The more intimate letters of Gerard Hopkins would go far in establishing a deeper knowledge of his character, as they have done in other writers (notably in Charles Lamb) whose private lives have been far removed from the gaze of men. The defection may be adequately compensated by a study of the letters he himself received from his more intimate friends. It was a happy inconsistency in him who was so negligent about his own literary arcana, to have shown a practical orderliness in conserving so many of the letters that came to him, and it is our good fortune to possess the most important. In the following pages we will endeavor to present the effect on Hopkins of the overtures of some of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century and thereby gain a better knowledge of the atmosphere in which he moved.
At the end of August, 1866, after returning home from a visit with Robert Bridges at Rochdale, Hopkins wrote the following letter to Newman:
Reverend Sir: —I address you with great hesitation, knowing that you are in the midst of your own engagements and because you must be exposed to applications from all sides. I am anxious to become a Catholic, and I thought that you might possibly be able to see me for a short time when I pass through Birmingham in a few days, I believe on Friday. But I feel most strongly the injustice of intruding on your engagements or convenience and therefore, if that is the case, I shall think it a favor if you will kindly let me know that you are unable to see me. I do not want to be helped to any conclusions of belief, for I am thankful to say my mind is made up, but the necessity of becoming a Catholic (although I have long foreseen where the only consistent position would lie) coming on me suddenly has put me into painful confusion of mind about my immediate duty in my circumstances. I wished also to know what it would be morally my duty to hold on certain formally open points, because the same reasoning which makes the Tractarian ground contradictory would almost lead one also to shrink from what Mr. Oakley calls a minimizing Catholicism. I say this much to take from you any hesitation in not allowing me to come to Birmingham if duties should stand in the way: you will understand that by God’s mercy I am clear as to the sole authority of the Church of Rome. While much in doubt therefore as to my right to trouble you by this application, I would not deny at the same time that I should feel it the greatest privilege to see you. If it were so, I should hope not to detain you long.
I may perhaps in some way introduce myself by reminding you of an intimate college friend of mine, William Addis, who once had the pleasure of spending an hour with you at the Oratory; I think also he has written to you since. I have little doubt that in not a very long time he will become a Catholic. If I should be so happy as to hear before Friday that you could spare time to see me, I should hope to be at Birmingham that day and sleep there, or if you had any convenient time in the two or three weeks after that I should like to come over from Rochdale where I shall be staying at Dr. Molesworth’s. But in ending I would again say that I beg you will have no hesitation, as I have no doubt you will not, in declining to see me if you think best.
Believe me, Reverend Sir, your obedient servant,
Gerard M. Hopkins.
Newman replied, some weeks later:
My dear Sir: —I am sorry I was abroad when your letter came. Now I am returned and expect to be here for some weeks. I will gladly see you as you propose, if you will fix a day.
Very truly yours, John H. Newman.
How many times in the next month they met, is difficult to say but Hopkins’s letter of October 15 seems to manifest a friendship deepened by acquaintance.
Very Reverend Father: —I have been up at Oxford just long enough to have heard from my father and mother in return for my letter announcing my conversion. Their answers are terrible: I cannot read them twice. If you will pray for them and me just now I shall be deeply thankful. But what I am writing for is this—they urge me with the utmost entreaties to wait till I have taken my degree—more than half a year. Of course it is impossible, and since it is impossible to wait as long as they wish it seems to me useless to wait at all. Would you therefore wish me to come to Birmingham at once, on Thursday, Friday or Saturday? You will understand why I have any hesitation at all, namely therefore if immediately after their letters urging a long delay I am received without any, it would be another blow, and look like intentional cruelty. I did not know till last night the rule about communicatio in sacris—at least as binding catechumens, but I now see the alternative thrown open, either to live without Church and sacraments or else, in order to avoid the Catholic Church, to have to attend constantly the services of that very Church. This brings the matter to an absurdity and makes me think that any delay, whatever relief it may bring to my parents, is impossible. I am asking you then whether I shall at all costs be received at once.
Strange to say, of four conversions mine is the earliest and yet my reception will be last. I think I said that my friend, William Garrett, was converted and received shortly after hearing of my conversion; just before term began another friend, Alexander Wood, wrcte to me in perplexity, and when I wrote back to his stiprise telling him I was a convert he made up his own mind the next morning and is being received today; by a strange chance he met Addis in town, and Addis who had put off all thought of change for a year, was by God’s mercy at once determined to see a priest and was received at Bayswater the same evening—Saturday. All our minds you see were ready to go at a touch and it cannot but be that the same is the case with many here.
Addis’s loss will be a deep grief to Dr. Pusey I think: he has known him so long and stayed with him at Chale in a retreat.
Monsignor Eyre seemed to say that I ought not to make my confession by means of a paper as I have been used to do. Will you kindly say whether you would prefer it so or not?
Believe me, dear Father, your affectionate son in Christ,
Gerard M. Hopkins.
P. S. And if you should bid me to be received at once will you kindly name the day? The liberality of the college authorities will throw no hindrance in the way.
The wrench that the convert suffers can be known adequately by converts alone, and for Gerard Hopkins, filled as he was with such tender love for parents and friends, importuned by the intellectual aristocracy of Oxford, following the tenuous reasoning of his mind so subtly balanced and so analytic, the wrench must have been, naturally speaking, a martyrdom, compensated only by the inexpressible peace and exhilarating happiness that he afterward experienced. Newman with his refined sensibilities and exquisite delicacy was indeed his ablest guide, and we find him writing to Gerard three days before his reception: “It is not wonderful that you should not be able to take so great a step without trouble and pain … you have my best prayers that He who has begun the good work in you may finish it—and I do not doubt He will.” Newman writes on November 21 and again on December 6, 1866:
I am glad that you are on easier terms than you expected with your friends at home. … I proposed your coming here because you could not go home—but, if you can be at home with comfort, home is the best place for you.
Do not suppose we shall not rejoice to see you here, even if you can only come for Christmas Day. … As to your retreat, I think we have misunderstood each other … it does not seem to me that there is any hurry about it—your first duty is to make a good class.* Show your friends at home that your becoming a Catholic has not unsettled you in the plain duty that lies before you. And independently of this, it seems to me a better thing not to hurry decision on your vocation. Suffer yourself to be led on by the grace of God step by step.
In his next letter, December 16, Newman again presses Hopkins to visit him:
You are quite right to go home, since they wish you, indeed, it would have been in every way a pity, had you not resolved to do so. But I don’t mean to let you off coming here… . Could you not come here for the week before term ? I want to see you for the pleasure of seeing you—but, besides that, I think it good that a recent convert should pass some time in a religious house, to get into Catholic ways—though a week is not long enough for that purpose.
Newman writes about further arrangements on January 14, 1867, and Hopkins came the following Thursday. While there he met a Mr. Darnell, a former fellow of New College, Oxford, and Anglican curate, who became a convert in 1847. At that time he was tutor to some half-dozen young men preparing for Oxford, and when Addis who was with him was leaving to become an Oratorian he was authorized to make the offer of his place to Hopkins. This explains Newman’s letter of February 22, 1867:
When you said you disliked schooling, I said not a word. Else I should have asked you to come here for the very purpose for which Mr. Darnell wishes for you. … I think you would get on with us, and that we should like you.
Since then it was only delicacy which prevented my speaking when you were here, I have no hesitation in asking you to accept the invitation which we now make to you.
Hopkins took his degree in the spring of that year, and spent his summer vacation on the continent, returning, however, to take up his duties at the Oratory on September 17. It was during Christmas vacation of that year that Newman wrote him about a retreat he was contemplating:
It seems to me you had better go into retreat at Easter, and bring the matter before the priest who gives it to our boys. If you think that this is waiting too long, I must think of some other plan.
Why Hopkins did not return to the Oratory after the vacation is not clear; but Newman writes again on February 7 apropos of his future state of life:
You need not make up your mind till Easter comes, as we shall be able to manage matters whether you stay or we have the mishap to lose you.
Newman’s next letter, which was written on May 14, 1868, is to congratulate him on his newly chosen state of life:
I am both surprised and glad at your news. … I think it is the very thing for you. You are quite out in thinking that when I offered you a “home” here, I dreamed of your having a vocation for us. This I clearly saw you had not, from the moment you came to us. Don’t call “the Jesuit discipline hard”: it will bring you to heaven. The Benedictines would not have suited you. We all congratulate you. Ever yours affectionately, John H. Newman.
Hopkins again spent his summer vacation abroad, and in the following September entered the novitiate at Roehampton. Firmly established in his vocation, he no longer needed the advice of his great friend, and so their correspondence became naturally more infrequent, though indeed their mutual esteem and affection never lessened. Newman subsequently wrote to congratulate him when he took his vows and on the occasion of his ordination, and also to reply to Hopkins’s yearly birthday greetings. In these last, Newman often refers to the end of all his labors, as when he says in 1873: “I am sure you said a good prayer for me upon it, for, at my age, it rather brings to mind one’s death than one’s birth.” In 1878 and 1879 Newman received his great academical and ecclesiastical distinctions—an honorary fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford, and the cardinalate—for both of which Hopkins wrote to congratulate him. Newman’s answer to the former, dated February 25, 1878, contains the following interesting note:
I am going to Oxford for a day tomorrow. I have not been there for thirty-two years, completed the day before yesterday. It is very kind of the Trinity men, but it is a trial.
In the spring of 1881 he wrote to Father Hopkins who was in the ministry at Liverpool and who had asked him about the respective merits of Carlyle and George Eliot:
You are leading a most self-denying life, and must be heaping up merit. It shames one to think of it.
As to your implied question, I have read little of Carlile’s (sic) and less of George Eliot, but I have ever greatly admired Carlisle’s French Revolution, and, with you, think G. E., great as are her powers, nevertheless, overrated. Perhaps, in number of pages, I have read much more of G. E. than of C, but one page of C. goes for many of G. E.
Two years later Hopkins pleased the cardinal much by offering to reedit his Grammar of Assent with a commentary and critical notes. It had been published in 1870; its originality and masterly psychology had received the serious approbation of competent scholars, but Newman with pleasing grace refused his offer.
Thank you very much for your remembrance of my birthday, and also for the complimentary proposal you make in behalf of my Grammar of Assent.
But I cannot accept it, because I do not feel the need of it, and I could not, as a matter of conscience, allow you to undertake a work which I could not but consider at once onerous and unnecessary. The book has succeeded in twelve years far more than I expected. It has received five full editions. It is being translated in India into some of the native tongues, broken into portions and commented on. It is frequently referred to in periodical home publications—only last Saturday week with considerable praise in the Spectator. Of course those who read only so much of it as they can reach while cutting open the leaves will make great mistakes about it, as Dr. Stanley has—but, if it is worth anything, it will survive papercutters, and if it is worthless, a comment, however brilliant, will not do more than gain for it a short galvanic life, which has no charms for me. Therefore, sensible as I am of your kindness, I will not accept it.
Hopkins replied that a compliment was far from his mind when he wrote, and hinted that England, like India, might welcome a comment, to which Newman again graciously replied:
In spite of your kind denial, I still do and must think that a comment is a compliment, and to say that a comment may be appended to my small book because one may be made on Aristotle, ought to make me blush purple! As to India, I suppose all English books, even Goody Two Shoes, are so unlike its literary atmosphere, that a comment is but one aspect of translation. I must still say that you paid me a very kind compliment; you seem to think compliments must be insincere: is it so?
There remain a few letters written to Hopkins in Ireland, and of these, I select one, now famous, quoted by Ward, in his Life of Newman:
Your letter is an appalling one—but on that account untrustworthy. There is one consideration however which you omit. The Irish patriots hold that they never have yielded themselves to the sway of England and therefore never have been under her laws, and never have been rebels.
This does not diminish the force of your picture, but it suggests that there is no help, no remedy. If I were an Irishman, I should be (in heart) a rebel. Moreover, to clench the difficulty the Irish character and tastes [are] very different from the English.
My fingers will not let me write more. [March 3, 1887.]
There is a touch of real pathos in Newman’s last letter to him on February 24, 1888, a lithographed acknowledgment signed with the wavering hand of an old man of eighty-seven. It was after this that Newman laid aside the mighty pen which had given so glorious a treasure to his Church, and to English letters, an act which also closed a literary union and one of his most beautiful friendships. On the part of the younger man it must have been reminiscent of their initial separation, what Father Keating has called: “The spirit of sacrifice that could deliberately part fellowship with a man who must, one would have thought, have satisfied every exigency, intellectual and moral, of the young convert’s being.” The sublime and lonely idealism which demanded the sundering of a cherished intimacy with the fine mind of Henry Parry Liddon, also severed a close companionship with John Henry Newman, but it brought Gerard Hopkins to a similar pinnacle where stood the older convert as the loftiest example of learning and holiness of nineteenth-century Catholicism.
*There is an interesting story told which illustrates the different attitude of Manning and Newman, both conscientious and far-seeing. An undergraduate of 1874 became a convert after his Moderations, wherein he took a first class at New College. On consulting Cardinal Manning as to his remaining at Oxford, the Cardinal was shocked and wondered if his conversion were true—”Of course he could not,” and he left without a degree, a step which seriously hampered his career. Newman wrote to Hopkins on November 21, 1866: “… I know you are reading hard but give me a line now and then.”
