Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things

Among other influences on Hopkins , the impact of Duns Scotus has already been mentioned here. It is fitting, therefore, to discuss it in more detail. G.M. Hopkins is very much a philosopher’s poet. The intensity of his search for an image of the world - as can be seen in his writings - could be compared to that of St. Augustine . Very Augustinean, too, are his doubts and tension of belief. The “inscape” and “instress” of Hopkins poetry are, however, influenced by a later medieval thinker, Duns from Scotland . 

Born around 1270, Duns the Scot became a Franciscan. A student and a teacher at Oxford . he also taught in Paris and Cologne , where he died in 1308. His writings, “at first a bristling mass of syllogisms”[1] subtle in reasoning to the extreme (the Church endowed him with the title doctor subtilissimus, though often brought up by the “new Franciscan school” in opposition to St. Thomas Aquinas, constituted in fact an effort of compromise between Thomism and Augustianism. Being introvert where Thomas was extrovert, Scotus countered Aquinas’ universalism and intellectualism with his belief in the superiority of the individual over the universal. and in the importance of will and intuition rather than intellectual cognition. In short, it may be said that Scotus’s system was a reaction to the reception of Aristotle by Christian philosophy and a reinforcement of the old Augustinian tradition. His incredible subtlety had its drawbacks: it prevented him from building an all-embracing system of thought like Aquinas’, and his competition with St. Thomas excluded Duns from the mainstream of Christian philosophy. “That is why Scotus is not served in the ordinary course of scholastic philosophy.”[2] It is probably for this reason too that Duns Scotus appealed to such an extent to Hopkins – so much that Hopkins ’s fascination with Scotus resulted in his superiors curtailing his theology course, as hinted by Paddy Kitchen in her biography of G.M. Hopkins.[3] 

On July 19th, 1872 , Hopkins wrote in his journal: “I began to get hold of the copy of Scotus... and I was flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm… It may be a mercy from God.”[4] It was. Doctor subtilissimus appealed to Hopkins in many ways: an fellow Oxonian, a mind subtle to the extreme, a believer in the individual nature. Hopkins ’s own concepts of inscape and instress found a firm philosophical basis in Duns Scotus’ haecceitas.

Haecceitas (this-ness) may be understood as the individual form of being; each being is made unique, and it is this individual form that is essential in things. Of Hopkins ’s many paraphrases of this definition, one is particularly fitting: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things” (in “God’s Grandeur”). Bearing this in mind, a comparison with the concepts of inscape and instress might best explain the relation between the Franciscan and the Jesuit. A certain difficulty occurs here, for Hopkins never defined his two ideas, taking them for granted, as illustrated in his letter to Bridges already quoted in Chapter 1. W.A.M. Peters’ study of Hopkins is more helpful here. It defines inscape as “the unified complex of those sensible qualities of the object of perception that strike us as inseparably belonging to and most typical of it, so that through the knowledge of this unified complex of sense-data we may gain an insight into the individual essence of the object.”[5] Elsewhere, instress is suggested to mean either “the energy that gives an object’s inscape its being,” or “the force which the inscape exerts on the mind or the feelings of the perceiver”[6] . This term is derived from “stress,” which Hopkins used instead of the scholastic actus or of the Greek έυέργεια – “the principle of activity in a being.”[7] Thus instress can be understood as an intrinsic realization of inscape. It should be added that Hopkins often uses the verb forms of these words, i.e. to inscape, to instress, which mean, respectively, to perceive the individual essence of a thing and to actualize this essence.

As can be seen, then, Hopkins ’s terms, especially that of inscape,” strictly correspond to Scotus’ haecceitas. When it is known that they were coined by the poet well before his discovery of Scotus (and probably first used in February, 1868), Hopkins ’s “new stroke of enthusiasm” is quite understandable. W.A.M. Peters even says that “ Hopkins ... practiced Scotism, so to say, before he knew the system of Scotus”[8].

Typically for Hopkins , his intellectual fascination with Scotus’ philosophy became highly personal. “His habitual self-examination never extended to the fact of his self: this was simply taken for granted until his Scotist studies made him examine the essence of his ego.”[9] Hopkins ’s discovery of Scotus gave him a new assurance and a systematized concept of knowledge. Modern critics observe that his sensual perception became “heightened” – just as, in Hopkins’s own words, “the poetical language of an age” should be “the current language heightened”[10] – by this knowledge to a degree achievable nowadays only with additional equipment: powerful field glasses as suggested in Grigson’s essay[11] or pharmacological stimuli (LSD proposed by McChesney[12]).

One consequence of Hopkins ’s discovery of Scotus was the poet’s tribute to the philosopher. The sonnet “Duns Scotus’s Oxford ,” while deploring the modern ugliness of the place, rejoices in the fact that Hopkins can “gather … and release” “the air” the Franciscan “lived on.” Oxford , so cherished by Hopkins in his undergraduate years (“This is my park, my pleasance”[13]) has acquired a new value for  the poet: “These walls are what / He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace.” This confession, combined with the one from a 1875 letter to Bridges[14], emphasizes the peculiar “soothing” influence of Duns Scotus on Hopkins . The Scot’s importance for the poet is further stressed in another letter to Bridges of the same year: “I put back Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the library some time ago feeling that I could not read them now and so probably should never. After all I can, at all events a little, read Duns Scotus and I care for him more even than Aristotle and more pace tua than a dozen Hegels.”[15]

Yet Duns Scotus’ impact on Hopkins has more important consequences than a single poem on their shared genius loci. Many poems by Hopkins simply take the Scotian image of the world a priori. Among those, the sonnet Henry Purcell is among the most-often cited examples. As a rare exception, Hopkins explained this poem at length, especially in yet another letter to the future Poet Laureate:

The sonnet on Purcell means this: 1-4. I hope Purcell is not damned for being a Protestant. because I love his genius. 5-8. And that not so much for gifts he shares, even though it shd. be in higher measure, with other musicians as for his own individuality. 9-14. So that while he is aiming only at impressing me, his hearer with the meaning in hand I am looking out meanwhile for his specific, his individual markings and mottlings, ‘the sakes of him.’ It is as when a bird thinking only of soaring spreads its wings: a beholder may happen then to have his attention drawn by the act to the plumage displayed.”[16]

The above is a very modern critical theory for a Victorian: Hopkins seems to accept interpretations unwanted or unimagined by the author, in fact separating him from his work.

Yet “the clearest statement among all Hopkins’s poems, of Duns Scotus’ belief in the fulfilling of individuality, in ‘selving’ (Hopkins’s own word)”[17], is, in agreement with G. Storey, the sonnet As kingfishers catch fire. Untitled and undated by the poet, and probably written in December, 1881, it is a Scotian Credo, a manifesto of “Scotism-Hopkinsism.”

The second quatrain is of crucial importance here.

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.

Any scientific definition could use the first line of this quotation. A mathematician could easily recognize in it the universal (“Each mortal thing”) and existential (“one thing and the same”) quantifiers of formal logic. For each thing, its self, and self only, is essential. The stem “self” and its variants appear thrice throughout the quatrain; the first person singular pronoun, four times. Also, the importance of the individual as the active (“instressing”) force in the world (c.f. do, go, come), as emphasized here, is reinforced by the teleological argument: instress is the reason, the substantiation of being (l. 8). “To selve” (l. 7) has the meaning of “to exist.” “The world is charged” with the individual. Thus haecceitas appears to be basically the same concept as inscape and instress.

This two-fold assurance of the “thereness” of the individual had another consequence in Hopkins ’s metaphysics. Inscape, or haecceitas, of things brings about the individual quality of all things. What follows is that the main reciprocal relation of things between themselves is that of difference. The world is composed (by God) of an uncountable number of individual patches: it resembles a pointillist painting (Seurat and Signac were Hopkins ’s contemporaries); it is, according to this approach, “dappled.”

“Glory be to God for dappled things” - begins the “ curtal-sonnet” of 1877, which, as is Hopkins’s wont, summarizes in a couple of words an interesting vision of the world, with consequences so vast and far-reaching as are almost incompatible with the succinct form of the poem. Yet the present study has already given examples of this ability of Hopkins ’s; here, however, the situation differs in the novelty of the idea. As mentioned above, this vision stems directly from what can be now quite legitimately called “Scotism-Hopkinsism” (a possible definition of which would be the application of Scotus’ philosophy to poetry, the “intressing of haecceitas”).

The sestet (being the initial stanza in this type of a shortened sonnet, Pied Beauty) is, after the first, “dapple-glorifying” line, an enumeration of instances of piedness in nature. The poem uses a considerable number of words suggesting this quality: “pied,” “dappled,” “couple-colour,” “brinded,” “stipple,” “plotted,” “pieced,” “freckled,” or even “fickle.” Diversity is further emphasized by the movement shown in the sestet: “trout that swim” bring about the image of fish, agile and moving under water; “chestnut falls” evoke the suddenness of the noise of the ripe fruit hitting the ground; “finches wings” flutter in flight. Another kind of movement, change, exemplified by the constant rotation of crops (l. 5) carries with it an even deeper meaning, that of the constant flow and ebb in nature, the perennial cycle of life and death. The final line (l. 6) suggests the ant-like, the swarm-like activity of human “trade.” It should be noted that Hopkins ’s perceptual abilities might be called “futurist:” the imagery of the two final lines of the sestet brings about that of a bird’s eye view of a farmland and of the frenzied activity of civilization. The signification of the two modifiers of “landscape,” i.e. “plotted and pieced,” is more important in its alliterative, possibly aspirational sound rather than in the vocabulary meaning of the two verbs. The falling-rising stress pattern of the phrase “plotted and pieced” irresistibly suggests two swift, sweeping cuts with an axe at a right angle, cutting the land into rectangular patches of “fold, fallow, and plough.” One can almost hear the sound of the blade cutting the air. This cutting (cutting is separating, providing a distinct division, contour – individuating) can also be noticed in earlier lines.

The fall of the chestnut (analogous to that of the blade) breaks it open; the “fresh-firecoal” suddenly appearing is very much alike to the “glash” of “gold-vermillion” in The Windhover. Birds cut the air in flight, just as trout do when they jump out of the water (cutting its surface) at an insect. For piedness implies contour, not blending; distinctiveness, not assimilation; creationism, not evolutionism.

It is interesting to notice Hopkins ’s attitude in this last respect. On September 21st, 1874 . in a letter to his mother, Hopkins is open-minded enough  not to downrightly dismiss Darwinism. “I do not think, do you know, that Darwinism implies that man is descended from any ape or ascidian or maggot or what not but only from the common ancestor of apes, … of maggots… of ascidians, and so on; these common ancestors, if lower animals. need not have been repulsive animals.” Still, some of its more enthusiastic followers made him “most mad” for “looking back into an obscure origin and … looking forward with the same content to an obscure future - to be lost in the infinite azure of the past”[18]. His disgust here might have been caused by the blending, assimilative, nature of the theory. In fact - and Hopkins must have been aware of this – Scotism is hardly compatible with evolutionism. Pied Beauty clearly demonstrates Hopkins ’s preference, in terms of aestheticism at least.

But in addition to the difference between beings, the poem evokes the other kind of individuation: that within one being. No being is homogenuous: “All … is freckled.” The parenthesized question following this fragment. “(who knows how?),” is more an expression of wonder than of ignorance.

The almost-onomatopoeic adverbs (“fickle,” “freckled,” “swift,” “slow,” “sweet,” “sour,” “adazzle,” “dim”) intensify the sensation of pointillism: the metaphysics of this quatrain is quite clearly atomist. Also, the contrast of qualities: “swift, slow; sweet. Sour; adazzle, dim,” the insistence on its existence in nature, confirms its importance for Hopkins .

In fact, Hopkins ’s belief in the importance of contrast to the very concept of beauty was one of the earliest characteristics of his aestheticism. An interesting example of this is the 1865 essay On the Origins of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue. Its characters (one of them is noticeably Ruskin-like) agree that “contrast is preferred to agreement” in beauty, which is “not likeness but likeness as thrown up by difference”[19]. The Dialogue, similarly to Hopkins ’s later Credo-like poems, is based on Ruskin’s idea that the duty of the artist is “to explain, to communicate, to praise.”[20] The description and analysis of detail in nature is another influence of Ruskin: it can be seen in Hopkins ’s early drawings, early verse, journals, and most importantly in his mature poetry after 1875. Pied Beauty is as much a result of Hopkins ’s interest in Ruskin as of his Scotism.

Moreover, in Pied Beauty, the contrast also occurs within a thing; it is “instressed.” The consequence of such a concession requires, perhaps, a short explanation.

By allowing the occurrence of contrast in a being, Hopkins is more self-explanatory here than in any other poem. He performs the affirmation of his own mental existence. Aware of “the war within” himself, he justifies it and points out its possible creativity. Being torn between contrasting, not contrary, tendencies, Hopkins praises “him … whose beauty is past change” for the opportunity given to the poet by the “giver of breath and bread” to admire both the beauty of nature (to do so by contrast) and “God’s better beauty, grace.”

This is why “Glory be to God for dappled things.” It helps Hopkins to reconcile the two poles of his thinking, to reconcile himself with himself. Thus, Hopkins ’s world can be seen as a contrasting, changing aggregate of individual beings, which is also contrasted within itself. Yet this is the quality of (inherently mortal) Nature; God, on the other hand, is “past change:” beyond change.

Once again the beauty of God, unchangeable and eternal, is shown by Hopkins to be better than the “Pied Beauty” of the material world. The natural piedness cannot aspire higher: it is locked in its almost-infinite individualisation, just as the lines describing it are locked between affirmations of God’s power and glory. God is clearly the maker of “dappledness;” it is He who created each individual being (creationism again); in fact, He still “fathers-forth,” or acts, “instresses” the world. It may be understood that the qualities which contrast in nature reach their agreement in God; He is not “freckled.”

A risky interpretation of God’s “forth-fathering” might insist on the present tense: the constant coming forward, emanation, of the contrasting features into Nature. While this neoplatonic interpretation would place Hopkins – again – among late Victorian decadents, “to father” can be perhaps more interestingly understood to suggest God’s care and preoccupation with the world

A poem of the same year (The Lantern out of Doors) carries a similar meaning: “Christ minds; Christ’s interest … care haunts.” Also, “the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast.” This idea of the “mastering” God is strictly in agreement with another characteristic of Scotus’ thinking. According to it, God is Will - and as such He is free in His decrees: “Voluntas sua est prima regula.”[21] It might be argued that Hopkins adds a second rule: “pulchritudo sua est altera regula.”

(C) Jan Rybicki 1987, 2005
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