Hopkins and Newman: Two Disagreements

Gerard Manley Hopkins rarely recorded disagreements with statements in published works of John Henry Newman. The small number of cases that are extant probably highlights his normal agreement with Newman or an inhibition toward dissenting from a revered figure who had facilitated his reception into the Catholic Church. This lack of expressed differences did not arise from an incomplete or superficial experience of Newman's work which he knew well during a period of some twenty-five years, from his days at Highgate to his death in Dublin. (1) During the years after 1864 he remained, in Newman's words in 1888, "among the cardinal's friends and well wishers" (Hopkins, Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins 414; Newman, Letters and Diaries 31:246). Five instances of disagreement, possibly all that are recorded, date from 1878 to 1887. Three of these concern literary matters. The first is a "blunder" Hopkins decried in a letter to Canon Richard Dixon: Newman's instancing the gain in smoothness and correctness of versification" Robert Southey showed over John Milton (Hopkins, Correspondence 13). (2) In the second incident, which he mentioned in a letter to A. W. M. Baillie, Hopkins found Newman guilty "of a usage clearly mistaken" when employing the word scope (Further Letters 284). Seven months later he paradoxically informed Coventry Patmore that Newman did not "know what writing prose was" (Further Letters 380). These differences of opinion, incidental remarks in letters, are presented in atone that varies from philological precision, charming disbelief, and rhetorical analysis. Hopkins maintains his certitude in each case, but there is always an implied regret about disagreeing with so great a literary figure and so respected a person. The two remaining disagreements, which are the subject of this essay, are more intellectually serious and personally meaningful for both authors, who have had an abiding influence on the nineteenth century's understanding of Christianity and literature. These two disagreements are interrelated, not least of all, by the circumstance that Hopkins addressed both of them to Coventry Patmore, a recognized older poet and, like Hopkins, a convert from Anglicanism. Their friendship had begun in 1883 and acquired a level of understanding that made for greater frankness in discussing Newman who, after his long career, was the revered veteran of the Roman Catholic cause in Great Britain. Hopkins, because of the values he shared with Patmore, was less inhibited in criticizing Newman's opinions, which Hopkins treated more cautiously with his two other correspondents: the agnostic Baillie and the Anglican Canon Dixon. Another element in the criticisms Hopkins forwarded to Patmore was his uncertainty that the positions he found wanting in Newman were actually the ones Newman espoused. After all, Hopkins could be certain in his argumentation but hesitant after twenty years of reading and reflecting on presentations Newman had made before Hopkins had been born. These had never been systematically revised although often reprinted. Hence, in the two disagreements to be examined, the debate is not always with Newman but rather with a position that seems to be present in his writings. Hopkins knew from experience how the understanding of a moral or philosophical issue might change by degrees in the transitions both he and Newman had made in the course of their experiences as Anglicans and Catholics. An Intolerable Doctrine The doctrine that Hopkins unequivocally rejected concerned a moral principle which, if Newman did not actually countenance, he left Hopkins with the "superficial impression" of doing so (Hopkins, Further Letters 341-42). This assertion on Hopkins's part seems, at its strongest, to defend Newman on the grounds that he expressed himself inadequately on a moral issue, which led to intolerable conclusions in the practical order. Hopkins locates the offensive doctrine of Newman "in his well known sermon about Demas" and concludes that it implicitly maintains "that a man may somehow sin mortally by no particular mortal sin" Hopkins's citation of the source presumably was adequate for his correspondent, Coventry Patmore, and for other contemporaries in 1883, even though it does not indicate the title of the sermon or the collection in which it appeared. …