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Smith, Philip E. II, and Michael S. Helfland, editors. Oscar W ilde’s Oxford Notebooks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Sylvester, James Joseph. Fliegende Blatter: Supplement to The Law s o f Verse. London: Grant, 1876. — . The Law s o f Verse or Principles o f Versification Exemplfied in Metrical Translations. London:

Longmans, 1870.Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam, in The Poems o f Tennyson. Edited by Christopher Ricks. 2nd

edition. Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1987. Vol. H, 315-459.Yeats, W. B. The Poems: A N ew Edition. Edited by Richard J. Finneran. London: Macmillan,

1984.

H O PK IN S AND T H E CA TH O LIC IMAGINARY

Joseph Pizza

Perhaps the most inexhaustible context for Hopkins’s work is his religion. Although there has never been a shortage of scholarship seeking to under­stand the influence of religion—and particularly his Roman Catholicism— on his writing, most work in this vein has tended to focus on the more or less abstract theological import of his metaphysical poetics as opposed to the lived experience of Victorian Roman Catholics. In attending, therefore, to the larger theological sources of his writing, such scholarship often overlooks the more mundane but equally revealing circumstantial pressures felt by individual believers. Among the many paths, then, that Hopkins scholar­ship may take, I want to propose here that a closer look at his attempts to reimagine a space for Roman Catholics within the larger Victorian social imaginary will offer significant insights into our developing understanding of his writing.

Several recent works have opened up new possibilities for such a consider­ation either by focusing on Hopkins and nineteenth-century Roman Catholic culture or by considering it as part of an exploration of a related subject. In the past two years alone, monographs by Michael Tomko, Meredith Martin, and Kirstie Blair all demonstrate the importance of Catholicism as a cultural and political force negotiated through the re-imaginings of poets and novelists in the nineteenth-century, the latter two with special attention to Hopkins. 1 Standing alongside these, of course, are established readings of the subject by Jill Muller, Margaret Johnson, Hilary Fraser, George Ten­nyson, and Stephen Prickett, all of which make for helpful starting points

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on the subject.2 Moreover, in addition to these works of literary criticism, a number of recent studies have added to our understanding of the cultural situation of Roman Catholics in the period. In particular, Mark Knight and Emma Mason’s Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature, Michael Wheeler’s The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, and Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age, to name only a few, offer fresh and exciting perspectives that Hopkins scholars may profitably expand upon. Taken together then, this growing body of research offers the scholar interested in the ways in which the cultural situation of Victorian Roman Catholics may have helped to shape Hopkins’s work a variety of paths to take. Though limitations of space preclude an extended consideration of these here, as an example of one such path I want to offer a reading of “Duns Scotus’s Oxford” as an instance of the potential insights gained from such a perspective.

Although “Duns Scotus’s Oxford” plainly addresses the university, it is the university considered in 1879 from the perspective of Hopkins the Roman Catholic priest, not that of the Anglo-Catholic student of the mid-1860s. In its ambivalent attitude towards Hopkins’s alma mater, the poem serves as an apt example of the ways in which his struggles as a marginalized Ro­man Catholic may add to our understanding of his work. Indeed, I want to argue here that the poem’s central ambiguity concerns the estrangement from home and self felt by Catholic converts in general and Oxford alumni like Hopkins in particular. Such alienation can be observed in broad terms in the broken relationship between town and gown evident in the sonnet’s octave.

Beginning with the first quatrain, the beauty of the city is presented as a harmonious balance of town and gown. In line 2, this harmony suspends time: “Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river- rounded” (L III142). Situated between two colons, the line should be a clause of its own, with the apostrophized “Oxford” as its implied subject. However, by making the verbs of the clause participial adjectives, each compound epithet could be described as both its own clause as well as an item in a catalogue describing an Oxford in which cuckoos echo, bells swarm, larks charm, rooks rack, and rivers round eternally. Indeed, the sound repeti­tions within the epithets, particularly the consonance and alliteration of “Cuckoo-echoing,” “rook-racked,” and “river-rounded,” create a doubling effect, as though the music of the city were caught in a perpetual, timeless

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reverberation.In the second quatrain, however, this harmony is confounded. As Hopkins

explained to Bridges, his return to the city as a Roman Catholic was not altogether j oyous.

You will see that I have again changed my abode and am returned to my Alma Mater and need not go far to have before my eyes...the charm of Oxford, green shouldering grey, [though it] is already abridged and soured and perhaps will soon be put out altogether. (LII 120)

Here the sourness of Hopkins’s response is rooted in his ambivalence over the encroachment of the newer brick buildings in east Oxford and Cowley, where he ministered to soldiers at the military barracks, upon the medieval and renaissance colleges of the university. Such division is apparent in the second quatrain, where town is set against gown.

Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there; sours That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded Rural rural keeping—folk, flocks, and flowers. (Pit 142)

By omitting the pronoun and placing the verb at the beginning of the sec­ond clause of the passage, Hopkins makes the subject of lines 4 through 6 elliptical, creating a momentary confusion of identity, which, in the larger context of the poem, is precisely the effect that the new architecture and its larger moral significance bears, both for him personally and for the larger character of the city. This dissolution of character, of the relations which maintain for Hopkins the amicable interdependence of town and gown, results in the blurred perspective of the octave’s last two lines: “graceless growth, thou hast confounded / Rural rural keeping—folk, flocks, and flowers” (PII 142). The confounding here overthrows and corrupts the previous lines’ sense of Oxford as “grounded” in the “graced” beauty of a “neighbour-nature” made all the friendlier by the hyphen that compounds them. The last line bears this out with its repetition of “Rural rural,” which seems intended to confuse and so suggests a lack of distinction not only between different senses of the word “rural” but also concerning whether it is to be understood as an adjective or an adverb. Victorian Oxford thus appears to Hopkins after his conversion to have confounded the friendly relations between town and gown. As the flady descriptive summary has it, Oxford has degenerated into “folk, flocks, and flowers,” the alliteration slurring even these together. Though there is certainly a Ruskinian critique of the utilitarian here, I want to claim that there is a crisis of self underly-

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ing this critique, one created by the effects of Hopkins’s conversion and evident more fully in the sonnet’s sestet. Consider, for example, that only after the Universities Tests Act of 1871 could Roman Catholics begin to take up places at Oxford. As a result, the majority of Hopkins’s parishioners at the time would have come from the Irish labourers inhabiting the brick townhouses decried above. This surely complicated his response, as other poems from his return to Oxford attest, such as “The Bugler’s First Com­munion” (P II146). Thus, while on the surface the poem’s criticism seems purely architectural, reading his response here in light of the situation of Roman Catholics in Oxford helps to shed new light on the poem’s central conflict by connecting it more clearly with the resolution, as a closer look at the sonnet’s sestet will show.

The sestet moves forward by looking back, turning on the speaker’s breathless recognition of his predecessor.

Yet ah! this air I gather and I releaseHe lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are whatHe haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace. [PII 142)

Couched within the concessive “Yet,” it is the “air” and not the life of town or gown that inspires the speaker. “Air” in fact is a key term for Hopkins in his writing on the Blessed Virgin Mary and functions as a locus for her inspiration, both here and in the later poem “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe.” There, it can be argued that the speaker’s prayer to be “folded,” “in thee isled,” responds to the lack of positive material spaces for Roman Catholics to inhabit in Victorian Britain {PII 158-61). As the exchange between Pusey and Newman would have demonstrated for Hopkins during his undergraduate years, it was belief in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary that divided Tractarians from Roman Catholics most sharply.3 Considering the sestet then in this light, one may read the conjuring of air here as both a response to the period’s anti-Catholicism and as a mark of his allegiance to neither town nor gown but to a counter imaginary, one “isled” in resistance to his alma mater and what it represents for the larger Victorian social imaginary.

The poem’s closing explores the nature of that resistance more fully.

O f realty the rarest-veined unraveller; a notRivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;Who fired France for Mary without spot. (PII 142)

Surely “realty” sends most to the dictionary for a second look, and its archa­ism is significant. As Christopher Ricks has noted concerning T. S. Eliot’s

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use of “behovely” in Four Quartets, archaism can be effective in presenting a belief that has itself fallen out of common usage.4 As the recently revised entry for the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary shows, “realty” pos­sesses two sets of significations, one a synonym for reality and the other for royalty. Moreover, in a usage particular to Scotland, and hence to Scotus, the former could also be used to designate royal land. Though both strands are touched on in Hopkins’s employment of the term in the poem, the second, with its Scottish sub-definition, has been out of use since the seventeenth- century, while the former, though rare, still appears as a legal term and in relation to real estate. In his choice of “realty” then, Hopkins inflects the contemporary usage with the former, itself more familiar to the medieval Scottish philosopher. In doing so, the sonnet’s closing seeks to recover an aspect of the past by bearing witness to it in the present. In other words, the realty, real estate, reality of Oxford is here imaginatively reclaimed by Hopkins as royal land, as a place which fostered the likes of Duns Scotus and the Roman Catholic understanding of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In this way, by asserting the endurance of Scotus’s Marian doctrine and of the larger Roman Catholic tradition in Oxford, Hopkins gleans from the “live air,” as his later poem on “The Blessed Virgin” has it, a correspondent vitality. That it is the life of a counter music is made clearer through the materiality of the poem. Take, for instance, the opposition emphasized by the sprung rhythm of the final line: “Who fired France for Mary without spot.” As Meredith Martin has demonstrated, Hopkins’s metrical marks extend “beyond the poem itself and into the public domain of national salvation and the very private domain of spiritual identity. ” 5 Such national and private concerns are evident here in the way in which the juxtaposed stresses direct one to read the line. Dramatizing the utterance with an un­usually athletic form of apologetic, metrical marks highlight Scotus’s role in the poem and, by virtue of his inspiration and allegiance, Hopkins’s also as affirming a counter argument, one replete with its own complex imaginary. In this way, the unusual stress on the second syllable of “without” appears as daring as any of Hopkins’s rhythmic experiments. His inversion of the usual pronunciation here emphasizes the spotiessness of Mary’s soul, the doctrinal point which frequently separated Anglo-Catholics from their Ro­man Catholic counterparts. Such separation, I want to claim, animates the poem as a whole and continues to challenge our responses to it.

In closing this discussion of the poem, however, one further note must be made in regarding Scotus’s role in Hopkins’s attempt to uncover and celebrate a counter imaginary. Ever attuned to the etymological “pitch” of a word, Hopkins was certainly aware of Richard Chenevix Trench’s history of the epithet “dunce”:

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At the revival of learning, however, [Scholastic] works fell out of favour.... [I]t was mainly in their authority that the Romish Church found support for its periled dogmas; on all which accounts, it was considered a mark of intellectual progress and advance to have broken with them and altogether thrown off their yoke. Some, however, still clung to these Schoolmen, and to one in particular, Duns Scotus... while the others would contemptuously rejoin, “Oh, you are a Dunsman,”— or, more briefly, “you’re a dunce”— [A]nd in as much as the new learning is ever enlisting more and more of the genius and scholarship of the age on its side, the tide became more and more a term of scorn. 6

In his praise for Duns Scotus then, Hopkins turns an English commonplace on its head, carving out an ironic space for Victorian Roman Catholics to inhabit. Read in this way, the poem marks one instance of many in which Hopkins can be shown to have broken with the conventions of the English language and its literature in order to give voice to his own and his com­munity’s ambivalent place within nineteenth-century British culture.

As I believe my reading of “Duns Scotus’s Oxford” shows, then, new perspectives on Hopkins’s work can be gained from a closer engagement with anti-Catholicism and the culture of Victorian Roman Catholics. Though there are certainly a host of other interesting paths worth pursuing, approaching Hopkins’s writing through the lens of this context offers new insights as well. And this extends not only to his experience in isolation but also to his relationship with other Roman Catholic writers. How, we might ask, does Hopkins’s imaginative experience relate to that of other Roman Catholic poets in the period? How might the work of Coventry Patmore, Alice Meynell, and Ernest Dowson, to name only a few, help to clarify our understandings of Hopkins? And what, more broadly, might we learn about Victorian and Modernist poetry by viewing Hopkins in this way? Though space precludes an engagement with these or other related issues here, I would suggest, as my last question implies, that their answers offer to enrich not only our understanding of Hopkins, but of nineteenth and early twentieth-century poetry as well.

Belm ont Abbey College

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NOTES

1. See Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question; Martin, Rise and Fall o f Meter, Blair, Faith and Form in Victorian Poetry and Religion.

2. See Muller, Gerard M anley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism', Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry, Fraser, Beauty and Belief, Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry; and Prickett, Romanticism and Religion.

3. See Pusey, Church o f England a Portion o f Christ’s One Holy Catholic Church, and Newman, Letter to Pusey.

4. See his T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, 258. However, it should be noted that, unlike Hopkins, Eliot is here alluding to an earlier text, Julian of Norwich’s fourteenth-century Sixteen Revela­tions o f Divine Love.

5. Martin, Rise and Fall o f Meter, 76.6. Trench, On the Study o f Words, 85-86.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blair, Kirstie. Faith and Form in Victorian Poetry and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press,2012.

Fraser, Hilary. Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature. Cambridge: Cam­bridge University Press, 1986.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Further Letters o f Gerard Manley Hopkins, Including his Correspondence with Coventry Patmore. Edited by Claude Colleer Abbott. 2nd edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.

---- . Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works. Edited by Catherine Phillips. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2009.

Johnson, Margaret. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry. Aldershot: Ashgate Publish­ers, 1997.

Knight, Mark and Emma Mason. Mneteenth-Century Religion and Literature: A n Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Martin, Meredith. The Rise and Fall o f Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1 8 6 0 -1 9 3 0 . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Muller, Jill. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: A Heart in Hiding. London: Rout- ledge, 2003.

Newman, John Henry. A Letter to the Reverend E . B. Pusey, on H is Recent “Eirenicon.” London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866.

Oxford English Dictionary, “realty” Last modified December 2008. Edited by James Mc­Cracken. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Prickett, Stephen. Romanticism and Religion: The Influence o f Coleridge and Wordsworth on the Vic­torian Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Pusey, Edward Bouverie. The Church o f England a Portion o f Christ’s One Holy Catholic Church, and a M eans o f Restoring Visible Unity. A n Eirenicon, in a Letter to the Author o f “The Christian Year. ” Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1865.

Ricks, Christopher. T. S. Eliot and Prtyudice. London: Faber & Faber, 1994.

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Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.Tennyson, G. B. Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1981.Tomko, Michael. British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity,

1 7 7 8 -1 8 2 9 . London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.Trench, Richard Chenevix. On the Study o f Words: Five Lectures addressed to the Pupils at the Diocesan

Training School, Winchester. London: 1851.Wheeler, Michael. The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

T H E O BED IEN T M IND O F G ERA RD MANLEY H O PK IN S

Summer J. Star

In one of the first biographies of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Geoffrey Grigson characterized the poet’s realism as a persistent reconnaissance with the “outward” world: “With letter-leaves, ant’s egg clouds, and rop­ing ooze...we are divorced from the averagely fine poetic diction of the nineteenth century. Here—and almost everywhere in Hopkins—we knock our sensibilities against exactitudes and starknesses which may still repel or dismay either those who live aesthetically in older, gentler modes or those who do not require to live outwardly at all.”1 The experience of be­ing knocked against the world as readers of Hopkins’s poetry comes for Grigson precisely from the spirit of living “outwardly” or “earnestly,” yet the moral imperative subtending such attention, the self-reflexive tension that girded the “outward” turn, has received less attention from critics considering Hopkins’s aesthetic principles. Critics since R. K. R. Thornton and J. Hillis Miller have tended to put the poet’s aesthetic and religious al­legiances in opposition (or, as with most current critics, put aside the moral pull completely in favor of more material interests). What I posit here, in an effort to promote the re-connection of moral and aesthetic criticism of Hopkins, is the role of his Jesuit training as a bridge between his aesthetic and moral activity. The principle of “obedience of thought” in particular, trained into him during the novitiate years, brought a reflexive practice of mind startlingly similar to the exercises of inscape-seeing recorded in his journals and encoded in the poems. Both the self-conscious mental work of turning the mind “outward” to see inscape and the rigor of Jesuit media-

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