HARMONY AND COUNTERPOINT IN THE WORKS OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS by DOREEN

162 Pages·2009·7.38 MB·English

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
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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.