The Working Men and the
Common Good
MADOX BROWN, MAURICE, MORRIS, HOPKINS
As we saw in the last chapter, the aspects of the Medieval Revival activated by Pugin and the PRB had by the middle of the nineteenth century gained in England the kind of approval which the Romantic Revival in literature already enjoyed. The resurrection of the Palace of Westminster had paved the way for the commercial cathedral of the Crystal Palace, erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition, and for Albert’s cultural campus at Kensington. Literature, architecture, religion and social thought had all drawn fruitfully on medieval models, as, more recently, had painting. The Medieval Revival was now acknowledged as contributing to English life, and all-out resistance ceased, though not without harrumphing in certain quarters. Accordingly, for the next generation, a medieval inspiration, in literature, art or design, felt less obligation to refer back to a medieval poem, document, building, or precedent. The varying impulses of the Medieval Revival could be expressed with a greater freedom of form and given various application. Application was something that Victorian England was good at. Research and development were over, manufacture had begun, product recognition was high, and commercial take-off led in some areas to high volumes of output. A tour of the horizon will indicate how medieval models were applied in several fields. The quantity of these applications means that generalisation becomes both inevitable and less safe, and that examples may be less representative. The chapter ends with a discussion of a special case.
Victorian Gothic architecture abandoned correctitude and native models. It borrowed and combined examples from North Italian and Northern European civic architecture, devising applications which range in success from splendid, bold, graceful and appropriate to odd, clumsy, garish and grotesque. Among the welter of new Gothic architecture, Street, Butterfield, Waterhouse, Webb and Burges, and the dynasties of Pugin and George Gilbert Scott, produced many successful public buildings. Indeed, if we compare the work of Pugin and of his Cambridge admirers at The Ecclesiologist with the firework display of Gothic building which followed Pugin’s death, there are, to an unarchitectural eye, two obvious differences. First, Pugin’s successors designed public, civic and corporate buildings: town halls, museums, hospitals and schools; insurance company buildings, banks, railway stations and hotels; monuments and war memorials; and private houses great and small. Before Pugin, neo-Gothic was first found decoratively in and around country houses, then seriously in churches, clergy houses, church schools and colleges. The Palace of Westminster is the first grand civic exception to these generalisations. Second, Gothic building after 1850, whether in stone or in brick, is richer than Pugin could normally afford to be; more flamboyant and more riskily polychromatic.
As the major Pre-Raphaelite painters left the Brotherhood behind, their painting was affected by medieval exemplars but they took fewer subjects from medieval history. The PRB and company had plenty of patrons wishing to beautify churches, public buildings and large houses. They also found plenty of buyers for their oil paintings, as art galleries in Birmingham and other cities still show. Canvases do not have to remain permanently on show, but buildings stand until destroyed. In the mid-twentieth century, curators of museums built by Victorians often withdrew Victorian canvases from public view. It was harder to hide the Midland Grand Hotel, designed by George Gilbert Scott for St Pancras Station in the 1860s. ‘Saved’ in the 1960s, after the employees of British Railways had walked out of the building (‘leaving the lights on’, according to a guide to the building), this tomato brick mega-Schloss is once again a luxury hotel. Behind it, St Pancras railway station houses the Eurostar terminal.
As Pre-Raphaelite painting went on, the early Christian component declined, except chez Holman Hunt. New sacred art gave way to new applications of Christian morality and pity to real and present misfortunes which might befall the middle-class family. In an age of comfort and gain, scenes of distress and loss struck home. Painters often depicted the dire consequences of sexual irresponsibility, in men and in women; the ruin to which gambling could lead; a child’s grief at the sudden loss of a parent; emigration. The scrupulous reproduction of pristine natural detail, a foundational principle for Ruskin and for the PRB, passed into the naturalism and realism characteristic of the period. The nature represented began to include human nature: populated English fields and shores, or the suburban greenery of Clapham Common, rather than the primal rocks, waters, grasses and mountains prized by Ruskin. Solo uplift gave way to social downfall, or to the mediocrity of ordinary life. The gradual departure of Victorian painting from academic conventions of representation and composition, and from academic subjects, was in part due to the PRB’s revolt against the Academy at which they had studied and in which Millais and Holman Hunt now exhibited. It was also due to the emergence of a new class of patrons, who wanted to see themselves represented, preferably in modern dress.
William Morris (1834–96) and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98), the leading artists of the second growth of the Pre-Raphaelites, devoted themselves to differing goals: to social good and to dreamy beauty respectively. Morris was not an architect, nor quite the poet that many of his contemporaries thought him, nor did he persist with his painting. Rather, the energy he put into his various enterprises, and the cumulative output of Morris and Co., had a widespread and permanent effect on British design, in the applied arts of house-building, furniture-making and printing, and on the decorative arts, especially wallpaper and fabrics. Among the enterprises of this human dynamo must be included the work done for him, especially the construction of the Red House at Bexleyheath, London, his first marital home, completed in 1859: medievally built and furnished by Philip Webb for William and Jane Morris, and painted by their friends. Its vernacular boldness embodies the best ideals of the Pre-Raphaelites in their younger years.
The PRB went to art school, Morris and Edward Burne-Jones to Oxford. Burne-Jones went up from King Edward VI School in Birmingham, where the handsome Gothic hall had been decorated by Pugin. Although Burne-Jones developed his talent and became a highly skilled painter, he seems, in comparison with Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Millais and Madox Brown, a painter and decorator. His most outstanding paintings made a great impact, but the cumulative effect of his unstinted production is decorative, his repeated motifs taking the form of lovely young women, rather than the plants and birds of William Morris’s designs. Burne-Jones began by replicating Rossetti’s dreamy interest in Woman, though his symbolic female forms do not have the afflicted gaze which Rossetti exchanged with his single images. As Burne-Jones passed into the gravitational field of Morris, he came under the spell of mythology. His serial female forms, and the graceful patterns in which he poses and drapes them, become more highly involuted, while the faces remain expressionless. The cult of beauty evoked from him some of Rossetti’s stunned and stunning qualities, in a whiter shade of pale. Never a naturalistic painter, the trajectory of his career seems in retrospect to illustrate how the raw vigour of the PRB turned into the passive, aesthetic, symbolic and almost abstract kinds of mood-painting which emerged in the 1870s, though there are exceptions to this, for example the stained glass at Birmingham’s Anglican cathedral (1885–7). Another grand exception, The Beguiling of Merlin (Plate 22), was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, a gallery which launched Whistler and George Frederick Watts, and a style which became more stylised and, among the Decadents of the 1890s, eroticised or (as in this instance) post-eroticised. Sir Edward Burne-Jones (he was eventually made a baronet, like Millais) was admired by two of the most gifted artists of that decade, men who personified its opposed tendencies. Rudyard Kipling, Burne-Jones’s nephew, ‘adored’ his uncle; Aubrey Beardsley ‘idolised’ him.1
For English people not specially interested in art the legacy of the PRB, in the dilutions of Morris and Burne-Jones, might today appear as accessories in the lifestyle of a stylish older lady: a Liberty scarf, Morris wallpapers, curtains and cushion-covers, children’s fairy stories illustrated by Arthur Rackham. However faded these might now seem, they are items in that new world of consumer capitalism, the coming of which revolted Ruskin, a world to which the young PRB was fiercely opposed.
Even more opposed to it, and ever more opposed, was William Morris, although his Firm had to take on some mass-production processes to ensure its survival as a business. It could not afford to be a guild. Social concern was something that Morris could express in words but not in paint. Ford Madox Brown could, as is shown, for example, by two of his paintings of the 1850s, Work and An English Autumn Afternoon. The latter painting, now in Birmingham, has no ‘message’. It shows an ordinary young couple looking down towards ‘a literal transcript of the scenery around London, as looked at from Hampstead’, as Madox Brown put it in the catalogue. ‘What made you take such an ugly subject?’ asked Ruskin. ‘Because it lay out of the back window,’ came the answer. Madox Brown painted exactly what he saw, which is what Ruskin had enjoined. He may be the first English artist to portray the poetry of the suburb.2 This achievement is all Madox Brown’s, but he would not have done it had he not been exposed to the Pre-Raphaelite programme. An English Autumn Afternoon is not a fruit sprung from the seeds of the Medieval Revival. But by their very rejection of Renaissance conventions as to elevation of subject and of style, and their reliance, instead, on unacademic principles of fidelity to perception, the PRB helped painters to look at an unstylish modern world, and allowed some of them to ‘find the living world enough’. Though ugly to Ruskin and ordinary to Madox Brown, the setting now seems semi-rural and almost idyllic.
The urbanisation of Hampstead is recorded in Work, a small and crowded canvas reproduced as Plate 19; its details repay careful study. Title and painting handily illustrate the central subject in a society which was being transformed by the pressures of the industrial economy – in this instance, by London’s growing need for drains. The human worth of physical labour, assumed and praised by Chaucer and Langland, and saluted in passing by Shakespeare, was not a preoccupation of the Augustan poets. It is not in Alexander Pope that the ploughman homeward plods his weary way. Rude forefathers and rural labour are idealised first by Gray, and then by Wordsworth, as in the elegiac figures of the shepherd and his wife in Michael: A Pastoral. In Past and Present and Heroes and Hero-Worship, Thomas Carlyle glorified hard work. His Latter-Day Pamphlets of 1850 were admired by Marx.
Now, for the first time since the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, manual work was depicted in English art. Ford Madox Brown’s picture has a programme. Hard labour – urban, not rural – is celebrated at the centre of the painting. Generations of American and Russian artists celebrate similar themes with less humour. Brown described his subjects: ‘the British excavator . . . the young navvy in the pride of manly health and beauty; the strong, fully developed navvy who does his work and loves his beer; the selfish old bachelor navvy . . . the Paddy with his larry and his pipe in his mouth’.3 They cheerfully dig up the pavement in Heath Street, Hampstead, making the bare-footed and the nicely shod edge past on the left; the hole they are digging blocks entirely the passage of a mounted lady and a gent in a top hat at the back of the painting. That is their bad luck! The dogs in this painting have similarly symbolic functions. Leaning against a railing on the right are two believers in work and in workers, Thomas Carlyle, eyeing the onlooker from beneath the brim of his hat, and a smaller man in clerical dress, F.D. Maurice.
Madox Brown himself worked long and hard at his paintings. He began Work in 1852, adding in 1856 the figures of Carlyle, the prophet of the gospel of work, and Maurice, the Founder and Principal of the new Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street, London. Work was then exhibited. The Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice, who had attended Cambridge and Oxford and had been Professor of English Literature and of History at King’s College, London, and then of Theology, had since 1848 been drawn into Christian Socialism: he wanted to apply the lessons of the gospel to the English poor. Associates of his in this work were the Rev. Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, who in 1857 was to publish Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Maurice had founded the college in 1854, and at a meeting held to raise funds, ‘Ruskin’s chapter “The Nature of Gothic” from The Stones of Venice had been given away as a pamphlet, with the words “and herein of the true function of the workman in art” significantly added to the title’.4
Ruskin taught drawing at the college, as did Rossetti, who was succeeded by Ford Madox Brown. If some fine artists taught in Great Ormond Street, so did some great owls. The Working Men studied grammar with F.J. Furnivall, a barrister who was behind the New English Dictionary, which became the Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, edited by James Murray, now known as the OED. Furnivall was also the founder of the Early English Text Society, the Chaucer Society, the Ballad Society and the Wyclif Society. The non-medieval societies he founded were fewer in number, but included the New Shakespeare Society, the Browning Society and the Shelley Society.5 Some of the teachers at the college were not advocates or practitioners of medievalism. Thomas Hughes, for example, taught boxing. But the Working Men’s College proves that medieval revivalists cannot be dismissed as escapists dwelling in ivory towers. The teachers at the college can certainly be charged with idealism and a willingness to serve. Social inequality was something Victorian society could both admit and address. Most of these teachers, like most of the revivalists, inclined to Christian Socialism; others were Christian Tories (Ruskin called himself a ‘communist, reddest of the red’). Their paternalism and quixotism did some good, and exemplified the medieval ideals of chivalry, generosity and charity.
The men who taught the Working Men were, by later standards, factually ignorant about the Middle Ages whose virtues they commended; Pugin had confessed to this. An ignorance so widely shared is not culpable, but it made the Middle Ages a handy source to authorise one’s wishes. A case in point is Madox Brown’s picture of John of Gaunt listening to a running glossary of the scriptures in the vulgar tongue read aloud by a theologian to a court which preferred to speak French (see page 143). More transparently self-persuaded is the argument offered by Professor F.D. Maurice in 1866 to disprove the notion that Chaucer might have been a Wycliffite: ‘He is not that. He is simply an Englishman. He hates Friars, because they are not English and not manly.’6 Chaucer’s Friar is wanton, but this acid portrait is not evidence either of a personal hatred of friars, or of a national conviction that all celibates are traitors, philanderers, wimps or worse. Thousands of friars have been as English as F.D. Maurice – Carmelites (such as St Simon Stock), Dominicans, Austin Friars, and Franciscans, such as Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and William of Ockham, whose Razor is still used by philosophers. Some of these friars had, like Maurice, held chairs at English universities. But Maurice, if thinking, was not thinking of history, one of the subjects he professed. Rather, as a married Anglican clergyman, he felt a present horror, as did Kingsley and other clergymen conscious of their manliness, at the return of celibate religious orders to the Anglican Church, at first for women, but now also for men. Maurice’s reactions have less to do with the Middle Ages than with the foundation of the Cowley Fathers in 1865.
In one of the few surviving recordings of the voice of W.B. Yeats, the poet can be heard defending the way he is about to read poems including ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. He says, or rather declaims: ‘I am going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm. I remember the great English poet William Morris coming in a rage out of some lecture hall where somebody had recited a passage out of his Sigurd the Volsung. “It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble”, said Morris, “to get that thing into verse.” It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were proose.’ Few today remember Morris as a great poet. He wrote a great deal of poetry, but his first volume, The Defence of Guenevere (1858), remains his best. Like Froissart and Malory, Morris writes of knights, but his tales have more gore than glamour. In the title poem, a remarkable dramatic monologue, Guenevere defends herself at length. This is shortly after the point at which King Arthur asks Sir Gawayne to ‘bring my queen to the fire and there to have her judgement’. Malory resumes: ‘And so the Queen was led forth without Carlisle, and anon she was despoiled into her smock. And then her ghostly father was brought to her, to be shriven of her misdeeds.’7 In Morris’s poem, Guenevere is beautifully dressed as she tells the listening knights how the friendship grew between her and Sir Lancelot. She beguiles her masculine audience with her beauty, to which her words often draw attention. She asks the listening knights how they could look at her white throat and believe that she could have been guilty of betraying her lord Arthur. Thus she turns the accusation back on her accusers, while also keeping the audience spellbound until Lancelot rides up to rescue her. As in Rossetti’s and Burne-Jones’s paintings, the theme is the almost irresistible power of female beauty, and an acknowledgement that the action of this power is indifferent to conventional morality.
Glamorous adultery was a theme enacted in the lives as well as the art of several of the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle. The taking of Lancelot and Guenevere as role-models (see Plate 20 and note 7) was an unhappy effect of the Medieval Revival, similar to the effect which the reading of D.H. Lawrence had on university English departments in the mid-twentieth century. We have seen that Rossetti did not heed the warning Dante gives in the story of Paolo and Francesca, who read together the story of Lancelot, and of how Love took charge of him, ‘di Lancialotto, e come amor lo strinse’. This led them to a kiss with fatal (in Dante, eternal) consequences. Chaucer, in his Nun’s Priest’s Tale of Chauntecleer the Cock, Pertelote his favourite Hen and Reynard the Fox, also issues a sly warning against reading about Lancelot and Guenevere. The Nun’s Priest says, of his story of talking animals:
This storie is also trewe, I undertake,
As is the book of Launcelot de Lake,
That wommen holde in ful greet reverence.
Another of the Nun’s Priest’s jokes at the expense of the Prioress who employs him is to have Chauntecleer translate, for the benefit of Pertelote, the Latin tag ‘Mulier est hominis confusio’ – ‘Woman is Man’s downfall’ – as follows: ‘Madame, the sentence of this Latyn is, / “Womman is mannes joye and al his blis.”’8
The fatal power of love over men became a constant theme in the work of W.B. Yeats, who admired Rossetti as well as Morris. This Pre-Raphaelite theme of love’s enchantment was first cast by Yeats into mythological forms taken from medieval Irish saga, and later into the more familiar types of Greek mythology. Yeats makes the beauty of Helen the sole cause of the Trojan War. Helen’s beauty, destructive of men, of ships and of cities, persists as a theme of Ezra Pound’s early Cantos. Yeats’s early tales of Aengus bewitched or of Cuchulain led by the nose by beauty were in the tradition of the verse romances of William Morris in The Earthly Paradise. In this capacious commonplace book, Morris retells many of the world’s old stories, and with much skill. The form of the work is modelled upon Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Morris later visited Iceland, which had since its settlement been a democracy of farmers, with an annual parliament, and so for Morris an example of an ideal society. Partly for this reason, but more for love of the old stories and their world, he became devoted to retelling the heroic tales of the Germanic North, writing a verse epic, Sigurd the Volsung, and several long verse romances, The House of the Wolfings, The Roots of the Mountains, The Story of the Glittering Plain, The Wood beyond the World and The Sundering Flood. As their titles suggest, these tales are directly ancestral to J.R.R. Tolkien’s prose romance The Lord of the Rings. The debt is overlooked, for Morris’s long poems now lie unread. Poems of one hundred pages in length, such as Scott’s Marmion, Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King, Browning’s The Ring and the Book and Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn, were popular in their time. Thomas Hardy, who thought Homer’s Iliad ‘in the Marmion class’, was a popular nineteenth-century novelist, but his epic verse drama The Dynasts, appearing in the twentieth century, was not popular. In the twenty-first century, English graduates who read poems read short poems, and long poems in selection. The gentle reader who is shocked at this is asked when he or she last read a poem of more than twenty pages in length.
At the end of his life, William Morris, who relaxed from a day’s work at ‘the Firm’ by turning out a few score lines of verse, translated Beowulf into verse, with the help of a prose version made by the Anglo-Saxon philologist A.J. Wyatt, publishing it in 1895 as The Tale of Beowulf Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats. It has been said that in order to read Morris’s translation it is necessary to learn Anglo-Saxon. There is some truth in this unkindness. One line reads: ‘Brake the bale-heedy, he with his wrath bollen’.9 A more intelligible line describes the reception given by Grendel’s mother to the hero of the poem when he dived into her underwater cave: ‘She sat on her hall-guest and pulled out her sax’. This is clearly not the conduct prescribed to a noble Anglo-Saxon hostess, but to visualise the scene the reader must know that a ‘seax’ is a stabbing knife. Furnivall would have had no difficulty with this line, and many Victorian readers, keen on folk-etymology and folk-origins, will have recognised a ‘sax’ as a knife. Carlyle had reminded them that the Saxons of the Dark Ages were known for their use of the ‘seax’. Hengist ordered his men to attack their British hosts with the words ‘Saxons, draw your saxes’, according to a story from Nennius’s History of the Britons (c. 830), repeated by Geoffrey of Monmouth. The arms of the county of Essex are three saxes.
Before he reached for Beowulf, William Morris had already fallen into what J.R.R. Tolkien calls ‘the etymological fallacy’. In his enthusiasm for democratic Saxon roots, he proposed that the Old English word ‘leeds’ should be resurrected to replace ‘people’, a word which in French use can sound de haut en bas. Morris also urged that instead of ‘omnibus’, a Latin word imported to England from France in 1809, to mean ‘[a carriage] for all’, the English should substitute Morris’s own compound word, ‘folk-wain’. ‘Folk-wains’ would have anticipated the cars developed for the German ‘Volk’ in the 1930s, Volkswagen. I have read both Morris’s Beowulf and his Sigurd the Volsung, the latter with pleasure. Sigurd swings, but The Tale of Beowulf Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats does not. W.S. Mackail, Morris’s biographer, reports, of the old man’s habit of translating a few lines of Beowulf each day, that as the work progressed, ‘his pleasure in the doing of it fell off’.10
Morris is known today as a designer and manufacturer. He also founded the Socialist League, and wrote the utopian fables News from Nowhere and A Dream of John Ball – Ball was the leader of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt (see Plate 21). Morris’s fables are hardly read now. His most popular poetic work was The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), which begins:
Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.
These are the only lines usually quoted, by critics who then shake their heads at Morris’s escapism. The contrasted cities are remarkably similar to those drawn by Pugin in his Contrasts, except that Christianity has been replaced by nature, a common Victorian substitution. The contrast between ‘Forget . . . And dream’ and Morris’s later political activism is often remarked, and indeed John Betjeman would have been proud to have written the lines quoted above. On the eve of the Second World War, Auden wrote, in his elegy for W.B. Yeats, that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’. This lesson, drawn by Auden from his own recent experience, has provoked protest, perhaps because, at the level of wars between nations, it is so evidently true. But ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ ends with an act of faith – that poems can make things happen in the lives of individuals:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days,
Teach the free man how to praise.11
To recall other views of the use-value of art, it is enough to mention two sayings of Yeats: ‘In dreams begins responsibility’, the epigraph of Responsibilities (1914), and a remark of his, recalled by Ezra Pound: ‘Nothing affects these people / Except our conversation’,12 a seigneurial version of Shelley’s claim that poets are the world’s legislators.
As the opening lines of The Earthly Paradise suggest, the movement of its verse and the unfolding of the sense are pleasantly clear and fluent, and Morris’s narrative runs well. There is the charm of a novel manner. Yet after some pages, pleasure in the reading falls off. There seems no reason why the story or the poet should stop or why the reader should go on. Morris can almost be heard to hum as he turns his verses. There is an analogy with the tapestries and wallpapers produced by Morris and Co.: wallpaper should please the eye but not detain it for long.13 Burne-Jones’s friezes and frescoes are properly decorative, but it is unsatisfactory to find the same quality in the saints of his stained-glass windows. The Earthly Paradise is less passive than Burne-Jones’s work, but similarly mesmeric. It is well done, but why is it being done at all?
During his detention in a US Army centre outside Pisa in 1945, Ezra Pound found a Roman Catholic chaplain’s handbook:
‘I have not done unnecessary manual labour’
says the R.C. chaplain’s field book
(preparation before confession)14
The question to which the first line is an answer is a medieval one, but William Morris might not have liked to answer it. The Earthly Paradise has a parallel in the Kelmscott Chaucer, which Morris designed with the help of Burne-Jones, and produced himself. It imitates the black-letter typography of those early printed books which imitated the handwritten letter-forms used in manuscripts, and whose black-and-white woodcuts replaced hand-painted manuscript illuminations. The Kelmscott Chaucer is an original which looks like a facsimile: a fascinating object, it is a trophy of art rather than a book to read. The problem with The Earthly Paradise is not that it is escapist, but that its purpose escapes the reader, who likes it, lays it down and forgets to pick it up again. The stories of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King can flag, but they are unified by common characters, and their themes glance at the present. Tennyson also knew why some poetry has to be written:
But, for the unquiet heart and brain
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In Memoriam, v
Like King Arthur, Morris had plenty of pain in his later life, but in his narcotic later poetry he does not seem to have known very well what he was doing.
* * *
It is a contention of this book that the French Revolution occasioned reflections, in Edmund Burke and others, which gave a sudden and more serious turn to the revived British interest in the romances of chivalry; and also that the vogue for Scott’s ‘histories’ in verse and prose intensified and popularised this development. After the defeat of Napoleon, however, it was the Industrial Revolution, and its social consequences, which began to fuel the Medieval Revival. What could or should be done about Disraeli’s Two Nations, the Rich and the Poor? Cobbett, Pugin, Disraeli, Carlyle and Ruskin thought that there was something to be learned from the Middle Ages here. But on how to approach Disraeli’s problem, medieval revivalists, like others, divided. Many of the heirs of Ruskin, ‘a Tory of the school of Homer and Sir Walter Scott’, were Socialists, notably Morris. Many Victorians, for whom the Christian dignity of human labour was an article of faith, were troubled by the harsh conditions of English industrial workers. Some of them, like Mrs Gaskell’s husband, worked as clergymen in industrial parishes. This chapter concludes by looking at the case of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who spent most of his adult life in prayer, in study or in parish work of this kind. In considering the pressures which, at this juncture, society and religion brought to bear upon a sensitive and conscientious man, Hopkins is clearly a special case, if a case of special interest. He was not an advocate or exponent of the Medieval Revival, for by his day the medieval had already been revived and was available to those who wanted it. Yet the medieval informed key aspects of his life and work.
Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, a response to Kingsley’s smear that Newman, like the Catholic clergy generally, did not hold truth for its own sake to be a virtue, was published during Hopkins’s second year as a classical scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. In his Apologia Newman explains that the Tractarians regarded Anglican bishops as successors to the apostles, and the Church of England as part of the divinely instituted universal Church, the mystical body of Christ. In the eighteenth century such a view, although a central part of the English Church’s own formulas, would itself have been regarded as something of a Gothic survival. When Newman, in Tract XC, had interpreted the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles in this sense, his bishop, the Bishop of Oxford, had disagreed; and Newman had resigned, in 1842. His Apologia satisfied many readers that Dr Newman was not a stranger to the truth. The undergraduate Hopkins went to Birmingham to ask Newman to receive him into the Catholic Church – to the acute distress of his family. He then joined the Society of Jesus, and after the long Jesuit training served as a priest, chiefly in industrial parishes. His last appointment was as Professor of Greek at the new Catholic university in Ireland. Newman had been the first rector there, delivering the lectures which became The Idea of a University. In Dublin, Father Hopkins S.J. felt ‘at a third remove’, and died there of typhoid in 1889. Like Newman, Hopkins conceived of the Catholic Church as an organic continuation of the church of the apostles, and his conception of society was likewise organic and visionary, but not egalitarian. Hopkins’s letter to Robert Bridges of 2 August 1871 indicates some of his attitudes to this question:
I am afraid some great revolution is not far off. Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist. [Hopkins adds a footnote: ‘I have little reason to be Red: it was the red Commune [in Paris in 1870] that murdered five of our fathers recently.’] Their ideal bating some things is nobler than that professed by any secular statesman I know of . . . Besides it is just. – I do not mean the means of getting to it are. But it is a dreadful thing for the greatest and most necessary part of a very rich nation to live a hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delight, or hope in the midst of plenty – which plenty they make. They profess that they do not care what they wreck and burn, the old civilisation and order must be destroyed. This is a dreadful look out but what has the old civilisation done for them? As it at present stands in England it is itself in great measure founded on wrecking. But they got none of the spoils, they came in for nothing but harm from it then and thereafter. England has grown hugely wealthy but this wealth has not reached the working classes; I expect it has made their condition worse. Beside this iniquitous order the old civilisation embodies another order mostly old and what is new in direct entail from the old, the old religion, learning, law, art, etc and all the history that is preserved in standing monuments. But as the working classes have not been educated they know next to nothing of all this and cannot be expected to care if they destroy it . . .15
Hopkins wrote several poems on people in humble roles, and on young people about to choose their way in life. Three of his poems are on working men: ‘Felix Randal’, and a later pair, ‘Tom’s Garland’ and ‘Harry Ploughman’. Other poems also involve the Christian dignity of labour, including ‘The Windhover’, which Hopkins thought the best thing he ever wrote. A line towards the end of this sonnet includes the sentence ‘sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine’. ‘Sillion’ is ‘furrow’, archaic in English but familiar in French. It comes in the refrain of the first verse of La Marseillaise, the revolutionary anthem of the French Republic, which encourages citoyens so to defend themselves against their enemies ‘[Qu’un sang impur] / Abreuve nos sillons’: ‘[That an impure blood] / should slake our furrows’. The Christian Hopkins associates the furrow made by the plough not with the impure blood of enemies but with daily sweat for daily bread: the lot of mankind since Adam (see Plate 21). For medieval Christian social thought, as seen in Piers Plowman, this gave physical work a special value: hence the maxim laborare est orare – ‘to work is to pray’. It also made the ploughman the archetype of man: the labourer whose labour provides the archetypal food for all. That is why, for Hopkins, the ploughman’s hard work makes the earth turned over by the plough to shine in the eye of heaven. His two poems on working men refer to this. The first, a sonnet written in Liverpool in 1880, begins: ‘Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended.’ It ends: ‘When thou at the random grim forge, powerful among peers, / Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!’
Felix Randal was a parishioner to whom Hopkins had brought the sacraments. Tom and Harry, the protagonists of the other poems, have typical names. Perhaps Hopkins recalled the Song sung by Winter at the end of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost:
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail.
The Tom of ‘Tom’s Garland’ has a mate, Dick; Harry is the third. ‘Harry Ploughman’ begins: ‘Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue / Breathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped flank . . .’ Admiration for a masculine physique was expressed easily by Victorian men, as with Ford Madox Brown and his British and Irish navvies. Madox Brown was the painter, Hopkins the poet, but the poet’s analysis of the Ploughman’s physique is almost as anatomical as a study by Leonardo. In the sonnet’s octave, Hopkins makes a ‘roll-call’ of Harry’s features, and orders his ‘one crew’ to ‘fall to’. The sestet begins: ‘He leans to it, Harry bends, look. Back, elbow and liquid waist / In him, all quail to the wallowing o’ the plough: ’s cheek crimsons . . .’ Hopkins portrays this ploughman from head to foot, ending with his heavy boots and the gleam of the turned furrow, the ‘sillion’ of ‘The Windhover’:
. . . broad in bluff hide his frowning feet lashed! raced
With, along them, cragiron under and cold furls –
With-a-fountain’s shining-shot furls.
The previous poem ended with the drayhorse’s ‘bright and battering sandal’. We do not see Harry’s horse but Harry following the plough as it wallows. He is the type of the unselfish hard worker, like Chaucer’s Ploughman, and is presented externally, like the horse he guides. In Christian analogy, Harry is a type of humanity (he is much more a type than a person). The horse has shared man’s labour since the Middle Ages. At the time of the Paris Commune, ploughs were drawn by horses (the poem was finished in Ireland, but Hopkins thinks of England). In one of the poems in A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896), the voice of a dead farm worker asks ‘Is my team ploughing?’ Although ploughing with horses was not so common by 1945, George Orwell chose a horse to stand for the uncomplaining worker, the sacrificial Boxer of Animal Farm.
The first poem in the pair, ‘Tom’s Garland: upon the Unemployed’, was also finished in Dromore in September 1887. Tom is not a farm worker, but ‘Tom Navvy’, a carefree labourer: ‘Tom seldom sick, / Seldomer heartsore’. Tom then bursts out with:
Commonweal
Little I reck ho! lacklevel in, if all had bread:
What! country is honour enough in all us.
Social inequality wouldn’t worry Tom, if all had bread; to be English is enough of an honour. Hopkins explained the poem to Bridges in a letter of 10 February 1888:
. . . As St. Paul and Plato and Hobbes and everybody says, the commonwealth or well ordered human society is like one man; a body with many members and each its function; some higher, some lower, but all honourable, from the honour which belongs to the whole. The head is the sovereign, who has no superior but God . . . The foot is the daylabourer, and this is armed with hobnail boots . . . the garlands of nails they wear . . . But presently I remember that this is all very well for those who are in, however low in, the common weal; but that the curse of our times is that many do not share it, that they are outcasts from it and have neither security or splendour; that they share care with the high and obscurity with the low, but wealth or comfort with neither. And this state of things, I say, is the origin of Loafers, Tramps, Cornerboys, Roughs, Socialists and other pests of society.16
Hopkins died in 1889, and most of his poems were published by Bridges in 1918. The letter gives up its analogy in a baffled outburst which helps with the sonnet’s abrupt final couplet. The despair and rage caused by unemployment make the day-labourer, who is the admirable ‘foot’ of the body of the Commonweal, degenerate into dog and wolf: ‘This, by Despair, bred Hangdog dull; by Rage, / Manwolf, worse; and their packs infest the age.’
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. Tom is not a lily, but Hopkins has an exalted idea of this ‘foot’, this member of the body of society. The poet’s exaltation comes from a high-strung Christian idealism, an intense sense of human splendour and misery, and of insoluble social inequities.
Hopkins found some of his ideas on poverty and the unemployed confirmed in William Cobbett’s A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland; showing how that Event has Impoverished the main Body of the People in those Countries; and containing a List of the Abbeys, Priories, Nunneries, Hospitals, and other Religious Foundations in England, and Wales, and Ireland, Confiscated, Seized on, or Alienated, by the Protestant ‘Reformation’ Sovereigns and Parliaments, in a series of Letters addressed to all Sensible and Just Englishmen, produced in parts from 1824 to 1825, and published in two volumes in London in 1829. Hopkins wrote to Dixon: ‘the most valuable and striking part of [Cobbett’s Reformation] to me is the doctrine about the origin of pauperism’.17 (Tudor law punished ‘sturdy beggars’. Cobbett blames the Reformation for making unemployment a social misdemeanour, and for categorising paupers as a burden on the state which the state should seek to avoid.) Hopkins accepted inequality as a fact, and took seriously the obligations it entailed: the rich to care for the poor, the strong to protect the weak – medieval chivalric ideals. The marriage of ‘One Nation’ Tory paternalism with a maternal Christian Socialism produced the Welfare State.
The idiosyncrasy and extreme abridgement of Hopkins’s expression meant he often had to unpack the meaning of his poems, even to Bridges and Dixon, both of them classicists and Christian poets like himself. Hopkins began the above letter: ‘I laughed outright and often, but very sardonically, to think you and the Canon could not construe my last sonnet; that he had to write to you for a crib. It is plain I must go no further on this road: if you and he cannot understand me, who will?’
Canon Dixon (1833–1900) had been at school in Birmingham with Burne-Jones. At Oxford, he became an associate of the PRB.18 Dixon became a clergyman, and briefly taught Hopkins at Highgate School, London, where T.S. Eliot was later ‘the American master’ when Betjeman was a pupil. Young Hopkins, like Dixon and Rossetti, admired the poetry of Keats. Minuteness of detail is the most Pre-Raphaelite feature of Hopkins’s poetry, as is already apparent in his schoolboy poem, ‘The Escorial’.
In a letter of 1 December 1881, Hopkins gave his old teacher a lesson in the history of the ‘Prae-raphaelites’: ‘This modern medieval school is descended from the Romantic school (Romantic is a bad word) of Keats, Leigh Hunt, Hood, indeed of Scott early in the century . . . Keats’s school chooses medieval keepings, not pure nor drawn from the middle ages direct but as brought down through that Elizabethan tradition of Shakspere [sic] and his contemporaries which died out in such men as Herbert and Herrick.’19 Hopkins goes on to the Lake poets, Byron’s school and other subjects, and ends: ‘Now since this time, Tennyson and his school seem to me to have struck a mean or compromise between Keats and the medievalists on the one hand and Wordsworth and the Lake School on the other.’ Literary genealogy interested Hopkins and Dixon, for both were members of that ‘modern medieval school’ of ‘Keats and the medievalists’. Hopkins concludes that, ‘The Lake School expires in Keble and Faber and Cardinal Newman’.20
Hopkins’s adult poems are medieval when the subject requires, as in ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’, where the ‘dapple-eared lily’ and the city ‘branchy between towers’ are Gothic. In this poem he calls that philosophical friar, ‘Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller’. Likewise, in ‘The Windhover’, the ‘dauphin’ of the kingdom of daylight brings in French chivalry, ‘chevalier’ and the ‘sillion’ made by the plough. Hopkins’s language is medieval when appropriate. He has little of the archaism common in Victorian poetry; exceptions are the ‘housel’ of ‘The Bugler’s First Communion’; or ‘’s cheek crimsons’, quoted above. Hopkins once wrote to Bridges, who was trying to interest him in the ‘Saxon’ English of Doughty’s Arabia Deserta:
You say it is free from the taint of Victorian English. H’m. Is it free from the taint of Elizabethan English? Does it not stink of that? for the sweetest flesh turns to corruption. Is not Elizabethan English a corpse these centuries? No one admires, regrets, despairs over the death of the style, the living masculine native rhetoric of that age, more than I do; but ‘’tis gone, ’tis gone, ’tis gone’ . . . to write in an obsolete style is affectation . . .
Hopkins’s idioms – ‘these centuries’, ‘’tis gone’ – mock ‘Elizabethan’ English.21 Hopkins’s use of older English was more radical than archaic. He often chooses Saxon words, to ‘rinse and wring the ear’; physical words like ‘thicket’ and ‘thorp’, ‘banks’ and ‘brakes’, ‘delve’, ‘hew’ and ‘hack’. More idiosyncratically, he coins words, such as ‘selve’, meaning to show a unique nature, and ‘unselve’ – to destroy it. His use of the compound nouns held to be natural to Germanic languages is both old and new. Anglo-Saxon had used compound nouns to extend its wordhoard, as Morris wished modern English to extend its word-hoard with ‘folkwain’. But the compound words in Anglo-Saxon poetry are traditional – their ‘whale-road’ was to them as everyday as ‘railroad’ is in American English. In marked contrast, Hopkins’s new-coined compounds are ‘original, spare, strange’, and singular. Sometimes, as he knew, he went too far on this road.
Hopkins’s ‘sprung rhythm’, a topic where many have ventured to tread, owes little to medieval English verse, and less than is often supposed. In the Preface to his unpublished poems, Hopkins says that ‘the old English verse seen in Pierce Ploughman’ is ‘in sprung rhythm’, a claim discussed below.22 He claims also that sprung rhythm is ‘the rhythm of common speech and of written prose’. English is indeed a stressed language, but in a discussion of English versification this is a first step only. Hopkins finds sprung rhythm in nursery rhymes and weather saws, illustrating this elsewhere with ‘Ding dong bell, pussy’s in the well’.23 Finally, he believes that no post-Elizabethan English poem is in sprung rhythm. This may be so, although, as we have seen, Coleridge had explained in the Preface to his metrical romance, Christabel, that its metre is ‘founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables’. To the modern reader, the effect of the metre of Christabel and The Lay of the Last Minstrel is reminiscent of Percy’s ballads and romances, and consciously so. All too often, however, the verse of the metrical romances relaxes into what Chaucer calls ‘doggerel’, which is also the word used of Langland by Hopkins. This weakness also affects Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’. Hopkins’s style lacks any such redundancy.
Hopkins’s reference to the ‘old English verse seen in Pierce Ploughman’ has been misunderstood. For though the English of Langland is old, it is not the Old English of historical linguistics: the Anglo-Saxon of c. 600–1100. Langland wrote in what scholars have since classed as Middle English, dating from c. 1100 to 1470. Hopkins’s claim about Piers Ploughman, and the confusion of ‘old’ with ‘Old’, has created the widespread but erroneous belief that his sprung rhythm is modelled on Anglo-Saxon. Hopkins did not claim this, and knew that Piers Ploughman was not an Anglo-Saxon poem. His point is that its versification counts stresses rather than syllables. In fact, however, Langland’s versification and language lack the economy of Old English verse, which differs from his in crucial respects. When Hopkins tried to read Piers Ploughman, he was disappointed in it, and judged that its version of ‘Anglo saxon verse’ was ‘in a degraded and doggerel shape’. He twice mentions in 1882/3 that he is beginning to read Anglo-Saxon in order to ascertain whether or not it is a precedent for the sprung rhythm he had been practising since 1876. We don’t know what he began to read. That is all the evidence we have that Hopkins had read Anglo-Saxon verse. We do not know that he could have understood its sense, still less its metre. The true basis of Anglo-Saxon versification began to be understood in Germany in 1873, too late for Hopkins to hear about it.24
Since it is hard to be certain of understanding Hopkins’s ideas of sprung rhythm, one cannot say whether Old English or Middle English verse is ‘sprung’. But it is certain that Anglo-Saxon verse was not the model for Hopkins’s verse. All they have in common is the English language. Old English verse alliterates regularly and systematically, whereas Hopkins does so gratuitously. Hopkins uses rhyme, which is the opposite of alliteration, and is rigorously stanzaic, whereas Old English verse adds line to line without limit. Indeed, all the poems so far discussed are sonnets with Italian rhyme-scheme, octave and sestet. Hopkins was not influenced by Old English verse, but by reading American books about the nature of English words: books of a nativist and primitivist tendency, which affected his ideas about word-choice and word-formation.25
Hopkins’s poetry is medievalist when he writes on medieval occasions, as in: ‘To What Serves Mortal Beauty’. His answer to this question is that the faces of some boys in the Roman slave market caught the eye of a future Pope, Gregory the Great: ‘lovely lads once, wet-fresh windfalls of war’s storm, / How then should Gregory, a father, have gleanèd else’. Gregory decided that these angelic-looking but pagan Angles should be evangelised. Ergo, mortal beauty serves immortal beauty. Hopkins reminds the English that it was a Roman, indeed a papal, mission which brought Christianity to Canterbury.
The question, ‘To what serves’ is medieval: Latin, Thomist, Aristotelian, teleological. Philosophy is the final aspect in which Hopkins might be considered medievalist. He delighted in the individuating and intuitionist philosophy of Duns Scotus, a Franciscan from Duns in Berwickshire, who had taught in Oxford. Scotus persuaded Paris that the Virgin whom the angel hailed as ‘full of grace’ must have been so since her conception. Hence the sonnet’s last line: ‘Who fired France for Mary without spot’. (Immaculacy is an additional reason for the ‘lily’ in ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’.) Hopkins liked Scotus and was grounded in the theology of Aquinas, the official theologian of the Jesuits. The Society of Jesus is not medieval, but Aquinas was made the standard of orthodoxy at the Council of Trent. Hopkins’s translations of Aquinas’s Eucharistic hymns are in common use, and probably known to more people than his poems are.
Another poem medieval in subject is ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe’. This comparison is more metaphysical than medieval, but Hopkins was a nature poet who saw all of nature, not simply human nature, as transformed by the Incarnation. Whether medieval or metaphysical, what now seems most sadly pre-modern about Hopkins is his habit of thinking and envisioning in terms of analogy and symbol: everything in creation speaks of Christ. Hopkins is the clearest sign that the ‘medieval’ strand in English literature would henceforward be linked with a vision of the world and of human life rooted in Christian beliefs, and that this vision would eventually identify itself as explicitly Catholic or Anglo-Catholic.
‘The Windhover’, admired for the intensity of its natural description and empathy, is dedicated to Christ our Lord. It is incarnational from its first line, and based on analogy: ‘I saw this morning morning’s minion, king-’. The bird is the darling son of the morning, coming as heir apparent to the kingdom of daylight. We do not readily recognise this as a natural augury of the Second Coming, the dawning of the Kingdom of Heaven. Modern natural philosophy, what Blake called ‘single Vision, and Newton’s sleep’, saw no evidence of a supernatural element in nature, and doubted the hypothesis of a supernatural element in human nature. Hopkins had made scientific contributions to the journal Nature concerning the effect of the eruption of Krakatoa on the earth’s atmosphere. He asserts metaphysical vision with urgency, because the natural science of his day had begun to see no need for it. In his ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ Hopkins wrote: ‘I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, / Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour’. A record of personal experience, this is also an act of faith, drawing on the injunction in the Mass to ‘Lift up your hearts’, and on the Psalms: ‘The heavens shew forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands’; and ‘I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, from whence cometh my help’. After the harvest, he ‘gleans’ our Saviour, looking carefully at the earth, and at the heavens, for the remaining grains are very fine, and as easily missed as a violet by a mossy stone.
A true medieval lyric such as ‘I sing of a maiden / that is makeles’ employs the biblical image of the ‘dew in Aprille that falleth on the grass’ as an analogy for Mary’s conception of Jesus. In the Middle Ages, natural supernaturalism needed no assertion; the particular was the universal. To assert or reassert such a vision is, then, medievalist rather than medieval. Yet it is also Romantic. Hopkins asserts the significance of nature, what it signifies. In this he is the heir of the Coleridge who in ‘Frost at Midnight’ had prayed for his baby son:
so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! He shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.26
Coleridge called his son Hartley, after the associationist philosopher who had developed Locke’s empirical derivation of ideas from sensations, but his second son Berkeley, after the idealist philosopher Bishop Berkeley. Coleridge held that the mind is divinely inspired, that its creativity comes from God, and that the perception of phenomena by the mind is a repetition of, and participates in, the continuous agency of divine creation. Of this he almost convinced Wordsworth, at that time a pantheist. Hopkins, however, sees in Nature, not only God the Creator, but Christ our Saviour.