People who visit what is now Newman House on St. Stephen's Green in Dublin are greeted by a plaque that celebrates the efforts there of three outstanding figures: John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and James Joyce. The three were connected in a variety of ways: Newman and Hopkins were bound by spiritual friendship and mentoring; and Joyce expressed his familiarity with and admiration for Newman in no less than forty-one allusions, made throughout his writing life (Pribek 169). Though Joyce missed by nine years the opportunity of being taught by Hopkins, he surely knew of him, and Fr. Robert Boyle and William York Tindall have offered careful arguments for Joyce's familiarity with Hopkins'ss poetry (Boyle 85ff). So these three were certainly connected on a literary level; yet it seems the only physical link between the three remains a building, Newman House.

However, there were two living links to Newman, Hopkins, and Joyce. The first was Thomas Arnold, Jr., a younger brother of the poet and critic Matthew. Newman hired Arnold and brought him to Dublin as Professor of Literature at the Catholic University in 1856. Arnold went on to become a colleague of Hopkins and, near the close of his career, a teacher of Joyce. Of these three figures, Arnold's connection to Newman was the strongest. Though their contact at Oxford had been minimal, Newman played a role in Arnold's two conversions to the Catholic Church: the first from the Church of England, and the second, from a mid-life drift into agnosticism. Both of Arnold's moves toward Rome were bitterly opposed by his wife: upon the first conversion, she threw a brick through the window of the local Catholic Church; the second time, she wrote Newman a scathing letter (Ker 625, 700-01), and refused to accompany her husband to Dublin (Darlington). Nevertheless, Arnold literally followed Newman to and from Dublin, and then to the Oratory School in Birmingham, where he served as Senior Classical Master. He later moved to Oxford to work as a private tutor and to edit Old and Middle English texts; and after his second conversion in 1882, he returned to University College, arriving two years before Hopkins. Arnold was still teaching in 1898 when, according to James Joyce's brother Stanislaus, the elderly professor took note of James Joyce's talents, once praising an essay he wrote on Macbeth (100). Still, Arnold's connections to Joyce and Hopkins would appear to be minimal, especially in comparison with his relationship with Newman.

A second and much stronger link between the three was Fr. Joseph Darlington, an English convert to Catholicism who joined the Irish Province of the Jesuits in 1880. Fr. Darlington was a disciple of Newman, a friend and colleague of Hopkins, and a teacher of Joyce, in both the fields of English and metaphysics. He went on to achieve a measure of fame (and infamy) as the model for the unnamed Jesuit dean of studies in chapter five of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , and more recently, as a source for biographers of Hopkins. But besides meriting the occasional reference in these contexts, Darlington seems lost to history. He bears only brief mention in Dr. Michael Tierney's centenary history of the Catholic University of Ireland (35-37), and he receives only one line in Louis McRedmond's history of the Irish Jesuits (232). And though one of his colleagues, Fr. Michael Egan, regarded him as more responsible than any other person for the success of University College (380)—Tierney also calls him the “linchpin” of the university (36)—scholars tend to view him as Joyce portrayed his fictional counterpart: colourful and benign, paternalistic and pitiable. This lecture will try to redress the neglect of this interesting and influential man, and realistically assess his relevance for scholars of Newman, Hopkins, and Joyce. He is well worth a closer look. Even James Joyce, who as a hot-headed young man once damned Darlington in a letter ( L II 28) did an about-face. In 1939, on the occasion of Darlington's death, Joyce praised him using the words of St. Matthew's seventh beatitude. He wrote to a former classmate, Constantine Curran, “I see . . . that our old dean of studies has gone. He was a well-meaning peacemaker, and I hope he is blessed” ( L III 450).

If one divides Darlington's nearly ninety years of life into thirds, those parts can be likened to the individual lives of the three writers mentioned previously. Much of the first third of his life replicated that of his mentor, Newman—though it might be said to have proceeded at a swifter pace. Darlington was born in Wigan, Lancashire, on the fifth of November, 1850. He enrolled at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1869, eventually earning bachelor's and master's degrees; he was tutored by Walter Pater, as Hopkins had been several years previously, though at Balliol College (Darlington 16). After four years in Oxford, Darlington attended the Anglo-Catholic seminary at Cuddesdon, and he took Anglican orders in 1874. After a brief stint as a curate, his lawyer-father secured for him a prosperous living at Thorndon, Eye, Suffolk; but in 1878, Darlington had to resign after his Roman sympathies caused parishioners to protest to the local bishop. In an exchange reminiscent of Newman's with his bishop over the controversial Tract 90 , Darlington's bishop pointed out that he was being paid to teach church doctrine as expressed in the Thirty-nine Articles as they were commonly understood. Could he or could he not do this? Darlington answered negatively, and promptly resigned (Egan 379). He immediately began taking instructions in Roman Catholicism, in part from Newman himself (Morrissey 140, Martin 417), as Hopkins had done a decade earlier. In a number of ways, he also came under the influence of Irish Catholicism: he worked as a tutor to an Irish family, and he struck up a friendship with an Irish Jesuit, Fr. Isaac Moore (Egan 380). He also read Newman's Idea of a University , and later in life Darlington was to recall, “[I] was so interested that I determined to give my whole life to the work of the Catholic University in Ireland” (Gwynn 17). In 1878, he was received into the Catholic Church by an Irish priest at the Brompton Oratory, London. Two years later he joined the Irish Province of the Society of Jesus at Milltown Park, Dublin. So Darlington's journey to Catholicism and to religious life was completed by the age of thirty, whereas Newman was forty-five when he entered the Congregation of the Oratory.

The middle years of Darlington's life could be said to approximate those of the mature Hopkins. He was halfway through his philosophy studies in 1883 when the Jesuits were charged with organising the new University College on Stephen's Green. Darlington was among the first to enrol ( A Page of Irish History 589). He later explained: “Though an M.A. of Oxford, I decided to enter the classes at the College and go through all the grades to M.A. in order to become acquainted with the standards and modes of examining” (Darlington 34). Darlington was clearly headed for an assignment at University College: for in the same year, he was also asked to serve as prefect for some lay students of the university who were residing at Milltown Park (Gwynn). In 1885, he was finally sent to Stephen's Green to teach, to complete his studies, and generally to assist the president, Fr. William Delany. The following year he was given the important post of Dean of Studies, which put him in charge of the day-to-day administration of the college. That same year the Royal University awarded him an Honours B.A. in Philosophy, and an Honours M.A. in Metaphysics followed in 1887: for the latter he was awarded first-class honours and a gold medal. His long career at University College was only interrupted for two years' theology study in Louvain and several months of tertianship at Chieri, Italy. Since Darlington had studied theology for two years at Oxford, he was ordained after only two years' study; however, this disavowed his being solemnly professed of the four vows, so that when he pronounced final vows in 1897, he did so as a spiritual coadjutor. When he returned to University College as a priest in 1889, he was to remain there for the rest of his long apostolic life, serving in a wide variety of roles, academic and administrative.

Hopkins and Darlington had much in common: both were Englishmen in Ireland, Oxonians and converts, who had shared the same tutor (Pater) and mentor (Newman). Both had a reputation for eccentricity. Perhaps their greatest bond, however, was demanding labour in the same brave but very uncertain educational endeavour. They must have taught many of the same students, under the same difficult conditions. That being said, much separated the two. Darlington acculturated himself to Ireland quite thoroughly; as one of his students put it, “though he had English eyes, he wore Irish spectacles” (Howley 502). And like Newman, he harboured sympathy for the cause of Irish freedom (Morrissey National University 140-42). Darlington was also blessed with robust health, confidence, and a fairly bold sense of humour—and in none of these could Hopkins be considered outstanding. And of course their tenures at the university differed greatly: Hopkins spent just five years on Stephen's Green, while Darlington gave nearly half a century to the institution.

The characteristic for which Darlington was legendary was his sympathy for and personal interest in others. He had a habit of affirming just about everyone and everything; according to a colleague, he acted on the principle that, “just as there is an element of good in everyone, so there is an element of truth in almost every statement; and his plan was to seize on that and build upon it” (Egan 381). Joyce captures this side of Darlington in the Portrait , when he pictures the dean between classes, trying to disengage from a student—though he listens patiently and speaks politely. “ Not a doubt of it, Mr. Hackett! Very fine! Not a doubt of it!”, the dean replies (199). But fiction is no match for fact. Fr. Thomas Morrissey recounts a story in which one student told Fr. Darlington that he planned to marry—to which the priest replied, “Capital, capital, I've often thought of it myself” (Morrissey “Hopkins's Friends” 201, Ellmann Joyce 58n).

But even Darlington's legendary amiability could not overcome the forces of politics and time. In the last third of his life, he and his former pupil Joyce came to experience rejection from an ever more nationalistic and authoritarian church. In fact they shared an antagonist in Archbishop William J. Walsh, whom Joyce lampooned as “Billy with the lip” in the Portrait (33) and as the pompous, poison-penned “His Grace” in Ulysses (149, 603, 750). In 1902, just after the time portrayed in Joyce's Portrait , Archbishop Walsh exercised his role as chancellor of the university to move Darlington to the medical school, to serve as dean of the student residence there. The priest put the best interpretation on his reassignment; indeed, he proudly retained his letter of reassignment, and wrote in his memoirs that he valued the new opportunity to rub shoulders with Walsh at meetings, and “recognize his esteem, and approval of Fr. Delany's work” (34). But Walsh further marginalized Darlington three years later, when the National University of Ireland was organized. Theoretically, all the professors under retirement age were entitled to positions at the new institution; but Archbishop Walsh and Chief Baron Palles opposed Darlington's appointment, and managed to have his candidature withdrawn (Morrissey National University 348-49). The reason given for Darlington's non-appointment was the poor quality of his teaching: he was reported to be “imprudent and eccentric,” and to possess a style that was “very involved, diffuse and often tedious” (Palles). But it is telling that the only two professors whose appointment Walsh opposed were Darlington and Fr. Thomas Browne: both people with whom he had had prior disagreements. In 1901, Darlington had spoken in favour of a scheme to create a new national university through a network of denominational colleges. This proposal was strongly opposed by Walsh, and Fr. Delany and the Jesuit provincial had to write letters repudiating Darlington's opinions (Morrissey National University 178-80). Fr. Browne had run afoul of Walsh in 1884 over the matter of Hopkins's appointment; he had been Jesuit provincial when Hopkins was appointed to the university faculty, against the opposition of Walsh, who had his own candidate for the position. Now it was Browne's turn to yield to Walsh, and Darlington's second misfortune at the hand of the archbishop.

Joyce's portrayal of Darlington as the dean of studies in the Portrait is basically sympathetic. Stephen views the dean as “a poor Englishman in Ireland,” a man isolated, as Joyce felt himself to be, from his nation, his family, and even his language. The dean is a second-rate shadow of Newman: he is “a humble follower in the wake of clamorous conversions,” “a late-comer, a tardy spirit” (188). He quotes Newman on the difference between the liberal and the useful arts; but he embodies only the useful arts, as he lights a fire (184-85). Like the cardinal, he serves at the altar and waits upon worldlings; but he has “remained ungraced,” possessing nothing of Newman's “saintly or . . . prelatic beauty” (185). The only emotion Stephen is said to feel for the dean is “a desolating pity” (190). Joyce makes it clear that the dean is no Newman; but the extent to which Stephen sympathises with him suggests that he may resemble the Jesuit Stephen (and Joyce) very nearly became.

In recent years a number of Hopkins scholars have resurrected the figure of Darlington, though he has not fared well at their hands. Robert Bernard Martin is the most severe. He grants that “by all accounts Fr. Darlington was a charitable man without malice”; but he also charges Darlington with propagating the view that Hopkins was odd, overly sensitive, and lazy (373-75). The book ends with a four-page, small-print appendix that is entirely given over to discrediting Darlington as a source for Hopkins biographers. Martin writes that Darlington “seems” to have contributed less than flattering material to biographers: in one paragraph alone, Martin uses the words “seems” three times, and “apparently” once, with no substantiation. He pictures Darlington as an “increasingly bitter” commentator on Hopkins; and though he admits that early biographers actually used few of Darlington's recollections of Hopkins, he proceeds to “guess . . . at the reasons for his feelings about Hopkins.” Darlington might have nursed old jealousies about Hopkins's greater success at Oxford; he might have found his fellow Englishman an embarrassment in Irish settings; more deeply still, he might have borne Hopkins “a kind of sexual antipathy.” This last accusation is justified by two random, out-of-context, and unattributed statements Darlington made about Hopkins's delicacy, as well as one about his choice of slippers (420). Can Martin really believe these statements justify an allegation of “sexual antipathy?”

My friend and Jesuit colleague Frederic Schlatter offered a much more detailed and annotated critique of Darlington in the Hopkins Quarterly in 2003. While stating that Darlington “was a minor figure of some interest” for Hopkins scholars (98), he also portrays him as a “purveyor of unreliable anecdotes” (123) and a self-aggrandizing, self-appointed expert on Hopkins (114). Schlatter depicts Darlington as a man of increasing bitterness after his 1909 failure to gain a position in the new National University. He justifies this portrayal by relying heavily on notes taken by would-be Hopkins biographer Humphry House in 1933, when Darlington was eighty-three years old, and for at least six years previous recognised as showing signs of senility (122-23). Schlatter's theory that Darlington was crushed and indignant about his exclusion is logical enough; however, it is nowhere supported by the accounts of Darlington's contemporaries. In fact, Fr. Egan recalled that even in his last years, when Darlington's health and memory were failing, “his sunny disposition and unselfish cheerfulness remained to the very end undimmed” (378-379). Schlatter's picture of a disillusioned Darlington is further belied by Darlington's own previously mentioned account of his reassignment by Archbishop Walsh in 1902, in which he puts an amazingly positive and charitable interpretation on the event (Darlington 34). Such was an act much more typical of Darlington, according to his contemporaries.

For a more accurate read of Darlington's impressions of Hopkins, Martin and Schlatter should have turned to the priest's lengthy 1920 account of the early years of University College. This was a handwritten document that was later typed into eighty-one legal-sized pages. The Jesuits publishing the first history of the college had asked Darlington for his recollections of Hopkins, but what they got was a much larger document treating of the entire institution: in fact, Darlington amended the title “The Life of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Ireland” by adding in his own pen, “and the Policy of Fr. Delany SJ, President of University College, Stephen's Green, 1884-1908.” Rather than being an obsessive commentator on Hopkins, Darlington clearly wanted to write about the university. Delany receives far more attention than Hopkins. That being said, a number of pages are devoted to Hopkins, who is recalled in terms that are very positive, if a bit abstract. The “force of his magnetic personality” exerted an “extraordinary spiritual influence” (ii), since he lived in “the refined purity of a more spiritual world” (18). He proceeds to paint Hopkins as “no ordinary mystic” who evinced traits of the Virgin Mary (17), St. John Vianney (18-19), and the poet-martyr, St. Robert Southwell (17). Darlington sums up his ideas thus:

Hopkins had a far deeper source of making a high impression than what he had derived from Baliol eighteen years before. Gerard Hopkins, so original, so famous a Greek scholar, so exalted in his spiritual life, with a poetic genius of so high a quality, by his daily presence, students could not fail to catch something of the spirit and interest in what he stood for—the realization of a Catholic University [and the sacrifice of his life for it.] (34) (brackets his)

Darlington wrote this document personally, in two drafts, while he was still in good health. Why Martin and Schlatter give it so little credence is a question.

Undoubtedly the discussion of Darlington and his merits as a source will continue. I make no claim beyond Schlatter's, that Darlington is “a minor figure of some interest” (98). His was the unenviable role of standing in the shadow of giants like Newman, Hopkins, and Joyce; who among us would fare well in the light they cast? I only plead for more of the charity of interpretation and affirmation of personhood that Darlington gave so liberally to others, over the course of a long apostolic life.

Works Cited

Boyle, Robert, S.J. James Joyce's Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition . Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.

Darlington, Joseph, S.J. The Life of Gerard Hopkins in Ireland [1884-1889], with a Brief Summary of London, Queen's and Royal Universities Since Emancipation and Their Influence in Ireland together with “Newman's Campaign” and the Policy Father Delany, 1884-1908 . Irish Jesuit Archives, Dublin.

Egan, Michael. S.J. “Father Joseph Darlington.” Irish Province News III, 4 (Oct 1939): 378-82.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce . Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.

Ellmann, Richard, ed. Letters of James Joyce . Vols. 2 and 3. New York: Viking, 1966.

Fathers of the Society of Jesus. A Page of Irish History: Story of University College, Dublin, 1883-1909 . Ed. Lambert McKenna, S.J. Dublin: Talbot, 1930.

Gwynn, Aubrey, S.J. Memoirs of Fr. Darlington . Irish Jesuit Archives, Dublin.

Howley, John. “Father Joseph Darlington, S.J., 1850-1939: An Appreciation.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 28 (1939): 502.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975.

Joyce, James. Ulysses . Penguin Classics Series. London: Penguin, 2000.

Ker, Ian. John Henry Newman . Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.

Martin, Robert Bernard . Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life . New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

McRedmond, Louis. To the Greater Glory: A History of the Irish Jesuits . Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1991.

Morrissey, Thomas J., S.J. “Hopkins's Friends and Colleagues.” Hopkins Quarterly 14 (1987-88): 201.

Morrissey, Thomas J., S.J. Towards a National University: William Delany SJ (1835-1924). An Era of Initiative in Irish Education . Dublin: Wolfhound, 1983.

Palles, Christopher, Chief Baron. Letter to Dr. William Walsh. 28 Sep 1909. Irish Jesuit Archives, Dublin.

Pribek, James, S.J. “Newman and Joyce.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 93, 370 (Summer 2004): 169-84.

Schlatter, Frederic W., S.J. “Hopkins's Dublin Critic, Joseph Darlington, S.J.” Hopkins Quarterly 30, 3-4 (Summer-Fall 2003): 98-126.

Sullivan, Kevin. Joyce among the Jesuits . New York: Columbia UP, 1958.

Tierney, Michael, ed. Struggle with Fortune: a Miscellany for the Centenary of the Catholic University of Ireland, 1854-1954 . Dublin: Browne & Nolan, 1954.

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