Literary Giants Literary Catholics (4 page)

Since T. S. Eliot was the poet most responsible for popularizing the poetic avant-garde, one might have expected him to be one of Hopkins’ most vocal champions. It is surprising, therefore, that he is less than enthusiastic:

Hopkins is not a religious poet in the more important sense in which I have elsewhere maintained Baudelaire to be a religious poet; or in the sense in which I find Villon to be a religious poet; or in the sense in which I consider Mr. Joyce’s work to be penetrated with Christian feeling. I do not wish to depreciate him, but to affirm limitations and distinctions. He should be compared, not with our contemporaries whose situation is different from his, but with the minor poet nearest contemporary to him, and most like him: George Meredith. The comparison is altogether to Hopkins’s advantage . . . where Meredith . . . has only a rather cheap and shallow “philosophy of life” to offer, Hopkins has the dignity of the Church behind him, and is consequently in closer contact with reality. But from the struggle of our time to concentrate, not to dissipate; to renew our association with traditional wisdom; to re-establish a vital connexion between the individual and the race; the struggle, in a word, against Liberalism: from all this Hopkins is a little apart, and in this Hopkins has very little aid to offer us.

There is something almost patronizing in Eliot’s criticism, and one is tempted to see an element of professional jealousy in his words. They were written in 1933, when Hopkins was at the very height of his fashionable popularity and when he was being lauded by many as the greatest of “modern” poets, a position that popular critical opinion had bestowed on Eliot during the previous decade. Yet, whatever the motives behind his criticism, Eliot’s appraisal fell far short of the perceptive qualities that permeated most of his critical essays. Most notable was his failure to appreciate the depths of orthodox Christian philosophy that underpinned Hopkins’ work. Eliot was fully conversant with the neo-Thomism that was in the ascendant during the early decades of the twentieth century, so it is curious that he failed to recognize the omnipresence of scholastic philosophy in Hopkins’ verse. The latter’s Jesuit training had grounded him in the teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and this had inspired his notion of
inscape
, the central concept at the heart of his poetry, which was itself a reflection of the teaching of Duns Scotus that everything in Creation has a unique spiritual identity, its
haecceitas
, or “thisness”. Distilling, through medieval philosophy, the purer spirit of faith and reason that had existed before the adulteration of the Enlightenment, Hopkins had served up Catholic theology to an unsuspecting modernity, which, accustomed to lighter fare, became intoxicated by its heady effects. In effect, therefore, and with more than a modicum of irony, Hopkins’ much-vaunted status as an honorary “modern” springs from his adherence to the authentic tradition of the Church, a powerful reminder that orthodoxy is always dynamic.

Although Hopkins remained unknown as a poet until the 1920s, he was not wholly without influence during his own lifetime. He was a close friend of Robert Bridges, and his critical judgment was greatly valued by Coventry Patmore. On one occasion Patmore actually burned one of his own manuscripts after it had been criticized by Hopkins. Following Hopkins’ death in 1889, Patmore wrote the following words of tribute in a letter to Bridges:

I can well understand how terrible a loss you have suffered in the death of Gerard Hopkins—you who saw so much more of him than I did. . . . Gerard Hopkins was the only orthodox, and as far as I could see, saintly man in whom religion had absolutely no narrowing effect upon his general opinions and sympathies. A Catholic of the most scrupulous strictness, he could nevertheless see the Holy Spirit in all goodness, truth and beauty; and there was something in all his words and manners which were at once a rebuke and an attraction to all who could only aspire to be like him.

Although Patmore enjoyed the critical acclaim that eluded Hopkins during his lifetime, it would be fair to say that his verse does not reach the sublime heights that Hopkins achieves in his greatest poems. Yet Patmore’s finest poetry, which followed the death of his first wife in 1862 and his conversion to Roman Catholicism two years later, almost justifies Sir Herbert Read’s judgment that much of his verse represents “true poetry of the rarest and perhaps the highest kind”.

Perhaps Patmore’s greatest champion in the final decades of the nineteenth century was Alice Meynell, herself a poet of some merit, who published popular anthologies of his verse. Together with her husband, Wilfrid Meynell, she edited several periodicals that were highly influential and that were instrumental in popularizing other Catholic writers, of whom the most notable was Francis Thompson. The energy and enthusiasm that the Meynells displayed in their tireless promotion of the Catholic literati in late Victorian and Edwardian England helped to oil the wheels of, and give momentum to, the Catholic literary revival as it entered the twentieth century. This was a role taken up with equal vigor by Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward in the years between the two world wars. Nonetheless, the Meynells’ greatest gift to posterity was their responsibility for the rescue and rehabilitation of Francis Thompson from a life of poverty and opium addiction on the streets of post-Dickensian London. Without their timely intervention, it is likely that Thompson would have died in wretched obscurity, without ever writing much of the poetry that has secured his place alongside Hopkins as the greatest Christian poet of the Victorian era. Three volumes of his poetry were published by the Meynells between 1893 and 1897 to immediate critical acclaim.

Through the Meynells, Thompson got to know the aging Patmore shortly before the latter’s death in 1896, and there are hints of Patmore’s influence in some of Thompson’s work. The most obvious example of this can be seen in a comparison between Patmore’s greatest poem, “The Toys”, and Thompson’s “Love and the Child”, both of which employ observations of a parent-child relationship as a metaphor for the relationship of man with God. There is also a remarkable affinity between Thompson’s mystical vision of nature and Hopkins’ notion of the intrinsic beauty, through
inscape
, of all created things. Thompson could not have been aware of Hopkins’ work, of course, but the coincidental depth of affinity is clearly discernible, most notably in Thompson’s “To a Snowflake”.

One also senses an affinity in such poems with the philosophy of gratitude that characterized so much of the writing of G. K. Chesterton a few years later. It is not too fanciful to imagine that Chesterton had read Thompson’s poetry when it was first published in the 1890s, and if he had done so, he would most certainly have recognized in Thompson a kindred spirit. During the years that Thompson’s verse was gaining widespread recognition, the young Chesterton was passing out of the period of adolescent doubt and despondency that had overshadowed his time as a student at the Slade School of Art. Writing of this period in his
Autobiography
, Chesterton referred to a time “full of doubts and morbidities and temptations; and which, though in my case mainly subjective, has left in my mind for ever a certitude upon the objective solidity of Sin.” Chesterton conceded that his morbidity “may have been due to the atmosphere of the Decadents, and their perpetual hints of the luxurious horrors of paganism” that prevailed at the Slade School of Art in the “naughty nineties”:

Anyhow, it is true that there was a time when I had reached the condition of moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of Wilde, that “Atys with the blood-stained knife were better than the thing I am.” I have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wilde; but I could at this time imagine the worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more normal passion.

Regardless of how they may be perceived by posterity, Hopkins and Newman saw themselves, first and foremost, as ordained ministers of the Church. They were priests first, and poets second. As obedient souls who sought to do God’s will in their daily lives, they could be called converts of the light. There was, however, a parallel movement of rebellious souls who were intent on experiencing all aspects of life, both the licit and the illicit, and who, often shunning the light, walked in the shadows or stumbled in the darkness. These were the Decadents, adherents of a movement originating in France but that would spread infectiously across the Channel under the beguiling influence of Oscar Wilde.

In considering the relationship between the Decadents and the Church, one is confronted with another paradox. At first glance the precociously risqué image of Wilde would appear to sit uncomfortably beside the primness and propriety of Newman. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. At the deepest level, saintly souls like Newman and Hopkins have more in common with “sinners” such as Wilde and Beardsley than with the archetypal, stoically self-righteous and sceptic-souled Victorians. “I have dreams of a visit to Newman,” Wilde confessed to a friend in 1877, “of the holy sacrament in a new Church, and of a quiet and peace afterwards in my soul.” Two years earlier he had scribbled in his Commonplace Book the words of the father of French Decadence, Baudelaire: “O Lord! Give me the strength and the courage to contemplate my heart without disgust!”

In later years Wilde fell under the influence of Baudelaire’s disciple, J. K. Huysmans, whose luridly licentious novel,
A Rebours
, had scandalized French society following its publication in 1884. Huysmans, like Baudelaire, had chosen to look sin straight in the eye, probing its allure and its ugliness, whereas respectable, “rational” society preferred to sweep it under the carpet or glance at it furtively or voyeuristically through a keyhole. Sin, for the prudishly prurient Victorians, was to be obscene but not heard. For the Decadents, however, the honesty of a sin confessed, even in the absence of contrition, was preferable to the hypocrisy of a sin concealed. For one as tormented by self-loathing as Wilde, this candid vision of decadence was alluring. Temperamentally tempted to despair, he saw Baudelaire and Huysmans as kindred spirits. They were seeking enlightenment from their own inner darkness. He was trying to do the same.

Far from vanquishing the religious question from their lives, the Decadents discovered that plunging themselves into the depths of sin brought them into closer contact with religion, even if the contact took the form only of conflict. Sin and despair were, after all, religious concepts. They were not physical, but metaphysical, realities. Furthermore, and crucially, despair was distinct from desolation. The former is the absence or the denial of hope, the latter the longing or the hunger for it. A desolate soul does not seek suicide; it seeks consolation. Ultimately, the hunger for hope engenders a hunger for faith. Thus, in the final chapter of
A Rebours
, the novel’s principal character, des Esseintes, discovers that his lustful appetites have not satisfied his inner hunger. In his hour of anguish, he realizes that “the arguments of pessimism were powerless to console him, and the only possible cure for his misery was the impossible belief in a future life”. At the very last, utterly desolate, des Esseintes breaks into a faltering prayer to the “impossible” God.

Ah! but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me!—Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament no longer illumined by the beacon-fires of the ancient hope!

In this agonizing
cri de coeur
we hear the embryonic convert pining for the authentic tradition, the “ancient hope”, that is only dimly discerned. Leon Bloy, in a poignant review of
A Rebours
written within weeks of the novel’s publication, wrote that Huysmans’ supreme achievement was to demonstrate that man’s pleasures were finite, his needs infinite. The choice that Huysmans had placed before his readers was “whether to guzzle like the beasts of the field or to look upon the face of God”. A similar conclusion was drawn in another review by the aging romantic writer Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, who highlighted the suggestive parallel between
A Rebours
and Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du mal
.

Baudelaire, the satanic Baudelaire, who died a Christian, must surely be one of M. Huysmans’ favourite authors, for one can feel his presence, like a glowing fire, behind the finest pages M. Huysmans has written. Well, one day, I defied Baudelaire to begin
Les Fleurs du mal
again, or to go any further in his blasphemies. I might well offer the same challenge to the author of
A Rebours
. “After
Les Fleurs du mal
,” I told Baudelaire, “it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the Cross.” Baudelaire chose the foot of the Cross. But will the author of
A Rebours
make the same choice?

Twelve years after these words were published, Huysmans recalled Barbey’s review: “Strange! But that man was the only one who saw things clearly in my case. . . He wrote an article which contained these last prophetic words: ‘There only remains for you to commit suicide or become a Catholic.’ ” By this time Huysmans had indeed become a Catholic, and he would spend the last years of his life in a monastery. Wilde, whose novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray
was greatly influenced by
A Rebours
and contains the same desolate
cri de coeur
, responded approvingly when he learned that Huysmans had entered a monastery, declaring his own desire to do the same. Like Huysmans, Wilde came to Christ and the Church via desolation, and even today, a hundred years after his death, he remains a controversial figure. Indeed, such are the moral somersaults that society has performed in the century since his death that he is now vindicated for the very things for which he was vilified. Sadly, Wilde is as misunderstood today as he was in his own day, especially as the central theme of his late works has precious little to do with the role of “sexual liberator” that posterity has thrust upon him and everything to do with the Christian penitent seeking forgiveness. Wilde’s “heart of stone” was broken by the experience of the two-year prison sentence imposed in the wake of the libel trial, and his two late works,
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
and the posthumously published
De Profundis
, bear witness to his eleventh-hour conversion to Catholicism. Three weeks before his death, he told a
Daily Chronicle
correspondent that “much of my moral obliquity is due to the fact that my father would not allow me to become a Catholic. The artistic side of the Church and the fragrance of its teaching would have cured my degeneracies. I intend to be received before long.” He was received on his deathbed.