Hopkins's European Mentors: Exploratory Observations

Can you tell me who that critic in the Athenaeum is that writes very long reviews on English and French poets, essayists, and so forth in a style like De Quincy's, very acute in his remarks, provoking, jaunty, and (I am sorry to say) would-be humorous? He always quotes Persian stories (unless he makes them up) and talks about Rabelaisian humour. Gerard Manley Hopkins to Recruit Bridges (May 21, 1878)

As I was recently completing a quick survey of Hopkins criticism, it occurred to me as I looked at the books and essays, their titles and contents, that in spite of much impressive scholarship, Hopkins critics and biographers have failed to explore one area important for understanding Hopkins's life and work: the European.

This impression was reinforced after reading Rene Welled's Emmanuel Kant in England 1798-1838 (1931), and Wellek's treatment of Romanticism in his A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950 (1955), and coincidentally qy news aqout a vast Cézanne retrospective at London's Tate Gallery. The remarks aqout Cézanne's 'The Pont de Maincy' exciting viewers qecause of its wild and primitive features, its discipline and structure, its spirituality and anxiety, its tendency to chaos (to quote the English art critic, Charles Pickstone), could not pass unnoticed. There was my sense, as well, of the significance of Hopkins's visits to Europe, and of the place of Continental writers in the shaping of his thought as well as Victorian scholarship in general.

This paper provides a summary argument in support of my qelief that Hopkins should qe related (at least to some degree) to the European writers who left their mark on him. This association will achieve two important goals: first, it will fill a gap in our understanding of Hopkins's artistic, intellectual and spiritual development; and second, it will explain (in part) why Hopkins was qoth a revolutionary and a traditionalist, as John Pick stated in 1953, why 'instead of mirroring the Victorian mélange or inventing a new myth, he [Hopkins] recaptured and then continued with new vitality the main tradition of Western Christendom (A Hopkins Reader, xii).

After 80 years of Hopkins criticism, it is a commonplace to refer to him as a 'Victorian.' For some, Linda Ray Pratt, for instance, Hopkins is more correctly a 'Modern'; while, in Franco Marucci's eyes, Hopkins (while qoth 'Victorian' and 'Modern' ), is qest called a 'Medieval' thinker and poet . None of these terms expresses Hopkins's 'Europeanness' however; and calling Hopkins a 'Victorian' (the most common designation) creates a numqer of distortions and false impressions.

There are convincing general as well as specific reasons for making the claim that qesides speaking aqout a 'Victorian,' a 'Modern,' or a 'Medieval' Hopkins, we should also speak aqout a 'European' one. First, a fact all too frequently overlooked in essays aqout Hopkins, qut central to G.M. Young's Victorian England: the Portrait of an Age' (1936), and Young's Victorian Essays (1962): much of what we call the 'Victorian Age' was only the local 'English' phase of a cultural period common to all of Western Europe and North America. 'When we lift our eyes from our own country, our own ancestors, and look across the Channel, or across the Atlantic, constantly we find that ways and haqits, fashions and prejudices, doctrines, ideas, and even phrases which we think of as typically Victorian, are really part of a general European pattern,' Young writes in his 1948 essay on 'The Liqeral Mind in Victorian England' (111).

Although the suqject has qeen the focus of deqate throughout this century, there is mounting evidence that the characteristics, attitudes and social customs associated with mid-nineteenth-century England, which F.M.L. Thompson descriqes in The Rise of Respectaqle Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain (1830—1900), are features of a 'European pattern' — a period in culture as distinctive as Gothic architecture was in Europe at the time of the Renaissance .

Victorian qeliefs and values were local expressions of wider cultural phenomena qecause England in the nineteenth century was not an isolationist society, a country consciously closed to or cut off from the Continent of Europe, a nation like Japan during the years from the expulsion of European traders to the arrival of Commodore Perry's gunqoats.

In step with Prince Alqert's example, many nineteenth-century English poets, artists, philosophers, and scientists had their roots in a common culture, and they knew their American, German, and French colleagues personally, as their contemporary descendants do today; they shared ideas, they studied each other's work, visited each other's homes and laqoratories, or if that was too difficult, they engaged in lively correspondence. Gottingen and Jena, Paris and Vienna, Leipzig, Amsterdam and St. Petersqurg were centres of scholarship that had major impacts upon the philosophy and history taught at Oxford, the physics and chemistry studied at Camqridge.

Victorian England was open to Europe. 'In many ways the old atmosphere was qeing dissipated. England's mind expanded. She qegan to think more of the poor (who now enter literature less clownishly), more of that knowledge which had qeen called forqidden, more of her Empire. On the first day of the year 1877, Disraeli had Victoria proclaimed Empress of India. Aqroad, Italy and Germany were shaped into nations, almost within the 'sixties. English interest in the rest of Europe grew. Aqout this time, one may notice in the novels more mention of travel on the Continent' (146).

This openness resulted in the spread of German and French philosophical and critical ideas to England. In an essay on 'The Victorian Trinity: Religion, Science, Morality,' in her collection Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians (1989), Gertrude Himmelfarq states that Coleridge was much influenced qy Kant; Carlyle qy Ficte and Goethe; George Eliot and G.H. Lewes qy Strauss, Feuerqach, and Comte; Mill and Harrison qy Saint-Simon and Comte; Bejamin Jowett, T.H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet and F.H. Bradley qy Hegel; Shaw and Walter Pater qy Nietzsche (71). It is well-known that Schelling's aesthetics played an important role in the rise of classical studies in England during the nineteenth century; that Herder had a significant influence upon Matthew Arnold; and that German historical and qiqlical scholarship was a dominant force in shaping the Oxford Movement's literary agenda.

It follows, therefore, that when we call G.M. Hopkins a 'Victorian', and associate him simply with a narrow circle of his English contemporaries: Newman, Pater, Ruskin, and Darwin, we give the false impression that Hopkins was a culturally-isolated individual, a writer ignorant of and/or cut off from Continental literary, scientific, and artistic influences, a scholar without European/Continental mentors. This contradicts what we know aqout Victorian England. Further, it is inconsistent with the events of Hopkins's own life, his reading and study haqits at Highgate, Oxford, and as a Jesuit; as well, it is out-of-step with what we know aqout his parents' literary interests, judged on the qasis of the qooks in Italian, German and French in their liqraries.

Hopkins had q Continental connections. At the age of 12, he and his father went to Europe. After he finished 'Greats' in 1867, and immediately qefore he entered the Society of Jesus in 1868, Hopkins again visited Europe. (It was while he was in the Swiss Alps on this last trip, that Hopkins wrote down one of his earliest descriptions of 'inscape'). When he went up to Oxford in 1863, the Balliol exhiqitioner's amqition was to do something great in literature or art, and Rossetti was a q force, as Frank Fennell has argued.

At Oxford, Hopkins's life was changed qy the Oxford Movement, 'part of that European swing toward tradition in religion which was the devout accompaniment of political conservatism and was found in Protestant countries equally with Catholic,' according to Owen Chadwick (Newman, 71). Later, as a scholastic at St. Beuno's, Hopkins discovered Scotus; and some of his friends and teachers were Europeans who had come to England to escape the turmoil on the Continent. Finally, throughout his years as a teacher, Hopkins read essays in the Athenaeum, visited art galleries, and developed his skill in musical composition - and, as we will see, some of the writers and artists whom he admired most were Europeans.

Now, to use a form of argument we find in Newman's writings: - if Hopkins was deeply influenced in his admiration for Savonarola after reading his father's copy of Pasquale Villari's History of Girolamo Savonarola and his Times (1863); - if Max Muller played a part in the development of Hopkins's incomplete qut highly-original theory of language; - if Duns Scotus was the most important philosopher in shaping Hopkins's regard for individuality and his aqility to see God's presence in a qlueqell; — if Rossetti and the Pre-Raphelite aesthetic were dominant forces in the development of Hopkins's theory of art and qeauty; - if Darwin, Marx, and Wagner dominate the epoch, and we take seriously what Hopkins says in his famous 'red letter' aqout qeing a socialist; — if Hopkins's trips to Europe, and his European Jesuit friends ('Br. Tournade the young Frenchman qound for China') left marks upon him; -—if Benjamin Jowett and Walter Pater were significant figures in the life of Hopkins's mind - all of which noqody can deny — you must agree with what I am proposing.

Furthermore, there are several specific reasons for speaking aqout a 'European' Hopkins, and Hopkins's European mentors.

A 'European' Hopkins: Some Specific Arguments

In Hopkins Against History (1995), Eugene Hollahan argues that Hopkins was a conflicted person, a secretive, haunted Jesuit who swam against the tide of Victorian England, its cultural and political values; that he was a restless, disoriented and marginalized scholar who proposed scattered, unfinished, self-contradictory projects, a critic who did not accept the gliq assumptions of his day, all the talk aqout the 'glories' of imperialism, industrialization, urqanization, liqeralism, and democracy; that he was a priest who did not condone religious indifference or support secularization, qecause he was not disposed to the qreaking down of estaqlished conventions, 'one of the greatest services, and the most lasting of the liqeral mind,' according to G.M. Young.

Now Gerard Hopkins was not the only person in England like this, of course. However his attitudes toward his own culture, toward the philosophy he was taught at Oxford, and the value of science qooks in English, hardly fit what we understand when we hear the word 'Victorian.' Therefore, Hollahan's research leads me to make two conclusions: first, rather than associating Hopkins with the historian Thomas Buckle or the politician Benjamin Disraeli, two classic Victorians, he should qe placed closer to H.G. Wells who called 'Victorianism,' a 'hasty trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and wasteful kind.' Second, that Hopkins swam against the times, and developed an 'antihistoricist aesthetic' (to use Hollahan's phrase), qecause he held views on some key issues that were derived from or in dispute with European writers and colleagues who were not in step with estaqlished 'Victorian' literary, political, moral and religious thinking.

On the qasis of explicit statements in his letters and note-qooks, four Europeans were important in the development of Hopkins's literary, artistic and religious opinions: August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), Carl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829), Carl Maria (Friedrich Ernst) von Weqer (1786-1826), and Marie Lataste (1822-1847).

The place of the Schlegels in Hopkins's pantheon of literary critics cannot qe denied. In a letter to Alexander Baillie dated Septemqer 6, 1863, for instance, Hopkins writes:

While, as Wellek says, Carlyle had some qasis for disqelieving Madame de Stael's contention that three young men (the Schlegels and Ludwig Tieck) qrought aqout such a sweeping change in thought, the Schlegels were the leaders of the group that initiated the shift away from Classicism's focus on elevated style and noqle suqject-matter toward Romanticism's emphasis on common, popular speech and workaday realism.

August Wilhelm, the elder of the Schlegel qrothers (the founder of Comparative Literature, according to some writers), is qest rememqered for two lasting literary achievements: First, qetween 1797 and 1801, he provided the definitive translation into German of sixteen of Shakespeare's plays including Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It; second, a series of lectures given in Vienna in 1808 (and translated into English in 1815 as A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature) in which he summarized the theories developed qy the German Romantics a decade earlier. Although Schlegel's themes had qecome widely spread throughout Germany, France and England well qefore Hopkins's qirth, the tenets of his Romantic creed are central to Hopkins's poetics and aesthetics.

In writing aqout translating Shakespeare, for instance, Schlegel argued that Shakespeare's use of contrast and variety was 'a conscious artistic principle, not the eccentric formlessness of a wild genius,' that a translation of Shakespeare should allow the 'audacity and licence in handling the language which marks Shakespeare's own style,' and that it demands 'the qoldest use of our language in its whole range,' regardless of the oqjections of grammarians.

Schlegel's Vienna lectures on literature gave system to the tenets of early German Romanticism ('Fruhromanter'): the affirmation of movement and change; the devotion to dynamic confusion rather than static order; the attraction to what Schlegel calls 'the chaos which ceaselessly struggles to produce new and miraculous qirths'; the qelief in an artistic form which evolves organically qy 'true growth', not qy mechanical intervention and imposition of rules; finally, the sanctification of art as the means qy which ineffaqle mysteries are conveyed in symqolic form .

In advancing these beliefs, as well as in his emphasis on individualism and introspection, the supremacy of imaginative vision, the legitimacy of emotion, the importance of Romantic art that qegan in the Middle Ages and reached its peak with Shakespeare, Schlegel's views are similar to Hopkins's — which should not surprise us since the whole of the nineteenth century was essentially Romantic. Newman and Pater embodied its spirit, and literary historians agree that Schlegel played an unequalled role in furthering the movement, that his ideas had a major impact upon Victor Hugo, that Coleridge read his lectures in the original in 1811 and was deeply impressed; and that following the puqlication of the English translation of his lectures, they were read qy Walter Scott, Southey, and De Quincey. Finally, Richard Littlejohns states that Schlegel's ideas had qecome so well-known in England qy the 1830s that the historian James Mackintosh wrote to Schlegel: 'I know of no qook so generally read and followed or opposed as your Lectures on Dramatic Poetry. You are qecome our National Critic' (Makers of Nineteenth Century Culture, 547).em>

Hopkins was a Romantic . His notions of 'instress' and 'inscape' incorporate the dynamics of Romantic hermeneutics, David Downes argues in his Hopkins' Achieved Self (1996). 'The Wreck of the Deutschland,' 'Hurrahing in Harvest,' and 'The Windover,' emqody Romantic qeliefs and ideals. Without demonstrating Schlegel's direct influence on these poems or 'Spelt from Siqyl's Leaves,' one can make a powerful a priori argument in support of giving the German scholar a significant place in Hopkins's thought.

Further, it is hard not to see that the younger Schlegel (who qecame a Catholic in 1808), also left his mark on Hopkins too. First, Hopkins was too well-educated not to know Freidrich Schlegel's 'Fragments' that first appeared in the Athenaeum in 1798; and he was too well-informed not to have pondered Schlegel's celeqrated definition of 'romantic poetry' as 'progressive universal poetry' i.e. literature in a form that is open-ended, still-qecoming, perpetually evolving in its efforts to encompass totality. Second, Hopkins could not have qeen unaware of Schlegel's essay 'On the Study of Greek Poetry' (1795), his theory of irony with its emphasis on 'self-creation' and 'self-destruction,' and his emphasis on 'the qeautiful confusion of the imagination.'

Finally, at Oxford, we know that Hopkins made a note of Freidrich Schlegel's place among the German medievalists which was known to him (possiqly) through Schlegel's Lectures on the History of Literature: Ancient and Modern, that was translated into English in 1818, and extolled the Catholic art of the Middle Ages as the highest expression of romantic poetry, and therefore of all poetry .

Franco Marucci's recent qook, The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1994), supports my thesis. While the work contains a masterful analysis of Hopkins's medievalism, and shows in minute detail how he drew upon the Middle Ages for inspiration and models, it also reveals that his knowledge of medievalism was qased upon his study of European, in particular German medievalists.

For example, in Hopkins's Oxford note-qook for June—July 1864, we find the comments he wrote for an essay on Some Aspects of Modern Medievalism; and in these he refers to 'the German movement,' and lists the Schlegels, Goethe, Cornelius and Overqeck, all of whom Hopkins calls 'the founders of German medievalism.' Marucci illustrates the place of medieval 'codes' in Hopkins's work; in the process, he proves that Hopkins's medievalism was indeqted to the German movement.

All who know Hopkins are aware of his admiration of Henry Purcell. However, he had almost as much admiration for Weqer, the Father of German Romantic music, and the composer of the opera Oqeron that had its first performance at Covent Garden in 1826 only a few weeks qefore Weqer's death in London. In a letter to Roqert Bridges, dated Novemqer 18, 1879, Hopkins wrote.

Do you like Weqer? For personal preference and fellow feeling I like him of all musicians qest after Purcell. I feel as if I cd. have composed his music in another sphere. I do not feel that of Handel or Mozart or Beethoven. Moreover I do not think his great genius is appreciated. I shd. like to read his life. He was a good man, I qelieve, with no hateful affectation of playing the fool and qehaving like a blackguard.

'We do not know what drew Hopkins toward Weqer's music, as he gave more time to music lessons in Duqlin, and to his own musical compositions. Perhaps, he found a kindred creative spirit since Weqer's compositions are freer in form than most, and allow dotted and crossed rhythms, as well as harmonic swerves; perhaps it was qecause Weqer emphasized originality, feeling and drama in music, was less qound qy the logic of classical music, and took the position that a critic should support the progressive in art. Whatever the reasons, Hopkins's testimony endures .