Literary relations: Pater, Hopkins, and me

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2002 by Weiss, Theodore

Hopkins, I suggest, though he no doubt would have denied-it, was also drawn, not so much to the fruit of experience, as to experience itself. He needed to establish an aesthetic as much as did Pater. A few weeks before his death, W. B. Yeats, in a letter, maintained "Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it. The abstract is not life, and everywhere it draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence." And by 1872 Hopkins had arrived at his credo's principal concept: "inscape." I must admit that I find it an elusive term, adjusting itself to the context it is in. However, it does resemble Don Scotus's belief in ipseity, the whatness or fitness of each thing. God not only created each thing but freed it to its unique pattern or design. And, with Pater, we are here to act as witnesses of nature's beauty, as the singers of its praises.

According to Hopkins,

All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose: looking out of my window I caught it in the random clods and broken heaps of snow made by the cast of a broom. The same of the path trenched by footsteps in ankle deep snow across the fields.

In certain basic particulars Hopkins's position approaches the climax of Pater's Conclusion. Like Pater, Hopkins lamented the plethora of unappreciated beauty. For beauty, he believed, is "the virtue of inscape" or the floruit of each object's form and being.

Talking about the hay stacked in a barn, Hopkins says, "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." But as we can see by the commonplace nature of the examples Hopkins presents (random clods and broken heaps of snow), his inscape enjoyed far wider scope than Pater's quest for beauty, his urging us "to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us." Hopkins was, I believe, reaching for a vision that would include all happenings and creatures, all of God's creation. However, after a short spell of innocence, Hopkins's vision failed him. (Pope was content to declare that

"Whatever Is, Is Right." Blake, requiring much more, insisted "everything that lives is Holy.") Still Hopkins could maintain, "It is not that inscape does not govern the behavior of things in slack or decay as one can see even in the pining of the skin in the old and even in a skeleton but that horror prepossesses the mind." The withered flower, the rotting body, have a ripeness of their own.

As his notebooks tell us, Hopkins early put himself to the sweet duty of direct, Pater-like observation. He looked so hard at nature's offspring that at times they looked back: he seemed to be inside the object looking out of it. (Nietzsche expressed the dark side of this relationship which soon overtook Hopkins: look into a void till the void looks into you.) Here I cite a magnificent example of Hopkins's powers of observation, his empathy with nature, his imagination: