Yet even with ample evidence of his unpredictability, his conversion to Roman Catholicism proved an unpleasant surprise to his friends and relatives.
First, some background on the entrenched phenomenon of anti-Catholicism in Victorian England: from the time of the ambiguously-named English Reformation, the public status of identifying as a Roman Catholic ranged from tolerance (during the reign of Mary Tudor, for example, 1553–58) to a sentence of high treason (during the reign of Elizabeth I, 1558–1604), punishable by public death by hideous torture. As decades passed, England loosened its religious prohibitions, but the Anglican Church, with its Thirty-Nine Articles and Book of Common Prayer, dominated the land and even the empire. There was no separation of church from state. As recently as the early twentieth century, Roman Catholics were viewed as undesirable outsiders. And for many decades after the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (which banished the pope and the doctrine of transubstantiation, among other basic Roman Catholic markers), Catholics had to hide as recusants, attend Mass in secret, stash their priests in closets, forego owning property, and abstain from travel beyond five miles from the place of their birth.
In seventeenth-century Ireland, Catholic priests were hunted down with horses and hounds and murdered. In England as well, Catholics were regarded as threats to the security of the Protestant nation, and the pope was considered a foreign enemy. After the passing of centuries without episodes of Catholic aggression, however, Parliament gradually relaxed, culminating in the Act of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. When Rome re-established a Cardinal, Henry Manning, at Westminster, London in 1850, though, crowds protested. There were anti-Catholic riots and burnings in effigy of Catholic bishops that recalled the Guy Fawkes affair of 1605 (remembered in England to this day every November 5). Of the forty thousand novels published under the long reign of Queen Victoria, many thousands included anti-Catholic themes.
In the year of the Great Reform Bill, 1832, a religious trend began at Oxford University, called the Oxford Movement (or the Tractarian Movement, because its participants published tracts). Members of both Senior and Junior Common Rooms joined in seeking to redeem the boredom and tepid flaccidity of Anglicanism by reintroducing some of the more interesting doctrines of the pre-Reformation past. Though initially identified with tracts on ecclesiastical subjects, the movement eventually included the rise of Gothic architecture and with it, medieval-style ceremony, the use of vestments, the practice of auricular confession, and the opening of Anglican religious orders. Historians generally mark the official “end” of the Oxford Movement at 1845 when its most famous leader – the former chaplain to Oxford University, John Henry Newman – went over to Rome, ultimately bringing a posse of Tractarians with him. After Newman’s departure from the university, however, the group was called “Puseyites,” after Dr. Edward Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew. When Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived at Oxford in 1864, he attended Sunday evenings with Canon Henry Liddon, a strong follower of Pusey and Tractarianism.
Had Hopkins stopped there, we would almost certainly not be reading about him right now. He would have spent Sundays with like-minded Anglicans, remained at Oxford, become a professor of Greek, and, presumably, sketched landscapes on his walking holidays. He might have gone on writing poems like “Heaven-Haven: A nun takes the veil.” Instead, he took a “veil” himself – on January 23, 1866 he wrote his famous diary entry, “For Lent. No pudding on Sundays…. No verses in Passion Week or on Fridays.” (So, in an ascetical resolution, he restricts his engagement with poetry.) On July 17, he noted in his journal “the impossibility of staying in the Church of England.” On October 15, he wrote to John Henry Newman about his decision to convert; one day later, in a letter, he announced his conversion to his father. When his father inquired if he had considered that this would alienate him from his family, Hopkins replied in the affirmative. On the other hand, for every loss, there was apparently compensation: he wrote to William Urquhart that he knew “the first complete peace of mind I have ever had.”
What happened next is legendary among those who know Hopkins’s biography – he wrote to Urquhart saying “my conversion when it came was all in a minute” (Letter of October 4, 1866). He then left Oxford to teach in Newman’s Oratory School in Birmingham. He strongly sensed an increasing conflict between his personal inclinations (poetry, for example) and his religious vocation. He burned his poems. In 1868, he joined the Jesuits. Like all new Jesuits, he undertook the demanding, life-changing Thirty-Day Retreat with The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. He completed two years of novitiate (1868–70), took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and put on the Roman collar. He studied for his philosophate at Stonyhurst (1870–73). His life as a Catholic stirred his compassion for the poor. One letter written from Stonyhurst (April 1871) to Robert Bridges has been called Hopkins’s “red” letter. In it he refers to himself as a “Communist”:
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 hopes in the midst of plenty – which plenty they make.
During these years, he kept a journal filled with what he seemed not to have known was potential poetry. Many of the journal entries concerned the weather:
July 1 [1866]. Sharp showers, bright between. Late in the afternoon, the light and shade being brilliant, snowy blocks of cloud were filing over the sky and under the sun hanging above and along the earth-line were those multitudinous up-and-down crispy sparkling chains with pearly shadows up to the edges. At sunset, wh. was in a grey bank with moist gold dabs and racks, the whole round of skyline had level clouds naturally lead-colour but the upper parts ruddied, some more, some less rosy. Spits or gleams braided or built in with slanting pellet flakes made their way. Through such clouds anvil-shaped pink ones and up-blown fleece-of-wool flat-topped dangerous-looking pieces.
Hopkins’s journals, like his letters, contain the same jolting, irregular phrases which will spring into the rhythm of his mature poetry.
In 1874 Hopkins moved to St. Beuno’s College in Wales to pursue the theologate, and there he wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” His journal stopped. He then entered high gear as a poet who wrote ten major poems in less than one year, was ordained a priest (1877), left Wales, and did much apparently grueling parish work. In preparation for Final Vows, which Jesuits take thirteen years after First Vows, he made tertianship (1881–82) and another Thirty-Day Retreat, during which he experienced a nervous breakdown. After Final Vows, he moved to Dublin (1884) to teach at Newman’s failing Catholic University, sank into a five-year depression, wrote the “terrible sonnets,” wrote “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire” (1888), and died of typhoid fever at the age of forty-four in 1889.
This terse chronology omits the early triumphs that rested on Gerard Manley Hopkins like a bright mantle until he became a Catholic; after that, usually, when he undertook priestly work, he seemed doomed to profound exhaustion. Another convert, Evelyn Waugh, explains that there was nothing pretty about English Catholicism:
My readers outside England should understand that the aesthetic appeal of the Church of England is unique and peculiar in those islands. Elsewhere a first interest in the Catholic Church is often kindled in the convert’s imagination by the splendors of her worship in contrast with the bleakness and meanness of the Protestant sects. In England the pull is all the other way. The medieval cathedrals and churches, the rich ceremonies that surround the monarchy, the historic titles of Canterbury and York, the social organization of the country parishes, the traditional culture of Oxford and Cambridge, the liturgy composed in the heyday of English prose style – all