Glasnevin Cemetery Dublin Hopkins Gravesite Jesuit
FROM 1881 TO 1882 Hopkins fulfilled the requirements of the “Tertianship”, a sort of second novitiate for Jesuits in midlife. The notes he wrote then on Ignatian Exercises have been regarded as illuminating not only for his spirituality but for his poetry too. In the late summer of 1882, he returned for the last time to Stonyhurst with a commission to prepare for university the high-Hying classicists among the school’s cream of students. (His stay was notable for the intense correspondence he initiated with an “established” Victorian poet, Coventry Patmore.)
This was, in retrospect, a preamble to the post he received in 1884, when he became professor of Greek and Latin literature at University College, Dublin — the institution founded by Newman as the “Catholic University College” but newly acquired by the Jesuits from the Irish hierarchy, who considered it a white elephant. At the same time he was made a fellow in classics in the Royal University of Ireland — as its name suggests, a national body which had campuses in Belfast, Galway, and Cork, as well as a constitutional connection to the college in Dublin.
Unfortunately, the tedious slog of examining (a considerable part of his duties under the latter rubric, and the scripts were numbered annually not so much in hundreds as in thousands), combined with the homesickness and sense of alienation he felt in Ireland to undermine his mental peace. These were years of nationalist agitation, and Hopkins, whose English patriotism was passionate, felt isolated and wrong-footed by his new colleagues. He acknowledged the historic grievances of the Catholic Irish, but not the rightness of the solution proposed: dissolution of the bond with Britain and the empire. In the notes of his last retreat, after acknowledging what was positive about his work, he went on:
Meanwhile 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 distasteful, like prisoners made to serve the enemies’ gunners, go to help on this cause.
[Cited from the papers of Robert Bridges, as deposited in Bodley's Library at Oxford, in R. B. Martin, Gerard Manley Hopkins]
Not that all of the Irish parties involved wanted his help. The provincial of the Irish Province disapproved in principle of English converts working in Ireland, and in Hopkins’s case, through inverted intellectual snobbery, the president of Maynooth and the Archbishop of Dublin agreed. His appointment “was a lasting grievance to the defeated fiction”. [N. White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography] Moreover, the students to whom Hopkins delivered his over-prepared lectures were unreceptive and sometimes boorish, the library facilities quite inadequate. Above all, his persona — and therefore, it seemed, his person — was out of place.
Many of his characteristics — appearance, way of talking, Newmanite conversion, shyness and reclusiveness, educated upper-class English and Oxonian mannerisms, scrupulous habits, interests in music and the visual arts, poetic compositions — appeared typical facets of an English aesthete…. He could be understood in Dublin only as an example of English aesthetic Catholicism, with which the Irish had no sympathy.
[N. White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography]
In these unpropitious circumstances, the various demons he had faced down — or at any rate faced — in the course of his short life now took up their abode. Deeper than the rational complaints there was a well of dreadful and — humanly speaking — unassuageable loneliness. The “Dark” or “Terrible” Sonnets are the upshot. He wrote to Bridges:
All impulse fails me: I can give myself no sufficient reason for going on. Nothing comes: I am a eunuch — but it is for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.
The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed C.C. Abbott (London, 1955)
But though Hopkins’s Dublin period was in one sense a disaster, inducing melancholia and depression, he also knew periods of buoyancy, usually coinciding with spells in the Ireland of the countryside and the coast, or holidays in the rest of the British Isles. Not all the poetry of these years is a poetry of desolation. At the same time, the poems written under the impact of his negative experiences are superb testimonies to the human spirit in its capacity to endure.
In early May 1889 Hopkins fell ill with fever. He seemed to be mending but during the night of 5 June took a turn for the worse. His parents were called, and on the morning of 8 June 1889 he received the last rites. He died that day. Hopkins was buried in the plot owned by the Jesuits in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery. The sanitary arrangements at 86 St Stephen’s Green had left much to be desired. The typhoid fever to which he succumbed was not a specialty of the city on the Liffey, dirty as it was, but a periodic danger in any conurbation of Victorian Britain.
Hopkins and Posterity
BY AND LARGE, Robert Bridges served Hopkins well as his literary executor. [However, Bridges' public apology for the ungrammatical quality of Hopkins's language, though doubtless designed to forestall criticism, sent many critics down the wrong track. Inspired by his study of dialect and philology, Hopkins's poetic "heightening" of current language was an intensification of the force not of standard prose but of common -- and especially of rural -- speech: thus J. Milroy, The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London 1977), 2-32, and passim. For Victorian word-collectors, rural speech had preserved "older forms unsullied by standardization, bookishness and artificiality"]
To keep his memory alive, he arranged for the publication of some few poems, by way of a memoir, more or less straight away. This fell resoundingly flat. So he waited until he judged the literary climate propitious for the release of the complete oeuvre. In his wartime anthology The Spirit of Man he ventured to include half a dozen complete poems and some parts of others. This time the response was different. Given Bridges’ standing as poet laureate front 1913 until his death in 1930, his advocacy was already a major point in Hopkins’s favor. But that was by no means the whole story. In September 1917 he wrote to Hopkins’ mother:
I have had lately some very authoritative appeals for the publication of all Gerard’s poetical remains. The `Spirit of Man’ has had a wide sale, and his poems in it have commanded a good deal of attention. The other day Sir Walter Raleigh, [professor of English literature at Oxford] whose judgment is very highly esteemed, said to me that Gerard’s poems in The Spirit of Man were the only ones among the comparatively unknown writers whom I had introduced, which stood up alongside of the greater writers. And this afternoon I met a man who had just come from Petrograd, who said much the same thing. He was very urgent about having a complete edition.
And he added, “I think the time has come to publish all the poems”. [E. Stanford (ed.), The Selected Letters of Robert Bridges (London 1983)] The first edition of the poems appeared, accordingly, in 1918 — with Hopkins’s middle name, Manley, included on the title page owing to a worry about confusion with his nephew, also Gerard, by then a well-known translator. Ever since the second edition, dated to 1930, Hopkins’s stock has continued to rise. Many would now rate him the outstanding English poet of the nineteenth century — a century of extraordinary literary flowering in our country. He and his work have been the object of some three thousand books and articles. One notes that among the most distinguished critics are his fellow Jesuits.
That process of reclamation began in 1920, when an unsigned group of Hopkins’s confreres, writing simply as “Plures“, contributed an important memoir to a commemorative issue of the then-premier British Catholic journal, The Dublin Review. Their judgment has been borne out by the best scholars since. As one of the latter sums up:
The judgment of Plures amounts to this: Hopkins was `an English mystic compounded of Benjamin Jowett and Duns Scotus’, with an extraordinary talent for `freakish’ mirth and for searching out `the odd and the whimsical’. He had nonetheless chosen a hard and unrewarding life as a Jesuit, fit neither by character nor by discipline to be one… Plures argued that Hopkins’ sensitive nature had been built upon Walter Pacer’s and John Ruskin’s aestheticism, his philosophical views upon Jowett’s Platonism, and his Catholicism upon Cardinal Newman’s doggedness…. The influence of Oxford had been crucial.
T. Zaniello, Hopkins in the Age of Darwin
In Plures’ opinion, plainly, Hopkins could have said with Newman, it was not Catholics who made him a Catholic. It was Oxford that did so.
Gerard Hopkins entered into the Catholic Christian vision of creation and redemption with all the rich energies of his mind and heart. He also suffered acutely from a sense of the failure not simply of projects for books that never saw the light of day but also of the pastoral and educational charges he undertook in the Church’s service. The latter were not burdens thrust upon him by the Jesuit Society in a spirit of making round pegs fit square holes. Within the — inevitably — limited range of possible assignments with which his superiors were faced, the difficulties he encountered were simply the way, for someone of his diffidence and sensitivity, things fell out.
To a limited degree, the English Jesuits gave him a sense of belonging to a holy brotherhood. The Society of Jesus was a clerical organization (though with “temporal coadjutors”, lay brothers who did the domestic labor). It was not an order of monks or canons regular, consisting of stable communities each with a closely bonded conventual life. In any case, the personality traits which made Hopkins prey to recurring feelings of self-disillusionment and loneliness were well established before entry and would not have been easy to dislodge. In his meditation notes on the Spiritual Exercises he had written, “Let all consider this: we are our own tormentors”.
Hopkins’s secular biographers have recorded a verdict of contradiction between the lives of priest and poet, or, more recently, the celibate and the man in love with human (especially male) beauty. Discounting the strata of the human personality where grace and nature — not without some tension — meet and embrace, they run the risk of counting for nothing, then, his dying words, “I am so happy, I am so happy”. [Cited R. B. Martin, Gerard Manley Hopkins] Probably such critics have not weighed sufficiently an entry in his retreat notes for 1883, on the eve of his mission in Ireland:
In meditating on the Crucifixion I saw how my asking to be raised to a higher degree of grace was asking also to be lifted on a higher cross. Then I took it that our Lord recommended me to our Lady and her to me.
The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1967)
