Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Poetics of Fancy [1 ed.] 9781443882422, 9781443877282

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Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Poetics of Fancy

Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Poetics of Fancy By

Kumiko Tanabe

Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Poetics of Fancy By Kumiko Tanabe This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Kumiko Tanabe All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7728-X ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7728-2

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................. vii List of Abbreviations................................................................................ ix Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xi Introduction ............................................................................................... 1 Chapter One .............................................................................................. 5 The Formation of Hopkins’s Poetics of Fancy 1.1. Introduction 1.2. Coleridge’s Definition of Fancy and Imagination 1.3. Ruskin’s Definition of Fancy and Imagination 1.4. Hopkins’s Introduction of Fancy into his Poetics 1.4.1. Hopkins’s Definition of Fancy and Imagination in ‘Poetic Diction’ 1.4.2. Fancy as ‘Diatonic Beauty’: ‘The Origin of Our Moral Ideas’ and ‘On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue’ 1.4.3. Hopkins’s Quest for the Origin of Words as Christ and Fancy 1.4.4. Toward ‘the New Realism’: ‘The Probable Future of Metaphysics’ 1.5. Conclusion Chapter Two ............................................................................................ 35 ‘The Language of Inspiration’ and ‘Parnassian’: The Two Kinds of Poetic Diction 2.1. Hopkins’s Definition of ‘the Language of Inspiration’ and ‘Parnassian’ 2.2. Hopkins’s Obsession with Beauty and Fancy: The Influence of the Parnassian Movement 2.2.1. Introduction 2.2.2. Hopkins’s Obsession with Beauty: ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ and ‘To what serves Mortal Beauty’ 2.2.3. ‘The Flight of Fancy’ as the Theme of the Parnassian School

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Contents

2.2.4. ‘The Flight of Fancy’ in ‘Il Mystico’ 2.2.5. The Imagination of the Poet in ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ 2.2.6. Hopkins’s Departure from Wordsworth and Keats 2.3. The Power of Fancy in the Disguised Heroines of Shakespeare 2.3.1. Hopkins’s Interest in Shakespeare’s Fancy 2.3.2. The Merchant of Venice 2.3.3. As You Like It 2.3.4. Twelfth Night 2.3.5. Conclusion 2.4. Between Truth and Untruth: Tennyson’s Fancy in ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ 2.5. Hopkins’s Experiments with ‘The Language of Inspiration’ Produced by Fancy 2.5.1. ‘Floris in Italy’ 2.5.2. ‘The Beginning of the End’ Chapter Three........................................................................................ 137 The Influence of Hopkins’s Conversion to Catholicism on his Poetics of Fancy 3.1. Introduction 3.2. Hopkins’s Conversion to Catholicism and his Belief in the Real Presence in the Eucharist 3.3. Fancy in the Gothic Revival 3.3.1. Fancy in Gothic Architecture: Coleridge, Ruskin and Hopkins 3.3.2. Hopkins’s Sympathy for ‘Oddness’ in the Fancy of William Butterfield 3.4. Hopkins’s Fancy and Inscape 3.4.1. Fancy as Revealing Inscape in Nature 3.4.2. Fancy as Revealing Inscape in Gothic Architecture 3.4.3. Fancy, Inscape and the ‘Haecceitas’ of Duns Scotus 3.4.4. Fancy, Inscape and ‘the Affective Will’ 3.4.5. Fancy, Inscape and Metalanguage 3.5. Fancy in the Baroque: Hopkins’s Entrance into the Society of Jesus and Baroque Elements in his Poetry 3.6. ‘Fancy, Come Faster’: The Abrupt Parallelism between Christ and Fancy in‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ 3.7. Fancy in Hopkins’s Sonnets Composed between 1877 and 1882 Conclusion ............................................................................................ 217 Bibliography ......................................................................................... 219 Index ..................................................................................................... 229

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. John Everett Millais, ‘Cherry Ripe’ (1879) (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) 2. John Everett Millais, ‘Bubbles’ (1886) (V & A Museum, London) 3. John Everett Millais, ‘My First Sermon’ (1863) (V & A Museum, London) 4. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, ‘La Fantasie’ (1866) (Ohara Museum of Art, Japan) 5. Gustave Moreau, ‘Hesiod and the Muses’ (1860) (Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris) 6. Gustave Moreau, ‘La Chimère’ (1867) (Matsuo Collection, Japan) 7. Gustave Moreau, ‘La Fantasie’ (1879) (Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris) 8. Gustave Moreau, ‘L’ Inspiration’ (1893) (The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago) 9. Edward Burne-Jones’s ‘Depth of the Sea’ (The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts) 10. Gustave Moreau, ‘La sirène et le poète’ (1895) (Musée Sainte-Croix, Poitier, France) 11. Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ (1862) (Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Oxford) 12. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Proserpine’ (1874) (Tate Britain, London) 13. Walter Howell Deverell, ‘Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV’ (1850) (Forbes Magazine Collection, New York) 14. William Holman Hunt, ‘Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus’ (1851) (Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham) 15. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1857) (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston) 16. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, ‘The Ecstasy of St. Teresa’ (1647-1652) (Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome) 17. Stefano Maderno, ‘The Statue of St. Cecilia’ (1600) (Sta Cecilia in Travestevere, Rome)

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List of Illustrations

*All the photographs in 3.3. and 3.4. were taken by Kumiko Tanabe at All Saints’ Margaret Street, London in July, 2008. The photographs in 3.7 were also taken by Kumiko Tanabe for the research under the theme of ‘On Hopkins’s Idea of Fancy’ with the research grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research in 2013 and 2014.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BL CN CW J

LI

LII

LIII

LNS MP PI

PII PIII

Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. W. G. T. Shedd. (Kyoto: Rinsen Book Co,. 1989) The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and completed by Graham Storey (London: Oxford University Press, 1959) The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. with notes and Introduction by Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1959) The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. with notes and an Introduction by Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1935, 2nd rev. impression 1955, repr. 1970) Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, including his correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed. with notes and an Introduction by Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1938; 2nd edn. rev. and enlarged, 1956) Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets (London: Chiswick Press, 1893) Modern Painters, 3 vols, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: Everyman’s Library, 1907) The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1970) Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. N. H. MacKenzie, Oxford English Texts series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)

x

S

SM SV TT

List of Abbreviations

The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. with an Introduction by Christopher Devlin (London: Oxford University Press, 1959) The Statesman’s Manual, in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972) The Stones of Venice, 2 vols., ed. E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904) Table Talk (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 14), ed. Carl Woodring (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people whose support forms the foundation of this book which is based on my doctoral thesis with the same title. First of all, I would like to thank Professor David Vallins, my tutor at Hiroshima University and an authority on S. T. Coleridge, for reading it through, correcting the mistakes in my use of English and giving me precious comments especially about Coleridge which I totally depend on. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Fr. Peter Milward SJ, professor emeritus of Sophia University and one of the most prominent scholars of Hopkins not only in Japan but also overseas as well as one of the founders of Hopkins Society in Japan, who first read my doctoral thesis. I also thank Professor Joseph J. Feeney SJ for sending me a valuable article on Hopkins’s idea of fancy written by Professor Robert Boyle, who first noticed the idea of fancy in his poetics, and had checked my article entitled ‘Fancy, Come Faster: Hopkins’s Poetics of Fancy as the Language of Inspiration’, which appeared in The Hopkins Quarterly (Vol. XL, Nos. 1-2 WINTER-SPRING 2013). I really appreciate the kind assistance of Professor Cathy Phillips at University of Cambridge, an authority on G. M. Hopkins, who took care of me and gave me precious data concerning Hopkins’s interest in paintings when I stayed at Downing College, University of Cambridge, as a visiting scholar in 2014. I also thank Professor Takashi Yoshinaka, Professor Akiyuki Jimura at Hiroshima University and Dr. Kazuyoshi Oishi at Tokyo University for checking my doctoral thesis. I must mention that my study on Hopkins’s poetics of Fancy was accomplished with a research grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research in 2013 and 2014. I mostly used it for my research in UK with the conclusion of my study of Hopkins’s fancy in my presentation at The Hopkins Conference in Denver in March, 2015. I also thank Professor Toma Ogata, one of the founders of Hopkins Society in Japan, although he cannot read this book now because he passed away in September 2014. I first encountered Hopkins’s poetry through his introduction in 1993, and he gave me the second edition of Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Robert Bridges (London: Humphrey Milford, 1933). Then I got the Master’s degree from Osaka University with a thesis entitled ‘Contrast and Unity in Hopkins’s

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Acknowledgements

Sonnets’ in 1995. Since then, I have been occupied with Hopkins’s idea of inscape, which connects opposite elements conspicuously in his metaphor. Around 2000, I found that Hopkins was influenced by Coleridge’s definition of imagination and fancy, and that the concept of fancy is crucial to his poetics, which can be identified with his concept of inscape. In this regard, I thank Professor Kenji Tamura, whose book on Coleridge made me realize that the underlying concept in Hopkins’s poetics is influenced by Coleridge’s definition of fancy. I thank Professor Isamu Saito, who taught me the works of Chaucer, Langland, Malory and Spenser, giving me an idea of juxtaposed structures evident in medieval literature, which are comparable to Hopkins’s idea of parallelism. Lastly but not the least, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Mr. David Knight, the archivist at Stonyhurst College, who kindly gave me great assistance, Fr. Joseph Munitiz, SJ at Campion Hall, University of Oxford, Fr. James Channing-Pearce SJ, Fr. Brian McClorry SJ and Sr. Anne Morris at St Beuno’s College, Mr. Henley Henley-Smith and Ms. Julia Hudson, the archivists at Highgate School, Fr. Adrian Howell SJ at St Francis Xavier Church in Liverpool, Mr. Daniel Joyce and Brother Joseph at Birmingham Oratory, Mr. Nigel Baldwin at All Saints Church in Selsley, and Dr George Mano who checked my English of an article which is a part of this book, as well as to many other people who encouraged me to work on this book. March, 2015 Kumiko Tanabe

INTRODUCTION

This book deals with the poetics of fancy in the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Fancy is a term paired with imagination in the well-known Romantic poetics, and fancy has usually been given a secondary and degraded position under imagination. My aim in this book is to shed new light on fancy which is described positively in Hopkins’s poetics and later becomes the essence of his idiosyncratic concept of ‘inscape’. Among the few critics who have mentioned Hopkins’s fancy, John E. Keating questions the use of the term in stanza 28 of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ because Hopkins later uses it with ‘pejorative connotations’ (Keating 94). Keating takes an example from Hopkins’s letter of 1881 to Richard Watson Dixon and writes: ‘Indeed, he himself accepts the pejorative connotations of the word, when…he criticizes a phrase in Browning’s Instans Tyrannus as coming “of frigid fancy with no imagination”’. In 1972, Robert Boyle countered the argument of Keating, and explored Hopkins’s use of the term ‘Fancy’ in ‘The Beginning of the End’ and ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. It is natural for critics concerned with Hopkins’s fancy to quote the term ‘fancy’ from these poems, and thus to interpret Hopkins’s use of the term in ways that suggest agreement with the viewpoint taken by this book as well. However, I doubt Boyle’s statement that Hopkins uses the term ‘Fancy’ in Wordsworth’s sense though he does not mention what Wordsworth means by fancy, and nor did Wordsworth himself clearly define the term. Nevertheless, Wordsworth greatly values the act of contemplation, which Hopkins thinks necessary for fancy. As I will mention in Chapter 2, in the early stage of his career as a poet he was influenced by Wordsworth as well as by Keats to some degree, but departed from them in the formation of his poetics of fancy. Hopkins thinks that the parts of Wordsworth’s poetic diction that come within the domain of fancy are not what he terms ‘the language of inspiration’ – that is, the highest kind of poetic diction – or the ideal embodiment of true fancy, but ‘Parnassian’ – a term by which he refers to a beautiful but lower, weary and practical kind of poetic diction without inspiration. Hopkins’s criticism of Wordsworth’s poetic diction can be observed in his essay ‘Poetic Diction’ as well as in his letter

2

Introduction

of 1864 concerning Wordsworth’s use of an ‘intolerable deal of” Parnassian’ (LIII 218). Hopkins criticizes Wordsworth’s fancy as ‘Parnassian’, while Coleridge also regards it as ‘recondite’. Furthermore, Hopkins changes his attitude toward fancy in his later years. This book will focus on Hopkins’s poetics of fancy before and after his conversion to Catholicism in 1866. He develops his concept of fancy in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1875) and his sonnets between 1877 and 1882. Although Hopkins does not neglect imagination, he sets fancy above it especially in the 1860s and 1870s. The poetics of fancy has traditionally been subordinated to that of imagination, but Jeffrey C. Robinson in Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism analyses ‘the poetic faculty of the Fancy and its emanation in the poetry and poetics of the Romantic Period from, roughly, 1770 to 1840’ (Unfettering Poetry, 1). His discussion of fancy associates it with the ‘periphery’ focused on in much recent literary criticism such as feminism or queer theory, in contrast to the central ideology of imagination. While Robinson does not comment on the idea of fancy in Coleridge in detail, much less in Ruskin and Hopkins, this book will independently highlight the development of their ideas in relation to Hopkins’s concepts of inscape and contemplation. The elements of fancy in post-Romantic poetry should receive more critical attention, as they were the signs of counterattack against the respect for subjective imagination in the mainstream of Romantic ideology. All the chapters in this book will examine various aspects of Hopkins’s poetics of fancy as the basis of his concept of inscape. Chapter 1 will discuss the influence of Coleridge and Ruskin on Hopkins’s poetics of fancy. Coleridge is known as the first literary critic who distinguished imagination from fancy, particularly in Biographia Literaria, while Ruskin also wrote many pages on the distinction between imagination and fancy in Modern Painters. Although Hopkins learned the theory of imagination and fancy from the works of these two literary critics, he stressed the importance of fancy and established his own poetics of fancy as producing the language of inspiration. This chapter also deals with some of the essays in which he formed his concept of fancy. Chapter 2 will focus on the concept of fancy in Hopkins’s predecessors, William Shakespeare and Alfred Lord Tennyson, who influenced him along with Coleridge and Ruskin, leading him to write the play Floris in Italy and the sonnet series ‘The Beginning of the End’ in order to experiment with the language of inspiration as an expression of

Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Poetics of Fancy

3

fancy. This chapter also deals with the aspects of nineteenth-century aestheticism which influenced his concept of fancy, and includes discussions of his early poems ‘Il Mystico’ and ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’. Both of these poems were written in 1862 before Hopkins had fully developed his concept of fancy, though he had been influenced by the aestheticism of the Parnassian Movement. The term ‘vision’ is related to Romantic imagination in contrast with ‘sight’ or objective perception which is connected with Hopkins’s idea of fancy. ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ reflects the influence of Walter Pater as his tutor at Oxford University, but the latter part of the poem expresses a reaction against this influence because the ideal of ‘flux’ in Pater’s thoughts is similar to Coleridge’s imagination. This chapter also refers to Hopkins’s departure from the fancy or poetic diction of Wordsworth and Keats. Chapter 3 will treat Hopkins’s conversion to Catholicism and Catholic art. He was deeply attracted to the concept of fancy just before his conversion to Catholicism. Hopkins was influenced by the religious and aesthetic tendencies at the time of his conversion, such as the Gothic Revival, the Oxford Movement and medievalism. This chapter will deal with his concept of inscape which is based on his idea of fancy, and with the influence of the two styles of Catholic art, gothic and baroque, on his poetics. After his conversion to Catholicism and seven years of poetic silence, Hopkins wrote ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and the sonnets between 1877 and 1882, where he successfully connected fancy with his concept of inscape as Christ incarnate.

CHAPTER ONE THE FORMATION OF HOPKINS’S POETICS OF FANCY

1.1. Introduction This chapter will focus on Hopkins’s definitions of fancy and imagination, which were influenced by but also diverged from those of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and John Ruskin (1819-1900), and then consider the formation of his poetics of fancy in the 1860s through his essays, journals and letters. Hopkins elaborated his poetics of fancy in ‘Poetic Diction’ and other essays of the 1860s through his consideration of the origin of beauty and words, and of Christ and the Incarnation in the Real Presence of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. He converted from the Anglican Church to the Roman Catholic Church in 1866 against his parents’ objection. What made him determine on conversion seems to be relevant to his resolution to create ‘the poetry of inspiration’ through what he termed ‘fancy’. Hopkins’s poetics of fancy is not only concerned with his creation of a new poetry but also with his belief in the Incarnation.

1.2. Coleridge’s Definition of Fancy and Imagination We find a lot of similarities between Hopkins’s poetics and Coleridge’s, which represents a dominant trend in Romanticism. Both poets are at the same time critics and philosophers, much influenced by Platonism. Hopkins studied the classics at Oxford University and was an ardent admirer of Plato and Heraclitus, whom Coleridge often used in his works. Both Hopkins and Coleridge rejected materialism but accepted idealism. Such a philosophical ideal seems to give similarity to their poetics. Hopkins’s journals also include descriptions of nature similar to those of Coleridge. Coleridge, Ruskin and Hopkins describe nature in detail, and their depictions of nature originate in their religious view of it as God’s creation. Some influence from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria can be observed in Hopkins’s journals and letters, though the expressions

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Chapter One

in his poetical works differ from those of Coleridge and other Romantic poets. While the high Romanticism of Coleridge holds subjectivity or the individual’s creative vision in high esteem, Hopkins avoids clinging to this and values fancy or objectivity more than imagination, though he inherits Romanticism to some degree by using the terms fancy and imagination. The key difference between the poetics of Hopkins and Coleridge lies in their treatment of fancy. Hopkins has some connections with Coleridge not only because he was influenced by the poetics of Coleridge himself but also because Coleridge’s grandchild, Ernest Hartley Coleridge (1846-1920), was one of his best friends at Highgate School. In a note of 1864, Hopkins mentions the name of John Duke Coleridge (1820-1894): ‘Butterfield had restored Ottery St. Mary church for John Duke Coleridge, and painted his drawingroom, whom he knows’ (J 59). William Butterfield (1814-1900) was an architect of the Gothic Revival, and his original and unusual patterns and style attracted Hopkins.1 The church of St. Mary was restored between 1849 and 1850, through the influence of Sir John Taylor Coleridge (nephew of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), and his eldest son, John Duke, was ‘certainly responsible for the choice of his life-long friend, Butterfield’ (J 329-30).2 * Before considering Coleridge’s definition of fancy, which he distinguishes from imagination, we should take heed of Longinus’s definitions of ‘phantasia’ and ‘imaginatio’, which influenced Coleridge’s definitions of ‘imagination’ and ‘fancy’. Coleridge’s discussions of imagination and fancy possibly originate in Longinus’s argument in On the Sublime. He uses the term phantasia to mean ‘visualization’:

1

Catherine Phillips in Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World mentions that Hopkins’s ‘favourite architect was William Butterfield, partly because he responded to the colour schemes used, but also because of the sensitivity to the religious significance of each part of the church evident in Butterfield’s designs’ (ix-x). Hopkins’s interest in Butterfield’s architecture will be discussed further in Chapter 3. 2 Sir John Taylor Coleridge was Justice of the Queen’s Bench and John Duke was later Lord Chief Justice and 1st Baron Coleridge. John Duke ‘extolled Butterfield’s work (carried out against the active opposition of the governors of the church) in a paper on the restoration read to the Exeter Diocesan Architectural Society Sept. 1851 (Transactions, iv. 189-217)’ (J 330).

The Formation of Hopkins’s Poetics of Fancy

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Weight, grandeur, and urgency in writing are very largely produced…by the use of ‘visualization’ (phantasia). …For the term phantasia is applied…to an idea which enters the mind from any source and engenders speech, but the word has now come to be used…of passages where, inspired by strong emotion, you seem to see what you describe and bring it vividly before the eyes of your audience. The phantasia means that the object of the poetical form of it is to enthrall, and that of the prose form to present things vividly, though both…aim at the emotional and the excited. (Longinus 215-17)

This statement describes phantasia as being related to the mental vision ‘inspired by strong emotion’ (passion) when one has a feeling of the sublime, which creates poetic diction. Coleridge divides phantasia into two different conceptions in Biographia Literaria: …fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being…two names with one meaning…. It is not, I own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek Phantasia, than the Latin Imaginatio…. The first and most important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under one and the same word…. (BL I 82-84)

Coleridge describes the confusion of the terms phantasia and imaginatio in English translation, which makes the distinction between fancy and imagination unclear (BL I 99). He defines phantasia that ‘is employed…to express the mental power of comprehension or the active function of the mind’ as imagination, and ‘imaginatio for the receptivity…of impressions, or for the passive perception’ as fancy, and distinguishes imagination into two types, ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’: The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency… It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; …it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (BL I 304)

Though Hopkins’s poetics is partly influenced by Coleridge’s definition of the primary imagination as the repetition of God’s creation and as unity in art, the essential difference between their views is that Hopkins respects

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Chapter One

objects that are ‘fixed’ and does not regard them as ‘dead’. Coleridge sets imagination and the human subject above fancy and the object: Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. (BL I 305)

Coleridge’s Table Talk further mentions the qualities of fancy and imagination: The Fancy brings together images which have no connection natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence… The imagination modifies images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one….             (TT 423)

Coleridge also refers to ‘the passive fancy and mechanical memory’: In association then consists the whole mechanism of their production of impressions, in the Aristotelian Psychology. It is the universal law of the passive fancy and mechanical memory; that which supplies to other faculties their objects, to all thought the elements of its materials. (BL I 103-104)

In The Self-Conscious Imagination, Kathleen Coburn picks up several passages from Coleridge’s notebooks which reveal that imagination is related to reason, the self-conscious self, and subjectivity: Thursday Night, X. 9 Septr 1830 It is a painful, a mortifying, but even therefore a necessary business, to make strict inquisition into the amiable tendencies of the comparatively best-natured Individuals, as soon as they are loose from the leading-strings of the Universal Reason…. Thus, take the yearning to be beloved, the craving for sympathy, in persons of active & constitutional Sensibility…ʊ and then watch the day-dreams, that have perhaps been scared & frowned or scoffed away by the awaking Conscience & the re-dawning tricky imaginations, by which the creaturely Will subjectively realizes for itself the sense of being beloved…. It is therefore Selfishness: that is, the Self is not only the starting-point from, but the Goal, toʊwhich the Soul is working during such momentsʊand consequently it is a Circuit of Ascent to a Zenith completing itself by a descent to the Nadirʊ [N 46 f 21] (The Self-Conscious Imagination, 13)

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Coburn comments that ‘Coleridge was well aware of the dangers of selfconcentration’, and ‘because he saw what he called “self-centering resolve” in Southey, and “self-vorticity” in Wordsworth, he believed in “genuine self-research”, to quote the first number of The Friend’ (The Self-Conscious Imagination, 14-15). Though their syntax is somewhat ambiguous, these notes by Coleridge seem also to reveal an unusual use of the word ‘imaginations’ to refer to something relatively misleading, and similar to ‘day-dreams’, whereby the individual may be distracted from the dictates of ‘Universal Reason’ (in Coleridge, an organ of divine illumination), even though ‘imagination’, as an aspect of the mind, is more often linked by Coleridge with Reason, rather than contrasted with it. ‘Secondary’ imagination, for Coleridge, indeed, is a source of the profoundest insights, whereby the intuitions of Reason are expressed in literature and philosophy, while ‘primary’ imagination underlies and shapes all our perceptions of a seemingly objective world. His use of the word ‘imaginations’ in this passage is therefore unusual, but reveals his concern about avoiding the forms of egotism or selfishness he found in some of his contemporaries. For Coleridge, the concept of imagination as such involves no idea of selfishness, though he places great emphasis on the importance of the individual, revelatory insights which the individual achieves and expresses through imagination. Hopkins, in contrast, finds such insights not to depend on the individual’s imagination, but rather on a passive immersion of the self in the forms of the perceptual world, through which ‘fancy’ can reveal the presence of Christ in the world through transubstantiation.

1.3. Ruskin’s Definition of Fancy and Imagination John Ruskin also influenced the formation of Hopkins’s poetics of fancy as well as Victorian arts in general including the Gothic Revival and medievalism. Hopkins’s journals show the influence of the Gothic Revival, in connection with Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. He expresses his interest in medievalism and left a lot of notes in the 1860s on the architects of the Gothic Revival, especially on Butterfield and the restorations of Catholic churches. Hopkins’s aesthetic concern is naturally directed to Ruskin, who champions medievalism, the restitution of Gothic architecture and the importance of the details in works of art. Although Hopkins does not completely agree with Ruskin and comments that ‘Ruskin often goes astray’ (LIII 204), he is certainly intrigued by Ruskin’s theories, as he mentions Modern Painters as one of the books to be read in his journal written in 1865 (J 56).

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Chapter One

* In volume II of Modern Painters, Ruskin attaches more significance to fancy than Coleridge does but still defends imagination over it: imagination is ‘the source of all that is great in the poetic arts’ and fancy is ‘merely decorative and entertaining’; however, they ‘have so much in common as to render strict definition of either difficult’ (MP II 152). For Ruskin, fancy responds to the outside of objects and sees them as parts, while imagination responds to the inside and grasps the whole (MP II 179). He adds a detailed explication of fancy in contrast to imagination: …the imagination being at the heart of things…is still, quiet, and brooding…; but the fancy staying at the outside of things…bounding merrily from point to point…but necessarily always settling…on a point only, never embracing the whole. And from these single points she can strike analogies and catch resemblances, which, so far as the point she looks at is concerned, are true, but would be false, if she could see through to the other side. This, however, she cares not to do; the point of contact is enough for her, and even if there be a gap left between the two things and they do not quite touch, she will spring from one to the other like an electric spark, and be seen brightest in her leaping. (MP II 182-3)

Ruskin here describes fancy’s restlessness and its ambiguity which can be both true and false. Fancy’s characteristic of uniting two things which ‘do not quite touch’ is compatible with Coleridge’s definition of fancy as that which ‘brings together images which have no connection’. Ruskin focuses on contemplation or theoria (a Greek word meaning ‘gaze’), which he connects with imagination. Though Ruskin admits the merit of contemplation detached from fancy, the third function of fancy, which he describes as ‘the highest’, is closely related to contemplation and evokes its nature as defined by Coleridge: The third function of Fancy already spoken of as subordinate to this of the Imagination, is the highest of which she is capable; like the Imagination, she beholds in the things submitted to her treatment things different from actual; but the suggestions…are not in their nature essential in the object contemplated; and the images resulting…may…change the current of contemplative feeling: for…we saw her dwelling upon external features…. (MP II 209)

This notion of fancy is similar to Coleridge’s definition of fancy that ‘brings together images which have no connection’. For Ruskin, the ‘regardant or contemplative action of Fancy is…different from…that

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mere…likeness-catching operation’ and it ‘loses sight of actuality’ and ‘passes gradually from mere vivid sight of reality, and witty suggestion of likeness, to…what is unreal’ (MP II 209-10).

1.4. Hopkins’s Introduction of Fancy into his Poetics 1.4.1. Hopkins’s Definition of Fancy and Imagination in ‘Poetic Diction’ In his undergraduate essay, ‘Poetic Diction’ (1865), Hopkins mentions Coleridge’s view on poetic diction and the ideas of imagination and fancy in order to refute Wordsworth’s opinion ‘that poetic diction scarcely differed…from that of prose’ (J 84). Hopkins apparently raises an objection to Wordsworth’s claim in Lyrical Ballads that the ‘most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose when prose is well written’ (Lyrical Ballads, 252). 3 Instead, Hopkins seems to approve of Coleridge’s view of poetic diction: ‘If the best prose and the best poetry use the same languageʊ(Coleridge defined poetry as the best thoughts in the best words)ʊwhy not use unfettered prose of the two? Because…of the beauty of verse’ (J 84). However, Coleridge actually defines prose and poetry as ‘prose = words in their best order;ʊpoetry = the best words in the best order’ (TT 56). Hopkins develops his own poetics from his misreading of Coleridge’s view of poetic diction: ‘…metre, rhythm, rhyme, and all the structure which is called verse both necessitate and engender a difference in diction and in thought…’ (J 84). Except for the emphasis on the ‘difference in diction and in thought’ of verse from prose, the statement resembles Coleridge’s argument in Biographia Literaria on the artificial arrangement of poetry as different from the nature of prose (BL II 11). Hopkins, however, underlines the necessity of structure and parallelism for the beauty of verse and places this at the centre of his poetics: But what the character of poetry is will be found best by looking at the structure of verse. The artificial part of poetry…reduces itself to the principle of parallelism. …And moreover parallelism in expression tends to beget or passes into parallelism of thought. This point reached we shall be able to see and account for the peculiarities of poetic diction. (J 84-85)

3

The quotation is from Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1965).

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Then, Hopkins traces the history of poetic structure and reduces the artificial part of poetry to the principle of parallelism, which is distinguished into two kinds: ‘marked parallelism’ which ‘is concerned with the structure of verseʊin rhythm, in alliteration, in assonance and in rhyme’ and ‘transitional or chromatic parallelism’ (J 84) – a concept explained in the passage I quote below. He apparently attaches more importance to marked parallelism as the first kind of parallelism than to transitional as the second kind because he gives extensive explanation of the former here. Hopkins states that only ‘the first kind, that of marked parallelism, is concerned with the structure of verse’ or the artificial or rhetorical elements of poetry, attaching much importance to a recurrence or parallelism in words and thought. Then, Hopkins develops his theory of poetic diction from ‘the best thoughts in the best words’ to parallelism in thought and expression (J 84-85). Finally, he connects these two kinds of parallelism with the terms ‘Fancy’ and ‘Imagination’: To the marked or abrupt kind of parallelism belong metaphor, simile, parable, and so on…. To the chromatic parallelism belong gradation, intensity, climax, tone, expression…, chiaroscuro, perhaps emphasis: while the faculties of Fancy and Imagination might range widely over both kinds, Fancy belonging more especially to the abrupt than to the transitional class. (J 85)

Hopkins’s use of the terms fancy and imagination here is certainly borrowed from his predecessors. In his definition, fancy is particularly relevant to marked and abrupt parallelism, which is a distinctive feature of his poetics. While Ruskin connects contemplation to imagination, Hopkins directly relates the faculty of contemplation to fancy in his notes on the history of Greek Philosophy (1868), and equates its fixity with the ‘abiding’ nature of contemplation, in contrast with the transitional nature of meditation and the discursive reason in imagination: The mind has two kinds of energy, a transitional kind, when one thought or sensation follows another…; (ii) an abiding kind…in which the mind is absorbed…, taken up by, dwells upon, enjoys, a single thought: we may call it contemplation, but it includes pleasures, supposing they…do not require a transition to another term of another kind, for contemplation in its absoluteness is impossible unless in a trance and it is enough for the mind to repeat the same energy on the same matter. (J 125-126)

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The contrast between two kinds of energy in the mind, an ‘abiding’ kind which he calls ‘contemplation’ and a transitional kind which corresponds to meditation, matches the aforementioned dichotomy between abrupt and transitional parallelisms or between fancy and imagination in ‘Poetic Diction’, written three years earlier. The association of meditation and discursive reason with imagination is based on Coleridge’s argument, and Lichtmann admits this as well. After she remarks that ‘Hopkins meant his poetry to be read…not only with the “transitional energy” of reasoning…but above all with the mind’s “abiding energy”…with contemplation’ (Lichtmann 131), she goes on to relate reason to imagination: ‘Where meditation involves the use of deductive reason, imagination, and “affections” of the soul, contemplation is regarded as the point of passage from self-effort to grace’ (Lichtmann 132). However, she does not mention that contemplation is associated with fancy, in contrast with meditation which involves imagination. Lichtmann unintentionally suggests Hopkins’s privileging of fancy as contemplation over imagination as meditation, and concludes that Hopkins’s ‘understanding of meditation as reasoning… reiterates the distinction…between transitional energy as reasoning and abiding energy as contemplation’ (Lichtmann 149). Ruskin’s definition of the third function of fancy as ‘the highest’, and closely related to contemplation, evokes its nature as defined by Hopkins and Coleridge, and is similar to Hopkins’s idea of abrupt parallelism, which in turn is supported by Coleridge’s definition of fancy as ‘bring[ing] together images which have no connection’. Though the dwelling (or abiding) nature of fancy described by Ruskin corresponds to Hopkins’s definition of contemplation, the difference between them is that Ruskin’s fancy is irrelevant to actuality or reality.

1.4.2. Fancy as ‘Diatonic Beauty’: ‘The Origin of Our Moral Ideas’ and ‘On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue’ In his journals and essays, Hopkins often tends to dig carefully into the idea of beauty. He begins with trivial matters, then inquires into the nature of art, and finally arrives at philosophical consideration. Before the establishment of his own poetics, Hopkins expresses his idea of beauty in his undergraduate essays of 1865, ‘The Origin of Our Moral Ideas’ and ‘On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue’. They epitomize his interest in the classics and Platonism as a student of the classics before his conversion to Catholicism in 1866 under the guidance of John Henry

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Newman. In ‘On the Origin of Our Moral Ideas’, submitted to his tutor Walter Pater, he refers to the idea of beauty: Beauty lies in the relation of the parts of a sensuous thing to each other, that is in a certain relation, it being absolute at one point and comparative in those nearing it or falling from it.… In sensuous things a certain proportion in the intervals makes up beauty…. (J 80-81)

Hopkins points out that what makes up beauty is the relation of the parts or the proportion in the intervals between the parts of the things. This suggests that he was highly influenced by the Platonic idea of beauty. Then, Hopkins discusses the necessity of recognizing unity in art: All thought is of course in a sense an effort a[t] unity. …In art it is essential to recognise and strive to realise…this unity in some shape or other. …In art we strive to realise not only unity, permanence of law, likeness, but also, with it, difference, variety, contrast: it is rhyme we like, not echo, and not unison but harmony. (J 83)

This statement suggests that an artist has the ability to recognize beauty in art and to compare and unite the parts. In ‘On the Origin of Beauty’, Hopkins pursues the origin of beauty using a Platonic form of dialogue between a character called John Hanbury and the Professor. Although the dialogue discusses the Platonic idea of beauty as consisting of symmetry, Hanbury suggests that the beauty of nature is produced by irregularity as well (J 89). Then, the example of an oak shows that, though it is asymmetrical and irregular, ‘the outline of its head is drawn by a long curve…of a parabola, which…is of almost mathematical correctness’ (J 89). Such irregularity in nature is related to the character of poetry. In the end, ‘beauty…is a mixture of regularity and irregularity’, and the example of a tree shows that ‘all the leaves on the tree’ have ‘precisely’ the ‘same irregularity’ (J 90). The irregularity of parts in the regularity of the whole is what Hopkins regards as individuality. Regularity is here defined as ‘likeness or agreement or consistency’ and irregularity as ‘difference or disagreement or change or variety’ (J 90). Beauty consists of likeness and difference, and the ‘beauty we find is from the comparison we make of the things with themselves, seeing their likeness and difference’ (J 90-91). Beautiful forms are neither too symmetrical nor asymmetrical, implying a Platonic beauty of the golden mean. The beauty and individuality of leaves lies in likeness with slight difference. In conclusion, universality lies in analogous forms. As the leaves of a tree as parts have diversity with resemblance and are united

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in a tree as the whole, ‘there is a relation between the parts of the thing to each other and again of the parts to the whole’ (J 97). Then, the discussion moves to structural unity in art: ‘the collective effect of a work of art is due to the effect of each part to the rest, in a play of each act to the rest, in a smaller poem each stanza to the rest…’ (J 99). The structural unity in a sonnet is emphasized here, and if one of fourteen lines were taken away, ‘that would be an important loss to the structural unity’ (J 100). Hopkins has high regard for regularity in poetry as well, and refers to the repetitive effect of sound in rhythm, meter and rhyme. Consequently, beauty is ‘considered as regularity or likeness tempered by irregularity or difference’. The aim of rhythm is to find difference in likeness, and ‘a meter is a whole of which each rhythmic foot is a part’ (J 101). Among other elements, rhyme is most highly valued in Hopkins’s poetics ‘as shewing the proportion of disagreement joined with agreement which the ear finds most pleasurable…’ (J 101). Rhymes resound to emphasize the sound and meaning in a stanza while each part is connected to compose the whole. Not only in poetry, but when we replace a stanza with a work of visual art, there is the point ‘where the principle of beauty is to be strongly marked’ and ‘the intervals at which a combination of regularity with disagreement so very pronounced as rhyme may be well asserted…’ (J 102). The term ‘intervals’ shows that there are connections among the parts and between the parts and the whole, based on mathematical ratios or the correspondence between relative structures in parallelism. Hopkins notes the type of relationship in which the parts are connected to compose the whole with comparative intervals based on the principle of beauty. The discussion of the distinction between fancy as abrupt parallelism and imagination as chromatic or transitional in ‘Poetic Diction’ can be linked to ‘On the Origin of Beauty’ which mentions ‘transitional and abrupt’ or ‘chromatic and diatonic beauty’: ‘Then of many divisions one might make of beautiful things, I shall consider that there is one…of transitional and abrupt. I think I would call it…a division into chromatic and diatonic beauty’ (J 104). The term ‘abrupt’ is transformed into a musical term, ‘diatonic’, and the discussion is similar to that in ‘Poetic Diction’. The dialogue leads to ‘these two kinds of comparison in poetry, comparison for likeness’ sake, to which belong metaphor, simile’ and ‘comparison for unlikeness’ sake, to which belong antithesis, contrast, and so on’ (J 106). Comparison is connected with parallelism as the structure

Chapter One

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of verse, which is distinguished from that of prose. Then, the discussion moves to parallelism as ‘diatonic beauty’ which includes ‘metaphor, simile, and antitheses’ while ‘chromatic beauty’ is reduced to ‘emphasis, expression…, tone, intensity, climax’ (J 106). Hopkins simply mentions ‘Parallelism’, which he previously called ‘abrupt parallelism’ in ‘Poetic Diction’. This means that his idea of parallelism may be changed so as to consider that parallelism is essentially diatonic and abrupt. For Hopkins, who attaches a high value to abrupt elements in poetry, fancy connects different things, and is related to the inspiration given to artists in the form of the Idea of Beauty. In this sense, he contrasts with Coleridge and other Romantic poets who regard imagination as a higher faculty than fancy. In the ‘abrupt kind of parallelism’ of fancy, there is an interval between things, and the proportion between them forms beauty, where we find a relation of correspondence. In ‘On the Origin of Beauty’, Hopkins repeatedly mentions the importance of comparison and a relation between things, which confirms his belief in analogy or the correspondence in relative structures. It is correspondences between the parts and also between the parts and the whole that compose works of art. As the two essays written in 1865, ‘Poetic Diction’ and ‘On the Origin of Beauty’, show, fancy is parallel to diatonic beauty while imagination is chromatic.

1.4.3. Hopkins’s Quest for the Origin of Words as Christ and Fancy Hopkins’s idea of beauty mentioned in ‘On the Origin of Beauty’ and other essays is reflected in his view of nature, art and words. The discussion of individuality in universality in ‘On the Origin of Beauty’ can be traced back to his study of word origins mentioned in his journals in 1863 and 1864. In the journal written in 1863, Hopkins writes down words that have meanings derived from the word ‘horn’: Horn. The various lights under which a horn may be looked at have given rise to a vast number of words in language. It may be regarded as a projection, a climax, a badge of strength, power or vigour, a tapering body, a spiral, a wavy object, a bow, a vessel to hold withal or to drink from, a smooth hard material not brittle, stony, metallic or wooden, something sprouting up…. …From the shape, kernel and granum, grain, corn. From the curve of a horn, …corona, crown. From the spiral crinis, meaning ringlets, locks. …;

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then for its sprouting up and growing, compare keren, cornu, …horn with grow, cresco, grandis, grass, great, groot. For its curving, curuvus is probably from the root horn in one of its forms. …crow…in English bear a striking resemblance to cornu…. So also…crane, heron, herne. Why these birds should derive their names from horn I cannot presume to say. …Corner is so called form its shape, indeed the Latin is cornu. Possibly…grin may mean to curve up the end of the mouth like horns.

(J 4) Hopkins’s consideration of the word ‘horn’ suggests that various words with diverse meanings are united in a single word. He looks for Christ as the Word in the origin of words that unites diversity. Hopkins pursues the essence of Christ by discovering how words are connected with each other, or their origin and the law that unites them. From 1863 to 1864, he further considers the origin of words and the relation between their meanings. In most of his journals at that time, Hopkins studies the root meanings of words that have similar sounds such as ‘[g]rind, gride, gird, grit, groat, greet…crush, crash’. He comments on other words as well: ‘Crook, crank, crick, cranky. Original meaning crooked, not straight or right, wrong, awry’ (J 5); ‘Drill, trill, thrill, nostril, nese-thirl (Wiclif etc.) Common idea piercing’ (J 10). These are just a few examples of root words which Hopkins connects to others with similar sounds and meanings. Hopkins thus tries to find common meanings in words with similar forms and sounds in order to reach their origin or the nature of Christ as the Word. He makes use of his study of words with similar sounds in his poems, which unite the parts to compose the whole and connect each word by virtue of parallelism. Hopkins’s interest in etymology is linked to his exploration of the beauty in nature, which he might have thought involves similar relations to those which words have to each other. Christ as the Word or the origin of words, who unites diversity, is also the origin of beauty, and that is why Hopkins’s poems are called ‘sacramental poetry’, being permeated by his inclination to the doctrine of the Real Presence and the Incarnation, which reveal Christ’s nature as the unity of opposites. * As James Milroy persuasively argues, Hopkins’s linguistic interest, and his interest in Christ as the origin of words, seems to have its roots in the etymological theory of Max Müller, the chief exponent of philology in the Victorian era: ‘There is direct evidence that Hopkins probably read Müller’s work after July 1864, by which time he had already made most of

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the etymological entries in his diary. Some time between 25 July and 7 September 1864, Hopkins makes a memo in his diary to read various works and authors, and includes Max Müller among them’ (Milroy 50). It is interesting to see Hopkins’s memo of the books to read mentioned above because the name of Müller appears among the works of Shakespeare, Gray’s poems, Vanity Fair, Henry Nelson Coleridge’s Greek Classic Poets, Gresley’s Short Treatise on the English Church and The Christians of St. Thomas (J 35-36). It shows his wide-ranging interest in his literary milieu. H. N. Coleridge was the nephew of S. T. Coleridge and an editor of the works of his uncle. Max Müller (1823-1900) ‘was already one of the chief living authorities on comparative philology as well as an outstanding Sanskrit scholar. At the time of this note (summer 1864), he held the Taylorian Chair of Modern European Languages in Oxford’ (J 317n). Among his works, Hopkins ‘certainly read The Science of Language’, which includes ‘two courses of public lectures given at the Royal Institution 1861 and 1863’ (J 317n). He was also interested in Müller’s pioneering work in comparative mythology. His father Manly Hopkins, a successful businessman, sent Müller a copy of his book Hawaii (1862), and ‘they corresponded about the chapter on language and later met in Oxford’ (J 317n). Müller called linguistics ‘a physical science’, which ‘deals with the works of God’ (Milroy 51-52). Milroy points out that Hopkins’s lifetime coincides with the heyday of English philology: ‘he was born shortly after the founding of the Philological Society and died just after the publication of the first volume of that Society’s great achievement ʊ the Oxford Dictionary’ (Milroy 49). Hopkins owed his observation of nature, and his perception of regularity in it discussed in ‘On the Origin of Beauty’, not only to Ruskin but also to the historical and comparative researches of nineteenth century philology, which made great strides in the 1850s and 1860s. Therefore, if Hopkins ‘had been born thirty years earlier, it is highly unlikely that he would have developed such interests’ (Milroy 35). Milroy also mentions that ‘the rise of philology can be clearly seen as related to the Romantic movement with all that implies with regard to interest in the past, interest in folk-culture, and the rise of nationalism’ (Milroy 40). Hopkins also shows his interest in medievalism ‘in various entries in the 1864 diary, where he records an intention to read the work of Tieck (a German Romantic medievalist) and the Schlegels (best known for their work on Sanskrit and Indian philosophy); he also makes various comments about pre-Raphaelitism and German and other Continental medievalists in art’ (Milroy 40).

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Before his conversion to Catholicism, Hopkins’s belief in Christ as the Word and the Incarnation was combined with the influence of nineteenth century philology as ‘a science of language’, as well as that of Romanticism. His view of words is parallel with his belief in the law of nature as the manifestation of the Incarnation, which is strengthened by Müller’s view of linguistics as a physical science. Therefore, these movements in science and literature contributed to and strengthened his ideal of poetic diction.

1.4.4. Toward ‘the New Realism’: ‘The Probable Future of Metaphysics’ When he was studying Greek philosophy under Pater, Hopkins submitted an essay, ‘The Probable Future of Metaphysics’ (1867) to him: ‘The Positivists foretell and many other people begin to fear, the end of all metaphysics is at hand’ (J 118). What he calls ‘metaphysics’ seems to be Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Catholicism and the arts in general including poetry, which embody these ideas. For Hopkins, who was influenced by the Oxford Movement and about to convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism under the guidance of Newman, the rise of positivistic science was a threat to his belief. Hopkins expands his discussion of diatonism as fancy and chromatism as imagination into a philosophic and scientific system in ‘The Probable Future of Metaphysics’. He takes Darwinism and Positivism as a philosophy of continuity or flux in opposition to Platonism and the metaphysics he believes in: …one sees that the ideas so rife now of a continuity without fixed points…of development in one chain of necessity, of species having no absolute types…all this is a philosophy of flux opposed to Platonism…. And this, or to speak more correctly Realism, is perhaps soon to return. …it [Realism] will challenge the prevalent philosophy of continuity of flux. …To the prevalent philosophy and science nature is a string all the differences in which are really chromatic…. The new Realism will maintain that in musical strings the roots of chords…are mathematically fixed and give a standard by which to fix all the notes of the appropriate scale…. (J 120)

Hopkins seeks a ‘new Realism’ connected to diatonism, as ‘in musical strings’ where ‘the roots of chords…are mathematically fixed’. The ‘new Realism’ or diatonism opposes a mathematical fixity to the prevalent

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philosophy or chromatism which can be seen in Darwinism, without ‘absolute types’. ‘Chromatism’ or Darwinism denies the analogy of being and the abrupt parallelism of fancy in the Great Chain of Being affirmed in Catholicism, and verifies that there is no absolute or fixed individual in the continuity of beings. In contrast, Hopkins maintains that, in his new Realism for the future of metaphysics, each individual has a fixed and absolute type. As he had already mentioned in ‘Poetic Diction’, Hopkins’s ideal is ‘the diatonic and abrupt parallelism between fixed individuals’. His aim for poetry is to find patterns and types common between species, and his emphasis changes from individuals and specifics to types (Bump 35). Hopkins’s respect for diatonism or fixed patterns and types of beings would later be the basis of his doctrine of ‘inscape’, and Miller regards it as showing ‘his feeling for pattern, and for the relation between patterns’ (The Disappearance of God, 279). In addition, he was interested in the analogy between the colours of the rainbow and the tones of the musical scale which had arisen during the seventeenth century when Isaac Newton correlated the seven colours of the rainbow with the seven tones of the diatonic scale in music, which was still a current topic of scientific study in the Victorian age (Zaniello 64). This seemed to confirm what Hopkins calls ‘the new Realism’ or ‘diatonism’ which identified Platonic forms of existence analogous to the ratio of the diatonic scale, and which contrasted with materialism or positivism which he calls ‘chromatism’. Miller points out that Hopkins was greatly inclined to diatonism, and ‘proposes the existence of inalterable types at definite intervals’. He also notes that diatonism ‘guarantees the stability of patterns and of the intervals between two patterns which chime like notes in a musical chord’ (The Disappearance of God, 279). Hopkins’s ‘new Realism’ thus saw the nature of being as closely corresponding to the relationship between the tones of the diatonic scale, rather than subscribing to chromatism, which proposes the continuity of species as stated by Darwin, and is also related to theories of the gradation of colours. Opposing chromatism or Darwinism which blurs the distinction between individuals, Hopkins is in favour of diatonism or Platonism which enables each individual with particularity to be in harmony with others as in the diatonic scale in music. It is the harmony of a common pattern in individuals which Hopkins calls ‘rhyme’, and his ideal is reflected in the concept of inscape as discovered by fancy. *

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The Victorian Age was, needless to say, the age of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and was also notable for a remarkable progress of science. New values overturned the ones traditionally followed and even threatened belief in the existence of God. However, there emerged a movement which sought to conserve the native British tradition against this scientific trend. In the middle of the nineteenth century in England, the Gothic Revival reached its peak, led by William Morris, Ruskin, the PreRaphaelites, A. W. N. Pugin and other architects, who endeavoured to protect the traditional Anglo-Saxon art and culture. At the same time, a religious movement later known as the Oxford Movement was led by John Henry Newman. It encouraged many students and scholars at Oxford University to convert from the Anglican Church (the mainstream religious denomination in England) to the Roman Catholic Church in order to restore the traditional religious views of England. These movements had the same purpose of giving new life to the culture and religion which formed the basis of England when people lived with faith in God, while Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite artists as his followers additionally pursued visual reality in detail. Hopkins was also influenced by these movements and strove to develop his own poetics from his artistic and religious viewpoints. In the Victorian Age, the progress of positivistic science was much more rapid than in the Romantic Period. Hopkins felt the need to respond to this rapid change in the field of poetry and art. Nevertheless, in the midnineteenth century, there still remained the romantic influence, which he especially found in Tennyson. Young Hopkins was impressed by Tennyson’s poetry, but he wrote in his letter to A. W. M. Baillie on Sep. 10, 1864: ‘Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson’ (LIII 215). The reason why Hopkins began to doubt Tennyson and was not impressed by his poetry any more was that he no longer felt any inspiration and fresh beauty in his poetic diction, which he regarded as falling into mannerism. He notes in his letter to Richard Watson Dixon on Dec. 1, 1881: Now since this time Tennyson and his school seem to me to have struck a mean or compromise between Keats and the medievalists on the one hand and Wordsworth and the Lake School on the other (Tennyson has some jarring notes of Byron in Lady Clare Vere de Vere, Locksley Hall and elsewhere). (LII 99)

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Hopkins here classifies contemporary poets into several schools mostly influenced by the Romantic poets. The Victorian poets must have found it difficult to escape from the powerful influence of Romanticism. To overcome this influence, Hopkins needed to speak of real nature and copy the visible parts of it in his poetry instead of staying in the world of imagination as the Romantic poets had done. By giving importance to the reality of objects, he follows the concept of fancy in Modern Painters. Ruskin states that fancy responds to the outside of objects and sees them as parts while the imagination responds to the inside and grasps the whole (MP II 179). In the age of Romanticism, Coleridge regards the imagination as a more important faculty of the mind than fancy, and notes the dangerous influence of the eye over the imagination and reason: Under that despotism of the eye…under this strong sensuous influence, we are restless because invisible things are not the objects of vision; and metaphysical systems, for the most part, become popular, not for their truth, but in proportion as they attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen, if only our visual organs were sufficiently powerful. (BLI 107)4

While Coleridge thinks that the ‘despotism of the eye’ hinders invisible poetic imagination and values the emotion of the heart over visible objects, the invention of photography made minute reality visible to the eye in the Victorian age. The Victorians followed the trend of thinking that visible reality is true, and valued the beauty of objects with its infinite variety, in relation to which fancy operates. In other words, this aesthetic of fancy reflects the paradigm of the age of science and technology, and its belief in visible objects. Ruskin criticizes the pathetic fallacy in Romanticism when he insists that artists must completely exclude emotions evoked by landscapes from their works, and encourages the reader to sketch nature in order to record its reality. Emotions are born from the conscious imagination which has its origin in the subject. In contrast, fancy is born from objectivity and the 4 The note made by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate explains this passage: ‘On the back flyer of his copy of Joannes Scotus Erigena De Divisione naturae (Oxford 1681), C remarks on “that Slavery to the Eye and visual Imagination (or Fancy), which must have a picture and mistakes surface for substance”’ (BL 107). ‘Fancy’ is described here as ‘visual Imagination’ and connected with the function of the eye, which deceives reason connected with imagination.

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unconscious, so that – in Hopkins’s view – the subject overcomes ego when it observes the object faithfully. The act of penetrating into nature as the object by the annihilation of ego leads to the adoration of God as the Creator of nature. It should be noted that there is a religious origin in Victorian landscape painting when we consider the act of sketching nature as the source of inspiration for Ruskin and Hopkins. Hopkins learned the significance of sketching nature and the concept of fancy from Ruskin. 5 Allison G. Sulloway remarks that the first volume of Modern Painters taught Hopkins how to see nature. He ‘had obediently been making exact studies according to the instructions in chapters such as “Of Truth of Vegetation” or “Of Truth of Clouds” in particular, and of Ruskin’s principles of nature’s infinite variety’ (Sulloway 68). She also points out ‘the two principles of accuracy and passion’: ‘Hopkins admits to being possessed of a “fury”, an “enthusiasm”, a “passion, so to speak” for what he sees, but he sees precisely. He does not merely see “leaves”; he sees two specific “shapes of growth in leaves”’ (Sulloway 68-69). The emphasis on ‘the three essential steps the artist must take in his work’ in the first volume of Modern Painters influenced Hopkins: ‘The first step is to see what is before him, and to see it quietly, and accurately, that is to say, ‘innocently’. The second step is to respond, and the third is to reproduce what he sees. The response…depends on what the artist honestly sees with his innocent eye…’ (Sulloway 69). Following Ruskin’s instruction, Hopkins tried to unite Romantic passion with the precision and accuracy of his eye. The compatibility of these antithetical elements gave Hopkins scientific observation of objects combined with poetic passion, which formed his concept of fancy, and is especially expressed in his idea of uniting ‘ideal truth’ and ‘material truth’: ‘Ideal truth is not a distortion of material truth, nor is it in conflict with material truth; it is drawn from material truth even while it transcends this truth of exact properties, because it is the “ideal form” of material truth…’ (Sulloway 69).

5

Murray Roston discusses the ways in which Hopkins’s paintings were influenced by Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites: ‘His reproduction of fauna and flora in meticulous detail, in the manner advocated by his mentor Ruskin, merely followed the procedure standard among Victorian amateurs. His taste in painters was no less conservative, the school of artists he most admired being the Pre-Raphaelites. In a letter written in 1863, he described Millais not only as the greatest English painter but as “one of the greatest of the world”, a view that he seems never to have altered’ (Roston 132).

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While Hopkins was absorbed in objective observation and sketching nature under the influence of Ruskin in the 1860s, he could not escape the Romantic influenceʊespecially that of Keats and Tennyson. Romantic poetics was strongly inspired by the idea of imagination valued by Coleridge and Wordsworth, who gave fancy a position inferior to imagination. However, in the seventeenth century – the age of Metaphysical poetry – fancy played an important role, which Coleridge also admits when he says that fancy was predominant in Shakespeare’s time: ‘Fancy, or the aggregative Power…the bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one point or more of Likeness 㸫 㸫 distinguished… / …common in the writers of Shakespeare’s time’ (Coleridge’s Notebooks, 99). In Chapter 1 of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge criticizes the elements of fancy and wit in poetry, and takes John Donne and Abraham Cowley as poets of fancy at that time due to their expressing ‘the most fantastic out-of-the way thoughts’ (BL I 23). There is, he writes: One great distinction…between, even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English; in the latter, the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. (BL I 23)

Both fancy and wit are characteristic of Metaphysical poetry in the seventeenth century, and Coleridge apparently opposes them while championing imagination in Romantic poetry. Hopkins suggests the connection between fancy, sight and memory: ‘ʊThy image on her wing / Before my FANCY’s eye shall MEMORY bring’ (BL I 22). In Chapter 4, Coleridge contrasts Milton with Cowley: Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the term imagination; while the other would be contra-distinguished as fancy. (BL I 84)

Hopkins in the 1860s was intrigued by fancy as a means of getting over the overwhelming influence of Romanticism, though later in 1879 he tried to acquire ‘a more Miltonic plainness and severity than I have anywhere else’ (LI 87). Although he tried to be more imaginative, as well as selfconscious or reasonable, than in his early sonnets, Hopkins as a poet seems

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to deplore the loss of inspiration as the source of fancy in ‘To R. B.’ (1889), his last sonnet: I want the one rapture of an inspiration. O then if in my lagging lines you miss The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation, My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.

In his treatment of reason, Coleridge regards imagination as ‘that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organizing…the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors’ (CW I 436). While imagination is connected with Reason – a term which Coleridge, like Kant, uses to refer to the source of our intuitions of the infinite and divine – fancy is contrasted with it. In contrast, Hopkins is attracted to fancy’s emphasis on perceptual reality, which seems to be relevant to his conversion to Catholicism in 1866. Catholicism values visibility as a means of proving the reality of Christ in the transubstantiation shown in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, and the bread and wine as his body and blood are present in the eye of the congregation. For Hopkins, nature, art and science should be present through perception to show and praise the reality of Christ. For him, the proof that Christ can be seen in the world through the Incarnation, though God is ‘not visible, audible, or tangible’, is that he ‘can exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and attributes’ (BL I 121). In this way, Hopkins prefers sensible objects as manifestations of Christ, and he needed to create his poetics to prove his beliefʊthe poetics of fancy concerning the object, sight and inspiration which goes beyond the power of imagination to express the transcendent idea of God. The duality of Christ as God and man and the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar encourage his concept of fancy which can be seen in his metaphors. Hopkins bases his poetic diction on parallelism from a comparative viewpoint. What he aims at is the abrupt parallelism with which different objects can be united without transition. The abrupt parallelism is remarkable in Hopkins’s experiments in metaphor in his poems written in the 1860s. His metaphor unites things that seem to have no relevance, and unveils a surprising similarity between them. Hopkins’s experiments in

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poetic diction are akin to those in the seventeenth century, and Metaphysical poets are famous for their conceits involving contrasts and comparisons between two different things. Their conceits involving surprise are concerned with fancy, not imagination. * In ‘The Probable Future of Metaphysics’, Hopkins speaks of ‘the view which will make future metaphysics a disappointment though not an illusion’: Psychology and physiology may withdraw to themselves everything that is special and detailed in the action of the mind and metaphysics will be left as the mode by which we give the bare statement of there being another side than the phenomenal when we regard thingsʊand nothing more than this, mere abstraction so far as any attempt at apprehending it goes, and always to be pushed back to the outermost skyline of science. (J 118)

Hopkins here foretells that psychology and physiology are the sciences to be developed in the future. He also minutely notes dream-images, sight and visual nerves in his journal in 1869: The dream-images also appear to have little or no projection, to be flat like pictures, and often one seems to be holding one’s eyes close to themʊI mean even while dreaming. This probably due to a difference still felt between images brought by ordinary use of function of sight and those seen as these are ‘between our eyelids and our eyes’ʊthough this is not all, for we also see the colours, brothy motes and figures, and at all events the positive darkness, made by the shut eyelids by the ordinary use of the function of sight, but these images are brought upon that dark field…by a reverse action of the visual nerves but it seems reasonable to suppose impressions of sight belong to the organ of sightʊand once lodged there are stalled by the mind like other images: only you cannot make them at will when awake, for the very effort and advertence would be destructive to them, since the eye in its sane waking office kens only impressions brought from without, that is to say either from beyond the body or from the body itself produced upon the dark field of the eyelids. Nevertheless I have seen in favourable moments the images brought from within lying there like others: if I am not mistaken they are coarser and simpler and something like the spectra made by bright things looked hard at. It is not in reality harder for the mind to have ken at the same time of what the eye sees and also of the belonging images of our thoughts without ever or almost ever confounding them than it is for it to multiply the pictures brought by the two eyes into one without ever or almost ever separating them (March 23, ’70). (J 194)

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Hopkins refers to the ‘dream-images’ created by the eyelids and eyes. In the field of psychology, Coleridge, Ruskin and Hopkins investigated the role of the unconscious in the creation of art by developing the concepts of fancy and imagination before C. G. Jung united Neo-Platonic metaphysics, alchemy and myths with empirical psychoanalysis. On the other hand, physiology in the nineteenth century brought a new scientific epistemology to the study of eyes and visual processes. It discovered that knowledge is conditioned by physical and anatomical structure and bodily functions, especially those of the eyes.6 Thus, sight was newly studied by physiology, and the epistemology of man’s thought related to sight was scientifically discussed. Through such a scientific shift combined with a new recognition of sight, Hopkins connected the unconscious with sight as a means to the development of his new metaphysics and the unification of poetry and science. Coleridge also studied psychology, physiology and dreams. Coburn mentions that Coleridge ‘thought the study of psychology should not be separated from physiology, “depriving the former” he said “of all root and objective truth”, and conversely that physiology should not be “a mere enumeration of facts and phenomena without copula or living form”’(The Self Conscious Imagination, 15). Coburn then refers to the ‘locus classicus for Coleridge on sleep and dreaming, his poem The Pains of Sleep’, which gives his reflections on this topic ‘a rich background in those ‘infernal dreams’ he recorded in the notebooks’ (The Self Conscious Imagination, 16). She quotes Coleridge’s reference to one particularly frightening and unpleasant dream of September 1803: ‘26 April1826. Wednesday Night. …Dreams…ʊIt is strongly impressed on my mind, that I shall imitate my dear Father in this as faithfully as Nature imitates or repeats him in me so many other points – viz. that I shall die in sleep … [Folio N f 42v]’ (The Self Conscious Imagination, 17). Then Coburn comments that in ‘the next entry he recorded that in his dreams he is always imagining all the wild chambers, Ruins, Prisons, Bridewells, to be in Hell’ (The Self Conscious Imagination, 17). Dreams are produced purely in the mind, so Coleridge suggests that they are the product of imagination as well, in contrast to Hopkins’s fancy, which directly reflects or responds to perceptual reality. Coleridge relates ‘Dreams’ to ‘Vision[s]’ in a non-physical sense:

6

Cf. Jonathan Crary, ‘Modernizing Vision’ in Vision and Visuality, 36.

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Chapter One …Now I purpose to note down the characteristics of Dreams, especially my infernal Dreams….The first point of course is the Vision itselfʊthat we see without eyes and hear without Ears. [Folio N f 43] (The Self Conscious Imagination, 18)

Coleridge describes dream-visions as distinctly different from direct responses to sense-impressions, and thus as related to his Romantic idea of imagination. Therefore, such visions should be distinguished from the sense of sight, which is the focus of Hopkins’s fancy. Coburn further points out that Coleridge ‘observed the presence of sexuality in dreams’ and he ‘anticipated Freud in being aware…that the dream carries on the work of the day, and that the conscious daytime life is affected by the activity of the unconscious and sub-conscious mind of the dreamer’. Hopkins also created the terms ‘overthought’ and ‘underthought’ which can be interpreted as referring to the conscious and the unconscious. In Coleridge’s theory, imagination and fancy both involve a unification of the conscious and the unconscious, or the subject and the object, but in the case of fancy, perception and the unconscious tend to dominate subjectivity, rather than being transformed by it. In their discussions of psychology, physiology, dreams, the conscious and the unconscious, and imagination and fancy, Coleridge and Hopkins are forerunners of Freud and Jung, who studied dreams from a scientific viewpoint. * Hopkins thought that the end of all metaphysics was at hand if it could not catch up with the trend of the age, in which epistemology was being reorganized. Therefore, he needed to prove that it could contribute to science, and emphasized the importance of its doing so in ‘The Probable Future of Metaphysics’: ‘It will always be possible to shew how science is atomic, not to be grasped and held together, ‘scopeless,’ without metaphysics: this alone gives meaning to laws and sequences and causes and developments’ (J 118). After Hopkins states that the ‘tide we may foresee will always run and turn between idealism and materialism’ (J 118), he asks: ‘what form will metaphysics take in the immediate future?’ (J 119) Then, he reflects on the history of philosophy and classifies it into ‘three great seasons’: ‘the first that of Plato, Aristotle, and the Schoolmen, the second that of Bacon and physical science and Positivism, the third that of Hegel and the philosophy of development in time’ (J 119). Hopkins hopes that he can prevent metaphysics and Platonism from fading out by means of the new Realism encouraged by his poetics of fancy.

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* Hopkins does not regard fancy as producing mere airy thoughts. Instead, he uses the concept of fancy positively for the future of metaphysics. In his view, it is certain that the creative activity of fancy is born from an accidental spark. Hopkins calls it an inspiration, and thinks that the origin of great poetry and art is the inspiration of a genius. However, inspiration does not come from the subject, but from the minute observation of objects. In this respect, positivism based on the observation of objects unexpectedly corresponds to the origin of fancy. Reason may be overturned by a new epistemology when another new discovery is found. Therefore, it is possible that the products of fancy will become real and true. With the observation and contemplation of objects, fancy leads the beholder to the unconscious, and away from the conscious. As C. G. Jung puts it, each individual is connected with every other in the collective unconscious.7 The unconscious associates the subject with the object, and is the realm where human beings encounter gods in myths. When it dominates one’s mind, one will go mad or sleepwalk between reality and dreams. Hopkins thinks, however, that this state of mind or contemplation is necessary for a genius to get inspiration in the creation of poetry and art. He suggests that the abiding energy in contemplation transcends reason (or what Coleridge calls ‘understanding’), and that inspiration can be attained in a trance. Fancy in poetic diction comes from inspiration and the abrupt parallelism between irrelevant things and images given by it must provide the reader with fresh surprise which will never fade. In his letter to Robert Bridges on September 1, 1885, Hopkins wrote: ‘I shall shortly have some sonnets to send you, five or more. Four of these came like inspirations unbidden and against my will’ (LI 221). Inspiration comes to poets whether they wish it or not, and this sensation is similar to the ideal creation in surrealism that would prevail later than Hopkins’s time. It was natural for artistic and poetic geniuses to think that inspiration is given them from an Other, the muses or God, beyond subjectivity. Surrealists believe that an Other emerges from within and forces them to write automatically. In other words, they affirm irrationality, in which the influence of an Other or objects creates artistic works. Objects emerge one after another which have no relevance to what the artists themselves imagine. When they surrender themselves to ‘super-real’ objects, they may 7

Cf. C. G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature.

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be susceptible to a mental disorder. Such a state of mind in contemplation and inspiration is close to a trance as Hopkins observes. What, then, is the difference between super-reality and mere reality? As mentioned before, the invention of photography led to visual realism and detailed descriptions of the variety of parts in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Hopkins also sketched nature realistically, but his poetics went further. In brief, not mere depictions of visible nature, but the essence of an individual object obtained by sight, which makes the self plunge into the object and get finally caught up in it and the unconscious, is exactly the new Realism that Hopkins aimed at. The figure of nature thus obtained seems irrational but not haphazard because it is the essence hinted at by inspiration from the object when an artist observes it minutely. Hopkins calls the essence ‘inscape’, which is the pattern connected to others in the unconscious. The reason why Hopkins as a Victorian is often regarded as the predecessor of modernism is that he had this surrealistic idea in advance of his timeʊthe idea which proposes the surrender of self to the unconscious and objects. * Hopkins’s new Realism is characterized by the abrupt parallelism of fancy, which irrationally unites different things in such figurative devices as metaphor, alliteration and rhyme. The irrational nature of fancy is due to the unconscious and objects, into which self plunges itself through observation and contemplation. Fancy embodies or incarnates an idea into figures of speech – that is, as the variety of parts in the rhetoric of poetry – while imagination transforms individual details into a whole through its deliberate organizing and re-forming power. In imagination, the mind can free itself from and take power over nature, or shape its own world, rather than being shaped by it. In Coleridge, the creative and transcendent vision must come from within, rather than outside, and imagination is essentially evolutionary in its effects. Because Hopkins noticed limitations in Romantic imagination, he did not choose to follow contemporary poets influenced by Romanticism. He foresaw the new Realism for the coming age of science with respect to objectivity and irrationality in the creation of art. It is also worthy of notice that Hopkins regarded Darwinism and imagination both as belonging to the philosophy of transitional parallelism or continuity, and thought that he had to get ahead of them with his poetics, which reflects his view of nature influenced by Catholicism. Hopkins advocates his poetics of fancy, where

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each individual in its own type is united with every other by abrupt parallelism with fixed distance beyond continuity and reason. The superrealism which Hopkins calls the new Realism is based on fancy’s abrupt parallelism between things. His poetic diction, especially his metaphor, begets images that are united by the abrupt parallelism of fancy, which preserves their distinctiveness in a fixed style. These fresh images yoked by his fancy are never fused into transitional imagination as described by Coleridge and Ruskin.

1.5. Conclusion As Platonists, both Coleridge and Hopkins believe in the unity between opposites, or between the subject and the object, which underlies and is expressed by imagination and fancy in the creation of art. The significant difference between imagination and fancy seems to lie in the ways in which the subject and the object are united. In other words, the subject dominates the object in imagination, while the object dominates the subject in fancy. That is why imagination is subject-oriented and fancy object-oriented. The ideal act of creativity requires both imagination and fancy, and the difference between the poetics of Coleridge and Hopkins lies in the fact that Coleridge relied more on imagination and Hopkins on fancy. Ruskin acted as the bridge between them, but as a Victorian he admitted more merits in fancy than Coleridge did. The idiosyncrasy of Hopkins’s poetics of fancy is due to his belief in Christ as the unity between opposites or between the objects which fancy links in parallelisms. According to his theory, Christ acts in the works of fancy as abrupt parallelism which operates in individuals while God acts in the works of imagination to produce transitional parallelisms which transform each individual into the whole. There is also a difference in religious beliefs between Coleridge and Hopkins because Coleridge was Protestant and Hopkins was Catholic. As a Victorian Catholic who lived in the age of science, Hopkins believed in visibility, while Coleridge criticized an excessive reliance on vision as leading to ‘the despotism of the eye’. Hopkins’s poetics of fancy is based on Christ as the origin of words and beauty. As Miller comments, ‘Hopkins emphasizes the doctrine of the Real Presence as the core of Catholicism’, which repeats the Incarnation, and he ‘broadens his theory of the Incarnation until he comes to see all things as created in Christ’ (The Disappearance of God, 312). While Hopkins’s poetics of fancy depends on Christ who unites both spiritual and material worlds and manifests

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himself in individual objects which can be perceptible and visualized in nature, art and transubstantiation, Coleridge’s poetics of imagination relies on God who cannot be seen nor perceived by the senses. OED defines the term ‘imagination’ other than the definition by Coleridge: 1. The action of imagining, or forming a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses (cf. sense 3); the result of this process, a mental image or idea (often with implication that the conception does not correspond to the reality of things…. Obs.

This definition also shows that imagination denies senses while Hopkins’s fancy is based on sense perception especially sight. Coleridge rejects or disdains appearances and to a large extent the material world in general, in pursuit of a spiritual and intellectual enlightenment which, in his view, can have little to do with the physical or perceptual world. This is in large part due to Coleridge’s increasing emphasis throughout his career on a Protestant or Calvinist viewpoint, which regards the physical world, or nature, as incapable of providing us with any knowledge of the spiritual world. In his early poetry Coleridge is sometimes more pantheistic, and occasionally describes nature as halfrevealing or hinting at the imperceptible divinity behind it. But in his later writings he increasingly rejects this view, and even in some of his early writings he describes it as dangerously unorthodox.8 Coleridge’s theory of imagination seems to reflect this distinction between the spiritual and the material. Perception in itself can tell us nothing, he argues, and distracts us from both spiritual and intellectual truth. Only a mind enlightened, or enlivened, by individual reflection can rise above the view of objects as mere lifeless entities and perceive a spiritual meaning underlying nature. This seems to be where the closest parallel between Coleridge and Hopkins emerges: Hopkins sees fancy, inspired by faith, as capable of perceiving or revealing the spiritual meaning of nature, while Coleridge sees imagination as capable of revealing a ‘whole’ which transcends and underlies the otherwise lifeless objects of our perception. However, Hopkins’s faith differs in important ways from that of Coleridge, and particularly in regarding individual 8

See, for example, ‘The Eolian Harp’, especially ll. 34-64, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), I: 100-102; also S.T. Coleridge, Lectures 1818-19 On the History of Philosophy, ed. J.R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 2000), 1: 415.

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objects in nature as the manifestation of Christ’s incarnation. In his idea of imagination, Coleridge argues that we should not be passive recipients of impressions from the physical world, and that we should re-shape our perceptions of things in order to take power over them, and infuse them with our own spiritual and intellectual vision. This is the key to Coleridge’s theory of imagination and his disdain for mere perception, as well as for the arbitrary rearrangement of impressions which he calls ‘fancy’ – a rearrangement, that is, uninspired by the re-shaping power of imagination which can liberate us from passive perception. In contrast, the abrupt parallelism of fancy is necessary for Hopkins to confirm his belief in the analogy of beings in nature and art, and to overcome Darwinism, which was a threat to Catholicism. He thinks that the insights of fancy can be gained by observing objects through the senses until he sees the abrupt parallelism between them. Even if they are different in their appearances or surfaces, the true poet can find the connection between them from their intrinsic qualities with the aid of his fancy. Hopkins learned to see things objectively and scientifically through Ruskin, and in order to be objective, he had to discard his subjective view or imagination which transforms their true nature. Thus, Hopkins’s fancy was formed by his belief in Christ and by the age of science. His attitude of discarding the self in order to see the abrupt parallelisms discovered by fancy or the true nature of objects is connected with the asceticism, imitating Christ’s passion, which he explored just before his conversion to Catholicism.

CHAPTER TWO ‘THE LANGUAGE OF INSPIRATION’ AND ‘PARNASSIAN’: THE TWO KINDS OF POETIC DICTION

2.1. Hopkins’s Definition of ‘the Language of Inspiration’ and ‘Parnassian’ In his note of 1864, Hopkins classifies poetic language into three kinds (J 38). The lowest is that of ‘poetasters’; then comes ‘Parnassian’, which can ‘only be used by real poets’ and can ‘be written without inspiration[.] Good instance in Enoch Arden’s island’; the third and ‘highest, poetry proper’ is the ‘language of inspiration’. He distinguishes ‘Parnassian’ without inspiration from ‘the language of inspiration’: …On first reading a strange poet his merest Parnassian seems inspired. This is because then first we perceive genius. But when we have read more of him and are accustomed to the genius we shall see distinctly the inspirations and much that would have struck us with great pleasure at first loses much of its charm and becomes Parnassian. (J 38)

Hopkins discusses the difference even further in his letter to Baillie of 10 September, 1864. Before he begins his explanation about the three kinds of poetic language, he comments on his disbelief in Tennyson, because he has found that the poetic diction of the poet he admired is not the language of inspiration but Parnassian: ‘I have begun to doubt Tennyson. …I have been thinking about this on and off since I read Enoch Arden and the other new poems….’ (LIII 215). Hopkins’s disbelief in Tennyson’s poetic diction makes him explore his own language of inspiration as the product of fancy, following the example of Shakespeare. In his letter to Baillie, Hopkins classifies the language of verse into three kinds: ‘the language of inspiration’, ‘Parnassian’ and ‘merely the language of verse distinct from that of prose’. Hopkins’s explanation

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focuses chiefly on the first two kinds, and he takes ‘the language of inspiration’ as the ‘first and highest’: I think then the language of verse may be divided into three kinds. The first and highest is poetry proper, the language of inspiration. …I mean by it a mood of great, abnormal…mental acuteness…according as the thoughts which arise in it seem generated by a stress and action of the brain, or to strike into it unasked. …the poetry of inspiration can only be written in this mood of mind…by poets themselves. (LIII 216)

The mood that bears the language of inspiration coincides with ‘a trance’, where contemplation is possible (J 126), and inspiration comes from without as the word ‘unasked’ intimates. The idea is ultimately associated with Hopkins’s ideal of fancy as having a quality of selflessness which he connects with Christ’s sacrifice because contemplation is the act of the subject overwhelmed by the object. Hopkins applies the term ‘Parnassian’ independently and flexibly to his idea of the language of verse. He contrasts Parnassian with the language of inspiration: …The second kind I call Parnassian. It can only be spoken by poets, but it is not in the highest sense poetry. It does not require the mood of mind in which the poetry of inspiration is written. It is spoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind, not, as in the other case, when the inspiration which is the gift of genius, raises him above himself. …Great poets…have each their own dialect…of Parnassian…and they can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort of inspiration. In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism…  (LIII 216-217)

It is better to consult OED for the definition of ‘Parnassian’ in order to consider its origin in relation to the cultural context of the nineteenth century: A. adj. 1.a. Of or belonging to Parnassus; of or poetic.

belonging to poetry,

b. spec. Epithet of a school of French poetry of the latter half of the 19th c., from the title Parnasse contemporain of a collection of their poems published in 1866; also transf. 1902 E. GOSSE in Daily Chron. 20 May 3/I This school was that of the Parnassian poets, who ruled French verse from about 1850 to 1890.

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1902 in Encycl. Brit. XXVIII. 256/I The name of ‘Parnassian School’ has been given to a group of poets who belonged to the generation succeeding that of the Rossettis and Wm. Morris. B. sb. 1.a. A poet: cf. A. I. b. spec. A French poet of the Parnassian school. c. spec. In the writings of G. M. Hopkins, a second kind of poetry, which can only be written by poets but which is not the language of inspiration. 1864 G. M. HOPKINS Let. 10 Sept. (1956) 216 Parnassian then is that language which genius speaks as fitted to its exaltation, and place among other genius, but does not sing...in its flights. Great men, poets I mean, have each their own dialect as it were of Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at last,ʊthis is the point to be marked, ʊthey can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort of inspiration. Ibid. 217 In Parnassian pieces you feel that if you were the poet you could have gone on as he has done, you see yourself doing it, only with the difference that if you actually try to find you cannot write his Parnassian. Ibid. 218, I believe that when a poet palls on us it is because of his Parnassian.

In addition, the signification of ‘Parnassus’ is ‘a mountain in central Greece, anciently sacred to Apollo and the Muses; hence used allusively in reference to literature, esp. poetry’ (OED ‘Parnassus’). Although Hopkins’s definition of the term in 1864 preceded the publication of Parnasse contemporain (1866, 1871 & 1876) by several French poets, it catches the artistic trend of the time, when the artists rejected what they perceived as Romantic sentimentalism and pursued the autonomy of beauty in order to create the world of fancy in art. The ‘Parnassiens’, headed by C. Leconte de Lisle and T. Gautier, published La Revue fantasiste in 1861, and their ideal was the contemplation of objective forms or figures in detail; in this they can be understood as a bridge between Romantic and modernist poetry. The Parnassians stressed restraint, objectivity, technical perfection, and precise description as a reaction against the emotionalism and verbal excess they found in

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Romanticism. Their influence led to experimentation in meters and verse forms and the revival of the sonnet.1 The Parnassian Movement is also relevant to ‘a group of British poets and artists who belonged to the generation succeeding that of the Rossettis and William Morris’, that is, the Pre-Raphaelites. In his journal written in 1864, Hopkins describes Alexander Pope and ‘all artificial schools’ as ‘great writers of Parnassian’, and continues: ‘This is the real meaning of an artificial poet’ (J 38). In general, Victorian poets prefer neo-classical rhetoric to Romanticism, and Hopkins regards this trend as ‘Parnassian’. The general concept of the Parnassian Movement provided Hopkins with the basis of his poetics of fancy as adhering to rhetorical detail, but he was not entirely sympathetic with it. He admits that Parnassian verse ‘can only be spoken by poets, but it is not in the highest sense poetry. It does not require the mood of mind in which the poetry of inspiration is written’ (LIII 216). The difference between the poetry of inspiration and Parnassian is that the latter ‘is spoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind, not, as in the other case, when the inspiration which is the gift of genius, raises him above himself’. Hopkins deems Parnassian to be a kind of rhetoric and superficial fancy within the level of the poet’s conscious ego. In contrast, the poetry of inspiration refers to Hopkins’s fancy, or that which transcends the ego so as to accept the reality and essence of the object. His poetics aiming at the poetry of inspiration presumes that a poet as an artist should be given inspiration and genius, which convert his self into his poetry or works of art as objects. Hopkins uses the word ‘Parnassus’ in his journal in 1864: It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither. Yet from time to time more men go up and either perish in its gullies fluttering excelsior flags or else come down again with full folios and blank countenances. Yet the old fallacy keeps its ground. Every age has its false alarms. (J 23)

‘Parnassus’ here signifies ‘poetry’, and ‘flying thither’ implies the act of fancy which unites opposite or different images by transcending the everyday significations of words in metaphorical or figurative expressions, or the condition of poetic genius when inspiration is given to a poet. Hopkins defines ‘Parnassian’ as the poetic diction with which poets 1

Cf. ‘Parnassian’ in Britannica Concise Encyclopedia (2011).

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display a ‘royal road to poetry’ or rhetoric without inspiration, contrary to the language of inspiration created by the poet’s faculty of fancy or rhetoric with metaphorical meanings. Herbert Read quotes these lines from Hopkins’s journal, and refers to his contemporaries: The most obvious false alarm…was Swinburne; but he was of the number who perish in the gullies of Parnassus. More false, because more seemingfair, are those who come down again with full folios and blank countenance, and among these can be numbered some of Hopkins’s closest friends. (Form in Modern Poetry, 51)

Hopkins clearly distinguishes Parnassian which ‘does not sing in its flights’ (LIII 216) from the language of inspiration which sings in its flights with the genius of a poet in his or her unconscious state of mind. In his later years, he writes in his letter to Bridges on 1 February, 1885: ‘Either in fact he [Swinburne] does not see nature at all or else he overlays the landscape with such phantasmata, secondary images, and what not of a delirium-tremendous imagination that the result is a kind of bloody broth…’ (LI 202). He criticizes Swinburne’s imagination as expressed in his rhetoric, which does not originate from fancy in its flight to catch the reality of the object. In his letter of 27 February, 1879, Hopkins admits that Tennyson is ‘a glorious poet’ (LII 25). However, he finds that Tennyson’s poetic diction is Parnassian or mere rhetoric, while Shakespeare’s is the language of inspiration or fancy with metaphorical elaboration, which engenders surprise and fresh beauty and cannot be imitated by any other poets: But I must not go farther without giving you instances of Parnassian. I shall take one from Tennyson, and from Enoch Arden…the description of Enoch’s tropical island. …Now it is a mark of Parnassian that one could conceive oneself writing it if one were the poet. Do not say that if you were Shakespeare you can imagine yourself writing Hamlet, because that is just what I think you cannot conceive. In a fine piece of inspiration every beauty takes you as it were by surprise…; …every fresh beauty could not in any way be predicted or accounted for by what one has already read. But in Parnassian pieces you feel that if you were the poet you could have gone on as he has done, you see yourself doing it, only with the difference that if you actually try to find you cannot write his Parnassian. (LIII 217)

Then, Hopkins points out defects of Parnassian in Tennyson’s Enoch Arden in contrast to ‘a fine piece of inspiration’:

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Chapter Two The glades being ‘like ways to Heaven’ is…a new thought, it is an inspiration. Not so the next line, that is pure Parnassian. If you examine it the words are choice and the description is beautiful and unexceptionable, but it does not touch you. The next is more Parnassian still. In the next lines I think the picture of the convolvuluses does touch; but only the picture: the words are Parnassian. (LIII 217-218)

Hopkins closely examines the poetic diction of Tennyson, and takes the examples of his Parnassian to explain its defects in contrast to the language of inspiration as the product of fancy which touches the reader. Therefore, he endeavours to incorporate Shakespeare’s language of inspiration with freshness into his poetics: …I believe that when a poet palls on us it is because of Parnassian. …it is notorious that Shakespear does not pall, and this is because he uses…so little Parnassian. He does use some, but little. Now judging from my own experience I should say no author palls so much as Wordsworth; this is because he writes such an ‘intolerable deal of’ Parnassian. If with a critical eye and in a critical appreciative mood you read a poem by an unknown author or an anonymous poem by a known, but not at once recognizable, author, and he is a real poet, then you will pronounce him so at once, and the poem will seem truly inspired, though afterwards, when you know the author, you will be able to distinguish his inspiration from his Parnassian, and will perhaps think the very piece which struck you so much at first mere Parnassian. You know well how deadened, as it were, the critical faculties become at times, when all good poetry alike loses its clear ring and its charm; while in other moods they are so enlivened that things that have long lost their freshness strike you with their original definiteness and piquant beauty. …There is a higher sort of Parnassian which I call Castalian, or it may be thought the lowest kind of inspiration. Beautiful poems may be written wholly in it. Its peculiarity is that though you can hardly conceive yourself having written in it, if in the poet’s place, yet it is too characteristic of the poet…to be quite inspiration. E.g. Yet despair / Touches me not, though pensive as a bird / Whose vernal coverts winter has laid bare. This is from Wordsworth, beautiful, but rather too essentially Wordsworthian, too persistently his way of looking at things. (LIII 218-220)

Along with Tennyson, Hopkins here takes the instances of Parnassian in Wordsworth. Though Hopkins admits the beauty in Parnassian, he regards it as ‘the language of poetry draping prose thought, a fine rhetoric, such as there is a good deal of in Wordsworth’s blank verse (LI 159). This comment is relevant to his criticism of Wordsworth’s poetic diction in his

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essay ‘Poetic Diction’. Parnassian is a kind of ‘a fine rhetoric’ or superficial fancy as suggested by the figures of speech, but it lacks inspiration, surprise and the freshness that a word used to have in its original sense, while the language of inspiration produced by true fancy in Hopkins’s sense must have them. He distinguishes inspiration without ego from mannerism or egotistical poetic diction in Parnassian. Hopkins finds true fancy with metaphorical meanings in Shakespeare’s language of inspiration or ‘the current language heightened’ which ‘is Shakespeare’s and Milton’s practice and the want of it will be fatal to Tennyson’s Idylls and plays, to Swinburne, and perhaps to Morris’ (LI 89). Coleridge also notes that fancy was ‘common in the writers of Shakespeare’s time’: ‘Fancy or the aggregative Power…the bringing together Images dissimilar in the main by some one point or more of Likeness’ (CN 99). He criticizes Wordsworth’s fancy as well in Chapter 22 of Biographia Literaria: In the play of Fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. (BL II 151)

The fault of Wordsworth’s fancy which Coleridge points out lies in his intentionally contrived or ‘egotistical’ rhetorical expressions which present no surprise to the reader, and they can be categorized in Hopkins’s terms as Parnassian’.2 Parnassian is a kind of fancy, rhetoric or poetic diction that is not free from the individual’s transformation, rather than discovery, of what is intrinsic in nature – while Hopkins’s fancy as the language of inspiration derives its insights from the reality of objects. As Coleridge suggests, the merit of the fancy which operates in poetic diction lies in the spontaneity or inspiration derived from the unconscious given to true poets. For Hopkins, a genius in poetic diction with the language of inspiration has the ability to express in his words the true essence of an object which he or she sees and relate it to other objects in a surprising way. This is a kind of revelation which suggests to poets the hidden connections or the analogies between beings in nature. Hopkins contrives to reveal them in his language of inspiration derived from fancy through abrupt parallelism, especially in metaphors. In the end, the point 2

The word ‘egotistical’ is used in Keats’s criticism of Wordsworth poetry, though not in Coleridge’s. See Keats, Letters [etc.].

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that Hopkins stresses in his criticism of Parnassian in Tennyson and Wordsworth is that the poetic diction with superficial meanings in their poems has no surprise or depth. The mannerisms of their styles pall on the reader, while a genius can create the language of inspiration through fancy when he completely plunges himself into the objects he observes and contemplates. In his letter to Baillie on 14 January, 1883, Hopkins expresses the abrupt parallelism of fancy in his terms ‘overthought’ and ‘underthought’, which he describes as the ‘two strains of thought running together and like counterpointed’ [sic], and which indicate the ideas in his metaphors and are suggestive of the paradigmatic relation between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the text: I will not say always, it is not likelyʊtwo strains of thought running together and like counterpointed; the overthought that which everybody, editors, see…which might…be…paraphrased…; the other, the underthought, conveyed chiefly in the choice of metaphors…used and often only half realized by the poet himself, not necessarily having any connection with the subject in hand but usually having a connection and suggested by some circumstance of the scene or of the story. (LIII 252)

In this sense, the overthought as the superficial meaning is Parnassian while the underthought is the in-depth meaning which only the language of inspiration can connote. Northrop Frye suggests that there is a distinction between contemplation as an abiding kind of energy and a transitional kind which matches the distinction between the underthought as the language of inspiration and the overthought as Parnassian (Frye 326).

2.2. Hopkins’s Obsession with Beauty and Fancy: The Influence of the Parnassian Movement 2.2.1. Introduction There are many detailed descriptions and sketches of the beauty of nature and man in Hopkins’s poems, essays and journals. They reveal his endeavour to grasp the beauty of the object with sight and then to find its origin. In terms of their idea of beauty, the French Parnassian poets and the aesthetes in Britain influenced by the Parnassian Movement in the nineteenth century aimed at the creation of a world of fancy in art, valued the senses more than thought and emotions, aimed to transcend morality,

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and insisted on the pursuit of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’. In literature, C. Baudelaire, T. Gautier, T. Banville, Leconte de Lisle and other French Parnassian poets, and Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde regarded beauty as the only aim in art and the highest of all values. Hopkins’s obsession with beauty was partially influenced by Pater as his tutor at Oxford University. The Parnassian Movement greatly affected Victorian aestheticism, and the term ‘Parnassian’ is significant in the development of Hopkins’s poetics of fancy, which reflects his obsession with the beauty relevant to Parnassian aestheticism. In mid-Victorian England, the adventurous artists of the rising generation were dissatisfied with the artistic conventions of the day. They rejected the subject matter of the popular art of the day with its sentimentality and obsession with anecdotal narrative. They had one clear and revolutionary aim: the desire to escape the ugliness and growing materialism of the age and formulate entirely new ideals of beauty. The term ‘l’art pour l’art’ was first coined by Gautier and was taken up by the writers and artists of the Aesthetic Movement as the perfect expression of their belief in the absolute necessity of art.3 The Aesthetes aimed to write ‘pure’ poetry; to paint pictures that did not tell stories, preach sermons, or rely upon sentimental cliché; and dared to create sculptures that simply offered visual delight. In the 1860s, this novel ‘Cult of Beauty’ united Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his younger PreRaphaelite followers, including William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. At the International Exhibition of 1862, there was progressive design of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, founded by Morris, with the artists Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and an architect, Phillip Webb, as designers. The followers of the Aesthetic Movement including the poets and painters were united in opposition to prevalent conventions in art and design (Calloway, ‘Beginnings: The Search for a New Beauty’, Art for Art’s Sake, 241-242). Hopkins’s interest in design and pattern was surely influenced by the Aesthetic Movement in his time, and he later developed his poetics of fancy in the 1860s into that of ‘inscape’ in the 1870s, when he equated design and pattern as expressions of inscape, which reflects fancy in parallelism of the parts of an object or design. Hopkins’s interest in the Pre-Raphaelites and his obsession with the beauty in fine art and his attention to ‘the simplifying and then amplifying or emphasising of parts’ and realism can be observed in extensive 3

Stephen Calloway, ‘Beginnings: The Search for a New Beauty’ (Art for Art’s Sake: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, Tokyo: Asahi Press, 2014), 241.

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instances in his journals and letters as he mentions the names of the prominent and related figures in the Brotherhood together with masters of art in the Renaissance and baroque periods. The following quotations from his writings are some of the instances: ...D. G. Rossetti. The Preraphaelite brotherhood. Consisting of D.G.R., Millais, Holman Hunt, Woolner, and three others. One of these three went out to Australia. (1864. J 30) F. Madox Brown

(1864. J 32)

Burne Jones’ Cupid conveying Psyche and Le Chant d’Amour.㸫’Je sais un chant d’amour triste ou gai tour à tour’. (1866. J 142) June 17. Fine. To lunch with Pater, then to Mr. Solomon’s studio and the Academy. …Millais 㸫 Sisters (his three daughters), Stella, Rosalind and Celia, Pilgrims to St. Paul’s…and Souvenir of Velasquez which I did not hear; Leighton Ariadne, Actae, Jonathan’s token to David, …Walker’s Vagrants; …Watts’ Clytie, a remarkable bust, and paintings too㸫Esau and Jacob, the Wife of Pygmalion…. (1868. J 167) Sept. 18㸫At the Kensington Museum. Bold mastery rudeness of the blue twelvemonth service of plates or plates by Luca Della Robbia..㸫Bronze gilt doors for Cathedral of Florence by?㸫The cartoons and a full sized chalk drawing from the Transfiguration…of Michael Angelo’s painting at Vatican: the might, with which I was more deeply struck than ever before, though this was in the dark side courts and I could not see well, seems to come not merely from simplifying and then amplifying or emphasising of parts but from a masterly realism in the simplification, both these things: there is the simplifying and strong emphasising of anatomy in Rubens, the emphasising and great simplifying in Raphael for instance, and on the other hand the realism in Velasquez, but here force came together from both sides…㸫Watts: Two sisters and a couple of Italian peasants with a yoke of oxen㸫instress of expression in the faces, as in other characteristic English work, Burne Jones’…. (1873. J 237) Millais㸫Scotch Firs: ‘The silence that is in the lonely woods’…true bold realism…the master shewn in the slouch and toss-up of the firtree-head in near background, in the tufts of fir-needles, and in everything. So too Winter Fuel: ‘Bare ruined choirs’ etc…most masterly Turner-like outline of craggy hill, siver-streaked with birchtrees, which fielded in an equally masterly rust-coloured young oak, with strong curl and seizure in the dead

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leaves. …There was a beautiful spray-off of the dead oak-scrolls against dark trees behind with flowing blue smoke above. … North-West Passage 㸫 Characteristic ruffing㸫in grandfather’s coat, girl’s skirts and rouches, in chart and the creased flag. … Young Nathaniel de Rothschild㸫Must be the very life̿hair (just bridled with a gilded curl or two), lips, eyes… crimson scarf, stride, embroidered bright-leather shoes carried to a knifeblade edge and a little rising… Daydream 㸫 a Millais-Gainsborough most striking crossbreed: colouring raw, blue handkerchief not any stuff in particular but Reynolds’ emphatic drapery, background (bushes and tank) either unfinished or mere mud. Intense expression of face, expression of character, not mood, true inscape 㸫 I think it could hardly be exceeded. …Great art in…fingers resting on or against one another very true and original (see on Holman Hunt’s Shadow of Death much the same thing) (1874. J 244-245)

Among the Pre-Raphaelites, Hopkins particularly notes the works of Sir John Everett Millais (1829-96; President of the Royal Academy 1896). Hopkins ‘knew and admired Millais early; was familiar with his blackand-white work in Once a Week from 1859 (J 386n). Once a Week was ‘one of the best of the illustrated journals of the 1860s’, and his father Manley Hopkins ‘contributed to it articles and poems’. 4 At the Royal Academy in 1863, Hopkins saw Millais’s paintings ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘The Wolf’s Den’, and ‘My first Sermon’, and called him ‘the greatest English painter, one of the greatest of the world’ (LIII 201). 5 The statement quoted above reveals Hopkins’s interest in Millais’s realistic depiction of nature, which is related to his observation, by means of fancy, of objects he found in nature. Millais also dealt with literary themes, and honed his delicacy of touch and acuity in his book and periodical illustrations, producing masterly and topical work for authors such as Tennyson, Trollope and Collins. His paintings were also called ‘fancy pictures’: the portraits, often of children, which were eagerly consumed in the form of prints in popular journals based on literary works, such as ‘Cherry Ripe’ (1879) [Fig. 1] and in their use in advertising as ‘Bubbles’ (1886) [Fig. 2]. These pictures portray children not solely as doll-like bearers of romantic ideals of innocence but as conveyors of a deep sense

4

Catherine Phillips, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), v. 5 Cf. J 387n.

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of inner life. 6 Many of the portraits he painted are what are known as ‘fancy-’ or subject-portraits (Rosenfeld, ‘Introduction’, Millais: A Sketch, 84). Among them are the portraits of his daughter Effie as seen in ‘My First Sermon’ (1863) [Fig.3], which Hopkins saw as quoted above. Hopkins seems to have felt special sympathy in Millais concerning fancy both in his realistic depictions of nature and in his portraits of children, and praised him as ‘a dramatist, with the true artist’s instinct of leaving his story unfinished, though usually suggested; …his line and composition were almost inspired; his black-and-white has never been excelled’ (Rosenfeld, ‘Introduction’, Millais: A Sketch, 75). Millais was an exceptional figure among the Pre-Raphaelites because he was against aestheticism which influenced later works of other Pre- Raphaelites especially Rossetti, as well as against Romanticism which other members tended to accept. Hopkins’s tutor at Oxford University, Walter Pater, published Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873. The book contained highly subjective meditations on Italian painters with other subjects including early French poetry and the life of the eighteenth-century German connoisseur Winckelmann. According to Pater, beauty should not merely be observed and classified, but experienced fully and appreciated through the senses. The privileging of sensitivity to the work of art and insistence upon intensity of aesthetic response lies at the heart of his philosophy. It led him towards the dangerous position of arguing that in art and in life experience is all and that considerations of morality and the dictates of convention should play no part in constraining that experience. Such ‘passionate attitudes’, as Pater termed them, caused him to be denounced from the pulpit by the Bishop of Oxford and called to account by the University authorities (Calloway, ‘Beginnings: The Search for a New Beauty’, Art for Art’s Sake, 243). Although Hopkins was influenced by the aestheticism of the PreRaphaelites and Pater when he was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford in the 1860s, he later disagreed with Pater’s subjective meditations, which he inherited from the Romantic emphasis on imagination, and with his belief in the theory of Heraclitean flux, where

6

Jason Rosenfeld, ‘Introduction’, Millais: A Sketch by Marion Harry Spielmann, preceded by ‘Thoughts on our Art of Today’ by John Everett Millais (London: Pallas Athene, 2007), 15.

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‘All things are in motion: nothing at rest’.7 This belief is associated with Pater’s impressionism derived from his aestheticism, which has some connections with Coleridge’s theory of imagination, which Hopkins terms ‘transitional’ in contrast to fancy’s ‘abrupt parallelism’.

Fig. 1 7

The epigraph given by Pater written in Greek in ‘Conclusion’ in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (The Renaissance, 150) was translated by Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, as ‘Heraclitus says “All things are in motion and nothing at rest”. In Plato and Platonism (1893) Pater translated this as “All things give way: nothing remaineth”’ (The Renaissance, 174n).

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2.2.2. Hopkins’s Obsession with Beauty: ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ and ‘To what serves Mortal Beauty’ The words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ can be seen in 29 poetic pieces by Hopkins. It is evident from this fact that he was no less obsessed with beauty than contemporary artists from the Parnassian school. In ‘The Leaden and the Golden Echo’ (1882), Hopkins writes on the beauty of man and frequently repeats the word ‘beauty’: HOW to keepʊis there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, …from vanishing away? (‘The Leaden Echo’, 1-2)

Man’s beauty is frail and no one can keep earthly beauty. It cannot conquer time, so the Leaden Echo moans and repeats the word ‘despair’: Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep, Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of gray?ʊ No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none, Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair, Do what you may do, what, do what you may, And wisdom is early to despair: Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done To keep at bay Age and age’s evils, hoar hair, Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay; So be beginning, be beginning to despair. O there’s none; no no no there’s none: Be beginning to despair, to despair, Despair, despair, despair, despair. (‘The Leaden Echo’, 3-16)8

The repetition of the words ‘beauty’ and ‘despair’ and alliterations stress the meaning with the sound effect of echoes. Then, the voice of the Golden Echo intrudes in rhyme with ‘despair’: ‘Spare! / There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!), / Only not within seeing of the sun’ (‘The Golden Echo’, 1-3). ‘Gold’ is a symbol of resurrection. The Golden Echo tells man that there is a key to keeping beauty: ‘Yes I cán tell such a key, I dó know such a place’ (‘The Golden Echo’, 6). Finally it tells him to give 8

All the lines from Hopkins’s poems are quoted from PI.

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frail earthly beauty back to God: ‘…beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death / Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver’ (‘The Golden Echo’, 18-19). ‘To what serves Mortal Beauty?’ (1885), also written in the later years of Hopkins as a poet-priest, further explores the topic of beauty: ‘To what serves mortal beauty | ʊdangerous; does dancing bloodʊthe O-seal-thatso | feature, flung prouder form / Than Purcell tune lets tread to?’ (1-3). The beginning of this poem implies the danger of indulgence in human beauty as well as the viewpoint that beauty warms men’s ‘wits to the things that are’ (3-4). In his letter to Robert Bridges (22 October 1879), Hopkins comments: I think then no one can admire beauty of the body more than I do, and it is of course a comfort to find beauty in a friend or a friend in beauty. But this kind of beauty is dangerous. Then comes the beauty of the mind, such as genius, and this is greater than the beauty of the body and not to call dangerous. And more beautiful than the beauty of the mind is beauty of character, the ‘handsome heart’. For though even bodily beauty…is from the soul, in the sense, as we Aristotelian Catholic say, that the soul is the form of the body, yet the soul may have no other beauty…than that which it expresses in the symmetry of the body…. (LI 95)

Beauty is also related to love: ‘To man, that needs would worship | block or barren stone, / Our law says: Love what are | love’s worthiest, were all known; / World’s loveliestʊmen’s selves. Self | flashes off frame and face’ (9-11). This poem points out the danger of indulgence in superficial appearances of beauty, but at the same time it suggests that ‘men’s selves’ shining out of their bodies and faces are the most beautiful among all the beautiful creatures. The word ‘lovely’ suggests the relation between beauty and love because it has the meaning of ‘beautiful’. When the subject is fascinated by the beauty of a man or the other, he or she is incorporated into the other by passion. In the end, there is a question of how we can meet human beauty: ‘What do then? how meet beauty? | Merely meet it; own, / Home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; | then leave, let that alone. / Yea, wish that though, wish all, | God’s better, grace’ (12-14). The poet shows that beauty cannot be found by a conscious effort, but it is unintentionally given from heaven. Therefore, he wishes for God’s perfect beauty as grace. Inspiration gives him the eye to see beauty unconsciously, and the unconscious ultimately signifies God.

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Hopkins considers the idea of beauty and shows it in his poetry with his minute observation of the beauty of man and nature as the manifestation of God’s perfect beauty. While his obsession with beauty is influenced by aestheticism, his minute observation of beauty provides the evidence that it belongs to God in his later years as a poet. It is noteworthy, however, that his aesthetics have some similarities to Parnassian aesthetics while he is in the process of developing his poetics of fancy in the early part of his poetic career. The rise of the Parnassian Movement and the relationship between beauty and fancy as its ideal have some similarities with Hopkins’s idea of fancy in the 1860s, when he contrived to develop his own poetics. Therefore, there is an interesting irony in that the ‘decadent’ Victorian aesthetics which celebrates sensation rather than imagination was transformed by Hopkins into an intuitive discovery of divine beauty through earthly beauty – one of the ways in which he formed a new aesthetics more suited to deal with the age of science. However, what Hopkins was concerned with was not only the pursuit of beauty in art and poetry like the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson, but also his own poetic diction as the language of inspiration, reflecting his poetics of fancy after his conversion to Catholicism.

2.2.3. ‘The Flight of Fancy’ as the Theme of the Parnassian School As for the possible source of the term ‘Parnassian’, it may be worth considering the Parnassian Movement in nineteenth century France, which is related to the formation of Hopkins’s idea of fancy and Parnassian in response to the contrasting movement of Romanticism. The French poets of the Parnassian school published La Revue Fantaisiste in 1861, and expressed their antipathy to what they saw as excessive passion in Romanticism. They valued objectivity, fancy and contemplation. The aestheticism of the Parnassian school influenced not only poets but also contemporary painters such as Gustave Moreau and Pierre-Cecile Puvis de Chavannes, who painted ‘the flight of fancy’ because they attached importance to fancy or fantasy. In ‘La Fantaisie’ (Fantasy) (1866) of Chavannes, Pegasus with open wings is depicted as the representation of fancy or fantasy [Fig. 4]. In the woods with the background possibly of Parnassus, a naked nymph is trying to catch Pegasus, while a child is making a wreath nearby. This painting shows the painter’s skill in creating a pastoral atmosphere leading us to ancient myth, and attracted attention in the salon of 1866 in Paris.

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Gautier called this work of Chavannes ‘blue country’ and commented that the colour was in fashion in the previous century (Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XX. 12 June 1866, 737). Chavannes himself was fond of this work, and depicted the same motif again in a smaller version about twenty years later between 1886 and 1887 for the retrospective exhibition in the gallery of Durand-Ruel, Paris in 1887 (Arcadia by the Shore: the Mythic World of Puvis de Chavannes, Shimane: Shimane Art Museum, 2014, 62, 70). Hopkins and Chavannes may have responded to the same ways of thinking concerning metaphysics. Chavannes was influenced by his contemporary Félix Ravaisson whose philosophy was based on the idea that ‘art is a figured metaphysics and metaphysics is a reflection upon art’, or in other words that the philosopher and the artist share the same intuition.9 Although Hopkins did not mention the name of Ravaisson, he seems to have included the poet and the artist in the category of metaphysics in his essay ‘The Probable Future of Metaphysics’ when he wrote it in 1867, a year later than the production of ‘La Fantaisie’, and this idea of metaphysics seems to have been prevalent not only in France but also in England with the influence of the Parnassian Movement. In the 1860s, Gautier as a prominent figure in the Parnassian Movement with his theory of ‘art’s for art’s sake’ anticipated the emergence of a previously unknown painter, Chavannes, who echoed his own aspirations. Gautier supported him to the end of his life, as did the Parnassian poets, because their demands were the same. Like the Parnassians, Chavannes was reacting against Romanticism, and detested all idle words and lyricism, which they distinctively associated with Romanticism (Arcadia by the Shore, 222). Hopkins and Chavannes are similar in their solitary position in their fields with their simplification of form in their works. Like Hopkins who then diverts himself from the Parnassian Movement and aestheticism, Chavannes, who at first shared the ‘thematic-oriented evocation of philosophical or scientific meditation of the Parnassians, applies a chiseled language hoping to render eternal that which is ephemeral, straining towards timelessness’ (Arcadia by the Shore, 222).

9

Bertrand Puvis de Chavannes, ‘The Solitary Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Never Alone’, Arcadia by the Shore (Tokyo: Nikkei Inc, 2014), 222.

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As the term ‘Parnassian’ indicates Apollo and the nine muses on Parnassus in Greece, Pegasus represents poetic inspiration fluttering on the heights of Parnassus. In ‘Hesiod and the Muses’ (1860) by Moreau, there are the Muses who give inspiration to Hesiod, the Greek epic poet, with Pegasus in the centre [Fig. 5]. In ‘La Chimère’ (1867), Moreau depicts the Chimera as half man and half Pegasus, together with a woman who holds the Chimera in order that they can fly together [Fig. 6]. Moreau suggests that woman is related to the unconscious and loves to lose her ego in order to be unified with the unknown or mysterious. In Greek myth, the Chimera is a creature with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a snake’s or a dragon’s tail, which can breathe out fire. Therefore, it indicates ‘an impossible idea or hope’ or ‘fancy’. In ‘La Fantaisie’ (1879), Moreau depicts a woman holding and flying with an image of fancy born of mystery and the unconscious. The painting has the same theme and composition as ‘La Chimère’ [Fig. 7], where the Chimera held by a woman is flying up towards fantasy. He also painted ‘L’ Inspiration’ (1893), in which a poet receives inspiration from a winged muse [Fig. 8]. Moreau repeatedly depicted the theme of the relationship between the poet and inspiration. For Moreau as well as for Hopkins, the poet plays the sacred role of mediating between God and man, so he repeatedly depicted the poets with personifications of fancy, fantasy, and inspiration with wings like the Chimera, Pegasus and the Muses. These paintings of Moreau show the Parnassian ideal that the subject contemplates the object of beauty or heavenly beings and is deprived of his or her ego by the object, imbuing himself or herself in fancy and ecstasy. In Moreau’s paintings, a woman loses her ego in order to be unified with fancy, and fancy is associated with beauty and love. When a poet contemplates beauty and loves the object she contemplates, she obtains poetic inspiration through fancy. In her contemplation of the objects, she loses her ego, feels ecstasy and plunges herself into them in an unconscious state of mind. The idea of fancy and inspiration behind Moreau’s paintings is very similar to Hopkins’s poetics of fancy. It is also noteworthy that fancy is accompanied by female figures because, as I argue later in this chapter, fancy is represented by women in the works of Shakespeare, Tennyson and Hopkins as well as the paintings of Pre-Raphaelites, with female figures depicted as femmes fatales. For Moreau, women are the representation of wickedness, death, nature, reality, the mortal world and sin, and he comments on his series of ‘La Chimère’ that they are essentially the beings who are attracted to the unknown and the mysterious and love wickedness (Takemoto 91).

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Tennyson in ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ in his Idylls of the King apparently depicts Elaine as related to death and Guinevere to wickedness as representations of fancy. The plays written by Shakespeare and Hopkins as his follower, however, differ from these examples in that they do not depict the personifications of fancy as evil although they are female figures. *

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The state of ecstasy which inspires fancy is observable in Hopkins’s idea of contemplation. In ‘Notes on the history of Greek Philosophy etc.’, Hopkins distinguishes two kinds of energy in the mind: a transitional kind and an abiding kind, the latter of which he associates with contemplation, which ‘is impossible unless in a trance’ (J 125-126). The state in which one obtains poetic inspiration is also ‘a mood of great, abnormal in fact, mental acuteness’ (LIII 216), or a trance, so it is possible to say that inspiration is generated by contemplation. Contemplation, which is needed to create the language of inspiration, is the act of the subject plunging into the object and being finally overwhelmed by the object in order to discover its beauty and inner nature. It is related to fancy, which is concerned with fixed or abiding objects. Fancy and contemplation are necessary for the creation of the language of inspiration, and the contrasting kind of energy which Hopkins calls ‘transitional’ is related to Parnassian, which can be written without inspiration. Hopkins’s criticism of Parnassian opposes poetic clichés, and the same criticism can be applied to the poetic diction of the Parnassian school in general. The Parnassian Movement influenced the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris, who, as Frye emphasizes, concentrates on the ‘transitional kind of mental energy’ (Frye 326). Frye also admits that there is an analogy between the distinction of two kinds of mental energy and ‘several others that Hopkins makes’, referring to the distinctions between ‘overthought’ and ‘underthought’, ‘running’ rhythm and ‘sprung rhythm’, and Parnassian and the language of inspiration.10 The poets of the Parnassian school were affected by positivism and the pursuit of controlled passion and emotions, and described external or concrete objects and figures in elaborate poetic diction and styles. Objective and detailed descriptions sought to control Romantic passion (despite the importance attached to the subject’s intense response to the object), but it seems that Hopkins did not reject passion and ultimately connected it with the Passion of Christ as representing the death of the 10

‘There is the distinction between the Parnassian level of writing which any genuine poet may achieve by habit and practice, and the totally unpredictable flashes that occasionally sweep across it. The general pattern is that of a middle level, and something else that may be called metaphorically either above and higher, or below or deeper. / It is clear that Morris devoted himself to the Parnassian level of writing, as in The Earthly Paradise, where the writing is invariably competent but seldom startling or haunting. He also devotes himself to the transitional kind of mental energy that emphasizes movement and continuity’ (Northrop Frye, Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays 1974-1988, 325-326).

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subject. Thus he linked passion with fancy and with the contemplation necessary for the poetry of inspiration. Hopkins aimed at poetic language which contains surprise, believing that the language of inspiration requires fancy as well as objectivity or realism in poetic diction. While Hopkins utilized the term Parnassian critically, he was influenced by the idea of contemplation and objectivity which the Parnassian school valued highly. Hopkins’s ideal poetic diction is not characterised by what Ruskin called the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of subjective and emotional expressions without realism, nor the control of passion in the elaborate but artificial style of the Parnassians, but by the language of inspiration that unites passion with objectivity.                   

2.2.4. ‘The Flight of Fancy’ in ‘Il Mystico’ Hopkins distinguished ‘the language of inspiration’ from ‘Parnassian’ between 1864 and 1865, and followed the former. This was the turning point at which he began to create his own poetics of fancy, just before his conversion from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic Church in 1866. The changes in his poetry and religion had the same level of significance for him. After his poetic silence following his entrance into the Society of Jesus in 1868, Hopkins wrote ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1875) in the form of what he called the ‘poetry of inspiration’, which was completely different from Parnassian. Before writing this ode, he developed his concept of fancy as the language of inspiration. Hopkins’s works of the 1860s, where we find the words ‘fancy’ and ‘phantasy’, show the process of practicing his poetics of fancy: ‘The Escorial’ (1860), ‘Il Mystico’ (1862), ‘Floris in Italy’ (1864-65) and ‘The Beginning of the End’ (1868). His greater interest in fancy rather than imagination can be observed in his frequent use of words related to fancy (‘fancy’, ‘fancied’, ‘fancies’, ‘fanciful’, ‘fantastic’, ‘phantasy’, and ‘phantasies’) in his works, while regarding words related to imagination, he uses ‘imagining’ only once. ‘Il Mystico’ is an unfinished poem with the theme of ‘the flight of fancy (phantasy)’, which Hopkins wrote in part of a letter to E. H. Coleridge, 3-6 September 1862 (LIII 9-13). 11 The poet looks up at the rainbow and envisages the mystery of nature. Wings and birds represent the fancy and free spirit born from his contemplation of beauty.

11

Cf. PIII 220n.

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Chapter Two But foul and cumber not The shaken plumage of my Spirit’s wings. But come, thou balm to aching soul, Of pointed wing and silver stole… (9-12)

Then the poet observes and contemplates the beauty of nature: Be discover’d to my sight From a haze of sapphire light, Let incense hang across the room And sober lustres take the gloom…

(17-20)

In a way that corresponds to the original signification of the word ‘discover’, the poet tries to take off the mysterious veil covering nature’s mysteries and hopes to be united with God’s light beyond: ‘Come because then most thinly lies / The veil that covers mysteries’ (35-36). Then he prays to God: ‘Touch me and purify, and shew / Some of the secrets I would know’ (39-40). The poet’s soul is compared to a lark flying under a cloud: Or, like a lark to glide aloof Under the cloud-festoonèd roof, That with a turning of the wings Light and darkness from him flings…

(65-68)

The ‘exquisite tints seven’ of the rainbow are caught ‘from angel’s wings in heaven’ (107-110). Then the poet looks up at the rainbow in the sky: Then may I upwards gaze and see The deepening intensity Of the air-blended diadem, All a sevenfold-single gem, Each hue so rarely wrought that where It melts, new lights arise as fair, Sapphire, jacinth, chrysolite, The rim with ruby fringes dight, Ending in sweet uncertainty ’Twixt real hue and phantasy. (113-122)

The seven colours of the rainbow are compared to gems, and the distinction between ‘real hue’ and ‘phantasy’ becomes unclear. The poet contemplates phenomena before his eyes and fancies an unseen mystery behind them. In other words, the fancy obtained by his contemplation of

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the object enables him to touch its underlying mystery and to be united with it. Although the theme of this poem is suggestive of ‘the flight of fancy’, it is rather Romantic in expression because Hopkins had written it before he established the language of inspiration in his poetic diction. Therefore, it is still reminiscent of a Romantic view of nature, where the poet’s contemplation moves from the object to a symbol of something which transcends it. The transient rainbow acts as the symbol which is the bridge between reality and God’s mystery. J. Robert Barth writes in The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition that ‘for Coleridge symbol is the product of the imagination’, and points out that there is a ‘relationship between the metaphor/symbol distinction and the distinction of fancy and imagination’ (The Symbolic Imagination, 76). Hopkins attempted to express the theme of ‘the flight of fancy’ in this poem, but when he wrote it in 1862, he seems to have confused fancy with imagination. Before he experimented with his metaphors in order to express the language of inspiration produced by fancy and distinguished fancy and imagination in his essay ‘Poetic Diction’ in 1865, Hopkins had not fully realized their distinctions and had not been able to evade Romantic influences in his language or his thought. The form of contemplation evoked in Hopkins’s ‘Il Mystico’ is related to NeoPlatonism because according to its belief all things emanated from the One, and individual souls could rise to mystical union with the One through contemplation (Britannica Concise Encyclopedia). As we shall see, however, his later poetics of fancy focuses more specifically on transubstantiation as connecting the objects he contemplates with the mystery of Christ’s incarnation. In ‘Il Mystico’, fancy is born when the poet looks up at the rainbow and tries to grasp its reality in his contemplation of it. Thus, fancy is related to the form of contemplation in which the subject passively plunges into the object. In the flight of fancy, the poet is mysteriously united with the rainbow, and feels ecstasy in transcending the distinction between the subject and the object: ‘Then would I fling me up to sip / Sweetness from the hour, and dip / Deeply in the arched lustres’ (131133). Then, the poet contemplates the beauty of nature: And look abroad on sunny clusters Of wringing tree-tops, chalky lanes, Wheatfields tumbled with the rains, Streaks of shadow, thistled leas,

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(134-142)

The mixed colours of the rainbow as the symbol of God’s mystery are compared to each beautiful part of nature as well as to the wings of angels and gems, suggesting the analogy between them. The phrase ‘drink that ecstasy’ (141) echoes the earlier phrase ‘sip / Sweetness from the hour’ (131-132) to emphasise the meaning, and shows that the poet receives ecstasy passionately by plunging into the mysterious beauty of the rainbow in his contemplation. This poem reveals Hopkins’s idea that religious ecstasy can be obtained by contemplating nature as creation. In NeoPlatonism and gnosis, contemplation is the intuition of or inspiration derived from the transcendent being behind phenomena, or from unity with God or holy being. The end of this unfinished poem indicates that only ‘pure souls’ which have the power of fancy can experience ecstasy. In ‘Il Mystico’, the poet needs fancy to reveal God’s mystery in his contemplation of nature as an object. The word ‘phantasy’ is used in this poem, and it is a synonym for ‘fantasy’ and ‘fancy’ in contrast to ‘imagination’. Similarly, the French word ‘fantaisie’ has the same signification as ‘fancy’. As a reaction against the Romantic imagination which seeks to dissolve the objects of perception and create new organic wholes reflecting the unique creative vision and will of the author, the Parnassian school depicts subjects who passively plunge into the beauty of the object by means of fancy. Hopkins’s poetics of fancy directly or indirectly incorporates this idea as part of the new aesthetics of the age after Romanticism. However, at this stage, Hopkins could not obtain the language of inspiration which he associates with fancy in its true sense in his poetic diction. Therefore, for better or for worse, he was still ‘Parnassian’ in his thought and used what he called a ‘Parnassian tongue’ in his poetic diction in this poem before he reached the language of inspiration produced by fancy.

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2.2.5. The Imagination of the Poet in ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ Hopkins wrote ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ at Christmas 1862, when he was a student at Oxford University. It consists of 143 lines, making it significantly longer than most of his other poems, and this shows that he could not evade the tradition of Romantic narrative poems. It contains an expanse of free and fresh imagery with the descriptions of various jewels and colours which express sensual beauty in ways comparable to the poems of Edmund Spenser and John Keats, but contrasting with his later religious poems. Being an early work and notably different from his later ones, this poem reveals Hopkins’s awareness of the relationship between impressions and subjectivity, showing some influence of the impressionism of Pater as his tutor at Oxford and the theory of imagination of Coleridge in interpreting the figures of the mermaids as representing a ‘vision’. Although few critics have discussed ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ in detail, J. Hillis Miller remarks that ‘Hopkins’s early poetry…expresses the suffering of a man who believes in God, but finds him unattainable, and who finds himself isolated in the midst of a universe which rebuffs him with blank unlikeness’, and that distance, vacancy, and silence are the keynotes of his early poetry (The Disappearance of God, 273). Though Miller here discusses the world of Christianity, ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ is more Hellenistic than Christian, and this fact reveals the influence of the aestheticism of the Parnassian Movement and the PreRaphaelites who dealt with Greek myth as the source of their motifs. The point in question is how to explain the sadness of the poet at the end of the poem. It may be possible to read the sadness of a man far from God, but I would like to read it in a broader context with some remarks on impression and imagination, which influenced Hopkins in the early part of his career as a poet. * At the beginning of the poem, ‘I’ rowed and reached a rock, which could be seen at that moment, but is covered by the water at high tide (12). The west was ‘Plum-purple’ but ‘spikes of light / Spear’d open lustrous gushes, crimson-white’ (7-8). Purple is the colour of Eros’s manteau and of Aphrodite’s veil as well. Images of Greek myth, such as Aphrodite and Siren, show the influence of aestheticism.

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Lines 9 and 10 show the view of the narrator: ‘Where the eye fix’d, fled the encrimsoning spot, / And gathering, floated where the gaze was not’. The expression implies that the view around us changes according to the observer’s viewpoint, which is consequently subjective. Though the poem focuses on the description of the mermaids, the first- person point of view in ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ with the first person ‘I’ appearing frequently reminds us of the existence of the observer with the verbs ‘see’, ‘gaze’ and ‘watch’. That kind of description, from the first-person point of view, suggests the influence of nineteenth-century impressionism, represented by Pater’s thoughts. ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’, however, was written in 1862, one year before Hopkins entered Oxford University, so it is true, as Miller asserts, that he could not have learned this world view exclusively from Pater (The Disappearance of God, 275). Miller also says that Hopkins’s ‘notion of the fixity of subjective consciousness within an evanescent flux of sensations recalls similar ideas in the writing of’ Pater, and remarks that the ‘early Hopkins might well have agreed with what Pater says in the celebrated “Conclusion” to The Renaissance’ (The Disappearance of God, 274). Though Miller’s comment is persuasive, Pater wrote The Renaissance in 1873, eleven years after ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ was written. However, it may be possible to think that Hopkins may have already been aware of Pater’s impressionism and subjective description in his aestheticism. Pater, in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, quotes the proposition of Heraclitus that ‘All things are in a state of flux’ as the epigraph, and introduces the idea of impressionism as the means to grasp fluid objects: And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind…. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. (The Renaissance, 151)

Thus Pater argues that impressions are inseparable from the subjectivity of each individual. Hopkins, however, takes a pessimistic view of this idea in his later sonnet, ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’, and he tries to get out of that situation in ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the comfort of the Resurrection’. He does not want to be isolated in a world centring around

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the self, and tries to transcend subjectivism. Miller points out that ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ ‘dramatizes the tragedy of an unsuccessful attempt to escape from the prison of Paterian phenomenalism’.12 Though Miller’s statement on Paterian influence on Hopkins seems appropriate, I do not completely agree with him in that he regards the mermaids in ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ as a representation of subjectivity. 13 When the sun sets, the mermaids disappear, and the first-person narrator ‘I’ is isolated from all objects. Therefore, the representation of subjectivity should not be the mermaids but ‘I’. With the view from ‘I’, the eye of God as the sun is implied in lines 11 and 12: ‘…thro’ their parting lids there came and went / Keen glimpses of the inner firmament’. The scene in the sky which is compared to ‘waterlily flakes…in beryl lakes’ (13-14) is reminiscent of the imagery of the sun boarding the ship of water-lilies and sailing into the night. The sunset changes: Anon, across their swimming splendour strook, An intense line of throbbing blood-light shook A quivering pennon; then, for eye too keen, Ebb’d back beneath its snowy lids, unseen. (15-18)

The colour of blood is said to shine in the end among the colours of sunlight, and the word ‘blood’ evokes an image of the death of the sun. In addition, the transition of the colours and the words, ‘swimming’, ‘throbbing’, and ‘quivering’, express fluidity.

12

‘If Hopkins begins in a position near Pater’s, unlike Pater he can see no way to make a viable philosophy out of it. The early poems do everything they can to transcend subjectivism. The mermaids long for the sun, and the alchemist [in ‘The Alchemist in the City’] in his central tower wants to reach “one spot” on the “horizon-round”. If he could reach the horizon he might be on the periphery of a circle around the divine gold sun rather than fixed in his subjective prison. …He wants to pass beyond the situation of being always the center of the world. He would far rather circle around God. …the sun is a symbol for the divine centre, that absent God whose unattainability darkens Hopkins’s early poetry’ (The Disappearance of God, 275-276). 13 ‘…the mermaids, like the alchemist in “The Alchemist in the City”, can get no closer to the sun than “free long looking”. The sun sinks beneath the horizon, the color vanishes from the west and from the irritated waters, and the mermaids, their longing unassuaged, sink back into “the dusk depth of the ponderous sea”’ (The Disappearance of God, 275).

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All things turn rosy, and the west is described as ‘an orb’d rose’ (20). The rose bloomed at first when Aphrodite was born in the sea, and in the Middle Ages it is the emblem of both Christ and the Virgin Mary, indicating spiritual love.14 Both the sky and the sea are tinged with rosy hues: Now all things rosy turn’d: To an orb’d rose, which, by hot pantings blown Apart, betwixt ten thousand petall’d lips By interchange gasp’d splendour and eclipse. The zenith melted to a rose of air; The waves were rosy-lipp’d: the crimson glare Shower’d the cliffs and every fret and spire With garnet wreaths and blooms of rosy-budded fire.

(19-26)

The ‘ten thousand petall’d lips’ in the sky corresponds to ‘rosy-lipp’d’ as a metaphor of ripples, and as we see in the meanings of the eye of the sun in the sky and Aphrodite in the sea and of the imagery of roses, images derived from Christianity and Greek myth are connected by the sensual metaphor ‘lips’. Moreover, lines 23 to 26 recall the thoughts of Heraclitus, that is, the transmutation of the four elements: ‘a rose of air’ (air); ‘the waves’ (water); the rain that showered the cliffs (earth); and ‘rosy-budded fire’ (fire). All of them gradually become rose-coloured. It is suggested in the phrase, ‘looking on the waters’ (27), that the narrator has observed the scene so far: Then, looking on the waters, I was ware Of something drifting thro’ delighted air, ʊAn isle of roses,㸫and another near;㸫 And more, on each hand, thicken, and appear In shoals of bloom; as in unpeopled skies, Save by two stars, more crowding lights arise, And planets bud where’er we turn our mazèd eyes. (27-33)

The island of roses is compared to stars in the sky. The phrase, ‘our mazèd eyes’, indicates that man’s reason and judgement are confused by the sight, and the planet imagery incites us to anticipate some approaching mysterious events.

14 See the section on ‘rose’ in Ad de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1974).

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The narrator continues to gaze at them to find that they are in fact mermaids: I gazed unhinder’d: Mermaids six or seven, Ris’n from the deeps to gaze on sun and heaven, Cluster’d in troops and halo’d by the light, Those Cyclads made that thicken’d on my sight. (34-37)

That kind of description suggests that one impression is changing to another in the mind of the individual. In contrast with the narrator’s gaze on the mermaids, they ‘gaze on sun and heaven’, and it may be suggested here that they are within the world encircling God, seeing from a different viewpoint from his. Besides, the mermaids are compared to ‘Cyclads’ as one of the Greek images in this poem. * In order to understand the fluidity of impression grasped by subjectivity, it would be worth considering the changing views of mermaids from the classical period and the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and the Romantic period, up to the nineteenth century. In the classical period and the Middle Ages, a mermaid was considered to be like a Siren, who tempted sailors and wrecked their ships. During the Renaissance period, however, Sirens were given a positive connotation through the influence of Neo-Platonism. This is shown in Petrarch’s Sonnet 167, where a Siren is described as a Muse in the heavens, or the personification of oratory and scholarship. Although mermaids as female figures causing the ruin of men did not entirely disappear, this image became fainter, and the name ‘Siren’ came to be employed as a cliché in literary works. The Romantics, however, inherited the medieval image of a Siren who combs her hair on a rock and wrecks ships, as in Heinrich Heine’s Lorelei. In contrast, in the nineteenth century, the fairy tale of Hans Christian Anderson gave mermaids an innocent image.15 The English in the nineteenth century were so interested in mermaids that eyewitness reports of them were published in newspapers and magazines. From the late nineteenth century to the twentieth century, a mermaid as a temptress became the theme of fine arts again, and a mermaid is depicted as a femme fatale in Edward Burne-Jones’s ‘Depth of

15

Cf. Vic de Donder, Le chant de la sirène (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).

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the Sea’ [Fig. 9]. Hopkins actually saw it in an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1886, and commented on the features of the mermaids: You speak of ‘powerful drawing’ in Burne Jones’s picture. I recognise it in the mermaid’s face and in the treatment of her fishments and fishmanship, the tailfin turning short and flattening to save striking the ground㸫a stroke of truly artistic genius…. (?3 July 1886 [LII 136])

While the mermaid depicted in this painting of Burne-Jones draws the drowning sailor into the depth of the sea, Gustave Moreau in Paris drew a mermaid as a Muse who gives inspiration to Orpheus, who has a harp on his back in ‘La sirène et le poète’ (1895) [Fig. 10]. In this respect, Moreau is similar to Petrarch in using the Parnassian theme of the poet and inspiration, which is comparable to Hopkins’s interest in fancy and inspiration though the work was painted after his death. Thus, the nineteenth century was a period in which various images of mermaids coexisted. Though they include both positive and negative images, the image common to these paintings is that they are mysterious beings to men or poets: they are both femmes fatales and the Muses who give inspiration to poets and artists, especially in the nineteenth century. Hopkins himself included a unique depiction of mermaids in his illustration on the first page of ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’, showing his earliest ambition to be a painter-poet like D. G. Rossetti [Fig. 11]. It also reveals ‘a remarkable talent for minute Pre-Raphaelite draughtsmanship and a sure sense of organic design’ (PI xviii-xix). One remarkable and original feature of the mermaids in his illustration, however, is that, as the poem indicates, he depicted many mermaids, not one as a femme fatale as in other paintings by the artists influenced by aestheticism. There are more features of Hopkins’s mermaids which distinguish them from other mermaids depicted in earlier periods and in his time: This was their manner: one translucent crest Of tremulous film, more subtle than the vest Of dewy gorse blurr’d with gossamer fine, From crown to tail-fin floating, fringed the spine, Droop’d o’er the brows like Hector’s casque, and sway’d In silken undulation, spurr’d and ray’d And was as tho’ some sapphire molten-blue Were vein’d and streak’d with dusk-deep lazuli, Or tender pinks with bloody Tyrian dye. (38-47)

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The description of the ‘crest’ is unprecedented in earlier images of mermaids, and here the masculine image of ‘Hector’ and the feminine one of silk are combined together with the description of gems like ‘sapphire’ and ‘lazuli’. In the description in lines 48 and 49, ‘From their white waists a silver skirt was spread / To mantle –o’er the tail’, silver symbolizes chastity and the goddess Artemis. The skirt ‘was spread / Around the Water-Nymphs in fretted falls, / At red Pompeii on medallion’d walls’ (49-51). The mermaids have ‘Hector’s casque’ (42), and the images of them involve both classical and masculine elements: One bound o’er dripping gold a turquoise-gemm’d Circlet of astral flowersʊdiadem’d Like an Assyrian prince, with buds unsheath’d From flesh-flowers of the rock… (60-63)

These images of mermaids are original and androgynous, and are more similar to the one in Moreau’s painting than to that in Burne-Jones’s. The following descriptions of the mermaids include unprecedented images as well: A tinted fin on either shoulder hung; Their pansy-dark or bronzen locks were strung With coral, shells. Thick-pearlèd cords, whate’er The abysmal Ocean hoards of strange and rare. Some trail’d the Nautilus; or on the swell Tugg’d the boss’d, smooth-lipp’d, giant Strombus-shell. (52-57)

‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ sets up several sequences of imagery, such as colours, flowers, gems, sea-shells, parts of the body, the sunsets, and the mermaids, and defines them all in terms of one another, so that there is a vibration back and forth between one motif and another. This gives the impression that all things are continuously transformed in the universal flux (The Disappearance of God, 275). W. H. Gardner also points out the instability of expression and ‘the flux of nature’ in the poem: ‘Epithets of colour pass before the eye with such frequency that the impression we receive is of unstable reds and blues which have ‘run’; ʊpurple, crimson, scarlet, carmine, pansy-dark, violet, blood-vivid, crimson-golden’ (Gardner 55). Gardner points out the binary opposition in the poem between ‘the immutable One’ and ‘the changing Many’ (Gardner 56), and this view of God in the centre with surrounding objects in flux is similar to

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Coleridge’s idea of imagination. While Gardner overlooks the position of man, who is isolated from both nature and God, Coleridge defines man’s creative activity as similar to that of God, and thus he situated man in the centre of the world, and as transforming objects in nature. Hopkins seems to have been influenced by the Romantic imagination at this stage, but he was not satisfied with this situation. Therefore, he introduces the idea of fancy into his poetics, which is especially evident in his metaphor. Contrary to Coleridge’s idea of imagination based on the nature of God, Hopkins’s poetics of fancy after ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ is based on the idea of Christ’s nature as uniting binary oppositions through abrupt parallelism, where he respects the individuality and reality of objects. The imagery of the mermaids is in flux, but the viewpoint of ‘I’ is constantly fixed, integrating those fluid impressions: Then saw I sudden from the waters break Far off a Nereid company, and shake From wings swan-fledged a wheel of watery light Flickering with sunny spokes, and left and right Plunge orb’d in rainbow arcs, and trample and tread The satin-pufled smooth to foam, and spread Slim-pointed sea-gull plumes, and droop behind One scarlet feather trailing to the wind; Then, like a flick of sea-fowl mounting higher, Thro’ crimson-golden floods pass swallow’d into fire.

(74-83)

Nereids with the swan-fledged wings contrast with the mermaids with a caudal fin and androgynous imagery. The swan is the symbol of unity between opposites, and ‘a wheel’ is the emblem of the moon and is associated with spinning cotton into threads which is the work of women, and hence is a symbol of woman. The ‘watery light / Flickering with sunny spokes’ means the spray flickering with sunlight, where the water is the symbol of a mother, while the light signifies the male principle. In the description of Nereids plunging ‘left and right’, the left suggests materiality, femininity and the unconscious, and the right implies spirituality, masculinity, the conscious and reason.16 The ‘rainbow arcs’ are half circles, like one made by the mermaids in a later description. The ‘foam’ (79) is associated with the scene where Aphrodite was born from the ripples of foam, surrounded by Triton and Nereids, who are not identical with Sirens. The swan-fledged wings turn to ‘Slim-pointed

16

Cf. The sections on ‘swan’, ‘wheel’, ‘water’, and ‘right and left’ in Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery.

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seagull plumes’ (80), and the thoughts of Heraclitus, who defines ‘fire’ as the most important of the four elements, can be observed in line 83. The mermaids crowding to the rock from where ‘I’ was looking are figuratively described in these fourteen lines: Soon ʊ as when Summer of his sister Spring Crushes and tears the rare enjewelling, And boasting ‘I have fairer things than these’ Plashes amidst the billowy apple-trees His lusty hands, in gusts of scented wind Swirling out bloom till all the air is blind With rosy foam and pelting blossom and mists Of driving vermeil-rain; and, as he lists, The dainty onyx-coronals deflowers, A glorious wanton; ʊ all the wrecks in showers Crowd down upon a stream, and, jostling thick With bubbles bugle-eyed, struggle and stick On tangled shoals that bar the brook ʊ a crowd Of filmy-globes and rosy floating cloud: ʊ So those Mermaidens crowded to my rock,  (84-98)

The simile in lines 84 and 85 shows a sudden change from the mild imagery of spring in the first half of the poem, as well as the surprise and change in the consciousness of ‘I’ who ‘gazed unhinder’d’. The phrase ‘all the wrecks’ (93) is associated with the ships and sailors wrecked by the Sirens, and in the figures of speech from lines 93 to 97, the words ‘bubbles’ and ‘filmy-globes’ represent transient images and impressions. The mermaids, who are a representation of transient impressions as well, ‘crowded to my rock’ (98); in other words, they were momentarily grasped by ‘I’ as the observer and the representation of subjectivity.

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Fig. 10

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Fig. 11

Some mermaids ‘sported’, being careless of the observer- narrator ‘I’: Careless of me they sported: some would plash The languent smooth with dimpling drops, and flash Their filmy tails adown whose length there show’d An azure ridge… (102-105)

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The observer is fixed outside the fluid images which mix with one another, and he cannot be mixed with them, being isolated from all that is in the poem. The chain of images can be observed in these words: ‘Plashes’ (87) and ‘plash’ (102); ‘filmy tails’ and ‘filmy globes’ (97). The transient nature of impressions is expressed in the description: ‘the argent bubbles stream’d / Airwards, disturb’d’ (109-110). On the other hand, most mermaids ‘in a half-circle watch’d the sun’ (116). The once brilliant description of the mermaids turns now to a sadder tone: ‘a sweet sadness dwelt on everyone’ (117). Up to this point, the verbs ‘gazed’, ‘saw’, and ‘watch’d’, which indicate sight, have been employed in the past tense for the act of the narrator, but the verbs ‘knew’ and ‘know’ are employed in line 118: I knew not why, ʊ but know that sadness dwells On Mermaids ʊ whether that they ring the knells Of seamen whelm’d in chasms of the mid-main, As poets sing; or that it is a pain To know the dusk depth of the ponderous sea, The miles profound of solid green, and be With loath’d cold fishes, far from man ʊ or what; ʊ I know the sadness but the cause know not. Then they, thus ranged, ’gan make full plaintively A piteous Siren sweetness on the sea, Withouten instrument, or conch, or bell, Or stretch’d chords tuneable on turtle’s shell; Only with utterance of sweet breath they sung An antique chaunt and in an unknown tongue. Now melting upward thro’ the sloping scale Swell’d the sweet strain to a melodious wail; Now ringing clarion-clear to whence it rose Slumber’d at last in one sweet, deep, heart-broken close.

(118-135)

The narrator can tell his impression of what he saw, but does not know the cause of the sadness which dwelt on the mermaids. What he thinks he actually saw was not real as the word ‘vision’ in the title suggests. Though the definition of ‘vision’ in OED has the signification of the ‘action of seeing with the bodily eye; the exercise of the ordinary faculty of sight, or the faculty itself’ (n. 3), it usually implies the first two senses: 1. Something which is apparently seen otherwise than by ordinary sight; esp. an appearance of a prophetic or mystical character, or having the nature of revelation, supernaturally presented to the mind either in sleep or in an abnormal state.

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Chapter Two 2. The action or fact of contemplating something not actually present to the eye, mystical or supernatural insight or foresight.

These two senses can be applied to the two poems which Hopkins wrote in 1862 – ‘Il Mystico’ and ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ – because they reveal that he could not evade Romantic impressionism or unrealistic fancy confused with imagination in poetic diction or figures of speech. Through the narrator’s imagination or impression, lines 119 and 120 in ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ remind us of the antiquated image of Sirens, as later confirmed by line 127. The mermaids are described as ‘cold fishes, far from man’ (124), so that they are different from ‘I’ as man, being part of fluid objects in nature. Thus, they are representations of objects in the imaginative impression created by the subjective ‘I’. The narrator is still isolated in the end because he cannot recognize the language of the mermaids (130-131). The verb ‘slumber’ (135) gives us the impression that the scene the narrator saw was his transient dream: a vision of the mermaids is not reality but his dream and imagination, in which alone they find their existence. The sun, representing God and the element of fire, ‘had lapsed to ocean’ (136), and the tide is in, in contrast to the ebbing tide at the opening of this poem. The flowing tide ‘quench’d the rosy isles’ (139-140), and the narrator is left alone in the Heraclitean flux of objects: …I stole away And gain’d thro’ growing dusk the stirless bay; White loom’d my rock, the water gurgling o’er, Whence oft I watch but see those Mermaids now no more.

(140-143)

* In ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’, fluid objects are described from the viewpoint of the first person, ‘I’. This suggests the act of imagination, and the role of the subject in Coleridge’s theory of imagination in Biographia Literaria, which later influenced the fluidity in Pater’s impressionism. Imagination is the act of the subject as well as a fluid impression, in contrast to fancy which relates to the fixity of objects. When he wrote this poem, Hopkins could not fully grasp the reality of objects but saw fluid objects from his subjective viewpoint. The poem, therefore, expresses the sadness of the poet as the subject, as well as of Hopkins, who is trapped by Romantic imagination. Later, he converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism and adopted fancy as the centre of his poetics after he entered

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the Society of Jesus in 1863. However, he had not achieved his poetics of fancy in ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’. ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ shows the influence of images conceived in previous ages, though it has originality. Mermaids are imaginative representations created by the subjectivity of poets and artists, and they are the central images in the flux of the poet’s imagination in this poem. Hopkins could not evade Romantic imagination in this poem with a ‘dreamy vision’ of mermaids created by his subjective impressions, but he developed his own poetics of fancy, which depends on inspiration combined with his respect for the reality of objects grasped by actual sight.

2.2.6. Hopkins’s Departure from Wordsworth and Keats In Parnassian aesthetics, the fancy of an artist is born when the subject is obsessed with objective beauty. This contrasts with Romanticism or the poetics of imagination, which argues that man’s mind should dissolve and re-make the objects of nature in a new and visionary form. Therefore, Parnassian aesthetics emphasises the element of fancy, which it associates with objectivity, in a way that anticipates aspects of modernism, such as the Imagist movement. Hopkins often uses the word ‘beauty’ in those of his works which are reminiscent of aestheticism and are influenced by the Parnassian Movement, and he willingly applies the concept of fancy to his poetics. His use of the term ‘Parnassian’, however, has an ironical connotation, because he does not end up with rhetoric and objective descriptions of beautiful figures, but seeks to achieve ‘the language of inspiration’ through passion. Finally, Hopkins creates a new form of poetic diction through a fancy derived from inspiration and passion, which is quite distinct from that of his contemporaries. Although he tries to reach God’s mystery with the flight of fancy in ‘Il Mystico’, he in fact confuses fancy with imagination, because the rainbow as the symbol of God is the product of imagination with an emphasis on transition to something which transcends, rather than being unified with, the visible world. In ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’, the narrator mostly speaks in the past tense, but he speaks in the present tense in line 125 (‘I know the sadness but the cause know not’), when he is about to conclude his vision of the mermaids as his impression. This is quite a Romantic way of concluding a poem, similar to Wordsworth’s poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ (composed 1804, published 1807):

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Chapter Two I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed--and gazed--but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.

Like Hopkins in ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’, Wordsworth employs the first-person narrator ‘I’, who observes nature and describes his experience in the past tense, while he describes his impression in the present tense with his meditation on the past experience in the concluding six lines. The thoughts in these lines are well expressed in his famous words in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800): ‘I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility’ (Lyrical Ballads, 266). This notion is related to imagination by which the subject transforms or re-creates the object with emotion in his or her mind after he or she saw it. Wordsworth’s notion of fancy is also different from Hopkins’s and Shakespeare’s fancy which is related to sight as I will argue later in this chapter, for he seems to confuse the work of fancy with that of imagination in ‘Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes’ (1833):

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Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes To pace the ground, if path be there or none, While a fair region round the traveller lies Which he forbears again to look upon; Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene, The work of Fancy, or some happy tone Of meditation, slipping in between The beauty coming and the beauty gone. If thought and Love desert us, from that day Let us break off all commerce with the Muse: With Thought and Love companions of our way, Whate’er the senses take or may refuse, The Mind’s internal heaven shall shed her dews Of inspiration on the humblest lay.

While fancy in Hopkins’s use of the term is related to actual sight, contemplation and reality, Wordsworth in these lines regards ‘the work of Fancy’ as meditation ‘with unuplifted eyes’. This is where the difference between Hopkins’s idea of fancy and the Romantic idea of fancy as the secondary faculty of mind under imagination becomes clear. Fancy is related to inspiration, the Muse and Love as is depicted by the artists of the Parnassian School and aestheticism. However, what Hopkins regards as Parnassian and distinct from fancy is this Romantic notion of fancy involving a confusion of the idea of fancy with that of imagination, because his ideal of true fancy is pure poetic diction or figures of speech with metaphorical meanings uniting opposites based on his insight gained by seeing the reality of objects. Keats criticized Wordsworth’s ‘egotistical sublime’ as what he felt to be the excessively self-centred quality of Wordsworth's poetry, in contrast with his own ideal of ‘negative capability’, which he found in Shakespeare. In this sense, Hopkins is similar to Keats with his enthusiasm for Shakespeare in the development of his idea of fancy and with the idea of negative capability as the quality of selfless receptivity necessary to a true poet. In a letter to his brothers (December 1817), Keats writes: At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. (Selected Letters of John Keats, 60)

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In his later letters, Keats complains of the ‘egotistical’ and philosophical bias of Wordsworth's poetry. By negative capability, he seems to have meant a poetic capacity to efface one's own mental identity by immersing it sympathetically and spontaneously within the subject described, as Shakespeare was thought to have done. This idea seems to represent a transition from the Romantic idea of fancy to Hopkins’s poetics of fancy, at the time when he wrote ‘Il Mystico’ and ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ with similar imagery to that in Keats’s poems. In advance of Hopkins’s love of Shakespeare’s fancy in his use of metaphor, as M. D. Serra remarks, Keats also loved Shakespeare as ‘his perennial & unsurpassable source of inspiration…because of his metaphorical and lyrical-rhythmic imagery’ (from Introduction by M. D. Serra in W. J. Bate, Negative Capability, I-II). She also comments on Keats’s ‘self-liberation from the “egotistical sublime”, whose most famous representatives were Byron and…the first admired and then criticized Wordsworth’, and what Keats called ‘allegorical life’: ‘It required a progressive de-personalization, both spiritual and psychological, a sympathetic objectification that was all encompassing and capable of projecting itself onto all other beings and things in nature. Keats’s sculpted poetic de-personalization…is carried out in the name of “Poetry’s naturalness” and in that of the poet himself, different from the “dreamer”’ (Negative Capability, II). This objective stance with de-personalization as a poet in contrast with the ‘egotistical sublime’ of Wordsworth seems to have certain effects on Hopkins’s poetics of fancy. Hopkins was quite familiar with Keats because his ‘grandfather was a surgeon, a fellow-student of Keats’ (LI 51). In his letter of 13 June 1878 to R. W. Dixon, Hopkins praised Keats’s genius: ‘Keats’ genius was so astonishing, unequalled at his age and scarcely surpassed at any, that one may surmise whether if he had lived he would have rivalled Shakspere’ [Hopkins’s spelling] (LII 6). Again in his letter of 20 October 1887 to Coventry Patmore, Hopkins mentioned Keats’s Endymion (1818): ‘After all is there anything in Endymion worse than the passage in Romeo and Juliet about the County Paris as a book of love that must be bound and I can’t tell what? It has some kind of fantastic beauty, like an arabesque; but in the main it is nonsense’ (LIII 382). Though Hopkins was critical of Keats’s fancy in his later years, it is possible to say that he was influenced by Keats’s idea of negative capability in his youth, and he copied the last stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’ (1819) in his journal of 1864. The following lines are from the last stanza of the poem with the description of ‘Fancy’:

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Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees Fledge the wild ridgèd mountains steep by steep; And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees, The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep; And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same: And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in! (50-67)

It is most probable that Hopkins read all the lines in the last stanza of this poem, for his letters contain a long discussion of Keats’s poetry. In this stanza, the poet offers the creation of ‘a working brain’ and ‘the gardener Fancy’. Hopkins may have been influenced by Keats’s emphasis on the function of fancy related to the detailed depiction of objects in nature in this poem. As Robinson comments, ‘Ode to Psyche’ is placed next to ‘Fancy’ (1818) in 1820, a volume privileging a poetry of the Fancy, so it is possible to think that Hopkins read this poem as well: ‘“Fancy” appears pretty much at the centre of the shorter poems, and thus its erotic ending, particularly as it is placed next to the “Ode to Psyche”, casts an influence forward and backward in the volume. “Fancy” declares its essentially Blakean eroticism that refuses control of the other’ (Unfettering Poetry, 269-270). The depiction of fancy in Keats’s ‘Fancy’ is similar to that in the paintings of the Parnassian School and the idea of aestheticism: Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home: At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth, Like to bubbles when rain peltheth. Then let wingèd Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind’s cage-door, She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar. O sweet Fancy! Let her loose; Summer’s joys are spoilt by use, And the enjoying of the Spring

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Chapter Two Fades as does its blossoming; Autumn’s red-lipp’d fruitage too, Brushing through the mist and dew, Cloys with tasting; What do then?

(1-15)

These lines are similar to the hedonistic eroticism in the descriptions of ‘Summer’ with his ‘lusty hands’ from lines 84 to 88 and of transitional seasons in ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’. Fancy is related to beauty and described as female: Fancy, high-commissioned㸫send her! She has vassals to attend her: She will bring, in spite of frost, Beauties that the earth hath lost; She will bring thee, all together, All delights of summer weather; All the buds and bells of May, From dewy sward or thorny spray; All the heaped Autumn’s wealth, With a still, mysterious stealth: She will mix these pleasures up Like three fit wines in a cup… (27-38)

Fancy mixes the pleasures of spring, summer, and autumn, just as wine is blended. This image of Fancy related to beauty and pleasures seems to have had an influence on the Pre-Raphaelites because it ‘was their mutual enthusiasm for Keats’s poetry that first brought Rossetti and Hunt together in May 1848, after Rossetti had admired Hunt’s painting The Eve of St Agnes (1848, Guildhall Art Gallery), on display at the Royal Academy: …Keats’s belief in the poet’s ability 㸫duty 㸫 to create through his art a separate world of beauty that transcended the inevitable inadequacies and contingencies of reality, could only have convinced the Pre-Raphaelites of the importance of their self-imposed artistic mission. …One of the undoubted stimuli to their interest was the publication in 1848 of Richard Monckton Milnes’s biography, The Life and Literary Remains of John Keats, which re-evaluated the work of the then all-but-forgotten poet. Prompted by its successful reception, Hunt and Millais in 1849 were considering making etchings as illustrations to one of his poems, Isabella, although the project fell through due to copyright squabbles. …Morris, whose own poems, such as The Defence of Guinevere, are steeped in a Keatsian medievalism 㸫his Earthly Paradise in particular contains echoes of Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale 㸫 perhaps best summed up Keats’s essential appeal to his ‘clique’ as being the visual resonance of his verse…. Later, while correcting the proofs for the Kelmscott Press edition of The

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Poetry of John Keats (no. 4), Morris was more specific, describing La Bell Dame sans Merci, as ‘the germ from which all the poetry of [his] group had sprung’.17

Although Hopkins in his later years was critical of Keats’s sensuality, he was clearly influenced by his idea of fancy through the aestheticism of the Pre-Raphaelites in his youth in the 1860s. The idea of fancy as related to sight described in ‘Fancy’ as well as in Shakespeare’s plays discussed later seems to have influenced Hopkins as the emphasis of the verbs concerning sight in ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ shows: Thou shalt, at one glance, behold The daisy and the marigold; White-plumed lilies, and the first Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst; Shaded hyacinth, always Sapphire queen of the mid May; And every leaf, and every flower Pearled with the self-same shower. Thou shalt see the field-mouse peep Meagre from its celled sleep; And the snake all winter-thin Cast on sunny bank its skin; Freckled nest-eggs thou shalt see Hatching in the hawthorn-tree, When the hen-bird’s wing doth rest Quiet on her mossy nest; (47-62)

The words ‘glance’, ‘behold’, ‘see’ and ‘peep’ emphasize the observer’s act of seeing, and the poetic diction here is reflected in Pre-Raphaelite imagery in ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’. The image of the bird’s wing is then connected to ‘wingèd Fancy’: O, sweet Fancy! let her loose; Every thing is spoilt by use: Where’s the cheek that doth not fade, Too much gazed at? Where’s the maid Whose lip mature is ever new? Where’s the eye, however blue, Doth not weary? Where’s the face One would meet in every place? 17

Jane Munro and Linda Goddard, ed. Literary Circles: Artist, Author, Word and Image in Britain 1800-1920 (Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, 2006), 11.

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Chapter Two Where’s the voice, however soft, One would hear so very oft? At a touch sweet Pleasure meltheth Like to bubbles when rain peltheth. Let, then, wingèd Fancy find Thee a mistress to thy mind: Dulcet-eyed as Ceres’ daughter, Ere the God of Torment taught her How to frown and how to chide; With a waist and with a side White as Hebe’s, when her zone Slipped its golden clasp, and down Fell her kirtle to her feet, While she held the goblet sweet And Jove grew languid.㸫Break the mesh Of the Fancy’s silken leash; Quickly break her prison-string And such joys as these she’ll bring. Let the wingèd Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home. (67-94)

The ‘wingèd Fancy’ may have influenced the theme of the flight of fancy or phantasy depicted in ‘Il Mystico’, with the reminiscence of the same theme of paintings by Chavannes and Moreau as the artists of the Parnassian school. A ‘mistress’ with the image of Proserpine as ‘Ceres’ daughter’ reminds us of Rossetti’s painting ‘Proserpine’ (1874) [Fig. 12], where he portrayed Jane Morris, his mistress and the wife of William Morris. Greek myth and imagery in Keats’s poetry influenced Hopkins as well as the Pre-Raphaelites. Hopkins’s ideal of objectivity in his poetics of fancy or his idea of poetic diction seems to have been influenced by Ruskin. In Modern Painters, vol. III, Chapter XII, Ruskin treats the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’, mostly criticizing Romantic fancy as being infused with egotism. This notion influenced the idea behind what Hopkins called ‘Parnassian’. Ruskin begins with the terms ‘Objective’ and ‘Subjective’:

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Fig. 12 German dullness, and English affectation, have of late much multiplied among us the use of two of the most objectionable words that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians, – namely, ‘Objective’, and ‘Subjective’. ...

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Chapter Two And then they [philosophers] agree that the qualities of things which thus depend upon our perception of them, and upon our human nature as affected by them, shall be called Subjective; and the qualities of things which they always have, irrespective of any other nature, as roundness or squareness, shall be called Objective. ...From which position, with a hearty desire for mystification, and much egotism, selfishness, shallowness, and impertinence, a philosopher may easily go so far as to believe, and say, that everything in the world depends upon his seeing or thinking of it, and that nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees or thinks of. (MP III 161-162)

Although Ruskin mentions ‘contemplative fancy’, it is similar to Wordsworth’s notion and use of fancy ‘under the influence of emotion’, and different from Hopkins’s idea of fancy which retains original inspiration with the suggestion of abrupt parallelism between objects, not transformed by emotion: ..we may go on at our ease to examine the point in question, –namely, the difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us. For instance ‘The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold’. This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain crocus? (MP III 163-164)

Ruskin’s criticism of Romantic fancy infused by emotion can be applied to Wordsworth’s description of daffodils: ‘Tossing their heads in sprightly dance’ (12). He then distinguishes this fallacy in poetic expression into two kinds and applies the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ to the latter: It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this fallacy is of two principal kinds. Either, as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak presently; but in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the other error, that which the mind admits when affected strongly by emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton Locke, ʊ

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‘They rowed her in across the rolling foam The cruel, crawling foam’. The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘pathetic fallacy’. (MP III 164 - 165)

Hopkins may have agreed with Ruskin’s notion of the ‘falseness’ in ‘wilful fancy’ and impression, which is similar to his criticism of Parnassian. Then Ruskin considers the pathetic fallacy ‘as eminently a character of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which we allow it, as one eminently poetical, because passionate’ (MP III 165). However, he believes ‘that we shall find the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness,ʊthat it is only the second order of poets who much delight in it’ (MP III 165). This reference is quite similar to Hopkins’s criticism of Parnassian without inspiration. In his definition of the term ‘Parnassian’, distinguished from ‘the language of inspiration’ as his ideal poetic diction and the product of his poetics of fancy, Hopkins seems to have been influenced by Ruskin’s idea of the pathetic fallacy and criticism of Romantic fancy. Beyond the transitional stage with Romantic influence, he later establishes his unique concept of fancy, which aims at ‘the language of inspiration’ related to Shakespeare’s fancy and reflects his belief in Christ as manifested in nature and art through the Incarnation and the Passion.

2.3. The Power of Fancy in the Disguised Heroines of Shakespeare 2.3.1. Hopkins’s Interest in Shakespeare’s Fancy Hopkins’s interest in Shakespeare may have been influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite depictions of the scenes from his plays and Victorian worship of the greatest English poet (Phillips 123). Walter Howell Deverell, a close friend of the Brotherhood, shares their enthusiasm for Shakespearean subjects and depicts himself as Orsino in the centre, with Elizabeth Siddal as Viola on the left, and D. G. Rossetti as the jester in his painting ‘Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV’ (1850) [Fig. 13]. Deverell illustrates the scene where Feste sings his song of love and death:

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Fig. 13 ORSINO

O fellow, come, the song we had last night. Mark it Cesario, it is old and plain. The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, And the free maids that weave their thread with bones, Do use to chant it. It is silly sooth, And dallies with the innocence of love, Like the old age.

FESTE

Are you ready, sir?

ORSINO

I prithee sing. Music

FESTE

(sings) Come away, come away death, And in sad cypress let me be laid. Fie away, fie away breath; I am slain by a fair cruel maid. My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, O, prepare it.

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My part of death, no one true Did share it. Not a flower, not a flower sweet On my black coffin let there be strewn. Not a friend, not a friend greet My poor copse, where my bones shall be thrown. A thousand thousand sighs to save, Lay me O where Sad true lover never find my grave, To weep there. (2.4.41-65)

William Holman Hunt depicted a passage from Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act V, Scene IV, ‘Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus’ (1851) [Fig. 14], which is about the moment when Valentine arrives at the end of the play to find his friend Proteus attempting to seduce Sylvia with whom Valentine is in love.18 Siddal also modelled for Sylvia here. On the left, Julia disguised as a page. The lines from this scene are inscribed on the left and right spandrel of the frame: VALENTINE Now I dare not say I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me. Who should be trusted, when one’s right hand Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus, I am sorry I must never trust thee more But count the world a stranger for thy sake. PROTEUS

My shame and guilt confound me. Forgive me, Valentine. If hearty sorrow Be a sufficient ransom for offence, I tender’t here. I do as truly suffer As e’er I did commit. (5.4.65-77)

Both of these plays have similar situations with heroines in disguise and complicated love exchanged between two couples with the work of fancy, which seems to influence the characteristics of Hopkins’s poetics of fancy.

18

Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1994), 15.

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Fig. 14

Hopkins ‘made many kinds of notes on Twelfth Night’ (White 86), and reveals his interest in Shakespeare’s fancy when he quotes the following lines from Twelfth Night in his notes in 1863 and 1864: Twelfth Night. Act I, Sc. III. … Sc. I. ʊSo full of shapes is fancy, That it alone is high-fantastical. Why alone? How will she love,… …when liver, brain, and heart, Those sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and fill’d, (Her sweet perfections,) with one self king! Meaning? Knight says her loving or marrying will fill them with one lord, and this will constitute her perfection, comparing Froissart, a woman being not complete till married. This I do not believe. (J 9-10)

On Hopkins’s doubts about the critic Charles Knight’s interpretation of these lines, Humphry House comments: ‘His own suggestion is preferable, and is similar to the view of Steevens which Knight quotes with disapproval: ‘Liver, brain, and heart, are admitted in poetry as the

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residence of passions, judgement, and sentiments. These are what Shakespeare calls “her sweet perfection”’ (The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, ed. Charles Knight, 7 vols, 1842: Comedies, ii. 136)’ (J 297n). These lines hint that it is the love and passion which generate fancy that create Viola’s ‘sweet perfections’. Hopkins also seems to be interested in the disguise which is connected with Viola’s fancy, and quotes these lines and comments on Shakespeare’s language of inspiration: Twelfth Night Act II, Sc. II. ‘Of pregnant enemy’. ‘Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness, wherein the pregnant enemy does much’. Chalmers says ‘i.e. enemy of mankind’, emphasising this kind from the word itself he is wrong. The meaning must be Disguise is a wicked thing in which crime is conceived (pregnant) and brought to birth by the devil’s means, i.e. brought to commission. ‘How will this fadge?’ ‘To fadge is to suit, to fit.’ Chalmers. To fond on, to be fond of, to dote on.

(J 16)

Hopkins is attracted to the evocation of fancy in Twelfth Night, and begins to learn that it relates to love, passion and disguise. When he considers Shakespeare’s words which cannot be interpreted easily and sometimes have double meanings, he notices that they are the language of inspiration produced by fancy, which relates to the androgynous characteristic of Viola disguised as a man who has a good command of rhetoric. In his journal of 1863, before he quotes the lines that contain the word ‘fancy’ from Twelfth Night, Hopkins analyses and compares a significant word, ‘cling’, in Macbeth, which contains double meanings, as an example of his language of inspiration deriving from fancy. Concerning the origin of the word and ambiguous words of fancy, he also mentions a prophet who acts the role of fancy as ‘an ideot knave’, using words interpreted in different senses: Macbeth, Act V, Sc. Till famine cling thee. There is a North Country word clam or clem, meaning starve; and there was at the time of the battle of Bosworth field a prophet…who prophesied, or rather described in idiotic ramblings, the result of the battle. He was heard to say ‘Now Dick! now Harry! run Dick! run Harry! Harry has the day’. Which was interpreted of Richard III and Henry Duke of Lancaster, at that time, it was

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Hopkins realizes the depth or underthought of Shakespeare’s language of inspiration as the product of fancy in his minute analysis of a word, which is metaphorically connected to other words in its origin. Hopkins here exercises his faculty of fancy in his analysis of the association of words and senses condensed into the etymology of one word as an example of Shakespeare’s poetic diction. Thus the condensation in poetic diction is the key to understanding Hopkins’s fancy found in his poetry of inspiration. Hopkins also quotes a line from The Merchant of Venice in his journal of 1863: ‘“see how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold”. Merchant of Venice’ (J 11), while he notes the names of Shakespeare’s plays together with the names and works of other poets and writers whose works he regards as books to be read in his journal of 1865: Books to be readʊ…King Henry V, VI (part i, ii, and iii), Richard lll, and Henry VIII; Wordsworth; …Villari’s Life of Savonarola, vol ii; Beresford Hope’s English Cathedral; E. B. Denison’s book on church-restoring or something of the kind; Le Morte Arthur; Tracts for the Times; …Matthew Arnold’s Essays; Hain Friswell’s Life-portraits of Shakespeare; Modern Painters; …Dombey and Son; …The Story of Elizabeth; Silas Marner; The Mill on the Floss… (J 56)

This note suggests Hopkins’s diverse interest in writers of all ages, but he was especially attracted to Shakespeare whom he read in order to improve

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his poetic diction. In fact, in the same letter of 1864 where he discusses Shakespeare’s language of inspiration in contrast to the Parnassian of Tennyson, he writes that he was reading Henry IV before his discussion on poetic diction (LIII 215). In later years, Hopkins also quotes lines from Shakespeare’s plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard III in his discussion of ‘Rhythm and the Other Structural Parts of RhetoricʊVerse’ (J 274 & 279). * In 1864, the year in which he composed his unfinished play ‘Floris in Italy’, Hopkins attempted to establish his theory of poetic diction, regarding Shakespeare’s as the first and highest among the three kinds, and also to write ‘Floris in Italy’, imitating Shakespeare’s plays with heroines in disguise as the representations of fancy in order to incorporate the essence of fancy manifested in them. Therefore, it is necessary here to consider Shakespeare’s fancy, which especially influenced the disguised heroine and the use of fancy in ‘Floris in Italy’. What attracted Hopkins in Shakespeare’s fancy was his language of inspiration, which vividly illustrates the characteristics of fancy that ‘brings together images which have no connection natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by some accidental coincidence’ (S.T. Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols. [Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1990], 1: 489-90). As mentioned earlier, Hopkins’s terms ‘Parnassian’ and ‘the language of inspiration’ parallel ‘overthought’ and ‘underthought’. Frye explains this using the example of Shakespeare plays: ‘There is the distinction between ‘overthought’, the superficial meaning conveyed by the syntax, and ‘underthought’, the deeper meaning conveyed by the imagery and metaphors, which in some Shakespeare plays, for example, may be telling us something quite different from the syntactical sense’ (Frye 326). As Frye summarises Hopkins’s relation to Shakespeare, Hopkins’s language of inspiration derived from fancy parallels his idea of underthought, which can be observed in Shakespeare’s metaphors. The fancy expressed in Shakespeare’s language of inspiration is related to the fancy demonstrated in the disguises of both his and Hopkins’s heroines, and is expressed in their poetic diction as well. Fancy in Shakespeare not only focuses on superficial appearances and on producing superficial figures, but is also used to fulfill the deeper wishes of the characters, and this can be compared to Hopkins’s view of fancy as

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moving from absorption in appearances to the intuition of a deeper truth. Hopkins was influenced by Romantic poets’ ideas about using colloquial language, but he was not satisfied with them because of their lack of surprise. He was particularly concerned with metaphors which surprise the reader with excellent fancy or the language of inspiration, which is demonstrated well in Shakespeare’s poetic diction, as distinct from Parnassian, or the mannerism which he found in some poets like Tennyson and Wordsworth. By fancy, Hopkins means rhetoric, or poetic diction with underthought as the truth hidden beneath the surface but discovered with minute observation. Later in life in his letter to R. W. Dixon written on 7 August 1886, Hopkins again mentions the difference between Shakespeare and Wordsworth in terms of rhetoric. Even though he admits Wordsworth’s insight into nature, Hopkins again criticizes his Parnassian as the poetic diction without underthought: Shakespeare had the finest faculty of observation of all men that ever breathed…. By the by, why should Wordsworth-worship be ‘a difficult thing’? …I mean his spiritual insight into nature; and they perhaps think is above all the poet’s gift? He had a ‘divine philosophy’ and lovely gift of verse; but in his work there is nevertheless beaucoup à redire: it is due to the universal fault of our literature, its weakness is rhetoric. The strictly poetical insight and inspiration of our poetry seems to me to be of the very finest, finer perhaps than the Greek; but its rhetoric is inadequateʊseldom firstrate, mostly only just sufficient, sometimes even below par. By rhetoric I mean all the common and teachable element in literature, what grammar is to speech, what thoroughbass is to music, what theatrical experience gives to playwrights. If you leave out the embroidery (to be sure the principal thing) of…the Excursion and look only at the groundwork and stuff of the web is it not fairly true to say ‘This will never do’? There does seem to be a great deal of dullness, superfluity, aimlessness, poverty of plan. (LII 140-141)

In 1865, in his essay ‘On the Origin of Beauty’, Hopkins discusses the difference in kinds of beauty between the works of Shakespeare and Tennyson, paralleling his discussion of the difference in their poetic diction in his letter: ‘...You would say that The Tempest is beautiful (I mean Shakespeare’s play) would you not? and you would say that Tennyson’s poems are beautiful, and I will suppose for argument’s sake that you like them all

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without exception: now do you mean the same thing in saying The Tempest is beautiful and that Tennyson’s poems are beautiful?’ (J 96)

To this question of the Professor, his student Hanbury answers that he cannot see the difference in kind between them. Turning from poems, the Professor then discusses the omission of a phrase with ‘unconsciously produced double senses’: ‘…one hears a great deal about the tragic irony of the Greek playwriters, and the spirit which is meant by that phrase will run through a play and be developed in particular scenes, but yet have so little directly to do with the story, that a child would understand the play just as well if all expressions of this spirit were left out. The misconceptions, the unconsciously produced double senses the prophecies and so on, of the characters are favourite channels of pathos and other dramatic effect with the poets. They are not needed by the plot or the bare statement of them only is needed, but dramatically considered their loss would be great, would it not? (J 96)

This time, Hanbury answers: ‘Certainly, yes.’ Hopkins here discusses the matter of poetic diction again, and he idealizes Shakespeare’s poetic diction in his plays as the language of inspiration with ‘unconsciously produced double senses’, while he also gives a similar explanation to his definition of ‘underthought’, ‘conveyed chiefly in the choice of metaphors… used and often only half realised by the poet himself, not necessarily having any connection with the subject in hand but usually having a connection and suggested by some circumstance of the scene or of the story’ (LIII 252). From this discussion, Hopkins seems to suggest that Tennyson’s poetic diction is Parnassian, which is beautiful but does not contain double senses and underthought. At first, Hopkins tried to imitate Shakespeare’s fancy with a heroine in disguise and the language of inspiration with underthought in ‘Floris in Italy’, but later he almost moved away from drama and concentrated on the fancy in poetic diction, especially metaphors, in the sonnet form. Beginning from his respect for Shakespeare’s language of inspiration, Hopkins later gave religious meanings to fancy with his belief in the Real Presence, the Incarnation and the Passion. *

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In L’Allegro (1645), John Milton wrote ‘sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child’ (133).19 The term ‘fancy’ applied to William Shakespeare has several meanings related to fantasy, inspiration, love, figures in poetry, and ornamentation. As well as the language of inspiration of Shakespeare, it is worthy of note that heroines in disguise display the nature of fancy in The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night.

2.3.2. The Merchant of Venice In The Merchant of Venice (1596), the elements of fancy are apparent in Portia: the ornamentation of a woman disguised as a man, the androgynous unity of opposites, and irrational illogicality. Her marriage is to be bound by her father’s will, but she longs for fancy in the form of free love. Portia contrasts reason with passion which has no bounds: …The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree ʊsuch a hare is madness the youth, to skip o’er the meshes of good counsel the cripple. But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband. O me, the word ‘choose’! I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father. (1.2.15-21)20

Portia laments her destiny because she is still ‘curbed by the will of a dead father’ and cannot love a man with her own will. His will tells her to marry a man who will choose the box containing her portrait from among three boxes. This idea itself is an expression of fancy or inspiration, which her father was given just before his death. Nerissa tells Portia that her ‘father was ever virtuous; and holy men at their death have good inspirations’ (1. 2. 23-24). Portia is a lady in the imaginary city of Belmont, where her fancy is bred. Fancy signifies love related to outward appearance and sight, which is described as ‘love at first sight’. Portia, who loves Bassanio at first sight, says to him: ‘Beshrew your eyes! / They have o’erlooked me and divided me’ (3.2.14-15). These lines suggest that the magical power of Bassanio’s eyes will divide the self of Portia, who is going to disguise herself as a man, assuming the androgynous element of fancy. In contrast 19

John Milton, L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas. Ed. Edward S. Parsons, Boston: Benj. H. Sanborn & CO., 1900), 6. 20 The text used here is: The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood (2003).

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to subjective imagination, fancy ‘is engend’red in the eye’ when the subject gazes at the other and is influenced by him or her. Portia uses a song expressing fancy, rhyming ‘bred’ with ‘head’ to hint at the box of ‘lead’ to Bassanio, and the act of contemplation involving sight which prompts fancy is explicit here: Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head? How begot, how nourishèd? Reply, reply. It is engend’red in the eye, (3.2.63-68) With gazing fed…

Portia wins Bassanio with the rhetoric of fancy. Fancy here signifies love, and these lines suggest that love is born through sight and outward appearance. Being thus both internal and external, it is also related to the ambiguity of figures with both superficial and profound meanings. After this rhyme, Bassanio says: ‘So may the outward shows be least themselves: / The world is still deceived with ornament’ (3.2.73). His words imply the disguises of Portia and Nerissa as men. Fancy’s ornamentation is not only relevant to disguise but also to figures and metaphors which combine superficial and profound meanings. Fancy begets metaphors because they have ambiguous meanings and connect different elements. Portia fancies that she will disguise herself and Nerissa as men, hiding their true selves, and in so doing suggests the relationship between fancy and love in her lies and her associated plans to deceive Bassanio and Lorenzo visually: NERISSA PORTIA

Shall they see us? They shall, Nerissa, but in such a habit That they shall think we are accomplished With that we lack. I’ll hold thee any wager, When we are both accoutred like young men I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two, …and tell quaint lies How honourable ladies sought my love, Which I denying, they fell sick and died 㸫 I could not do withal. (3.4.59-72㸧

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Thus, the heroine in disguise has both superficial and in-depth meanings and both truth and falsity, by playing the role of a man though she is a woman. In The Merchant of Venice, the fancy of a woman disguised as a man resolves all the problems in the end, and reveals the truth and true love by the power of fancy or rhetoric. Portia does not passively follow the destiny given to her by her father. Instead, she makes use of it, and succeeds in gaining the love of the man she loves at first sight by means of deception and figures which are the products of fancy. Portia in the imaginary city of Belmont copes with Shylock in Venice in the disguise which is a product of her fancy. She leaves Belmont and displays her fancy in the court of Venice which is a real and different world for her. As a result, Portia’s fancy defeats Shylock’s. The same pattern is observable in two other works: heroines leave their hometowns and express their fancies in different places.

2.3.3. As You Like It In the three plays of Shakespeare mentioned above, the androgynous heroines disguised as men have good command of their fancies in seeking to attain their loves. Fancy is relevant to rhetorical and figurative elements in poetry as well as love at first sight. In As You Like It (1598-1600), Shakespeare emphasizes both the element of the heroine in disguise and that of love at first sight, describing the ambiguity of fancy, the contrast between real and imaginary worlds, and love at first sight. Rosalind becomes an outsider, who is expelled from the court which is dominated by reason and convention, disguises herself as a man and goes into the forest on the periphery of society. Disguise and love at first sight as the products of fancy are also manifested here, when Rosalind as the representation of fancy disguises herself by means of tricks in the forest and again meets Orlando, whom she loved at first sight in the court. Her disguise fools the eye of Orlando who loves her, and her fancy is the means to see if his love is true. This play also implies that the figures of speech in poetry and rhymes are closely connected with fancy. Rosalind tries to see if the love or fancy of Orlando is true after she finds the poems which tell his love for her. She calls him ‘fancy-monger’ signifying ‘dealer in love’: ‘If I could meet that fancy-monger, I would give him some good counsel, for he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him’ (3.2.347349). The words ‘fancy’ and ‘fantastical’ are more frequently used in this play than in The Merchant of Venice. The exchange of words between

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Rosalind and Orlando suggests the connections among fancy, love and rhyme, and between poetry and madness: ROSALIND ORLAND ROSALIND

But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak? Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much. Love is merely a madness, and… deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do…. (3.2.377-383)

Rosalind’s words (3.2.381-383) intimate a current method of treatment for the insane, as seen in the trick played on Malvolio in Twelfth Night (4.2).21 To cure the lovesickness of Orlando, Rosalind gives some false examples with her fancy and tells him to play, imagining her ‘his love’: …He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me. At which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something, and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colourʊwould now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him, that I drave my suitor from his mad humour of love to a living humour of madness… (3.2.387-398)

The act of ‘imagining’ begins with the self, so it is apt to fall into prejudice or preconception without looking at the true nature of the object. Rosalind promises to cure the lovesickness of Orlando, suggesting that he make advances to her imagining her to be his love though she wears the disguise of a man. While Orlando is concentrating on his imagination, he says that Rosalind is ‘fantastical’ and she recites the adjectives concerning the elements of fancy. Her words imply that fancy which derives from love yields madness. The difference between imagination and fancy is that imagination is trapped by man’s own creative vision while he is affected and overwhelmed by his love through fancy. While the sun represents male subjectivity and self-centeredness, the moon is related to the female periphery, otherness and madness. Therefore, fancy can be characterized as ‘moonish’ (3.2.389). Rosalind, who plays her role in a complicated play within a play, disguises herself as a man with her fancy and hides her true

21

See the note to As You Like It, 172.

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self to manipulate Orlando. Finally, her fancy in the periphery dominates his imagination in the centre. Not only is Rosalind disguised as a man, but also Touchstone as a court jester or fool plays an important role concerning the act of fancy. Sir Oliver Martext calls him ‘a fantastical knave’: ‘Ne’er a fantastical knave of them all shall flout me out of my calling’ (3.3.96-97). Fools are also in disguise, emphasizing the aspect of ‘a play within a play’ in Shakespearean drama, and embodying fancy as madness, in the sense that they invert conventional values. Their fancies make the periphery dominate the centre in festivals, in contrast with the real world dominated by reason. Shakespeare, however, does not regard the fools in his plays as truly mad. In fact, they play the part of mad men, have good command of figurative words which they use by means of fancy, and sometimes represent the playwright himself standing outside his plays and manipulating them. Touchstone also describes poetry with the characteristics of fancy as being at once true and false: ‘…the truest poetry is the most feigning, and lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry it maybe said, as lovers, they do feign’ (3.3.16-18); he also tells Audrey about fancy in poetry: ‘If thou wert a poet, I might have some hope thou didst feign’ (3.3.21-23). Thus, Rosalind in disguise and the fool make good use of fancy to handle truth and falsity and connect opposite things. Fancy is relevant to the madness and passion of ‘love at first sight’, which is subject to the effects of outward appearance and opposed to reason. Fancy is thus true as well as false, and the poetry it produces is characterised by figures and metaphors. The heroines in disguise use words with two meanings through their fancy. Figures are ornaments which hide the true meanings of words. Rosalind and the fool suggest the relationship between art and nature in the ideal of Elizabethan drama in that both of them are conscious of acting and producing a play within a play. Corin, an old shepherd, calls the exchange between Silvius as a young shepherd and Phoebe as a shepherdess ‘a pageant truly played’, and then Rosalind says that she will ‘prove a busy actor in their play’: CORIN

If you will see a pageant truly played Between the pale complexion of true love And the red glow of scorn and proud disdain, Go hence a little, and I shall conduct you, If you will mark it.

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(to Celia) O come, let us remove. The sight of lovers feedeth those in love. (To Corin) Bring us to this sight, and you shall say I’ll prove a busy actor in their play. (3.4.47-55)

In the exchange between Silvius and Phoebe, the word ‘eye’ is frequently repeated and emphasizes ‘love at first sight’: PHOEBE (to Silvius) Thou tell’st me there is murder in mine eye. ’Tis pretty sure, and very probable, That eyes, that are the frail’st and softest things, Who shut their coward gates on anatomies, Should be called tyrants, butchers, and murderers. Now I do frown on thee with all my heart, And if mine eyes can wound, now let them kill thee. Now counterfeit to swoon, why now fall down; Or if thou canst not, O, for shame, for shame, Lie not, to say mine eyes are murderers. Now show the wound mine eye hath made in thee. (3.5.10-20)

Phoebe opposes the statement of Silvius that there is murder in her eye (3.5.10), but as Portia’s rhyme in The Merchant of Venice shows, fancy is bred in the eye. Thus, the deprivation of self which affects a person experiencing love at first sight signifies the nullification and death of the subject. Silvius implies that ‘the power of fancy’ produces this state of mind: If ever ʊ as that ever may be near ʊ You meet in some fresh cheek the power of fancy, Then shall you know the wounds invisible That love’s keen arrows make. (3.5.29-32)

Rosalind, whose persuasive disguise represents the power of fancy, enters onto the stage. Phoebe, who is tricked and trapped by the fancy of Rosalind through her disguise as a stunning man, quotes the line from Christopher Marlowe: ‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’ (3.5.82) Thus, fancy expressed through Rosalind’s disguise evolves into the eternal triangle involving Orlando and Phoebe. At the end of the play, Rosalind unfolds her true self and love, and marries Orlando. As is often mentioned in Shakespearean criticism, the following lines spoken by Jaques convey Shakespeare’s ideal of drama:

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Chapter Two All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. (2.7.139-143)

The idea behind these lines is that people have ambiguities and multiplicities, hide their true selves, and must act their roles in the temporary world as if it were a stage, in contrast with heaven as the true home of their spirits. Therefore, human existence itself is subject to fancy, which is both true and false, reflecting the ideal of Shakespeare’s time that the stage should be the mirror of the world. The theme of fancy commented on by Jaques, who is obsessed with melancholy, is later taken up in the first lines of Orsino: ‘I have neither the scholar’s melancholy… nor the musician’s, which is fantastical…’ (4.1.10-11).

2.3.4. Twelfth Night The word ‘fancy’ is also significantly used in Twelfth Night (1601), where Viola in disguise as a man is the representation of fancy as the source of ornament, poetic figures, and multiplicity. At the beginning of the play, Orsino, Duke of Illyria, suggests that the multiplicity of fancy is related to love and music: If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die. … …So full of shapes is fancy, That it alone is high-fantastical. (1.1.1-15)

The word ‘fancy’ here means ‘love’ which transforms itself into various shapes, and this implies that Viola, who is in love with Orsino, hides her true nature under the disguise of a man. It is clear from the first that the theme of the play is fancy, as Orsino speaks of his love at first sight for Olivia: ‘O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first / Methought she purged the air of pestilence’ (1.1.18-19). In Act 1, Scene 2, the storm is making Viola’s ship drift towards the shore of Illyria. Her fancy (or wit) makes her ask the captain to help her disguise herself as ‘an eunuch’: I pray theeʊand I’ll pay thee bounteouslyʊ Conceal me what I am, and be my aid For such disguise as haply shall become

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The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke. Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him. It may be worth thy pains, for I can sing, And speak to him in many sorts of music That will allow me very worth his service. What else may hap, to time I will commit, Only shape thou thy silence to my wit. (1.2.49-58)

These lines imply that Viola’s fancy as the source of multiplicity and ornamentation is related to music as well. Her very name signifies a musical instrument, the viola, and also the term ‘fancy’ itself signifies ‘a composition for keyboard or strings in free or variation form’ in sixteenth and seventeenth century music (OED). In a way that resembles the pattern of the heroines in the two other plays of Shakespeare I have discussed, Viola’s fancy expressed in her disguise is explicit in Illyria, which is an unknown place to her. Thus Shakespeare’s heroines in disguise exercise their fancy in a new and ‘other’ world for them, which is completely irrelevant to their experience. In other words, they must transfer from their true self or nature to otherness with their disguises, showing the characteristics of fancy. As for fancy in Twelfth Night, A. W. Schlegel discusses the relationship between love and fancy in ‘Lecture XXIV: Criticisms on Shakespeare’s Comedies’ in Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1809). He comments that in Shakespeare’s ‘language, the some word, fancy, signified both fancy and love’, and contrasts the Duke’s love for Olivia with Viola’s love for him: ‘The love of the music-enraptured Duke for Olivia is not merely fancy, but imagination; Viola appears at first to fall arbitrarily in love with the Duke, whom she serves as a page, although she afterwards touches the tenderest strings of feeling’ (Schlegel 392). There is an important point that Schlegel does not mention here. Although Viola’s love as fancy seems to be lower than the imagination of the Duke, her love for him turns out to be true and his love for Olivia false in the end. The Duke’s love for Olivia only exists in his imagination, which is related to his ego. Hopkins seems to think that imagination (or what Hopkins calls the transitional kind of energy in mind) relates to self. As I will mention later, Coleridge relates the secondary imagination to individual will, or the free will as an aspect of the self, while Hopkins’s definition of imagination relates to his religious idea of ‘the elective will’ or ‘the arbitrium’, which is concerned with ego or self. In contrast, fancy

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is represented in Twelfth Night by a woman disguised as a man, and the androgynous and peripheral fancy of Viola eventually overturns the maledominated centre and imagination. While the Duke’s love in his imagination is prepossessed with convention and pedigree, Viola’s fancy makes him aware of the facts and of true love in the end. Besides, Olivia’s love at first sight for Cesario, who is acted by Viola in disguise, is an expression of fancy as well, suggesting the relationship between fancy and sight, but her love for Cesario as a pretended man is not true. In other words, only the heroine in disguise can manipulate the power of fancy, which controls the people around her. The Duke says that men’s ‘fancies are more giddy and unfirm, / More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, / Than women’s are’ (2.4.32-34). These lines also suggest that fancy is insubstantial and ambiguous, but Viola’s fancy is directed only towards the Duke, so she finally attains him by means of it. In Act 4, Scene1, Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother, refers to the absurdity of fancy in contrast with reason, when Olivia comes to him, mistaking him for Cesario: ‘…I am mad, or else this is a dream. / Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep. / If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep’ (4.1.59-61). Thus, fancy is repeatedly connected by Shakespeare with madness, dream, the unconscious, and irrational love. The love triangle involving the heroine disguised as a man in this play, developed from As You Like It, reaches a finale when Sebastian suddenly appears. The female and male twins can be seen as standing for the act of fancy itself as the unity between opposites, and Viola best represents the element of fancy among the heroines in the three plays treated here. The lines from the monologue of the Duke in Act 1, scene 1, including the words ‘fancy’ and ‘fantastical’ which Hopkins mentions, are also quoted by Coleridge in Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets: Twelfth Night. Act 1. sc. 1. Duke’s speech:ʊ ‘ʊso full of shapes is fancy, That it alone is high fantastical.’ …’Fancy’ may very well be interpreted ‘exclusive affection,’ or ‘passionate preference’. Thus, bird-fanciers, gentlemen of the fancy, that is, amateurs of boxing, &c. The play of assimilation,ʊthe meaning one sense chiefly, and yet keeping both senses in view, is perfectly Shakespearian.

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… Ib. [Act. ii] sc. 4. ‘Duke. My life upon’t, young though thou art, thine eye Hath stay’d upon some favour that it loves; Hath it not, boy? Vio. A little, by your favour. Duke. What kind of woman is’t?’ And yet Viola was to have been presented to Orsino as a eunuch! … Ib. ‘Vio. A blank, my lord: she never told her love!ʊ But let concealment,’ &c. … Act. iii. Sc. 1. ‘Clown. A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit’. … Act. v. sc. 1. Clown’s speech:ʊ ‘So that, conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives makes your two affirmatives, why, then, the worse for my friends, and the better for my foes’. …In the name of love and wonder, do not four kisses make a double affirmative? The humour lies in the whispered ‘No!’ and the inviting ‘Don’t!’ with which the maiden’s kisses are accompanied, and thence compared to negatives, which by repetition constitute an affirmative. (LNS 295-297)

Starting by considering the relationship between fancy and affection, or love and passion, Coleridge discusses the characteristics of fancy in Twelfth Night. He also mentions the act of fancy in combining two different senses of words, which ‘is perfectly Shakespearian’. Coleridge also implies the relationship between fancy and sight, and refers to the word-play which is manipulated by Viola and Feste the clown as the product of fancy. In Act 2, scene 4, Orsino who thinks Viola is a boy (or a eunuch, as Coleridge says), asks her if she gazed at the face of a man (woman) she loved. She answers with the words ‘by your favour’, which is a pun on both ‘by your leave’ and on ‘a face like yours’ (Twelfth Night, 135). This shows an example of Viola’s good command of fancy. She hides her true self and her love for Orsino, explaining ‘what love women to men may owe’ and that women ‘are as true of heart’ as men before she tells him the story of a maiden who did not tell her love to the man she loved (2.4.105-111). Feste also manipulates fancy with his word-play. In

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Act 3, scene 1, the word ‘cheveril’ (or ‘chev’rel’ in Shakespeare’s original text) means ‘literally kid (from Middle English chevrelle), a very soft, pliable leather (OED sb.1) easily turned inside out, and so an apt expression for the way in which a phrase can be manipulated for witty purposes’ (Twelfth Night, 153n). The last instance of Shakespeare’s language of inspiration as the product of fancy which Coleridge presents is more enigmatic. Feste’s simile of kisses, he argues, can be interpreted as follows: ‘as in grammar four negatives make two affirmatives, so, when a girl is asked for a kiss, her “no, no, no, no” may be construed as “yes, yes”. The point of the comparison is to show how things turn out to be the opposite of what you expect: negatives prove affirmatives, friends foes, and vice versa’ (Twelfth Night, 201n). These instances well explain Coleridge’s appreciation of Shakespeare’s fancy, which is explicit in the acts and words of Viola and Feste in Twelfth Night. Eventually, the Duke calls Viola ‘fancy’s queen’. This implies that Viola, who has served him as a page, finally stands above him, and their ranks are reversed: …Cesario, comeʊ For so you shall be while you are a man; But when in other habits you are seen, Orsino’s mistress, and fancy’s queen. (5.1.375-378)

Viola also makes this play original as the heroine who loves a man at first sight after she disguises herself. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare apparently stresses fancy as he mentions it in the first and the last lines. As for the disguise in Twelfth Night, it is evident that the element of fancy concealing true self is most emphasised, considering the fact that this play is a mask. Not only the heroine in disguise, but also Feste hides his true self and wisdom, and his presence is even more intense than that of Touchstone in As You Like It. While the narcissistic Malvolio becomes a true fool because he disguises himself by means of his imagination, Feste, who has the playwright’s viewpoint and looks at the play from the outside, concludes it with his song which tells the audience that all is a play or fancy. He intensifies the element of festivity on the eve of the Epiphany, and reverses the conventional relation between the centre and the periphery with the heroine in disguise exercising the power of fancy in a play as a kind of a carnival. It is possible to say that the heroine disguised as a man in the centre of the play clearly displays her festive figure, representing fancy in the world as a stage.

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2.3.5. Conclusion Through the three plays of Shakespeare, Portia disguises herself as a man only in the court of Venice in The Merchant of Venice, but the heroines in As You Like It and Twelfth Night wear men’s attire in most of the scenes. In addition, Twelfth Night has the largest number of scenes in which the heroine hides her true self from the man she loves. Just as Rosalind, who disguises herself as a man, makes Orlando tell his love to her and is loved by Phoebe at first sight in As You Like It, Viola disguised as a page suggests her love for the Duke and is loved by Olivia. Thus, these plays exhibit intricate homosexual relationships controlled by fancy. It is also likely that fancy with elements of disguise and homosexuality was even more evident in the time of Shakespeare, when boys acted the heroines disguised as men. Through the fancies of androgynous heroines in disguise representing ambiguity, Shakespeare implies that his drama also plays the role of fancy in connecting art with nature, and the real with the unreal, while hiding reality and truth with figures and masks. His plays make the audience believe that the stage is real. In order to show that this can only be done by the power of fancy, Shakespeare has endowed his heroines in disguise with this power.

2.4. Between Truth and Untruth: Tennyson’s Fancy in ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ Hopkins categorizes poetic language into three kinds in his notes written in 1864 (J 38). The lowest is that of ‘poetasters’; then comes “Parnassian” which can ‘only be used by real poets’ and can ‘be written without inspiration Good instance in Enoch Arden’s island’; the third and ‘highest, poetry proper’ is the ‘language of inspiration’. He explains this in detail in his letter to Baillie on 10 September, 1864. Parallel to this definition of poetic diction, in his journal of 1864, Hopkins notes: ‘Mem. To ask Mr Burton about picture-frames, price of models, whether the pictures by W. S. Burton in the Academy are his, about the Preraphaelite Brotherhood, the French Preraphaelites, the Düsseldorf school etc. (J 31)

This note proves Hopkins’s interest in the pictures by William Shakespeare Burton (1824-1916), whose style follows Pre- Raphaelite

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realism applied to a historical subject (Wood 61). They are “‘Guinevere” and “Elaine” (illustrating scenes from Idylls of the King)’ (J 315n), and it is possible that Hopkins saw them in the exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1864. In his letter to R.W. Dixon written in 1879, Hopkins admits that Tennyson’s works including The Idylls of the King are ‘works of fancy’ (LII 24), though in his later years he becomes critical of Tennyson’s fancy as in his discussion of Tennyson’s Miller’s Daughter in his letter to Patmore in 1883: ‘The ingenuity of the passage about Cupid’s bow and the letters spelling ‘Kiss’ is extreme, but extreme ingenuity and turns of pure fancy in art are in great danger of frigidity’ (LIII 320). The elements of fancy are evident in Tennyson’s ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ (1859), the seventh idyll in Idylls of the King. Before writing ‘Floris in Italy’, Hopkins was influenced by Tennyson’s ‘Lancelot and Elaine’, where the words ‘fancy’ and ‘fantasy’ appear frequently. The direct influence of ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ and the Arthurian theme on ‘Floris in Italy’ is observable in some fragments of Hopkins’s play.22 Elaine as the heroine in this narrative poem is depicted as the representative of fancy, who uses the power of fancy in a similar way to the heroines in disguise in Shakespeare’s three plays examined above. * The Story of ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ was developed from ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1832 &1842) because both poems have the same plot: the dead body of a maiden who loved Lancelot comes down the river in a boat to Camelot. Tennyson was so interested in the theme that he worked on it twice. While Lancelot plays a supporting role in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, Tennyson begins ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ with the depiction of Elaine as the 22

There are eight fragments in ‘Floris in Italy’, and N. H. MacKenzie points out the influence of ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ in fragment (g) ‘Scene. A cave in a quarry’ : ‘…here Gabriel’s reference to Guinevere…is given great emotional impact in (h) by a more compelling character. Lancelot in Tennyson’s ‘[Lancelot and] Elaine’ finds healing from a hermit in a cave (PIII 248n). The influence of the Arthurian theme is also evident in fragment (h) ‘ʊO Guinevere’: ‘That GMH was preparing to make greater use of the Arthurian prototypes emerges from J. 56 (c. 2 Mar. 1865), “Books to be read…Le Morte Arthur…”. Wm. Morris had publ. “The Defence of Guinevere” in 1858. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859) had taken a stern view of the moral corruption sown by Guinevere’s love for Lancelot…’ (PIII 248).

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woman who influences Lancelot. The Pre-Raphaelites were attracted to ‘The Lady of Shalott’. Rossetti contributed five illustrations of Tennyson’s Poems, published by Edward Moxon in 1857, one of them for ‘The Lady of Shalott’ [Fig. 15]. 23 Hopkins may have seen this illustration in an illustrated edition of Tennyson’s Poems. Hopkins’s interest in the theme of ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ was possibly developed from this Pre-Raphaelite affection for Tennyson who treated Arthurian romance. As with fancy, the words ‘beauty’ and ‘love’ are frequently used in ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ in order to show that its theme is the truth and untruth in love. Fancy is concerned with mutually exclusive elements: truth and untruth, or reality and fantasy. The key characteristic of fancy here is that of uniting opposite elements which is also emphasized in Coleridge’s definition of fancy, and is also the same as Hopkins’s definition of fancy as producing abrupt parallelisms. Elaine is depicted as the personification of fancy. She demonstrates the characteristic of fancy as producing ornament and rhetoric, when she gives Lancelot the idea of disguise and is waiting for him to come back to her, decorating ornaments on his shield: Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable, Elaine the lily maid of Astolat, High in her chamber up a tower to the east Guarded the sacred shield of Lancelot;

(1-4)

There are words concerning ‘beauty’ and ‘love’ in the depiction of Elaine here at the beginning of the poem. The setting of the story in brief is: King Arthur has not been aware of the adultery between Lancelot and Queen Guinevere; Lancelot hiding his own identity takes part in a joust held at Camelot, but as his shield is well known, he leaves it with Elaine when he visits Astolat; even though she does not know his name, Elaine is fascinated by him and waits for his return in a tower: Then fearing rust or soilure fashion’d for it A case of silk, and braided thereupon All the devices blazon’d on the shield In their own tinct, and added, of her wit, A border fantasy of branch and flower, And yellow-throated nestling in the nest. 23 Laurence Des Cars, The Pre-Raphaelites: Romance and Realism, trans. Francisca Garvie (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 67.

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112 … …so she lived in fantasy.

(7-27)

Arthur takes nine diamonds from his crown, and gives them one by one to the winner each year, and Lancelot keeps winning for eight years. Lancelot devises a secret plan whereby he will give the nine diamonds to Guinevere to win ‘her loyal fancy’ (71) if he also wins the last time. While the word ‘fancy’ here means ‘love’, it also implies Lancelot’s secret intention to surprise her with the diamonds. Hearing her saying, ‘Stay with me, I am sick; my love is more / Than many diamonds’ (87-88), he speaks ‘against the truth’ (92) and says: ‘Sir King, mine ancient wound is hardly whole, / And lets me from the saddle’ (93-94). Then, Lancelot gets angry, ‘having lied in vain’ (102). In order to know her true feeling, he asks the Queen: ‘…would yourself, / Now weary of my service and devoir, / Henceforth be truer to your faultless lord?’ (117-119). She answers, ‘He never had a glimpse of mine untruth’ (125). Guinevere ironically calls Arthur’s ‘Table Round’ fancy: ‘Some meddling rogue has tamper’d with himʊelse / Rapt in this fancy of his Table Round’ (128-129). The Queen compares ‘the faultless King’ (121) to ‘the sun in heaven’ (123):

Fig. 15

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He is all fault who hath no fault at all. For who loves me must have a touch of earth; The low sun makes the colour. I am yours, Not Arthur’s, as ye know, save by the bond. (132-135)

The Queen, untrue to Arthur, sees his ideal kingdom as fancy. Her words imply the difference between their viewpoints, and the borderline between truth and untruth or between reality and fancy is ambiguous here. After Arthur gives up, knowing that Lancelot will not take part in the joust, the Queen suggests that he join it while hiding his true identity so as to surprise the King by revealing the truth after he wins. Like Lancelot who tries to surprise her, the Queen uses her fancy to surprise the ‘true King’ (151). This shows that fancy may involve an effect of inspiration which surprises people. There is a multilayer structure of fancy, in which the Queen does not know the true intention of Lancelot while Arthur does not know the intention of either of them. Thus, the fancies involved in these secret intentions are significant in this narrative poem. After receiving the Queen’s order, Lancelot suddenly gets ‘to horse / Wroth at himself’ (158-9): …Not willing to be known, He left the barren-beaten thoroughfare, Chose the green path that show’d the rarer foot, And there among the solitary downs, Full often lost in fancy, lost his way; (159-163)

Lancelot gets angry at himself because he lies to himself, suppressing the truth. Then he suddenly arrives at Astolat and sees the tower where Elaine lives. There is also an element of fancy here in this unrealistic development of the story, where things happen fortuitously due to destiny. Lancelot meets the Lord of Astolat, his two sons, Torre and Lavaine, and his daughter, Elaine. He asks them to lend him a shield ‘with some device’ differing from his to hide his true identity, and borrows Torre’s shield (189-193). The depiction of Elaine at the beginning of the poem has already mentioned the device on the shield. As fancy’s role, which Shakespeare also depicts in his plays, includes the use of figurative ornamentation to hide true meanings in poetry, so the shield is the identification of Lancelot, and the device on it implies the influence of fancy. The depiction of Elaine at the beginning suggests that she is the personification of fancy.

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Lavaine says to his father that Elaine ‘dreamt / That some one put this diamond in her hand’ (210-211), and stresses that he is telling a tale of fancy by using the conditional ‘if’: …and then I said That if I went and if I fought and won itʊ But all was jest and joke among ourselvesʊ Then must she keep it safelier. All was jest. But, father, give me leave, an if he will, To ride to Camelot with this noble knight. (214-219)

When Torre belittles Elaine by saying that a ‘fair large diamond’ is ‘for queens, and not for simple maids’ (229-230), Elaine keeps ‘her eyes upon the ground’ (231). However, she lifts her eyes when Lancelot replies to his words, ‘looking at her, / Full courtly, yet not falsely’ (235): ‘If what is fair be but for what is fair, And only queens are to be counted so, Rash were my judgment then, who deem this maid Might wear as fair a jewel as is on earth, Not violating the bond of like to like.’ (236-240)

Although Lancelot’s face was marred by the ‘great and guilty love he bare the Queen, / In battle with the love he bare his lord’ (244-245), ‘he seem’d…noblest, when she lifted up her eyes… / And loved him, with that love which was her doom’ (253-259). Thus, Elaine is depicted as the passive subject, who is influenced and controlled by her doom or the Other. Lancelot as the object of Elaine’s love is described as ‘the great knight… / Loved of the loveliest’ (260-261). While the lines suggest the relationship between love and beauty, this kind of epithet is generally used for a lady. When he is looking for his shield, Elaine appears out of the tower standing in the moonlight. Lancelot is fascinated by her unearthly beauty. The scene depicts one of the elements of fancy, in which the beauty of the object fascinates and surprises the subject: …He look’d, and, more amazed Than if seven men had set upon him, saw The maiden standing in the dewy light. He had not dream’d she was so beautiful. Then came on him a sort of sacred fear, For silent, tho’ he greeted her, she stood Rapt on his face as if it were a god’s. (348-354)

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Elaine suddenly suggests to Lancelot the idea that ‘he should wear her favour at the tilt’ (356). Lancelot agrees to her suggestion, and asks her to keep his shield until he comes back. He hides his true identity with a disguise, which Elaine has given him as the element of fancy. ‘Then to her tower she climb’d, and took the shield, / There kept it, and so lived in fantasy’ (395-396). The disguise of Lancelot who hides himself with the decoration of Elaine’s favour represents fancy in multiple figures and shapes. When Lancelot appears at the tilt against Arthur’s knights, his identity is about to be discovered because of his strength and elegance. However, he does not have the habit of wearing a favour, so a fury seized his relatives, that is, a ‘fiery passion for the name / Of Lancelot’ (475-476). Thus, fancy makes people lose their reason. Though Lancelot wins the tilt, he is dying with a lance in his side. He shouts without taking the diamond as a prize: ‘Prize me no prizes, for my prize is death!' (504). His shout expresses his moral and rational understanding, which leads him to think that God curses him because he has betrayed Arthur and tried to obtain the diamond for the Queen. To die for love is an act of fancy, whereby the subject plunges him- or herself into the object so as to lose his or her ego. This poem has many sudden and unexplained twists in the plot that cannot be logically explained, and the adverb ‘suddenly’ often appears. This shows the element of fancy characteristic of fairy tales and medieval poetry. Lancelot ‘vanish’d suddenly from the field / With young Lavaine into the poplar grove’ (506-507). Then, a hermit comes and heals Lancelot, who has pulled the lance from his side and is dying from loss of blood (517-518). The poplar is a symbol of death and resurrection, so it hints that the dying Lancelot will recover. Arthur looks for the knight with a red sleeve, and sends Gawain to give him the diamond as his prize. Arthur thinks, ‘Is it Lancelot who hath come / Despite the wound he spake of, all for gain / Of glory, and hath added wound to wound, / And ridden away to die?’ (563-567), and he asks the Queen, ‘And where is Lancelot?’ (570). She pretends to be amazed, and reveals to him that the knight is Lancelot: And when the King demanded how she knew, Said: ‘Lord, no sooner had ye parted from us Than Lancelot told me of a common talk That men went down before his spear at a touch, But knowing he was Lancelot; his great name Conquer’d; and therefore would he hide his name From all men, even the King,… (573-579)

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The disguise of Lancelot who hides his name and true identity implies the act of fancy hiding the subject with ornaments. The King, hearing the story, replies: ‘Far lovelier in our Lancelot had it been, In lieu of idly dallying with the truth, To have trusted me as he hath trusted thee. Surely his King and most familiar friend Might well have kept his secret. True, indeed, Albeit I know my knights fantastical…’ (586-591)

Although the words ‘true’ and ‘fantastical’ here superficially signify ‘loyal’ and ‘great’, the contrast between them is ironical. When the King says that Lancelot wore ‘upon his helm / A sleeve of scarlet, broider’d with great pearls, / Some gentle maiden’s gift’ (600-602) and hints that ‘Lancelot is no more a lonely heart’ (599), the Queen ‘choked, / And sharply turn’d about to hide her face, / Past to her chamber…And shriek’d out ‘Traitor’ to the unhearing wall’ (603-608). Her love is what she herself and Lancelot later call ‘jealousy in love’ (1340 & 1385), and different from Elaine’s pure love for him. Lancelot is dying in punishment for his love of the Queen; Elaine loves him so passionately that she dies when she finds her love unrequited; the Queen’s jealousy is different from their love because it has something to do with her pride, as is suggested by Lancelot’s asking if her love is ‘jealousy in love’. The act of fancy is related to pure love because it suggests the act of the subject who plunges him- or herself into the object so as to lose his or her ego. Although Gawain as Arthur’s messenger is looking for the knight, he cannot find him and arrives at Astolat late at night. While Arthur is ‘the sun in heaven’ (123) and his ideal kingdom, Camelot, and the scenes of battles between men are depicted in the world of daytime, Elaine shines in the moonlight, and Astolat where she lives is depicted mainly at night. While the sun and daytime represent reason and the conscious, Elaine as fancy represents the moon, night, madness and the unconscious. Like Lancelot, Gawain is also fascinated by her perfect beauty, and finds that the shield which she is holding is Lancelot’s, crying, ‘our Lancelot! that true man!’ (661). Elaine says, ‘I know not if I know what true love is, / But if I know, then, if I love not him, / I know there is none other I can love’ (672-674). When Gawain goes back to Camelot to tell Arthur that

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Lancelot is the knight, he sings a ‘true-love ballad’ (700) to hint of the theme of ‘true love’ in this poem. Elaine had a dream in which Lancelot was as thin as a skeleton and pale as the dead, and was willing to help him. The act of knowing reality means death to Elaine, who lives in the supernatural, unreal world of dreams and the unconscious: And while she made her ready for her ride Her father’s latest word humm’d in her ear, ‘Being so very wilful you must go’, And changed itself and echo’d in her heart, ‘Being so very wilful you must die’. (774-778)

Elaine found Lancelot in a hermit’s cell (806). He was ‘lying unsleek, unshorn, / Gaunt as it were the skeleton of himself’ (810-811) as she had seen him in her dream. Elaine gave him the diamond as the prize from the King. She ‘fancied, “Is it for me?”’ (817). Lancelot found that she loved him, but he could not accept her love because he loved the Queen. Therefore, he ‘loved her with all love except the love / Of man and woman’ (863-864). He could not take the new love of Elaine because the ‘shackles of an old love straiten’d him, / His honour rooted in dishonour stood, / And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true’ (870-872). Thus, Lancelot suffered from the fancy and love of two women and lived between truth and untruth: he followed the order from the Queen who advised him to hide himself with her fancy, and he suffered from the Queen’s jealousy as he fought in his helmet decorated with Elaine’s sleeve as the representation of her fancy. Because ‘that ghostly grace’ of the Queen ‘Beam’d on his fancy’ (880), he acted coldly toward Elaine. The ‘fancy’ here means ‘love’, suggesting the relationship between fancy and love. Elaine, who realized that she could not win the love of Lancelot, ‘murmur’d, “Vain, in vain! It cannot be. / He will not love me. How then? must I die?”’ (887-888). Nothing was left for her but death as she experienced the effects of fancy by plunging herself into Lancelot in her love for him: ‘Him or death’, she mutter’d, ‘death or him’, / Again and like a burthen, ‘Him or death’ (897-898). After Lancelot had recovered and come back to Astolat, Elaine decorated ‘her sweet self’: In that wherein she deem’d she look’d her best She came before Sir Lancelot, for she thought, ‘If I be loved, these are my festal robes, If not, the victim’s flowers before he fall’. (901-905)

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Lancelot thanks her for her help, so ‘ever prest upon the maid / That she should ask some goodly gift of him / For her own self or hers: “and do not shun / To speak the wish most near to your true heart”’ (906-909). Then Elaine lifted up her face ‘like a ghost’ (913), and ‘like a ghost without the power to speak. / And Lancelot saw that she withheld her wish’ (914-915). The word ‘ghost’ signifies fancy as a source of illusion. It is applied to both the Queen and Elaine because both of them can influence Lancelot and their love can be ‘truth’ and ‘untruth’ at the same time. Lancelot ‘found her in among the garden of yews’ as the symbol of death and love, and asked her wish again on the day he was going back to Camelot. Elaine thought that she could never see him again, and told him about her true heart: ‘Then suddenly and passionately she spoke: / “I have gone mad. I love you; let me die”’ (924-925). Elaine’s passion and love for the other cause her to lose reason and ego in such a way as to die. While it is customary for a knight to love the wife of his lord in depictions of courtly love in the Middle Ages, Elaine who tells Lancelot about her love for him reverses the traditional relationship between man and woman. She wants to be his wife, but he denies the world of the senses: ‘Nay, the world, the world, / All ear and eye, with such a stupid heart / To interpret ear and eye’ (935-936). Lancelot’s view of the world here is similar to that of Coleridge, who regards the imagination as a more important faculty in the mind than fancy and notes the dangerous influence of the eye over the imagination and reason, and this viewpoint is incorporated into that of Floris in Hopkins’s ‘Floris in Italy’. While Elaine is the representation of fancy without reason, Lancelot has imagination with reason and ego. Therefore, he reasonably and logically preaches to Elaine: This is not love, but love’s first flash in youth, Most common; yea, I know it of mine own self, And you yourself will smile at your own self, Hereafter, when you yield your flower of life To one more fitly yours, not thrice your age. (944-948)

As Elaine, whose love is refused, becomes ‘deathly-pale’ (959) and loses consciousness, she is again related to the unconscious and death. Elaine gives back the ‘naked shield’ (972) to Lancelot:

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…Full meekly rose the maid, Stripped off the case, and gave the naked shield; Then, when she heard his horse upon the stones, Unclasping flung the casement back, and looked Down on his helm, from which her sleeve had gone. (971-975)

Elaine takes off her ornament from the shield, and this implies that Lancelot is now free from her fancy. Her sleeve taken off from his helmet emphasizes this meaning (974-975). Elaine’s gaze at Lancelot implies that the subject loves the object through sight so as to produce the effects of fancy. He does not look at her and leaves without a word. Lancelot tries to be cold to her in order to break her passion, but ‘she mixt / Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms / Of evening and the moanings of the wind’ (994-996). Elaine’s love is not repaid, so she goes mad. She composes a song called ‘The Song of Love and Death’ (998), which implies the aspect of fancy that is relevant to madness, love, death, and the creation of poetry. Elaine sings the song and wants to die: ‘Sweet is true love tho’ given in vain, in vain; / And sweet is death who puts an end to pain’ (1000-1001). Her voice is getting higher and higher in such a way as to shake her tower. Her brothers hear her shrieking, and think that it is ‘the Phantom of the house’ (1015). Elaine is compared to ‘the phantom of the House’ (1015), ‘a ghost’ (913) and ‘the Fairy Queen’ (1247). They are spiritual beings, but able to affect the material world like the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and relevant to the ambiguity of fancy in terms of the relation between truth and untruth which it involves. Elaine foretells that she will come down to Camelot by boat (1027-1054). Contrary to the Queen who mistakenly thinks that Lancelot has betrayed her, Elaine never hates him, saying that she dies in love and he is the noblest man. To break her passion, Elaine’s father tells her about the immoral love between Lancelot and the Queen ‘in an open shame’ (1075). However, Elaine tells him that it is her ‘glory to have loved / One peerless, without stain’ (1083-1084) and dies. She calls her father ‘tender and true’ (1103) when she is dying, and says: ‘Deny me not…ye never yet / Denied my fancies’ (1104-1105). The men described as ‘true’ in this narrative poem are Arthur, Lancelot and Elaine’s father, who are characterized by reason. Lancelot tries to be reasonable, but he suffers from the fancies of the Queen and Elaine and the conflict between truth and untruth. The Queen, trapped by earthly love, associates Arthur with fancy. Although Elaine as the personification of fancy is not reasonable, she says to her father: ‘ye never yet / Denied my fanciesʊthis, however strange / My latest’ (11041106). She asks her brother Lavaine to write ‘as she devised / A letter’

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(1096-1097). She also asks her father to place the letter in her hand (1106) after she dies and take her to a barge in the river, leading to the palace. The theme of this poem is thus that men’s truth is affected by women’s fancy. Men’s truth is connected with reason and imagination in contrast to women’s fancy, and fancy can be true from women’s viewpoint. When Elaine ceased, she ‘grew so cheerful’ that her father and brother ‘deem’d her death / Was rather in the fantasy than the blood’ (1124-1125). On the eleventh day after her death, her father placed the letter in her hand, and her two brothers rowed a barge containing her body to Camelot. Meanwhile at the palace, Lancelot gave the Queen the ‘nine-years-foughtfor diamonds’ (1160), but she replied to him coldly: ‘Not for me! / For her! for your new fancy’ (1208-1209). ‘Fancy’ here signifies ‘love’ as it does in Shakespeare’s plays, and the word hints at the identification of fancy with Elaine who dies for ‘Lancelot’s love’ (1111). Lancelot was disappointed at the attitude of the Queen. Then, the barge bringing Elaine to the palace appeared: Then while Sir Lancelot leant, in half disdain At love, life, all things, on the window ledge, Close underneath his eyes, and right across Where these had fallen, slowly past the barge Whereon the lily maid of Astolat Lay smiling, like a star in blackest night. (1230-1235)

The ‘haggard face’ of the oarsman who saw her on the barge is ‘the face that men / Shape to their fancy’s eye from broken rocks / On some cliffside’ (1242-1245). Elaine was going down the river to the palace as her dream had foretold, and the King knew that her love for Lancelot was in vain. Elaine is described here as ‘the Fairy Queen’ who enchants men (1246-1249). Tennyson was probably aware of Arthur in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Arthur as the ideal king will not die, so the Fairy Queen will take him ‘to Fairyland’ (1249-1251). Elaine and Arthur are unworldly while the Queen and Lancelot are worldly. While the heroines in disguise use the power of fancy to gain their loves in Shakespeare’s plays, Elaine is so passionate about Lancelot that she finally dies of her unrequited love for him. As the heroine who represents fancy, she is associated with passion, pure love, beauty, ornament, femininity, otherness, sight, night, the unconscious, madness, the death of the self and the creation of poetry. True love requires passion with the death of the self because the subject plunges into the object in

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such a way as to lose itself. Therefore, Elaine writes in her letter to Lancelot, which is to be found after she dies: ‘…my true love has been my death’ (1269). Lancelot confesses to the King that Elaine loved him ‘with a love beyond all love / In women’ though she was good and true, that her brothers and father asked him to break her passion, and that ‘to be loved makes not to love again’ (1286). Therefore, her brothers and father begged him ‘to be plain and blunt, and use, / To break her passion, some discourtesy’ against his nature (1291-1294). Elaine tries to obtain his love in vain acting against the convention of courtly love, while Shakespeare’s androgynous heroines succeed in winning their loves using their power of fancy and reign over the male-dominated and patriarchal society characterized by reason and subjective imagination. The King, who is not conscious of the Queen’s fancy and trusts Lancelot, calls him ‘a man / Made to be loved’ (1352-1353). Against the medieval custom of courtly love, here Lancelot plays the feminine role of being loved, in contrast with Elaine, who dies in quest of his love. This reversal of their gender roles emphasizes the element of fancy, which facilitates such a change of attitudes between man and woman. When the King says that Lancelot could have loved Elaine, he answers: Then answer’d Lancelot: ‘Fair she was, my King, Pure, as you ever wish your knights to be. To doubt her fairness were to want an eye, To doubt her pureness were to want a heartʊ Yea, to be loved, if what is worthy love Could bind him, but free love will not be bound’.

(1363-1368)

‘Free love’ suggests Lancelot’s love for the Queen without matrimony as well as his fascination with Elaine, so it contradicts his belief in ‘true love’. While fancy produces pure love, this love is not genuine from the viewpoint of reason. Therefore, it involves opposite meanings. Lancelot, who believed that he had reason, finds himself driven by fancy as Elaine is when she dies due to her love of him. Tennyson stresses the theme of truth and untruth in fancy and love, contrasting the jealous and guilty self-love of the Queen with the pure love of Elaine, and defends Elaine as the Queen’s ‘guiltless rival’ (741). The Queen herself admits that her love is ‘jealousy in love’ (1340), and then Lancelot ‘answer’d with his eyes upon the ground, / That is love’s curse’ (1341-1342). Elaine’s death due to her

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love of him makes him realise that his love for the Queen was not true and that Elaine’s love which was due to fancy is ‘a love / Far tenderer than’ the Queen’s love (1383-1384). Finally, he finds that what he believed to be the Queen’s love for him is ‘jealousy in love’ (1386) or ‘jealous pride’ (1387), and that true love is gained when the subject offers itself to the object. * In ‘Lancelot and Elaine’, Tennyson focuses on Elaine’s love and death when she loses herself in her passion for Lancelot. The element of fancy expressed in figures or rhetoric is evident in her decoration of his shield as the representation of him because fancy as a source of rhetoric decorates the true meanings of words. The frequent use of the word ‘fancy’ or ‘fantasy’ in this narrative poem also refers to the fancy of the Queen and the kingdom of Arthur, and the ambiguity of fancy in the theme of true love. Fancy can be true and untrue, and the ambiguity of fancy is represented in the complicated structure of this poem, mixing reality with unreality.

2.5. Hopkins’s Experiments with ‘The Language of Inspiration’ Produced by Fancy 2.5.1. ‘Floris in Italy’ Hopkins refers to ‘Floris in Italy’ in his letter to Baillie of September 10, 1864, where he contrasts the language of inspiration with Parnassian: ‘It occurred to me that the story of “Floris in Italy” is dramatic, and all of a sudden I began to turn it into a play. It is a great experiment. …I fancy there is a fascination about the dramatic form’ (LIII 221). His words clearly show that he suddenly altered a poem into a play with his fancy and inspiration, following Shakespeare’s fancy as expressed in the language of inspiration. Therefore, the play contains a lot of ambiguous poetic diction, especially in monologues. In September, 1864, Hopkins describes the fragments from ‘Floris in Italy’ (J 40) as ‘Elizabethan English’ (PIII 244). As Coleridge mentions in a note of 1808, ‘Fancy, or the aggregative Power…the bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one point or more of Likeness’ is ‘common in the writers of Shakespeare’s time’ (CN 99), and important lines from Shakespeare often connote metaphorical meanings. Therefore, it is probable that Hopkins

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was intrigued by the element of fancy in Shakespeare’s works and expressed this interest in ‘Floris in Italy’.24 The element of fancy which is characteristic of this unfinished drama seems to be influenced by the theme of fancy in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or other plays containing heroines in disguise, as well as in Tennyson’s ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ in Idylls of the King. The main characters in ‘Floris in Italy’ are Floris and Giulia, who loves him. Floris is engaged to her cousin and tries not to be fascinated by the beauty of Giulia. In part (i), Giulia disguises herself as a man one night in order to sneak into the camp where Floris is sleeping. The word ‘fancy’ is significantly used in Twelfth Night, where Viola in disguise as a man is the prototype of Giulia and the characteristics of fancy as expressed in ornament, figures of poetry, and variety or multiplicity are emphasized. In his note of 1863, Hopkins quotes the lines of Orsino (J 9): ‘…So full of shapes is fancy, / That it alone is high-fantastical’ (1. 1. 1-15). The word ‘fancy’ here means ‘love’ which transforms itself into various shapes, and this implies that Viola, when in love with Orsino, hides her true self under her disguise as a man. Hopkins imitates Viola’s fancy in his portrayal of ‘Giulia’, who is apparently named after ‘Julia’, Shakespeare’s heroine in male disguise in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Hopkins seems to have been interested in Shakespeare’s fancy as embodied in the disguises of his heroines in these plays as well as of those of Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Rosalind in As You Like It. 25 The heroines in disguise use words with two meanings by means of their fancy. Figures are ornaments which hide the true meanings of words. Hopkins imitates these Shakespearean heroines and their fancy especially in his experiments with metaphorical expressions.

24

Hopkins’s special attention to Shakespeare’s language of inspiration as an expression of fancy throughout his career can also be seen in his translation of some songs from Shakespeare in 1886. He translated the song sung by Portia, ‘Tell me where is Fancy bred’ from The Merchant of Venice into Latin and Greek (PI 224, 225, 340 & PIII 188, 189, 467, 468). 25 Catherine Phillips also notes Hopkins’s experiments in poetic diction in this unfinished play and his interest in Shakespeare’s heroines and fools: ‘Hopkins’s diaries contain a wealth of poetic experiments during this period…. Hopkins’s appreciation of the liveliness of such Shakespearian heroines as Viola and Olivia and the role played by Shakespearian fools is evident in (ii)’ (PII 176).

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Hopkins pursues the language of inspiration, not Parnassian, in the monologue of ‘Floris in Italy’. In fragment (c), Giulia disguised as a man sneaks into the camp at night to see Floris sleeping:26 Laughing or tears. I think I could do either ʊ So strangely elemented is my mind’s weather, That tears and laughter are hung close together. Comes to the bed. Sleep Floris while I rob you. Tighten, O Sleep, Thy impalpable oppression. Pin him down, Ply fold on fold across his dangerous eyes, Lodge his eyes fast; but as easy and light As the laid gossamers of Michaelmas Whose silver skins lie level and thick in field. (13-21)

N. H. MacKenzie points out that this dramatic poem is ‘strongly reminiscent of Shakespeare and his successors’, and interprets the metaphorical expression ‘Lodge his eyes fast’ in line 19 as referring to ‘eyelashes’ as resembling the image of ‘crops laid flat by the wind, which is used literally in “The Summer Malison”’. 27 This metaphorical expression comparing eyelashes with crops is very original and unusual, and surprises the reader and makes him or her think deeply about its meaning. This is an instance of Hopkins’s experiments with fancy as expressed in the language of inspiration, which combines a superficial or literal meaning with a deep or metaphorical one so as to make them compatible simultaneously. The verb ‘lodge’ used here in a transitive sense allows the metaphorical interpretation of the expression ‘Lodge his eyes fast’ in an imperative sentence. If Hopkins used it in an intransitive sense with a preposition, such as ‘lodge in his eyes fast’, it would only denote that ‘sleep inhabits his eyes’. Or if the verb is used in a transitive sense 26

N. H. MacKenzie explains this scene, where Giulia tries on the ring taken off from the sleeping Floris, and wears it as a pectoral (27-30), in comparison with Shakespeare’s heroines in disguise: ‘…we may assume that Giulia, who had deserted the fight…by leaving the field to her cousin, had returned (after hearing that Floris seemed in need of her watchful care?). Shakespeare’s Viola disguised herself as a page “Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy” (Twelfth Night, I. v. 165), and Giulia may pass herself off as fourteen. …Cf. also Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, who serves her lover as a page unrecognized by him until he sees her with his ring’ (PIII 248). 27 A Reader’s Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 217.

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meaning ‘provide (someone) with accommodation’ (OED), the correct form is ‘be lodged in’ in the passive form with a preposition. This means that the signification would be implied, but the expression of it not entirely correct. Therefore, the verb with object, meaning ‘(of wind or rain) flatten (a standing crop)’ (OED), is a correct use in the active voice with no preposition in this sentence, making the metaphorical meaning valid. Hopkins does not use the word ‘eyelashes’ because he hopes to avoid a single signification.28 The word ‘fast’ is also used ambiguously, making these interpretations possible: the superficial meaning is that ‘sleep inhabits eyes firmly’; the metaphorical meaning is that ‘crops laid flat by the wind are bound fast’ and this imagery is applied to ‘eyelashes of eyes closed firmly’. Hopkins’s use of the verb ‘lodge’ in relation to ‘the crops laid flat by the wind’ can be seen not only in ‘The Summer Malison’ (1865), but also in ‘A Voice from the World’ (1864-1865): ‘And seven ears crown the lodged corn’ (‘The Summer Malison’, 6). In, ‘A Voice from the World’, Hopkins also tries to include a double entendre in his use of the past participle of the transitive verb ‘lodge’: ‘…but could not move / My fastlodged tongue’ (‘A Voice from the World’, 115-6). This use of ‘lodged’ can mean ‘fixed’ in a superficial sense, but also implies the metaphorical sense that the tongue ‘is laid flat’ like crops gathered and fixed in the field. Hopkins’s use of the verb appeared in almost the same year that he wrote ‘Floris in Italy’, and it is evident that he experimented with the language of inspiration produced by his metaphor and fancy by using this word in a transitive sense between 1864 and 1865. While the verb ‘lodge’ is used transitively in the passage discussed above, it is used intransitively, with the meaning ‘to become fixed in’, in ‘The Nightingale’ (1866): ‘Or never lodges there’ (25). MacKenzie’s interpretation of the word is valid because Hopkins used it between 1864 and 1866 while he was writing ‘Floris in Italy’ and it is relevant to crops when he uses it transitively. The metaphorical meaning of ‘Lodge his eyes fast’ is suggested by the passages preceding and following this sentence. In fragment (c), Giulia refers to her extreme emotions with this metaphorical expression: ‘So strangely elemented is my mind’s weather, / That tears and laughter are hung close together’ (14-15). The past participle ‘elemented’ (15) is 28

Note that Hopkins also uses the verb ‘lodge’ in the context of dream, sleep and eyelids in a journal entry written in 1869: ‘it seems reasonable to suppose impressions of sight belong to the organ of sightʊand once lodged there are stalled by the mind like other images’ (J 194).

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Hopkins’s coinage from the noun ‘element’ because the word is not normally used as a verb. Though the superficial meaning of the word is ‘the condition in which two elements are mixed together’, the phrase ‘mind’s weather’ makes another interpretation possible because ‘element’ is relevant to ‘the elements’ meaning the weather, especially bad weather. Therefore, this imagery of ‘bad weather’ is connected to that of ‘crops laid flat by the wind’. Through this metaphorical expression, tears are associated with rain and the intense emotion of the act of crying is associated with stormy weather. Hopkins creates his own poetic diction by using the word ‘element’ as a verb or past participle, so that it can include an ambiguity about its metaphorical signification. The sentence could have been ‘my mind has strange elements’ if it had been written in a way that confined it to a superficial meaning, but Hopkins’s fancy expressed in the language of inspiration includes both superficial and metaphorical meanings. The phrase ‘mind’s weather’ is also connected to the subsequent lines: Alas now I find I am ready with my tears As the fine morsels of a dwindling cloud That piece themselves into a race of drops To spill o’er fields of lilies. (29-33)

The chain of metaphorical imagery associated with ‘eyelashes laid flat as fast (or firmly) as crops laid flat by the wind’ can be seen in the words of Giulia: ‘Ply fold on fold across his dangerous eyes’ (19). Another instance of Hopkins’s experiments in the language of inspiration is observable in the lines just after the words ‘Lodge his eyes fast’. The phrase ‘laid gossamers of Michaelmas’ is metaphorically related to the imagery of crops as representing Floris’s eyelashes because Michaelmas is the time of harvest and a holiday for peasants. Hopkins describes the scene of the field with spider’s webs all over it at the end of September, the time of the Michaelmas holiday. This metaphor seems abrupt and surprises us when we try to identify ‘sleep’ with ‘spider’s webs in a field’, and this surprise is what Hopkins aimed at with his fancy expressed in the language of inspiration. There still remains the association with the imagery of ‘crops in a field’. Hopkins might have contemplated the spiders’ webs in a field at Michaelmas in order to create this example of what he called ‘the language of inspiration’. Another interpretation which makes possible this abrupt parallelism between ‘crops’ and ‘Michaelmas’ is that Michaelmas is a holiday for peasants, and crops are laid and bound in the fields at

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harvest. The expression ‘lie level and thick in field’ (22) also suggests ‘crops laid flat’. This abrupt parallelism between eyelashes and crops is an instance of Hopkins’s fancy expressed in the language of inspiration, based on his contemplation of the reality of nature. The imagery of a ‘spider’s web’ in fragment (c) of the play is associated with that of ‘Floris’s eyes folded by cloth’ and then with the monologue of Henry in fragment (a): Thus he ties spider’s web across his sight And gives for tropes his judgment all away, Gilds with some sparky fancies his black night…

(21-23)

These lines imply that Floris, who is engaged to Giulia’s cousin, tries not to see her beauty though he is aware of her love for him. Henry describes how Floris ‘ties spider’s web across his sight’, suggesting that he pretends not to notice Giulia’s beauty. Parnassian aesthetics reacts against Romanticism by emphasizing sight more than emotion, and sets visual beauty and fancy above the imagination. The ideology of the imagination does not take account of visual beauty and the reality of the object, but fuses the object into a new whole informed by reason, or the source of transcendent insight, as described by Coleridge. In Coleridge and Christian Doctrine, J. Robert Barth suggests that imagination is connected with reason and symbol, and quotes Coleridge’s words from The Statesman’s Manual: The reason’s idea cannot be expressed except by symbol, the suprasensible in terms of the sensible. At the same time the reason, by 1816, is very much the dominant faculty. Even the imagination, which as the symbolmaking faculty might seem to supersede it, is really at the service of reason: ‘The reason without being either the sense, the understanding, or the imagination, contains all three within itself, even as the mind contains its thoughts, and is present in and through them all…’. (Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine, 23)

In contrast, and in a way that is particularly valorised by Hopkins, fancy makes the subject see the object by means of contemplation, and finally the subject is incorporated into the beauty of the object. Even though Floris covers his eyes, the translucent web cannot make him completely blind. In Hopkins’s metaphorical expressions, Giulia does not actually tighten ‘his dangerous eyes’ to make him blind, but plies ‘fold

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on fold across’ them ‘as easy and light / As the laid gossamers’ of sleep, wishing him to see her beauty through them. The eyes of Floris are dangerous, because Giulia could be found stealing into his room in the literal meaning of this passage. However, in a metaphorical interpretation associated with the image of a ‘spider’s web’ in fragment (a), it is ‘dangerous’ for him to see the beauty of a woman other than his fiancée, and much more so her cousin, because his seeing her would morally corrupt him. Nevertheless, he is actually able to see Giulia’s beauty through the spider’s web, so he gilds ‘with some sparky fancies his black night’. Hopkins probably owes the expression ‘sparky fancy’ to Ruskin’s Modern Painters, which he noted as one of the books ‘to be read’ by him (J 56). Ruskin describes fancy as abrupt, springing from one point to another ‘like an electric spark’ (MP II 182-3). It is noteworthy that the words of Floris in fragment (a) begin with the word ‘BEAUTY’, where he, ‘having found by chance that Giulia loves him, reasons with himself…in defence of his not returning her love’, and her ‘beauty is urged’:29 BEAUTY it may be is the meet of lines, Or careful-spacèd sequences of sound, These rather are the arc where beauty shines, The temper’d soil where only her flower is found. Allow at least it has one term and part Beyond, and one within the looker’s eye; And I must have the centre in my heart To spread the compass on the all-starr’d sky; For only try by gazing to divide One star by daylight from the strong blue air, And find it will not therefore be descried Because its place is known and charted there. (1-12)

Norman White comments regarding these lines that the ‘speech is less about love than aesthetics; though Hopkins’s outline states that Giulia’s “beauty is urged”, “beauty” is discussed in the abstract, and Giulia forgotten’ (White 123). As he also suggests, ‘careful-spacèd sequences of sound’ may lead to the ‘sprung rhythm’ which Hopkins practiced ten years

29 C. Phillips interprets these lines as ‘a speech in which Floris, having discovered that Giulia loves him, argues against reciprocating her love…’ (PII 314).

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later.30 In addition, Hopkins may refer to the two kinds of signification which he identified in the beauty of poetic diction: the underthought and the overthought. Floris’s speech on beauty is also relevant to the discussion of beauty in Hopkins’s essay ‘On the Origin of Beauty’, written in the same year as he wrote fragment (a).31 Line 2 also implies the theory expressed in Hopkins’s statement in ‘The Origin of our Moral Ideas’ (1865) that ‘Beauty lies in the relation of the parts of a sensuous thing to each other…in those arts of which the effect is in time, not space, it is sequence at certain intervals’ (J 80).32 The rhyme between ‘part’ and ‘heart’ makes the word ‘Beyond’ come first in line 6 with the capital letter ‘B’, which emphasises the autonomous beauty as ‘BEAUTY’ in capital letters, showing some influence of Parnassian style and aestheticism. The ‘term and part… within the looker’s eye’ (5-6) signify the beauty of the object interpreted by the subject as ‘the looker’. 33 This can be construed as the understanding achieved by the subject as the centre of consciousness or an interpretation by the imagination. As Ruskin says, the imagination is ‘at the heart of things’ (MP II 182), and also ‘within the looker’s eye’. Then, the beauty ‘Beyond’ (6) implies ‘Beauty itself which reflects the reality of the object’ not hindered by subjective interpretation, or the idea of ‘autonomous beauty’. This idea of beauty, which is related to ‘fancies’ in Henry’s monologue, seems to be affected by aestheticism, which values beauty and fancy with its ideal of the ‘autonomy of beauty’. Aestheticism shows the element of fancy ‘staying at the outside of things…bounding merrily from point to point…but necessarily always settling…on a point only, never embracing the whole’ (MP II 182-183), and it tries to catch the reality of autonomous beauty beyond (or outside) the looker’s eye. While the imagination in the centre comprehends parts in terms of the whole, the fancy stays in parts, variety and multiplicity. 30 ‘Hopkins is crudely breaching [sic] a phonaesthetic ideal which would be fully developed ten years later, as well as laying the ground work for his theory of perception’ (White 123). 31 Fragment (a) was written in September 9-11, 1865. ‘This scene, though the last to be written, obviously precedes Giulia’s farewell visit to the sleeping Floris. …The whole scene was a byproduct of other activities, esp. his Platonic dialogue “On the Origin of Beauty” (J. 86-114, 12 May 1865); cf. J. 95, “Beauty then is a relation…a geometrical sort of things… A mathematical thing, measured by compasses.”’ (PIII 245n) 32 Cf. PIII 245n. 33 Cf. ‘Shakes. Love’s Labour’s Lost (which GMH was then reading), II. i. 15, “Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye”’ (PIII 245n).

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Floris tries to ‘have the centre in’ his heart, and to interpret the world with his imagination and reason. While ‘daylight’ is the realm of the subject or the self, reason and male imagination, night and sleep is the realm of the object or the other, the unconscious and female fancy. Therefore, Floris denies the effectiveness of ‘gazing to divide / One star by daylight from the strong blue air’ (10) by saying that ‘its place is known and charted there’ (12), that is, ‘in [his] heart’. He cannot see the star owing to the dependence of its beauty on his imagination, or what Hopkins implies to be the interference of his subjective imagination. In the following lines, Floris speaks of ‘love prescriptive’, in comparison with the star whose ‘place is known and charted there’: No, love prescriptive, love with place assign’d, Love by monition, heritage, or lot, Love by prenatal serfdom still confined Even to the tillage of the sweetest spot,ʊ It is a regimen on the imperfect wind, Piecing the elements out by plan and plot. Though self-made bands at last may true love bind, New love is free love, or true love ’tis not. (13-20)

These lines also exhibit Hopkins’s experimentation with the language of inspiration produced by fancy. Not with his passion but with his reason, Floris exerts himself to love the woman to whom he has been affianced by his family. His reason ‘binds true love’ so that his self cannot be nullified by the beauty of another woman. ‘New love’ here is his love for Giulia ‘free’ from his reason and morals, but although Floris associates this with ‘true love’, he also suggests that such love may be preserved through ‘selfmade bands’. Floris is unwilling to admit Giulia’s beauty because he tries not to be seduced by her power of fancy expressed in her beauty, so he struggles between the alternatives of ‘free’ love informed by fancy, and ‘assign’d’ love dependent on reason. However, while he denies her beauty, his words are ironically based on fancy expressed in figures, using all these metaphorical expressions. As Henry describes him, Floris, who ‘gives for tropes his judgment all away, / Gilds with some sparky fancies his black night’, appears to resemble Hopkins as a poet, exploring metaphorical expressions with fancy in the language of inspiration. The influence of Tennyson’s ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ (1859) in The Idylls of the King on Hopkins’s ‘Floris in Italy’ is observable in the words of Floris in part (iii), which metaphorically imply Parnassian aesthetics, stressing visual beauty and rhetoric: ‘New love is free love, or true love ’tis not’ (20). Lancelot tells Arthur about Elaine’s beauty and love after

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her death: ‘…if what is worthy love / Could bind him, but free love will not be bound’ (1363-68). Floris is reminiscent of Lancelot, and Giulia of Elaine. While Floris’s words, ‘New love is free love’, refer to his love for Giulia, they connote the aesthetics of fancy whereby he gives himself to her visual beauty, even though he fears that his new love for her, dependent on sight and senses, is not morally right. Nevertheless, he cannot evade sight: as Henry says ‘he ties spider’s web across his sight’, so he euphemistically admits his fancy as ‘free love’. The following lines, ‘And gives for tropes his judgment all away, / Gilds with some sparky fancies his black night’, suggest that Floris’s monologue includes a lot of metaphors and figures, and the verb ‘gild’ implies the act of making ambiguous objects visible, or creating poetic diction by giving form to ambiguous thoughts. Floris describes fancy as underlying the ‘true love’ which he contrasts with the ‘regimen on the imperfect wind’ which ‘love prescriptive’ ultimately becomes, but he tries to control this true love with his reason. However, despite his resistance to fancy, a lot of metaphorical expressions in his words represent the act of fancy itself. Finally, as Ruskin says, fancy’s ‘electric spark’, expressed as ‘sparky fancies’ in ‘Floris in Italy’, is ‘seen brightest in her leaping’, even ‘if there be a gap left between the two things and they do not quite touch’, and this is what Hopkins tries to achieve in his language of inspiration in the form of fancy’s abrupt parallelism. Although Hopkins does not reject the form of totalizing consciousness which enables us to recognize the power of God expressed in the perceptual world, he focuses more on individual elements of nature, which parallel each other in a way that becomes a manifestation of Christ as the unity of opposites or the abrupt parallelism between the two individual objects. The monologue of Floris indicates that his metaphorical expressions are influenced by fancy against his reason, which seeks to bind him to ‘love prescriptive’, and also his imagination, which focuses more on idealized forms of unity than on the details of perception. * Hopkins’s letters and journals in 1864 and 1865 reveal that his criticism of Parnassian style or aesthetics begins with his scepticism about Tennyson’s poetic diction, though he was influenced by the element of fancy in ‘Lancelot and Elaine’. He conceived ‘Floris in Italy’ with the aim of achieving the form of fancy represented by the heroines in disguise in

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the works of Shakespeare and in Shakespeare’s poetic diction as the language of inspiration. In this unfinished drama, Hopkins practiced the language of inspiration in his metaphor with his fancy, leading to the development of his own poetics connected to his idea of ‘inscape’. He is influenced by Coleridge, Ruskin and Shakespeare in his idea of the abrupt parallelism of fancy which is related to variety and ambiguity, which he argues are elements of poetry in the highest sense. Hopkins’s poetics of fancy is related to the nineteenth-century aestheticism which values fancy and beauty. By pursuing the idea of fancy, Hopkins criticizes the mannerisms or Parnassian style in the poetic diction of Tennyson and Swinburne who he argues are still trapped by their Romantic imagination, and then tries to express the reality of the object in his metaphors. As a result, Hopkins exploits his poetic diction by means of surprise, and his experiments succeed in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and especially in the form of sonnets. For Hopkins, poets aiming at Parnassus cannot reach its summit without the flight of fancy which directly derives from inspiration.

2.5.2. ‘The Beginning of the End’ Hopkins wrote ‘The Beginning of the End’ (1865) almost at the same time as ‘Floris in Italy’ (1864-1865) as well as his essays ‘Poetic Diction’ (1865), ‘On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue’ (1865), and ‘The Probable Future of Metaphysics’ (1867). This sonnet series represents a crucial stage in Hopkins’s poetry, being clearly different from his earlier poems which are reminiscent of the discursive and transitional elements in Romanticism. It is ‘suggestive of Jacobean sonnet-sequences’ (PIII 272n), and is divided into three parts, seemingly irrelevant to each other in order to practice his idea of the abrupt parallelism of fancy. Part (i) indicates that the poet’s love for his cold mistress has lessened: ‘My love is lessened and must soon be past’ (1); but that ‘less is heavens higher even yet / Than treble-fervent more of other men’ (12-13), and if she could understand that, her ‘unpassion’d eyelids might be wet’ (14). Part (ii) begins with the sentence, ‘I must feed Fancy’, and abruptly introduces the theme of astrology: I must feed Fancy. Show me any one That reads or holds the astrologic lore. And I’ll pretend the credit given of yore: And let him prove my passion was begun

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In the worst hour that’s measured by the sun, With such malign conjunctions as before No influential heaven ever wore; That no recorded devilish thing was done With such a seconding, nor Saturn took Such opposition to the Lady-star In the most murderous passage of his book; And I’ll love my distinction: Near or far He says his science helps him not to look At hopes so evil-heaven’d as mine are. (1-14)

Part (ii) suggests the relationship between the idea of astrology and the abrupt parallelism of fancy, for the former is based on Neo-Platonism, and involves ideas of parallelism and fixity which are central to the correspondences between stars fixed in their sphere as well as between the heavenly bodies as macrocosm and human beings as microcosm. This idea corresponds to the abrupt parallelisms perceived by fancy and the fixity of the objects it observes. In the Neo-Platonic ideal that all things return to Oneness in a hierarchical order by virtue of contemplation, humans are to reach the state of losing their ego in order to be unified with Oneness. It also corresponds to the new Realism based on metaphysics, with which Hopkins wanted to counter positivism in the nineteenth century. The sonnet form consisting of parallel structures and significations best fits his idea of the abrupt parallelism of fancy. By connecting fancy with astrology in the Renaissance period, which regarded the fortune of the subject as destined by Otherness (the other or the object), Hopkins attempts to develop the idea of fancy expressed in his metaphor. The truths revealed by the Romantic imagination may concern the individual’s relation to the Whole, or the universe, or God, so that although the intuition may be subjective the meaning or significance of it is regarded as objective, and the individual may also regard his own consciousness as ‘destined by Otherness’. Although Hopkins inherits Romantic idealism, his differences from this tradition lie mainly in his view of fancy, or the immersion of the self in the perceptual world of nature, as providing the profoundest insights, and also in his poetic diction which reflects his theory of fancy. Hopkins endeavours to express the inspiration gained from his contemplation of each individual object in his poetic diction, while Romantic imagination tries to transform it with subjectivity in recollection, that is, with ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’, as stated in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Lyrical Ballads,

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266). Hopkins’s poetics of fancy defends the crude inspiration, not altered in recollection or afterthought. He directly expresses the abrupt parallelism with his inspired fancy which reveals the nature of Christ’s abrupt parallelism. Hopkins criticizes Parnassian style which can be seen in the prosaic expressions in the poems of Wordsworth and Tennyson which give no surprise to the reader with their poetic diction. The ideal poetic diction or the language of inspiration for Hopkins must contain double entendre in metaphor, which reveals the mystery of Christ’s abrupt parallelism. In this way, Hopkins develops his own poetics of fancy. His experiment in his metaphors well exemplifies his decision to break away from Romantic expressions in his own poetic diction. Though it is obvious that Hopkins’s poetics is influenced by the Romantic ideas of fancy and imagination, in a deliberate reversal of Coleridge’s hierarchy of poetic faculties, he concentrates on the idea of fancy as producing metaphorical expressions with abrupt parallelism, which accordingly make his poems difficult to understand rationally. Hopkins’s concept of fancy, which champions distinct individuality, is apparent in the concluding words of part (ii): ‘And I’ll love my distinction’ (12). In terms of Hopkins’s distinction between the ‘underthought’ and ‘overthought’ as two contrasting but related aspects of the meanings of his metaphors, the ‘underthought’ of the word ‘distinction’ seems to be the concept of one ‘of the parts into which a whole is divided; a division, section; a class, category’ (OED, †2); the ‘condition or fact of being distinct or different; differences’ (OED, 4); and something ‘that distinguishes or discriminates; a distinguishing quality, mark, or characteristic’ (OED, 7), while its overthought is ‘a distinguishing name or title’ (OED, 7). The sentence ‘And I’ll love my distinction’ implies Hopkins’s ideal of the self, whose destiny is determined by its correspondence with the macrocosm as the whole while retaining its own distinction as a part, in a way that recalls Coleridge’s words on the parts of Christian cathedrals, which ‘preserve their distinct individuality’ and ‘are in themselves sharply distinct’.34 The subject and the object as distinctive individuals or phenomena with ‘distinguishing marks’ parallel each other through the abrupt parallelism of fancy. After the abrupt change in part (ii), part (iii) states the conclusion of the sonnet sequence, and returns to the theme of part (i):

34 S.T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1987), 2: 400.

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You see that I have come to passion’s end; This means you need not fear the storms, the cries, That gave you vantage when you would despise: My bankrupt heart has no more tears to spend. (1-4)

The word ‘passion’ is significantly allocated in each part: ‘unpassion’d eyelids’ [(i) 14]; ‘my passion was begun’ [(ii) 4]; and ‘I have come to passion’s end’ [(iii) 1]. Passion originates in the interaction between the subject and the object or between the self and the other, and in this poem Hopkins underlines the act of the latter concerning ‘Fancy’, describing it in different situations: (i) the amorous passion of the poet is aroused by his mistress, but withers away when his self is not fascinated by the other; (ii) from a broader viewpoint, the passion and ill-fated love between the human selves as microcosms is originally and absolutely influenced by the fixed disposition of stars as macrocosm or Otherness; (iii) the fading passion between the lovers is abruptly connected to the ‘sceptic disappointment’ of the young poet, seemingly referring to Hopkins reading Tennyson’s Enoch Arden, as his letters and works between 1864 and 1865 reveal that his criticism of Parnassian style begins with his disbelief in Tennyson (LIII 217 & J 38): Is this made plain? What have I come across That here will serve me for comparison? The sceptic disappointment and the loss A boy feels when the poet he pores upon Grows less and less sweet to him, and knows no cause.

(10-14)

These lines imply that this sonnet series is self-referential by means of metaphorical comparison, and that the theme in the end is ‘a boy’s disappointment at the poet because his passion for the poet’s works is lessened’. The word ‘pore’ connotes the act of contemplation, with which the passion of the subject is aroused by the object; the passion of the poet is lessened because he cannot be impressed by otherness any more. The overthought of the word ‘passion’ especially in part (i) of the poem is normally ‘amorous feeling’ (OED, ‘passion’ III. 8.a), but its underthought, Hopkins implies, is its nature as ‘the being passive’ and ‘the fact or condition of being acted upon or affected by external agency; subjection to external force’ (OED, ‘passion’ II. 5.a). In part (iii) the poet discloses the true theme of the sonnets using comparison (10-11). Thus, each distinctive part of the sonnet sequence parallels the others, metaphorically suggesting the theme of the relationship between the subject (the boy reading poetry)

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and the object (the poetry he pores upon). The poet’s words ‘I must feed Fancy’ are significantly placed at the beginning of part (ii) and at the centre of the sonnet sequence together with the description of Otherness as ‘Fancy’ influencing the self, and this arrangement implies that ‘Fancy’ is the poem’s theme. In the end, the sonnet reveals its meta-poetical nature in terms of its reference to the reading of poetry, suggesting the self plunging into the object of contemplation and disengaged from the act in ‘passion’s end’. In this poem, Hopkins’s fancy with metaphorical structures explores unconscious meanings in the nature of words. This deep structure in ‘underthought’ or the unconscious makes the reader realize that the title of the poem itself implies that the metaphorical structure in the text is selfreferential. It is imperative for the reader to plunge into the text as the object and to seize its nature in order to understand this self-referential structure. Poetic diction without inspiration engenders mannerism or Parnassian style, and the boy in part (iii) of ‘The Beginning of the End’ is no longer inspired by ‘the poet he pores upon’, for his poetic diction lacks the ‘surprise’ by which ‘every beauty takes you’ in ‘a fine piece of inspiration’ (LIII 217). This idea is explicit in Hopkins’s notion of Parnassian: ‘I believe that when a poet palls on us it is because of his Parnassian’ (LIII 218). ‘The Beginning of the End’ meta-poetically attempts to reveal the nature of poetic diction with surprise engendered by inspiration, which gives the poet the abrupt parallelism of fancy and connects the marked turns in the three parts of the sonnet sequence by metaphorical comparison. The boy’s ‘passion’s end’ in reading the poet he ‘pores upon’ represents Hopkins’s disillusionment with the Parnassian of Tennyson and his will to establish the poetry of inspiration with his own poetic diction, which requires fancy and passion. In ‘The Beginning of the End’, Hopkins attempts to create the poetry of inspiration by means of the comparison or abrupt parallelism of fancy in metaphors and a metaphorical structure combining overthought and underthought.

CHAPTER THREE THE INFLUENCE OF HOPKINS’S CONVERSION TO CATHOLICISM ON HIS POETICS OF FANCY

3.1. Introduction The core of Hopkins’s idea of abrupt parallelism in his poetics of fancy is deeply connected to his interest in the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. In his letter to E.H. Coleridge on June 1, 1864, Hopkins writes: ‘The great aid to belief and object of belief is the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. Religion without it is sombre, dangerous, illogical, with that it is…loveable’ (LIII 17). He also tells his father about the significance of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar as ‘the whole Body of Christ’ on October 16, 1866, just before his conversion to Catholicism on October 21, 1866: I shall hold as a Catholic what I have long held as Anglican, that literal truth of our Lord’s words by which I learn that the least fragment of the consecrated elements in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is the whole Body of Christ born of the Blessed Virgin, before which the whole host of saints and angels as it lies on the altar trembles with adoration. This belief once got is the life of the soul and when I doubted it I shd. become an atheist the next day. (LIII 92)

The Incarnation and the metaphorical nature of the Word as Christ are repeated in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, and Hopkins connects this quality of Christ with the abrupt parallelism or diatonism of fancy later in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. In order to understand Hopkins’s religious belief in relation to Christ as analogous to fancy, this section will discuss his conversion to Catholicism and his belief in the Real Presence in the Eucharist, examining some of his early poems. Hopkins’s conversion to Catholicism was influenced by the Oxford Movement and the Gothic Revival, which was part of a wider movement of medievalism in the nineteenth century. Therefore, his idea of fancy should be viewed in a religious and historical context. Ruskin’s emphasis

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on the variety of parts in Gothic architecture had substantial influence on artists of the Gothic Revival. In his idea of fancy, Hopkins also emphasized the variety of parts and their distinctiveness, as well as their connection with each other revealed by abrupt parallelism. .

3.2. Hopkins’s Conversion to Catholicism and his Belief in the Real Presence in the Eucharist Hopkins was born in 1844, and baptized in the Church of England. At that time, the religious tendencies of England were quavering between Anglicanism and the new force of the Oxford Movement, which aimed to return to pre-Reformation Catholicism. The latter movement necessarily encouraged medievalism with the aid of the Gothic Revival. The most distinctive figure of the Oxford Movement, John Henry Newman (18011890), converted to Catholicism in 1845, just one year after Hopkins’s birth. As he was educated at Oxford University, Hopkins was influenced by the Oxford Movement against the counterforce of liberalism at Oxford (Nixon 7). In 1866, he converted to Catholicism under the guidance of Newman, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1868. * In 1865, one year before his conversion, Hopkins wrote ‘Barnfloor and Winepress’: And he said, If the Lord do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? Out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress? 2 KINGS vi. 27 THOU that on sin’s wages starvest, Behold we have the joy in harvest: For us was gather’d the first-fruit, For us was lifted from the roots, Sheaved in cruel bands, bruised sore, Scourged upon the threshing-floor; Where the upper mill-stone roof’d His head, At morn we found the heavenly Bread, And, on a thousand altars laid, Christ our Sacrifice is made! (1-10)

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This poem already hints at the Eucharistic features before Hopkins’s conversion. As the epigraph suggests, it is inspired by 2 Kings 6, in which ‘an Israelite requests the King’s son as food for the famine’.1 Both the King’s son and Christ undergo sacrifice for the people. The communion bread eaten as Christ’s body in the Eucharist significantly represents his sacrifice. This is suggested in the capitalized ‘Bread’. Then the theme of Christ’s sacrifice is connected to the winepress: Thou whose dry plot for moisture gapes, We shout with them that tread the grapes: For us the Vine was fenced with thorn, Five ways the precious branches torn; Terrible fruit was on the tree In the acre of Gethsemane; For us by Calvary’s distress The wine was rackèd from the press; Now in our altar-vessels stored Is the sweet Vintage of our Lord. (11-20)

Here is the vision of Christ crucified. Line 13 suggests Christ wearing the crown of thorns around his head, shedding blood for men (Matt. 27:27-29; John 19:2, 5). Again, the capitals ‘V’ in ‘the Vine’ and ‘Vintage’ in line 20 emphasize the abrupt parallelism of fancy between Christ and the wine in the Eucharist. Christ is described as the vine in Gethsemane, where He foresees His doom just before being caught by Judas’s betrayal (Matt. 26:36). In the New Testament, Christ compares himself with the vine: ‘I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser’ (John 15:1). When the ‘Terrible fruits’ are ripe, Christ, being crucified on Calvary, sheds blood (Luke 23:33), which becomes ‘rackèd from the press’. ‘Calvary’ originally signifies ‘skull’ (OED), so that ‘Calvary’s distress’ is associated with the earlier imagery of Christ with the crown of thorns around his head. Lines 8 to 10, and 18 to 20, showing the concrete description of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, contrast with the Biblical implications in the lines quoted.

1

‘Unable to provide for his citizens sustenance from the barnfloor and winepress, the King, Ben-Haded, surrenders his son who is subsequently cooked and eaten. This account presents a true picture of Christ as the communion host, “Sheaved in cruel bands, bruised sore, / Scourged upon the threshing-floor.’ In the morning, he became the ‘heavenly Bread”’ (Nixon 40).

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After Christ undergoes his sacrifice, the Resurrection follows His death: In Joseph’s garden they threw by The riv’n Vine, leafless, lifeless, dry: On Easter morn the Tree was forth, In forty days reach’d Heaven from earth; Soon the whole world is overspread; Ye weary, come into the shade. (21-26)

‘Joseph’ here refers to ‘Joseph of Arimathea’, who was present at Christ’s crucifixion, received the crucified body of Christ and buried Him (Matt. 27:57-60; Luke 23:50-53, John 19:38-42). The dead body of Christ is described in line 22. Lines 23 and 24 indicate the resurrected body of Christ. Considering that many of Hopkins’s poems deal with the theme of the Resurrection, the main focus in his poetics is certainly the Resurrection as well as the Eucharist. He was probably influenced by the words of St. Paul, for the heart of the faith expressed in his poems is occupied with the Resurrection.2 St. Paul says: ‘if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty’ (1 Corinthians 15:14). The last two lines show the world covered with the love of Christ, who saved the world through his sacrifice. This is echoed in the description of the inexhaustible love of God and the Holy Ghost in Hopkins’s later sonnet ‘God’s Grandeur’ (1877): ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ (1); ‘…the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings’ (13-14). The next stage of ‘Barnfloor and Winepress’ reveals the connection between man and Christ:

 

2

The field where He has planted us Shall shake her fruit as Libanus, When He has sheaved us in His sheaf, When He has made us bear His leaf.ʊ We scarcely call that banquet food, But even our Saviour’s and our blood, We are so grafted on His wood. (27-33)

On the influence of St. Paul on Hopkins, see James Finn Cotter, ‘The Meaning of St. Paul’ in Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 34-54.

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The Eucharist is again implied in lines 31 and 32. Here is the heart of Hopkins’s belief that Christ and man can be united in the Eucharist. This is confirmed in the imagery of man as the graft of ‘His wood’ (33). The imagery here evokes John 15:4-5, where man is a branch of Christ as the vine: Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without me you can do nothing.

In the Eucharist, man can be united with Christ by consuming the communion bread and wine as His body and blood. ‘New Readings’ (1864) is closely related to ‘Barnfloor and Winepress’ in theme and imagery, and ‘it plays with literal and spiritual interpretations to show Christ fruitful where His parables seem to predict barrenness’ (MacKenzie 22): ALTHOUGH the letter said On thistles that men look not grapes to gather, I read the story rather How soldiers platting thorns around CHRIST’S Head Grapes grew and drops of wine were shed. (St. 1)

The imagery of Christ as the vine and His blood as wine is recurrent here again. Hopkins thinks that Christ’s sacrifice is significant for humans and it is to be repeated in the Eucharist. His sacrifice is pronounced fruitful in the second stanza: Though when the sower sowed, The wingèd fowls took part, part fell in thorn And never turned to corn, Part found no root upon the flinty road,ʊ CHRIST at all hazards fruit hath shewed. (St. 2)

The description here seems to refer to ‘the Parable of the Sower’ (Matt. 13:3-8, 18-23). It is also associated with the Resurrection suggested in lines 24 and 25 in ‘Barnfloor and Winepress’. The third stanza more clearly reveals Christ’s sacrifice for man’s salvation: From wastes of rock He brings Food for five thousand: on the thorns He shed Grains from His drooping Head;

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‘Food for five thousand’ refers to Mark 6:35-44. Christ’s sacrifice now transforms itself into man’s sustenance, as is typologically suggested in the sacrifice of the King’s son in the Old Testament. ‘Grains from His drooping Head’ implies the bread in the Eucharist. In 1865, Hopkins wrote ‘The Half-way House’, which well expresses his state of mind before his conversion to Catholicism. The title is taken from Newman’s statement in his Apologia, where he ‘saw Anglicanism as the halfway house to Romanism and Liberalism the halfway house to Atheism’ (Nixon 58). The second stanza hints at Hopkins’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism: My national old Egyptian reed gave way; I took of vine a cross-barred rod or rood. Then next I hungered: Love when here, they say, Or once or never took Lover’s proper food; But I must yield the chase, or rest and eat.ʊ Peace and food cheered me where four rough ways meet.

(St. 2)

‘My national old Egyptian reed’ alludes to ‘the “bruised” or “broken” reed of Egypt’ (2 Kings 18:21; Isaiah 36:6). This implies that Anglicanism and the ‘national’ religion of the established Church had failed to satisfy Hopkins (PI 251). Instead of subscribing to Anglicanism, the poet ‘took of vine a cross-barred rod or rood’, meaning Catholicism. The ‘vine’ is the Eucharistic symbol of Christ, mentioned in John 15:1-5. W. H. Gardner interprets the line as meaning that ‘Hopkins, like the Roman Catholics, had deliberately turned from Old Testament to New Testament aspects of Christian truth….’ 3 This kind of typological expression shown in ‘New Readings’ is central to the abrupt parallelism which characterizes Hopkins’s fancy. His tendency to abrupt parallelism in typology seems to show the influence of Tractarianism. G. B. Tennyson points out that the Tractarian aesthetic concern shown by John Keble and Isaac Williams deals with analogy, in terms of which they regard the entire universe as the symbol and representation of the Creator (G. B. Tennyson 44 & 56). He further mentions that this theory of analogy was inspired by 3

W. H. Gardner, Gerard Manly Hopkins: A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, Vol. 2 (London: Oxford UP, 1961), 84. Hereafter, Gardner II.

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the doctrine of the sacramental system (G. B. Tennyson 93). This quite fits Hopkins’s case, for his system of poetics is grounded in the abrupt parallelism of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Taking analogy as a synonym of abrupt parallelism, the bread and wine in the Eucharist are analogous to Christ’s body and blood, which are manifested as the Real Presence of Christ. Tractarian analogy or parallelism originally comes from typology. While Protestant-minded interpreters will hold to a fairly narrow typological reading that is concerned for the most part with finding prefigurements of Christ in the Old Testament, Catholic-minded interpreters will indulge in broader readings. Tractarians are included in the latter, and they go so far as to hold typology to be a warrant for various kinds of non-Scriptural symbolism, where it merges with analogy, which is held to apply so widely as to include all of the visible world, and to be a general mode of communicating religious knowledge (G. B. Tennyson 147). As his poems reveal, Hopkins’s concept of analogy or abrupt parallelism was influenced by Tractarian poetics relating to both the sacramental system and typology. Considering the Tractarian influence on Hopkins’s poetry, line 4 in the second stanza of ‘The Half-way House’ can be interpreted in terms of the Eucharist.4 In line 5, to “rest and eat” implies to take the communion bread in the Eucharist. This gives peace and love to the weary heart of the poet. Then, the third stanza takes over the imagery of the Eucharist: Hear yet my paradox: Love, when all is given, To see Thee I must see thee, to love, love; I must o’ertake Thee at once and under heaven If I shall overtake Thee at last above. You have your wish; enter these walls, one said: He is with you in the breaking of the bread. (St. 3)

This stanza states that the poet finds comfort in the Eucharist received as the Real Presence (Gardner II 84). The expression in line 3 seems to show Hopkins’s feeling for his immediate conversion to Catholicism by emphasizing his relinquishment of the via media. The expression ‘enter these walls’ is echoed by Hopkins’s later sonnet ‘The Candle Indoors’ 4

Gardner refers to line 4 and the last line in the second stanza: ‘Line 4 refers to the Last Supper: “Take, eat; this is my body”. The insistence on “food” seems to indicate the Host, or Communion in one species. …The image of “four rough ways” is puzzling: to us it implies that the poet, having reached the “crossroads” on his spiritual journey, found himself at the centre of the Crossʊthe Sacred HeartʊLove’ (Gardner II 84).

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(1879): ‘Come you indoors, come home; your fading fire / Mend first and vital candle in close heart’s vault’ (9-10). The inside of the house is here used as a metaphor of man’s heart, where one should have the fire of faith. The word ‘vault’ is associated with a church or cathedral, where the Eucharist takes place. The last line is ‘an expression of belief in the Real Presence’ (PI 251). The Real Presence in the Eucharist is what attracts Hopkins most because the abrupt parallelism in transubstantiation can be compared with and applied to his poetics of fancy in poetic diction, which itself has the aim of showing Christ as the Word. Consuming communion bread suggests assimilation with Christ, who has the dual nature of both man and God by the Incarnation. Thus, in terms of Hopkins’s belief, the Eucharist is the repetition of the Incarnation. For Hopkins, the Real Presence in the Eucharist is the only means to confirm his belief in Christ, for it is able to explain Christ’s nature in terms of abrupt parallelism or unity between opposites.5 Abrupt parallelism is the key to understanding the doctrine of the Eucharist, which connects Christ with man. Hopkins’s poetics of abrupt parallelism in the creations of fancy is basically grounded in this belief, and his description of nature sees it as paralleling Christ’s nature.6 The aim of writing poetry for Hopkins is to describe Christ incarnate and to be one with Him in the manner of the Eucharist. Metaphor, for Hopkins, is a means of transubstantiation such as is believed to occur in the sacrament of the Eucharist. ‘Easter’ (1866?) reflects Hopkins’s hope for his conversion to Catholicism. This poem uses nature analogically:7 Gather gladness from the skies; Take a lesson from the ground; Flowers do ope their heavenward eyes 5

James Finn Cotter regards the Eucharist as the means of achieving unity: ‘The Eucharist not only acts as a visible sign of Christian unity, but causes the unity. Through communion in his sacrifice Christ makes the partakers one’ (Cotter 114). 6 Nixon points out the ‘sacramental and incarnational poetics’ of Hopkins in relation to Newman and Keble: ‘…Newman and Keble have shown that poetry and religion converge because poetic language, in itself a reality that is transubstantiated into a higher reality…at once takes on the convention of a sacrament. A related sacramental or incarnational poetics can be treated almost anywhere in Hopkins’ most serious poetry....’ (Nixon 92). 7 ‘Those typological poems, the Herbertian ones like “Easter”, are, because of their analogical use of nature, more Tractarian than Romantic’ (Nixon 87-88).

The Influence of Hopkins’s Conversion to Catholicism And a Spring-time joy have found; Earth throws Winter’s robes away, Decks herself for Easter Day.

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(St. 3)

The depiction of nature here hints at the Tractarian convention, in which ‘nature leads the Christian mind from observation of physical beauty to reflection on what lies behind the appearance to worship of the creator of all things’ (G. B. Tennyson 101). The Resurrection is analogically reflected in nature. Winter and spring are compared to Christian practice. On Easter Day, people give back nature to Christ because it was redeemed by his sacrifice:8 BREAK the box and shed the nard; Stop not now to count the cost; Hither bring pearl, opal, sard; Reck not what the poor have lost; Upon Christ throw all away: Know ye, this is Easter Day.

(St. 1)

The second stanza shows the aspect of the Eucharist: Build His church and deck His shrine, Empty though it be on earth; Ye have kept your choicest wineʊ Let it flow for heavenly mirth; Pluck the harp and breathe the horn: Know ye not ’tis Easter morn?

(St. 2)

The Real Presence in the Eucharist repeats Christ’s sacrifice and the Resurrection because the bread and wine represent the presence of Christ’s body and blood in our lives again. They are consumed in the Eucharist in order to represent Christ’s sacrifice for us and his resurrection in us. The first two lines suggest the Church on earth, where the Eucharist takes place. Then, man is required to ‘seek God’s house’: Seek God’s house in happy throng; Crowded let His table be; Mingle praises, prayer, and song, Singing to the Trinity. 8

G. B. Tennyson points out that Hopkins brilliantly exploits the intellectual assumptions behind the poetry, which asserts ‘nature as God’s creation and sign, nature as fallen with man and yet redeemed through Christ’ (101). This viewpoint regarding nature can be seen in the first stanza.

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Henceforth let your souls alway Make each morn an Easter Day.

(St. 5)

The first two lines remind us of the last two lines of ‘The Half-way House’. Here is certainly the image of both the Eucharist and the Last Supper. As the Eucharist is also called ‘the Lord’s Supper’, it originates in the Last Supper and also further back in the Passover. St. Paul noticed this significant correlation and presented the Last Supper as the feast protected by the Church. St. Paul realized that by being united to ‘the body’ of Christ, man is united to the dead body and then the resurrected body of Christ.9 The ‘Trinity’ (4) reveals that ‘the Three Persons are one Being’ (Cotter 17). Hopkins’s unfinished poem, ‘Summa’, written perhaps in the same year as ‘Easter’, shows his interest in God as at the same time one and three in the Trinity: THE best ideal is the true And other truth is none, All glory be ascribèd to The holy Three in One.

(1-4)

As the title shows, this poem is relevant to the theology of Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologiae reveals the role of analogy as the means to connect the ‘holy Three in One’ in the Trinity and also to connect man with God: Man is most low, God is most high As sure as heaven it is There must be something to supply All insufficiencies.

(5-8)

Lines 5 and 6 show the hierarchy in the universe, as well as that of angels in heaven. Analogy is ‘something to supply all the insufficiencies’, and seems to work as the means to connect man with Christ and God. The present text is from Hopkins’s manuscript A, and the completed version of the poem was destroyed with other works, when Hopkins joined the Society of Jesus (PI 308). In his letter to Robert Bridges, written in 1868, the year Hopkins joined the Jesuits, he says: ‘I cannot send my Summa for 9

Cf. The sections on ‘the Lord’s Supper’ and ‘the Passover’ from Takao Yamagata, Seisho Sho-jiten (A Glossary of the Bible).

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it is burnt with my other verses: I saw they wd. interfere with my state and vocation’ (LI 24). Hopkins entered the Society of Jesus two years after his conversion to Catholicism. In 1866, his interest in Aquinas may have been one of his motives for entering the Society, for it authorized Thomism. ‘S Thomae Aquinatis Rythmus ad SS. Sacramentum’ (1876) is a translation of Aquinas’s hymn to the Blessed Sacrament: O thou our reminder of Christ crucified, Living Bread the life of us for whom he died, Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind, There be thou the sweetness man was meant to find.

(St. 5)

Christ’s sacrifice is repeated in the Eucharist. Stanza 6 metaphorically refers to sacrifice: Bring the tender tale for the Pelican; Bathe me, Jesu Lord, in what thy bosom ranʊ Blood that but one drop of has the worth to win All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.

(St. 6)

The ‘tender tale for the Pelican’ alludes to the legendary ‘pious’ Pelican who suckles its young on blood from its own breast (PI 324). Line 2 implies the analogical relationship between the Pelican’s tale and Christ’s sacrifice. When Hopkins entered the Society of Jesus, however, his interest in Aquinas in terms of analogy seems to have been reversed by the so-called ‘New Thomism’, which was modified by Suarez and authorized by the Society (Ogata xiv). This was quite different from what Hopkins had been looking for. He realized this when he discovered Duns Scotus in 1872. The Scotist idea of ‘the univocity of being’ which is combined with his ‘principle of individuation’ attracted Hopkins, and he found that there was a fundamental difference between the univocity of being in Scotus and the ‘concept of the analogy of being’ in Aquinas as the official theologian and philosopher of the Jesuits.10 He realized that what he had been looking for 10

‘…Scotus and Aquinas represent opposing tendencies of thought, and…these tendencies…would lead to two radically different concepts of nature and poetry. The concept of the analogy of being leads to an hierarchical view of nature…. Things are analogous to the nature of God, and each thing in nature stands not for the whole nature of God, but for a particular attribute of deity. The idea of the

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was not Aquinas’s idea of analogy but Scotus’s idea of the univocity of being, where each being wholly, not partially, imitates Christ’s nature in a way which Hopkins saw as the origin of the abrupt parallelism of fancy. Interestingly, Hopkins’s poems dealing with Eucharistic imagery are mostly found in his early works written around the time of his conversion to Catholicism in 1866, with the exception of ‘The Bugler’s First Communion’ (1879). After entering the Society of Jesus, Hopkins suffered from a conflict between his vocations as poet and priest, which he imposed on himself. He created his own poetics out of this very conflict to make these two roles or identities compatible in his poetry. This conflictinspired expression is reflected in his later sonnets in a more original and stylistic manner, in which his words imitate the abrupt parallelism in the Incarnation and its repetition in the Real Presence in the Eucharist.

3.3. Fancy in the Gothic Revival 3.3.1. Fancy in Gothic Architecture: Coleridge, Ruskin and Hopkins In addition to their definitions of imagination and fancy, Coleridge and Ruskin also made interesting remarks on Gothic cathedrals or architecture in relation to fancy, which are relevant to Hopkins’s poetics of fancy. Coleridge’s comments on Christian cathedrals contrast the products of imagination as consisting of ‘the whole perceived in a perceived harmony with the parts that compose it’ to those of fancy, in which the parts ‘preserve their distinct individuality’. 11 He sets imagination higher than fancy, for he values the beauty arising from the former as ‘Majestic Beauty’ when the parts ‘melt undistinguished into the Whole’. Fancy, in which the parts remain distinct, produces ‘Beauty simply’, which he identifies with the parts of Christian cathedrals, where ‘the parts are in themselves sharply distinct, and this distinction counterbalanced only by their multitude & variety…’ (Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature, 2: 400). univocity of being leads to a different view of nature, and therefore to a different kind of poetry…. [T]he main tendency of his [Hopkins’s] vision is toward seeing inscapes as versions of the whole nature of Christ’ (Miller, The Disappearance of God, 314-315). For further discussion of Scotus’s influence on Hopkins’s poetics, see 3.4.5. 11 S.T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1987), 2: 400. See also Imagination in Coleridge, 99.

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In contrast, for Hopkins, each part with its ‘distinctive individuality’ should be united with another by the abrupt parallelism of fancy. His idea of fancy is relevant to the effect of Gothic architecture on the human mind, which Coleridge illustrated in his lecture on the Gothic Mind (27 January 1818). Coleridge compares the works of antique art with Gothic architecture. The former ‘excites a feeling of elevated beauty, and exalted notions of the human self’, while ‘Gothic architecture impresses the beholder with a sense of self-annihilation; he becomes…a part of the work contemplated’ (Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature, 2: 60). Coleridge apparently defends the ‘elevated beauty’, associated with the ‘Majestic Beauty’ of imagination, while Hopkins sympathizes with fancy as producing the ‘Beauty simply’ of Gothic architecture with the variety of the parts, which absorbs the beholder. Hopkins’s fancy or the inscape discovered by its contemplative activity, demonstrates what Maria R. Lichtmann calls ‘a kenosis of intellect’ or self-annihilation in the Passion, in contrast to Romantic imagination, which is related to meditation: ‘With its parallelistic inscape, Hopkins’s poetics privileged the contemplative response in deliberate reaction to the Romantics’ emphasis on reflection and imagination. In conformity with his poetics, Hopkins’s poems, written with a kenosis of intellect in their parallelism and simple connectives, invite not meditation but contemplation’ (Lichtmann 5). Hopkins contemplates the parallel or repetitive patterns of the parts with their distinctions, which engender ‘a sense of self-annihilation’ through fancy. * Ruskin’s view of fancy is also relevant to the fanciful style of Gothic architecture, since he privileges the beauty of Gothic over other architectural styles in The Stones of Venice. A ‘modern spontaneous Gothic’ (J 13), he writes, idealizes the role of medieval craftsmen, and its origin in the Middle Ages recalls Hopkins’s idea of poetic diction as the natural and native form of language. Ruskin respects the work of medieval craftsmen. He points out that there is no creativity in modern architecture, but finds it in the work of fancy in Gothic architecture. Ruskin attaches much greater value to the Gothic spirit which expresses irregularity and freedom of thought than to the regularity of modern architecture: And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished. …Alas! if read rightly, these

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Chapter Three perfections are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek. … And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children. (‘The Nature of Gothic’, The Stones of Venice, 85-86)

Ruskin notes variety of decorations in the detail of Gothic architecture, and values the fancy and creativity of medieval craftsmen. He also connects fancy with the external forms of Gothic buildings in ‘The Nature of Gothic’: Now observe: the chemist defines his mineral by two separate kinds of character; one external, its crystalline form, hardness, lustre, etc.; the other internal. The proportions and nature of its constituent atoms. Exactly in the same manner, we shall find that Gothic architecture has external forms and internal elements. Its elements are certain mental tendencies of the builders, legibly expressed in it; as fancifulness, love of variety, love of richness, and such others. Its external forms are pointed arches, vaulted roofs, etc. And unless both the elements and the forms are there, we have no right to call the style Gothic. It is not enough that it has the Form, if it has not also the power and life. It is not enough that it has the Power, if it has not the form. (‘The Nature of Gothic’, 78)

Ruskin’s definition of Gothic architecture as having these ‘external forms and internal elements’ corresponds to the definitions of imagination and fancy in Modern Painters: fancy as the source of the parts or ornamental designs in the details of the buildings is relevant to external objects while imagination as expressing the whole or heart of the builder or sculptor is relevant to the self. Hopkins’s notes on and sketches of the ornamental parts of Gothic architecture reveal the nature of the fancy which he perceived in them. *

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Although Hopkins does not thoroughly coincide with Ruskin as he comments that ‘Ruskin often goes astray’ in his letter to Baillie on September 6, 1863 (LIII 204) after he writes that ‘Ruskin is a critic whom you admire’ (LIII 203), he is certainly intrigued by Ruskin’s writings, which extensively influenced Victorian aesthetics, when he mentions Modern Painters as one of the books to be read in his journal in 1865 (J 56). In his journal in 1863, Hopkins also notes ‘a modern spontaneous Gothic’, which he compares with other styles of architecture in the history of art: Note. There is now going on what has no parallel that I know of in history of art. Byzantine or Romanesque Architecture started from ruins of Roman, became itself beautiful style, and died, as Ruskin says, only in giving birth to another more beautiful than itself, Gothic. The Renaissance appears now to be in the process of being succeeded by a spontaneous Byzatinesque style, retaining still some of bad features (such as pilasters, rustic-work etc) of the Renaissance. …Whether then modern Gothic or this spontaneous style conquer does not so much matter, for it is only natural for latter to lead to a modern spontaneous Gothic, as in middle ages, only that the latter is putting off what we might be or rather are doing now. Or the two may coalesce. (J 13)

This statement shows that the Gothic Revival and Ruskin’s theory of Gothic architecture excited the aesthetic curiosity of the young Hopkins. He feels that Gothic architecture is still alive with spontaneity and abrupt parallelism uniting his time with the Middle Ages. The central concept of Hopkins’s fancy basically consists in the visualization of an idea, which can be seen in Catholic beliefs, especially in the ideas of the Incarnation and Passion, as Christ’s body and blood are visualized and consumed by congregations in the Real Presence of the Altar according to the doctrine of transubstantiation. In this respect, it is fundamentally different from Coleridge’s imagination, because Coleridge regards an excessive emphasis on the visual as leading to ‘the despotism of the eye’, and sees imagination as liberating the self from domination by the objective, enabling it to discover a deeper unity between self and other. Differing from Romanticism, Victorian aesthetics, such as that of the Gothic Revival and the Pre-Raphaelites who were influenced by Ruskin, stresses visualization of the variety of parts in detail. In the field of poetry, the revival of rhetoric indicates an increased interest in the aspect of fancy as against that of imagination. Hopkins is influenced by this tendency in Victorian poetry, architecture and art, and pursues the abrupt parallelism of fancy in order to realize transubstantiation through his poetry.

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3.3.2. Hopkins’s Sympathy for ‘Oddness’ in the Fancy of William Butterfield Hopkins’s journals reveal a remarkable influence of the Gothic Revival on the formation of his views on art, nature and poetry. In 1864, Apologia pro vita sua by J. H. Newman was published. At the age of twenty, the Oxford Movement following Newman’s thought directly affected Hopkins as a student at Oxford University. As for the Gothic Revival, Hopkins’s journals of the 1860s provide us with detailed information on the restoration of Catholic churches which was prevalent in his time. His aesthetic concern was naturally directed to John Ruskin, who advocated medievalism, the restitution of Gothic architecture and the importance of detail in works of art. Among the architects of the Gothic Revival, Hopkins particularly sympathized with William Butterfield because he found spontaneity in the ‘modern Gothic’ architecture of Butterfield, which was relevant to the originality and eccentricity or what he called ‘oddness’ in his own poetry. Although some early critics suggest the connections between Hopkins’s conversion and the Oxford Movement, the connection between Hopkins and the Gothic Revival, especially Butterfield, has rarely been mentioned. Though Ellen Eve Frank contributes to our understanding of the analogy between literature and architecture, she does not mention fancy as relevant to Butterfield’s Gothic architecture, where Hopkins finds an eccentricity similar to that of his poetic diction. Kenneth Clark notes the emphasis on the parts over the whole in Gothic architecture (Clark 50), and compares Hopkins ‘in his clash of interrupted rhythms, no less than in the indigestibility of his detail’ with Butterfield as an architect of the Gothic Revival and ‘the first master of discordant polyphony’ (Clark 91). Nikolaus Pevsner finds ‘fantasy rather than logic’ in Gothic architecture, in contrast to the logical and organic Greco-Roman tradition (Pevsner 102103). The elements of fancy or fantasy are observable in the reliefs on the columns or the detailed patterns or designs of the parts of Gothic architecture, and Hopkins is particularly interested in the fancy and eccentricity found in the works of Butterfield. * The Gothic Revival started when Horace Walpole built his mansion in the Gothic style in 1750. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, A.W.N. Pugin wrote Contrasts (1836) and The True Principles of Pointed or

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Christian Architecture (1841), where he described the Middle Ages as the canon of his time, insisting on its revival. His works show the history of architecture from the viewpoint of a Catholic. The Gothic Revival was deeply connected with the Oxford Movement starting at Oxford University, and a lot of students including Hopkins were converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, regarding it as representing their religious roots in the Middle Ages. When Hopkins was thirteen years old, he read John Henry Parker’s An Introduction to the Study of Gothic Architecture (1849), which had a great impact on the Gothic Revival. He borrowed architectural terms to describe his ideas from the same author’s A Glossary of Terms used in Grecian, Roman, Italian, and Gothic Architecture (1840). Through these works, Hopkins may have encountered medieval monasticism and Christianity (White 21-22), which constitute the basic ideal of Gothic architecture. Hopkins was, indeed, influenced by the beauty of Gothic cathedrals and churches, and left detailed illustrations and sketches of them in his journals, where the name of Butterfield first appears in 1864, two years before his conversion to Catholicism: ‘Butterfield’s new church built for ǧ800 on the Nine Mile Road between Finchampstead and Ascot’ (J 49).12 In 1865, Hopkins notes ‘Wootton Church just restored by Butterfield’ (J 56). 13 In the same year, he notes another restoration by Butterfield: ‘Butterfield has restored Ottery St. Mary church for John Duke Coleridge, and painted his drawing-room, whom he knows’ (J 59). This note suggests Hopkins’s relationship with the Coleridges, and the life-long friendship between J. D. Coleridge and Butterfield (J 330). The following commentary on the Ottery St. Mary church by the editor of Hopkins’s journals suggests the eccentricity in Butterfield’s design: …he [J. D. Coleridge] extolled Butterfield’s work (carried out against the active opposition of the governors of the church) in a paper on the restoration read to the Exeter Diocesan Architectural Society Sept. 1851 (Transactions, iv. 189-217). The nave was enlarged by the removal of pews and galleries and paved with encaustic tiles; the roof painted in polychrome colours; and a new font of Devon and Cornish marble installed. Butterfield’s pupil, Woodyer, … had earlier restored the Lady

12

‘St Sebastian’s, Wokingham. Style Early English. Consecrated 10 Dec. 1864’ (J 319n). 13 ‘…Wootton, Northants., in the diocese of Peterborough. The parish church was reopened after Butterfield’s restoration on 16 Feb. 1865’ (J 328n).

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In 1867, Hopkins visited ‘Butterfield’s new church’ (J 156), ‘All Saints’, Babbacombe, 2 miles N. of Torquay’ (J 328). The note in Hopkins’s journal says that the construction of the church was begun in December, 1865, ‘and sufficiently complete to be consecrated by Samuel Wilberforce on All Saints’ Day 1867, although the tower and chancel were not added until 1873-4’: Large and imposing from the outside, it has Butterfield’s typical and profuse decorations within: bands of coloured Devonshire marble; encaustic tiles; an elaborate marble front. It has remained in the AngloCatholic tradition. (J 375)

Later, Hopkins went to All Saints’, Margaret Street on June 12, 1874: 14 …we went to All Saints’ Margaret Street. I wanted to see if my old enthusiasm was a mistake, I recognized certainly more than before Butterfield’s want of rhetoric and telling, almost to dullness, and even of enthusiasm and zest in his workʊthought the wall-mosaic rather tiresome for instance. Still the rich nobility of the tracery in the open arches of the sanctuary and the touching and passionate curves of the lilyings in the ironwork under the baptistery arch marked his genius to me as before. But my eye was fagged with looking at pictures. (J 248)

Hopkins sees here ‘the nineteenth century’s most influential church: with it, High Victorian Gothic sprang into being, complete in every vigorous essential’ (Brooks 309). In the Gothic architecture of Butterfield, Hopkins finds the effects of fancy including surprise in the abrupt parallelism between different patterns, which ‘abut abruptly on one another; different classes of material, rare and common, expensive and cheap, are bluntly juxtaposed’ (Brooks 310). Fancy is relevant to originality and inventiveness, which Hopkins discovers in the oddness of Butterfield’s architecture. 15 Hopkins uses the verb ‘mark’, meaning ‘to stress the individuality of a genius’. It corresponds with his definition of fancy as engendering ‘the marked or abrupt kind of parallelism’. Hopkins impressively uses the word as a noun meaning fancy’s abruptness in his 14

All the photographs in 3.3 and 3.4. were taken by Kumiko Tanabe at All Saints’ Margaret Street, London in July, 2008. 15 ‘Restlessly inventive, Butterfield pushed compositional drama further, keeping components sharply articulated but increasing their compression, so that forms and volumes appear compacted or telescoped together’ (Brooks 313-314).

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poetry. Although Hopkins is sometimes criticizes the oddness of Butterfield’s architecture including its use of ‘structural polychromy’ (Brooks 309),16 he seems to identify it with his poetry as the creation of his fancy, which repeats the surprise he experienced when he was given inspiration. In his journal of August, 1874, Hopkins describes his interest in the oddness of Butterfield’s architecture on his second visit to All Saints’, Babbacombe: Then I went…to Butterfield’s Church at Babbicombe. It is odd and the oddness at first sight outweighed the beauty. It is long and low, only a foot or so, just to mark the break, between the nave and aisle (lean-to) roofs (I am nearly sure I remember there being once a wider interval with quatrefoil fanlights); the windows scattered; the steeple rather detached, not, I thought, very impressive, with an odd openwork diaper of freestone over marble pieces on the tower/ and on the spire scale-work, and with turrets at corners. …Inside chancel-arch much as at St. Alban’s, Holbornʊ a cross and lozenges in freestone enclosing black-and-white patterned tiles set in chequer and the pattern, more by suggestion than outright, passing from one to the other…. …Medallions by east window/ alternate inscapesʊall five-spoked wheels or rosesʊodd. …Wrought brass chancel gates with a running inscape not quite satisfying, continued by deep marble party-wall (as at Margaret Street) pierced by quatrefoils. Very graceful gasjets from the walls. (J 254-255)

The exterior of this church impresses the beholder while abundant polychrome patterns in the decoration inside, which show the characteristics of Butterfield’s style, have an overwhelming effect due to the ambiguity of the design as a whole. 17 Such a style inherits the ‘Anglo-Catholic tradition’. The idiosyncrasy of Butterfield’s works is that they are fanciful and have various styles, so they are beyond the category of medievalism. Butterfield’s buildings at Merton College ‘were condemned for their “fantastic striving after every strange and unheard of form”’ (Crook 16

‘Externally, bands and zigzags of black brick pattern the red, constantly varied in how they relate – or do not – to windows, doors and buttresses. So the arrangement of the decoration and the disposition of the architectural forms are allowed to collide with one another’ (Brooks 309-310). 17 ‘Babbacombe, Devon (1865-74), where a web of raised stone ribs, covering nave and chancel walls (189), is repeated in analogous forms and patterns through the church, unifying decoration and structure in an ambiguous system of echoes and half-echoes. Idiosyncratic, intriguing, Babbacombe is among Butterfield’s most compelling achievements’ (Brooks 315).

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292). 18 All Saints’ Margaret Street makes good use of polychrome, abstract geometrical patterns and shapes. Butterfield’s style as ‘Modern Gothic’ is a mixture of German, English, French and Italian.19 Nikolaus Pevsner points out that the idiosyncrasy in Butterfield’s architecture cannot be categorized as belonging to any period of time or national character (Pevsner 75-76). This can be regarded as demonstrating the free spirit in ‘the Englishness of English art’ which characterizes Gothic art and architecture (Pevsner 74). Both Hopkins and Butterfield lived in the age of the Gothic Revival, and their works reflect its spirit. They showed idiosyncrasy and the abrupt parallelism of fancy, and the Gothic Revival itself revealed the abrupt parallelism between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century in its

18

Crook’s quotation is from Sat. Rev. xxxvii (1874), 808-809. ‘…his [Butterfield’s] sources of inspiration were as much English as Italian. Of course there is polychromy at Verona or Pavia. But there is medieval polychromy as well at King’s Lynn or Higham Ferrers. …So out goes Butterfield the disciple of Ruskin. …He was simply playing the eclectic game, and playing it to please himself. The result was Modern Gothic: “a tentative solution”, as Benjamin Webb put it – thinking of All Saints, Margaret St – ‘of the problem [of] what the architecture of the future [is] to be’ (Crook 140). 19

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innovative repetition of the medieval spirit and style. It also led to the return to Catholicism as among the origins of Englishness before the Reformation. What made the works of Hopkins and Butterfield odd to their contemporaries was ‘a willingness to shock’ (Crook 141) or surprise the reader or observer by the abrupt parallelism of fancy which connects opposite elements. The oddness in Butterfield’s style was considered to be ugly (Crook 140-142). Hopkins found faults in Butterfield’s architecture as well as in his poetry when he noticed the similarity between their fancies, both of which he regarded as perceiving inscape. Hopkins was first overwhelmed by the oddness of Butterfield, and then found similarity between his own poetics of fancy and the element of fancy in the repetition of polychrome patterns in the detail of Butterfield’s architecture. In his letter to Butterfield, Hopkins regretted that his contemporaries did not understand the originality in Butterfield’s architecture: I hope you will long continue to work out your beautiful and original style. I do not think this generation will ever much admire it. They do not understand how to look at a Pointed building as a whole having single form governing it throughout…. And very few people seem to care for pure beauty of line, at least till they are taught to. (Thompson 305)

Hopkins’s interest in the Gothic Revival demonstrates his desire for fancy and creativity as aspects of Englishness, which were lost in the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, and his sympathy for the oddness in the Gothic architecture of Butterfield leads him to identify his poetics of fancy with his concept of inscape, which thus becomes a visual metaphor of the intrinsic analogies he perceives as existing between natural phenomena.

3.4. Hopkins’s Fancy as Revealing Inscape 3.4.1. Fancy as Revealing Inscape in Nature Hopkins coined the terms ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’ and first used them in his undergraduate essay on ‘Parmenides’ (1867), two years after he defined the terms fancy and imagination in ‘Poetic Diction’ (1865): His [Parmenides’s] great text, which he repeats with religious conviction, is that Being is and Not-being is notʊwhich means that all things are upheld by instress, and are meaningless without it. …[Parmenides’s] feeling for instress, for the flush and foredrawn, and for inscape / is most striking and from this one can understand Plato’s reverence for him as the great father of Realism…. But indeed I have often felt when I have been in

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What gives us hints here about the distinction between the two terms ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’ is that instress upholds all things, or all parts of intrinsic energy. Instress is concerned with the whole and is in the centre of an organic unity which manifests inscape, while inscape is relevant to the particularity of the parts. This distinction is comparable to the definitions of imagination and fancy by Coleridge and Ruskin. Coleridge’s imagination is concerned with the underlying unity between objects which it enables the subject to discover or envisage, while his fancy is concerned with their distinctness and fixity. Ruskin is more relevant to Hopkins’s description here because his imagination corresponds to the inside or the self which grasps the whole while his fancy corresponds to the outside of objects or the parts. While imagination is the power that unites the parts into a whole, fancy is concerned with the variety of the parts. Though fancy as the source of abrupt parallelism unites two things together, the particularities of the parts cannot be transformed. While Coleridge’s imagination is the power that transforms all the parts or objects through the subject’s intuition of the infinite (or of what Kant calls ‘ideas of reason’), Hopkins champions the concept of fancy as related to the particularities of objects as the parts, and his inscape takes over this idea. He tries to identify the realities of objects as Parmenides and Plato did, and seeks a new Realism to show them in his poetry.20 Hopkins uses the term ‘inscape’ more often than ‘instress’ when he describes particular charms in nature and art in his journals: ‘Note that a slender race of fine flue cloud inscaped in continuous eyebrow curves hitched on the Weisshorn peak as it passed…’ (J 181). This is the note written on July 24, 1868 during his visit to Switzerland, and the word ‘inscape’ here is used as a verb meaning ‘to show its inner self’, while he also uses it as a noun meaning ‘inner self’ in his other journals. In the Romantic poetics of imagination, an object cannot have a self and must be ‘dead’ because it should be seen as expressing an underlying but imperceptible reality which unifies it with other objects from the point of view of the imaginative observer. Hopkins, however, admits the particularity 20

‘The remote origin of these concepts was probably the “plastic stress” of Plato’s “One Spirit”, which sweeps through the world of dull matter to impose upon it the predestined forms of the Prime Good. For Hopkins, inscape was a glimpse or strain of a universal harmony, and as such revealed its divine origin’ (PI xxi).

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or ‘self’ in the object as a part of the surface of reality. He has scientific and objective views as a Victorian in the age of science, so he minutely observes and cherishes variety and detail in nature and art. Here are some instances of Hopkins’s use of the term ‘inscape’ with his minute observation of nature: ...I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it. It[s inscape] is [mixed of] strength and grace, like an ash [tree]. (1870. J 199) Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is. (March, 1871. J 205) The bluebells in your hand baffle you with their inscape, made to every sense: if you draw your fingers through them they are lodged and struggle/ with a shock of wet heads; …then there is the faint honey smell and in the mouth the sweet gum when you bite them. But this is easy, it is the eye they baffle. They give one a fancy of panpipes and of some wind instrument with stopsʊa trombone perhaps. …the inscape of the flower most finely carried out in the siding of the axes, each striking a greater and greater slant, is finished in these clustered buds, which for the most part are not straightened but rise to the end like a tongue and this and their tapering and a little flattening they have make them look like the heads of snakes. (May 11, 1871. J 209) …I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how neat at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again. (1872. J 221) I saw the inscape though freshly, as if my eye were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come. (1872. J 228)

These instances reveal that the inscape of objects in nature can be gained by sense perception, especially by sight. They also show the characteristics of fancy as against the Romantic poetics of imagination, as Coleridge warns against the ‘despotism of the eye’ (BL I 107). Vision (or actual sight or observation) draws the subject into the object, and this state of contemplation deprives the subject of imagination, or the power to transcend the surface appearances of objects, except in terms of grasping the Platonic ‘inscape’ which Hopkins describes. Therefore, the visual attraction of the object is dangerous for Romantic poets such as Coleridge, for whom underlying truth must be discovered through inward reflection

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rather than observation. Conversely, Hopkins’s eyes are as objective as a scientist’s, but at the same time the object inspires him to obtain ‘a fancy’ through sight, which makes him see an apparently different essence or the inscape of another thing. In the journal entry of May 11, he sees in the bluebells ‘a fancy of panpipes and of some wind instrument’. The term ‘fancy’ here is used as a synonym for ‘inscape’. When the object ‘baffles’ the subject with visual surprise, the subject can gain its inscape through fancy. This is the concept of inscape based on Hopkins’s poetics of fancy, which he practices especially in his metaphors. His fancy as the source of his discoveries of inscape is based on his minute observation of the object, not subjective imagination, and his faith in an underlying Platonic unity extends these visual similarities into an idea of intrinsic parallels between objects. In addition, the beauty of the object seems to Hopkins to be essential when it attracts the subject: The chestnuts down by St. Joseph’s were a beautiful sight: each spike had its own pitch, yet each followed in its place in the sweep with a deeper and deeper swoop. When the wind tossed them they plunged and crossed one another without losing inscape. (Observe that motion multiplies inscape only when inscape is discovered, otherwise it disfigures) (May 14, 1870. J 199) The Horned Violet is a pretty thing gracefully lashed. Even in withering the flower ran through beautiful inscapes by the screwing up of the petals in to straight little barrels or tubes. (June, 1871. J 211)

The beauty of the object attracts the subject through sight. Hopkins was given inspiration or fancy, making him see the inscapes of beautiful things in his contemplation of them. Hopkins’s critics tend to focus on the analogical function of inscape. Tom Zaniello explains that Hopkins was interested in the analogy between the colours of the rainbow and the tones of the musical scale (Zaniello 64). This theory arose during the seventeenth century when Isaac Newton correlated the seven colours of the rainbow to the seven tones of the diatonic scale in music. Although some critics point out the analogical nature of inscape, apart from Boyle they do not seem to recognize that it is also an aspect of fancy.

3.4.2. Fancy as Revealing Inscape in Gothic Architecture Hopkins’s letter to Robert Bridges of February 15, 1879 reveals that he saw the idiosyncrasy of Butterfield’s buildings as similar to the oddness or

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eccentricity in his own poetics of fancy, and that he paid great attention to the inner pattern of things with his concept of inscape, which he described as being revealed by the abrupt parallelism of fancy: No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling ‘inscape’ is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. (LI 66)

This statement emphasizes that inscape is the inner pattern and the most indispensable element in the structure of art works. Hopkins admits that inscape can be observed not only in nature but also in art, so he believes that there must be an abrupt parallelism between art and nature when particular things with distinctive qualities in nature and art have the same internal pattern or inscape. This abrupt parallelism between apparently different things is clearly derived from the concept of fancy underlying Hopkins’s poetic diction. The abrupt parallelism between nature and art is well exemplified in the passage from his journal of May 11, 1871 quoted above. He agrees, however, that he ‘cannot have escaped’ oddness in expressing the abrupt parallelism of fancy as inscape in his poetry – an oddness which he also finds in the fancy of Butterfield’s Gothic architecture. Hopkins’s coinage of the terms ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’ is derived from the architectural terms ‘stress’ and ‘scape’ in Parker’s Glossary, and ‘the prefix in to scape only serves to emphasize the architectural meanings, since it directs attention to notions of interior and exterior, inside and outside’ (Frank 56).21 According to Parker, ‘stress’ is due to the action of two forces tending to pull or push the constituents of a member apart, so ‘instress’ can be interpreted as ‘the stress or energy by which each constituent part is connected together, making the whole’. The other architectural term ‘scape’ is ‘a column shaft’, which is a constituent part of the whole building. As a ‘scape’ is a part in architecture, ‘inscape’ is each constituent part inside the organic whole, and ‘instress’ is the energy combining each part into the whole.

21

Frank also adds: ‘Instress and inscape require and depend upon architectural space concepts…’ (Frank 57).

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Hopkins’s interest in the abrupt parallelism or analogical patterns in Gothic cathedrals is observable in his journal, where he commented on the window of Whitby Abbey sometime between 1863 and 1864: Whitby Abbey. I have not seen any parallel to this kind of tracery in French or Italian Gothic. …The bars split at the ends, which connect the bights or recesses of the four-sided openings with other parts of the tracery are at a distance and in effect straight and yet harmonize completely. This is the only successful manner of introducing them in Decorated windows that I know, for those in early geometrical are poor and the instance in Merton choir erected in finest style and in company with other windows of exquisite tracery is quite unworthy of the others and a failure. (J 14)

Here is an example of the abrupt parallelism of fancy revealing inscape in the repetition of geometrical patterns in Gothic architecture.22 In his journal entry dated 15 September, 1871, Hopkins notes on Netley Abbey: In the afternoon to Netley Abbey, a spot which everything makes beautiful – the ruins, the lie on the ground, the ivy, the ashtrees, and that day the bright pieces of evening light. …There is one notable dead tree in the N. W. corner of the nave, the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of branches up to the tops of the timber. ...In the building the most beautiful and noticeable things are the east window; …a pair of plain three-light lancets in each clearstory of the S. transept, which dwell on the eye with a simple direct instress of trinity; lastly three beautiful windows in the chapterhouse, not quite of equal breadth etcʊa plain sixfoil, clear, not enclosed in any roundel, at least inside, riding two plain broad lancets: the cups were sharp and both it and the lancets had no work beyond the splay inwards but the jambs (?) of the head to the whole window were moulded and stripes of red colour could be seen in the splay of lancets of one window radiating from the opening and so following the splay. (J 215-216)

The description of the abbey and ‘one notable dead tree’ suggests the affinity between the Gothic cathedral and nature because the columns 22

T. A. Hoagwood notes that the repetition is what most intrigued Hopkins: ‘…the bars of the window make geometrical shapes…. They symbolize each other, or analogize each other. …the repeated design itself – or its symbolic repetition – is its meaning; the shape is something Hopkins contemplates for its own sake’ (‘Hopkins’s Philosophical Poetics’ in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Critical Discourse, 185).

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inside it actually imitate trees. Gothic architecture is the ideal for Hopkins’s concept of inscape as revealed by fancy because it shows fancy’s abrupt parallelism between different things, and between art and nature. His ‘passionately keen observation’ of ‘oneness’ or individuality in the distinctive beauty of Gothic art and nature generates the activity of fancy which connects them.23 The Trinity represents three persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) existing as one, so it corresponds to instress, which unites the three inscapes into a whole concept. Hopkins’s concept of inscape as revealed by fancy is at once individual and universal, being distinctive but connected with others by abrupt parallelism. Inscape also means the poet’s insight based on his sight and observation, capturing the essences in objects so as to connect them by the similarity in their inner patterns. Gothic architecture most clearly reveals the meaning of the concepts of inscape and instress in Hopkins’s poetics. In a journal entry dated February, 1875, he describes the castle ruins in Denbigh: ‘I had an instress which only the true old work gives from the strong and noble inscape of the pointed arch’ (J 263). The ‘pointed arch’ is characteristic of Gothic architecture, and it is described as revealing inscape in a part, while instress is the internal energy which holds the whole structure together. Hopkins describes Merton College Chapel, restored by Butterfield in 1865: I was wrong about Merton. The sexton says the font, with its cover and bracket, the reredos, the choir-screen, gates and metal-work, everything in fact except the pulpit were designed by Butterfield. …All but the parts named above therefore are by Butterfield, carefully following out the old work. The tiling is by him too. …There was once much more ornament (fleurs-de-lys etc) in the red altar-cloth which was taken away by order of

23

‘By 1875 he had written all that remains of his journal, in the prose of which a passionately keen observation of nature is combined with a poetic feeling for language. In his vivid descriptions of skies, cloud-formations, trees, waves breaking, flowers opening and withering, and other phenomena, Hopkins is mainly fascinated by those aspects of a thing, or group of things, which constitute its individual and “especial” unity of being, its “individually-distinctive beauty”, or…the very essence of its nature. For this unified pattern of essential attributes (often made up of various sense-data) he coined the word “inscape”; and to that energy or stress of being which holds “inscape” together he gave the name “instress”. This “instress” is often referred to as the force which also, as an impulse from the “inscape”, carries it whole into the mind of the perceiver’ (PI xx).

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Fancy as revealing inscape and Gothic architecture have a common ideal and function. A cathedral is an image of the cosmos and the ‘New Jerusalem’ described in Revelation, and is designed according to the image of Christ crucified (Simson 229). The comparison between architecture and the human body started in the works of Vitruvius (Frank 229). The architectural terms and concepts were first borrowed from rhetorical treatises, and later the relationship was reversed (Frank 231). As for the relationship between Gothic cathedrals and music, the proportions of the cathedral corresponded to the ratios of the musical consonances (Simson 8, 36 &199). This parallels Hopkins’s interest in diatonism. In the Middle Ages, God was regarded as the architect of the universe, which was seen as having been built according to the mathematical ratios in the laws of musical consonance (Simson 31-32). In the same way, medieval architects analogically imitated ‘the work of [their] divine master’ (Simson 35). It follows, therefore, that the Gothic cathedral filled the role of a microcosm corresponding to Heaven as the macrocosm, through the influence of Neo-Platonism (Simson 36 & 188). The abrupt parallelism between Hopkins’s poetics of fancy as revealing inscape and the ideal of Gothic architecture lies in the facts that both are greatly influenced by Platonism, both aim at harmony in musical consonance, and both reflect the nature of Christ analogically. As for instress, Daniel Brown states that Hopkins had some interest in the doctrine of energy physics, and interpreted this as suggesting that the only source of energy is God as ‘the Great Architect of nature’ and that all nature is mechanically the manifestation of the one sovereign energy through a logic of analogy, and his concept of instress is influenced by this idea (Brown 193-199, 204209, 230 & 238). While instress as a unifying force is an aspect of God’s creation as a whole, inscape is an aspect of individual elements of art and

24 ‘Butterfield carried out a major restoration of the Chapel in 1849, enlarging the choir, erecting a new screen and removing collars from the roof so as to show the whole height of the E. window. He added most of the fittings and decorations noticed by Hopkins, two years later. Of these, the font (of green and white marble) remains…. Butterfield’s encaustic tiles of red, black, and white squares set diagonally, with a decorated yellow border, replaced the plain black and white squares of Ackermann’s print (1814). The altar-piece is by Tintoretto’s son. It is a little odd that GMH did not comment on the roof of the choir, decorated with medallions and spandrel pictures painted (under Butterfield’s direction) 1850…’ (J 330).

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nature and is visually manifested in Gothic cathedrals as a metaphor of Christ’s body. * ‘To Oxford’ (1865) seems to refer to Merton Chapel as described in Hopkins’s journal in the same year. In the second half of the sonnet, the minute description of the chapel reveals how the beauty of each part of it impresses the poet: Thus, I come underneath this chapel-side, So that the mason’s levels, courses, all The vigorous horizontals, each way fall In bows above my head, as falsified By visual compulsion, till I hide The steep-up roof at last behind the small Eclipsing parapet; yet above the wall The sumptuous ridge-crest leave to poise and ride. None besides me this by-ways beauty try. Or if they try it, I am happier then: The shapen flags and drillèd holes of sky, Just seen, may be to many unknown men The one peculiar of their pleasured eye, And I have only set the same to pen. (15-28)

Hopkins’s note on the beauty of the lines in Butterfield’s architecture in his letter is reflected in the ‘vigorous horizontals’ of stones described as ‘each way fall[ing] in vows…by visual compulsion’. The poet’s eye observing the object can attain beauty, and he wishes others to find it as well. The traceries shaped as flags and the sky seen through them represent the harmony between art and nature through this inscape of architecture, which impresses the beholder with peculiar beauty. This shows an ideal of Gothic architecture, which imitates nature as creation. The final line implies the poet’s endeavour to express the peculiarity of Butterfield’s architecture, as well as the internal connection between nature, art and man: This is my park, my pleasance; this to me As public is my greater privacy, All mine, yet common to my every peer. Those charms accepted of my inmost thought, The towers musical, quiet-wallèd grove, The window-circles, these may all be sought By other eyes, and other suitors move,

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The poet states that Oxford, where nature is in harmony with art, is also in harmony with the people living there: music from the towers, the grove surrounded with walls, and people assembling around Gothic buildings. The harmony of architecture with music, nature and man is accepted by the poet’s ‘inmost thought’ or inscape. The inscape grasped by sight ‘may be sought by other eyes’ as well, and moves their hearts. People’s ‘specialgeneral title’ to the love of Oxford suggests the concept of fancy as grasping inscape, whereby an individual or a part with its distinctiveness can also be shared with others by virtue of abrupt parallelism. All things, whether created or man-made, are connected by their inner patterns as inscape. These two sonnets show the connection between beauty, sight and love in the idea of fancy as well. Hopkins wrote an unfinished poem, ‘(On a Piece of Music)’ (1879), using the term fancy: HOW all’s to one thing wrought! The members, how they sit! O what a tune the thought Must be that fancied it. Nor angel insight can Learn how the heart is hence: Since all the make of man Is law’s indifference. [Who shaped these walls has shewn The music of his mind, Made known, though thick through stone What beauty beat behind.] (St. 1-3)

Bridges rightly said that the ‘subject of the poem…is that the artistic individuality is something beyond the artist’s control’ (PI 313) because the artist’s fancy expresses or is inspired by the unconscious beyond his ego. While Hopkins once wrote in ‘To Oxford’ (1865) about the ‘visual compulsion’ of fancy, which he probably perceived in Merton Chapel which had been mainly restored by Butterfield, here he compares Gothic architecture with music in terms of their patterns or structures with the eye of his fancy perceiving their inscapes.

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The first stanza shows the architectural and structural beauty in the unification of members or parts, suggesting the concept of inscape as discovered by fancy. Music is described in terms of architecture here, implying the abrupt parallelism between their structures. Hopkins’s attention to music is also relevant to diatonism in music as well as in the abrupt parallelism between Gothic architecture and music in the Middle Ages. 25 The second stanza describes the human heart, which cannot be revealed even by an angel’s ‘insight’. The ‘make of man’ can be interpreted as ‘the mind or heart of man’, which is ‘law’s indifference’, unlike other forms of structure. The walls in this poem are literally interpreted as architecture, but also metaphorically as the human body, music and works of art in general. ‘The music of his mind’ is compared to ‘the thought’ as ‘a tune’, which creates the form or structure of a work. The Form of Beauty in a Platonic sense unites each part with repeated forms of beauty. This poem suggests that fancy is relevant to the thought or mind of an artist motivated by the Form of Beauty. The distinctiveness or individuality of the artist as a man in the second stanza is described as ‘not free’ in the fourth stanza: Not free in this because His powers seemed free to play: He swept what scope he was To sweep and must obey. Though down his being’s bent Like air he changed in choice, That was an instrument Which overvaulted voice.

(St. 4-5)

Though the artist’s individuality seems to be free, it is like ‘air’, in the same way as melody is ‘an instrument’, which gives structure to, or ‘overvaults’, voice (St. 5). The song or the work of art is merely a set of colours or sounds as parts, and compared to a comb: No more than red and blue, No more than Re and Mi, Or sweet the golden glue That’s built for by the bee.

(St. 9)

25 Further discussion of Hopkins’s attention to music is mentioned in ‘Appendices: iii. Hopkins as Musician’ (J 457-498).

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The word ‘sweet’ here is comparable with ‘sweetest nectar’ in the tenth stanza: [Who built these walls made known The music of his mind, Yet here he has but shewn His ruder-rounded rind, His brightest blooms lie there unblown, His sweetest nectar hides behind.]

(St. 10)

The ‘sweetest nectar’ can be interpreted as wisdom: ‘My son, eat thou honey, because it is good…. So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul…’ (Prov., 24:13-14).26 The work of art created by the artist is ‘ruder-rounded rind’, and the comparative degree ‘ruder’ hints at the existence of the Form of Beauty in the highest degree. Gothic architecture is ideal for Hopkins because it represents the harmony between art, religion and nature, so he tries to represent it in his poetry through his concept of fancy as revealing inscape. His aim in describing inscape is to show that each being is characteristic of Christ.

3.4.3. Fancy, Inscape and the ‘Haecceitas’ of Duns Scotus Hopkins’s theory of inscape developed through his concept of fancy was seemingly established when he discovered the work of the theologian Duns Scotus after he had coined the term ‘inscape’ in 1867: At this time I had first begun to get hold of the copy of Scotus on the Sentences in the Baddely library and was flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm. It may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from God. But just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus. (July 19, 1872. J 221)

Hopkins discovered the Scotist concept of individuality (‘haecceitas’ or ‘thisness’) and was fascinated by Scotus’s Scriptum Oxoniense super Sententiis. From his realist viewpoint, Scotus criticized the theory of the unity of belief and reason, which had been the centre of orthodox scholasticism. Hopkins’s idea of fancy as superior to reason agrees with Scotus’s standpoint in his Christian belief. Therefore, he was intrigued by

26

Cf. ‘honey’ in Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery.

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the philosophy of Scotus, and introduced it into his concept of inscape as revealed by fancy. * Seven years after he discovered Scotus, Hopkins wrote the sonnet, ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’ (1879), in which he compares Oxford in the Middle Ages with Oxford in the nineteenth century. The first quatrain shows the former when nature was in harmony with towers as examples of Gothic architecture: TOWERY city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did Once encounter in, here coped and poised powers. (1-4)

In medieval Oxford, the trees could be seen between towers, and nature and architecture, or creatures and art, were ‘coped and poised powers’. They were harmonized with each other in an age when the whole city was united by Catholicism, and cathedrals represented theological ideals. Then, the poet deplores the disharmony between nature and architecture in the current Oxford: 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.

(5-8)

In Victorian Oxford, brick was the typical material for modern buildings (‘brickish skirt’). They are the representations of industrialization, which spoils the nature that once harmonized with architecture and displayed a ‘grey beauty’. In the sestet, the poet thinks of Scotus: Yet ah! this air I gather and I release He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what He haunted who of all men most sways my spirit to peace; Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece; Who fired France for Mary without spot.

(9-14)

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Alliterations in the description of ‘these weeds and waters, these walls’, which have been alive since the time of Scotus, show the unity between them in their freshness. In the second tercet, his insight is applauded. Scotus’s ‘insight’ is ‘the ability to integrate the natural with the man-made, religious with the organic, Oxford as city with Oxford as country’, which ‘is a quality rare and worthy’, and it is the special quality which Hopkins selects to distinguish him, and ‘constitutes a pun on visual perception’ (Frank 97). OED defines ‘insight’ as ‘the fact of penetrating with the eyes of the understanding into the inner character or hidden nature of things; a glimpse or view beneath the surface; the faculty or power of thus seeing’. For Hopkins, an inscape is ‘an insight, by Divine grace, into ultimate reality – seeing the “pattern, air, melody” in things from…God’s side’ (Gardner I 27). As fancy is related to sight, so is inscape with its faculty to penetrate into the reality of objects. That is why Hopkins was so attracted to Scotus as the ‘rarest-veinèd unraveller’ of ‘realty’. 27 What Hopkins feels about the peculiarity of Butterfield’s architecture can be clarified by the thought of Scotus. In the expression ‘rarest-veinèd’, Hopkins suggests not only the rare talent of Scotus but also his distinctiveness, which he sees as analogous to the oddness shown in the polychrome patterns of Butterfield’s architecture. * According to Scotus, two sides – the universal and the particular – coexist simultaneously in an individual. Paul G. Arakelian explains that the ‘universal is common to all men while the particular is a hidden, unknowable ingredient which distinguished each man from the other’, and the latter ‘is not perceived by the intellect (since the intellect can only perceive universals) but by the senses’.28 Scotus thinks that each ‘created thing, in its own special way, is the total image of its creator’. Similarly, ‘the main tendency of’ Hopkins’s ‘vision is toward seeing inscapes as versions of the whole nature of Christ’ (Miller 315). In Hopkins’s poetics of fancy as inscape, there is a fundamental idea that all things are explained by the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. Therefore, each different individual can be connected to every other by abrupt parallelism of fancy or by the affinity of its pattern. 27

‘…Scotus, as Hopkins was well aware, was the “rarest-veinèd unraveller” of “realty”, of the inscapes in all of nature, and he lived on “these weeds and waters, these walls”’ (Mariani 134). 28 Paul G. Arakelian, ‘The Uncertainty of Incompleteness: The Music of “Henry Purcell”,’ in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Critical Discourse, 42.

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Hopkins’s ideas of inscape and instress seem to express the difference between his perception of Christ and God. Inscape denotes Hopkins’s perception of inner selves, which he sees in particular objects in art and nature. He connects this idea with the Incarnation because he thinks that Christ incarnated is perceivable through the senses, especially sight. Therefore, he believes in the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar because the bread and wine in it are the manifestations of Christ’s body and blood. This is exactly what Hopkins means by his concept of inscape and fancy as making abrupt parallelisms which reveal the intrinsic similarities of objects. For Hopkins, the underlying concept in inscape, the Incarnation and the Real Presence is the same, and only Christ can realize it. Christ as the mediator between God the Father and man is the origin of Hopkins’s ideas of inscape and of fancy as revealing fundamental truths through its abrupt parallelism. God the Father cannot be seen, but Christ can be through the Incarnation. Accordingly, God’s energy activated within each object as ‘instress’, which unites all the parts of the world into a whole, cannot be seen, while inscape as its manifestation and the inner reality in particular objects can be seen with the eye of fancy. Thus, Hopkins’s poetics of fancy as inscape requires sight, based on his belief in Christ and the Real Presence.

3.4.4. Fancy, Inscape and ‘the Affective Will’ Although Hopkins was fascinated by Scotus’s theory of haecceitas and almost identified it with his concept of fancy as revealing inscape, he found later that they were different. The difference between them lies in Hopkins’s distinction of two kinds of wills: ‘the affective will’ (voluntas ut natura) and ‘the elective will’ (voluntas ut arbitrium). In his devotional writings, Hopkins left a lot of discussions of the affective will and the elective will: The memory, understanding and affective will are incapable themselves of an infinite object and do not tend towards it. They are finite powers and can get each an adequate object. But the tendency in the soul towards an infinite object comes from the arbitrium. The arbitrium in itself is man’s personality or individuality and places him on a level of individuality in some sense with God; so that in so far as God is one thing, a self, an individual being, he is an object of apprehension, desire, pursuit to man’ s arbitrium. There would be no apprehension, desire, action, or motion of any kind without freedom of play, that play which is given by the use of a nature, of human nature, with its faculties; …with the use of a nature and

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Hopkins juxtaposes the affective will and memory in order to equate it with fancy. Coleridge defines fancy as related to memory: ‘The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space’ (BL I 305); ‘It is the universal law of the passive fancy and mechanical memory’ (BL I 104); ‘..our fancy (always the ape, and too often the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory)….’ (BL II 235); ‘…we may deduce the uselessness if not the absurdity of certain recent schemes which promise an artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a confusion and debasement of fancy’ (BL I 127-128). It is generally agreed in Coleridgean criticism that fancy is related to understanding while imagination is related to reason, in the Kantian sense of the faculty which provides us with intuitions of higher or supersensible ideas (Willey 28). Coleridge’s concept of understanding is similar to Hopkins’s concept of fancy as well. Coleridge defines the terms imagination, fancy, and understanding as follows: ‘…the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy, or the aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative, substantiating and realizing power…’ (BL I 293). Hopkins’s fancy as the source of abrupt parallelism connects different things and has a substantiating and realizing power, as shown in his idea of fancy as revealing Christ’s incarnation and passion represented in the Real Presence. While the affective will described by Scotus can be regarded as equivalent to fancy, the elective will is related to Scotus’s concept of haecceitas as well as free will and imagination: ‘The arbitrium is indeed free towards all alternatives, even though one of them should be absolute evil, evil in itself; but not so the affective will: this must always be affected towards the stem of good’ (S 149). Coleridge refers to ‘Free Will or Arbitrement’ (BL I 294), which can be construed as equivalent to Hopkins’s concept of the elective will or arbitrium. Coleridge also relates the secondary imagination which co-exists with the conscious will to ‘self will’ (BL xc), which is ‘the free will’ relevant to ‘our only absolute self’ (BL I 114). 29 Hopkins continues describing the affective will and the 29

Cf. the editor’s notes on ‘free will’ and ‘absolute self’ here: ‘C connects freewill (as opposed to passive materialism) with the essence of individuality. It is the evidence of the divine in man and hence the fear of “profanation” expressed immediately below. The apposition “our absolute self” may be an echo of Fichte’s

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elective will, and the latter is then connected to ‘power of pitch’ and haecceitas: …what is called above the necessary or constrained act (of consenting to grace) is really necessary, and in the affective will is constrained, but in the elective will or arbitrium is free. … … …And no freedom is more perfect; for freedom of field is only an accident. So also pitch is ultimately simple positiveness, that by which differs from and is more than nothing and not-being, and it is with precision expressed by the English do…. Is not this pitch or whatever we call it then the same as Scotus’s ecceitas [haecceitas]? … This being so, God exercises his mastery and dominion over his creatures’ wills in two waysʊover the affective will by simply determining it so or so…; over the arbitrium or power of pitch by shifting the creature from one pitch contrary to God’s will to another which is according to it or from the less to the more so. (S 150-151)

Christopher Devlin and Maria R. Lichtmann explain that Hopkins’s spelling of haecceitas here is ecceitas as ‘a reminder of ecce, “behold” or “look”’ (S 293-294 & Lichtmann 135). This also suggests Hopkins’s respect for sight as the means to find the selves or individualities of objects. Then, Hopkins distinguishes the affective will as fancy from the elective will as the imagination: …the affective will, taken strictly as a faculty of the mind, is really no freer than the understanding or the imagination. …Its [the elective will’s] freedom of choice comes into play with freedom of field or choice of alternatives, all of which must have, though in different degrees, the quality of good. And it is in presence of the alternatives that the elective will has this freedom…. (S 152)

Although Hopkins might not have known the close connection between fancy and understanding, which is generally agreed among Coleridgean critics nowadays, he clearly differentiates the affective will as fancy from imagination, which he sees as related to free will or the elective will.

das absolute or reine Ich. But whereas Fichte sees this absolute ego or pure self as supra-personal or even divine, C wants to emphasis the free agency and will of the individual human being while expressly avoiding the naming of God Himself by any form of “I” or “ego,” even if modified by “pure” or “absolute”’ (BL I 114).

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Miller explains the difference between the two kinds of will as Hopkins conceives them: Memory, understanding, and ‘affective will’ taken together make up man’s share in the common nature, his inscape. Hopkins often calls them simply man’s ‘heart.’ On the other hand there is what he calls ‘elective will.’ This he identifies with the haecceitas of Scotus, man’s individualizing form, his selftaste or pitch of selfhood. Often he calls man’s selftaste his ‘personality,’ as opposed to his ‘nature.’ (Miller 329)

Miller thinks that these two forms of will contradict each other, and this contradiction of self or individuality is also that of God’s nature because it reflects the most complicated pattern of God as ‘many’, and the perfection of individuality, as Scotus’s haecceitas (thisness) reflects His nature as ‘one’. The affective will as fancy is observable in Hopkins’s nature poems which express the coexistence of nature, the Word, self and Christ, while the elective will can be seen in the Dark Sonnets in his later years, expressing the self isolated from Christ, God and nature. The perfection of individuality leads to what Scotus calls ‘the ultima solitude of man’, and it ‘leads to the idea that a man has no kinship with anything, not even with God’ (Miller 331). In contrast, however, we should note that in Coleridge’s philosophy as in his poetry, imagination (which Hopkins associates with the elective will) often involves an intuition of the unity of the self with the infinite and divine spirit, as well as a liberating sense of elevation or transcendence, so that Hopkins’s interpretation of imagination is somewhat idiosyncratic, significantly contrasting with the meaning of imagination for most Romantic authors. Although some early critics point out the similarity between Hopkins’s coinage of inscape and Duns Scotus’ haecceitas, it is generally admitted that they are different. James Finn Cotter explicates that haecceitas is different from inscape: [The] Scotist concept of haecceitas defines the thisness that constitutes an existent, that makes this being be. Here Hopkins associates it not with inscape, as has been often done by critics, but with pitch. For Scotus, as for Parmenides, being is univocal, unique, not a sharing in other being or an analogous reflection, but its self, one in the One, word of the Word. Inscape, as the directing energy of pitch and its mark or target, is the dynamic vortex in which all things are scaled and which foreshadows or instresses each with active and meaningful sway. This center is found in the core of all reality and in each particularity as a point of outward pressure and inward suction…. The inner circle of self [inscape] is not a hollow shell alone unto itself but a microcosm of the whole. (Cotter 126-127)

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Inscape is what an object has in common with others. Therefore, the distinctiveness in inscape is not an aspect of its outward appearance; rather, the inscape of an object shows its inward shape when closely observed with our senses. In other words, as Hopkins says, inscape is a kind of pattern like ‘design in pictures or melody in music’, the pattern which is a means of connecting it with other individuals and ultimately with God, through Christ as the origin of abrupt parallelism in fancy. On the other hand, haecceitas expresses another aspect of individuality, which is independent in itself and does not form unity with others because it imitates God’s nature as ‘one’. Hopkins aims at describing what Christ is with various poetic techniques based on the abrupt parallelism of fancy as revealing inscape, and he saw this as the only way for him to be united with Christ. His poetry is the means to connect himself with the abrupt parallelism involved in the nature of Christ himself, which he demonstrates in the sonnets on art and nature between 1877 and 1882. Then, the elective will or haecceitas makes the poet inquire into himself in the sonnets Hopkins wrote during 1885 and 1886, where he feels separated from Christ and God.

3.4.5. Fancy, Inscape and Metalanguage The term ‘inscape’ coined by Hopkins describes his ideal unity, in which a pattern in each object and art work is harmonized with another by parallelism (LI 66). Therefore, inscape can be construed as the view of polysemous selves united in the nature of an object, as suggested by the term when divided into ‘in’ and ‘scape’. In other words, Hopkins contemplates in the essence of every object, art work and man the existence of an inner self, which is different from the exterior self grasped by reason, and connected and assimilated to others with the same pattern by parallelism.30 This inner self indistinguishable from others is not unreal but exists in the reality he perceives in an object, and which he seeks to actualize by his poetic diction. In his later work of poetic theory, ‘Poetry and Verse’ (1873-1874), Hopkins reaches the view that poetry ‘is speech framed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning’ (J 288). He adds here the idea of inscape, which bears resemblances to semiotics and reveals the meta-poetic nature of fancy as the source of poetic diction or rhetoric produced by contemplation: ‘Poetry 30

For the ‘inner self’ of man awakened by contemplation, see Merton 7-11.

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is in fact speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sakeʊand therefore the inscape must be dwelt on’ (J 288). Hopkins’s fancy as abrupt parallelism is not only relevant to his employment of metaphor, but also reminiscent of his sprung rhythm, for he writes in his letter to R. W. Dixon on February 27, 1879 that the word ‘sprung’ implies ‘abrupt’: ‘the word Sprung which I use for this rhythm means something like abrupt and applies by rights only where one stress follows another running, without syllable between’ (LII 23). He explains to Bridges in his letter on February 25, 1878 that he developed it from his study of the rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry: Why do I employ sprung rhythm at all? Because it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining…opposite and…incompatible excellences, markedness of rhythmʊthat is rhythm’s selfʊand naturalness of expression…. (LI 46)

Hopkins takes William Langland’s Piers Ploughman as the earliest example of sprung rhythm, and deplores the fact that ‘it has in fact ceased to be used since the Elizabethan age’ (PI 49). He pursues a natural speech which is at the same time old and new, and which he found in the origin of English poetry. On October 5, 1878, Hopkins writes to Dixon about the new rhythm for ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’: I had long haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realized on paper. …I do not say the idea is altogether new; there are hints of it in music, in nursery rhymes and popular jingles, in the poets themselves…. But no one has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout, that I know of. Nevertheless to me it appears…to be a better and more natural principle than the ordinary system, much more flexible, and capable of much greater effects. (LII 14)

Sprung rhythm is traditional but not used in the works of other contemporary poets, and it sounds new and abrupt. Thus, Hopkins is always concerned with the origin and essence of words, beauty and nature, and his tendency to search for the traditional and the new as aspects of Englishness and naturalness parallels his interest in inscape as revealed by fancy. Although he distinguishes poetic diction from the words of prose, he avoids using poetic cliché, aiming at what he calls ‘the current language heightened’: ‘[T]he poetical language of an age shd. be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not… an obsolete one’ (August 14, 1879. LI 89). Despite inheriting Romantic

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poetics, Hopkins does not seek prosaic and transitional expressions but both natural and poetically heightened and abrupt expressions. Hopkins’s idea of poetic diction manifests his endeavour to unite nature as prose with art as rhetoric, and it is accomplished by art’s imitation of nature. His investigation of ‘rhythm’s self’ and ‘naturalness of expression’ reveals his recognition of the essence even of the part of an expression, and this ‘self’ is not just attributed to human beings, but also signifies the nature or individuality intrinsic in every object and art work. His concern for the nature of parts or objects leads to his idea of fancy that is abrupt and springs from one part to another ‘like an electric spark’, as Ruskin says in Modern Painters. In ‘Poetic Diction’, Hopkins searches out the parallelism that is innate or natural in the origin of verse, and his special emphasis on the abrupt parallelism of fancy makes his poetic diction distinctive. Thus, Hopkins’s search for Anglo-Saxon elements in Gothic architecture parallels his search for the origin or the self of each word and speech in order to create his own language of inspiration through fancy. Hopkins’s idea of the abrupt parallelism and contemplation of fancy as rhetoric largely depends on ‘paradigmatic’ (diatonic, abrupt) associations among images or signs in his poetry. The term ‘paradigmatic’ is used significantly by Franco Marucci, who regards ‘a reactivation of the paradigmatic and verticalizing tendency’ as ‘one of the cornerstones of the semantic-symbolic culture of the Middle Ages’ (Marucci 106). He contrasts it with ‘Victorian syntagmatic and aparadigmatic codes’, which ‘Hopkins’s mature textuality shows…even the abolition of’ (Marucci 108). Lichtmann states that Hopkins’s ‘poems have been written with a kind of kenosis of discursive reason so that the mind can ‘abide’ or dwell in them, making the linear meaning secondary’ (Lichtmann 140). Hopkins’s poetic diction is greatly concerned with the ‘paradigmatic’ relationship of meanings, not the ‘syntagmatic’ or ‘linear meaning’. Graham Allen defines the ‘paradigmatic’ as ‘the associative aspect of language’ (Allen 216) and the ‘syntagmatic’ as ‘the combinatory aspect of language’ that is concerned with ‘the sequential placing of words together to form sentences’ (Allen 220). I use the terms ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘syntagmatic’ to contrast the paradigmatic mode of fancy as abrupt parallelism and irrationality with the syntagmatic mode of imagination as transitional parallelism and reasoning. In Hopkins’s poetic diction, the paradigmatic language of fancy connects distant, fixed images. His concept of fancy as metalanguage

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affirms the discontinuity of objects in a new poetic language, where some images can be exchanged for others independently of the reason or will of the author. Hopkins’s concept of fancy as inscape is, in fact, very close to the discussion of poetic writing by Roland Barthes, who also distinguishes poetry from prose (Writing Degree Zero, 42-50). Barthes regards poetry as a ‘decorative equation’ with ‘a quality sui generis’, which ‘is no longer an attribute but a substance’ and ‘carries its own nature within itself’. He comments on the ‘modern poetry’ as ‘a poetry of the object’ or ‘the new poetic language’ with an ‘inhuman’ and ‘discontinuous speech’, which is to open the door to all that transcends Nature. Accordingly, Hopkins does not agree with the ‘syntagmatic’ (chromatic, transitional, linear) relation of words implied in the continuum of imagination, which dreams of the humanization of objects in nature. His metaphor begets images united by the abrupt parallelism of fancy, and preserves their distinctiveness as autonomous marks or signs, which appear in a fixed style and are never fused by the ‘transitional’ imagination. Figures require the artificial and paradigmatic unity of natural elements, and Hopkins’s emphasis on parallelisms in poetic language affirms the paradigmatic nature of figures and metalanguage in contrast to the superficial meanings of words.

3.5. Fancy in the Baroque: Hopkins’s Entrance into the Society of Jesus and Baroque Elements in his Poetry Hopkins entered the Society of Jesus two years after he converted to Catholicism, and wrote ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1875) after seven years of poetic silence. Although Hopkins could not fully accomplish the poetry of inspiration at the time when he composed ‘Floris in Italy’ and ‘The Beginning of the End’ as poetic experiments before his conversion to Catholicism, in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, he realized it by using the word ‘passion’ to mean Christ’s Passion, which implies the idea of meta-poetry as involving the birth of a new form of poetic language through his idea of fancy. In his letter to Dixon on October 5, 1878, he wrote about the poetic silence and initiation of writing this ode: What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more…unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion calls for. But when in the winter of ’75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. (LII 14)

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Hopkins’s entrance into the Society of Jesus may have affected his poetic techniques and made his works more Christ-oriented because the name of Christ frequently appears in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and the nature poems he composed between 1875 and 1882. There are two major styles of Catholic art: Gothic and baroque. While the Gothic Revival and medievalism influenced Hopkins’s poetics before his conversion, his poems became more baroque than gothic especially after his entrance into the Society of Jesus, which was founded on August 15, 1534 by St Ignatius Loyola and his followers. Baroque art was the expression of Propaganda for the Counter-Reformation. Gothic and baroque styles of Catholic art are similarly visible in visual arts and in the variety of parts in architecture and music. Some art critics such as Pevsner and Eugenio d’Ors discuss the relation and the degree of coincidence between gothic and baroque. Pevsner takes an instance of an eclectic style between gothic and baroque in All Souls College, Oxford, built by Nicholas Hawksmoor, and regards it as a form of Englishness (Pevsner 75). He also states that Hawksmoor and Butterfield ‘were laws unto themselves – as indeed on an infinitely vaster scale was Shakespeare – and they can only be tenuously tied to the category of national character’ (Pevsner 76). J. M. Crook deals with the eclecticism of styles in architecture. Paul Thompson also mentions Butterfield’s interest in baroque: Even in the undistinguished late classical interior of Christ Church Albany Street he did not impose gothic furniture: the screen of 1883, for example, is neo-Jacobean. He was also interested rather earlier than most architects in the English baroque of James Gibbs. (Thompson 90)

Hopkins may have noticed the eclectic style between Gothic and baroque in Butterfield’s architecture as an instance of Englishness. As with his inclination towards Gothic architecture, Hopkins shows his interest in the works of baroque composers such as Henry Purcell, J. S. Bach and G. F. Handel and their contrapuntal method in his letters, and this interest is deeply connected to his poetics of fancy. In his letter to Robert Bridges on January 28, 1883, he says: You should have been more explicit about the origin of music. I try to get a bit of strumming every day now. Somebody left with me a volume of Bach’s Fugues and…perhaps some day I shall find that I can read music pretty easily. (LI 173)

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Hopkins perhaps seized an opportunity for his composition with the help of the volume of Bach’s Fugues. The same letter, which asks Bridges to send some pieces of Purcell, also reveals his interest in baroque music as well. Hopkins remarks on Bach and Handel concerning counterpoint in his letter to Bridges, Jan. 12, 1888: ‘What I ought to do…is to tabulate Bach’s practice and principles’ (LI 271). Hopkins’s poetic devices such as idiosyncratic collocation, syntax and metaphor have sometimes been compared to metaphysical poets. Against the Parnassian in the nineteenth century, Hopkins established his own poetics, which somehow returned to what had been used in metaphysical poetry in the seventeenth century. The style is chiefly seen in the seventeenth century in the baroque period. René Wellek points out that the term ‘baroque’ was first used to mean ‘bizarre’ in the eighteenth century (Wellek 70). As the original meaning of the word suggests, baroque art expresses freedom of form in contrast to the classicism of the Renaissance. In that sense, both metaphysical poems and Hopkins’s works may be termed baroque. The elements of baroque cannot be observed in Hopkins’s earliest poems, however. Although his earliest works such as ‘The Escorial’ and ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ may be called baroque in terms of their imagery, they scarcely have originality in form, including some echoes of Romanticism. In the Easter of 1860, Hopkins was awarded a poetry prize at Highgate School for his first poem ‘The Escorial’. It is a poem on the fancy of King Philip II, who built the Escorial: So, grown fantastic in his piety, Philip, supposing that the gift most meet, The sculptur’d image of such faith would be, Uprais’d an emblem of that fiery constancy. (St. 3)

Hopkins here connects Philip’s fancy with his piety in the Escorial, which was completed in 1584, as an example of baroque architecture. Most of Hopkins’s other early works are comparably formal and easy to read. His style, however, changed greatly after ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. The elements of baroque are also evident in his later sonnets. The term ‘baroque’ was first applied to the visual arts of architecture, painting and sculpture. Later, it was applied to the fields of music and literature. Baroque art has some connections with the Society of Jesus, which influenced the Counter- Reformation. The Society of Jesus was

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founded in 1540, and it is possible to regard the Christian arts which flourished between 1580 and 1750 as baroque. Though it is not so simple to define what baroque is because of the complexity of various arguments, Heinrich Wölfflin enumerates the characteristics of the baroque style in the visual arts: (1) painterliness, which replaced a linear style and produced the illusion of movement; (2) monumentality, love of the grand, the massive, and the awesome; (3) multiplication of members or units making up a whole; (4) movement, lack of repose (Wölfflin 92). Hopkins’s entrance into the Society of Jesus seems to have had some influence on those of his works that include baroque elements and to be the starting point for his new poetics. This could be the answer to the question of the origin of the revolutionary poetic devices in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. Margaret R. Ellsberg touches on the relation between Hopkins’s sprung rhythm and the counterpoint of baroque music (Ellsberg 100). Hopkins defines sprung rhythm as ‘the native and natural rhythm of speech’ (LI 46), and it corresponds to Curt Sachs’s third definition of baroque (vocal) music, ‘the natural tone of speech in the open form of baroque’. 31 Sachs’s first definition, ‘melody overwhelmed by grace and variation’, also corresponds to the technique, form and metaphor in Hopkins’s poetry, while the fourth definition, ‘the change from variety to unity’, matches the fundamental style of Hopkins’s sonnets which are divided into octave and sestet. The ideal in baroque art is an absolute unity where each part loses its particularity. Exquisite baroque works have unity as a whole although each part is independent and conspicuous. J. S. Bach’s music, especially his fugues, display a lot of grace notes and kaleidoscopic changes between high and low tone, while on the other hand they are mathematically and architecturally united, giving the listener a feeling of sublimity and solemnity. Though his music is intended to praise Christ and God, it nevertheless reveals his individuality, which makes us realize why he is a 31

Sachs first introduced the idea of ‘baroque’ into music, based on Wölfflin’s definition, applying the contrast between the Renaissance and the baroque in art to the contrast between them in music: linear and picturesque, plain and deep, closed and open form, clear and vague. The one compared with sprung rhythm further indicates that the shift from the closed form of the Renaissance to the open form of the baroque is similar to the shift from the rhythm controlled by time to the natural tone of speech (Cf. ‘Baroque’ from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 2.

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genius. Hopkins’s letter to Bridges on his sonnet ‘Henry Purcell’ (1879) expresses his feelings about his genius, suggesting that it is entirely divine (Ellsberg 118). As Hopkins’s studies on the origin of words suggest that words with variety have a common origin, poetry, together with architecture and music, is one of the best media in which to show that the variations of individuals as parts are connected with each other to make up the whole. After ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, Hopkins regards a sonnet as the best form in which to show clearly the unity in the relation between the variations of reiterative patterns and the whole. The characteristics of baroque can be applied to the arts in the ages after the baroque period. Paul G. Arakelian admits that Hopkins’s preference for individuality was controlled by ‘Jesuit conformity’ and ‘obedience’ (Critical Discourse 54). Ellsberg does not regard the influence of the Society of Jesus on Hopkins’s poetry as negative but positive. Though there may have been some regulations by the Society about his writing poetry, most of the time he made these decisions himself, as mentioned in his letters. Hopkins’s poetics of fancy is based on his belief in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar; and the Counter Reformation which led the baroque movement declares the importance of transubstantiation in the doctrine of Catholicism: ‘…in Session XIII, the Council [of Trent] had reformulated the dogma of transubstantiation, according to which the bread and wine consecrated during the Mass become the very body and blood of Christ, which are eaten and drunk in performing the sacrament. …the Council declared that Christ’s actual body and blood are consumed; when the conversion takes place, the spirit becomes flesh, and the material of the bread and wine becomes spiritual food’ (Sypher 187-188). Thus, the baroque manner of materializing the spiritual was paralleled in the principle of transubstantiation. Hopkins tries to realize it with the abrupt parallelism of fancy in his poetry. He identifies fancy as analogous to the Passion and the Incarnation because the nature of a word consists in the abrupt parallelism between signifier and signified and is derived from the nature of Christ as the Word and the Incarnation. The effect of sound in Hopkins’s poetry has been widely debated, and in fact he was attracted to the idea that poetry should imitate music. Although there are many critics who focus on the sound and metrics in Hopkins’s works, there are comparatively few who have discussed the

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significance of music in his thought. Arakelian discusses the music of Henry Purcell as incorporating Pater’s theory in The Renaissance. Ellsberg regards Hopkins as a baroque poet and also cites his sonnet ‘Henry Purcell’ (1879). Though Arakelian carefully studies the stress pattern in ‘Henry Purcell’ and connects it with the music of Henry Purcell, he does not go on to mention the baroque aspects in Hopkins’s poetry. On the other hand, Ellsberg does not deal with Hopkins’s poetical devices so much, while much of her concern is to find out how the Jesuits’ ideal influenced him. The abrupt parallelism of fancy can be seen in the concept of discordia concors as the ideal in Baroque art and music with the multiplicity and variety of parts. The general signification of discordia concors is: ‘harmonious discord; harmony or unity gained by combining disparate or conflicting elements’. Dr. Johnson uses the term for the conceits of metaphysical poets. According to Frank L. Huntley, it refers ‘to the idea of world harmony, the discovery of unity in variety or variety in unity in the cosmos and in ourselves’: ‘Thus the crucial point of Johnson’s criticism of the metaphysical poets is their ‘imitation of nature’. Metrically they fail to imitate its harmony, and philosophically they try to make its discordant elements concordant by ‘violently yoking them together’.32 Chronologically, the baroque period corresponds to the time of Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets, and their use of fancy was conspicuous, as Coleridge mentioned. Hopkins probably identified the abrupt parallelism of fancy with the ideal of discordia concors in baroque music when he wrote ‘Henry Purcell’. For Hopkins, abrupt parallelism as diatonism is related to the idea of counterpoint because all of these terms converge on the idea of discordia concors, which is the essence of baroque music, while its purposes are laudando (to praise God) and commovendo (to move man’s heart), as declared by Johann Mattheson in 1739 (Isoyama 148). Hopkins’s interest in the doctrine of transubstantiation was originally connected to the Council of Trent which attached importance to it, in order to transform the spiritual into the material in baroque art. The baroque 32

Frank L. Huntley, ‘Dr. Johnson and Metaphysical Wit; Or, “Discordia Concors” Yoked and Balanced’, in The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association. Vol. 2, Papers of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Number 1. Poetic Theory / Poetic Practice (1969), 103.

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ideal of discordia concors is significant for his poetics of fancy as the source of abrupt parallelism because it gives him the positive proof which enables him to make his words spiritual, imitating transubstantiation in order to be united with Christ. After all, the ideal also makes two selves united – Hopkins as poet-priest.

3.6. ‘Fancy, Come Faster’: The Abrupt Parallelism between Christ and Fancy in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ consists of two parts: Part the First where the poet prays for inspiration from God, and Part the Second which describes the wreck of the Deutschland itself. Hopkins practices sprung rhythm for the first time in this ode, where different elements are united by such ornamental rhetoric as alliteration, rhyme, sprung rhythm and metaphor, all emphasizing the elements of fancy. As parts of Gothic architecture, patterns are repeated and the various parts parallel each other abruptly. Interestingly, this ode shows the characteristics of both gothic and baroque, the two styles of Catholic art, both of which emphasize the variety of parts and repeated patterns in them. Hopkins’s entrance into the Society of Jesus and his poetic silence may have added baroque elements such as the theme of martyrdom and religious ecstasy in the Passion to ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. Parts the First and the Second are united by fancy though there seems to be a gap between them. The two parts suggest the two stages of writing poetry. After the poet meditates on God and Christ in Part the First, he contemplates the theme of the wreck as inspired by fancy, which leads him to see its reality in the unconscious in Part the Second. This implies that this ode is self-referential, and the two parts are abruptly connected. There are ten stanzas (St. 1-10) in Part the First while there are 25 stanzas (St. 11-35) in Part the Second, so it is evident that the latter is more emphasized. The two parts show the different stages of mind in the creation of poetry, which must be united abruptly for Hopkins: The poet’s self in meditation in Part the First should be united with the heart of the nun as the object of contemplation, where the poet actually sees the real scene of the wreck and the passion of the nun with his mind’s eye in Part the Second.

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The poet meditates ‘on God’s infinite power and masterhood’ (PI 255) in Part the First, which begins with his resolution to write poetry again and his prayer to God for inspiration: THOU mastering me God! Giver of breath and bread; World’s strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou has bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

The poet’s self mastered by God prepares to cast itself into the object of his description in Part the Second. The rhyme in ‘bread’, ‘dead’ and ‘dread’ shows God’s power over the life and death of human beings. These words also imply that God is dreadful and sublime because he is the master of the sea in Part the Second. Here is the theme of life and death or the poet’s resurrection in his creation. In the second stanza, ‘lightning’ suggests the inspiration given to the poet, which impresses him into crying ‘O’ three times: I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod; Thou heardest me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God; Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night: The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod Hard down with a horror of height: And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

As in the first stanza, the dark side of God is implied in words with similar sounds, ‘terror’ and ‘horror’, and the word ‘stress’ shows that the poet is impressed with and at the same time tortured by Christ and God. The third stanza states that the poet’s heart has wings, as a representation of inspiration, to fly to ‘the heart of the Host’: I whirled out wings that spell And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host. My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell, Carrier-witted…

In the fourth stanza, there is the metaphor of an hourglass, suggesting the destiny of mortal man in contrast with immortal God:

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The metaphor of a vein connects the poet as individual with ‘Christ’s gift’ as inspiration given by Christ, and water links with the description of the sea in Part the Second. As Ruskin regards rocks as a representation of firm universality, so the poet’s heart stays ‘steady as a water in a well, to a poise’ because it links with a vein from craggy hills representing Christ. Water and his heart are implied to be in a process of change or transition because ‘mined with a motion’ can be phonetically construed as ‘mind with a motion’. These metaphorical expressions imply that the poet’s belief in Christ calms his mind. The rhyme between ‘thunder’ and ‘wonder’ in the fifth stanza implies that God is visible in surprising phenomena in nature. The poet stands in awe of Christ’s mystery and hopes to be united with him: I kiss my hand To the stars, lovely-asunder Starlight, wafting him out of it; and Glow, glory in thunder; Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west: Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder, His mystery must be instressed, stressed: For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.

Christ’s mystery ‘must be instressed, stressed’, or impressed on the poet’s heart with inspiration. Man cannot understand Christ’s mystery with reason and logic. Only when he understands Christ’s duality or nature giving him both pain and love, can he be united with Christ. The last line links with the climax in Part the Second. ‘The stress’ is not born ‘out of his bliss’ or ‘heaven’ but delivered by ‘stars and storms’: Not out of his bliss Springs the stress felt Nor first from heaven (and few know this) Swings the stroke dealtʊ Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver, That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and meltʊ

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But it rides time like riding a river (And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).

Hearts with transitory emotion melt and are fused by universality, and the image of water also leads to Part the Second and Christ as the origin of inspiration in the seventh stanza: ‘The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat’ (l. 5). The only way human beings can understand Christ’s mystery is not with reason but with the sense of perception: How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, Gush!ʊflush the man, the being with it sour or sweet, Brim, in a flash, full! (St. 8, ll. 3-6)

The contrastive words ‘sour or sweet’ show the Passion, the Resurrection and the duality of Christ and God, and the expression is taken over by ‘sweet, sour’ (l. 9) in the sonnet ‘Pied Beauty’ (1877). Men imitate the Passion: ‘Hither then, last or first, / To hero of Calvary, Christ’s feet / Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it men go’ (St. 8, ll. 6-8). Stanza 9 also expresses Christ’s duality in such metaphors as ‘lightning and love’, ‘a winter and warm’ and ‘Father and fondler of heart’ (ll. 6-8). The reiterative technique connects lines 1 and 2 with the last line of stanza 10: ‘Be adored among men, / God’; ‘…but be adored, but be adored King’. The word ‘King’ is repeated by the poet’s address to Christ ‘Our King back…upon English souls!’ in the last stanza of Part the Second. While Part the First describes the poet’s internal emotion and prayer to God, Part the Second repeats the same words, phrases and meanings in several places. The word ‘passion’ which appears three times implies the theme of this ode as the Passion and the poetry of inspiration: ‘The dense and the driven Passion’ (St. 7), ‘The appearing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart’ (St. 27), and ‘Our passion-plungèd giant risen’ (St. 33). In Part the Second, the poet as the subject identifies himself with the nun as the object, and asks for fancy in order to plunge into her. Stanza 11 expresses Death and Time as the symbols of destruction: ‘Some find me a sword; some The flange and rail; flame, Fang, or flood’ goes Death on drum, And storms bugle his fame. But wé dream we are rooted in earthʊDust! Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,

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Men are mortal, frail and dominated by Death and Time in contrast to God’s immortality and infinity. Flowers, representing creation, also have the same destiny as man, and the meadow leads to the image of Time’s scythe. The scythe is described as ‘sour’, which emphasizes taste as a sense of perception, as in the description of the ‘sloe’ in stanza 8. The word ‘sour’ is also associated with death and the image of putrefaction that takes over when ‘Flesh falls’. As with the image of an hourglass as ‘the fall into nothingness’ (St. 4), men’s flesh falls into dust, though they hope for final salvation. ‘Fang’ is associated with ‘the sharp steel fang’ of the ancient icon of Time while the ‘flange’ is associated with the Wheel of Fortune which shows men’s destiny. The ‘rail’ seems to represent the road on which Time marches in triumph, which was the prevalent icon of Time in fifteenth-century Italy.33 The ‘flood’ suggests the deluge in the story of Noah in the book of Genesis. Hopkins also describes the ruthlessness of Time and the coming Death in stanza 15: ‘Hope had grown grey hairs, / Hope had mourning on, / Trenched with tears, carved with cares’ (1-2). These lines invoke sixteenth- century allegorical paintings by Hans Baldung Grien, ‘Three Ages of the Woman and the Death’ (1510) and ‘The Three Ages of Man and Death’ (1539), where an old woman is contrasted with a young woman. Time corresponds to Death with an hourglass, which reminds us of the imagery of an hourglass in stanza 4. The Deutschland was bound for America from Bremen (St. 12). The words ‘bay’ and ‘vault’ imply the image of a gothic cathedral and the dark side of divine providence, which impress people with feelings of sublimity and awe: ‘Yet the dark side of the bay of thy blessing / Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?’ (ll. 7-8). ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ is a grand ode with an architectural and musical structure with unified patterns of stress and alliteration in eightline stanzas. The first line is repeated by the second in stanzas 14 and 15 (The example of stanza 15 is noted above): ‘She drove to the dark to leeward, / She struckʊnot a reef or a rock’. The placement of ‘And’ in lines 5 and 7 of each stanza is contrapuntally arranged, while the phrases ‘And the sea flint-flake’ (St 13, l. 5) and ‘And she beat the bank’ (St. 14, l. 5) are similar in the pattern of alliteration. The pattern of repetition is gradually transformed, contributing to the effect of variation like reiterative patterns in parts of Gothic architecture. 33

Cf. Chapter 3 of Studies in Iconology.

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There is the description of God’s trial and fallen men: They fought with God’s coldʊ And they could not and fell to the deck (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled With the sea-romp over the wreck. Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble, The woman’s wailing, the crying of child without checkʊ Till a lioness arose breasting the babble, A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.

The cries of the crowd are described in lines 5 and 6, which are concerned with the descriptions of death, wounds, tears and cries in the Passion, written by Ignatius Loyola in The Spiritual Exercises. Two phrases similar in sound are used in line 5 as in the earlier stanzas. In stanza 18, the nun speaks as a prophetess to show that people can only be saved by imitating the Passion: Ah, touched in your bower of bone, Are you! Turned for an exquisite smart, Have you! Make words break from me here all alone, Do you!ʊmother of being in me, heart. O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth, Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start! Never-eldering revel and river of youth, What can it be this glee? the good you have there of your own?

Lines 3 and 4 imply the birth of poetry, when the heart is called ‘mother of being in me’ with the rise of emotion as passion, which leads to Christ’s Passion as the poem’s theme. The nun calls to her own heart in the second person while a similar expression occurs in the poet’s words, ‘My heart, but you are dovewinged’ (St. 3, l. 6), which implies the abrupt parallelism between the nun and the poet. As for line 6, ‘madrigal’ is ‘a short lyrical poem of amatory character’ (OED, ‘madrigal’, 1); and ‘A kind of part song for three or more voices…characterized by adherence to an ecclesiastical mode, elaborate contrapuntal imitation, and the absence of instrumental accompaniment’ (OED, ‘madrigal’, 2). The signification of ‘madrigal’ suggests that the poem is based on the concept of counterpoint with a religious theme and represents the marriage or unity between Christ and the nun. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia defines madrigal as a ‘form of vocal chamber music, usually polyphonic and unaccompanied, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’: ‘It originated and developed in Italy, under the

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influence of the French chanson and the Italian frottola. Usually written for three to six voices, madrigals came to be sung widely as a social activity by cultivated amateurs, male and female. The texts were almost always about love; most prominent among the poets whose works were set to music are Petrarch, Torquato Tasso, and Battista Guardini. …Thomas Morley, Thomas Weelkes, and John Wilbye created a distinguished body of English madrigals’ (Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, ‘madrigal’). The madrigal’s polyphonic nature is right for the multiple interconnections between the poet (male) and the nun (female) united by the theme of Christ’s Passion and Incarnation. Passion is linked to love and ecstasy. ‘Fancy’ is relevant to madrigals as well because it also had the meaning of ‘a composition for keyboard or strings in free or variation form’ in sixteenth and seventeenth century contrapuntal music, and division technique penetrated nearly all seventeenth century English instrumental forms, including the venerable polyphonic fancy.34 Tears, as one of the characteristics of baroque, are not for sorrow but for ‘glee’. Line 7 implies the wedding feast and the resurrection accompanied by the nun’s unity with Christ. She expresses the religious ecstasy evoked by the statue by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, ‘The Ecstasy of St. Teresa’ (Fig. 16).35 The last two lines in stanza 18, ‘Never-eldering revel and river of youth, / What can it be this glee? the good you have there of your own?’, suggest resurrection with ecstasy, where the subject plunges into the object. The abrupt parallelism between the poet and the nun is implied in ‘melting’ (l. 6) and ‘melt’ (St. 6, l. 6). The poet’s narration reappears abruptly in stanza 19: ‘A master, her master and mine!’ (l. 2) The line assimilates the previous one in sound pattern: ‘Sister, a sister calling’ (l. 1).

34

Cf. ‘fancy’ in Oxford Dictionary of English, Second Edition Revised (2005). The original Italian name of the statue is ‘L’estasi di Santa Teresa’ (1647-1652), and it is enshrined at the altar in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. In his journal on Aug. 18, 1874, Hopkins referred to the reproduction of the statue of St. Cecilia, when he went to St Mary’s Church, Devon: ‘By the by I saw there Maderna’s beautiful statue of St Cecilia: he was a contemporary of Bernini’s but the natural grace of this figure is due to its having been made after the body of the saint as it was found lying’ (J 254). This statue by Maderna (1600, Sta Cecilia in Travestevere, Rome) (Fig. 17), his original Italian name being Stefano Maderno, conveys the martyrdom of St Cecilia accompanied by the extremity of religious ecstasy and pain as well as that of St. Teresa. Then, Hopkins mentions Butterfield’s church at Babbicombe (J 254).

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Fig. 16

Fig. 17

The five Franciscan nuns were exiled from Germany, where Protestantism became the dominant form of Christianity through the doctrine of Luther: ‘Loathed for a love men knew in them, / Banned by the land of their birth, / Rhine refused them, Thames would ruin them’ (St. 21, ll. 1-3). Luther is compared to a ‘beast of the waste wood’ (St. 20, l. 6). In contrast to him, St. Gertrude, a German Catholic saint, is described as ‘Christ’s lily’ (l. 5), which is associated with Mary’s lily as the symbol of chastity. Then, the fact that both Luther and St. Gertrude were from the same town is

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correlated with the story that Abel and Cain were fed from the same mother’s breasts (ll. 7-8). Luther eliminated from the liturgy the words which hint that a mass represents the repetition of Christ’s sacrifice. He also insisted that Mary was a mere woman who had borne Christ. Hopkins could not condone what Luther had done because he believed in the repetition of Christ’s sacrifice in the Eucharist as well as the Immaculate Conception. ‘Thou martyr-master’ (St. 21, l.7) suggests the Passion, and the number ‘5’ is the ‘mark’ as Christ’s individualizing characteristic (the number of his wounds) and the symbol of his sacrifice, which parallels the number of nuns on the ship in stanza 22: Five! The finding and sake And cipher of suffering Christ. Mark, the mark is of man’s make And the word of it Sacrificed. But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken, Before-time-taken, dearest prized and priced – Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token For lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.

Hopkins uses the word ‘mark’ to show the inscape as revealed by fancy and the oddness in the Gothic architecture of Butterfield, and ‘cinquefoil token’ (l. 7) implies a pattern in tracery. ‘Christ’ rhymes with ‘Sacrificed’, and is associated in the poem with his nature as ‘the word’. The ‘cipher of suffering Christ’ can be interpreted as the synonym of ‘the word of it Sacrificed’. The effect of variation is created by the rhyme in ‘Christ’ and capitalized ‘Sacrificed’ with the association of Christ as the Word, which is clearly indicated in the last line of stanza 30: ‘Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright’. The red rose in ‘ruddying of the rose-flake’ is the emblem of martyrdom. In stanza 23, Father Francis, the founder of the Franciscan order, is characterized as the man who embodied Christ’s sacrifice: Joy fall to thee, father Francis, Drawn to the life that died; With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his Lovescape crucified And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride, Are sisterly sealed in wild waters, To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to bathe in his all-fire glances.

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The influence of The Spiritual Exercises is discernible in the description of the nails and wounds in Christ’s body, connoting that ‘the pattern of Christ’s five wounds’ was ‘reproduced in the stigmata received by St. Francis’ (PI 261). The five wounds parallel the five nuns. There are similar sound patterns, phrases, and alliterations to exhibit the multiple parallels between these elements. The poet inquires what the nun portended (St. 25). First, he asks the ‘arch and original Breath’ of the Holy Spirit: ‘Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been?’ (l. 3) ‘Her lover’ stands for Christ as bridegroom. Then, the poet addresses Death, ‘Breathe, body of lovely Death’ (l. 4). His sensitivity that expresses Death as ‘lovely’ is rightly called baroque. The paradoxical collocation is made possible by the poet’s wish to overcome the suffering of death in order to be united with Christ. This sort of paradox can be observed in the second inquiry of the poet: ‘Or is it that she cried for the crown then, / The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?’ (ll. 7-8)

There is a remarkable and astonishing correspondence between the voice of the Franciscan nun at death’s door in the wreck (St. 24) and that of the poet who abruptly intrudes himself in Part the Second (St. 28), which illustrates Hopkins’s idea of fancy: Away in the loveable west, On a pastoral forehead of Wales, I was under a roof here, I was at rest, And they the prey of the gales; She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’: The Cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best. But how shall I…make me room there: Reach me a…Fancy, come fasterʊ Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there, Thing that she…There then! the Master, Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head: He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her; Do, deal, lord it with living and dead; Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, dispatch and have done with his doom there.

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The motif of the Passion is repeated by the nun’s self-sacrifice and reception of Christ (‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’). Her selfannihilation or assimilation into Christ as the Other parallels the creation of poetry, with ‘Fancy’ as the faculty that represents or reveals the Incarnation and Christ’s nature as the parallelism or reconciliation of opposites (‘Reach me a…Fancy, come fasterʊ’). The abrupt parallelism between Fancy and Christ as the Word with his natures of both man and God suggests that Hopkins sees fancy as the origin of his poetic diction and the means to unite the subject with the object. The parallelism between Christ’s passion and ‘Fancy’ suggests that the diction of the poem is created by the poet’s contemplation of, and assimilation into, the aim of this ode by reading ‘the unshapable shock night’ and ‘wording it’ or segmenting its ambiguity into poetic language (St. 29). Parts the First and the Second are united by the abrupt intrusion of the poet’s voice into the nun’s, indicating a simultaneous polyphonic discourse between them beyond time and space. Thus, the poet can feel the reality of the wreck by penetrating into or experiencing the nun’s self-annihilation. Christ, as the representation of abrupt parallelism or reconciliation of opposites, unites the suffering of the nun’s death with her religious ecstasy (or trance in contemplating Christ) through her repetition of the Passion and assimilation to him (St. 28, 6). Hopkins’s fancy parallels Christ with ‘Fancy’ so as to describe his ‘real presence’ and relive the Passion. The voice of the poet’s self, present in the moment of describing the Passion, reconciles Christ with Fancy through their paradigmatic association, and disappears after ‘wording it’. The aim of this ode is indeed the same as that of baroque music in its repetition of patterns in order to connect each part by the abrupt parallelism of fancy, imitating the nature of Christ shown in the Passion and the Incarnation. In ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, Hopkins describes the moment the self disappears when it receives otherness or fancy; or when it penetrates into the objective narration of the wreck and into the nun’s heart through his prayer to God with the abrupt parallelism between Christ and ‘Fancy’. His attempt to connect ‘Fancy’ with passion in ‘The Beginning of the End’ culminates in the abrupt parallelism between ‘Fancy’ and Christ, or Christ’s passion in this ode. Hopkins illustrates the birth of ‘Fancy’ that transcends what he regarded as the subjectivism of Romantic imagination. Fancy makes the self penetrate into Otherness when faced with the illogicality of God appearing as both good and evil.36 The status of the 36 This transcendent unification with otherness can be interestingly compared with the late Coleridge’s Kantian (though also somewhat Scotist) emphasis on

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poet’s self meditating on the unfathomable mastery of God in Part the First is essentially fluid as the source of imagination. It is fixed, however, at the moment when the poet utters ‘Fancy, come faster’ in order to assimilate his voice with that of the nun in the realistic description of her passion imitating the Passion in Part the Second. The word ‘faster’ figuratively signifies the fixity of ‘Fancy’. The abrupt parallelism between the nun’s and the poet’s speeches should be seen as a secret code, and Hopkins’s intention is so successful that even his critics have not hitherto pointed it out, for the comparison between Christ and ‘Fancy’ might have been regarded as heretical by the Society of Jesus. Nevertheless, he dares to attach importance to ‘Fancy’ relative to the Passion as the key to solving the ‘cipher of suffering Christ’ (St. 22). By contemplating the reality of the object, the self is abruptly and ultimately absorbed into ‘Fancy’ or Otherness, to be lost in the paradigmatic associations of figures. The moment when the poet’s speech is uttered discloses the ascendancy of fancy over imagination, which reverses Coleridge’s definition of the terms.

3.7. Fancy in Hopkins’s Sonnets Composed between 1877 and 1882 After writing ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, Hopkins evolved his ingenious sonnet forms, resembling the form earlier attempted in ‘The Beginning of the End’, with his idiosyncratic coinages, metaphors and other poetic devices. Between 1877 and 1882, Hopkins wrote the sonnets on art and nature, which are characteristic of the abrupt parallelism of his fancy in the condensation or compression of their style. In this period, Hopkins seems to have had spiritual life, surrounded by beautiful nature in Wales and Stonyhurst, which gave him a lot of inspiration and fancy to write his poems. They are contrary to the sonnets written in his later years in life in Dublin, which show the dark mood of the poet who cannot obtain

antinomies as evoking the transcendent nature of the divine, as in ‘God is a circle, the centre of which is every where, and the circumference, nowhere’ (S.T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer [Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1993], 233). The difference seems to lie primarily in Hopkins’s emphasis on the discovery of concrete truths analogous to that of the Real Presence, in contrast with Coleridge’s, Kant’s and Erigena’s emphasis on a confrontation with inexpressible and unrepresentable truths or ideas. See also David Vallins, Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism (Macmillan, 2000), 147-8 on these aspects of Coleridge.

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fancy, conflicting with his ego. In some sonnets between 1877 and 1882, Hopkins also criticizes industrialization and man’s ego which destroyed beautiful landscape. * Hopkins wrote ten sonnets at St Beuno’s in Wales: ‘God’s Grandeur’, ‘The Starlight Night’, ‘Spring’, ‘The Lantern out of Doors’, ‘The Sea and the Skylark’, ‘In the Valley of the Elwy’, ‘The Caged Skylark’, ‘The Windhover’, ‘Pied Beauty’ and ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’. In `God’s Grandeur’ (1877), Hopkins describes man who cannot feel God’s grandeur in the octet: THE world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

In Hopkins’s choice of words, some devices are used to express abrupt parallelism of fancy. In line 7, a device of Welsh poetry, ‘cynghanedd sain’ is used, and it is the combination of alliteration and internal rhyme. The alliteration of ‘sm’ combines different senses ‘smudge’ and ‘smell’, which expresses sight and smell. In imagery, ‘the grandeur of God’ has two figures in lines 2 and 4. The former figure is an imagery of light and the latter is an imagery of oil, and they are combined by the end rhyme ‘foil’ and ‘oil’. The tone of the first quatrain is luminous and expresses the praise for God, whose grandeur shows the unity of two different figures, but the tone changes from line 4. From this line to the last line of the octave, the tone is dark and here the poet criticizes the activity of man charged with the grandeur of God and the world deteriorated by man with contrasts. In the sestet, however, he represents the inexhaustible power of nature constantly charged by God through Holy Ghost: And, for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went

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Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springsʊ Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The sestet is the conclusion of the octet. Nature and ‘the dearest freshness’ as the manifestation God’s grandeur is never spent, which is proved in line 11 and 12. Finally, the Holy Ghost broods over the world bent by man’s desire with the ideal unity between man and God. Hopkins seems to think that a faithful poet should express the grandeur of God in nature by his inspiration. He can feel the supernatural power of God with the inspiration, which is connected to his fancy. He has the idea that the world reflecting the double nature of Christ, who is at the same time one and the same and God and man, consists in the unity between opposites. Hopkins expresses in his poetry the idea that each individual is harmonized with every other to make up the whole. * Hopkins describes the unity between opposites as dapples in ‘Pied Beauty’ (1877). This sonnet is written in the form of curtal sonnet which consists of sestet and quatrain, while most of his sonnets consist of octet and sestet: GLORY be to God for dappled thingsʊ For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and piecedʊfold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

The ‘dappled things’ here are visible manifestations of fancy represented by the multiplicity in Christ’s incarnation in nature. ‘Pied Beauty’, as the first and final lines suggests, expresses the poet’s praise for God, whose grandeur and power can be felt by him with the aid of Christ and the Incarnation that inspire him to write this sonnet about the abrupt parallelism in dappled things, which can be realized by his perceptions. The sestet shows the beauty of dappled things, and inscape manifested in nature is expressed by some poetic techniques. Such compounds as

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‘couple-colour’, ‘rose-moles’, ‘fresh-firecoal’, and ‘chestnut-falls’ show the unity between different elements in restrictive relation, and the alliteration ‘p’ in line 5 units counter meanings, ‘plotted’ and ‘pieced’. The quatrain unites the dappled things described in the sestet. Though ‘all things counter, original, spare and strange’, they are united by the source of abrupt parallelism, Christ, and finally by God who created them. The contrasts described in line 9 are united by sound technique, that is, by ‘s’ in the first two contrasts and ‘d’ in the last which are laid in stressed syllable each. The fickleness of dapple ca be immutable by God ‘whose beauty is past change’. ‘God’s Grandeur’ and ‘Pied Beauty’ show that God’s power makes each creature grow up, repeating life and death. Hopkins seems to indicate in his works that the poet can attain the unity between nature and art by imitating nature in detail and adding his individuality as a poet of fancy to emphasize the abrupt parallelism between opposites in each being as a part of the world created by God as well as the manifestation of Christ in nature. * Hopkins wrote ‘The Starlight Night’ on 24 February 1877, the day after he wrote ‘God’s Grandeur’ at St Beuno’s. Hopkins wrote on stars in his journal on 17 August 1874, which seem to have inspired him to write this sonnet.: ‘As we drove home the stars came out thick: I leant back to look them and my heart opening more than usual praised Our Lord to whom and in whom all that beauty comes home’ (J 254). Hopkins noted that this sonnet has ‘standard rhythm opened and counterpointed’ on March 1877 (PIII), and ‘”opened” ‘means that both octave and sestet are opened with a “sprung line’ (PI 264). In ‘The Starlight Night’, the stars in the sky are compared to the diamond and gold in the earth, and the sight of the beauty of nature and the excitement of the poet who gains fancy from it are emphasized by his ecstatic cries with a lot of exclamation marks: LOOK at the stars! Look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! The elves’-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! Airy abeles set on a flare!

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Flake-doves sent floating forth at farmyard scare!̿ Ah well! It is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Here is the description of the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm. In line 4, ‘Down in dim woods’ ‘suggests country scenes viewed from above’. As the picture of St Beuno’s on the hill shows, the poet seems to cast his eyes upward in the sky at first and then downward to ‘dim woods’ at dusk from the hill. This sonnet is fanciful because ‘by an imaginative inversion of direction, looking up we are made to fancy we are gazing down on woodlands, grass, and farms’ (PIII 364). In line 6, the hyphenated word ‘Flake-doves’ suggests the abrupt parallelism or the unity between two different things in Hopkins’s compounds, and Hopkins ‘repeats the ancient fancy that the Pleiades were doves frightened by Orion the hunter’. The fanciful image of the ‘elves’eyes’ is connected to the shimmering light reflected in diamonds in ‘delves’, which are connected by the internal rhyme and metaphor. The sestet turns the reader to Christ in heaven: Buy then! Bid then!̿What?̿Prayer, patience, aims, vows, Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

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Chapter Three Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! These are indeed the barn; withindoors house The shocks. This piece-bright paling shut the spouse Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

The final tercet abruptly shows the images of a harvest and Christ as ‘the spouse’, which means the bridegroom of the parable of Matt. 25: 1-13, wedded to the Mystical body of the Church (PIII 365). Hopkins’s fancy unites the images of stars, diamonds, elves’ eyes, prize, harvest and finally Christ as the source of abrupt parallelism. * Hopkins’s idea of fancy is expressed in the metaphors of ‘The Sea and the Skylark’ (1877): Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend, His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinéd score In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.

The line ‘His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinéd score’ evokes the skylark’s singing. The distinctive feature of Hopkins’s expression here is his use of simple and original hyphenated words. He explains the meaning of the adjective ‘rash-fresh’: ‘…a headlong and exciting new snatch of singing, resumption by the lark of his song, which by turns he gives over and takes up again all day long, and this goes on, the sonnet says, through all time, without ever losing its first freshness, being a thing both new and old’ (LI 164). Then, Hopkins explains the expression ‘re-winded newskeinéd score’: ‘The skein and coil are the lark’s song, which from his height gives the impression (not to me only) of something falling to the earth and not vertically quite but trickingly or wavingly, something as a skein of silk ribbed by having been tightly wound on a narrow card or notched holder or as fishingtackle or twine unwinding from a reel or winch….’ (LI 164). His phrase, ‘the impression (not to me only)’, shows that in his observation of nature he tries not only to speak of his subjectivity but to value nature by describing it objectively. Such a detailed explanation of his metaphor confirms that what Hopkins calls ‘poetic diction’ means the condensed and reproduced description of nature. Hopkins further explains the metaphor in the sonnet, using the phrase ‘Fancy’s eye’: ‘The lark…is all wound off on to another winch, reel,

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bobbin, or spool in Fancy’s eye by the moment the bird touches earth and so is ready for a fresh unwinding at the next flight’ (LI 164). His statement suggests that the insights of ‘Fancy’ can be obtained by the minute observation or contemplation of nature. Hopkins reads each object in nature as the manifestation of the Incarnation with ‘Fancy’s eye’ in order to show Christ’s nature based on the abrupt parallelism of fancy. He values ‘Fancy’ as providing an objective impression which is more reliable than his subjective feelings. Hopkins persists in respecting the object as it is. Whereas Coleridge regards fancy as a lower faculty than imagination, and as incapable of achieving any intuition of higher truths, Hopkins greatly values fancy as revealing the inspiration or intuition given by the contemplation of nature. He respects the individualities or inscapes of objects, while Coleridge values imagination, which he regards as discovering higher or deeper truths than those of ordinary perception, more than objects themselves, the repetition of which by fancy he describes as ‘fixed and dead’. Hopkins seeks to achieve a greater degree of objectivity than the Romantic poets by developing a new form of expression in poetry and by focusing on the abrupt parallelism of fancy as revealing the Incarnation. Therefore, he tries to elaborate his language of fancy as inspiration or Christ as the Word. * The insights of Fancy obtained through contemplation of the beauty of objects in nature is the means for Hopkins to ‘decipher the suffering Christ’ and the Incarnation behind natural phenomena. The flight of fancy is often represented as the flight of birds. Contemplation of the beauty of the object is seen by Hopkins as the act of emptying the mind of subjectivity so as to assimilate it. The soul of the poet flies upward and assimilates the object of contemplation through fancy. The description of the poet’s fancy flying like birds is characteristic of Hopkins’s poems on birds, and it is also remarkable in ‘The Windhover: To Christ our Lord’ (1877). In the octave, the poet looking up at the Falcon or ‘the Windhover’ is ‘stirred for a bird’ and obtains fancy from his contemplation of the bird: I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,ʊthe achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

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The poet who has found the Falcon in the dawn is inspired by the attitude of the bird. The Falcon’s ‘riding / Of the rolling level underneath him steady air’ catches the poet’s heart. The Falcon’s action is simultaneous with the poet’s in his mind because it inspires him to write poetry. He simultaneously feels the Falcon’s ‘ecstasy’ in the moment when his self is assimilated with it. As William Empson points out in discussing the relation between the Windhover and Pegasus,37 there is an association with Pegasus because ‘the rein’ connotes the horse, and ‘a wimpling wing’ implies the ‘Pegasean wing’ as John Milton, whom Hopkins admires as a great poet, uses it in Paradise Lost, where also ‘wing’ in its singular form is adopted. The following lines from Paradise Lost are worth consideration: Descend from heaven Urania, by that name If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine Following, above the Olympian hill I soar, Above the flight of Pegasean wing. (VII 1-4)

These lines express the poet’s invocation of one of the Muses, Urania, as he soars ‘above the flight of Pegasean wing’, following her voice.38 ‘I’, referring to the poet also appears in the first line of ‘The Windhover’. ‘I’ as poet and observer assimilates himself to the Falcon in the flight of fancy. As the quotation from Paradise Lost suggests, Hopkins wishes to culminate in fancy as the source of the language of inspiration because the words ‘Urania’, ‘the Olympian hill’ and ‘Pegasean wing’ have the connotation of poetry, so that in the context of his own association of poetic ‘flight’ or soaring with fancy, the figure of the Falcon in ‘The Windhover’ connotes fancy in the Pegasean image because Pegasus is ‘said allusively to bear poets in the ‘flights’ of poetic genius’ (OED), while it has Christian connotations as Milton’s lines. 39 From this

37

William Empson, ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Critical Heritage, 169. 38 ‘Urania (Cerestial) was anciently the Muse of Astronomy, and as such she has an obvious right to preside over the part of the poem primarily concerned with the macrocosm…. M.’s denial that his Urania is one of the Muses nine, however, directs attention to a more recent, single Muse. …the name had been used for the specifically Christian Muse of the divine poetry movement…. Milton wants to call upon a truly celestial being’ (Paradise Lost, 356n). 39 ‘The winged horse Pegasus was regularly an emblem for the inspired poet. …After striking the Muses’ spring from Helicon, Pegasus flew up to the heavens: hence he could symbolize the poet soaring above ordinary sources of inspiration.

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viewpoint, ‘The Windhover’ is a self-referential poem. The alliterations of ‘m’ and ‘d’ (1-2) express the motion of the Falcon rhythmically with a correspondence between content and form. The poet’s passion culminates and he receives the insights of fancy in his ecstasy in the moment when his self plunges into and is assimilated with the Falcon as object: Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

The poet is impressed by the ‘brute beauty’ showing Christ incarnate in a natural object as part of God’s creation. As the subtitle shows, Hopkins dedicates this sonnet to Christ through the figure of the Falcon as representing Christ and the Incarnation. Through the abrupt parallelism between the Falcon and Christ, the poet is assimilated with Christ in his flight of fancy. The fancy of the poet is born when he exclaims ‘Buckle!’ in his ecstasy through his assimilation with the beauty of the object as expressing the Incarnation. Although its beauty is ‘told lovelier’ with the language of inspiration, it is ‘more dangerous’, or more powerful, because it is incorporated into the text by fancy through the death of the subject who is assimilated with the object. The abrupt parallelism between the flight of the Falcon as Christ incarnate and the flight of fancy in ‘The Windhover’ shows diatonic beauty. * There are two sonnets especially featuring the Valleys of Elwy and Clwyd near St Beuno’s at St Asaph in Wales: ‘In the Valley of the Elwy’ and ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’. Hopkins wrote the former on 23 May, 1877: In the Valley of the Elwy I REMEMBER a house where all were good To me, God knows, deserving no such thing: Comforting smell breathed at very entering, Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood.

…More usually, Pegasus was itself the Christian aspiration’ (Paradise Lost, 356n357n).

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That cordial air made those kind people a hood All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wing Will, or mild nights the new morsels of Spring: Why, it seemed of course; seemed of right it should. Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales, All the air things wear that build this world of Wales; Only the inmate does not correspond: God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales, Complete thy creature dear O where it fails, Being might a master, being a father and fond.

The octet of this sonnet refers to a small house in Kent, not in Wales. Hopkins writes on it to Robert Bridges on 8 April, 1879: The kind people of the sonnet were the Watsons of Shooter’s Hill, nothing to do with the Elwy. The facts were as stated. You misunderstand the thought, which is very far fetched. The frame of the sonnet is a rule of three sum wrong, thus: As the sweet smell to those kind people so the Welsh landscape is NOT to the Welsh; and then the author and principle of all four terms is asked to bring the sum right. (LI 76-77)

River Elwy

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Though Hopkins as a native English man may not have been in good terms with Welsh people, more importantly the sonnet implies that the beauty of the Welsh landscape is contrasted to the ugliness of mankind or their egos. True kindness comes from selfless love or devotion to others as shown in the second quatrain. This image is linked to that of ‘the Holy Ghost over the bent World brood with warm breast’ in ‘God’s Grandeur’. The poet connects the kindness and love of people in the octet with the beauty of nature in Wales in the sestet in this sonnet with the abrupt parallelism of fancy because they are the ideal match, and wishes that God would supply for the deficiency of people in Wales or mankind in general to match their souls with the beauty of nature. Hopkins wrote ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ on 1 September, 1877 in ‘Vale of Clwyd’ (PIII 388): Hurrahing in Harvest SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies! I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies? And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic̿as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!̿ These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

Hopkins wrote a letter on this sonnet to Bridges on 16 July, 1878: ‘The Hurrahing Sonnet was the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the Elwy’ (LI 56). The poet sees Christ in the beauty of nature that gives him enthusiasm and ecstasy. The sonnet contains a lot of words related to sight, and the reality gained by sight is connected to Hopkins’s belief in the Real Presence. He believes that the beauty of nature must meet ‘the beholder’. The idea of ‘beholder / Wanting’ in the sestet is concerned with the line of part (ii) of ‘To Oxford’ (1865):

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None besides me this by-ways beauty try. Or if they try it, I am happier then: The shapen flags and drillèd holes of sky, Just seen, may be to many unknown men The one peculiar of their pleasured eye, And I have only set the same to pen. (23-28)

The poet appreciates the beauty in the parts of Gothic chapel as well as in those of nature because they both manifest the beauty of Christ. Thus the act of seeing beauty inspires him to hurl for Christ with the wings of fancy. * Among his sonnets, Hopkins’s fancy as the source of abrupt parallelism is most conspicuously exemplified in ‘Henry Purcell’ (1879), which he himself regarded as one of his ‘very best pieces’ (LI 171). The epigraph points to Purcell who represents Hopkins’s ideal of an artist with genius, with which he reveals the universal truth with inspiration from God: The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man’s mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and all men generally.

Hopkins praises Purcell for what he sees as his objectivity, which transcends ‘the moods of man’s mind’, or the products of an imagination which he sees as preoccupied with subjectivity, as well as for his genius in expressing the qualities common to every man, or each part, and the whole. His rejection of subjectivism and praise for Purcell’s objectivism in this sonnet is evident in his comment comparing it with Bridges’ works: ‘My sonnet means “Purcell’s music is none of your d--d subjective rot”’ (LI 84). The poet is inspired by ‘the forgèd feature’, or Purcell’s inscape, not his ‘mood’: Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear, Or love, or pity, or all that sweet notes not his might nursle: It is the forgèd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal Of own, of abrúpt sélf there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.

For Hopkins, the self of an artist as well as his genius should have a pattern according to a mold forged or determined (or fixed) by God, so that the ‘abrúpt sélf’ of Purcell can be united with others by parallelism.

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Hopkins accents the essential words to convey his idea of the self as a pattern to be united with others by the abrupt parallelism of fancy. In the sestet, the poet with a keen eye for Purcell’s nature compares the composer’s individuality to the mark which he happens to see under a bird’s wing: Let him oh! With his air of angels then lift me, lay me! only I’ll Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to his pelted plumage under Wings: so some great stormfowl, whenever he has walked his while The thunder-purple seabeach, plumèd purple-of-thunder, If a wuthering of his palmy snow-pinions scatter a colossal smile Óff him, but meaning motion fans fresh our wits with wonder.

Hopkins elucidates the thought in his letter to Bridges: …as the seabird opening his wings with a whiff of wind…unaware gives you a whiff of knowledge about his plumage, the marking of which stamps his species, that he does not mean, so Purcell, seemingly intent only on the thought or feeling he is to express…incidentally lets you remark the individualizing marks of his own genius. (LI 83)

In his metaphorical expression, Hopkins’s fancy as inspiration unites utterly different entities as a result of his insight into art and nature. It unintentionally hints at the abrupt parallelism between ‘the sakes of’ Purcell and the ‘quaint moonmarks’ under the bird’s wings as the same patterns or ‘individualizing marks’ through his careful contemplation. Hopkins contemplates the distinctive beauty of each individual object in nature as part of the Creation, and unites it to the self of Purcell who represents an ideal artist with genius for him because he thinks that Purcell could unconsciously perceive inspiration given by God. Hopkins suggests that fancy reveals the abrupt parallelism between the individualities of Purcell and the bird through the inspiration which unconsciously occurred to him, and inspiration is God’s gift to true poets and artists. Thus, Hopkins tries to show his language of inspiration using the metaphor of a bird to represent Purcell’s self with his language of inspiration reiterating his surprise. The poet’s eye ‘to the sakes of him’ is ‘Fancy’s eye’ contemplating objects. The last line of ‘Henry Purcell’ illustrating the motion of the bird’s wings represents an abrupt turn, which directs the reader’s attention to the

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topic of creating poetry: ‘but meaning motion fans fresh our wits with wonder’. The individuality of the bird as an object to be united with Purcell’s self gives inspiration to the poet, who contemplates both of them and suddenly finds the abrupt parallelism between them; then the poet repeats the fresh wonder or surprise he receives from the objects of contemplation in his poetry to unite nature as the Creation with art as its repetition. The sonnet has, in a quite exemplary way, the elements of wit and fancy in Coleridge’s definition: ‘When the whole pleasure received is derived from surprise at an unexpected turn of expression, then I call it wit; but when the pleasure is produced not only by surprise, but also by an image which remains with us and gratifies for its own sake, then I call it fancy’ (LNS 74). The element of wit is implied in the structure of the sonnet.

While the first quatrain begins with the poet’s prayer to Purcell and the second refers to his self, the sestet abruptly describes the bird’s ‘moonmarks’, which are metaphorically compared with the ‘abrúpt sélf’ of Purcell. The last line suggests that the selves of the bird and Purcell equally inspire the creation of this sonnet. The expression ‘our wits’ veers round the matter of the poet’s creation of poetry to a universal ideal that the selves of an artist and an object in nature can be united through ‘an unexpected’ or abrupt turn by the inspiration of fancy. The sonnet also includes the idea of fancy, which Coleridge distinguishes from wit: Purcell’s self in the octave and the individuality of the bird in the sestet are united by metaphor, which enables the two distinctive images to be abiding and fixed in the reader’s mind. Hopkins uses the word ‘wit’ alliteratively, and it implies Coleridge’s definitions of wit and fancy, which are incorporated in Hopkins’s idea of fancy as the source of abrupt parallelism. Hopkins’s metaphor, as in ‘Henry Purcell’, directly connects different objects, ideally in art and nature, and their distinctive individualities are expressed in the sonnet form divided into octave and sestet, to be united by the abrupt parallelism of fancy. The abrupt intervention of the poet’s voice (‘I’ll have an eye to the sakes of him’) between the octave and the sestet which mediates the two objects makes the poet fixed and present in the moment when the selves of Purcell and the bird are united with the abrupt parallelism between them in the sonnet, or when he creates metalanguage, as we have already seen in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (‘Fancy, come faster’). The poet’s self contemplates and penetrates into objects or other selves to attain the parallelism between art and nature, as well as between thought and diction, by losing itself in his poetic diction which springs from ‘our wits’ and fancy. In other words, ‘he becomes a part of the work contemplated’, and the subject and the object can be exchanged for each

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other as unfettered signs. Through this self-reflexivity, whereby one of the objects that are compared is the same as the mind or voice which is comparing them, the sonnet conveys the objectivity not only of the poet in writing poetry but also of the reader who penetrates into otherness. Notably Hopkins does not use the terms ‘Fancy’ and ‘passion’ in this sonnet as he did in ‘The Beginning of the End’ and ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. ‘Fancy’ always appears with the poet’s voice representing the presence of his self, to be lost in figures at the moment when it is absorbed into images as objects. In ‘Henry Purcell’, he leaves the poet’s voice that connects the two figures of Purcell and the bird to vanish into them, and manages to elaborate the abrupt parallelism of fancy in genuinely metaphorical condensation with a fixed and paradigmatic sonnet form. As for sound patterns, the baroque technique of counterpoint can be observed throughout the sonnet: ‘Have fair fallen, O fair have fallen, so dear / To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell, / An age is now since passed, since parted’ (1-3; italics mine). The repetitions of words and alliterations are gradually varied. The same can be seen in the second quatrain: Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear, Or love, or pity, or all that sweet notes not his might nursle: It is the forgèd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal Of own, of abrúpt sélf there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.

(5-8)

Other notable examples of counterpoint in the sestet are ‘then lift me lay me’ (9) and ‘The thunder-purple seabeach, plumèd purple-of-thunder’ (12). Thus, the technique of counterpoint is used in this sonnet to express the music of Purcell and his ‘pitch’ or distinctiveness. Repetition itself has significance, for the poem’s inscape as discovered by fancy itself emphasizes the multiplicity of words or parts. The same thing can be said of Purcell’s music or baroque music, using contrapuntal techniques such as fugue and canon. Hopkins’s concept of fancy as inscape asserts that each part has its uniqueness and makes up the whole in relation to every other part. This corresponds to one of the characteristics of baroque art – the multiplicity and exaggeration of parts. It gives the listener the impression of oddness, which Hopkins regards as revealing inscape, and he finds it in Purcell’s music with irregularly divided bars and ‘the shifting of accents or durations from the first to the second beat of a bar’ (Arakelian in Critical Discourse, 48). Irregularity is another characteristic of baroque, and it is observable in Hopkins’s sprung rhythm, which has

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irregularity in its stresses. Sprung rhythm in his poems makes them distinctive among iambic English poems. The seemingly odd combination of the octave and the sestet, or between Purcell’s music and the bird’s flight, connotes that both have their own selves but their pitches are the same, because both move the poet’s heart to the same extent. The bird’s figure here shows the inscape of Purcell, and Hopkins’s concept of inscape as revealed by fancy shows the abrupt parallelism between seemingly different objects. The ideals of discordia concors and commovendo in baroque music can be seen in ‘Henry Purcell’. As for discordia concors, Hopkins unites Purcell’s genius to the bird’s ‘moonmarks’ as its individualizing marks with the abrupt or diatonic parallelism of fancy revealing inscape, which is comparable to consonance in music. The oddness in parts of this sonnet, due to the unexpected syntax, which is remarkable in Hopkins’s compounds, reiterative techniques and the irregular stresses, is combined with balance in his sonnet form consisting of octave and sestet. As for commovendo, both Purcell’s music and the bird’s motion move the poet’s heart (commovendo) to the same extent, for they have the same pitch. This is why Hopkins sees the inscape of the poet in the bird. His eventual connection of them suggests the abrupt parallelism between art and nature. * Hopkins’s interest in each individual or part in the world as a whole leads him to think of the ‘pitch’ of each being, when he regards the world as music which is arranged contrapuntally by the melody and rhythm of all creatures. He expresses the pitch of each being in ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ (1882): As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

The first quatrain shows a catalogue or enumeration of the acts of things. There is a contrast between the first two things and the others in the first quatrain – that is, between the fire and flame of ‘kingfishers’ and ‘dragonflies’ and the sounds of stones in wells, ‘each tucked string’ and

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‘each hung bell’s bow swung’. Actually, the first two also have their own sounds that are not expressed in the sonnet. The first two imply actions in nature, but they are expressed in an unusual way, for they cannot emit fire or flame but their movements look as if they leave a trace of fire. The transition from nature to art can be observed in a man’s hand throwing stones ‘in roundy wells’, for stones are natural while wells are man-made. Then, there is a description of music as art in the notes of ‘each tucked string’, which is pitched.40 Finally, the poet expresses the sound of ‘each hung bell’ in the church, expressing praise of God and Christ and guarding people. The order of the catalogue is intended to show the order of their pitches according to the hierarchy or the Chain of Being. The second quatrain reveals that the act of each being in the first quatrain reveals its self. Selves, with their own pitches, make harmony and music to praise God and Christ. This harmony of selves exemplifies Hopkins’s ideal of the abrupt parallelism of fancy or discordia concors. The sestet consolidates the idea of laudando as the aim of both baroque music and Hopkins’s poetics of fancy, and consequently the original purpose of art as mimesis: Í say more: the just man justices; Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is– Chríst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. (9-14)

Christ is analogous to fancy as the abrupt parallelism between selves, which are otherwise isolated from each other. As the mediator, ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places’ in order to connect creatures with the Creator. Hopkins tries to observe and catch the essence of Christ and the Incarnation visible in each being both in art and nature with his concept of fancy. Hopkins imitates Christ’s abrupt parallelism with his fancy, which is also evident in his idea of counterpoint as discordia concors: Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. 40

MacKenzie notes that ‘tucked’ signifies ‘plucked’, and this evocation of a string suggests Hopkins’s argument in ‘The Probable Future of Metaphysics’: ‘just as the notes in a scale are mathematically fixed through nodal points on a string, so natural species are not accidental stages in the flux of evolution’ (PI 368).

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Í say more: the just man justices; Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – Chríst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

With the repetition of sounds, words and phrases, Hopkins uses rhymes to strengthen musical effects. The abrupt parallelism between poetry and music is attained by counterpoint. Hopkins broadens his view of transubstantiation to regard each being in nature as the manifestation of the Incarnation. * Hopkins had studied philosophy at Stonyhurst College since 1870 until 1873. He returned there in September 1882 to teach classics for two years to students preparing for University of London external degrees (PIII 432n). He wrote the sonnet ‘Ribblesdale’ in 1882: EARTH, sweet Earth, sweet landscape, with leavès throng And louchèd low grass, heaven that dost appeal To, with no tongue to plead, no heat to feel; That canst but only be, but dost that long̿ Thou canst but be, but that thou well dost; strong Thy plea with him who dealt, nay does now deal, Thy lovely dale down thus and thus bids reel Thy river, and o’er gives all to rack or wrong. And what is Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart else, where Else, but in dear and dogged man?̿Ah, the heir To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn, To thriftless reave both our rich round world bare And none reck of world after, this bids wear Earth brows of such care, care and dear concern.

This sonnet criticizes the industrialization destroying the beauty of nature in Ribblesdale. Since Hopkins’s years at Stonyhurst ‘as a philosopher, 1870-3, the lower courses of the three beautiful rivers around the College (J 230-4) had fallen victims to the industrial prosperity of Lancashire, too foul with factory discharges to allow salmon to spawn, though the Ribble had been “one of the finest and most productive salmon rivers in England” (Th. Baines, Yorkshire Past and Present, 1871, i. 251-

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Ribble Valley (Ribblesdale)

3) (LIII 432). Hopkins who loved intact beauty of nature as creation and the manifestation of Christ was greatly disillusioned by man who destroys nature with his ego, or ‘the heir / To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn…’. The poet cannot feel the unity of each part in such devastation. He realizes that the harmony between nature and architecture filled with the beauty of each part as the manifestation of Christ can give him fancy to write the poetry of inspiration. * Hopkins avoids clinging to subjectivity as a Catholic priest especially after his conversion. He takes a different direction from Romantic poets, using simple and individualistic metaphors representing his fancy. These metaphors, which draw clear distinction from familiar poetic clichés, embody inscapes as individualities innate in things. He uses not only unusual metaphors, but also sprung rhythm which was commonly used in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Hopkins’s metaphors are not ordinary figures of speech nor merely show attributes of things. The idiosyncrasy generated by the abrupt

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parallelism of the opposites gives surprise and freshness to poetic diction and reproduces the surprise that the poet finds in his minute observation on nature. Hopkins seems to inherit the idea of the reconciliation of the opposites which produces organic whole from Coleridge’s organic theory, which suggests that a part or an individual cannot be separated from the whole. Hopkins adopts and practices it in his poetry, thinking that the world consists of individuals opposed to each other, and the order can be made by the unity between them. This can be said to the relationship between man and nature, and the unity between them can be made by art with which man imitates God’s creation. Hopkins also thinks that art as man’s creation should be    connected to nature created by God. Hopkins regards metaphor as the means to unite the opposite ideas such as nature and art. Hyphenated words in his poetry show the unity between the opposites in uniting words and things in his poetic diction. Hopkins’s metaphors, which are unique and clearly distinguished from prosaic expressions, have various significations. The reason why Hopkins attained new poetic expressions, replacing Coleridge’s organic theory, lies in his respect not only for the subject as in Romanticism but also for the object and in his faithful reproduction of the latter in the form of poetry. He does not merely describe nature but tries to communicate the surprise he finds in inscapes of things directly to the reader with his own condensed words using hyphens and metaphors with repetitions of sounds, based on the idea of abrupt parallelism. Hopkins imitates each part of nature as the manifestation of Christ in the world covered by God’s grandeur.

CONCLUSION

Hopkins’s letters and works before his conversion to Catholicism prove two things: the first is that his criticism of Parnassian started from his sense of the artificiality of Tennyson’s poetic diction; the second that he worked on Floris in Italy using a heroine in disguise, following the manner of Shakespeare’s fancy as the source of the language of inspiration. Hopkins’s idea of fancy as abrupt was influenced by Coleridge and Ruskin, and he pursued it in connection with the aesthetics of his time when the Gothic Revival flourished with its emphasis on fancy focusing on the variety of the parts. He criticized Parnassian or the mannerisms of Tennyson, Swinburne and Wordsworth because he saw them as characterized by an artificiality and subjectivism which he associated with the influence of the Romantic imagination. In contrast with these poets, Hopkins pursued an objectivity of expression which he believed could only be achieved through the use of metaphors free from the influence of ego. As a result, he exploited his own poetic diction, involving passion and surprise. Hopkins’s efforts bore fruit in the nun’s words in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’, repeated by the poet’s voice, ‘Fancy, come faster’, with an implication of the abrupt parallelism between Christ and ‘Fancy’. He further explored his poetics of fancy as revealing inscape in the sonnets on art and nature composed between 1877 and 1882, but in his later years, his use of the term ‘fancy’ in ‘St. Winefred’s Well’ (1882) and ‘(The Soldier)’ (1885) have some pejorative connotations. Thus, the sonnets Hopkins wrote after 1882 reveal the anxiety of the poet, who is trapped by his ego or subjective imagination and cannot use his fancy to see the inscapes of objects in nature as the Incarnation. Hopkins’s poetic diction is a condensed evocation of art and nature with fancy as the source of his inspiration. The objectivism he seeks depends on fancy’s abrupt parallelism, by which the subject and the object with distinctive selves are united, while the poet’s self contemplating them is lost in his poetic diction so as to reveal the meta-poetical nature of his works. Hopkins’s poetic idiosyncrasy is generated by the abrupt parallelism between distinctive and autonomous images which repeats his surprise and ecstasy contemplating art and nature. With his affirmation of objects, his poetics is different from that of Wordsworth, which involves

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the syntagmatic humanization of nature. Hopkins’s metaphors are the best examples of ‘the artificial part of poetry’, or the paradigmatic nature of fancy as abrupt parallelism. He endeavoured to accomplish the poetry of inspiration with his emphasis on fancy as the source of poetic diction so as to reinstate it as a ‘new Realism’. His fancy concerned with objects reveals the loss of the self and the intrusion of others in the nature of poetic figures, structures and styles. It also foregrounds the discontinuous nature of a new poetic diction, which demonstrates unfettered combinations between autonomous images and signs in metalanguage in advance of semiotic literary theories. Hopkins’s poetry especially written before 1884 expresses his idea of the fixity of fancy, reigning over the fluidity of imagination and the self, which is ultimately absorbed into fancy as the source of the language of inspiration, and whose unification of subject and object parallels the meaning of Christ incarnate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(i) Works by Gerard Manley Hopkins A Concordance of the Poetry in English of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Alfred Borrello. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1969. Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. C.C. Abbott. London: Oxford UP, 1970. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Selection of his Finest Poems. Ed. Catherine Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Robert Bridges. London: Humphrey Milford, 1933. The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon. Ed. C.C. Abbott. London: Oxford UP, 1970. The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Humphry House. London: Oxford UP, 1959. The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges. Ed. C.C. Abbott. London: Oxford UP, 1970. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 4th ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie. London: Oxford UP, 1970. The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. N. H. MacKenzie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Christopher Devlin, SJ. London: Oxford UP, 1959.

(ii) Works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Imagination in Coleridge. Ed. J. S. Hill. London: Macmillan, 1978. Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature. Ed. R. A. Foakes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets. London: Chiswick Press, 1893.

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Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature. Ed. R. A. Foakes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Lectures 1818-19 On the History of Philosophy. Ed. J.R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Lyrical Ballads. Ed. R. L. Brett and A. L. Jones. London: Methuen, 1965. Table Talk. Ed. Carl Woodring. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. E.H. Coleridge, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1912 The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. W. G. T. Shedd. vol. I. Kyoto: Rinsen Book Co., 1989. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn et al. 5 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957-2002.

(iii) Works by John Keats Selected Letters of John Keats. Ed. Grant F. Scott. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. John Keats: The Complete Poems. Ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Penguin Classics, 1977.

(iv) Works by John Milton L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas. Ed. Edward S. Parsons, Boston: Benj. H. Sanborn & CO., 1900. Paradise Lost. Ed. Alastair Fowler. London & New York: Longman, 1991.

(v) Works by John Ruskin Lectures on Art. Introduction by Bill Beckley. New York: Allworth Press, 1996. Modern Painters, vol. I-III. Ed. Ernest Rhys. London: Everyman’s Library, 1907. The Seven Lamps of Architecture: Lectures on Architecture and Painting. New York: Bryan, Taylor & Company, 1894. The Stones of Venice, vol. II. Ed. E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1904. Unto This Last and Other Writings, Ed. Clive Wilmer. London: Penguin Books, 1985.

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(vii) Works by Lord Alfred Tennyson A Concordance to the Entire Works of Alfred Tennyson. Ed. Barron Brightwell. NY: Haskell House Publishers LTD, 1970. Enoch Arden. London: Macmillan, 1925. Idylls of the King. Ed. J. M. Gray. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Poems of Imagination and Fancy. Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co., 1866.

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INDEX

Baillie, 21, 35, 42, 109, 122, 151 Bridges, 29, 39, 51, 146, 160, 166, 178, 181, 182, 184, 206, 207, 208, 209, 219, 222 Burne-Jones, 43, 69, 70, 71 Burton, 109 Butterfield, 6, 9, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 172, 181, 192, 194 Chavannes, 52, 53 Coleridge Biographia Literaria, 2, 5, 7, 11, 24, 41, 78 dream, 9, 27, 28 Gothic architecture, 149 Lectures, 148, 149 reason, 8, 9, 22, 25, 127, 174 Shakespeare, 24, 41, 106, 108, 122, 185 Table Talk, 8, 95 The Friend, 9 Dixon, 1, 21, 82, 96, 110, 178, 180 Gainsborough, 45 Hegel, 28 Heraclitus, 5, 47, 66, 68, 73 Hopkins analogy, 16, 20, 33, 60, 64, 143, 160 bluebells, 159, 160 colour, 20, 26, 44, 45, 62, 64, 65, 68, 71, 160, 162, 168, 199, 200 dream, 26, 27, 45, 125, 189 Gothic architecture, 9, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 179, 181, 194 landscape, 39, 199, 206, 214 Middles Ages, 151

music, 15, 19, 20, 96, 166, 170, 177, 178, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 190, 196, 202, 208, 212, 213, 214 nature, 5, 14, 19, 39, 66, 96, 171, 198 Parnassian, 1, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 52, 60, 61, 64, 79, 81, 86, 89, 95, 96, 97, 109, 122, 124, 136, 217 realism, 19, 20, 28, 30, 43, 44, 61, 133, 157, 158, 218 rhythm, 12, 15, 60, 95, 128, 152, 178, 183, 186, 200, 205, 212, 215 science, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 52, 133, 159 the language of inspiration, 1, 2, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 52, 60, 61, 63, 64, 79, 89, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 132, 134, 204, 205, 217, 218 Essays (Hopkins) 'On the Origin of Beauty', 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 96, 129, 132 'The Origin of Our Moral Ideas', 13, 129 'The Probable Future of Metaphysics', 19, 26, 28, 53, 132, 213 'Poetic Diction', 1, 5, 11, 13, 15, 16, 20, 41, 63, 132, 157, 179 Poems (Hopkins) 'As kingfishers catch fire', 212 'The Beginning of the End', 1, 2, 61, 132, 136, 180, 196, 197, 211

230 'The Caged Skylark', 198 'Duns Scotus's Oxford', 171 'Easter', 144, 146 'The Escorial', 61, 182 'Floris in Italy', 61, 95, 97, 110, 118, 122, 123, 124, 125, 130, 131, 132, 180 'God's Grandeur', 140, 198, 200, 207 'Henry Purcell', 184, 185, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212 'Hurrahing in Harvest', 198, 205, 207 'Il Mystico', 3, 61, 63, 64, 78, 79, 82, 86 'In the Valley of the Elwy', 198, 205 'The Lantern out of Doors', 198 'The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo', 50 '(On a Piece of Music)', 166 'Pied Beauty', 189, 198, 199, 200 'Ribblesdale', 214 'The Sea and the Skylark', 198, 202 'Spelf from Sibyl's Leaves', 66 'Spring', 198 'The Starlight Night', 198, 200 'To Oxford', 165, 166, 207 'To what serves Mortal Beauty', 50, 51 'A Vision of the Mermaids', 3, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 78, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 182 'A Voice from the World', 125 'The Windhover', 198, 203, 204, 205 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', 1, 2, 3, 61, 132, 137, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 190, 196, 197, 210, 211, 217 Donne, 24 Hunt, 44, 45, 84, 91 Kant, 25, 158, 174, 196, 223 Keats, 1, 3, 21, 24, 41, 65, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86

Index Millais, 23, 44, 45, 46, 84 Milton, 24, 41, 98, 161, 204 Moreau, 52, 55, 70, 71, 86 Morris, 21, 37, 38, 41, 43, 60, 84, 86, 110 Müller, 17, 19 Newman, 14, 19, 21, 138, 142, 144, 152 Parker, 153, 161 Pater, 3, 14, 19, 43, 44, 46, 47, 65, 66, 67, 78, 185 Plato, 5, 13, 14, 19, 20, 27, 28, 31, 47, 63, 64, 69, 129, 132, 133, 157, 158, 159, 164, 168 Pugin, 21, 152 Reynolds, 45 Rossetti, 37, 38, 43, 44, 46, 70, 84, 86, 89, 111 Ruskin, 2, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 31, 33, 61, 86, 88, 89, 128, 129, 131, 132, 137, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 156, 158, 179, 188, 217 Modern Painters, 2, 9, 10, 22, 23, 86, 94, 128, 150, 151, 179 The Stones of Venice, 149 Shakespeare, 2, 18, 24, 35, 39, 40, 41, 55, 80, 81, 82, 85, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 113, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 132, 181, 217 The Merchant of Venice, 94, 98, 100, 103, 109, 123 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 123 Twelfth Night, 89, 92, 93, 98, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 123, 124 Tennyson, 2, 21, 24, 35, 39, 40, 42, 45, 52, 55, 95, 96, 97, 109, 110, 120, 121, 122, 123, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 142, 145, 217 Wordsworth, 1, 3, 9, 11, 21, 24, 40, 41, 42, 79, 80, 81, 82, 88, 94, 96, 134, 217