The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

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

  All felled, felled, are all felled,

  and Hopkins's lament runs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Here he knelt then in regimental red.

  Forth Christ from cupboard fetched, how fain I of feet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire.

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

  Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

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

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

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

  And in The Sea and the Skylark he says:

  How these two shame this shallow and frail town!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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