HOPKINS AND HIS CRITICS
545
acter. The work covers a wide range of excellence. Unfortunately one
of the essays sounds like a voice from
Th e Provincial L etters,
and the
editor, who undoubtedly knows better, ought not to have included it.
Several of the essays are pointless, but five of them represent a trained
critical intelligence applied with greater or less relevance to problems
in Hopkins' poetry. And there is a good account by Father Carroll of
his religious vocation in relation to his writing. Hopkins' vocation
has been profitably discussed bcfore-Mr. John Pick's
Gerard Manley
Hopkins, Priest and Poet
might be mentioned especially-but its central
importance for an understanding of the poems is essential: and parti–
cularly the Ignatian character of that vocation, which the present
authors are in a position to appreciate. Hopk.ins, before he became a
Jesuit, had contempla ted the Benedictines.
It
would be difficult to
conceive of two orders more unlike each other, and Hopkins' early verse
has a Keatsian sweetness which might have got out of hand under
the more mellow discipline of St. Benedict. During his first year of
philosophy Hopkins wrote, " ... this life here though it is hard is God's
will for me as I most intimately know, which is more than violets knee
deep." The sweetness was obviously acquiring sinew, and the training
of the will, which is the peculiar Ignatian discipline, was also, without
his knowing it, training his sense of word and rhythm. His violets knee
deep were becoming hardy perennials, and most un-Tennysonian blooms.
Father Martin C. Carroll's essay on "Hopkins and the Society of J esus"
is a sensitive account of Hopkins as a Jesuit priest, and no deeper com–
ment on Mr. Winters' clumsiness in dealing with Hopkins' spirituality is
needed than what is provided in this essay.
One of Hopkins' great poems is the sonnet beginning, "No worst
there is none." Mr. Winters (with a heroism that ought to receive due
acknowledgment) undertakes to read this sonnet as a variant on iambic
pentameter. When he fail s to do so he holds it against poor Hopkins,
but fairly admits that "the perversity is equalled by the skill." But he
asks: "Skill to what purpose, however? The rhythm is fascinating in
itself, but it does not exist in itself, it exists in the poem." But where,
except the poem, should the rhythm exist? Criticism that prefers the
pleasure derived from a dead metrical scheme to the pleasure derived
from a living rhythm in a particular poem reminds me less of criticism
than of necrophilia.
It
is
therefore with a sense of relief that one turns to Father Walter
J.
Ong's long essay, "Hopkins' Sprung Rhythm." This is the best essay
in
Immortal Diamond,
and if it embodies a somewhat tedious inclusive–
ness, Mr. Winters has convinced me tha t one will be able to say the
