HARMONY AND COUNTERPOINT IN THE WORKS OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS by DOREEN CATHERINE PETERS B.A., Goshen College, 1961 B.Ed., University of Manitoba, 1969 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES Department of English We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA October, 1978 (c) Doreen Catherine Peters, 1978 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of English The University of British Columbia 2075 Wesbrook Place Vancouver, Canada V6T 1WS TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE 11 CHAPTER TWO 59 "the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation" CHAPTER THREE 118 "the music of his mind" . . . "the rehearsal / Of own, of abrupt self . . ." EPILOGUE 154 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 155 LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED 158 iv INTRODUCTION It is a "much neglected law of literary history— that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires.""'" Throughout his life, Gerard Manley Hopkins searched for the expressive form his genius required. Although he respected the laws regulating poetic form, he felt compelled to find new forms for the new rhythms that beat in the ear of his mind. The restrictions of the sonnet form, for example, which presented him with an exhilarating challenge in his early maturity, became too confining for his inventiveness. Similarly confining to him were the limitations of common English rhythm. In a letter to Coventry Patmore, Hopkins stated his view of what constitutes poetic genius: every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.2 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 250. 2 C. C. Abbott, ed., The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 263. Hereafter cited as LB. 2 Patmore was not prepared for Hopkins1 startling origin ality: he found too much "impracticable quartz" among the "veins of rare gold." Hopkins, however, in his last years, understood more fully and accepted freely the extent of his originality. In response to Bridges' crit icism of "Heraclitean Fire," he wrote, the effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree. Perhaps then more reading would only refine my singularity , which is not what you want.i Hopkins admired much in English poetry: Keats, Words worth, Burns, Milton, Shakespeare. He found inspira tion as well in the rhythms and tonal effects of Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Welsh, and Icelandic poetry. Although traces of influence from these sources can be found in Hopkins' poetry, he turned elsewhere for his deepest inspiration. The central source and focus of Hopkins' artistic inspiration were sounds in nature, the rhythm and flow of natural speech, and the melodic and harmonic form of music. In natural sounds and u l t i mately in music Hopkins found the form his genius required. The system of poetics which was taking shape during the time he wrote his lecture notes on rhetoric, was more C. C. Abbott, Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 222. Hereafter cited as FL. 3 fully developed in his Preface, and which we see applied in various ways in the poetry of his early, middle, and late maturity, is a system whose principles are based on music. Hopkins was introduced to the study of music at the age of six by an aunt who taught him the piano. At the end of his Oxford years (1867) he started to play the violin. In 1874 Hopkins' interest in the structure of music led him to continue with the piano. As his interest in musical composition developed, he concentrated on the study of music theory: harmony and counterpoint. During the last two decades of his life, Hopkins' creative impulse gradually came to center on music. In his letters to Bridges and Dixon, Hopkins described the song melodies and harmonies that filled his mind, and the elation he felt when the musical setting of a well- loved poem grew into the right shape: I endeavour to make the under parts each a flowing and independent melody and they cannot be independently invented, they must be felt for along a few certain necessary lines enforced by the harmony. It is astonishing to see them come.1 Hopkins was frequently impatient with the theorists. He found the standard forms of modern musical time C. C. Abbott, ed., The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 135. Hereafter cited as'CoD. 4 "stifling."''" He chafed under the rules governing harmony and counterpoint, and threw the rules aside to develop new melodies and new harmonies. "I have invented a new style," he wrote to Bridges in 1880. He confidently insisted that his "new art" was "a kind of advance on 2 advanced modern music." Critics have recognized Hopkins1 musical ability and accomplishment, as well as their significant relation ship to his poetics. W. H. Gardner, in an appendix to his comprehensive two-volume study of Hopkins, evaluates both the poet's depth of music knowledge and his innova tive music theories. Gardner concludes that despite the poet's "genuine urge to composition," and his "musical imagination which, because it is based upon an under standing of the principles underlying a ll art, is in 3 some measure independent of technical skill," he was, 1LB, p. 120. 2Ibid., pp. 103 and 211-212. 3W. H. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) : A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, Vol. II (London: Martin Seeker & Warburg, 1958), p. 382. To substantiate his conclusions, Gardner draws on analyses of Hopkins * songs made by four competent musi cologists: Dr. J. Dykes Bower (his analysis appears in the third appendix to CoD) finds Hopkins' musical ideas variously "attractive . . . interesting," but also says that Hopkins' "inadequate knowledge of harmony prevented his making really effective use of them." (p. 388) Mr. L. H. Baggarley says that the melodic structure of one of Hopkins' songs seems "to indicate an adventurous mind looking forward to effects in music which were not used on any wide scale until some time later." (p. 389) Mr. Norman Suckling "believes that Hopkins the musician was something more than a blindly- groping, amateur enthusiast." (p. 391) John F. Waterhouse is referred to elsewhere on these pages. nevertheless, limited in expressing his ideas musically: that music "wild and strange" which Hopkins heard when he "groped in his soul's very viscera" and "thrummed the sweetest and most secret cat gut of the mind" is a vaguely apprehended new world of musical delight which a wider tech nical accomplishment would have enabled him to objectify and make audible to others.1 In the introduction to Volume II of his critical work, Gardner refers briefly to the relationship music and poetry have in Hopkins' thinking: "his prosodic theories especially later in life, were always closely bound up 2 with his musical theories." Gardner does not, however, attempt to analyze this relationship. He says that the J purpose of his appendix has been merely to reveal the general trend of his [Hopkins'] activities in a sister art which in this case bore a specific and not simply a generic relationship to his main art, which was poetry.^ Several chapters of Gardner's work deal with Hopkins' "new rhythm," which, as Hopkins writes in his Preface, is found in a ll "but the most monotonously regular music. Gardner does not, however, approach his study with a view to showing how the poetic principles underlying this new rhythm are specifically related to music. Gardner, II, p. 391. 2Ibid., p. 101. 3Ibid., p. 389. 6 A major study of Hopkins and music, one on which Gardner was able to draw for his analysis, appeared in the July 1937 issue of Music and Letters. In this signi ficant essay, John F. Waterhouse discusses Hopkins' musical interests, abilities, and progress in formal music theory. He maintains that the time and exertion Hopkins spent in music is not poetry's loss; instead, it is precisely the interplay between the two arts that made Hopkins' poetry what it i s. Waterhouse believes, for example, that the words and music of a poem written in 1879, "Morning, Midday, and Evening Sacrifice," "grew together."''" He goes on to say that joining words and music in this simple, lyrical way was clearly not the direction either Hopkins1 poetry or his music took in the ensuing years: "his prosodic theories led his poetry into a new world where music could stand by and help but could not have joined to mutual advantage" unless he could find some way out of 2 the restricting laws of modern harmony and counterpoint. Waterhouse suggests that Hopkins found this new freedom and inspiration in ancient Greek modal music: as a Jesuit Hopkins was well acquainted with Gregorian chant and the medieval modal system; but as a Greek scholar, and a remarkably intel ligent and original student of Greek lyric metres, he had also found his way into the John F. Waterhouse, "Hopkins and Music," Music and Letters (18, 1937), p. 231. Waterhouse bases his supposition on the "facile metre and pattern" of the poem. 2Ibid., p. 231. 7 very problematical world of ancient Greek music and modes. . . . Hopkins' musical theorizing certainly sprang mainly from the Greek.^ •Given Hopkins' innovativeness in both poetry and music, it is a small step, from this point, to speculate, as Waterhouse does at the end of his essay, that Hopkins might perhaps, granted a longer life, have turned consistently to his own verse and become a neo-Greek poet-musician, creating simultan eously with the words a barless, unaccompanied enharmonic music.2 This sort of speculation, however interesting, is rela tively futile. More to the point is an effort to dis cover the function of music in the "new world" of poetry Hopkins found. In an essay published in 19 56, William L. Graves adds "an interpretive postscript" to the studies of Waterhouse and Gardner. He traces the steps in Hopkins' musical development much as the earlier critics had done. He agrees that Hopkins' potential as a composer exceeds his actual achievement, but he also finds that Hopkins "understood the complementary relationship between the 3 values of poetry and music," and that, therefore, in Waterhouse, p. 23 4. 2 Ibid., p. 235. 3 William L. Graves, "Hopkins as Composer: an Interpretive Postscript," Victorian Poetry (I, 1963), p. 146.