a despairing realization that the poems he produced were no longer compatible with his priestly vocation. Hopkins’s Dublin poems unravel the sacerdotal poetics he had constructed in The Wreck of the Deutschland and worked to perfection in the great nature sonnets of 1877. In these poems, he had called a temporary truce between priest and poet. Making use of the rhetorical mode of “bidding,” he had sought to reconcile his two vocations by using poetry to call his audience to a deeper religious understanding.33 In The Wreck he had endeavored to put his poetic gifts to work by contributing to the English Catholic literature called for by both Newman and Manning. Even after he had ceased to hope for a contemporary Catholic readership, he continued—as Daniel Harris has argued convincingly in Inspirations Unbidden—to address his work to a “hypothesized” or “fictive” Catholic audience.34 In such poems as “Pied Beauty” and “The Starlight Night,” Hopkins assumes a priestly role, exhorting his audience to accept Christ’s gift of himself in creation. In the Dublin poems, however, Hopkins ceases to address even a fictive audience.35 The poetpriest of the sonnets of desolation can summon neither host nor congregation. First written early in 1885 and reworked extensively during the following six months, “To seem the stranger” is the most self-evidently autobiographical of Hopkins’s Dublin poems, providing a narrative key to the other sonnets of desolation. The poem is a bitter reckoning of the cost of religious change: To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life Among strangers. Father and mother dear, Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near And he my peace/my parting, sword and strife. England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife To my creating thought, would neither hear Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I: I wear y of idle a being but by where wars are rife. I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third Remove. Not but being in all removes I can Kind love both give and get. Only what word Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard, Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.

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Distanced from the youthful drama of his conversion by nearly two decades of social estrangement and blighted expectations, Hopkins concedes that the Church of Rome has not proved to be “heaven-haven.” His faith has neither sheltered him from the “sharp and sided hail,” nor carried him “out of the swing of the sea” (“Heaven-Haven” 2, 8). On the contrary, Christ, his “peace,” has also been his “parting, sword and strife” (4). His embrace of Catholicism has alienated him from “father and mother dear” (2), siblings, friends, and compatriots. Worse, England, “whose honour all my heart woos, wife/To my creating thought” (5–6), has remained obdurately Protestant despite his efforts to win her by poetic “pleading” (7). Now at “a third/ Remove” (9–10) in Ireland, “where wars are rife” (8), Hopkins’s emotional isolation is made concrete by politics and geography. Called to service in an historic cause, the creation of Ireland as a free Catholic nation, and surrounded by his co-religionists, the poet finds himself more than ever the stranger. Seamlessly interweaving priestly and poetic disillusionments, Hopkins proclaims an end to his efforts to woo faithless England—“plead nor do I” (7) —and a “wear/y” (7–8) acknowledgment that his “Wisest” (12) words are sentenced to be “Heard unheeded” (14) or hoarded “unheard” (13). Hopkins’s identification of himself, at the close of “To seem the stranger,” as a “lonely began” (14) has prompted Harris and Hillis Miller, among others, to read the sonnets of desolation as a “circling back’ to “repeat aspects of the crisis preceding his conversion.”36 The despairing voice of Hopkins’s Dublin sonnets does indeed appear upon first reading to echo the pre-conversion anguish of poems such as “Nondum” and “My Prayers must meet a brazen heaven.” These early poems had expressed the loneliness of a believer who could find no evidence of God in the world nor hear any answer to his prayers. In “Nondum,” the twentyone year-old Hopkins compares the universe to “a lighted empty hall/Where stands no host at door or hearth” (10–11). He laments that “Our prayer seems lost in desert ways/Our hymn in the vast silence dies” (5–6). Yet there is a significant difference between the poems of Hopkins’s Oxford crisis and the “inspirations unbidden” of the Dublin years. In many of the earlier poems, Hopkins speaks as one of a generation of spiritual searchers. “A Voice from the World” is framed in answer to Christina Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold.” In “Myself Unholy” the poet compares his sins to those of unnamed friends, observing that their attempts at “sweet living” also fall short of the Christian ideal. The unanswered psalm of “Nondum” is uttered by plural voices: We guess; we clothe Thee, unseen King, With attributes we deem are meet; Each in his own imagining Sets up a shadow in Thy seat; Yet know not how our gifts to bring, Where seek Thee with unsandalled feet. (13–18) The sonnets of desolation, however, eschew all reference to a world outside the self. There is no hint of communal suffering. Estranged from the Tractarian colleagues of his Oxford days by his definitive turn to Rome, Hopkins found himself utterly alone when Catholic consolations failed. Though not entirely friendless, as has sometimes been argued, Hopkins found no supportive Catholic community that could rival the close relation ships he had formed at Oxford or compensate for the physical and spiritual distance of his family. In describing himself, in the final words of “To seem the stranger,” as a “lonely began,” the poet bemoans both his emotional isolation and his apparent inability to succeed in any of the occupations available to a Victorian Jesuit. The numerous beginnings in his Catholic career, as teacher, preacher, scholar, parish priest, and, most disheartening of all, Catholic poet, all petered out in failure and

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rejection. By the time he reached Dublin, feelings of “unfitness” were the steady accompaniment of all that he undertook.37 Although there can be no question that the collapse of Hopkins’s incarnationalist poetics and his fall into solipsism were hastened and exacerbated by his vocational crisis in Ireland, it is also clear that the sonnets of desolation built upon certain destructive tendencies in Hopkins’s spiritual and imaginative life that were present from his earliest Catholic years. The solipsistic prison of the Dublin sonnets had its foundation in a meditation on selfhood made by Hopkins as part of his Long Retreat in Liverpool in 1880. Obeying the Ignatian injunction to make use of creation to fulfill man’s first duty of praise, the poet broke from his customary explorations of Christ’s presence in the inscapes of external nature to look for traces of a creating power within himself. His inward turn was itself an outcome of two years of “slavery of mind” in city parishes, far away from the inspiration of a “country sight.”38 It coincided with his growing inability to perceive nature’s inscapes undistorted by the pathetic fallacy. “Spring and Fall,” the last poem Hopkins completed before the Liverpool Long Retreat, presents a natural scene, “Goldengrove unleaving” (2), from a perspective markedly different from that of the 1877 sonnets. The value of the fallen leaves is no longer sacramental; instead, they are symbols of destiny. Even Margaret herself is a mere audience for the poet’s melancholy reflections on mortality. Hopkins’s own inscape had become the most absorbing object of his contemplation. On retreat in Liverpool he admitted, “I find myself both as a man and as myself something more determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of wal-nutleaf or camphor.” This unique “self-taste,” Hopkins argued, tells of the Creator because it could “Have been developed, evolved, condensed, from the vastness of the world…only by one of higher determination than itself” All other inscapes of nature, he declared, “rebuff me with blank unlikeness.”39 Hopkins’s celebration of his own individuality as the highest pitch of creation initiates an increasingly solipsistic spirituality. Defining his “centre” as the experiencing mind, he distances and objectifies even his own corporeality: Part of this world of objects, this object-world, is also part of the very self in question, as in man’s case his own body, which each man not only feels in and acts with but feels and acts on. If the centre of reference spoken of has concentric circles round it, one of these, the inmost, say, is its own, is of it, the rest are to it only.40 In positing an impregnable self at the center of rippling circles of experience, Hopkins seems to unsay the promise of his 1865 poem “Let me be to Thee as the circling bird,” in which he had placed God at his center, as the “dominant” of his “range and state” (13), and likened himself to a bird or bat whose path traces the divine circumference. By fixing the experiencing self as the center of his spiritual cosmos, and by setting out to “meet” and “greet” God in the particularities of his own nature, Hopkins makes his faith in an immanent and benevolent deity a hostage to the fluctuations of his temperament. As early as 1873, Hopkins’s Stonyhurst journal had recorded an exhausting day of traveling in which he struggle to absorb the succession of inscapes that pressed upon his gaze: Bright sunset: all the sky hung with tall tossed clouds, in the west with strong printing glass edges, westward lamping with tipsy buf-flight, the colour of yellow roses. Parlick ridge like a pale goldfish skin without body. The plain about Clitheroe was sponged out by a tall white storm of rain. The sun itself and a spot of ‘session’ dappled with big laps and flowers-in-damask of cloud. But we hurried too fast and it knocked me up.

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Arriving at Stonyhurst to find “no gas…candles in bottles…things not ready,” Hopkins recalled a collapse into “darkness and despair” in which “nature and all hr parcels and faculties gaped and fell apart, fatiscebat, like a clod cleaving and holding only by strings of root.” He concluded ominously that “this must often be.”41 Seemingly nothing more than a record of passing discomfort and fatigue, the experience encapsulated in this brief journal entry neatly foreshadows the disintegration, a decade later, under the strain of overwork and urban life, of Hopkins’s incarnationalist spirituality and poetics. The passage illustrates the extent to which his perception of presence and inscape in nature were dependent upon an emotional equilibrium that was, in its turn, hyper-reactive to changes in his physical health or daily routine. Grounded as it was in affective experience of God’s immanence, Hopkins’s Catholic faith could not free him from the pitfall of the pathetic fallacy. Any severe disturbance of his own feelings of psychic integrity had the potential to disrupt the process of instress by which he perceived God’s design in the world. In times of distress, inscapes became unstable. Even the poet’s own being began to gape and cleave. In Dublin, as we have seen, Hopkins’s melancholic tendencies were so exacerbated by social isolation and vocational crisis that he could no longer find any evidence of God in his interior world. His preoccupation with original sin, already evident in the Liverpool writings, acquired such a nightmarish intensity that his Scotist conviction of Christ’s continual re-incarnation in human inscapes— “Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his” (“As kingfishers catch fire” 13) —collapsed entirely. In the Dublin poems, Hopkins sees all humanity through the distorting mirror of his self-loathing. Man is no longer Christlike but grotesque. “The Shepherd’s brow,” a poem Hopkins was still working on up to two months before his death, views “life’s masque” in the curved surfaces of “smooth spoons” (13). Deformed and diminished by original sin, man is but a “scaffold of score brittle bones” (5), a bestial creature who lives “hand to mouth” and “voids with shame” (9). In “I wake and feel,” Hopkins’s erstwhile celebration of his distinctive “selftaste” has become a bitterly parodic communion in which he consumes self-risen “dull dough” (12) and recognizes in his own flavor the “gall” (9) with which Christ was tormented by Calvary. In Dublin, where Hopkins was a “stranger” and Christ seemed to have withdrawn from the world, the poet’s habit of objectifying his own body left him in a “coffin” of oppressive and alien physicality from which there was but one escape. The letters of his last years reveal a fascination with suicide and selfmutilation. In an 1885 letter to Baillie, prompted by the suicide of an Oxford friend, Martin Geldart, Hopkins notes: Three of my intimate friends at Oxford have thus drowned themselves, a good many more of my acquaintances and contemporaries have died by their own hands in other ways: it must be, and the fact brings it home to me, a dreadful feature of our days.42 His reference, in the same letter, to Geldart as a “self-tormentor” finds a disturbing resonance in the sonnet “My own heart,” also written in 1885, in which the poet describes a condition of self-hatred and selfdivision in which he is compelled to “live this tormenting mind/With this tormented mind tormenting yet” (3–4). Writing to Bridges in 1888, Hopkins supplies a morbidly detailed account of a young man, “wellknown to some of our community,” who “put out his eyes” with barbed wire. Later in the same letter, after complaining of persistent ocular pain, he protests, “It seems to me I cannot always last like this: in mind or body or both I shall give way.”43 Hopkins’s Christian commitment enabled him to resist an evident temptation towards suicide. Yet, although he was only thirty-eight years old when he arrived in Dublin, his writings, from that time on, express no expectation of an earthly future. As his confidence in the value of his Jesuit vocation, his consciousness of Christ’s sacramental presence in nature, and his hopes of finding a Catholic audience for his poetry all fell away, Hopkins turned

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increasingly from the empty prospects of this world to eschatological speculation. The dark spirituality of the sonnets of desolation flatly denies the incarnationalist message of the earlier Catholic poems. “I wake and feel” speaks of silence and absence where once there was loving reciprocity: “And my lament/Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent/To dearest him that lives alas! away” (6–8). The wide prospects of stars, clouds, and cornstooks which had characterized the Welsh sonnets narrow into a “coffin of dejection.”44 In contrast to the sacramental theology of The Wreck of the Deutschland, in which the present reality of an immanent Christ “rides time like riding a river” (stanza 6), the writings of Hopkins’s Dublin years explore an apocalyptic chronology of death, judgment, and damnation. As a “lonely began,” the poet of the sonnets of desolation is preoccupied with endings: his late poetry returns obsessively to themes of personal and cosmic dissolution. Yet even as Hopkins endured excruciating spiritual distress and feelings of alienation from family, friends, and homeland, his poetry continued to mirror the concerns of the wider Victorian Catholic community. His loss of confidence in the imminent conversion of England, his increasingly self-involved spirituality, even his anxiety about judgment and the punishment of the damned, all reflect a larger loss of confidence, an increased insularity, and a preoccupation with individual eschatology that characterized English Catholic writing during the 1880s. In October 1884, only months before Hopkins’s “To seem the stranger” announced the poet’s intention to stop “pleading” (7) with obdurate England, the controversial Catholic biologist St. George Jackson Mivart published an article entitled “The Conversion of England” in The Dublin Review in which he urged his coreligionists to recognize the futility of their dreams of a Catholic England and to concentrate on putting their own house in order. Mivart attributed the failure of Catholic efforts to bring about the conversion of England to the excesses of Ultramontanist rhetoric and devotions, the revival of liturgical life within the Anglican Church, the prevalence of scientific ideas hostile to religion, and widespread “leakage” from the faith. He advised English Catholics to focus on retention rather than expansion. Heimann’s Catholic Devotion in Victorian England confirms that in the last two decades on the nineteenth century, “the Catholic community’s highest endeavour was to keep its own small community whole.”45 Conservative Catholic intellectuals, including many of Hopkins’s Jesuit contemporaries, sought to define and restate core Catholic doctrines in an effort to arm the faithfal against an onslaught of liberal interpretations from the surrounding Protestant culture. A doctrinal area particularly vulnerable to skepticism and challenge was that of eschatology. For many nineteenth-century Christians, the doctrine of a Last Judgment in which humankind would be divided into saints, destined for everlasting bliss, and sinners, consigned to eternal torture, was no longer proof of God’s omnipotent justice but presented, instead, a real stumbling block to faith. Moral objections to eschatological teachings that “at death there is passed upon every impenitent sinner an irreversible doom to endless tortures, either material or mental, of the most awful and unspeakable intensity; and that this doom awaits the vast majority of mankind,” gathered intellectual support from the Darwinist challenge to traditional ontology and epistemology.46 As Michael Wheeler has shown in Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology, theocentric and “catastrophic” models of judgment and the afterlife came under increasing pressure from more anthropocentric, experiential, and gradualist approaches to eschatology.47 The most articulate and formidable late Victorian challenge to traditional eschatology was issued by F.W.Farrar, a high-ranking member of the Anglican Church. The Archdeacon of Westminster’s influential 1877 volume, Eternal Hope, argued that the fate of man was not “finally and irrevocably sealed at death” and speculated that “all men would ultimately be saved.” Although Farrar protested that “virtue which has no better basis than fear of hell is no virtue at all,” few Victorian theologians were ready to dispense with the moral sanctions of endless punishment.48 The majority of Christian writers of all denominations shared

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Pusey’s conviction that “the dread of hell peoples heaven: perhaps millions have been scared back from sin by the dread of it.”49 Alarmed by the possible effect of Farrar’s message upon the Catholic faithful, Hopkins’s Jesuit contemporaries rushed into print to defend the Church’s teachings on the afterlife. Although the Jesuit George Porter was willing to restrict the categories of persons eligible for eternal punishment to “adult wellinstructed Christians who grievously transgressed the law of God with full knowledge and died willfully impenitent,” he nonetheless insisted, in an 1878 reply to Farrar in The Month, that the expectation of final judgment and the possibility of damnation were “the mainstay of all true happiness to individuals and of stability in human society.”50 Hopkins would certainly have been familiar with Porter’s article on “Eternal Punishment” He would also have encountered W.D.Strappini’s 1881 explication of “The Doctrine of Purgatory,” Richard J.Clarke’s 1882 series of articles defending “The Justice of Endless Punishment,” and William Humphrey’s 1887 “The Sacrament of the Dying” in the pages of The Month. Porter and Clarke were personal friends of the poet. Among other Victorian Catholic writings on eschatology, Hopkins may very well have read H.N. Oxenham’s 1876 Catholic Eschatology and Henry Coleridge’s 1878 treatise on purgatory, The Prisoners of the King. Most significantly, Hopkins’s sonnets of desolation attest to his attentive reading of Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius, a poem described by Wheeler as, after In Memoriam, “the best-known and most frequently discussed literary work on the subject of death and the future life to be published during the Victorian Age.”51 Concerned as they are with the poet’s private and personal spirituality, Hopkins’s sonnets of desolation are also a response to the eschatological writ ings of his Catholic contemporaries. The sonnets blur the boundary between the living and the dead. Comparing himself to “the lost,” the poet uses imagery drawn from Catholic eschatology to describe the spiritual torments of his earthly life during the Dublin years. These late sonnets, along with Hopkins’s other writing on future punishment, invite a reading that acknowledges not only their value as spiritual autobiography but also their, as yet, “unheard” contribution to Victorian Catholic eschatological debate. Admittedly, eschatological themes had not been entirely absent from Hopkins’s earlier poems. Indeed, Alison Sulloway argues that The Wreck of the Deutschland represents a “complete Apocalypse,” following an “apocalyptic rhythm from horror and carnage to joy in the expectation of the Second Coming…with St. John’s Apocalypse as the model.” She traces the poem’s prophecy of an imminent parousia (“coming” or “presence” of Christ at the end of time) to the Tractarian influences of Hopkins’s Oxford days, notably the “violently apocalyptic sermons of Liddon and Pusey.”52 Hopkins’s view of his “fast foundering own generation” presented in the shipwreck poems, The Wreck of the Deutschland and “The Loss of the Eurydice,” undoubtedly conforms to Liddon’s prediction, in his Sermons Bearing Chiefly on the Two Comings of Our Lord, that the parousia would be anticipated by “widespread intellectual confusion, political and social perplexity” and a noticeable “falling off from the faith.”53 Yet, as I argued in chapter two, The Wreck’s apocalyptic impulse is mollified by Hopkins’s willingness to admit the possibility of encounters with an incarnate Christ, existing at once within and outside historical time, through mystical experience and through a Scotist understanding of divine immanence in nature. Sulloway’s Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Temper offers an insufficient consideration of the poet’s specifically Catholic cultural influences. Her “apocalyptic” reading of The Wreck of the Deutschland draws on the poem’s Tractarian roots while failing to acknowledge an equally significant Catholic eschatological context. The apocalyptic anxiety identified by Sulloway as “commonplace among Tractarian and Evangelical priests and in Dissenting households” in nineteenth-century England was not shared by the majority of mid-Victorian Catholics.54 English Catholic eschatology in this period took a far more

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optimistic form, associating prophecies of the parousia with hopes for the return of England to the Catholic fold. For example, Newman’s 1852 sermon “The Second Spring” makes deliberate use of apocalyptic rhetoric to proclaim the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy and the expected conversion of England. He describes the restoration of the hierarchy as a “national commotion” and a “storm in the moral world.” England, he claims, has experienced a “miracle”: “The English Church was, and the English Church is once again…. It is the coming in of a Second Spring.”55 The final stanzas of The Wreck of the Deutschland also associate the return of Catholicism with the parousia. Like Newman, Hopkins uses metaphors of fertility and renewal to describe both the restoration of Catholic England and the second coming of Christ. The Wreck explicitly rejects the “dooms-day dazzle” (stanza 34) of Tractarian and Evangelical millennialism; envisioning instead, in its concluding stanzas, a “released shower let flash to the shire” (stanza 34) engendering a Catholic Messianic Age of idealized medievalism and agrarian order. In Hopkins’s nature sonnets of 1877, eschatological themes give way to Scotist incarnationalism. For a few months at least, the poet’s intense encounters with an immanent God in the inscapes of Wales appear to have silenced his yearning for an apocalyptic resolution to human history. Harris points out that Hopkins understood that the doctrines of immanence and of apocalypse were mutually exclusive…. Belief in the first precluded the second, since it presumed the temporal world to be already infused with divinity; faith in the Apocalypse insisted that the desired immanence of the Holy Spirit was still distant, unachieved, and the earth still wracked by corruption.56 Although Hopkins laments that nature bears man’s “smudge” and “smell,” such sonnets as “God’s Grandeur,” “Pied Beauty,” and “Spring” express confidence that grace still resides “deep down things” (“God’s Grandeur”) and that creation’s inscapes offer “word, expression, news of God.”57 The poet found this confidence increasingly difficult to sustain once he was separated from the “woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales” (“The Valley of the Elwy” 9) of wild Wales. Preaching at Bedford Leigh, in Lancashire, in November 1879, Hopkins warned his parishioners of the approaching apocalypse: Now, brethren, as the time of Christ’s second coming is uncertain so is the time of our death…. But one thing may be said of both and the apostle says it: The night has got on, the day is nearer…. For life and time are always losing, always spending, always running down and running out, therefore every hour that strikes is a warning of our end and the world’s end, for both these things are an hour nearer than before.58 It is difficult to know to what degree this sermon, preached on a prescribed text (Romans xiii, 11–14) reflects Hopkins’s personal apocalyptic concerns. However, the evidence of his letters and poems suggests that by the end of the 1870s his Scotist convictions were no longer proof against eschatological anxiety. From this period on, Hopkins’s poetry increasingly addresses themes of dissolution and decay. “Binsey Poplars” and “Inversnaid” bemoan Victorian desecrations of the “rural scene” (“Binsey Poplars” 24). Alongside the poet’s concern with human threats to the “weeds and the wilderness” (“Inversnaid” 16) is a deepening conviction that the whole of creation is implicated in original sin. No longer an innocent source of grace, nature is “bad, base, and blind” (“Brothers” 40). In an 1881 letter to Dixon, Hopkins observes,

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In Nature is something that makes, builds up, and breeds, as vegetation, life in fact; and over against this, also in nature, something that unmakes or pulls to pieces, what…is called Death and Strife.59 In “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” an 1882 composition that would turn out to be the only completed portion of his projected verse drama on St. Winefred, Hopkins warns that all mortal beauty is subject to “Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay” (12). Faced with human despair at the transience of “looks, locks, maidengear, gallantry and gaiety and grace” (13), the singers of the “Golden Echo” advise that preservation is possible only by exchanging beauty-in-the-flesh for “beauty-in-the-ghost” (17). Earthly delight must be forfeited for happiness “yonder” (32). The point is yet more harshly driven home in the Dublin composition “To What Serves Mortal Beauty,” in which Hopkins contrasts a lost harmony between divine providence and human desire with his own bleak experience of sexual guilt. England’s first conversion was the result of Pope Gregory he Great’s attraction to some “lovely lads” (6) —“Not Angles but angels” —in the Roman slave market: thus “God to a nation dealt that day’s dear chance” (8). For Victorian Hopkins, however, beauty and grace have fallen into polarities. A religious man may “meet” (12) but not “greet” human loveliness. Mortal beauty must be “let…alone” (13). Meanwhile, Hopkins’s increasingly urgent emotional dependence on a linear and apocalyptic model of human salvation was not supported by historical events. The waning of the poet’s hopes for success and glory as a Catholic bard was accompanied by a general diminution of Catholic expectations in England. In an 1880 letter to Bridges, Hopkins had announced his intention to write an ode in celebration of the threehundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of Edmund Campion, adding that he expected “heaven” to mark this day with “a great conversion or other blessing to the Church in England.”60 Neither Hopkins’s ode nor the “great conversion” ever materialized. Five years later, as “To seem the stranger” makes clear, the poet had abandoned hope of England’s imminent return to Catholicism. The disappointments of the Irish years further undermined Hopkins’s confidence in the parousia. In an 1885 poem, “The Soldier,” Christ “bides in bliss,” speaking of his second coming, as Harris points out, “in a strangely hypothetical subjunctive mode”: “‘Were I come o’er again,’ cries Christ, ‘it should be this’” (37). In “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” written in the same year, Hopkins envisions an apocalypse without Christ, a Last Judgment without the possibility of salvation. Discussing the apocalyptic vision of The Wreck of the Deutschland, Sulloway claims that the poet was “infinitely more haunted by the ‘horror and havoc’ of the Second Coming than he was exhilarated by the coming ‘glory of it.’”61 While I do not believe this statement to be true of The Wreck, it is certainly applicable to “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves.” The Dublin poem is a reversal of the optimistic eschatology of The Wreck’s conclusion. The Wreck’s climactic images of dawn and rebirth are countered, in “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” by a revelation of cosmic dissolution in which evening “Strains to be time’s vast, womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night” (2). The Dublin apocalypse, written, as Hopkins reminded Bridges, for “performance” as a dirge-like chant, mourns the “disremembering, dismembering” (7) of the poet’s incarnational vision and warns of an approaching decreation in which nature’s inscapes, in all their piedness and variety, will be “unbound” (5) and their colors drained to featureless monochrome. In a stunning rejection of the staunchly held Scotism that had structured all the great poems of his Welsh years, Hopkins envisions a final darkness in which creatures retain neither their distinctiveness nor their common nature as images of Christ. Even “fire-featuring heaven” (5) offers no consolation now: starlight no longer wafts Christ to earth, as in The Wreck of the Deutschland, nor illuminates the nativity with “piece-bright paling” (13), as in “The Starlight Night.” Instead, the distant stars “overbend us” (4), shedding their dispassionate “bleak light” (9) on earth’s unravelling:

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Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty, voluminous,…stupendous Evening strains to be time’s vast, womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night. Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height Waste; her earliest stars, earlstars, stars principal, overbend us, Fire-featuring heaven. For earth her being has unbound; her dapple is at end, as tray or aswarm, all through her, in throngs; self in self steeped and pashed-quite Disremembering, dismembering all now. Heart, you round me right With: Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms, and will end us. Only the beakleaved boughs dragonish damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black, Ever so black on it. Our tale, O our oracle! Let life, waned, ah let life wind Off her once skeined stained veined variety upon, all on two spools; part, pen, pack Now her all in two flocks, two folds-black, white; right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind But these two; ware of a world where but these two tell, each off the other; of a rack Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. The Sibylline Oracle reveals that at the Last Judgment all human history will be reduced to a conflict of good and evil. The complexities and ambigui ties of individual experience will be of no account; all of life’s “once skeined stained veined variety” (11) will be unwound on “two spools” (11), separated into “two flocks, two folds-black, white; right, wrong” (12). In “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” the moralist in Hopkins scores a crushing victory over the aesthete. The Jesuit poet’s earnest attempts to find theological justification for his celebrations of mortal beauty are nullified by the harsh moral absolutism of the Dublin apocalypse. At the Last Judgment, “dapple is at end” (5) and “self in self steeped and pashed” (6). Hopkins’s delight in “dappled things,” in his own “selfbeing,” and in the “features of men’s faces” is exposed as mere worldliness.62 “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” is an eschatological vision without consolation or hope. The moral universe is depicted as a Manichean conflict between good and evil in which there is no promise of rewards for the just nor any hint of divine intervention through grace. Instead, judgment is presented as a mechanical process of sorting. As Schneider has commented, the “statement of the poem…is about choice but its spirit is not of choice but of doom.”63 The sonnet describes a seemingly predetermined and inescapable contraction of both cosmic and imaginative space. The “vaulty, voluminous” evening sky of the octet shrinks into claustrophobic self-enclosure in the sestet’s representation of hell. The implosive dynamic of “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” is a perfect mimesis of Hopkins’s descent into solipsism in the Dublin years. The poem is both prophecy and spiritual autobiography. The poet’s despairing vision of the end of the world and the coming days of wrath is also a projection of vocational crisis and self-fragmentation in his “world within.”64 Creation’s apocalyptic unwinding imitates the catastrophic unraveling of Hopkins’s carefully constructed poet-priest-patriot persona. As Harris observes, “the earth is consumed by a death-wish that may reflect Hopkins’s own.”65 “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” dramatizes Hopkins’s retreat from authoritative public utterance— “Our evening is over is; our night whelms, whelms, and will end us” (8) —into agonized interiority: “selfwrung,

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selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans grind” (14). It is the last poem in which Hopkins addresses an implied congregation and the last in which he links his fate to a common doom.66 In the poems that follow, Hopkins turns his attention from u niversal apocalypse to the fate of the individual soul. Catholic eschatology provides imagery and structure for Hopkins’s accounts of deeply personal suffering in the sonnets of desolation. During the Long Retreat in 1881, the poet had asked God for “an interior sense of pain which the lost suffer, so that if I should through my faults forget the love of the Eternal Lord, at least the fear of punishment may help me not to fall into sin.”67 The sonnets of desolation offer grim testimony that his request was granted. In “I wake and feel,” “Patience,” and “No worst, there is none,” as in the sestet of “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” Hopkins speaks as a soul separated from God and imprisoned in his own self-being. The poet’s speculations about the experience of damned souls in the 1881 meditation on hell are now applied to his own experience of spiritual claustrophobia and self-disgust: “God’s most deep decree/Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me” (“I wake and feel” 9–10). The language he employs to express personal anguish recalls his efforts to represent the sensory properties of hell in the Ignatian meditation. In 1881 Hopkins had endeavored to follow Ignatius’s injunction to hear the “groans” and “cries” of hell, and to taste “bitter things such as tears, sadness and the worm of conscience.”68 Four years later, in Dublin, his cries “heave, herds-long,” his “thoughts against thoughts in groans grind,” and he tastes himself as “gall” and “heartburn.”69 In the sestet of “I wake and feel,” he explicitly compares his misery to that of the damned: “the lost are like this and their scourge to be/As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse” (13–14). Even Hopkins’s concession that the fate of the “lost” is “worse” probably refers to the duration rather than the quality of their suffering: in “No worst, there is none” he offers himself the threadbare “comfort” that “all/Life death does end and each day dies with sleep” (13–14).70 While the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius supply the meditative framework for Hopkins’s eschatological speculations, contemporary Catholic writers influenced his view that hell is not an eternity of physical torment but an “infinite removal of good” in which the sinner is “carried and swept away to an infinite distance from God.”71 Hopkins’s decision that “as it is by the imagination that we are to realize these things so I suppose it to be by the imagination that the lost suffer them,” places him squarely in the camp of such Victorian eschatological liberals as Newman, Manning, and Joseph Rickaby. Indeed, his discussion of intellectual suffering, in the 1881 meditation on hell, concludes with a swipe at his more conservative fellow Jesuits: “This simple explanation will never strike our Scholastics because they do not see that there is an intellectual imagination.”72 In the sonnets of desolation, Hopkins seems to take his rejection of hell’s materiality a stage further, apparently arguing that the torments of the “intellectual imagination” can occur on either side of the grave. Any attempt, however, to present Hopkins as a liberal in matters of eschatology must tackle not only his unyielding insistence that life’s “skeined stained veined variety” will be reduced, in the Last Days, to “black, white; right, wrong,” but also his apparent disregard for contemporary theories of purgatory as a place or condition of ameliorative suffering. Catholic eschatological writing of the nineteenth century almost invariably focuses on the doctrine of purgatory. Belief in an intermediate state or place of purification in which penitent souls are prepared for heaven offered Victorian Catholics a means of reasserting divine justice and omnipotence in a manner compatible with contemporary ideas of a continually evolving universe. Emphasis on purgation as a process permitted Hopkins’s contemporaries to mediate between the absolute alternatives of heaven and hell and to absorb elements of gradualism and progress into the catastrophic scheme of Christian eschatology. Yet a closer examination of Victorian Catholic writings about purgatory reveals a lack of consensus about the nature and purpose of experience in the “intermediate state.” As a third destination or category of afterlife

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experience, purgatory became the Catholic site of the familiar Victorian conflict between punitive and ameliorative eschatology. Faber’s All for Jesus identifies “two views of Purgatory within the Church.” The first view, which the writer attributes to the medieval saints and to the “popular delineations” of continental devotional literature, represents purgatory “simply as a hell which is not eternal”: It dwells, and truly, on the terribleness of the pain of sense which the soul is mysteriously permitted to endure. The fire is the same fire as that of Hell, created for the single and express purpose of giving torture…. The sense of imprisonment, close and intolerable, and the intense palpable darkness, are additional features of the horror of the scene, which prepare us for that sensible neighbourhood of Hell, which many saints have spoken of as belonging to Purgatory.73 Faber locates a more “calm” and “patient” vision of purgatory in the writings of St. Catherine of Genoa and St. Francis de Sales. According to this second view,” purgatory is a voluntary process of self-purification: [The soul] goes into Purgatory with its eyes fascinated and its spirit sweetly tranquilized by the face of Jesus, its first sight of the Sacred Humanity, at the Particular Judgment which it has undergone…. Its sweet prison, its holy sepulchre, is in the adorable will of its heavenly Father, and there it abides the term of its purification with the most perfect contentment and the most unutterable love…. There are revelations which speak of some who are in Purgatory, but have no fire. They languish patiently detained from God, and that is enough chastisement for them.74 There is little discussion of the afterlife in Challoner’s Garden of the Soul, the prayerbook and devotional manual used by English recusants in the decades prior to 1850. The two views of purgatory described by Faber in All for Jesus reached English Catholics through a wave of translations of continental devotional writings undertaken by Ultramontanists immediately after the restoration of the hierarchy. Views of purgatory as a hell of limited duration were propagated by R.A.Coffin’s 1857 The Eternal Truths: Preparation for Death, a translation of the eschatological writings of the eighteenth-century Italian, St. Alphonsus Liguori. St. Catherine of Genoa’s fifteenth-century vision of purgatory as a voluntary and ameliorative process was introduced to English Catholics by Manning in his 1858 translation of her Treatise on Purgatory. Liguori’s writings emphasize the material torments of hell and purgatory, using vivid sensory descriptions of the sufferings of the damned to stir souls to repentance: The unhappy wretch will be surrounded by fire like wood in a furnace. He will find an abyss of fire below, an abyss above, and an abyss on every side. If he touches, if he sees, if he breathes, he touches, he sees, he breathes only fire.75 A mainstay of Ultramontanist popular Catholicism, Liguorian eschatology found a wide audience not only through Coffin’s translation but also in the emotive preaching of the Redemptorist Fathers, a missionary order founded by Liguori in 1732. The Redemptorists, who had long been active in Ireland, arrived in England in the early 1850s. Manning’s translation of St. Catherine’s Treatise presented a more abstract vision of hell and purgatory as spiritual states rather than places to which the soul was banished by the mechanical actions of divine justice. Catherine denied that the fate of the soul was fixed forever at death. Instead, she insisted that all but the most unregenerate sinners, when confronted by the vision of Christ at the particular judgment,

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voluntarily elect to undergo purgation in order to be fitted for a full and eternal relationship with Christ in love. The Treatise on Purgatory stressed the unity of human life before and after death, arguing that the soul’s education in purgatory was the culmination of a process begun at birth. A shared appreciation of Catherine of Genoa was one of the few areas of common ground between Newman and Manning in their Catholic lives. Although widely read by Tractarian converts, Manning’s translation of the fifteenth-century mystic was perhaps too abstract to possess much popular appeal. It was through Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius, first published in The Month in 1865, that Catherine of Genoa’s eschatology reached a mass audience. Following the example of St. Catherine, The Dream of Gerontius interprets the afterlife as a continuation of the personal relationship with God that was begun by the soul on earth. Yet it is a relationship that is played out in a context of Catholic doctrine, tradition, and liturgy. Neither an unrepentant sinner nor a saint, Newman’s Gerontius is a Catholic Everyman. The poem narrates his final agony and death, his encounter with the “Incarnate God” (351) at the particular judgment, and his voluntary flight into purgatory’s “golden prison” (358).76 At each stage of his journey, Gerontius is supported by prayer and ritual and by other members of the visible and invisible Church. As he lies dying, a priest intones the last rites from the 1860 Rituale Romanum and his friends recite the Kyrie and the Litany. Gerontius himself alternates personal petitions with recitations of the Sanctus and the Creed.77 After death his Guardian Angel escorts him to the throne of God where choirs of angels “hymn their Maker’s praise continually” (345). As Gerontius enters purgatory, his Guardian Angel promises, “Masses on earth, and prayers in heaven,/Shall aid thee at the throne of the Most Highest” (361). Gerontius’s Guardian Angel is a mouthpiece for Newman’s contributions to the Victorian eschatological debate. Newman addresses contemporary controversy about the exact duration of afterlife punishments by explaining, through the Guardian Angel, that time is entirely subjective in the “immaterial world” and “everyone is standard of his own chronology” (331). Moments are measured by “living thought alone/And grow and wane with its intensity” (332). When the intellect is fully harmonized with the will of God, there will be no further experience of time: “It is thy very energy of thought/Which keeps thee from thy God” (332).78 Newman makes further use of the Guardian Angel in an attempt to solve one of the most persistent dilemmas in Catholic eschatology: how can disembodied souls experience bodily torments? The Angel explains to Gerontius that during the interval between death and the final resurrection of the body, souls retain “Some lower measures of perception” (340) in the same way that persons on earth whose hands or feet had been amputated “still cried that they had pains/In hand or foot, as though they had it still” (341). For souls as yet unable to participate directly in the Beatific Vision, sense-memories are necessary to aid the intellect in grasping “holy truths” (340): For the belongings of thy present state, Save through such symbols come not home to thee.(341) Only sight—the “princely sense” which “binds ideas in one and makes them live” (340) —is withheld entirely from the soul until …the joyous day Of resurrection, when thou wilt regain All thou hast lost, new-made and glorified. (341–342).

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Yet although the Guardian Angel uses metaphors of fire and water to describe the process of purification, first warning Gerontius that purgatory “comes like fire” (342) and then announcing his intent to “dip” the penitent soul in “penal waters” (360), he emphasizes that purgatorial suffering is primarily intellectual rather than physical: …two pains, so counter and so keen, — The longing for Him, when thou seest Him not; The shame of self at thought of seeing Him, — Will be thy veriest sharpest purgatory. (351) In many respects, The Dream of Gerontius adheres to the gradualist narrative of religious change that Newman had employed only a year earlier in his Apologia Pro Vita_Sua. Just as the Apologia had rejected catastrophic models of conversion in favor of an evolutionary history of the author’s “religious opinions,” so The Dream of Gerontius denies Liguorian eschatology, according to which the fate of the soul is determined by its condition at the moment of death, in order to trace an afterlife process of gradual alignment of the individual will with the will of God. The journey of Gerontius’s soul from deathbed to “judgment-court” (334) is also a spiritual pilgrimage from terror and confusion to acceptance of and willing participation in God’s design. In the Apologia, Newman’s childhood attraction to ritual and dogma develops into a mature assent to the teachings of Roman Catholicism through his study of scripture and ecclesiastical tradition. In The Dream, Gerontius, predisposed by grace and the sacraments, achieves a willing submission to providence through the instruction of his Guardian Angel. At the poem’s beginning, Gerontius expresses “horror” (315) and “fierce and restless fright” (319) at the “emptying out of each constituent/And natural force, by which I came to be” (314). Prayer affords him only temporary calm in a “storm of…bewilderment” (316). It is the arrival of his Guardian Angel that first lends him “A sort of confidence” (324) as he realizes that he is not “Self-moving, but borne forward on my way” (325). Aided by a chorus of “tender beings angelical” (344), the Guardian Angel reminds Gerontius of man’s fallen condition and Christ’s scheme of redemption, preparing his for the “keen and subtle pain” (349) of the particular judgment. By the time he enters the “Presence-chamber,” Gerontius can proclaim his loving acceptance of divine justice: My soul is in my hand: I have no fear, — In his dear might prepared for weal or woe.(351) He falls “Passive and still before the awful Throne” (357), his vision of Christ signaled by a breakdown of language— “I go before my Judge. Ah!…” (357) — like that of stanza 28 of The Wreck of the Deutschland in which the poet uses ellipses and fragmented syntax to hint at the visionary experience of the tall nun. Gerontius’s last words are of acquiescence to the suffering of purgatory: “Take me away, and in the lowest deep/There let me be” (357). Gerontius’s peaceful self-surrender at the close of The Dream is reminiscent of Newman’s description of his own submission to the Catholic Church in the final chapter of the Apologia: “From the time I became a Catholic…. I…have had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace and content ment; I never have had one doubt.”79 Yet the frustrations and disappointments of Newman’s Catholic career indicate that whatever spiritual contentment he achieved was purchased at a very high cost in more worldly emotions. Like his disciple, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Newman had looked to Catholic ritual and dogma for the resolution of his competing emotional and intellectual needs. Neither man found the “heaven-haven” he

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had dreamed of. Written nearly twenty years after he joined the Church of Rome, Newman’s Dream of Gerontius is a rewriting of his conversion fantasy of self-surrender to an impregnable authority, this time deferred into another world. Two decades after his religious change, Hopkins also turned to thoughts of the afterlife. But unlike Newman, his speculations brought him little encouragement. In A Son of Belial, Martin Geldart’s memoir of Balliol College in the 1860s, the youthful Hopkins appears thinly disguised as Gerontius Manley. The Dream of Gerontius was published only a year before Hopkins’s conversion, when Newman’s influence over him was at its height. Although there is no reference to The Dream in Hopkins’s letters or journals, his eschatological meditations, written during the Long Retreat in 1881 and 1883, and his representations of spiritual agony in the sonnets of desolation leave no doubt of his familiarity with Newman’s verse drama. Like Newman, Hopkins argued in his spiritual writings that the harshest suffering of the lost was their consciousness of separation from God: Now the sinner who has preferred his own good…to God’s good…has that evil between him and God, by his attachment to which and God’s rejection of it he is carried and swept away to an infinite distance from God; and the stress and strain of his removal is his eternity of punishment.80 Like Newman, he sought to account for the physical torments of the disembodied by arguing that, after death, souls retain a residue or aftershock of bodily sensation which is experienced through the “intellectual imagination.” While Newman had likened the corporeal sufferings of dead souls to the residual pain felt by living persons with amputated limbs, Hopkins theorizes, in an 1881 meditation, that sinful actions carried out on earth leave “scapes or species” in the mind which block and oppose the soul’s craving for God. Such conflict within the soul, he argues, would be “instressed” by the intellectual imagination as physical pain, “and the pain would be that of fire, supposing fire to be the condition of a body texturally at stress”.81 Newman and Hopkins shared the belief that sufferings in the afterlife are caused primarily by internal spiritual conflict rather than by punishment inflicted from without. Newman’s Dream describes Gerontius’s claustrophobic experience of his own interiority: And the deep rest, so soothing and so sweet, Hath something too of sternness and of pain. For it drives back my thoughts upon their spring By a strange introversion, and perforce I now begin to feed upon myself, Because I have naught else to feed upon (323). Gerontius’s “veriest, sharpest purgatory” is the clash of warring impulses within his own soul— “two pains, so counter and so keen” (351). He both longs for God and fears him. Hopkins’s eschatological writings of the early 1880s echo and amplify Newman’s images of self-imprisonment, self-division, and selfconsumption. Speculating on the fate of Satan and his angels, he observes that for instance, the will addressed at ‘forepitch’ towards beatitude, happiness in God…is confronted by that scape, that act of its own, which blotted out God and so put blackness in the place of light.82 Against these “scapes and species” of its past actions, the soul “dashes itself like a caged bear…violently instresses them and burns, stares into them and is the deeper darkened.”83

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Hopkins’s speculations about the torments of the lost are dramatized with nightmarish immediacy in the Dublin sonnets. In “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” all exterior objects of perception are dissolved and dismembered, leaving the speaker confined to a “rack” of self-division on which “thoughts against thoughts in groans grind” (14). In “Patience,” the hearts of the rebellious “grate on themselves” (9). The speaker of “I wake and feel,” who explicitly likens himself to the lost, is compelled, like Newman’s Gerontius, to feed upon his own thoughts: “God’s most deep decree/Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me” (9–10). Hopkins’s Dublin sonnets are influenced not only by Newman’s account of the afterlife sufferings of Gerontius but also by his dramatization of the process of dying. Newman emphasizes psychological disintegration rather than the physical pain of death: Gerontius experiences a “strange innermost abandonment” and an “emptying out” (315) of the constituents of identity. His final moments are punctuated by waves of panic and spiritual vertigo: I can no more; for now it comes again, That sense of ruin which is worse than pain, That masterful negation and collapse Of all that makes me man; as though I bent Over the dizzy brink Of some sheer infinite descent; Or worse, as though Down, down for ever I was falling through The solid framework of created things, And needs must sink and sink Into the vast abyss. And, crueller still, A fierce and restless fright begins to fill The mansion of my soul (319). This passage from The Dream of Gerontius is distinctly echoed in two of Hopkins’s sonnets of desolation. Like that of Gerontius, the experience of the speaker in “No worst, there is none” is characterized by successive waves of sorrow and terror: No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. (1–2) As in Newman’s poem, psychic collapse is represented by images of vertiginous descent: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who never hung there. (9–11) The link between “Carrion Comfort” and The Dream is clearer still. The poem’s opening quatrain, in which the speaker struggles against a pitch of anguish that threatens to dissolve his very identity, contains a direct quotation from Newman: Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

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Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be (1–4). The words of the dying Gerontius, “I can no more,” are italicized in Hopkins’s manuscript to show that they are not his own. Brian Vickers, who first pointed out the link between the two poems in a 1966 article in the Times Literary Supplement, suggests that “Carrion Comfort” is “repudiating Newman’s presentation of the passive nature of the soul’s collapse and urging a more intense heroic state, where the soul lies ‘wrestling with (my God!) my God.’”84 Paul Mariani explains that “Hopkins’s will is more stubborn. The responsibility to ‘not choose not to be’ cannot be surrendered; death is the surrender of the body only, not of the self”85 Both writers seem to overlook the fact that Hopkins’s “I can no more” is uttered in a very different spiritual context from that of Newman’s Gerontius. While Newman’s Catholic Everyman dies upheld by the liturgy and tradition of the Church, passing from the care of priest and grieving friends in this world to the protection of his Guardian Angel in the next, the speaker in “Carrion Comfort,” whom I assume, for reasons already discussed, to be Hopkins himself, wrestles alone with thoughts of suicide. As a priest in Liverpool in 1880, Hopkins had preached a sermon on “Divine Providence and the Guardian Angels” in which he had urged his congregation to consider the “wonderful honour” conferred on “fallen men by blissful spirits” who “while they have us poor wretches in their sight…are at the same time gazing on the face of God.”86 Guardian Angels, however, do not seem to figure in his personal spirituality. No “blissful spirits” mollify the horrors of his eschatological meditations, nor do they intervene in the struggle of the sonnets of desolation. The intense spiritual upheavals that structure “Carrion Comfort”—conversion and temptation to despair-are mediated neither by Catholic liturgy nor by human or celestial helpers. Hopkins quotes Gerontius’s words of resignation to death in a poem that describes his own frantic struggle with a lion-limbed and “devouring” (7) adversary whom he addresses first as “Despair” (1) and only much later, and parenthetically, as God. It is only by comparing his current agony and terror with the experience that preceded his conversion that Hopkins can recognize his divine assailant: But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer. Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God. (5–14) In the sestet of “Carrion Comfort,” Hopkins, the “lonely began,” takes a new perspective on the conversion experience he had described ten years earlier in The Wreck of the Deutschland. In The Wreck’s opening stanza, he had acknowledged God as both creator and destroyer:

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Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing… In the second stanza, he had described his conversion as an act of terrified submission to God’s overwhelming energy and violence: I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod; Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God; Thou knowest the wall, altar and hour and night: The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod Hard down with a horror of height: And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress. The same cruel deity appears in “Carrion Comfort,” presiding over the poet’s unmaking, pitilessly eyeing his “bruised bones” (7), and seemingly tempting him to despair. In this late poem, however, the sweet and restorative aspects of divine power, represented in The Wreck by imagery associated with Gertrude of Helfta and the parousia, are wholly absent. God’s mastery is no longer countered by mercy. The poet’s recollection of his past spiritual trial, underscored by verbal echoes of The Wreck’s rhyming “rod” and “trod,” offers no reassurance that he will escape God’s rekindled wrath. Instead, he questions the humility of his earlier submission, when “(seems) I kissed the rod” (10). Recoiling from the egotism of The Wreck, he wonders whose triumph he was lauding in his account of spiritual struggle? Had he upstaged God as the “hero” of his conversion? In the sonnets of desolation, Hopkins the self-dramatizing convert has become an object of his own disgust and of God’s rage and abandonment. Like the lost souls in Newman’s Dream of Gerontius, he suffers from “two pains, so counter and so keen” (351): the pain of bodily torments, experienced through the intellectual imagination, and the pain of separation from God. Unlike Newman’s lost souls, however, the speaker in Hopkins’s sonnets expresses no expectation that his sufferings will end in beatitude and no acknowledgment that they are deserved. As Harris has commented, Hopkins “shows a far greater consciousness of divine power than of justice.”87 In “I wake and feel,” his torments are ascribed, without explanation, to “God’s most deep decree” (9). In “To seem the stranger,” he attributes his failure as a writer to “hell’s spell” (13) and “dark heaven’s most baffling ban” (12). The God of the afterlife casts a malign influence over the world of the living. Heaven and hell are equally hostile to the poet’s intentions. Although the influence of Newman’s Dream of Gerontius is evident both in Hopkins’s Dublin sonnets and in his eschatological writing of the early 1880s, neither the poems nor the meditations make any allusion to purgatory as a destination or condition of souls. Nor do they evince any notion of ameliorative suffering or of any intermediate state between “black, white; right, wrong.” In the sonnets of desolation, Hopkins draws on Newman’s imagery of purgatorial suffering to describe the spiritual agonies that laid waste to his earthly life during the Dublin years. In his meditations, Newman’s speculations about the experience of souls in purgatory are applied to the fate of the damned.

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At a time when many of his Catholic contemporaries had seized upon the doctrine of purgatory as their best defense against growing popular rejection of Christianity’s traditionally harsh teachings on eternal damnation, Hopkins’s eschatological writings are notable for their silence on the subject of an intermediate state and for their strenuous efforts to preserve and justify Ignatian and Liguorian views of hell. Much of Hopkins’s eschatological conservatism was surely prompted by the peculiarities of his own nature. The same masochistic fascination with absolute forms of authority that led him, as a young man, to abandon the Anglo-Catholic “via media” and embrace the Church of Rome, to reject the collegiality of Newman’s Oratorians in favor of the strict discipline of the Society of Jesus, to subject himself to harsh and unnecessary penances, and to dream of martyrdom, is evident in Hopkins’s late descriptions of the sufferings of the lost. Yet his refusal to relinquish traditional teachings on divine justice and eternal damnation, while pitting him against mainstream Protestant and secular culture and against the more liberal stream of Catholic opinion represented by Newman in The Dream of Gerontius, Oxenham in Catholic Eschatology and Universalism, and Henry Coleridge in The Prisoners of the King, placed Hopkins squarely in the camp of his former Stonyhurst colleague, and the new editor of The Month, Richard J.Clarke, and marks a rare point of agreement with his fellow Jesuits in Ireland. In a pair of 1882 meditations on hell and death, believed by Devlin to “have been connected with a Lenten mission that he gave in Cumberland,” Hopkins employs a floridly populist rhetoric and an evident relish for his subject matter: We shall die in these bodies. I see you living before me, with the mind’s eye, brethren, I see your corpses: those same bodies that sit there before me are rows of corpses that will be. And I that speak to you, you hear and see me, you see me breathe and move: this breathing body is my corpse and I am living in my tomb. There is one thing certain of your place of death; you are there now, you sit within your corpses; look no farther: there where you are you will die.88 Although he echoes Newman in his assertion that lost souls experience physical torment through the mind, Hopkins’s lingering attention to the sensory properties of hell conforms to traditional Ignatian meditative practice and invokes the Liguorian eschatology more commonly associated with continental missionary orders such as the Redemptorist Fathers: Smell with an imaginary smell the smoke, the brimstone, the dregs and bilgewater of that pit, all that is foul and loathesome. The same must be said here as had been said of eyes and ears. It is sin that makes them fuel to that fire: the blinding stifling tear-drawing remembrance of a crowd of sins is to them like smoke; stinging remorse is like the biting brimstone; their impurity comes up before them, they loved it once and breathed it, now it revolts them, it is to them like vomit and like dung, and they cannot quit themselves of it: why not? Because they are guilty of it; it is their own sin; they wallowed in it willingly, now against their will they must forever wallow.89 In typically Liguorian fashion, Hopkins argues that salvation hinges upon the condition of the soul at the precise moment of death. Liguori’s The Eternal Truths: Preparation for Death claims than “an eternity of every joy or every torment” depends on “that last moment, that last gasp, that final closing of the scene.”90 According to Hopkins, “The devil rages then, for he knows that his time is short: one thought of mortal sin at the last gasp is enough, it will do his work for ever, and he watches well, he knows when death is near.”91 Like Liguori, Hopkins prescribes devotional practices to ward off Satan’s final onslaught: his listeners

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should give alms, pray for the salvation of others, and “get and wear the brown scapular and the medal of the Immaculate Conception.”92 While Hopkins’s harsh vision of eternal damnation undoubtedly reflects the depression and self-rejection of his final years, it also reveals his support for the conservative eschatology of his Jesuit contemporaries. For Victorian Catholics, as we have seen, the 1880s were a decade of social and doctrinal retrenchment. The English Jesuits were particularly alarmed by the possible social consequences of a breakdown of the traditional fear of eternal punishment. As early as 1878, Henry Coleridge, whose Prisoners of the King was based on St. Catherine of Genoa’s view of purgatory as a condition of ameliorative suffering, and strongly influenced by The Dream of Gerontius, had conceded, It will be better hereafter to have quailed in terror before some picture of Purgatory in which the most fearful torments have been depicted in the grossest way, in which the souls are represented as writhing on spits in the midst of flames, torn to pieces by devils, screaming in agony…than to have persuaded ourselves that these sufferings of which the saints of God think so much are light and short, and that it can be no such very terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living God on the day of His judgment.93 During the early eighties, Richard J.Clarke, a former colleague of Hopkins at St. Beuno’s, mounted a strenuous defense of Ignatian and Liguorian teachings on hell in a series of editorials in The Month. In “Eternal Punishment and Infinite Love,” written in January 1882, Clarke promises to show that “Hell is not incompatible with Infinite Love, but that-paradox though it may seem-it is because God is a God of Infinite Love that Hell is eternal.”94 Arguing that “the essential evil of Hell does not proceed from the action of God, but rather form the will of man,” he claims that “the abolition of Hell would be a misfortune to man, inasmuch as it would involve him in evils greater than any to which he is now liable.”95 A month later, in “The Justice of Endless Punishment,” Clarke insists that since “the deliberate choice of evil is made at some time or other by all the lost,” it must be recognized that “God deals out, even in Hell, the most exact justice.”96 In March 1882, he concludes, in “The Positive Argument for Endless Punishment,” that “there are in the world…only two classes—saints and sinners” and “if the crack of doom were to sound at this very moment, every human being…would be found ready, as far as their own internal state is concerned, for heaven or hell.”97 Clarke’s words were evidently fresh in Hopkins’s mind when he composed his meditations on death and hell in the spring of 1882. His defense of eternal punishment contains no hint of the questioning of divine justice that would arise in the sonnets of desolation; instead, he echoes Clarke in his insistence on the compatibility of damnation with God’s paternal love: Can these things be? It is horrible to have to speak of them, but Christ spoke of them; they must then be true. Are they just? —Yes, because God is just. But you can yourselves see they are just; if you tell your child; Let your sister alone, do not beat her, or I will beat you, are you unjust to threaten him? And if he disobeys you and torments her still are you unjust to carry out your threat? Are we not warned by God?98 Nor was Clarke alone in his unwillingness to soften the threat of eternal punishment by allowing for the intermediate state of purgatory. His division of souls into “only two classes—saints and sinners” is echoed in the “two flocks, two folds” (12) of “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves.”

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In his support for conservative teachings on eternal punishment, Hopkins allied himself not only with his English Jesuit contemporaries but also with his colleagues at University College, Dublin. Liguorian eschatology reigned unchallenged in Irish seminaries throughout the nineteenth century.99 In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, who attended University College a decade after Hopkins’s death, describes the sadistic fascination of his Jesuit teachers with the punishments of the afterlife, recalling a retreat in which students are guided through the Ignatian meditations on death and hell by a preacher who dwells lovingly on the torments of the senses: O how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls. And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike.100 Devlin observes that the sermon in Joyce’s Portrait resembles Hopkins’s meditation on hell in its use of the “crescendo of suffering from point to point” as a rhetorical device. Such devices, he speculates, although absent from the Spiritual Exercises, may have been a convention among nineteenth-century Jesuits.101 Like Hopkins, Joyce’s preacher makes no mention of purgatory. Judged by their eschatological writings, Hopkins, who always felt himself an outcast and a “stranger” in Dublin, was more in tune with his Irish colleagues than the Catholic University’s revered founder, John Henry Newman.102 The occasionally shrill conformity of the 1882 meditation contrasts sharply with the private eschatological uncertainties expressed by Hopkins in the “unheard” sonnets of desolation. In Send My Roots Rain: A Study of Religious Experience in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donald Walhout claims that Hopkins “never had any quandary about orthodox Catholic belief?” He asserts that the poet “seems not to have dealt with orthodox belief except to affirm it, to apply it and occasionally to speculate in those areas where dogma was not fixed and where speculation was admitted and invited.”103 Yet even if we grant that Hopkins’s interest in Scotus, although unpopular with his superiors, did not exceed the boundaries of permissible speculation, it is hard to see how the sonnets of desolation, with their blurring of distinctions between the living and the dead in their apparent questioning of divine justice, can be absolved of all taint of unorthodoxy. Admittedly Hopkins’s use of eschatological imagery to describe the psychological sufferings of the living is uncannily prophetic of twentieth-century Catholic views of hell as a subjective experience of separation from God. For example, in The Destiny of Man, published in 1937, the exiled Russian personalist Nicholas Berdyaev argues that hell is not an afterlife destination but a condition of spiritual death, “the state of the soul powerless to come out of itself…[of] absolute self-centredness.”104 Berdyaev, who is unlikely to have read Hopkins, virtually paraphrases the solipsistic vision of the conclusion of “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” in his description of the fragmented consciousness of the lost: The phantasms of hell mean the loss of the wholeness of personality and the synthesizing power of consciousness, but the disintegrated shreds of personality go on existing and dreaming, and the broken up personal consciousness goes on functioning. These dissevered fragments of personality experience absolute loneliness.105

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Yet even if we read the sonnets of desolation as the creation of a theologian ahead of his time, a pioneer in eschatology as in poetry, we are still left with the difficult task of reconciling Hopkins’s alleged orthodoxy with his agonized complaints of a distant and unforgiving God. Beginning with the claim of his earliest biographer, G.F.Lahey, that Hopkins’s sufferings in Ireland “sprang from causes which have their origin in true mysticism,” Catholic scholars have attempted to explain the spiritual unrest of the poet’s last years by comparing his experience to the “Dark Night of the Soul” described by St. John of the Cross.106 According to the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, the “Dark Night” is a period of spiritual death in which The Divine assails the soul in order to renew it and thus to make it Divine; and, stripping it of the habitual affections and attachments of the old man, to which it is closely united, knit, together and conformed, destroys and con sumes its spiritual substance, and absorbs it in deep and profound darkness. As a result of this, the soul feels itself to be perishing and melting away.107 Evelyn Underhill’s influential 1911 study, Mysticism, locates the “Dark Night” as a discrete stage in the “Mystic Way,” a “last and drastic purgation of the spirit” prior to the experience of union with God.108 Comparing St. John’s account with descriptions of similar experiences by other Christian mystics, she describes a “state of helpless misery” in which the self “surrenders itself, its individuality, and its will, completely.”109 The anguish of the “Dark Night,” Underhill concludes, is “an orison” in which the “starved and tortured spirit” learns that Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather, our own will is our separation from God. All disorder and corruption and malady of our nature lies in a certain fixedness of our own will, imagination, and desire, wherein we live to ourselves, are our own center and circumference, act wholly from ourselves, according to our own will, imagination, and desires.110 Following Lahey’s claim that Hopkins’s Dublin poems were written “from the bleak heights of spiritual night with his God,” Downes’s Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of His Ignatian Spirit draws an explicit parallel between “what Hopkins expresses in his sonnets and what St. John describes in the chapter entitled ‘The Dark Night.’”111 Other subscribers to the “mystical” interpretation of the sonnets of desolation include Bergonzi, for whom the poems “represent… a further stage of Hopkins’s spiritual development and selfawareness,” and Mariani, who argues that “whatever desolation and isolation Hopkins experience at the end of his short life…one thing is clear: he was growing steadily closer to the condition of sainthood.”112 For these and other Christian readers, the eschatological imagery and allusion in Hopkins’s late poems refer to the mystical experience of dissolution of the self prior to full union of God. The spiritual torments described in “No worst, there is none” and “I wake and feel” are interpreted as stages in a providential teleology. Hopkins’s temporary experience of the pains of “the lost” is a guarantee that he will escape their fate in the afterlife. While there is undoubtedly a strong resemblance between the spiritual travails described by Hopkins in the Dublin sonnets and the purificatory sufferings of St. John of the Cross and other mystics, such a resemblance provides a flimsy basis from which to argue that the poet was himself a mystic. It is surely significant that Hopkins, who was deeply interested in the testimony of mystics and visionaries, never made any such claims for his own experience. Neither in the sonnets of desolation nor in his notebooks and letters is there any indication that he embraced the anguish and aridity of the Dublin years as a gateway to a higher state. Only once, in “Carrion Comfort,” does the poet speculate that his sufferings might be a form of

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purgation: “That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear” (9). Elsewhere, he finds them simply “baffling” (“To seem the stranger” 12). Yet, according to Underhill, the “Dark Night of the Soul” is a voluntary process of mortification: “The mystic… undertakes it without reluctance: pushed by his vivid consciousness of imperfection, his intuition of a more perfect state, necessary to the fulfilment of his love.”113 Surely the tormented speaker of “Carrion Comfort” has little in common with Underhill’s model of willing self-surrender. Finally, perhaps, the spiritual significance of Hopkins’s sufferings in Dublin can only be determined by their outcome. Since, in the teleology of mysticism, the “Dark Night” is the penultimate stage in a process leading to union with God, it might be expected that the sonnets of desolation would be followed by writings celebrating such a union. In fact, Hopkins’s last poems proffer little or no evidence of mystic experience. It is true that the poems of his three remaining years do not sustain the restless anguish of the 1885 sonnets of desolation. But neither do they seem to reflect the emotions of a man who has achieved, in Underhill’s words, “the final triumph of the spirit.”114 According to Underhill, mystics who experience the “Unitive Life” are infused with new “vitality” and “creative powers”: “The self, lifted to the divine order, is to be an agent of the divine fecundity: an energizing centre, a parent of transcendental life.”115 Yet the writings of Hopkins’s final years contain repeated references to spiritual and artistic sterility. On retreat in February 1889, he mourned, “All my undertakings miscarry: I am like a straining eunuch.”116 A month later, in “Thou art indeed just, Lord,” he calls himself “Time’s eunuch” who cannot “breed one work that wakes” (13). In his last poem, “To R.B.,” written only weeks before his death, the poet describes a “winter world” (13) in which he can no longer achieve “the one rapture of an inspiration” (10). Yet at the end of his life, Hopkins seems to have achieved a measure of resignation. In “To seem the stranger,” the poet railed against “hell’s spell” and “dark heaven’s baffling ban”; four years later, in “Thou art indeed just, Lord,” he affirms his faith in divine justice before humbly requesting an explanation for his life’s defeats: Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinner’s ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end? As he struggled to come to terms with the frustrations of his Jesuit career, Hopkins sought consolation in the lives of other holy failures. Among his last poems was a celebration of the recently canonized St. Alphonsus Rodriguez. Like Hopkins, the sixteenth-century Jesuit lay-brother had led an outwardly uneventful life, working for more than thirty years as a hall-porter at the College of Montesion in Majorca. Yet the wisdom and patience displayed in his private devotional writings had earned him the highest honor the Catholic Church could bestow. His significance for Hopkins is easy to understand. In “In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez,” the poet reminds himself that great spiritual victories are not only won with “gashed flesh or galled shield” (2); there are also triumphs in “the war within” (6). Even Christ, whom a younger and more optimistic Hopkins had worshipped as “a warrior and a conqueror,” was now a model of thwarted heroism: Above all, Christ our Lord: his career was cut short and whereas he would have wished to succeed by success—for it is insane to lay yourself out for failure, prudence is the first of the cardinal virtues, and he was the most prudent of men-nevertheless he was doomed to succeed by failure; his plans were baffled, his hopes dashed, and his work was done by being broken off undone.117

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Hopkins’s last poems contain no indication of a renewed joy in the world. There is no recovery of his earlier sense of God’s immanence. The creator remains bafflingly absent from creation. The exultant conclusion of “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire” is a triumph of the will to believe: the powerful Christian consolation of the sestet is uttered like a spell to banish the sonnet’s nightmarish vision of dissolution and flux: …Enough! the Resurrection, A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection. Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal flame. Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christs is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. In his 1908 study, Scholasticism, Hopkins’s Jesuit colleague Joseph Rickaby observes that the “critical spirit” of Duns Scotus was “less confident than St. Thomas [Aquinas] as to the range of religious truth that reason could directly establish.” Unconvinced by philosophical arguments for the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, Scotus believed that “for a sure and certain hope of resurrection…we must fall back upon faith alone.”118 Long after he had relinquished the thirteenth-century Scholastic’s buoyant sacramentalism, Hopkins echoed Scotus once again in his stark assertion of faith against reason and instinct. “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire” is a retelling of the apocalyptic prophecy of “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves.” This time the poet sees his own fate set apart from the world’s general dismembering. Christ’s promise looms larger than the threat of the Last Judgment Writing less than a year before the end of his life, Hopkins defies his own demons and declares his faith in an optimistic Christian eschatology. Soon to be rid of “mortal trash,” he looks forward confidently to an afterlife in which he will be “what Christ is.” In February 1889, Hopkins’s retreat notes record: Nothing to enter but loathing of my life and a barren submission to God’s will…. How then can it be pretended there is for those who feel this anything worth calling happiness in this world? There is a happiness, hope, the anticipation of happiness hereafter: it is better than happiness, but it is not happiness now.119 His “happiness hereafter” was not long in coming. Early in May he became ill. At first, his malady was vaguely diagnosed as “rheumatic fever” and “a fleabite.”120 He had been sick for over a week before it was recognized that he had typhoid. Toward the end of the month he appeared to rally, but then peritonitis set in. His parents were called by telegram on June 6. He died on June 8, 1889, at half-past one in the afternoon.121 According to his Jesuit colleagues, Hopkins’s was a model death. Like Newman’s Gerontius, he was consoled by his family and supported by the rituals of the Church. His deathbed demeanor followed the prescriptions of St. Alphonsus Liguori’s The Eternal Truths: Preparation for Death at every point. Lahey reports that he grew “more collected” at the end, retaining consciousness and appearing to “follow mentally” the prayers for the dying. Upon receiving the final blessing and absolution, “he was heard two or three times to say, ‘I am so happy, I am so happy.’”122

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

L3, 293. Leavis 159, 192. Ibid 175. Eliot 52. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. xl. Pick xi. Gardner 1. Mizener argues that much of Hopkins’s social thinking is also “that of a typical nineteenth-century Englishman,” noting the poet’s “concern for the Empire and his unquestioning acceptance of the superiority of Englishmen” (95). Even Hopkins’s “eccentricity” is read by Mizener as a “nineteenth-century and especially a British habit” (99). L3, 245. Marucci 117. Bergonzi 60. Bridges 204. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent 60–64. From fewer than seventy thousand souls at the beginning of the nineteenth century, England’s Catholic population had grown to more than one quarter of a million by 1851. Irish immigrants continued to swell the ranks throughout Victoria’s reign. Even in the last decade of the nineteenth century, converts still streamed in at a rate of nearly 10,000 per year. L1, 231. L2, 89. “The Second Spring.” A Newman Treasury 217. The Idea of a University 284. Ibid 294. Ong 170. Apologia Pro Vita Sua 206. Hollis 205. J 120. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats 209. S 34; L2, 137–38.

CHAPTER ONE: NEWMAN, HOPKINS, AND “HEAVEN-HAVEN”

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1. L3, 435. For a valuable explanation of Liddon’s role in Hopkins’s religious life at Oxford and particularly his encouragement of Hopkins’s increasingly ritualist sympathies, see Nixon 1–50. Nixon contends that “Liddon’s formative influence on Hopkins’s religious life and poetry cannot be overestimated” (50). He comments especially on the influence of Liddon’s Bampton Lectures on the formation of Hopkins’s Christology and on Liddon’s preoccupation with sexual restraint and the right appreciation of mortal beauty. Nixon speculates that Liddon’s primary reasons for remaining in the Anglican communion may have been social rather than theological: patriotism, snobbery, and the strength of his ties with Oxford. Manley Hopkins was right in his assessment of Liddon’s influence over his son’s religious views but mistaken in thinking Liddon could muster any anti-Roman arguments likely to dissuade Gerard from his idealistic course. Limbo, in traditional Catholic eschatology, is a place of exile and exclusion, the destination of the unbaptized dead. 2. L3, 95; L3, 19. 3. For a detailed and fascinating survey of Victorian writings on heaven, see Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology, 119–74. 4. L3, 95. 5. The story of Newman’s dispute with Kingsley is well known. For the basic texts of the controversy between Kingsley and Newman and full discussion of the Apologia’s origin and reception, see Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. David J.DeLaura, Norton Critical Edition. All citations will be from this edition. 6. Apologia 184. 7. L3, 221. 8. Wilfrid Ward 63. 9. Apologia 206. 10. Jude Nixon observes that both Hopkins and Newman were happier, humanly speaking, in their Protestant lives and both were written off as failures in their Catholic lives (52). 11. Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, published in 1845, argues that while Christianity possesses a fixed “essence,” doctrine may undergo a continuous process of development, sometimes involving the emergence of truths hitherto unknown, or at least unrecognized. The legitimacy of new beliefs as outgrowths of the true “essence” is to be decided by empirical tests. 12. Apologia 184. 13. Ibid 194. 14. Harrold 51. 15. Gilley 334. 16. Apologia 199. 17. Twelve years later, Henry Coleridge, as editor of The Month, would refuse to publish Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland. 18. Apologia 7. 19. L3, 28. 20. Gilley 315. 21. Trevor 1–31, 73–98, 112–156. Ronald Chapman’s Father Faber provides a counterweight to Trevor’s uncritical support of Newman. A more balanced account of the two Oratories appears in Norman 225–6. 22. For a detailed account of this episode, see Schiefen 219–21. 23. A useful account of The Rambler’s troubled history appears in J.J. Dwyer’s “The Catholic Press 1859–1950” in Beck 490–95. 24. Gilley 275–6. For Newman’s definition of “liberal education,” and particularly his distinction between “useful knowledge” and “liberal knowledge,” see John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, 40, 41, 88, 91. In his autobiographical novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero, James Joyce satirizes the debasement of Newman’s pedagogic theories at the hands of his Jesuit successors. See my article, “John Henry Newman and the Education of Stephen Dedalus” James Joyce Quarterly 33.4 (1996) 593–603. 25. Manning, Miscellanies 27, 71. 26. Trevor 358.

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

NOTES

Newsome 257. Trevor 298. John Henry Newman, Callista: A Tale of the Third Century 215. Apologia 40. Ibid 255, 156, 13, 413. Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects 274. Cameron describes Newman as “a controversialist of superb gifts, perhaps the most remarkable in the history of English letters” (7). Apologia 84. The mature Newman’s appreciation of Scott was perhaps based upon personal recollections of the novelist’s ability to satisfy his childhood craving for tales of “magical powers and talismans” (Apologia 14). In Young Mr. Newman, Maisie Ward reports: “Scott’s novels were just coming out, and Newman, who had listened with delight to his mother’s reading of the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ devoured the novels in bed in the early morning” (7). Apologia 29. Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects. 274–75. Loss and Gain 42. Ibid 230, 265. Apologia 150, 133. Newman associated religious “feelings” (his own included) with the pious emotionality and “enthusiasm” of Methodists and Evangelicals. His private letters show a fastidious distaste for all raw displays of emotion. In the preface to the Apologia, he responds to Kingsley’s ill-restrained emotionality with patronizing scorn: “I wish to impute nothing worse to him than that he has been furiously carried away by his feelings” (5). An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent 105. Apologia 34, 51, 16. Ibid 29, 187. For extensive discussion of Newman’s use of generic and hermeneutic models from earlier Christian autobiography, see Peterson 93–119. Apologia 188; William Wordsworth, “Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (56). David Goslee discusses the “mystical” and “visionary” elements in Newman’s autobiography in “A Mystical Subtext to Newman’s Apologia” Auto/Biography Studies 6 (Fall 1991) 198–210. Goslee argues that Newman uses the Apologia to “affirm and deny his own Romantic heritage in the same breath” by employing “imaginative power to win the insight that such power is not only superfluous but false” (209). Apologia 84. In his Apologia, Newman recalls his discovery of an old Latin verse-book whose first page is embellished with childish drawings of a crucifix and a rosary: “I suppose I got these ideas from some romance, Mrs Radcliffe’s or Miss Porter’s; or from some religious picture…” (15). For a detailed exploration of the relationship between Catholic polemics and nineteenth-century literary medievalism, see Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Idea in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Chandler discusses the far-reaching influence of texts such as John Lingard’s History of England (1819–30), Kenelm Digby’s The Broadstone of Honour, or the True Sense and Practice of Chivalry (1822), and the French medievalist, Alexis Francois Rio’s writings on Christian poetry; all of which combine Romantic medievalism with Catholic apologetics. White 21. For discussion of the sources of Hopkins’s “The Escorial,” see MacKenzie 20–21. L3, 395; L3, 15. White 25. See L3, 2–3. According to Gosse’s “Essay on Swinburne,” Hopkins was not the only Victorian poet to learn metrics and masochism from the same pedagogue. Swinburne told Gosse that his taste for punishment had come from a “stunning” tutor at Eton whose “one other pet subject was metre” (Letters 6.244 qtd. in Dellamora 84). White 33, 26–27. Marucci 132.

NOTES

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54. J 26–27. 55. For a comprehensive examination of Ruskin’s influence on Hopkins, both before and after his conversion, see Sulloway 64–114. 56. The intensity of Ruskin’s conflict over Catholicism is illustrated in a note in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which he confesses that “no man was ever more inclined than I…to a sympathy with the principles and forms of the Romanist Church” (8:267), but goes on to assert that Catholicism is “the darkest plague ever to have held commission to hurt the earth” (8:268). He writes this in 1849, a few months after attending mass at Rouen and recording in his diary the conviction that “freed from abuses, this mode of service was the right one” (qtd. in an editors’ note 8:268). Whether Ruskin’s eventual resistance is interpreted as the triumph of Evangelical prejudice or as an honest inability to accept Catholic dogma, it is nonetheless true that he came very close to being “lured into the Romanist Church” (9:437), by the aesthetics of the Gothic, an accusation he brought against Pugin in a vicious appendix to the first volume of The Stones of Venice. Ruskin ranks Pugin as “one of the smallest possible or conceivable architects” (9:438), and pours scorn on his conversion to Catholicism, accusing him of having been “jangled into a change of conscience by the chimes of a belfry” (9:437). But even here, while he ridicules the supposedly aesthetic grounds of Pugin’s change of faith, Ruskin concedes that there are other, less contemptible motives for conversion to Catholicism: I can respect the desire for unity which would reclaim the Romanist by love, and the distrust of his own heart which subjects the proselyte to priestly power: I say I can respect these feelings, though I cannot pardon unprincipled submission to them (9:436–37).

All references refer to The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T.Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (Library Edition, 39 vols., London: George Allen 1903–1912). For farther discussion of the relationship between Ruskin and Pugin, see Rosenberg 47–63. Kristin Otteson Garrigan’s Ruskin on Architecture: His Thought and Influence also discusses the many similarities of interest and temperament between Ruskin and Pugin. 57. For discussion of Pugin’s contribution to mid-nineteenth-century Catholic art and culture, see Gilley 243; Holmes 69; and Clark 123–196. 58. After the separation of the two Oratories, one of the few remaining areas of accord between Newman and Faber was their common antipathy towards Pugin. According to Chapman (184), Pugin was so outraged by the Italianate design of Faber’s London Oratory that he claimed to have put a curse on the building. 59. Loss and Gain 212, 33. 60. Poems (3rd Edition) 96. 61. Saville 5. 62. Bergonzi quotes a contemporary account of Dolben’s theatrical Catholicism at Eton: “He crossed himself at meals, and left his queer books about, and behaved generally so as to make himself and his opinions a ridiculous wonder to the boys” (28). For a discussion of Dolben as a homosexual poet, and speculation about his influence on Hopkins, see Reade 10–12; Martin 80–120; and Bridges, The Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben. 63. J 60, 71. In his discussion of Hopkins’s embrace of Catholic religious practices as a means of channeling homoerotic desire into literary production, Dellamora suggests that confession to Liddon was a literary activity for Hopkins, one that permitted him to “transform fantasy and secret actions into spoken words” (47). 64. MacKenzie 12. 65. Dellamora 17, 47; Saville 21. 66. The earliest examination of Newman’s possible homosexual orientation occurs in Geoffrey Faber’s Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement. The account contains very strong hints rather than explicit allegations. Faber suggests that, “the mating instinct had never fully developed” in Newman and that when “the ideal of virginity became a part of the furniture of his conscious mind, there was nothing else there which needed

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67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

NOTES

to be painfully dislodged” (30). He concludes that by the time he vowed himself to celibacy at the age of fifteen, Newman had “made a discovery about himself, from which he concluded that he was not likely to marry” (31). Faber observes that Newman’s contemporaries, both enemies and friends, referred to his “feminine” characteristics and cites W.G.Ward’s famous dream, first recounted in his son’s, Wilfrid Ward’s, Life of Cardinal Newman, in which Ward “found himself at a dinner party next to a veiled lady, who charmed him more and more as they talked. At last he exclaimed, ‘I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman at Oxford.’ ‘I am John Henry Newman,’ the lady replied, and, raising her veil, showed the well-known face” (33). The apparent violence of Newman’s recoil from heterosexual relations is evident in his description of Charles Reding’s encounter with a newly married couple in Loss and Gain: “Love was in their eyes, joy in their voice, and affluence in their gait and bearing. Charles had a faintish feeling come over him; somewhat as might beset a man on hearing a call for pork chops when he was sea-sick” (241). Hilliard 187, 209. Reed 221–22. Early Poetic Manuscripts and Notebooks 197, 198, 190. Bronte 382. The “via media” was Newman’s attempt, as a Tractarian, to define an Anglican compromise between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism based upon the three foundations of “dogma, the sacramental system and antiRomanism” (Apologia 65). He first mapped out this position in “The Prophetical Office of the Church viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism” published in 1837. The principles of the “via media” continued to shape the Tractarian position during Hopkins’s undergraduate years. J 146. “Coleridge” (1866) in Selected Writings of Walter Pater 144. Pater, only five years older than Hopkins, was a new fellow of Brasenose College when he began coaching Hopkins in 1865. His essay on Coleridge identifies the poet as a leader of the lost cause of absolutism. He describes the “literary life of Coleridge” as a “disinterested struggle against the relative spirit” (145). Coleridge’s philosophy of art, claims Pater, was “an attempt to reclaim the world of art as a world of fixed laws.” Pater’s description of Coleridgean aesthetics might very well apply to the aesthetic ideas of Hopkins. Indeed, the very year in which Pater published “Coleridge” anonymously was the year in which Hopkins appealed for a return to “fixed laws” in “The Probable Future of Metaphysics.” The verdict of Pater that Coleridge’s “own pathetic history pleads for a more elastic moral philosophy than his, and cries out against every formula less living and flexible than life itself” (167) has been applied by many to Hopkins’s own life. Yet although Hopkins and Pater held such very different philosophies, their relationship seems to have been one of mutual respect and cordiality. In 1878, long after his conversion, Hopkins renewed his connection with Pater and recorded that he “was one of the men I saw most of” (L3, 246). For a detailed and insightful comparison of Hopkins’s and Pater’s views on morality and aesthetics, see Nixon 175–230. J 83. J 120. L3, 226. Lines 9–10 in “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.” Poem 67 in Poems, 4th Edition. For Hopkins’s view of the “Parnassian,” see L3, 215–23. Martin 106. As early as 1968, Wendell Stacy Johnson, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Poet as Victorian observes that “although autobiography of the circumstantial kind is not frequent in Hopkins, some of his early poems hint at it” (25). Robert Bridges, who had introduced Dolben, his distant cousin, to Hopkins in February 1865, was well aware of the autobiographical content of the sonnet sequence, “The Beginning of the End,” and noted on his copies of the first and third poems: “These two sonnets must never be printed” (Poems 250). Moore 26–33. Discussing the resonances of Newman’s sermons in Hopkins’s poems, Moore explains that “passages from Newman’s writings are not being advanced here as ‘probable’ sources for Hopkins’s poems, but, rather, as indications of a oneness of mind…between men. Hopkins had doubtless read at least some of the sermons from which these selections are taken” (89–90).

NOTES

105

82. L3, 226; Essays Critical and Historical 2:443. 83. Parochial and Plain Sermons V, 326, 316; Parochial and Plain Sermons VI, 85. 84. Apologia 133. For example, Newman’s “Letter to the Rev. E.B.Pusey D.D. on his recent Eirenicon,” written in January 1866, only months before Hopkins’s conversion, answered Pusey’s objections to the Marian extravagances of Faber, Manning, and Ward by denying that the Ultramontanists were true spokesmen for English Catholics. Clearly Newman intended to imply that he was. Pusey’s Eirenicon was an attempt to achieve reunion between Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholic moderates. Hopkins reveals his own familiarity with Newman’s “Letter to Pusey” in an October 1866 letter to Urquhart in which he describes the Dublin Review (W.G.Ward’s mouthpiece for Ultramontanist opinion) as “an extreme paper which represents, as Dr. Newman says, nobody but itself” (L3, 28). 85. White remarks that “it did not matter what philosophical views a man adopt, so long as he understands and is consistent in them” (97). The anatomy of “enthusiasm” compiled by the Oxford Catholic, Ronald Knox, in 1950, exhibits prejudices already common in Oxford religious circles a century earlier. He defines the “enthusiast” as one who “decries the use of human reason as a guide to any sort of religious truth” and who celebrates “direct personal access to the Author of our salvation, with little of intellectual background or liturgical expression” (2–3). 86. White 52; Moore 99. A comprehensive Anglo-Catholic reply to Essays and Reviews did not appear until the publication, in 1899, of Lux Mundi, among whose contributors was Henry Scott Holland. 87. J58. 88. L3, 226–27. 89. L3, 402. 90. See Loss and Gain (253): “‘God calls you!’ said Carlton, ‘what does that mean? I don’t like it; it’s dissenting language’” In his introduction to the Oxford “World Classics” edition of Loss and Gain, Alan G.Hill observes that Carlton has traditionally been identified with Newman’s Tractarian colleague, John Keble (xvii). 91. L3, 31–32. 92. L3, 27. 93. Martin 44. 94. The following verbal echoes seem to me to make a certainty of Jude Nixon’s opinion that Hopkins “no doubt read Loss and Gain” (56). 95. Loss and Gain 251. 96. Ibid 252. 97. Apologia 133. 98. L3, 93. 99. L3, 92. 100. Apologia 160. 101. Ibid 160; L3, 92. 102. Loss and Gain 226. 103. Discourses to Mixed Congregations 192. 104. Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teachings 163; Loss and Gain 255; L3, 93. 105. L3, 92; Apologia 178–79. 106. L3, 95. Reed draws parallels between “the American youth movement of the 1960s” and the “Catholic Revival or Anglo-Catholic movement in the nineteenth-century Church of England,” observing that “each stood in opposition to some of the dominant values of its time and place, appealing to people who were…disaffected from those values. Both were, in short, ‘counter-cultural movements’” (xxi). Later, Reed observes that Catholic religious practice “distanced its adherents from the world of commerce, rebuked that world’s pretensions and subverted many of its values” (185). Even at the time, Anglo-Catholicism was clearly associated with adolescent rebellion. In 1877, J.C.Ryle, a leading Evangelical who was later Bishop of Liverpool, described young people attracted to Anglo-Catholicism as “idle young ladies and thoughtless young men, who love anything gaudy, showy, sensational and theatrical in worship, or like to show their independence by disagreeing with their parents” (qtd. in Reed 184–85). Although Hopkins differed from Reed’s “giddy” young Anglo-Catholics in the

106

107. 108.

109. 110.

111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

NOTES

depth and quality of his religious commitment, one of the many and complex motivations of his conversion to Roman Catholicism was undoubtedly youthful rebellion. L3, 94–95; L3, 435. Confession notes in Hopkins’s diary of 1865 include such “sins” as “imitating Papa at the office, criticizing Papa and Mamma… Imitating Papa once, less respectfully,” and “allowing imitation of and laughter at Papa” (Early Poetic Manuscripts and Notebooks 95–107). At the time, Hopkins was twenty-one years old. J 21, n.3. This particular passage from Loss and Gain seems to have influenced Hopkins. Compare Reding’s response to his friend Carlton’s concern that conversion will be a “terrible blow” to his family, with Hopkins’s response to his parents’ grief: Reding explains, “Do you think I have not considered it, Carlton? Is it nothing for one like me to be breaking all those dear ties, and to be losing the esteem and sympathy of so many persons I love? Oh, it has been a most piercing thought; but I have exhausted it, I have drunk it out” (235); Hopkins writes, “You ask me if I have had no thought of the estrangement. I have had months to think about everything” (L3, 94). The day before his reception, Hopkins assured his mother, “You might believe I suffer too” (L3, 100). White 143. L3, 22. Ibid 405. Proudfoot xiv. Loss and Gain 15. Apologia 107; Loss and Gain 240; L3, 27. Apologia 156. Describing the often mutinous atmosphere of Newman’s Oratory, Meriol Trevor remarks that it is scarcely surprising that “clever young men …who had fought their way into the Church against the opposition of parents, teachers and the whole weight of English society…did not overnight become docile sheep” (12). Their zealous acceptance of supernatural authority and their passionate allegiance to the Pope in distant Rome was not always accompanied by equal enthusiasm for the more mundane acts of self-denial required by a missionary Church. Hopkins, for example, who dreamed of heroic martyrdom, complained that teaching at the Oratory School left him insufficient time for reading, and later, as a Jesuit, was irked by the daily task of tidying his room. For further discussion of the divisions within the Victorian Catholic community, see John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1950. For a useful overview of the pontificate of Pius IX, see Vidler 146–56. “The Work and Wants of the Catholic Church in England.” Miscellanies 70–71. Ibid 65, 56–57. According to Holmes, for the Ultramontanes, “the attitude of a Catholic toward temporal power became the touchstone of his loyalty on other issues” (116). For a useful comparative biography of Newman and Manning, see David Newsome, The Convert Cardinals: John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning.

CHAPTER TWO: ONE “FETCH” IN HIM 1. For an extensive discussion of the political and social background of Bismarck’s anti-Catholic legislation, see Blackbourne 3–41. 2. L3, 106. 3. A Newman Treasury 217. 4. Ellis 239. 5. Hopkins signed The Wreck of the Deutschland and his Welsh poem, Cywydd, with the pseudonym “Bran Maenefa,” a bardic name meaning crow of Maenefa. 6. Letters and Diaries XXII: 314–15 7. Miscellanies 4.

NOTES

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

107

Ibid 19. Ibid 161. Snead Cox I: 215. Heimann 22. Gibson 265. For a full discussion of the religious and political ideas of John Lingard and his influence on nineteenth-century English Catholics, see Joseph P. Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine Movement 1750–1850 (Shepherdstown: The Patmos Press, 1980). For a useful overview of Victorian Catholic periodical literature, see J.J. Dwyer, “The Catholic Press 1850– 1950,” in Beck 475–97. For more about popular Catholic novels of the period, see Margaret H. Maison, The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Religious Novel (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961); Andrew Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel, 1840– 1880 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979) 121–47; Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: Garland, 1977) 39– 65. Readings of the Wreck 17. Idea of a University 282–83, 310, 297. Miscellanies 181–82. Maison 6. Pollen 64. White 259. L3, 138 Bergonzi 53. Coleridge’s obituary described him as “a man of great refinement and a sensitiveness that was somewhat excessive” (qtd. in Rowell 170). Judging from this description, Coleridge and Hopkins had much in common, though their extreme sensitivity may have made for a difficult relationship. L1, 135–36 L3, 138. Ibid. Chester S.Burns, S.J., prefaces his contribution to Immortal Diamond with the declaration that “religious orders have no crying need of poets; nor, yet again, craving for the honor of their company. Be the poets of major, minor, or mediocre attainments, religious orders flourish grandly, like the cedars of Lebanon without them. With them they continue to do so provided the poets in question rest content with their common lot.” Schneider128. Bergonzi 59–60. White 332. Early Poetic Manuscripts and Notebooks 201. L3, 83. Thomas 164, n.2. Ibid 56. White 257. An illuminating view of Hopkins through the eyes of his Jesuit contemporaries is assembled by Joseph J.Feeney, SJ., in “Hopkins in Community: How His Jesuit Contemporaries Saw Him.” Saving Beauty: Further Studies in Hopkins, eds. Michael J.Allsopp and David Anthony Downes (New York: Garland, 1994) 255– 64. L1, 46. Robinson 152. Matthew Arnold, “Preface to Poems” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, gen. ed. M.H.Abrams, 5th ed., vol. 2 (New York: W.W.Norton, 1986) 1399. L1, 46. White 385. S 233.

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

NOTES

Marucci 22. L1, 160. Beck 521. L1, 231. Marucci 54. L1, 50. Marucci 54. Idea 311 L3, 43; L3, 228; L3, 43–45; L3, 231. L3, 408. Letters and Diaries XII, 113. White 159. Robinson 122. John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England 13. Maison observes that “few modern horror comics could equal in cruelty, sadism, hysteria and blood-curdling violence the story of Jesuits in popular Victorian fiction. From the best-selling literature of the day, we see that the Jesuit loomed large in Protestant imagination as a villain of the blackest dye, a spy, a secret agent, suave, supercilious and satanically unscrupulous, laying his cunning plots for the submission of England to Jesuitocracy” (169). For an extensive examination of Victorian anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit propaganda, see D.G.Paz, Popular Anti-Catholirism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). Addington 313. Trevor, 449. See also Moore, “The oft-told story of Newman’s relations with Manning, Faber, Ward and the Ultramontane party, makes an interesting background against which to consider Hopkins’s religious development” (313 n.152). L3, 46–47. Zonneveld 70–73. L3, 39. Hopkins admits, however, that his writing may not find favor with the Dublin Review’s irascible editor, William George Ward. This article (like so many of Hopkins’s projects) was apparently never written. L3, 43. Newman’s Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk on the Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation (London: B.M.Pickering, 1875) contains the fullest formulation of his views on the relationship between church and state. Certain Difficulties I: 240. Zonneveld 25. Miscellanies 29. Miscellanies II 34. Ibid 29. Holmes 160. L1, 27–28. For a discussion of the political and social objectives of Catholic corporatists, see Zonneveld 6–7. Frederick Hathaway, “Prospects of Catholic Charity,” The Month March 1867:246–54; Henry Coleridge, “Social Danger,” The Month February 1867: 121–34. Miscellanies 19. For a discussion of Cosmopolitan influences on English Jesuits, see Thomas 95–96. See also J 236. Beck 443. Heimann 7. Hollis 224. J 262. Zonneveld 14.

NOTES

109

79. J 153–54; J 156. Kenelm Vaughan, later Manning’s private secretary, was well known for his Ultramontane enthusiasms. In a December 1867 letter to Urquhart, Hopkins makes an approving reference to Vaughan’s “extraordinary devotion to the B[lessed] Sacrament” (L3, 49). 80. J 200–201; J 229; J 261. 81. J 195. 82. For further discussion of Emmerich’s life and visionary claims, see Kselman 85–86. 83. J 261. 84. L3, 231. 85. Miscellanies 117. 86. Dyos and Wolff 837, 853. 87. All for Jesus 33–34 88. Norman 87. 89. Parochial and Plain Sermons I: 263; Growth in Holiness (London: 1854), 353. 90. Letters and Diaries XV: 242; All for Jesus 227. 91. Apologia 150; All for Jesus 227. 92. Moore 163. 93. The only comparison of Hopkins with Faber that I have come across appears in Gerald Roberts’s Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Literary Life. Roberts compares Hopkins’s “Easter Communion” with Faber’s “Ash Wednesday,” arguing that Hopkins’s poem “both suggests and rises above the work of the contemporary Catholic priest-poet, Fr. Frederick Faber, who died in 1861 after a life which had some parallels with Hopkins” (12). 94. On July 17, 1844 (only months before he was received into the Roman Catholic Church), Faber exclaimed to J.B.Morris, “O, that my wretched nature had the yoke of St. Ignatius laid on it: there is nothing in our system to macadamize one” (Addington 117). 95. In a letter of December 16, 1842, Faber told J.B.Morris, “I have felt, more strongly this Advent than ever, that I have very sinfully permitted the man of letters to overlay the priest. Now the necessity of parish duties comes like a divine interference with my willfulness” (Addington, 93–94). Faber’s Cherwell Water Lily, published in 1840, was his only collection of poems. Addington (13) describes Faber’s friendship with Wordsworth and his frequent visits to Ambleside in the years before his conversion. Like Hopkins’s, Faber’s conversion to Catholicism was accompanied by a theatrical renunciation of poetry. Unlike that of Hopkins, Faber’s resolve was unbroken. 96. See, for example, Addington 68–69. 97. Trevor 375. 98. The Creator and Creature 348. 99. Ibid 333. 100. “Pied Beauty” 10. My sources for this discussion of Duns Scotus include S338–351; The Harper Collins Encydopedia of Catholicism, Gen. ed. Richard P.O’Brien (New York: HarperCollins, 1995) 1170–71; and Downes 32. 101. Otto 97. 102. Creator and Creature 348; S154. 103. J 221, 249. David Lewis (1814 or 1815–95) was converted by Newman and joined the London Oratory after the schism. He shared Faber’s interests in the Spanish mystics and published biographies and translations of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. Devlin describes Brande Morris as “one of the major eccentrics of the Oxford Movement and the Catholic Revival” (S 435). 104. L1, 47. 105. Moore 164. 106. McNeely 101–103. 107. Addington 150. 108. Creator and Creature 20. 109. Ibid 19–20. 110. Otto 12–20.

110

111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119. 120.

121. 122.

123.

124. 125. 126.

127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

133. 134.

NOTES

Sermons Preached on Various Occasions 77–78. Parochial and Plain Sermons II:xxiii. Miscellanies 65–66. Creator and Creature 24, 22, 7, 21, 24. See Newman’s Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent 49–92. Creator and Creature 332–33, 352, 357. Gibson 267; Kselman 95; Spiritual Conferences 307. Heimann 150–53. Besides the evidence of his 1881 sermon on the Sacred Heart, the importance Hopkins himself attributes to the heart, both his own and the Sacred Heart, is expressed in such poems as “Nondum,” “Rosa Mystica,” “The Handsome Heart,” “The Windhover,” “Carrion Comfort,” and especially in The Wreck itself. In The Wreck, Hopkins describes the moment of his conversion as the “swoon of a heart” (2) and “a fling of the heart to the heart of the host” (3). He refers to the tall nun’s vision as evidence of “a heart right” (29) and, in the poem’s triumphant penultimate stanza, he exalts the “heart-fleshed” (34) miracle of the incarnation. See, for example, Sulloway 158–95. Sources of information on Gertrude and the other women mystics of Helfta include Emilie Zum Brunn and Georgette Epinay-Burgard, Women Mystics in Medieval Europe. Trans. Sheila Hughes (New York: Paragon House, 1989); Mary Jeremy Finnegan, The Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Sister Maximilian Marnau, Gertrude of Helfta: The Herald of Divine Love (New York: Paulist Press, 1993). The Life and Revelations of St. Gertrude 72. Ibid 185–86. The passage is worth quoting in full: “He who loves to pour forth His gifts on the humble seemed to make a golden tube come forth from His Heart, which descended upon this humble soul in the form of a lamp, making a channel through which He poured forth on her the abundance of all His marvels; our Lord poured forth from His sacred Heart all the virtue and beauty of His divine perfection…. The saint was drawn in a miraculous manner into the Heart of Jesus, through this sacred channel of which we have spoken, so that she found herself happily reposing in the bosom of her Lord and Spouse.” All for Jesus 139. Gertrude’s Victorian translators felt sufficiently defensive about the saint’s erotic language to remark in their preface that, “if our love were purified…and if we had no carnal taint in our affections,…we should not so easily doubt or mislike these marvelous manifestations of His most marvelous charity” (Life and Revelations xliv). All for Jesus 244. Creator and Creature 222. Poems no. 140. For discussion of the date of this fragment, see Norman H.Mackenzie’s “Foreword on the Revised Text and Chronological rearrangement of the Poems,” xlv-xlvi. See Life and Revelations: “Jesus said: ‘When I behold anyone in his agony who has thought of Me with pleasure, or has performed any works deserving of reward, I appear to him at the moment of death with a countenance so full of love and mercy, that he repents from his inmost heart for ever having offended me, and he is saved by this repentance’” (201). This copy is now in the library at Heythrop College, University of London. Miscellanies 71. Life and Revelations 43. Schneider 29. S 200; Schneider 30, For an extensive and insightful discussion of the cultural context of nineteenth-century Marian apparitions, see Blackbourne 3–41; and Sandra L. Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Apologia 225. Funeral sermon reported in the Weekly Register, December 18, 1875. Manning makes no attempt at all, in his “official” account of the nuns’ last hours, to explain the wild shouting of the tall nun, behavior to which all the newspaper accounts of the wreck referred. White (255) comments that “Hopkins would have known the text of this

NOTES

135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

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sermon and must have made a conscious choice not to have used such a doubtful interpretation of the event.” White supplies a full text of the description of the nuns in The Daily News: “There were five nuns on board who, by their terror-stricken conduct, seem to have added greatly to the weirdness of the scene. They were deaf to all entreaties to leave the saloon, and when, almost by main force, the stewardess …managed to get them on to the companion ladder, they sank down on the steps and stubbornly refused to go another step. They seemed to have returned to the saloon again shortly, for somewhere in the dead of the night when the greater part of the crew and passengers were in the rigging, one was seen with her body half through the skylight, crying aloud in a voice heard above the storm, ‘O, my God, make it quick! Make it quick!’” (255). Martin 25. J 425. L1, 46; Creator and Creature 357; S 31. L2, 15. Idea 310; L2, 14; L1, 46. For a discussion of Hopkins’s medievalism, see Marucci 89–137. Idea 310. L1, 46. L1, 119. Boyle 108. S 200–20.

CHAPTER THREE: “THESE THINGS WERE HERE AND BUT THE BEHOLDER WANTING” 1. See Thomas 171. James Brown (1812–81) was consecrated Bishop of the newly created diocese of Shrewsbury on July 27, 1851. He celebrated the Silver Jubilee of his episcopate at Shrewsbury Cathedral on July 27, 1876, and at St. Beuno’s on July 30. 2. L3, 140. It was not the first time that Hopkins had contributed to an after-dinner entertainment. Back at St. Mary’s Hall, during his Philosophate, the Beadle’s journal for 1873 records a concert for German refugees that consisted of “music, comic and half comic pieces” which was “got up by Mr. G. Hopkins” and “was a decided success” (Thomas 127). Hopkins’s Jesuit contemporaries, though unaware of his serious poetic gifts, were highly appreciative of his talent for humorous verse. Even during the melancholy Dublin years, he was viewed by colleagues as a “droll jester” (White 259–60). 3. L1, 77–78. 4. “The Loss of the Eurydice” 88. For discussion of Jesuit failure to convert the Welsh, see White 246. 5. Poems 172. In a letter to his father, Hopkins comments ruefully that “they had to come to me [for a Welsh verse], for, sad to say, no one else in the house knows anything about it” (L3, 140). In his first year in the theologate, he had taken up the Welsh language with enthusiasm, despite the view generally held at St. Beuno’s that a theology student “is a mere bird of passage, and ought not to waste his time and energies in acquiring a language which will be of no earthly use to him after he has finished his course of theology” (White 245). He mounted an unsuccessful defense of the language in a St. Beuno’s debate of April 1876, in which it was resolved that “the sooner Welsh dies out the better” (Thomas 252). By this time, Hopkins had given up his own study of the language out of fear that his motives were self-indulgent and not purely pastoral (J 258). 6. Thomas 246–56. 7. Poems 332–33. Hopkins goes on to castigate Burke, an Irish supporter of Home Rule, as one who “lays my countrymen low throughout the world,” calling on the local saint, Winefred, to “soften his hostile breast with love.” 8. White 274–75. 9. See, for example, Hopkins’s 1883 Retreat notes in which he entreats God to ensure that his “compositions” do not “do me harm through the enmity or imprudence of any man or my own” (S 253–54).

112

NOTES

10. Sulloway 65; Rosenberg 25, 91. Hopkins’s Oxford essay on “The Origin of Our Moral Ideas” provides an interesting gloss on Ruskinian “innocence of the eye”: “when the innocent eye of the uneducated or of children is spoken of in art it is understood that their sense is correct, that is that they are free from fallacies implying some education, but not that it is strong or definite” (J 80). 11. J 135. 12. J 146. Compare Ruskin’s discussion of growth in ash leaves in Modern Painters V (vii, 38–39). 13. J 176. 14. For further discussion of Hopkins’s earliest use of “inscape” and “instress,” see Sulloway 46, 78–80; and Ong 17. 15. J 120. 16. Apologia 186; Sermons Preached on Various Occasions VI, 79. 17. Nixon (139) observes that “approximately one third of Hopkins’s poetic corpus is devoted to nature and especially the poet’s response to it. 18. L3, 19. 19. L3, 92. 20. J 190. 21. Meadows 119. 22. J 71. 23. S 129; J 199; J 200; J 230. 24. J 221. 25. Bokenkotter identifies Duns Scotus as “a theologian who seems to have deliberately chosen an adversary relationship to Thomism…. As a mainstay of the Franciscan school he commanded a larger following than Thomism in the late medieval period” (177–78). In Scholasticism, Joseph Rickaby, the Jesuit theologian and contemporary of Hopkins at St Beuno’s, writes: ‘John Duns Scotus (1266–1308)… ‘the Subtle Doctor,’ was to the Franciscans what Thomas Aquinas had been to the Dominicans. For centuries afterwards Schoolmen were divided in to Thomists and Scotists. Scotus was the glory of Oxford as St Thomas of Paris” (26). 26. For discussion of the influence of Scotus on Hopkins’s Christology, see Finn Cotter 123–25. 27. Wolter 98–101. 28. J 261. 29. White 242. 30. Hopkins’s fascination with Holywell was shared by a large number of Victorian Catholics. Herbert Thurston’s “Holywell in Recent Years” (The Month 128 [1916], 38–51) records that the nineteenth-century revival of the Welsh shrine began with the publication of Bishop John Milner’s Authentic Documents Relating to the Miraculous Cure of Winefred White in 1805. By the latter part of the century, pilgrims to the well were drawn from all social classes and included converts, former recusants, and Irish immigrants. The attraction of Holywell even appears to have transcended the cultural opposition between Liberal and Ultramontanist factions in the Victorian Church. The earliest reference to the shrine in Hopkins’s papers is in September 1867, when he records Kenelm Vaughan’s claim to have been cured of consumption by drinking the waters of the well (J 157). 31. Quotations are from the English translation of “In S Winifridam” (Poems 334). For further discussion of Hopkins’s response to St. Winefred’s Well, see Bump 149. 32. J 221. 33. Waterman Ward 51–52. 34. L1, 46. 35. Harris 134. 36. Ibid 130. 37. L1, 66. 38. L2, 28. 39. L3, 141. 40. White 260.

NOTES

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

113

J 268. Ong 134. Eliot 52–53. Eliot, “Fragment of an Agon” 32. Russell 33–38. Eliot 53. Bibby 78. Darwin II:32. In Memoriam LVI. Wiseman I, 6; II, 96. For discussion of the effect of the Munich Brief on English liberal Catholics, see Schiefen 328. Allitt 8. See also D.McElrath, The Syllabus of Pius IX: Some Reactions in England (Louvain, 1964). For discussion of the First Vatican Council, see Bokenkotter 327–339; and Vidler 146–156. Vidler describes the Council as the “climax of the Ultramontane movement” (154). Manning, The Vatican Council and Its Definitions: A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy, 216. Ibid 215. Norman 311. For further discussion of Protestant reaction to the rulings of the First Vatican Council, see Walter Arnstein, Protestant Versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982). Gilley 373–74. Apologia 199–201. Letters and Diaries XVIII, 322. Idea of a University 392. Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent 310. According to Jude Nixon, Newman’s Apologia describes and advocates a pattern of change that is “gradual rather than abrupt, the type of change that is consistent with, even modeled after, Darwinian gradualism” (119). Mivart, On the Genesis of Species 16. My principle source of biographical information about Mivart is Jacob W.Gruber, A Conscience in Conflict: The Life of St George Jackson Mivart (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960). Other sources of information about Mivart include Allitt 107–110; Holmes 231–249; and Norman 242–244. In “Darwinism and the Argument from Design” (Journal of the History of Biology 10 no.1 [1977]), Peter J.Bowler describes On the Genesis of Species as “the kingpin of a protracted effort to demonstrate the insufficiency of natural selection as an explanation of evolution” (29). Genesis of Species 239. Ibid 260. The Ultramontane Tablet hailed the Genesis of Species as “a valuable contribution of an English Catholic man of science to the defense of religion against those materialistic theories…which are accounted by many as forming a serious obstacle to the reception of religious truth” (The Tablet February 25, 1871, 232). Ward, in The Dublin Review, pronounced the work “gratifying to those who, like ourselves, are anxious to defend Revelation and at the same time to do full justice to Science” (The Dublin Review 68, 1871, 482). The Month praised Mivart as “a sound, careful reasoner, who will sift arguments, [and] examine for himself the logical value of received observations” (The Month XIV, 1871, 528). Mivart, “Evolution and its Consequences” 101. Thomas Henry Huxley, “Mr. Darwin’s Critics” 147. In his Life of John Henry Newman, Wilfrid Ward would describe Kensington University as a “ludicrous failure” (II: 198). According to Edward Norman (299), the college was plagued from the first with allegations of financial and other improprieties. In 1877, Lord Petre withdrew his son from the college, complaining of “immoralities” among the students. An 1878 Episcopal inquiry revealed severe financial mismanagement by the rector, Mgr. Thomas Capel. The college survived until 1882, when it merged with St. Charles’s College, Bayswater. Gruber 148–49.

114

NOTES

73. “Liberty of Conscience.” The Dublin Review 79 (1876) 563–64. Mivart’s statement in The Dublin Review provoked a blistering editorial by the extreme Ultramontanist, W.G.Ward, who insisted that “not only is it consistent with justice, but it is essential to the well-being of a state, that legislation shall exist, which imposes comparative disadvantage on those who sincerely hold this or that erroneous tenet on religion or morality.” (“Professor Mivart on the Rights of Conscience,” The Dublin Review LXXIX, 1876:3). 74. The Times, London, January 25, 1900. 75. My principal source of information on the neo-Thomist revival in late nineteenth-century Catholic theology is Gerald A.McCool, Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1977). Other sources include Allitt 8–10; Bokenkotter 356–58; and Vidler 179–82. 76. McCool 226. 77. Scholasticism 86. 78. Ibid 47. 79. J 120. 80. John Rickaby, “Evolution and Involution” 284. 81. McCool 231. 82. John Rickaby, “On Man’s Attitude to Nature,” 28. A helpful interpretation of Aquinas’s view of the relationship between creator and creation can be found in George P.Klubertanz, St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1960). 83. Scholasticism 87–88; 47–48. 84. McCool 233. 85. Ibid 1. 86. Thomas 221–28; 246. 87. Finn Cotter 139. 88. McCool 238. 89. Ong 90. 90. Zagovsky 29. 91. Crehan 22. 92. Finn Cotter 137; S 292. 93. L2, 95. 94. Poems 174. 95. David Downes, “Hopkins and Thomism” 272. 96. L3, 124; L3, 143–44. 97. L1, 31. 98. Zaniello 97. 99. Thomas 246–56. 100. Zaniello 105. 101. “Evolution and Involution” 282. 102. Ibid 270, 280–81. 103. Joseph Rickaby, “Review of Lessons from Nature by St. George Jackson Mivart.” 497. 104. John Tyndall’s “Belfast Address” (1874) asserts that “we claim, and we shall want from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thoughts of controlling it.” Fragments of Science: A Series of Five Detached Essays and Reviews (London, 1879) II, 199. 105. “Professor Tyndall’s Inaugural Address” 220–21. 106. Apologia 136, 46. 107. “St. Augustine and Scientific Unbelief” 197. 108. Zaniello 100. 109. L3, 128. 110. Ibid.

NOTES

111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138.

115

J 252. Ong 158. Zaniello 48. L2, 139. In their notes to Poems, Gardner and MacKenzie report that the earliest autograph copies of these poems are dated February 23, 1877, and February 24, 1877. “On Man’s Attitude to Nature” 16, 29, 24. “The Reign of Mist” 295. Ibid 288. L1, 54. L1, 186–87. The precise extent of Hopkins’s acquaintance with German post-Kantian philosophy is uncertain. Norman White (96) speculates that he may have studied Hegel and Kant with T.H.Green during his last term at Oxford. In an 1875 letter to Bridges, Hopkins makes his lack of interest in German thought very clear: “I have no time to read even the English books about Hegel, much less the original, indeed I know almost no German…. I do not afflict myself much about my ignorance here. After all I can…read Duns Scotus and I care more for him even than Aristotle and more pace tua than a dozen Hegels” (L1, 30–31). Chevigny 145. For extensive discussion of the relationship between Romanticism and nineteenth-century religious thought, see Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). L1, 56. “The Reign of Mist” 288, 296. Schneider 119. Ellis 135. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I. iv. Cap. I L3, 148. Qtd. in White 284. Fathers of the Society of Jesus 105. Lahey 132; Thomas 183. S xiii. Finn Cotter 167. L1, 163. L1, 66. S 129. L3, 349. Marucci 207. J 252.

CHAPTER FOUR: “THE LOST ARE LIKE THIS” 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

L1, 55. Ibid 189–90. L3, 63. L1, 190. L3, 164. The sources of my information about University College are Martin 360– 62 and White 358–60. See also Fergal McGrath, S.J., Newman’s University: Idea and Reality (Dublin, 1951) and Kevin Sullivan, Joyce among the Jesuits (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). 7. L3, 63.

116

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

NOTES

Idea 99. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, 207. White 361. L1, 190. Qtd. in White 361. For further discussion of Hopkins and the “Irish Row,” see White 357– 77. Ibid 385. Tynan 157. Martin 420. White 386. Nonetheless, Hopkins’s correspondence suggests that he had a positive opinion of Rector Delany whom he described as a “generous, cheering and open-hearted” man with a “buoyant and unshaken trust in God” (L3, 164). Keenan 28. Hopkins’s dislike of Burke, a prominent Irish Scholastic and outspoken supporter of the nationalist cause is expressed in his 1877 poem, “Ad Reverendum Patrem Fratrem Thomas Burke O.P.” Miscellanies 217. Holmes 82. L3, 413–14. Marucci 158. L3, 366–67. S 255. L3, 183, 164, 170. L1, 252. L3, 281–82. S 261–62. Pick 111–112. Harris 23. L3, 256. L3, 232, 255; L2, 138; L1, 222. Hopkins defined the art of “bidding” in a letter to Bridges: “I mean the art or virtue of saying everything right to or at the hearer, interesting him, holding him in the attitude of correspondent or addressed or at least concerned, making it everywhere an act of intercourse—and of discarding everything that does not bid, does not tell” (L1, 160). Harris 134. For discussion of the disappearance of an audience in the Dublin poems, see Harris 129–44. Harris 47; Miller 353. L3, 63. In a letter of June 1883, Hopkins lamented to Dixon, “I see no grounded prospect of my ever doing much not only in poetry but in anything at all. At times I do feel this sadly and bitterly, but it is God’s will and though no change that I can foresee will happen yet perhaps some may that I do not foresee” (L2, 108–9). L1, 135. S 122–23. Ibid 127. J 236. L3, 254. L1, 282. Ibid 215. Heimann 169. Farrar xxxiii. Wheeler xiii. Farrar 64, 120.

NOTES

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

117

Pusey 19. Porter, “Eternal Punishment” 360. Michael Wheeler, “The Dream of Gerontius: From Verse Drama to Music Drama” 89. Sulloway 159, 164. For definition and discussion of Christian teachings on the parousia, see Travis 13, 19–23, 63. Liddon 277. Sulloway 160. Newman Treasury 212–213. Harris 36. S 129. Ibid 41. L2, 53. L1, 135. Sulloway 160. Quotation is from “The Shepherd’s Brow” (2–3). “Pied Beauty” (1); S123; “As kingfishers catch fire” (14). Hopkins’s absolutist eschatology first makes an appearance as early as 1868, in a letter to Urquhart: “The difference between a state of grace and a state of reprobation, that difference to which all other differences of humanity are as the splitting of straws, makes no change in the outer world; faces, streets and sunlight look just the same; it is therefore the more dangerous and terrible” (L3, 51). Schneider 168. S 122. Harris 20. According to Mariani, there is “an appropriate shadowiness” around the inception of “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” which “stands at the threshold of the…sonnets of desolation, written most probably between January and midsummer of 1885” (197). S135. Hopkins’s request was no doubt prompted by his study of St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Excercises, in which “the exercitant is exhorted to enter imaginatively into each stage of Christ’s suffering, drawing out the physical implications of the biblical narrative” (Wheeler 345). S 136. “No worst, there is none” (5); “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” (14); “I wake and feel” (9). In an 1883 meditation on hell, Hopkins observes, “No one in the body can suffer fire for very long, the frame is destroyed and the pain comes to an end; not so, unhappily, the pain that afflicts the indestructible mind, nor, after Judgment Day, the incorruptible body” (S 241). S 133, 139. Ibid 136. All for Jesus 269. Ibid 271–72. Liguori 19–20. Page references to The Dream of Gerontius are from John Henry Newman, Verses on Various Occasions, (London: Burns & Oates, 1869) 314–61. For identification of the prayers incorporated into Newman’s poem, see Wheeler, “Dream” 91. Newman renewed his speculations about chronology in the afterlife in a discussion of eternal punishment in his 1873 Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. “For what we know, the suffering of one moment may in itself have no bearing, or but a partial bearing, on the suffering of the next; and thus, as far as its intensity is concerned, it may vary with every lost soul” (328). In an 1879 letter to Pusey, he attempts to sidestep questions of the duration of hell’s torments by arguing that “an eternity of physical fire would perhaps be no eternity of physical suffering —it might so shatter the material constitution of our nature, as to make us incapable of suffering. Certainly, judging by such experience as I have had, I should say intense pain destroys the recognition of time, or a

118

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

NOTES

succession of minutes and hours” (qtd. in Rowell 142). Time, according to Newman, operates only in the unfinished experience of earth and purgatory. Apologia 184. S 139. Ibid 136. Ibid 138–39. Ibid 138. Vickers 178. Mariani 230. S 91. Harris 113. S 245. Ibid 242–43. Liguori 19. S 247. Ibid 251. Coleridge, The Prisoners of the King: Thoughts on the Catholic Doctrine of Purgatory 199–200. Clarke, “Eternal Punishment and Infinite Love” 2. Ibid. 4. Clarke, “The Justice of Endless Punishment” 209, 196. Clarke, “The Positive Argument for Endless Punishment” 307–308. A decade later, Clarke was responsible for the excommunication of the Catholic biologist St. George Jackson Mivart. It was Clarke who alerted Cardinal Vaughan to the “doctrinal errors” in Mivart’s 1892 article in the Nineteenth Century, “The Happiness in Hell.” Mivart’s article argued that even the torments of hell are temporary and ameliorative. Vaughan demanded that Mivart should recant his position and subscribe to a statement of belief in eternal punishment that rejected as “false and heretical” all doctrines that teach that “souls in hell may eventually be saved, or that their state in hell may be one which is not punishment.” Mivart refused to sign and was afterwards excommunicated. S 243. Keenan 243. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 121–22. S 243, n.1 For further discussion of the many differences in pedagogical style between Newman and his Jesuit successors at University College, see my article, “John Henry Newman and the Education of Stephen Dedalus.” James Joyce Quarterly 33 no. 4. Summer 1996, 593–603. Walhout 129. Berdyaev 277. Ibid 270. Lahey 143. John of the Cross 104. Underhill 396. Ibid 388, 170. Ibid 397. Lahey 142; Downes 131. Bergonzi 154; Mariani xxii. Underhill 221. Underhill compares the mystic’s eager embrace of the “Dark Night of the Soul” with the joyful plunge into purgatory by the souls of the newly dead in Catherine of Genoa’s Treatise on Purgatory. Ibid 413. Ibid 428. S 262.

NOTES

117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

S 34; L2, 137–38. Scholasticism 29. S 262. L3, 196. For a fuller account of Hopkins’s final illness, see White 452–55. Lahey 147.

119

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Index

Acton, Sir John 6, 40, 82 Achilli, Giovanni Giacinto 15 Addington, Raleigh 150–51 n.95 Addis, W.E. 29, 33 Aeterni Patris 85, 87 Alphonsus Rodriguez, St. 134 Aquinas, St. Thomas 54, 72, 75, 83, 86–88, 92, 94, 98, 135 Aristotle 88, 98 Arnold, Matthew 44

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 18, 143 n.73 Cullen, Archbishop 16 Darlington, Joseph, SJ 103 Darwin, Charles 6, 8, 72, 80, 83–84, 91, 92 Origin of Species 80–81, 83 Descent of Man 84, 91 Dei Filius 81, 85 Delany, William, SJ 102–3 Dixon, R.W. 4, 66, 78, 88, 92, 106, 116 Dolben, Digby Mackworth 23–24, 26–27, 65, 74 Dollinger, Johann von 81–82 Dowson, Ernest 9 Dublin Review 5, 15, 40, 48, 85, 112 Dyne, John Bradley 21–22, 104

Baillie, A.W.M. 2, 12, 28, 29, 105, 106, 111 Bacon, Francis 43–44 Balliol College, Oxford 11, 22, 23, 33, 124 Barraud, Clement 43–44, 50 Berdyaev, Nicholas 132 Bismarck, Otto von 37, 49, 64, 82 Bond, Edward 48, 91 Bowles, Emily 17 Bridges, Robert 3–4, 23, 42, 44–45, 49, 55, 66–67, 69, 78, 88, 101, 105–106, 111, 116 Bronte, Emily 93, 9 Browning, Robert 1, 44 Fra Lippo Lippi 77 Burke, Thomas 71, 104

Edinburgh Review 40 Eliot, George 14 Eliot, T.S. 1, 2, 79–80 Emmerich, Anne Catherine 51, 66 Empson, William 1 Essays and Reviews 29, 33 Faber, F.W. 3, 5 and eschatology, 120 and Gertrude of Helfta, 60–61 influence on Hopkins, 7, 51–61, 65, 150 n.93 and Newman, 15, 47, 52–53, 58 devotion to the Sacred Heart, 59 spirituality, 28, 52, 58–59 Scotism, 59, 75 as Ultramontanist, 6, 26 All for Jesus 5, 52, 53, 59, 61, 70, 120 The Creator and Creature 54, 56, 58, 61–62 The Foot of the Cross 51 Growth in Holiness 52 Spiritual Conferences 59

Carlyle, Thomas 4, 93 Campion, Edmund 42, 116 Catherine of Genoa, St. 120–21, 130 Catholic University of Ireland (see also University College, Dublin) 16, 101 Chaucer, Geoffrey 66 Clarke, Richard J., SJ 5, 8, 89, 92, 113, 129–31 Coffin, R.A. 120 Coleridge, E.H. 11, 21, 74 Coleridge, Henry, SJ 5, 7, 15, 38, 41–42, 44–46, 49, 66, 78, 113, 129, 130 128

INDEX

Falck Laws 37, 64 Farrar, F.W. 113 Forde, Richard 21 Francis de Sales, St. 120 Froude, Hurrell 24 Fullerton, Lady Georgiana 40, 41, 52 Gallwey, Peter, SJ 43 Garden of the Soul (Challoner) 40, 120 Garrett, A.W. 33 Geldart, Martin 111, 124 Gertrude of Helfta, St. 7, 60–63, 128 Life and Revelations 60, 62–63, 152 n.122 Gladstone, W.E. 1, 82, 87 Gordon, General Charles 1 Harris, Elizabeth 19 Heythrop College 5 Hildegard of Bingen 61 Hilliard, David 24–26 Hopkins, Gerard Manley as Catholic poet, 4–6, 37–38, 107, 112, 114 “communist letter,” 49 conversion, 3, 7, 26–29, 35–36 and Darwinism, 19, 72 depression, 105–106, 109–111 and Digby Dolben, 23–24, 74 influence of Catherine Emmerich, 51 and eschatology, 111–113, 115, 118–119, 124–125, 129, 131–133, 135 fails exam in theology, 97–98 influence of Faber, 7, 51–61, 65, 150 n.93 and Gertrude of Helfta, 61–63 and Gothic, 21–22 at Highgate School, 21–22 and Irish nationalism, 104–105, 108 and Manning, 48–50 interest in miracles and shrines, 50, 64–65 and Mivart, 91–92 modernist readings of, 1–2 as possible mystic, 132–134 and nature, 71–74, 77, 79–80, 91, 97, 99, 100, 115 influence of Newman, 7–8, 12–15, 25–30, 33–35, 124–129 rejection of Newman, 7, 46–48 relationship with parents, 11–12, 30–33 poetic theories, 4–5, 44–45, 66–67, 71 and St. Winefred’s Well, 76 and Scholasticism, 71–73, 87–88, 94, 98–99

129

Scotism, 54–55, 73–75, 79, 97–98, 110, 114–115, 117, 132 “slaughter of the innocents” 43 and Society of Jesus, 46–47, 49–50, 74, 85, 98, 129– 131 and Stonyhurst Philosophers, 89–93 fascination with suicide, 111, 126 as Tractarian, 22–25 and Ultramontanism, 38–39, 46 and Wales, 69–71, 76–77, 79, 99, 154 n.5 attempts to publish Wreck of the Deutschland, 42–44, 78–79 Ad Episcopum Salopsiensem 69 Ad Reverendum…Thomam Burke 71 The Alchemist in the City 27 Ashboughs 106 The Beginning of the End 27 Binsey Poplars 115 Cywydd 69–70, 76 Duns Scotus’s Oxford 23, 99–100 Easter Communion 11, 23, 27 The Escorial 21, 33 God’s Grandeur 4, 72, 78, 92–94, 97, 115 The Habit of Perfection 11, 23, 73 The Half-way House 31 Heaven-Haven 11–12 Hurrahing in Harvest 8, 77, 80, 93–94, 98–100 “I wake and feel” 106, 111, 119, 125, 128, 133 In honour of St Alphonsus Rodriguez 135 In the Valley of the Elwy 70, 92, 115 Inversnaid 115 The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo 116 “Let me be to Thee” 27, 110 Lines for a Picture of St. Dorothea 33 The Loss of the Eurydice 67, 79, 114 Margaret Clitheroe Moonrise 93 “My prayers must meet a brazen heaven” 108 “Myself Unholy” 27, 108 Nondum 108 “No, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair” 68, 106, 126– 128, 133–34 “No worst, there is none” 106, 119, 126, 133 On Personality, Grace and Free Will 54 On the Probable Future of Metaphysics 25–26, 73, 85 “Patience, hard thing” 106, 119, 125 Pied Beauty 8, 72, 77–78, 96–97, 107, 115 St Thecla 33 St Winefred’s Well 33, 76, 106

130

INDEX

The Sea and the Skylark 70, 97 The Shepherd’s Brow 111 Silver Jubilee 69–71 Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves 26, 67, 106, 116–119, 125, 131, 132, 135 Spring 72, 78, 94, 115 Spring and Fall 109 The Starlight Night 77–78, 80, 93–96, 99, 107, 117 Summa 48 That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire 100, 135 The Soldier 106, 116 The Windhover 9, 72, 78 “Thou art indeed just, Lord.” 134 To R.B. 134 “To seem the stranger” 106–109, 116, 128, 134 To what serves Mortal Beauty? 106, 116 A Voice from the World 108 “What shall I do?” 106 Hopkins, Kate (mother) 32 Hopkins, Lionel (brother) 33 Hopkins, Manley (father) 11, 12, 25, 27, 30–32, 34, 47 Humphreys, William, SJ 113 Huxley, Thomas 84, 89 Ignatius, St. (of Loyola) 3, 119, 129, 130 Spiritual Exercises 3, 119, 131 John of the Cross, St 132–33 Johnson, Lionel 9, 55 Jowett, Benjamin 1, 29, 33, 102 Joyce, James 8, 131, 139 n.24 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 8, 131, 139 n.24 Stephen Hero 102, 139 n.24 Kavanagh, Dr. James 103 Keats, John 2, 22, 93, 95 Keble, John 18 Christian Year 18 Keenan, Desmond 104 Kingsley, Charles 14, 15, 41 Kleutgen, Joseph 87 Leavis, F.R. 1 Leo XIII, Pope 6, 7, 85, 87 Lewis, David 55, 75 Liddon, H.P. 6, 11, 12, 23, 27, 29, 30, 32, 114, 138 n.1 Liguorianism 8, 121, 123, 129, 130, 131 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 57 Lucas, Herbert, SJ 8, 55, 89, 92, 93, 102

Luther, Martin 60, 62 Luxmore, C.N. 21 Manning, Henry Edward as convert, 3 calls for English Catholic literature, 4, 37, 41, 107 describes Faber, 52 and fate of the Deutschland, 64–65 Hopkins’s familiarity with writings of, 5 influence on Hopkins, 48–50 and Irish nationalism, 104 mistrust of Newman, 13, 17 and Mivart, 84 and St. Catherine of Genoa, 121 devotion to the Sacred Heart, 59 social and political beliefs, 48–49, 58 as Ultramontanist, 6, 26, 36, 39, 47, 49, 58 Caesarism and Ultramontanism 50, 58 Christianism and Anti-Christianism 50 Glories of the Sacred Heart 59 Last Glories of the Holy See 49 Letter to Earl Grey 104 The Pontificate of Pius IX 58 The Vatican Council and its Definitions 87 The Vatican Decrees and their Bearing on Civil Allegiance 50 MacHale, Archbishop 16 Margaret Mary Alacoque, St 61 Maynooth Seminary (Dublin) 4 Mechthild of Hackeborn 60 Mechthild of Magdeburg 60 Meeker, Mrs Ogden 40 Meredith, George 1 Mill, John Stuart 93 Milton, John 4, 67 Mivart, St. George Jackson 5, 6, 8, 83–86, 90–92, 112, 163 n. 97 Contemporary Evolution 84 The Conversion of England 112 Lessons from Nature 90 On the Genesis of Species 83–84 Month, 5, 8, 38, 40–42, 66, 67, 69, 86, 89, 91, 93, 113, 129 Morris, Brande 55 Munich Brief 81 Nettleship, R.L. 102 Newman, John Henry childhood, 19

INDEX

conversion, 3, 7 and Catholic education, 16–17, 101–102 difficulties of Catholic life, 14–15 on English Catholic literature, 4, 66, 107 and eschatology, 119, 121, 124, 131, 161–163 and Faber, 15, 47, 52–53, 58 and Hopkins at Birmingham Oratory, 46, Hopkins differs from, 47–48 influence on Hopkins, 2, 5, 7–8, 12–15, 25–30, 33–35, 124–129 and Irish nationalism, 104 and nature, 73 post-conversion writings, 28 and science, 82 sermons, 57 sexual orientation, 142 n.66 and Stonyhurst Philosophers, 90–91 opposition to Ultramontanism, 6, 13, 39–40, 144 n. 84. Apologia 5–7, 12–20, 30, 32–33, 35–36, 39, 48, 55, 82–83, 104, 123, 139 n.11, 140 n.39 Callista 17, 40 Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans 27, 31, 48 The Cross of Christ the Measure of the World 28 On Consulting the Laity on Matters of Doctrine 16 Discourses to Mixed Congregations 31 The Dream of Gerontius 8, 41, 67, 113, 121–130 Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent 3, 19–20, 48, 83 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine 83 The Idea of a University 4, 37, 41, 82, 102 John Keble 28 Lead, Kindly Light 27 Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics 15 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk 82, 104 Loss and Gain 7, 14, 19, 23, 30–35, 146 n.110 The Minds of Little Children 19 Omnipotence in Bonds 57 The Second Spring 4, 6, 38, 114 Secret Faults 27 Sins of Ignorance and Weakness 27 The State of the Religious Parties 18 The Tamworth Reading Room 18 The Thought of God the Stay of the Soul 28 Tolerance of Religious Error 57 The World Our Enemy 27 Nightingale, Florence 33, 40 Oratory, Birmingham 7, 15, 17, 34, 36, 46–48, 53 Oratory, London 52

131

O’Connell, Daniel 40 Otto, Rudolf 54, 56 Oxenham, H.N. 113, 129 Parker, J.H. 21 Pater, Walter 1, 25, 26, 143 n .73 Pastor Aeturnus 81, 87 Patmore, Coventry 100, 105 Piers Ploughman 66 Pius IX, Pope (Pio Nono) 6, 36, 38, 80, 81, 84, 85 Porter, George, SJ 113 Pre-Raphaelites 22 Prescott, William 21 Propaganda, College of 15, 17 Pugin, Augustus Welby 22, 141 n.56 Purbrick, Edward 102 Purgatory 119–121, 128, 131 Pusey, E.B. 6, 23, 29, 82, 113, 114, 144 n.84 Quanta Cura 38 Quarterly Review 18, 40, 84 Rambler 5, 6, 15, 40 Recusants 6, 35, 40, 120 Redemptorist Fathers 121, 129 Reed, John Shelton 24, 145 n.106 Reffe, J.E. 103 Rhymers Club 2 Richards, I.A. 1 Rickaby, John, SJ 5, 8, 86, 89–94 Rickaby, Joseph, SJ 5, 8, 85–86, 89–93, 98, 102, 119, 135 Roehampton (Manresa House) 5, 49, 51, 52, 74, 87 Rossetti, Christina 1, 108 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 1 Ruskin, John 1, 4, 22, 72, 141 n.56 The Nature of Gothic 22 Russell, Charles 40 Ryder, Ignatius 48 Scholasticism (see also Thomism) 72, 85–87, 92, 96, 99, 100, 119, 135 St Beuno’s (Wales) 5, 8, 43, 44, 62, 69, 71–72, 76, 78, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 97 St Winefred’s Well (Holywell) 4, 50, 66, 76, 155 n.30 Schneider, Elizabeth, 63–64 Scotus, Duns 3, 8, 54, 73–75, 94, 96, 99–100, 135, 155 n. 25 Scotism 8, 9, 54, 75–76, 98

132

INDEX

Scott, Sir Walter 18, 139–140 n.34 Scott Holland, Henry 29 Sewell, William 41 Simpson, Richard 6, 16, 40 Southey, Robert 18 Splaine, Cyprian 43, 45 St John, Ambrose 24 Stonyhurst (Lancashire) 5, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 74, 87, 89, 102, 110 Stonyhurst Philosophers 89–90, 92 Strappini, W.D., SJ 113 Suarez, Francisco 88 Syllabus of Errors 36, 38–39, 81 Tablet 5, 40, 87 Talbot, George 17, 47 Taylor, Fanny Margaret 40 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 1, 2, 44, 5 Thomism (see also Scholasticism) 8, 71–72, 79, 87–88 Thompson, Edward Healy 15 Thompson, Francis 55 Tractarians 6, 13, 17, 23, 108, 114 Tuite, James 103 Tynan, Katharine 103 Tyndall, John 8, 89–90, 92, 158 n.104 Ultramontanism 6, 7, 26, 36, 38–40, 46–47, 49–51, 59, 64, 112, 120–21 Underhill, Evelyn 133–34 University College, Dublin (see also Catholic University ofIreland) 101–104, 131 Urquhart, E.W. 15, 27, 29, 30, 35, 46, 47 Vaughan, Herbert 15, 39, 40, 85 Vaughan, Kenelm 50 Victoria, Queen 1 Walsh, Dr. William 103 Ward, Wilfrid 13 Ward, W.G. 3, 6, 15, 142 n. 66 Authority of Doctrinal Decisions 38 Wilberforce, Samuel 18 Wiseman, Nicholas 15, 16, 17, 39, 40, 47, 52, 67, 81 Fabiola 40 Wood, Alexander 33 Wordsworth, William 18, 93–94 Yates, Edmund 22

Yeats, W.B. 1, 2, 8 Autobiography 8