POET AND PRIEST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 922, 12 April 1957, Page 12

POET AND PRIEST

FURTHER LETTERS OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, Second Edition, including many new letters discovered in 1952. Edited by Claude Colleer Abbott; Oxford University Press, English price 50/-.

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

OPKINS is one of those poets, like Keats and Blake and Wordsworth, about whose personal life we shall always be curious. With such men, the stresses and contradictions in their work drive us back on the unique personality behind it. Anything we can reliably learn about Hopkins is precious, for his was a great spirit touched to fine issues. And there has been rather too much special pleading from those who would protect his religious vocation (which hardly needs human defence) and his order (which possibly does) at the expense of the artist both sometimes combined to thwart. The two earlier volumes of Hopkins’s letters-to Bridges and Canon Dixonare classical documents which, as Mr Abbott writes, "confirm the poetry." This third volume of miscellaneous letters was first published in 1938, but material uncovered since then fully justifies a revised edition. New family letters throw light on that most crucial event for Hopkins, his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, And a hitherto unpublished letter to Coventry Patmore makes clear the grounds on which Hopkins objected to Patmore’s Sponsa Dei, later destroyed. We now know what the priest meant when he said to the older poet with a grave look, "That’s telling secrets." It is not merély the ascetic side of Hopkins that is illustrated in this volume. The early letters outline for us the attractive portrait of a gifted schoolboy and Balliol Scholar. Something of this undergraduate liveliness and intellectual zest persists through the long correspondence with Mowbray Baillie, that cultivated sceptic and horseman who remains a rather surprising confidant for a Jesuit priest. But between Gerard and his family a curtain fell. A new element appears with the ice-hard letters to his parents announcing his conversion, the manoeuvre by which he forestalled their effort to delay his precipitate entry into the Catholic Church, the convert’s harshness towards their ‘subsequent distress. The most moving letter in this collection comes from the father, not the son. Unlike some Oxford contemporaries who took the same course, Hapkins never wavered in his newfound _allegiance. But it is clear that his work as a Jesuit teacher, patticularly as an Englishman in Ireland at a time of political stress, was often uncongenial to him. His "outward service" (as distinct from that inward service which was his consolation and no doubt his reward) seemed to him sometimes as "laborious and distasteful" as the efforts of "prisoners made to serve the enemies’ rs." We are always aware of passions that religious exercises could not entirely subdue. From these moods of

conflict Hopkins made some of his finest poems; but we do not know what he wrote in his spiritual diaries, or by whose orders they were destroyed. At least, we can uSe the surviving records -of which these lectures are some of the most valuable-to trace the painful drama of this dedicated life, and return to the poems with a deeper understanding of their charged intensity.