Genius loci: placing place in Gerard Manley Hopkins

Modern Language Review, The, Jan, 2006 by Malcolm Hardman

ABSTRACT

Genius loci: Placing Place in Gerard Manley Hopkins by Malcolm Hardman Key to Hopkins is his precise sense of place--including landscape, speech patterns, and the origins of poetic vocabulary. He shares a sense of cosmic geography with Boethius and Abelard, wrestles with the Roman legacy of territorial absolutism, deploying possible antagonists in the Jesuit cause--Dante, Pascal, Tennyson--under the moderating influence of Augustine and Newman; draws on the Faust legend with the aid of Goethe (and Marlowe), also classical archetypes from (Chapman's) Homer, Vergil, Ovid, equally with contemporaries such as Ruskin and C. Rossetti; and his triune meditation of locality and history from Scotus, Heraclitus ('Scotinus'), and Scott is updated from contemporary newspapers.

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All readers of Hopkins are likely to remain indebted to Norman White's biography and Norman H. Mackenzie's edition of The Poetical Works. (1) Yet a rare misjudgement in the former also typifies a difficulty in the latter. Misled, perhaps, by an unconsciously sentimental view of the Victorians, White (p. 204) assumes that, in describing some wychelm leaves in an Isle of Man churchyard as 'happy', during August 1872, Hopkins is indulging in the 'pathetic fallacy'. In fact (like Ruskin, who coined the phrase), Hopkins inherits the cooler, eighteenth-century school of judgement, alert to matters of placing and status: the leaves are 'happy' because by chance ('hap') arranged pleasingly: serendipitously in their right places.

Hopkins's almost fanatical concern with both the haecceitas (intensely individual 'thisness') and comparative status of particular places runs through his work: Mackenzie (concerned to do justice to the critical legacy) occasionally misses the chance to read a Hopkins poem whole from beginning to end through insufficient scrutiny of place: intensely specific, so that each seems branded into the memory (in Dido's words) as the 'spoor of an old fame' (veteris vestigia flammae), (2) yet also positioned in a hierarchy formed by universalizing codes of historical and spiritual endorsement--whether we consider the British Empire and its extent and history which Hopkins was taught to revere, the Graeco-Roman culture whose modes constituted his education, or the absolutist territorial claims of the Roman Church he embraced. Sprung from a father prominent in Britain's worldwide marine insurance business--serious enough in its details--and a mother whose childhood was spent thirty yards from the site of the scaffold on Tower Hill (White, pp. 4-5), Hopkins deploys a wider, deeper, grimmer, sense of time and space than has always been allowed. As a Jesuit in the 1870s, he was on the front line of European battles (in which men fought and died) raging around such issues as the territorial claims of the papacy. Not merely the 'Great War' of 1914 was already anticipated, but the splitting of the atom that would come (on the heels of Bridges's first edition of December 1918) (3) in the terrible year of Versailles. Many of Hopkins's most constructive allusions are acutely contemporary, including current newspaper themes; and like other Victorian intellectuals, he is prospective as well as retrospective. He certainly has humour and, like his father (White, p. 6), will worry a word almost to death in exploring its range of meaning. What is sometimes perceived as his sentimentality (the dialect moments in 'Felix Randal', for instance) is more a kind of honesty in objectifying his own capacity for male-directed tendresse: like a Greek chorus, the voicing (sometimes even the main burden of meaning) of a Hopkins piece requires clarification through the vividness, and distancing, of histrionic performance and mime. Cruelly honest about himself, as a Jesuit he was in more than one sense on a forward line, but rarely gushing or naive. For him, as for Arnold, poetry was a public act.

What follows is principally an attempt--relying on White and Mackenzie--to read all through 'Henry Purcell', 'Spring and Fall', and 'The Windhover', paying particular attention to Hopkins's inherited, adopted, and cultivated sense of place. To do so will require some exploration of Roman territorial absolutism, of the peculiar character of Catholic Lancashire, of Hopkins's relation to the Gallic/Gaelic, as Englishman (recovering his own Welshness) and as Roman Catholic (retaining elements of his twenty-two years as an Anglican).

From schooldays on, Hopkins was deeply aware that, while Latin commonly uses one word for 'here', it has at least three for 'there'. There is the toughly objective ibi; but also the more confrontational (or deferential) istic ('in your area'); and then there is illic: 'in that famous place'. This is the 'there' most relevant to Hopkins's sensibility: the most opposed to the common 'here' of mortal existence, close neighbour as that is to 'here lies'--'the cold Hic Jacets of the dead'. (4)

Typifying a culture that brooked no rival, formed and sustained by war, held together and forced apart by male bondings and oppositions, Rome's istic was not without influence on Hopkins; but two relevant uses of illic are suggestive. Boethius (480-524), awaiting assassination in a tyrant's dungeon amid the ruins of the classical world, is nevertheless a mental 'acrobat' (one who goes to heights, and depths) who can relate his inmost longings to 'the highest height of heaven' and find there (illic) stars of justice and love eternally triumphant over hate. Abelard (1079-1142), Renaissance man out of his time, is the 'castrated boar' (maialis) appropriately punished for deflowering his pupil; but also the lyric visionary who depicts life's journey from Babylon here to Jerusalem there: only there (illic) are grace, security, an unending Sabbath of delight. So Dante: 'here' always and only the dark wood; only but eternally 'there' the love that moves the sun and all the stars. (5) Those blind to this ghostly map inhabit the opposed there of the pit. Thus Hopkins's geography: 'Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!' That illic sets itself above the istic of the great Enemy: 'you, dark tramplers, tyrant years'. For Hopkins, as for Boethius, 'The times are winter, with the world undone'; but to succumb to voices of ambivalence is to be 'selfwrung, selfstrung' on a 'rack' yielding no release save in a 'Here!' that is ultimately the voice of Christ planting resurrection's banner in hell itself. For the spiritual acrobat, 'cliffs of fall' are a vividly realized 'there' (ibi), challenging him to climb from darkness to light. In Christ alone is the perception of Heraclitus realized: literally, in the abrupt, sculptural vividness Greek excels in, and Hopkins imitates: 'Road Up Down One'. (6)