Hopkins and Patmore
BY GRAHAM HOUGH THE main reason for this second edition of the Gerard Manley Hopkins Further Letters* is the inclusion of a group of eighty-one family letters not known in 1938 when the first appeared. There is one important addition to the correspondence with Patmore; otherwise this edition is much like the first. Rather unfortunately so. Letters should be pre- sented in chronological sequence, and the piecemeal arrange- ment of this volume—miscellaneous letters, family letters, letters to A. W. M. Baillie and correspondence with Patmore, all in separate groups—deprives us of the sense of a con- tinuous record and gives it a more fragmentary character than it deserves. It is true that these letters have not the supreme literary interest of those to Bridges or to R. W. Dixon; their interest is mainly biographical, and that is all the more reason for arranging them chronologically. It might have been that the present plan was designed to respect the integrity of the important block of family letters, and to record their discovery, by the late Humphry House. But the fact that it was he who found them in 1952, having been invited to go through the family papers at Haslemere on the death of the poet's brother Lionel, is nowhere recorded in this volume. I take the oppor- tunity of recording it here.
Gerard Hopkins printed the seal of his own strong, comfort- less personality on everything he wrote, and as his private and miscellaneous writings appear everything confirms the impression. It is a character curiously compounded of elements not often found together—integrity with curiosity, scrupulosity with strong judgement, rigour with sensibility. Whatever the subject of his writing, the pattern is always the same—an intense desire for freedom of action and expression, straining against an equally imperious and equally internal need for rigorous discipline. By the strict letter of Hopkins's metrical rules any combination of syllables possible in the English language, including the London Telephone Directory, could be scanned as verse; yet by mere virtue of elaborating the rules Hopkins succeeds in imposing on himself the necessary sense of constraint. In character and conduct he has consider- able tenderness for what he calls tykishness—`an old Adam of barbarism, boyishness, wildness, rawness, rankness, the disreputable, the unrefined.' Yet this consorts with an extreme scrupulosity in matters of feeling and doctrine. He rallies Patmore, for example, on not being enough of a tyke; but sternly and minutely reprehends the slightest divagations of sensibility in The Angel in the House. The disconcerting thing is that he is always right. Patmore's attitude to courtship and married love treads on a narrow ridge between the two abysses of blasphemy and sentimentality; and with unerring patience and accuracy we find Hopkins pointing out where he lurches to one side or the other.
But in spite of an admiration for the intelligence and strength of feeling, a sense of painful constriction is often felt in reading these letters. The family letters in particular show the distress- * FURTHER LETTERS OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS. Second edition revised and enlarged. Edited by C. C. Abbott. (O.U.P., 50s.) ing impoverishment of human relations after Hopkins's con version; mainly due no doubt to the intensity of mid-Victorian theological prejudice. The letters to his parents about the tint( of his reception into the Roman Catholic Church are hart and doctrinaire; and the later ones, extending to the time o his death, are on the whole superficial and constrained. Thel show how wide the gulf had become; though reading betweet the lines, and using the evidence of the poetry, we can knov how deeply he felt the isolation. About his work in Irelan( there is a sense of defeat and frustration. 'Outwardly 1 oftei think I am employed to do what is of little or no use.' And th( continued low spirits and ill-health tell the same tale.
It is probable that Hopkins's delight in technical rigour and intricacies is in part a relief from these personal distresses The most high-spirited and spontaneous letters, apart fron some very early ones, occur when he is discussing with Bail the possible derivation of Greek proper names from tit( Egyptian, or arguing about metrics with Patmore. On the wholl the best letters in this collection are those to Patmore, when the subject is mostly poetry, and mostly Patmore's poetry, an( that mostly from the technical point of view.
Since they were both Catholic converts, the basis of thei beliefs was the same, and there was no need to discuss funda mentals. Politically they were both Conservatives—Hopkin an extremely shrewd, perceptive kind of Tory Radical Patmore the Platonic idea of which Captain Waterhouse an( Sir Waldron Smithers are imperfect copies. But in tempera ment they were strikingly opposed. Patmore was a bon spiritual adventurer, always suffering the grotesque mis fortune of falling into the third-rate. His sense of quality wa not equal to his vitality. Erotic mysticism and bread and butte do not go well together. Even so, the best poems on The Unknown Eros are of great distinction, spiritually and poetically. Hopkins, with a stronger emotional endowment, has it far more rigorously under control. His is the kind of orthodoxy that is exact and undeviating, but never the result of following a well-worn groove. It is always the result of tension—tension between forces whose range and intensitY, in both directions, it is difficult to measure. The extent of his comprehension is infinitely greater; and it is no accident that Hopkins could understand and sympathise with Patmore's poetry. while to Patmore Hopkins's work was a closed book.
Mr. E. J. Oliver's small book on Patmore- is a well-thought out and useful introduction to the man and his work. It i not very original, being largely dependent on the work of Basil Champneys and Mr. Derek Patmore, but it discusses the poetry in a fresh and sympathetic way, and takes it ill close connection with Patmore's life. It is written from Catholic point of view, and in reading it we have, to a lesser degree, the same feeling as in reading much of Hopkins and Patmore themselves—a sense of the peculiar atmosphere of modern English Catholicism, so different from the normal temper of English life, but so utterly different too from the Catholicism of the rest of Europe. Both Hopkins and Patmore are irretrievably English. Hopkins is a thorough patriot, horri- fied by any discredit to British arms; yet always painfully aware that in the last analysis his country does not fully stand behind the ideals that his religion and his conscience enjoin. Patmore, less embarrassed because less perceptive, becomes plus royaliste que le roi, a sort of Colonel Blimp born out of his due time, reacting violently against the proletarian horrors of Disraelian reform. It is not that the convert failed to absorb the Catholic values value; both Hopkins and Patmore did; it is that in die nineteenth century when the national ethos
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t COVENTRY PATMORE. By E. J. Oliver. (Sheed and Ward, 12s. 6d was so strong and so pervasive, the disharmony with it could not but be felt. (Nowadays the conflict need hardly trouble anyone—the national ethos having reached a level of squalor and insignificance where disharmony with it can only be a cause for satisfaction.) It is always a pity when so much that is admirable exists in a state of insulation. One wishes to enter this shuttered room of the Victorian English Catholics, and to stay long enough to observe the inmates with sympathy and respect. Then there comes an overwhelming desire for a breath of fresh air.
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