Hopkins and Prose (I): The Journal
Wednesday November 30th 2011, 16:19 pm
Filed under: Second Paper

 

Hopkins as a prose writer also provides a series of hints and certainties towards a homoerotic interpretation of his poetic works. To a certain extent, it could be said that in his prose writings, especially his personal writings, Hopkins speaks through his true voice, or, at the most, with a voice that is closer and more honest to his true inner self than the voice speaking in his poems—in theory, the conscious or unconscious textual manipulation in his poems is absent in his prose works, especially his private writings. For this particular reason, the selection of his prose works which concerns us here enables us to clarify certain points which are blurred or taken ambiguously considering only in his lyrical works, in accordance with the holistic approach which is mentioned in the Introduction to the paper. On the whole, the passages that follow belong to his personal diaries and journals, his letters and to his religious Jesuit writings.

In the available bibliographical references, there is hardly any prose work written before his religious conversion in the second semester of 1866. The only one which I have had access to during research for this paper is the following, which proves the extent to which Hopkins was psychologically in need of an external controlling agency (eventually the Society of Jesus), in view of what he himself considered his own indulgence:

 

Extract J1: Early Diaries. January 23, 1866.

For Lent. No pudding on Sundays. No tea except if to keep me awake and then without sugar. Meat only once a day. No verses in Passion Week or on Fridays. No lunch or meat on Fridays. Not to sit in armchair except can work in no other way. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday bread and water.

(Phillips 1986: 189)

 

Barely six months later, Hopkins had eventually realised such need, and wrote the following:

 

Extract J2: Journal. July 17 [1866]

Dull, curds-and-whey clouds faintly at times.—It was this night I believe but possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England, but resolved to say nothing to anyone till three months are over, that is the end of the Long, and then of course to take no step till after my Degree.

(Phillips 1986: 191)

 

Fortunately however, Saville records in her work part of Hopkins’s early diaries, showing not only how he categorised certain aspects of his behaviour as indulgence, as Extract 1 shows, but also extremely explicit references to homosexual desire. In Saville’s own words, “his confessional notes closely document not only transgressive actions or gestures but also thoughts, inclinations, and even moods. Repeatedly, he recorded his attractions to working-class men and boys in a manner that suggests he regarded same-sex passion as a malady associated with self-indulgence and insidious languor to be remedied with strict self-discipline. As the following extracts show, records of homoerotic experience are enveloped in self-accusations of laxity, as if he regarded the two as inextricably connected” (Saville 2000: 35):

 

Extract J3: From Hopkins’s Early Diaries. 1865.

14 [April 1865] Good Friday. Self-indulgence in not getting up at once. Inattention at church in morning. … The evil thought in writing on our Lord’s passion. … Parker’s boy at Merton: evil thoughts. (From The Early Poetic Manuscripts and Note-Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Facsimile. Ed. Norman H. MacKenzie. New York: Garland, 1989; 157)

15 [April]. Easter Eve. … Idling over architectural scribbling at lunch time. Unclean habits, not exactly the old ones. Looking at a cart-boy fr. Standen’s shopdoor. Wasting time in evening. Lapses into idleness. (Ibid.; 157)

(21) [April] No lessons. Quickness with Cyril. Waste of time. Madox Brown’s pictures. Looking [?] at navvies in Swiss Cottage Fields. Waste of time in going to bed. Impurities. (Ibid.; 158)

[23 April] Dangerous talking about Dolben, no reading whatever. (Ibid.; 158)

26 [May].  Putting off penitential psalms till late at night. … Malice towards Jeffreys. Evil thought slightly in drawing made worse by drawing a crucified arm on same page. (Ibid.; 167)

8 [July]. Imprudent looking at organ-boy and other boys. Inatt. at prayers (family.) 9 [Sun]. And at them [prayers] and twice at church. … Looking at temptations, esp. at E. Geldart naked. (Ibid.; 174)

(Saville 2000: 35)

 

Moving on, his personal journal proves the extent to which Hopkins was visually receptive and prone to a detailed, profuse and sensuous description, most importantly, of nature. Certainly a vast amount of his journal writing is solely dedicated to the description of nature and recollection of natural inscapes, translating from the visual to the textual; and some passages are devoted most simply to the ordinary description of the weather:

 

Extract J4: Journal. Aug. 22. [1867].

Bright. — Walked to Finchley and turned down a lane to a field where I sketched an appletree. Their sprays against the sky are gracefully curved and the leaves looping over edge them, as it looks, with rows of scales. In something the same way I saw some tall young slender wych-elms of thin growth the leaves of which enclosed the light in successive eyebrows. From thespot where I sketched – under an oak, beyond a brook, and reached by the above green lane between a park-ground and a pretty field – there was a charming view, the field, lying then on the right of the lane, being a close-shaven smoothly-rounded shield of bright green ended near the high road by a row of viol-headed or flask-shaped elms – not rounded merely but squared – of much beauty – dense leafing, rich dark colour, ribs and spandrils of timber garlanded with leaf between tree and tree. But what most struck me was a pair of ashes in going up the lane again. (…)

(Phillips 1986: 191)

 

Extract J5: Journal. Aug. 23. [1867].

Fine and cloudless; fiery sunset. (…) Then to the chapel of the poor Clares, where I made my resolution ‘if it is better’, but now, Sept. 4, nothing is decided. For the evening to Aunt Kate’s.

(Phillips 1986: 192)

 

Extract J6: Journal. Aug. 30. [1867].

Fair; in afternoon fine; the clouds had a good deal of crisping and mottling.—(…) Putting my hand up against the sky whilst we lay on the grass I saw more richness and beauty in the blue than I had known of before, not brilliance but glow and colour. It was not transparent and sapphire-like but turquoise-like, swarming and blushing round the edge of the hand and in the pieces clipped in by the fingers, the flesh being sometimes sunlit, sometimes glassy with reflected light, sometimes lightly shadowed in that violet one makes with cobalt and Indian red.

(Phillips 1986: 192)

 

That visual description of nature, verging on a sensuous character, is the ruling theme in the previous excerpts is not surprising, bearing in mind that his decision to become a Jesuit priest was yet to come. The following passage recalls his religious decision and interestingly combines both concerns, the natural and the pious:

 

Extract J7: Journal. [1868]. [Retreat at Roehampton].

May 2. Fine, with some haze, and warm.

This day, I think, I resolved.

May 5. Cold.

Resolved to be a religious.

May 6. Fine but rather thick and with a very cold N.E. wind.

May 7. Warm; misty morning; then beautiful turquoise sky.

Home [Hampstead], after having decided to be a priest and religious but still doubtful between St. Benedict and St. Ignatius.

May 8. Dim sunlight; wind not cold, yet East.

May 9. Sultry and, I believe, dull.

May 10. Thick, but fine evening.

May 11. Dull; afternoon fine.

Slaughter of the innocents.

(Phillips 1986: 192-193)

 

However, and most strikingly, the following pieces are undeniable evidence that Hopkins remained a ‘visually-receptive artist’ with a tendency to the sensuous even after his decision to become a Jesuit and his eventual adherence to the Society of Jesus—an issue that is obviously in accordance with the sensuousness recurring in many of his post-conversion poems. From a simplistic or lay perspective, one could assume that a man with such a newly found devotion would devote most of his personal writing to it. This is not the case however. His visual and descriptional skills and his enormous sensuous capacity are proven to remain untouched upon his entrance into the community. Or, as Roberts puts it: “While the few letters of Hopkins’s noviceship reflect that the Constitutions’s injunction against writing them was more or less observed, the Journal, by whoever’s advice, was continued and, as before, the sensuous external world figured far more than the spiritual. The colour, imagery and generally imaginative language by no means reflect a novice subdued by his training” (Roberts 1994: 32-33), so basically “the sensuous artist was clearly still unspoilt by the Jesuit experience” (Roberts 1994: 58). Or, as Gardner puts it, “although his hopes of becoming a painter or poet were receding, he was still possessed by a zeal for noting anything that delighted his eye and stimulated his sense of form”, and as such, “the entries range from bald weather reports to critical notes on Royal Academy paintings; but the best part of the work consists of carefully written observations on natural phenomena – on colour, organic form, movement, in fact the intrinsic quality of any object which was capable of striking through the senses and into the mind with a feeling of novelty and discovery” (Gardner 1985: xix-xx):

 

Extract J8: Journal. [Holiday in Switzerland]. July 11. [1868].

Fine. We took a guide up the Wylerhorn but the top being clouded dismissed him and stayed up the mountain, lunching by a waterfall. Presently after long climbing – for there was a good chance of a clearance – we nearly reached the top, when a cloud coming on thick frightened me back: had we gone on we should have had the view, for it cleared quite. Still we saw the neighbouring mountains well. The snow is ofter cross-harrowed and lies too in the straightest paths as though artificial, which again comes from the planning. In the sheet it glistens yellow to the sun. How fond of and warped to the mountains it would be easy to become! For every cliff and limb and edge and jutty has its own nobility.— (…)

(Phillips 1986: 193)

 

Extract J9: Journal. July 19, 1868.

(…) We came up with a guide who reminded me of F. John. He took E.B.’s knapsack and on finding the reason why I would not let him take mine said ‘Le bon Dieu n’est pas comme ça.’ The man probably was a rational Protestant; if a Catholic at least he rationalised gracefully, as they do in Switzerland. (…) At times the valley opened in cirques, amphitheatres, enclosing levels of plain, and the river then ran between flaky flat-fish isles made of cindery lily-white stones. (…)

We saw Handeck waterfall. It is in fact the meeting of two waters, the right the Aar sallow and jade-coloured, the left a smaller stream of clear lilac foam. It is the greatest fall we have seen. The lower half is hidden in spray. I watched the great bushes of foam-water, the texture of branchings and water-spandrils which makes them up. At their outsides nearest the rock they gave off showers of drops strung together into little quills which sprang out in fans.

(Phillips 1986: 195-196)

 

Extract J10: Journal. [1871].

The spring wheater began with March about

I have been watching clouds this spring and evaporation, for instance over our Lenten chocolate. It seems as if the heat by aestus, throes/one after another threw films of vapour off as boiling water throws off steam under films of water, that is bubbles. (…)

(Phillips 1986: 203)

 

Extract J11: Journal. [1871].

(…) The film seems to rise not quite simultaneously but to peel off as if you were tearing cloth; then giving an end forward like the corner of a handkerchief and beginning to coil it makes a long wavy hose you may sometimes look down, as a ribbon or a carpenter’s shaving may be made to do. Higher running into frets and silvering in the sun with the endless coiling, the soft bound of the general motion and yet the side lurches sliding into some particular pitch it makes a baffling and charming sight.—

(Phillips 1986: 204)

 

Extract J12: Journal. [1871].

(…) What you look hard at seems to look hard at you, hence the true and the false instress of nature. One day early in March when long streamers were rising from over Kemble End one large flake loop-shaped, not a streamer but belonging to the string, moving too slowly to be seen, seemed to cap and fill the zenith with a white shire of cloud. I looked long up at it till the tall height and the beauty of the scaping—regularly curled knots springing if I remember from fine stems, like foliation in wood or stone—had strongly grown on me. It changed beautiful changes, growing more into ribs and one stretch of running into branching like coral. Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is.

(Phillips 1986: 204)

 

Extract J13: Journal. March 17 [1871].

—In the morning clouds chalky and milk-coloured, with remarkable oyster-shell moudling. (From a rough pencil sketch)

 

Between eleven and twelve at night a shock of earthquake.

End of March and beginning of April—This is the time to study inscape in the spraying of trees, for the swelling buds carry them to a pitch which the eye could not else gather—for out of much much more, out of little not much, out of nothing nothing: in these sprays at all events there is a new world of inscape. The male ashes are very boldly jotted with the hedas of the bloom which tuft the outer ends of the branches. The staff of each of these branches is closely knotted with the places where burds are or have been, so that it is something like a finger which has been tied up with string and keeps the marks. (…)

(Phillips 1986: 205)

 

Extract J14: Journal. June 13 [1871].

—A beautiful instance of inscape sided on the slide, that is/successive sidings of one inscape, is seen in the behaviour of the flag flower from the shut bud to the full blowing: each term you can distinguish is beautiful in itself and of course if the whole ‘behaviour’ were gathered up and so stalled it would have a beauty of all the higher degree.

(Phillips 1986: 209)

 

Extract J15: Journal. July 19 [1872].

… Stepped into a barn of ours, a great shadowy barn, where the hay had been stacked on either side, and looking at the great rudely arched timberframes—principals(?) and tie-beams, which make them look like bold big As with the cross-bar high up—I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again. 

This month here and all over the country many great thunderstorms. Cyril, in bed I think, at Liverpool after a simultaneous flash and crash felt a shock like one from a galvanic battery and for some time one of his arms went numbed. At Roehampton Fr. Williams was doubled up and another Father had his breviary struck out of his hand. Here a tree was struck near the boys’ cricketfield and a cow was ripped up

(Phillips 1986: 211)

 

Extract J16: Journal. Dec. 19 [1872].

—Under a dark sky walking by the river at Brockennook. There all was sad-coloured and the colour caught the eye, red and blue stones in the river beaches brought out by patches of white-blue snow, that is/snow quite white and dead but yet it seems as if some blue or lilac screen masked it somewhere between it and the eye: I have often noticed it. The swells and hillocks of the river sands and the fields were sketched and gilded out by frill upon frill of snow—they must be seen: this is only to shew which way the curve lies. Where the snow lies as in a field the damasking of white light and silvery shade may be watched indeed till brightness and glare is all lost in a perplexity of shadow and in the whitest of things the sense of white is lost, but at a shorter gaze I see two degrees in it (…)

(Phillips 1986: 214)

 

Even more, his personal writing could either lead or mislead towards the interpretation that his Jesuit life was of no real interest to him – at least compared to his visual experiences or ‘inscapes’ with nature. In some instances, descriptional profusion comes first, followed by a brief closing commentary, if any, on his religious life. Other passages simply alienate the recalling of his religious activity, by simply underestimating it in comparison with the description of inscapes, or most commonly, by being as succint as possible:

 

Extract J17: Journal. [Holiday in the Isle of Man]. August [1872].

After the examinations we went for our holiday out to Douglas in the Isle of Man Aug. 3. At this time I had first begun to get hold of the copy of Scotus on the Sentences in the Baddely library and was flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm. It may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from God. But just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus

Aug. 4—Kirk Onchan church is modern and if you looked to anything but the steeple very poor but the steeple is so strongly and boldly designed that it quite deceived me and I took it for old work well preserved. In the churchyard is an old engraved cross with knotword such as on those at Whalley.

Aug. 8—Walked to Ramsey, and back by steamer. From the high-road I saw how the sea, dark blue with violet cloud-shadows, was warped to the round of the world like a coat upon a ball and often later I marked that perspective. I had many beautiful sights of it, sometimes to the foot of the cliff, where it was of a strong smouldering green over the sunken rocks—these rocks, which are coated with small limpets, discolour the coast all along with a fringe of yellow at the tide-mark and under water reflect light and make themselves felt where the smooth black ones would not shew—, but farther out blue shadowed with gusts from the shore; at other times with the brinks hidden by the fall of the hill, packing the land in/it was not seen how far, and then you see best how it is drawn up to a brow at the skyline and stoops away on either side, tumbling over towards the eye in the broad smooth fall of a lakish apron of water, which seems bound over or lashed to land below by a splay of dark and light braids: they are the gusts of wind all along the perspective with which all the sea that day was dressed.

(Phillips 1986: 211-212)

 

Extract J18: Journal. Feb. 24 [1873].

—In the snow flat-topped hillocks and shoulders outlined with wavy edges, ridge below ridge, very like the grain of wood in line and in projection like relief maps. These the wind makes I think and of course drifts, which are in fact snow waves. The sharp nape of a drift is sometimes broken by slant flutes or channels. (…)

May 11—Bluebells in Hodder wood, all hanging their heads one way. I caught as well as I could while my companions talked the Greek rightness of their beauty, the lovely / what people call / ‘gracious’ bidding one to another or all one way, the level or stage or shire of colour they make hanging in the air a foot above the grass, and a notable glare  the eye may abstract and sever from the blue colour / of light beating up from so many glassy heads, which like water is good to float their deeper instress in upon the mind.

(Phillips 1986: 215)

 

Extract J19: Journal. June 15 [1873].

—Sunday after Corpus Christi. Some of us went to Billington to join in their procession. Mr. Lucas was with me. The day was very beautiful. A few streamer clouds and a grapy yellowing team moving along the horizon. At the ferry a man said ‘Hāst a penny, Tom?’ —the old ferry was below the rocks.

(Phillips 1986: 215)

 

Extract J20: Journal. August [1873].

Aug. 16 [1873]—We rose at four, when it was stormy and I saw duncoloured waves leaving trailing hoods of white breaking on the beach. Before going I took a last look at the breakers, wanting  to make out how the comb is morselled so fine into string and tassel, as I have lately noticed it to be. I saw big smooth flinty waves, carved and scuppled in shallow grooves, much swelling when the wind freshened, burst on the rocky spurs of the cliff at the little cove and break into bushes of foam. In an enclosure of rocks the peacks of the water rompted and wandered and a light grown of tufty scum standing him on the surface kept slowly turning round: chips of it blew off and gadded about without weight in the air. At eight we sailed for Liverpool in wind and rain. I think it is the salt that makes rain at sea sting so much. There was a good-looking young man on board that got drunk and sun ‘I want to go home to Mamma’. I did not look much at the sea: the crests I saw ravelled up by the wind into the air in arching whips and straps of glassy spray and higher broken into clouds of white and blown away. Under the curl shone a bright juice of beautiful green. The foam exploding and smouldering under water makes a chrysoprase green. From Blackburn I walked: infinite stiles and sloppy fields, for there has been much rain. A few big shining drops hit us aslant as if they were blown off from eaves or leaves. Bright sunset: all the sky hung with tall tossed clouds, in the west with strong printing glass edges, westward lamping with tipsy bufflight, the colour of yellow roses. Parlick ridge like a pale goldish skin without body. The plain about Clitheroe was sponged out by a tall white storm of rain. The sun itself and the spot of ‘session’ dappled with big laps and flowers-in-damask of cloud. But we hurried too fast and it knocked me up. We went to the College, the seminary being wanted for the secular priests’ retreat: almost no gas, for the retorts are being mended; therefore cnadles in bottles, things not ready, darkness and despair. In fact being unwell I was quite downcast: nature in all her parcels and faculties gaped and fell apart, fatiscebat, like a clod cleaving and holding only by strings of root. But this must often be

We found the German Divines from Ditton Hall with their rector and professors spending their villa at the college…

Aug. 22 [1873]— We went back to the Seminary

(Phillips 1986: 217)

 

Extract J21: Journal. May 23 [1874].

—Dark, very heavy, fine rain. The change this morning was not so much from temperate to warm as from cold to temperate, the weather has been so wintry: I even got chilblains again.

I went one day to the Academy and again June 12, when Fr. Johnson (Superior in the absence of Fr. Porter, who is gone take the waters at Carlsbad in Bohemia) kindly sent me to town with Br. Bampton for change. These are the notes on the two days—

(Phillips 1986: 219)

 

Extract J22: Journal. July [1874].

July 14 [1874]—To the House of Commons. The debate was on the Schools Endowment bill moved by Lord Sandon, who spoke well; so did, not so well, Mr. Foster in reply. We heard Newdigate. Gladstone was preparing to speak and writing fast but we could not stay to hear him. Lowe, who sat next him, looked something like an apple in the snow.

July 23— To Beaumont: it was the rector’s day. It was a lovely day: shires-long of pearled cloud under cloud, with a grey stroke underneath marking each row; beautiful blushing yellow in the straw of the uncut ryefields, the wheat looking white and all the ears making a delicate and very true crisping along the top and with just enough air stirring for them to come and go gently; then there were fields reaping. All this I would have looked at again in returning but during dinner I talked too freely and unkindly and had to penance going home. One field I saw from the balcony of the house behind an elmtree, which it threw up, like a square of pale goldlead, as it might be, catching the light.

Our schools at Roehampton ended with two days of examination before St. Ignatius’ feast the 31st. I was very tired and seemed deeply cast down till I had some kind words from the Provincial. Altogether perhaps my heart has never been so burdened and cast down as this year. The tax on my strength has been greatr than I have felt befre: at least now at Teignmouth I feel myself weak and can do little. But in all this our Lord goes His own way.

(Phillips 1986: 220-221)

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«HOPKINS AND PROSE (II): THE LETTERS»

«INTRODUCTION»

«COVER PAGE»





     
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