Hopkins seems to find only one fault in mortal beauty, the fact of its being mortal. A letter to Patmore completes our picture of Hopkins ’s view on the ethics of beauty:

Why do we find beautiful evil? Not by any freak of nature, nature is incapable of producing beautiful evil. The explanation is to be sought outside nature, it is old, simple, and the undeniable fact. It comes from wicked will, freedom of choice, abusing the beauty, the good of its nature.[20] “Thou wert,” the Scripture says and great writers apply it to the Devil, “the seal of resemblance.” The instance is palmary and shows how far evil can be beautiful and beauty evil and what the phenomenon means when it occurs.[21]  

Nature is incapable of producing beautiful evil because, we may add, it is “charged with the grandeur of God.” Suspect here is also the “freedom of choice,” so contrary to the ascetic discipline of the Jesuit Hopkins. The letter to Patmore is a simple example of Hopkins ’s particular aestheticism. This “Christian aestheticism” in Hopkins benefited from two major influences: Pater, his tutor and lecturer, and Ruskin, whose impact, according to Warren , is “pervasive in Hopkins ’s sketches and in his journalizing …. Like Ruskin. he was able to discover the medieval and Franciscan joy in God’s creation.”[22] One couls add this point that, since Duns Scotus, a major influence on Hopkins discussed below, was a Franciscan, the world of Hopkins ’s philosophy once again shows its amazing coherence. Hopkins ’s collection of poems is not unlike a catechism: it should be easy to find a poem devoted to the discussion of the problem of beauty. Indeed, in August 1885 - towards the end of his “terrible” period - Hopkins tried to answer his own “overwhelming question.” “To What Serves Mortal Beauty?” is a title that would probably offend his Oxford tutor, yet in fact it does not agree with the content of the poem: to better reflect the content of the poem, it should have been entitled “What shall we do with the mortal beauty,” or, more properly, “How meet beauty” – as in l.12 of the sonnet.

Some critics insist that “mortal beauty” means here that of “not all mortal things but only human beings... First and most of all, the poet is concerned with the visible loveliness of human bodies.”[23] Paddy Kitchen, determined in her biography of the poet to prove, or at least to discuss, Hopkins ’s homosexuality, emphasizes the fact that, in a number of poems, he dwells on the beauty of men or boys rather than women.[24] Refusing to be drawn at this point into this fashionable debate, one should state that such a limitation of the problem seems quite unfounded. On the contrary: there is no indication why “mortal beauty” should not refer to the beauty of nature, for nature is mortal for a believer like Hopkins . It is probably the awareness of nature’s mortality that kept him just outside Pantheism.

To what serves mortal beauty - dangerous: does set danc
-ing blood – the O-seal-that-so feature, flung prouder form
Than Purcell tune lets tread to? See: it does this: keeps warm
Men’s wits to the things that are: what good means – where a glance
Master more may than gaze, gaze out of countenance.  

This sonnet begins in a way which irresistibly suggests it as a sequel to The Windhover. It repeats the insistence on the dangerous side of beauty; here, the danger lies in “setting blood dancing” – this is where the Devil comes in, Loyola would say. However, this caution is expressed as a minor, parenthetical remark on the side, the good-natured wagging finger of an indulgent and benevolent clergyman, far from Savonarola’s fiery zeal. In this sonnet, combining some truly Hopkinsean flights of fancy (“O-seal-that-so feature”) with a direct, almost conversational style (“See: it does this), Hopkins gives an instruction, similar in kind to those of the Spiritual Exercises, on the place of beauty of nature in the world. Mortal beauty does serve a purpose after all: it stimulates men’s interest in nature. Beauty is the motive for philosophy, one might say. Also, beauty enhances the pursuit of good - Hopkins was an attentive student of Pater. Beauty is recognized by intuition: “Where a glance master more may than gaze,” in those moments of “stir of heart” (as in The Windhover). Hopkins thus shows himself to be a continuator of the Platonic - Augustinean - Franciscan - Scotian tradition in his attitude to the beauty of nature.

The middle part of the sonnet (ll. .6-8) is apparently much less convincing. Here, Hopkins claims that the beauty of young English slaves helped to bring about the Christianization of England. His argumentation emphasizes the role of mortal men’s beauty in an act of God. These lines, containing praises of the beauty of British male slaves remarked on by pope Gregory, are an open invitation to discuss Hopkins ’s alleged, or irrelevant, homosexuality; yet they carry a more significant if less spectacular message: God acts through beauty, and does this in most unlikely ways. God intervenes in the time of a papal stroll in the Roman marketplace and thus changes the course of history; this is why He is God.

Then Hopkins comes back to his broader discussion of beauty. The need of it in man is clearly stated in l. 9: “man … need s would worship block or barren stone.” The ever-present Scotism in Hopkins once again comes to the fore: “love’s worthiest …; World’s loveliest - men’s selves.” It should be noted how Hopkins forces his reader to connect two separate phrases by a minute hint at alliteration and assonance.

Beauty manifests itself through the individual, Duns Scotus’s haecceitas (the individual essence of things), and Hopkins ’s inscape (in short, the perception of haecceitas). A more detailed discussion of this crucial concept is left to Chapter 2.

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 beauty, grace.  

Man’s reaction to beauty must be open and accepting, Hopkins says. Beauty is “heaven’s sweet gift” which should be cherished and felt. “Home” (l. 13) may be treated as a verb; it implies then the closest cognition of beauty, possibly even one’s identification with it. Then, however, it should be left alone. like a tired guest at home. Do not dwell on it in excess, Hopkins might say, there is a greater value awaiting: “God’s better beauty, grace.”

Though with less “valour and act,” this poem agrees in its aesthetic implications with The Windhover. It does, however, explain more clearly the beauty of nature’s goodness. Only one thing is better, the absolute beauty of God’s grace. Hopkins does not diminish mortal beauty’s value in comparison with God; he praises his Lord as the only being above beauty.

To What Serves Mortal Beauty represents a more mature Hopkins than does The Windhover. Not only was he eight years older: in August 1885, the date of this sonnet, Hopkins had just emerged from his darkest period of doubt and desolation. He was then also older by his knowledge of “cliffs of fall” and “pitch of grief.” Yet Hopkins had already recovered; the sonnet of 1885 shows a perfect coherence with that of 1877. The “terrible” period directly preceding the writing of “To What Serves Mortal Beauty” could have been another reason for Hopkins ’s need to re-establish his aesthetic Credo. His power of concision is better than ever: these fourteen lines of “common rhythm highly stressed”[25] are equal to a complete essay on aesthetics. If an adjective should be found which would describe Hopkins ’s aestheticism as elucidated in this poem, there is one obvious yet somehow surprising: “ascetic,” that is, disciplined in its theocentricism. Certainly, it requires a great deal of willpower, just as Hopkins seems to have overcome in this poem “inspiration unbidden and against my will.”[26] 

The modern reader might be startled by this sheer Victorian control of utterance. In the most widespread view among 20^th-century critics, a part of Hopkins seems to try to accept “mortal beauty” without any limitations, as can be seen in his nature poems, e.g. “Spring” (1877); another part, that of his inner censor, curtails this admiration, brandishing a volume of Spiritual Exercises. In fact, this idea of what has been called here “the two poles of Hopkins’s thought,” of an unwholesome repression of natural idiosyncrasies, is used and reused and finally abused by a host of critics, who then blame Hopkins’s vocation for the limitations imposed on a creative talent. This common error has already been mentioned in this study: the above analysis of “To What Serves Beauty?” serves as a good pretext (and introduction) to deal with it at some length.  

***

It seems that some critics would like to imagine a Hopkins who abandoned the self-imposed limits of asceticism, deleted the embarrassing praise of God present in almost all of his little poems, and “fulfil” himself in a free worship of beauty, and finally took a more active sexual interest in either men or women (preferably men, for what is can be a more tempting scholarly subject than a homosexual Jesuit poet). Indeed, Paddy Kitchen explodes at a point that “it is difficult to believe that Hopkins had not experienced some kind of passionate love… During the summer of 1864 he also wrote poems implying his appreciation of the charms and pitfalls of the opposite sex, and it could be argued that his sexual orientation was, at this stage, equivocal.”[27]

It is therefore much more constructive to look at Hopkins not as at a homo-, hetero-, or bisexual person, but, perhaps more traditionally and less scandalously, as at a subject of Queen Victoria . The same Paddy Kitchen admits that the sentence “A man is not a man who does not control his passions” is central to Victorian morality. “Masculinity was associated with self-control and continence, whilst effeminacy was associated with sexual licentiousness”[28]. The post-Freudian reader may dismiss this point of view as hypocritical and Victorian-conventional; yet the same point of view was accepted and used as a basis of upbringing in Hopkins ’s time. Of course, the great Freudian revolution was not there yet to free people from their complexes, psychoses, and neuroses, and perhaps Hopkins himself was a psychotic or a depressive (“I think my fits of sadness… resemble madness”[29]). Even if it were so, this fact could hardly influence unfavourably his poetic talent – or quite to the contrary. Nobody seems to consult Hopkins for his opinion on the problem of freedom and will, but the sole fact of his being a Scotist yields his answer: he considered freedom (c.f. his letter to Patmore quoted in the preceding chapter) as dangerous, as something which must be controlled by will. Indeed, the “sonnets of desolation,” hailed by some as the most revelatory of Hopkins , he himself calls his defeat: “inspirations unbidden and against my will.”[30] After all, while his poetry transcends its epoch, Hopkins as a person was a typical Victorian in upbringing, education, system of values and religious turmoil.

More importantly, it is a simple yet rarely mentioned fact that Hopkins ’s poetry, were it devoid of asceticism, would lose its main characteristics - indeed, it would have been impossible at all. The so-called conflict between asceticism and aestheticism, or purity and sensuality, mentioned by so many critics, is not a conflict but a creative tension. St. Francis of Assissi (of whom Duns Scotus was a follower) was very much akin to Hopkins in his joy at the beauty of nature, and yet nobody called him “paradoxical”[31]. An even more obvious blunder can be found, and it is admitted with shame here, in Polish criticism: “ Hopkins … ended up as a Catholic monastic priest. He ended his career literally for, being a Jesuit, he held that he should not write. Thus ended the development of one of the greatest poetic talents of Great Britain” – or perhaps such a view was seen as politically correct by the critic in question, since the statement was made in still-communist Poland.[32]

A Hopkins free of his “conflict” would not have been able to become what he is: an innovator full of intensity. He would either continue to imitate Keats, or lose himself in an aesthetic wasteland. None of his major poems – including particularly “the best thing he ever wrote,” “The Windhover,” could have ever existed without the blessed influence of Scotus and Loyola to balance that of Pater. Also, asceticism was as much in Hopkins ’s nature as was aestheticism:

His appearance, and his nickname of “Skin,” probably belied the strength of his will, already exercised on one occasion at least in self-denial... “No pudding on Sundays. No tea except if to keep me awake and then without sugar. Meat only once a day. No verses in Passion Week or on Fridays. No lunch and meat on Fridays. Not to sit in armchair except can work in no other way. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday bread and water.”[33]