Gerard Manley Hopkins and Oscar Wilde - both Writers, Poets and Victorians

By Leonara Obed, USA

In the year 1865 Gerard Manley Hopkins took on an unusual and most unlikely role: that of prophet, diviner, and soothsayer. Writing in his Early Diaries, he contemplated the writings of Edward the Confessor, and in his meditation upon that thing which he loved most -- trees, trees, and more trees -- he came up with his own unique vision of a twentieth century England:

Edward the Confessor had a vision, F.G. Lee's Sermon in the second series of the A.P.U.C. sermons quoted in the Union R., says that England should be afflicted and not

restored to God's mercy 'till a green tree, cut down from the root, and removed three furlongs distant from its own stock should, without the help of any man's hand, return to its own root again, and bring forth fruit and flourish'.This is recounted in the Salisbury Breviary. Taking 1525 as the date of the Reformation and a furlong of 125 years, that is the 8th of 1000 years which might well stand for a mile, three furlongs would = 375 years and brings the date of reunion to 1900.

Hopkins and the Marian Shrine of Walsingham

One of the most prevalent and powerful leitmotifs of Hopkins' life and oeuvre was that of the Marian shrine of Walsingham and the r eturn of its newly baptised English devotees. It was a thread of continuity that united his works, from the Spanish milieu of his early poem, The Escorial - with its image of an earthly Mary, playing with her divine child - to the sonnet To R.B., with its maternal allusions of a mother of immortal song ... The widow of an insight lost she lives,with aim/Now known and hand at work now never wrong. Walsingham was a potent, albeit subtle, force, that infused his works and perhaps reminded Bridges of a Catholicism that was dangerous in that it infiltrated the ordinariness of daily life, and thus, threatened to convert his own.

Hopkins's prophecy of 1865 was significant in that it took exception to an apocalyptic event that was markedly English. Nevertheless, Hopkins's concern for the redemption of his native land was hardly isolated. In the mid-1800s, British churches reverberated with the fire and brimstone of end-of-the-world sermons.

The publication of Scotch Church Pamphlets 1847-1873 (1858) in 1873 by the Edinburgh-based R. Lendrum indicated the geographical and theological breadth of this phenomenon. While it is unlikely that Hopkins had heard of it, one particular sermon from this collection, entitled The Seventh Angel, Peace on Earth, or, The Mystery Revealed, by Angel may be singled out for its vision of a British apotheosis.

As a foil to Hopkins' vision of peace, Angel's sermon employed a political and biblical numerology to justify Protestant Great Britain's alliance with satanic forces:

The mystery which this author has to reveal, is the meaning of the number 666, -which, he says, signifies Great Britain, which, since the Reform Bill increased, transformed her into a beast, - 'the two-horned beast', by which Antichrist is meant! This wonderful discovery is founded on the fact that the gov't. of Great Britain is not a monarchy represented by one individual; it is not a pure democracy, an aristocracy, a theocracy, nor autocracy; but a mixture of all these. The legislature of Great Britain is made up of lords and commons, - 658 constituencies of the Commons, and eight of the peerage, making together 666. This is a strange effect of the Reform Bill! But what is the object of this discovery? - To recommend the clergy of the Church of Rome as universal arbitrators, to realize the idea of the Peace Society, to prevent wars, and to denounce the Lutheran Reformation as a failure! (4)

Jesus the Demagogue

That the Lutheran Reformation had failed to bring about social justice and theological reform was the message not only of Angel's prophecy, but of a growing number of orations and published articles. As late as 1896 Walter Walsh reiterated the essence of Angel's concern: that the historical Christ was one whose history was tied, first and foremost, to one's personal history, and therefore, was mutable and empathetic with the sufferings of humanity. The prophecy has been fulfilled, Walsh wrote of Jesus the Demagogue - The English working-men have said, He is the man for us - three cheers for the Man of Nazareth .... We used to think that Christ was a fiction of the priests; at all events not a man like us in any way; .... But now we find he was a man after all, like us; a poor working-man, who had a heart for the poor, and wanted to turn the world upside down, but could not do it once. (5)

Halfway between Hopkins's '1900' epiphany and Walsh's socialist christology was the formation of the A.P. U.C., or, the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, in 1857, by Frederick George Lee and Bishop Forbes of Brechin on the Anglican side, and A.W. Pugin on the Roman Catholic side, the objective of which was closely connected not only with the Catholic Church, but also with the Orthodox Church. The A.P.U.C. had also become widely known in the middle 1860s, by two books which Lee edited Sermons on the Reunion of Christendom, in two volumes in 1864 and 1865, and Essays on the Reunion of Christendom, in 1867. That Lee believed profoundly in the Anglican Communion was evident in his 1870 book on The Validity of the Holy Orders of the Church of England; he had become increasingly disturbed by the antagonism of the Church of England to the Holy See, and had various doubts the validity of Anglican Orders. Activities of the A.P.U.C. continued well into the 1890s; they produced a paper, The Union Review, and garnered the support of illustrious Catholics, such as Ambrose de Lisle. Reunion between the Catholic and Anglican churches was one of the topics discussed at the Lambeth Conference in 1888, but the movement finally collapsed, as it failed to gain support from Catholics under Cardinal Vaughan. More importantly, the Papal Bull of 1894, Apostolicae Carvae, nullified ordinations performed according to the Anglican rite, made further rapprochement impossible.

Hopkins' prophecy referred to sermon number XVII of Frederick George Lee, from Twenty-One Sermons on the Re-Union of Christendom, Second Series, by members of the Roman Catholic, Oriental, and Anglican Communions, London 1865. These sermons were printed for certain members of the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, of which Lee was secretary.(6) The prophecy quoted here is given in a note to a review of the Sermons in the Union Review, vol. 3. It had appeared twice the previous year in the Union Review, headed on the first occasion with regard to the present Catholic Revival in the Church of England. (7) On a personal level, Hopkins' revisioning of Lee's sermon was significant in that it revealed his extensive awareness of and involvement with the religious atmosphere of his time; this was in stark contrast with the isolated composition of his idiosyncratic poetry. If Hopkins the poet was still anonymous Hopkins the priest strove to be as eponymous as the radical Dr. Lee of Lambeth. It was through the public, theological authority of Lee that Hopkins 'justified' his own personal aspirations of a Marian England; through the social activities of Lee and the Lambeth Movement Hopkins solidified his yet unread body of poetic work into a firmly grounded body of public works. Thus, Hopkins' dual roles of poet-priest were contrapuntal in their points of recognition: although Hopkins the poet became further entrenched in his chosen secrecy, so Father Hopkins, through his alliance with Lee, moved forward and unofficially became a movement which was religious and, ironically, literary - The Catholic Revival, described by Holbrook Jackson as a wave of Catholicism which swept over the world of art, manifested in the construction of the Byzantine-style Westminster Cathedral and the emerging talents of Francis Thompson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Hillaire Belloc. Moreover, Hopkins' outspoken eloquence reflected the boldness of English Catholicism in the late nineteenth century. Hopkins himself could be seen as a symbol of this shift. Just as he emerged from the isolation of an ostracised convert, so the Roman Catholic Church in England emerged from the alienated, defensive, and ultra-conservative position it had held since the Reformation to a position of ardent engagement in social and political affairs.(10) By apostrophising the notion of a redeemed England Hopkins made it clear that he, as a double-outsider of convert and Jesuit, would no longer support his position as an attacked and underestimated minority. By the 1880s the composition of the Roman Catholic Church in England was not just limited to the descendants of the original families who had survived the Reformation - older Catholics who included John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and A.W. Pugin - but comprised the mass number of Irish immigrants who escaped the famine of the 1840s. The arrival of the Irish accounted for the increase in Catholic population from 250,000 in 1811 to 622,619 in 1851.(11) Another group comprised the the Oxford converts, such as John Henry Newman, F.W. Faber, and William Ward. While the Oxford group was small in numbers, their intellectual approach empowered them to convert those who belonged neither to the Irish nor to the old families: Hopkins was one such person, and his wish for the unification of all Britons stemmed from his wish to be accepted by the Irish and the older Catholics - groups that were not especially welcoming to converts and, most especially, Jesuit converts. Silently, and with the prayer-like subtlety that a diary afforded him, Hopkins prophesied for himself and his nation the dissolving of such differences like the exceptional Oxford group that he epitomised, was a force to be reckoned with, and his prophecy of '1900' enunciated his belief that the future of Roman Catholicism depended upon a converted England.

Uncertainty of the Role of the Prophet

The role of the prophet was an uncanny one. To prophesise was to not only invoke the divine, but to ventriloquise it, a process not unlike poetry, which, in its most primeval state, was a form of dictation, the Parnassian impulse that Hopkins called that language which genius speaks as fitted to its exaltation, and place among other genius, but does not sing in its flights (SP, To Baillie, 10/11 Sept. 1864). Throughout his life Hopkins made profound links between prophecy and poetry. They were supernatural gifts which caused him great disquiet and unease. They were the alarums and false alarms of impostors and men who knew little about general truths. They were the roads of din and difficulty, or, poetry at Oxford, as he recorded in his Early Diaries of 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 (SP, 17).

For a man as markedly eccentric as Hopkins, the best remedy for such false alarms was melodrama, that pivotal moment when the prophet and poet became synthesized into the Fifth Business (12) of Father Hopkins. The priest was the temperate spirit, the holy harbinger between the divine source and the divining sorcerer. Hopkins' role as Jesuit priest enabled him to establish a somewhat neutral ground: as time's eunuch he allowed himself the luxury of a pious procrastination, the perpetual excuse to pursue neither the apocalyptic apogees of a lofty prophet nor the verbal wanderlust of a poetic spirit Perhaps one of his more sophisticated alibis for his unambitious nature was the theological subtlety that

my life is determined by the Incarnation down to most of the details of the day. Now this being so that I cannot even stop it, why should I not make the cause that determines my life, both as a whole and in much detail, determine it in greater detail still and to the greater efficiency of what I in any case should do, and to my greater happiness in doing it? (SP, Retreat Notes, Tullabeg, 1 Jan. 1889)

It was through Father Hopkins that the exorcism of poetry was accomplished: the Slaughter of the Innocents was an unsuccesful attempt to quell the prophetic voice that would herald the 'birth' of a Modernist poet forged in Victorian fire: Hopkins's deathbed apotheosis of I am so happy! I am so happy! was the moment when Father Hopkins ceased to be the Fifth Business that was neither Hero nor Confidante nor Villain, yet, in his seeming insignificance, was essential in bringing about the Recognition or the denouement.

The Prophet-Poet Quandry

Pyromania aside, Hopkins' melodramatic practices were comic and absurd. The most whimsical illustration of the prophet-poet quandary was his wrestling with a divining angel, otherwise known as Thomas Carlyle. Like a rebel youth of a beat generation, Hopkins was outspoken in his dislike of the revered elder:

My dear Bridges ... I am always thinking of the Communist future. The too intelligent artisan is master of the situation I believe. It is what Carlyle has long threatened and foretold. But his writings are, as he might himself say, most inefficacious- strenuous heaven-protestations, caterwaul, and Cassandra-wailings. He preaches obedience but I do not think he has done much except to ridicule instead of strengthening the hands of the powers that be. Some years ago when he published his Shooting Niagara he did make some practical suggestions but so vague that they should rather be called too dubious moonstone-grindings and on the whole impracticable-practical unveracities. However I am afraid some great revolution is not far off. Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist (SP, Stonyhurst, 2 Aug. 1871)

Hopkins had a tendency to juxtapose Carlyle with his most personal and vitriolic controversies: his avowed Communism was no less difficult to admit than his own imposture as a poet and priest. Hopkins did more than just lean upon Carlyle's respected, albeit idiosyncratic, reputation. He sought, however unconsciously, the support of the one man who could possibly understand him. In 1840 - four years before Hopkins per se was born - Carlyle wrote about such a man, or, the Hero as Prophet and Poet, the Hero as Priest: the essential paradoxes that heroized Hopkins' life:

Vates means both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well understood, have much kindred of meaning.... That they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the Universe; what Goethe calls 'the open secret'....--open to all, seen by almost none! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, 'the Divine Idea of the World,' that which lies at the bottom of Appearance,' as Fichte styles it; .... This divine mystery is in all times and in all places; veritably is...So far Poet and Prophet, participators in the 'open secret,' are one. (Buckler, The Hero as Poet, from Heroes and Hero-Worship, 114-115)

and again,

and also,

Hopkins was the living manifestation of Carlyle's synthetic hero. He was, in a peculiar way, one of Carlyle's most startlingly accurate predictions, for in his lifelong alchemy of the sacerdotal and the supernatural Hopkins was privy not only to the open secret of life, but anticipated a new type of artist: one who would maintain an intense piety, an exuberant rush to meet life, a violence of imagery and multitudinousness.(14) Long before Yeats implored Irish poets to earn their trade - and thereby, to merge a personal mysticism with a national history - Hopkins asked simply that until his poetry be first performed, it was not yet heard. By propagating a speech that was at once imminent and immediate, Father Hopkins changed the face of poetry: like the best of prophets, his goal was simple - he believed that the language of poetry should be the current language heightened. As Walford Davies has noted, Hopkins's endless insistence to Bridges that his poems should be read aloud was aimed at completing that connection between voice and faith. (15)

Hopkins's dislike of Carlyle was parallel to his essential mistrust of himself and his own grandiloquent schemes: Hopkins had a special term - supposedly orchestrated by Bridges - for that need to be heard by a live audience, and in that aural appreciation, be able to convert them. The art of conversion, or proselytization, was as much a poetic-prophetic task as it was religious. Indeed, Hopkins' apologia for himself could equally have been voiced for Carlyle:

My verse is less to be read than heard, as I have told you before; it is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so. I think if you will study what I have here said you will be much more pleased with it and may I say? converted to it. You ask may you call it presumptious jugglery. No, but only for this reason, that presumptious is not English. I cannot think of altering anything. Why shd. I? I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you. (To Bridges, St. Beuno's, St. Asaph, Aug. 21 1877, CP, p. 229)

Hopkins admitted to his presumptious jugglery in 1877: it was the year of his ordination; the year of his teaching at Mount St. Mary's College, Chesterfield; it was a prolific year, when he wrote ten poems, most especially the signature poems that readers tend to identify as being typically 'Hopkinsian': God's Grandeur, The Starlight Night, As Kingfishers catch fire, The Windhover, Pied Beauty. For a brief moment, the poet, prophet, and priest were sacramentally united: just two years earlier he began to write The Wreck of the Deutschland. It was exactly six years since his first bout with a Carlylean allergy, and twelve years since he made the curious prediction about the year 1900 and England's redemption through an apocalyptic tree.

What became of that prediction, and how did that single yet spectacular foray into prophecy affect Hopkinss' life? On the 30th of November 1900 a man known as Sebastian Melmoth died in the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris. Just hours before an Irish Passionist priest named Father Cuthbert Dunne gave him conditional baptism, absolved and anointed him. (16) Monsieur Melmoth died as he wished: a Roman Catholic.

While he lived he proclaimed that Catholicism is the only religion to die in. Much of my moral obliquity is due to the fact that my father would not allow me to become a Catholic. The artistic side of the Church and the fragrance of its teaching would have cured my degeneracies. Sardonic until the end, he claimed to have been fighting to the death with the hideous wallpaper that surrounded him, but those who knew Sebastian Melmoth well knew that he had been slowly dying since he arrived in Dieppe in 1897: basing himself in Paris, he wandered around Italy and France, talking about the novels he would write, and the play that he would produce in London, but none of these plans materialised. Those who looked closely could see that he had once been majestic, dignified; despite his weight he was statuesque, godlike. There was something extravagant about his poverty: the velvet cravat, emerald ring, occasional Egyptian cigarette.

Occasionally he dared to approach famous persons, like Dame Nellie Melba, and ask her for money. Prior to his European exile Sebastian Melmoth was also known as convict C.3.3., convicted under the law that forbade any male person ... the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person.(17) Before he was infamous he was famous, the playwright who lit the marquees of London's West End. He was the author of, amongst others, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere's Fan, The Selfish Giant and The Importance of Being Earnest. Oscar Wilde, the exuberant Dubliner, was indeed that robust green tree, cut down from his Irish roots. His scandal and imprisonment removed him three furlongs distant from his native stock and adapted England towards exile and an ignominious death. Without the help of any man's hand, he did return to his own literary root again, to bring forth immortal artistic fruits and flourish in the twentieth century and beyond. Wilde shared Hopkins' preoccupation with unity. In De Profundis, Wilde remodeled Christ as a secular, historic Jesus who was the first to conceive the divided races as a unity; he was a deity who embodied commitment and community and encouraged individuals to be themselves. 1900? 1900. But ... This is a number! It was a number, but now it's a name ... It's perfect. It's so beautiful. A grand name, yes Sir, a grand name, really, it is (19): Wilde was Novecento, the Legend of 1900, for his name was inextricably linked with that year in English history. England was afflicted by the wounds of Wildean wit, spontaneity, and forthrightness, a cultural malaise that culminated in the infamous trial between Wilde and the Marquess of Queensberry at the Old Bailey in 1895. That his death was soon followed by that of Queen Victoria was momentous, for in their demise they signalled the end of an era and the possible restoration of what Hopkins hoped would be the return of English pilgrims to the Marian shrine at Walsingham: the subsequent and dramatic Catholic conversions of Evelyn Waugh, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Lord Alfred Douglas were perhaps signs of these Hopkinsian times.(20)

Hopkins and Wilde, equally colourful Oxford Undergraduates

If not yourself, then who would you rather be? Filling out an American Confession Album in 1877, Wilde answered this question with a rather astounding aspiration: A Cardinal of the Catholic Church. (21) Preceding Wilde by only a decade, Hopkins the Oxford undergraduate had been an equally colorful dandy, cultivating a trim sartorial style that could not be fully exorcised by Jesuitism.(22) Much to the chagrin of his Jesuit superiors, Father Hopkins sported a Dante coiffure, irritating those who were already affronted by his effeminate gait, handkerchief-waving, diabolical laugh, and parody of fellow priests through Consule Jones, a humorous sketch that he performed for them on Provincial Day, the 22nd of July 1875:

Cardwell an Englishman and a true man His thoughts all turned German, his words all gone gruff A learned and amiable bonfire scarce human Serves to warn Dubberley not to take snuff. (Jones, 14)

Wilde liked to boast that many of his friends were Jesuits in disguise. Surprisingly, this was true. One of his closest friends at Oxford was Dunskie, or David Hunter Blair, a Scottish baronet who underwent a remarkable conversion to Catholicism. Ten days after attending a ceremony in Rome at which Manning was created a cardinal, Blair was then confirmed by Archbishop Howard and blessed by Pius IX, who conferred on him the honorary post of papal chamberlain. He later became a monk and Abbot of Fort Augustus. Pray for me, Dunskie, pray for me, was Wilde's constant plea to his friend. Until 1892 the classically epicene John Gray had been Wilde's intimate Muse, a privilege marked by his habit of signing his name as Dorian. Wilde's exclusive affection for him was later supplanted by Robert Ross, who would then be replaced by Lord Alfred Douglas. If Dunskie's road to Rome had been smooth, Gray's was chequered. En-route to conversion he considered suicide, became lovers with André Raffalovich - whose rivalry with Wilde culminated in the building of St. Peter's Church in Morningside, Edinburgh, for Gray - and the publication of religious and homoerotic poetry, the title of which was also his sobriquet: Father Silverpoints. One of the few times that Wilde cried in public was when he heard about the death of his mother; the other time was when he was refused a place at a Jesuit retreat in Farm Street after his release from prison. Perhaps it was a curse. In 1877 Wilde travelled to Greece with his Trinity College tutor, Professor Mahaffy. The arch-Protestant Mahaffy dissuaded Wilde from going to Rome, claiming that

Oscar Wilde: From Popery to Paganism