Literary relations: Pater, Hopkins, and me

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Self/east of spirit a dull dough sours. I see The lost are like this, and their scourge to be As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Meantime, looking into the details of Hopkins's life, I was delighted to learn that Pater, only five years older than Hopkins, had been one of his professors at Oxford. Each in his time as an Oxford student proved brilliant and was called "the star of Balliol." I find it tantalizing to speculate on what they discussed as they, in so many ways similar, took tutorial walks.

Unfortunately little remains of their exchange. After their first wintry walk Hopkins, borrowing a line of poetry, characterized Pater as "bleak-faced Neology.' Apparently Pater, especially if he sensed profound similarities, did not give himself easily. If he seemed bleak, he may have resembled the embers in Hopkins's "The. Windhover" that, fallen, break open to the fires concealed within them like a glorious Renaissance Cruxifixion in the making.

We do have several essays on philosophy that Hopkins wrote for Pater. But Hopkins rarely mentioned Pater in his journals and letters. At his death many of Hopkins's papers were, we suspect, burned. In a May 31, 1866 journal entry, mainly given over to a description of clouds and rain, we collide with a lone notation startling in its starkness, content to say no more than "Pater talking two hours against Xtianity." One cannot help being intrigued by speculation on what was said behind Hopkins's scant factual statement. Was he pleased, amused, offended by Pater's exertion? Did it serve chiefly to underscore and speed Hopkins's settled convictions? Or recognizing the many qualities of his own nature in Pater, was Hopkins stirred to act against the lure of those qualities?

And was Pater, on the other hand, given over to privacy, to reticence, moved to such unusual and, we might think, dangerous exertion in an effort to save Hopkins and his rare talents from the backwash of the Oxford Movement they were living in? Apparently outspokenness was possible at Oxford even at this time. Or was it Pater's persistent naivete that made him assume paganism, the denial of the after-life, and related spiritual topics were legitimate subjects for lectures and books?

And for life as well! We have Pater's footnote to the Conclusion in which he did admit such difficulties. He says, "This brief Conclusion was omitted in the second edition of the book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall." This disclaimer amusingly manipulates the facts. Pater removed the Conclusion in the second edition because the first had already prompted attacks, accusing him of celebrating unabashed hedonism. So, seeing that Pandora's box was forever open, anything in it able to escape, anything a reader in self-justification sought to extract from it, Pater restored the Conclusion in the next edition.