CHAPTER 7

Essaying "W. H. Pater Esq.":
New Perspectives on the Tutor/Student
Relationship Between Pater and Hopkins

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LESLEY HIGGINS

WALTER PATER'S PRESENCE in Gerard Manley Hopkins's life and work was much more than an undergraduate phenomenon. Three phases of personal and intertextual connection can be identified: the formative months of tutoring and friendship in Oxford from 1866 to 1868; their renewal of personal contact a decade later, when Hopkins returned to the city of Oxford as a Jesuit priest; and the impersonal but affective instances in the mid-1880s when a despondent and nostalgic Fr. Hopkins, now consigned to his "winter world"¹ in Dublin, would review and "overhaul" his old correspondence and papers.² Fundamentally, though, theirs was a relationship predicated upon the indelible influence of the University: the attitudes towards life and learning fostered in its colleges and common rooms; the philosophical and religious controversies it sustained but never resolved. Although there has been a great deal of conjecture, and some learned commentary,³ as to the relationship which existed between the Brasenose don and the "star of Balliol," critics have not been able to ascertain the full extent of Pater's impact on Hopkins. The documents and manuscripts central to this enquiry remain unpublished—including five of the six essays which Hopkins wrote for Pater in 1866 and 1867. By focusing on the latter, analyzing them in conjunction with the Pater articles to which Hopkins was responding, I hope to provide a more searching and complete account of their intellectual and intertextual communion. The discussion will also suggest, in brief, how all of Hopkins's extant undergraduate work illuminates our rather sketchy knowledge of Pater's undergraduate career and curriculum. Hopkins's papers are especially helpful in clarifying Pater's intellectual ties with Benjamin Jowett, the Regius professor of Greek and Balliol Fellow who played crucial roles in the lives of both men.

Walter Pater was born five years before Hopkins (1844-1889), and he outlived him by five years. Only two academic terms separated Pater's final classes with Jowett in the spring of 1862 and Hopkins's initial tutorials in April 1863. Three years later, in Trinity term 1866, Hopkins began "coaching" with Pater, now established as a fellow of Brasenose.⁴ The circumstances of these preparations for Hopkins's impending Greats examinations enter into our discussion in several crucial ways. The twelve months

before Hopkins met Pater were pivotal in Hopkins's life; they were also emotionally searing. Each intensely-felt anxiety—about his academic performance, religious beliefs, or personal behaviour—fed into and exacerbated all the others. Jowett, for example, his tutor since matriculating in April 1863, represented both intellectual achievement and apostasy. Hopkins's defection from Jowett's sphere of influence and absenteeism from his tutorials during this year of inner turmoil were openly encouraged by the Rev. Henry Liddon,⁵ the chief disciple of High Church Puseyism who became Hopkins's confessor in February 1864.⁶ It was Jowett, I surmise, who dispatched Hopkins to Pater, a private coach from outside Balliol who was the antithesis of Puseyism. The Master of Balliol, Robert Scott, was unacquainted with Pater. Jowett, on the other hand, had been extremely impressed with Pater as an undergraduate⁷  and could rest assured that his former pupil would actively counter-balance Hopkins's ritualistic tendencies.

In what frame of mind Hopkins first arrived at Pater's rooms is another matter. As Gerald Monsman has shown us, as early as February 1864 Hopkins had been strenuously warned about Pater's "infidel" beliefs by Samuel Brooke, the Corpus Christi undergraduate and member of the Old Mortality essay society who denounced Pater's Old Mortality presentations about "subjective immortality" and "self-culture" to his diary, his friends, and the Rev. Liddon.⁸ When tutor and student met in April 1866, Hopkins was in the throes of a religious crisis—whether to "Romanise" or not—and Pater was at his most anti-Christian. "Neology" was the then-popular term for sceptical or latitudinarian attitudes; and just as Hopkins's friend Edmund Geldart identified Jowett as Oxford's principal Neologian,⁹ so Hopkins characterized his new instructor: "Coaching with W. H. Pater this term. Walked with him on Monday evening last, April 30. Fine evening bitterly cold. `Bleak-faced Neology in cap and gown': no cap and gown but very bleak."¹⁰ A month after this initial walk, he noted, "[a] little rain and at evening and night hard rain.—Pater talking two hours against Xtianity."¹¹

Despite these outstanding disparities, a rapport between the two was established, testimony to a shared belief that "in unimpeded talk with sincere persons of what quality soever—there, rather than in shadowy converse with even the best books—the flower, the fruit, of mind was still in life-giving contact with its roots."¹² For Hopkins, one can imagine that the vaguely avant-garde Brasenose don represented a welcome change from the hothouse atmosphere of Balliol. From all accounts, Pater's was a gently ironic demeanour, and therefore far removed from the overtly judgmental attitudes of such would-be Pygmalions as Jowett and Liddon. As for Pater's status as a neologian, Hopkins could always look beyond a "reputation" in order to see the man for himself.

Pater's positive response to Hopkins would have been similarly multifaceted. One reason, I would suggest, was that he welcomed the opportunity to work with a genuinely bright and inquisitive pupil. Pater was always content at Brasenose, but the initial adjustment must have been considerable. Quite frankly, the college was an intellectual backwater. Balliol had Jowett, Lincoln had Mark Pattison, Christ Church had Henry Liddell—and Brasenose had its own beer.¹³ "Brase-nose was a college for the average man," writes John Buchan at his most diplomatic.¹⁴Humphry Ward, another student of Pater and a contemporary of Hopkins, is more forthright: "It must be owned that the Brasenose undergraduates of my standing were for the most part not clever. . . . [T]hey toiled at games and played at books."¹⁵ Small wonder that Pater would enjoy working with promising young men sent to him by Jowett and others.

Friendship with Hopkins was a fortuitous and mutually gratifying result of a diligent and enriching academic association. Hopkins's eagerness to absorb Paterian ideas, the alacrity with which he adopted some of his tutor's phraseology, is demonstrated in many ways. Within two months of meeting his new instructor, "as Pater says" had become a popular qualifying statement. Advising a friend about holiday plans in late June 1866, Hopkins remarks, "Folkstone is a sorry place. . . . The Sussex downs are seductive as Pater says, if there is a church."¹⁶ A year and a half later, Hopkins begins his "Notes on Greek philosophy,"¹⁷ with outlines for the lessons he is to teach at the Birmingham Oratory School, with the following generalization: "Great feature of the old Gk. philosophy, Pater said, its holding certain truths, chiefly logical, out of proportion to the rest of its knowledge."¹⁸ His favourite Paterian verb and participle are "to colour" and "colouring"; the adjective most admired is "strange"; the most adaptable Pater term is "under-current," which was transformed into Hopkins's "underthought."

Among the Hopkins manuscripts at Campion Hall are fourteen notebooks from his undergraduate days: journals which include notes from lectures, quotations from various authors, and forty-five essays for such tutors as Jowett, Pater, and T. H. Green. No notebook is so formally identified as D.III, the inside front cover of which is inscribed "Essays/ for W. H. Pater Esq./ Gerard M. Hopkins."

As Hopkins must have quickly learned, Pater relished the "really large and adventurous possibilities" of the essay form. For him, as for Plato, it represented "a voyage of discovery."¹⁹ What we have in Hopkins's D.III notebook are six such voyages, navigated (with varying degrees of success) according to the following charts: "The origin of our moral ideas"; "Plato's view of the connection of art and education"; "The Pagan and Christian virtues"; "The relation of Plato's Dialectic to modern logic and metaphysics"; "Shew cases in wh[ich] acts of apprehension apparently simple are largely influenced by the imagination"; and "The history and mutual connection in ancient ethics of the following questions—Can virtue be taught? Are virtue and vice severally voluntary and involuntary?" A. C. Benson states that Pater would often ask for the essays in advance of the tutorial, at which time he would discuss "his careful verdicts as to the style and arrangement."²⁰This information is based on the recollections of Humphry Ward, who also states that Pater " `was severe on confusions of thought, and still more so on any kind of rhetoric. An emphatic word or epithet was sure to be underscored, and the absolutely right phrase suggested'."²¹ Of the six essays in D.III, only the first has been subjected to Pater's pencil. The underscoring is quite extensive, however, as might be expected with a first assignment, when both pupil and teacher take pains to impress. Pater's discrete underlining implicitly queries both what is said ("the chain of morals fr[om] one age to another is de facto and a succession") and how it is said ("so to call it," "much exception").

Often, Pater would not set a subject for the essay, preferring instead that the student select a topic "in which he was interested."²² Some of the titles quoted above cover traditional Greats material. The Plato papers follow the general course charted in Benjamin Jowett's lists for student essays, and as such suggest that the new Brasenose tutor was trying to emulate his own teachers.²³ Aesthetic questions reflect the preoccupations of both student and tutor. Overall, the papers hint at the range and orientation of lectures on the history of philosophy which Pater began presenting at "the end of 1866 or beginning of 1867."²⁴ They also anticipate, quite strikingly at times, the formalized lectures later published as Plato and Platonism, and therefore help to correct the view that Pater's interpretation of Plato was wildly idiosyncratic. For the purposes of my discussion, I would like to comment on the essays and their constant interplay with Paterian ideas and texts according to a very basic itinerary: the papers dealing with moral philosophy (D.III.1, 3, and 6) will be considered first, then the arguments about metaphysics (D.III.4), and finally, deliberations on aesthetic matters (D.III.2 and 5).

For the same reasons that they preferred their aesthetics to be grounded on moral criteria, most Victorians emphasized the moral dimensions and ramifications of philosophy. Throughout his undergraduate notebooks Hopkins rehearses the crucial debates of classical and contemporary philosophy; the essays for Pater are distinguished by the range of comparisons the student feels compelled to consider (Plato and John Stuart Mill, Heraclitus and Marcus Aurelius), and the attention paid, at all times, to "first principles," questions which, according to D.III.6, "go very much to the bottom of things."²⁵ "First principles" was both a favourite phrase and a modus operandi for Pater; he em-braced the dialectic "in all its forms" because, to quote Plato and Platonism, it constituted "a dialogue, an endless dialogue, with one's self; a dialogue concerning those first principles, or 'universal definitions', or notions, those `ideas', which, according to Plato, are the proper objects of all real knowledge."²⁶

"The origin of our moral ideas" is both the longest essay for Pater, and the most diffuse. Classical sources are cited or alluded to several times, but Hopkins is primarily interested in refuting Utilitarian theory, "which makes morality lie in what attains or tends towards attaining the greatest happiness for the greatest number."²⁷ Not only does Hopkins question the objectivist stance of the utilitarians, he also faults them for failing to realize that "the things which we consider most absolutely excellent in point of morality . . . are not the earliest but the latest in point of apprehension. . . . [C]ivilisation is always trying to realise to itself morality in more and more disinterested, that is absolute, manifestations."²⁸ The latter sentences take on heightened significance when compared with Pater's essay on "Coleridge's Writings," in which praise for Coleridge's poetry is juxtaposed with a frank, disapproving critique of his theological and philosophical speculations, his "passion for the absolute." The article begins with deceptively general comments about the changing "currents" of "intellectual and spiritual culture," then proceeds to a direct statement of very un-Coleridgean dicta: "Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the 'relative' spirit in place of the 'absolute.' Ancient philosophy sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in a necessary formula, and types of life in a classification of 'kinds' or genera. To the modern spirit nothing is or can be rightly known except relatively under conditions."²⁹ Coleridge was therefore anachronistic in his frequent "attempts to reduce a phase of thought subtle and exquisite to conditions too rough for it . . . to fix [scientific truth] in absolute formulas."³⁰ He was also too limited in his theological views, according to Pater, because "Coleridge thinks that if we reject the supernatural, the spiritual element in life will evaporate also, that we shall have to accept a life with narrow horizons, without disinterestedness, harshly cut off from the springs of life in the past."³¹ Hopkins is clearly trying to challenge Pater's argument on its own terms. When he considers "the questions into wh. the discussion of the spring of moral ideas will throw itself," he can only conclude that "the utilitarian formula requires much exception."³²

Of all of Coleridge's so-called "arguments," the one which Pater was most reluctant to refute concerned unity. Simply by reading the quotations which he cites in the article one rediscovers a crucial source for the emerging aesthetic of Pater and Hopkins. This is especially true of the fragment from Aids to Reflection which states, "[i]n the world, we see everywhere evidences of a unity, which the component parts are so far from explaining, that they necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition of their existing as those parts, or even of their existing at all."³³ In late 1865 and 1866, Pater was still wrangling with the implications of this notion. Although his mature art criticism is grounded on the belief that "the unity of the thing with itself"³⁴is paramount, his early philosophical essays reveal a hesitancy towards the "constraining" forces of unity. Hopkins, on the other hand, accepted wholeheartedly the arguments for unity. His first essay for Pater concludes with this ringing endorsement: "All thought is of course in a sense an effort a[t] unity. This may be pursued analytically as in science or synthetically as in art or morality. In art it is essential to recognise and to strive to realise on a more or less wide basis this unity in some shape or other. It seems also that the desire for unity, for the ideal, is the only definition wh. will satisfy the historical phenomena of morality."³⁵ On this point at least the pupil's thinking was more settled and harmonious than the teacher's.

Thanks largely to Kant and Coleridge, the subject-object antinomy had become a staple of the British intellectual diet by mid-century, a "distinction," to quote D.III.4, "understood widely and reappearing in all discussions."³⁶ Jowett, however, stressed its absence in the ethical teachings of Socrates and Plato.³⁷ When the phrase "objective and subjective" is first employed in D.III.1, Pater underlines it, perhaps to indicate that further explication is needed. Hopkins tries to explain all of his terminology in D.III.3, "The Pagan and Christian virtues":

One is struck by the different values given by Xtianity and paganism to what wd. be called the subjective and objective sides of morality. We cannot but recognise the vast benefit gained fr. the distinctions of will and deed or conscience and law . . . which Xtianity has established when we turn to the ethics of the ancients and see the slow and incomplete unwinding of moral from mental excellences and the far greater prominence given to the fulfillment of the outward ideal of right conduct.³⁸

By the time Hopkins composed this third essay for Pater, they had obviously grown comfortable enough in each other's company to confront their differences openly. Pater's strident attacks on the "Christian religion" in the 1860s are exemplified in "Coleridge's Writings." The article applauds those "who have passed out of Christianity"; it insists categorically that "[t]he Catholic church and humanity are two powers that divide the intellect and the spirit of man."³⁹ Nothing could be more antithetical to this position than the support for Christian morality in general and Catholicism in particular voiced in Hopkins's essay "On Pagan and Christian Values." Even the most enlightened pagans, Hopkins argues, defined their morality and their virtues in terms of the state, the public good, "not with the individual."⁴⁰ Hopkins contrasts this at some length with Christianity, in which "the all-important relation is to God."⁴¹

In D.III.1 and again in D.III.3 Hopkins refers to Plato's "remarkable" belief that "goodness was knowledge, vice ignorance"⁴²—an issue that Jowett always stressed in his lectures.⁴³ Pater asked Hopkins for a detailed analysis of the proposition, no doubt mindful that such a topic was standard Greats material. Accordingly, Hopkins assembled his thoughts on: "The history and mutual connection in ancient ethics of the following questions—Can virtue be taught? Are virtue and vice severally voluntary and involuntary?"—questions posed in Plato's Meno, Protagoras, and the Apology. Hopkins's essay draws on primary sources, "Jowetry," and George Grote's seminal study, Plato, and the Other Companions of Sokrates; Pater's complementary analysis is found in the third chapter of Plato and Platonism.

Although the substance of Hopkins's argument is very traditional, the epistemological strategies he must entertain reflect once again the contemporary debate about the relative or non-relative nature of human knowledge. While pursuing these pivotal questions in Plato, Hopkins discovered not one but several contrary expressions of thought. He responded: "It is to be observed that contradiction of this sort matters little: the point is not whether Plato in some places surrenders an opinion . . . but whether an opinion is treated strongly enough to appear one of the currents which draw his thought. His irony and the suspension of judgment which after all he allows on great questions, as Goethe did too, make us not wish to press him to a conclusion."⁴⁴ (The comparison between Plato and Goethe which springs to mind is a very Paterian gesture.) Hopkins's remarks are typical of what one could call the Oxford approach to Plato, a sage man who, to quote Pater, "in spite of the demand he makes for certainty and exactness and what is absolute, in all real knowledge," believes that knowledge remains somewhat "elusive, provisional, contingent, a matter of various approximations."⁴⁵ Pater too cites the master's irony and humour as touchstones of "Plato's actual method of learning and teaching," a method which embodies "what is still sometimes understood to be the 'academic spirit', surveying all sides, arraying evidence, ascertaining, measuring, balancing, tendencies, but ending in suspension of judgment."⁴⁶ Pater was very comfortable with such an approach—some would say, too comfortable. Hopkins on the other hand demonstrated from youth an obverse need to make and then act upon firm judgments. Accordingly, D.III.6 concludes with this statement: "But with or without irony it cd. not be avoided that Plato's ethical system shd. be criticised after his time and be forced to the conclusions which it suggests. This is done by Aristotle."⁴⁷

Walter Pater was similar in many ways to the Giordano Bruno he recreated for Gaston de Latour, a man who "was careful to warn off the vulgar from applying the decisions of philosophy beyond its proper speculative limits."⁴⁸ What Pater always asked of his students was that they discover for themselves these philosophical boundaries. In Hopkins's case, the process was fully under way when he composed D.III.4, "The relations of Plato's Dialectic to modern logic and metaphysics." The essay builds upon the translation of the Philebus which Hopkins undertook for Jowett in Lent term 1866.⁴⁹ For Pater, however, Hopkins turns from the Philebus to the more difficult and intellectually challenging Symposium,⁵⁰ retracing the steps from the love of mortal beauty to the love and "knowledge of the beautiful itself"⁵¹ first outlined for Socrates by the Mantinean Sibyl. In this "process of abstraction," Hopkins blithely insists, "the concrete [is] plainly being cast aside at each step of the ascent."⁵² Pater would have vehemently challenged this point for two reasons: first, because he always privileged the concrete over the abstract; and secondly, because he believed that Socrates and Plato, masters of "visual expression"⁵³ and keen appreciators of the concrete world, achieved an understanding of the concrete within the Idea parallel to their concept of the Many within the One. The proof of Pater's persuasiveness is found in the argument which Hopkins puts forward in D.XII, the Birmingham commentary written some months after D.III.4. These notes begin by re-examining the concrete's relationship to the abstract:

Great feature of the old Gk. philosophy, Pater said, its holding certain truths, chiefly logical, out of proportion to the rest of its knowledge, as Parmenides his dialectic abt. Being and Not-Being, Zeno the contradictions involved in Motion, the Meharians and Heracleitus the difficulties of identity. The explanation of this perhaps is that they argued on the Idea alone, on the thought at its first blush, unrealised. This is not the same thing as saying, what is obviously true, that they argued in abstractions without referring to the concrete, because that is just leaving the question open whether abstractions exist apart in any way fr. the concrete, of Nominalism and Realism in their merely logical bearing in fact. The Idea, it is to be remembered, is not the abstraction, indeed it is as much the concrete as the abstract and exists before the universal has been abstracted from the particulars and the particulars realised in the universal.⁵⁴

He has definitely conceded Pater's argument, yet characteristically he draws the line between an appreciation of the material, concrete world and materialism itself. Hopkins goes on in D.XII.1 to distinguish between himself and those "grimed with the concrete," the Comtean positivists.⁵⁵

This reference to Comte enables us to clarify our understanding of what Pater did not say about Positivism. Although he shared with Comte a belief in the relativity of knowledge, "there is no evidence," to quote Billie Inman, that Comte "ever had a strong influence on Pater."⁵⁶When Pater does refer to Comte in the 1868 essay "Poems by William Morris," it is to warn his readers that "what we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing opinion and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte or of Hegel or of our own."⁵⁷ If Hopkins's differentiation between Pater and Positivism is not made clear, then one of his best undergraduate essays, "The probable future of metaphysics,"⁵⁸ is likely to be misread. Written for T. H. Green in the term just preceding the Greats exam (spring 1867), when Pater was probably still coaching Hopkins, the paper defends metaphysics against a series of would-be usurpers, most especially psychology and Comtean sociology. Hopkins marshalls support from John Grote, Mill, and Hegel to counter the argument that "the end of all metaphysics is at hand."⁵⁹ He begins by refuting the Positivists, and saves until last the Paterian philosophy of flux.

"The probable future of metaphysics," I would suggest, constitutes Hopkins's response to some of the primary ideas expressed in Pater's essay on Winckelmann published in January 1867,⁶⁰ and to the theory of flux described in "Coleridge's Writings." From his first essay to his last, Pater eschewed metaphysics and "all dead metaphysical philosophies."⁶¹ It is "easy to indulge the commonplace metaphysical instinct," he observes in "Winckelmann," "[b]ut a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life."⁶² In these remarks Pater is seconding Benjamin Jowett, who "protested" with "vehemence," a student re-calls, that "the chief use of metaphysics is to get rid of metaphysics altogether."⁶³

Modern thought has abandoned the pursuit of the absolute, Pater insists in "Coleridge's Writings"; instead, the relative spirit, the spirit of the Heraclitean flux, is being cultivated. As further proof of his argument, Pater links the relative spirit with the wisdom of Hegel and Darwin to try to demonstrate that the "inexpressible refinements of change"⁶⁴are common to moral philosophy, the sciences, and the arts. "Forms of intellectual and spiritual culture," he observes, "often exercise their subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from them. . . . Nature, which by one law of development evolves ideas, moralities, modes of inward life, and represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity."⁶⁵ Pater's use of the term "continuity" may seem mystifying, because we no longer associate it with the concept of flux. Hopkins, however, was very familiar with the connection. In the latter half of "The probable future of metaphysics," he brings forward several points to "challenge the prevalent philosophy of continuity or flux."⁶⁶ The current philosophical "season" of "Hegel and the philosophy of development in time," he remarks, is characterized by "the ideas of Historical Development, of things both in thought and fact detaching and differencing and individualising and expressing themselves, of continuity and of time."⁶⁷ Taking up Pater's argument about Nature, Hopkins acknowledges that "[t]o the prevalent philosophy and science nature is a string[,] all the differences in which are really chromatic but certain places in it have become accidentally. . . fixed and the series of fixed points becomes an arbitrary scale."⁶⁸ However, he asserts, there are non-arbitrary, timeless forms in the realms of nature, art, and ideas which transcend the flux:

[T]here are certain forms wh. have a great hold on the mind and are always reappearing and seem imperishable, such as the designs of Greek vases and lyres,. . .the fleur-de-lys, while every day we see designs both simple and elaborate wh. do not live and are at once forgotten; and some pictures we may long look at and never grasp or hold together, while the composition of others strikes the mind with a conception of unity wh. is never dislodged: and these things are inexplicable on the theory of pure chromatism or continuity—the forms have in some sense or other an absolute existence.⁶⁹

One of the more remarkable features of this passage—a prototype for Hopkins's theory of "inscape"—is that Hopkins has used elements of Pater's own argument to contradict his tutor. It is in the same "Winckelmann" essay which sounds the death-knell of metaphysics that Pater celebrates the timeless beauty, repose, and "centrality" of Greek sculpture and praises any work of art in which we find "the clear ring of a central motive. We receive from it the impression of one imaginative tone, of a single creative act."⁷⁰ Pater was far more tolerant of inconsistencies in his thoughts and work than Hopkins was.

The primary point to be made concerning Hopkins's undergraduate essays on aesthetics is that the majority of the papers—and the best—were not written for Pater. This surprises us until we remember that Pater only gradually discovered his talents and tendencies in art criticism; his first public displays of combative erudition focused on philosophical subjects. Nonetheless, we are grateful for such Hopkins essays as "On the rise of Greek prose-writing,"⁷¹ "On the signs of health and decay in the arts,"⁷² and "On the true idea and excellence of sculpture"⁷³—all composed before Hopkins met Pater—because they retrace the gestation of many aesthetic concepts with which both young men tried to wrestle. Principally, they direct us to the preoccupations and pedagogy of Jowett, for whom these essays were written. It was Jowett who lectured to both of them on the relevance of Lessing, Kant, and Hegel, and who always cast his arguments in terms of such antithetical pairs as Classical and Romantic, objective and subjective, centripetal and centrifugal. It was also Jowett who used sculptural metaphors to explain the unsurpassed artistry of Plato's prose style, his "perfect perception of the plastic power of words."⁷⁴ One Jowett lecture, entitled "On the style of Plato," stresses that the "manliness + simplicity," the "self restraint" of Classical art is also to be found in the best philosophical literature:

You may look at a Greek statue and be struck with the flexure of the limbs, the majestic folds of the drapery, the simplicity, the strength; And yet scarcely any topics arise in the mind of the uncritical [viewer], only when the difference is pointed out to him between such work as the Venus Victrise and some muse of the Augustan age or later, with its flattened [paste del.] cardboard looking face and thin creased robe he sees a separation not of degree but of kind. The highest art is colourless like water, it has been said; it is a surface without prominences or irregularities over which the eye wanders impressed by the beauty of the whole with nothing to detain it at a particular point.

The same image about style—colourless as water. Criticism cannot analyse but only imperfectly describe it. It is a smooth surface over which the hand may pass without interruption, but the curious work lies beneath the surface: the effect only is seen from without. The finer the workmanship the more completely is the art concealed.⁷⁵

In this way Jowett alerted his auditors to the excellences of Greek sculpture and provided a peculiarly apt frame of reference for judging Plato's classical style—lessons that neither Pater nor Hopkins forgot.

Remarks in D.III.1 to the effect that "the clearest and most disinterested appreciation of beauty" comes from "education"⁷⁶ lead directly to essay D.III.2, "Plato's view of the connection of art and education." Pater may have been hoping that his pupil would challenge some of Plato's precepts, particularly the decision to banish poets from the commonwealth, but Hopkins refrains from doing so. Instead, he affirms previous arguments about the need for unity in art and morality, stressing that Plato depends upon music, drama, and poetry "to preserve unity in the distracting multiplicity of life."⁷⁷

On the surface D.III.2 seems to contribute little to our further understanding of the intellectual exchange enjoyed by Pater and Hopkins. However, the education which Plato advocated consisted of two basic courses of instruction: gymnasia and mousika. The last, as George Grote explains, "includes all training by means of words or sounds: speech and song, recital and repetition, reading and writing. . . ."⁷⁸Therefore, what we have in D.III.2 is an essay in which Hopkins reminds Pater that music, by virtue of harmonia, is the pattern of all the arts, and that the arts, like morals, contribute to and reflect the inner unity of humankind. Pater himself makes the latter point in Marius the Epicurean, when he observes that "the old Greek morality again, with all its imperfections, was certainly a comely thing—Yes! a harmony, a music, in man's ways, one might well hesitate to jar."⁷⁹ However, it is his recapitulation of the former point for which he is best remembered: "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music."⁸⁰ Various sources have been suggested for Pater's most pregnant and provocative axiom. Hopkins's essay reminds us that Plato was among the first to probe the metaphorical potential of music, as well as its formal properties. As Pater summarizes in Plato and Platonism, "accordingly, in education, all will begin and end in `music', in the promotion of qualities to which no truer name can be given than symmetry, aesthetic fitness, tone. Philosophy itself, indeed, as he conceives it, is but the sympathetic appreciation of a kind of music in the very nature of things."⁸¹

Of all the essays in D.III, the only one that must have disappointed pupil and tutor alike was D.III.5, "Shew cases in wh. acts of apprehension apparently simple are largely influenced by the imagination." The initial paragraphs are quite promising: Hopkins attempts to distinguish between "Locke's sense of our consciousness"⁸² and "Kantian" distinctions between imagination "in the logical sense, for conceiving" and imagination as "the faculty of art production."⁸³ But what eludes him is the point at which sensation becomes "influenced" by the intangible imagination. Consequently he soon becomes sidetracked by logical distinctions, and eventually abandons the assignment with the remark, "I now see this is not the subject of the essay."⁸⁴

Hopkins was assigned this topic, I would suggest, to allow him to grapple with the same sensation-perception-imagination matrix which Pater himself tried to address in "Coleridge's Writings." Before evaluating the way in which Coleridge "weaves" into his own philosophy "Kant's finespun theory of the transformation of sense into perception," Pater pauses to expound his own views: "What every theory of perception has to explain is that associative power which gathers isolated sensible qualities into the objects of the world about us. Sense, without associative power, would be only a threadlike stream of colours, sounds, odours—each struck upon one for a moment and then withdrawn."⁸⁵ Coleridge's borrowed theory, he goes on to argue, fails to account for the fact that "this power of association, of concentrating many elements of sense in a object of perception, is refined and deepened into the creative acts of the imagination."⁸⁶

To conclude my overview of Pater's intertextual presence in Hopkins's thinking and writing, I would like to pursue the Paterian "under-currents" informing Hopkins's theory of "inscape." Ruskin of course initially inspired both young men to identify and appreciate the beauty and science of form, the essential organic pattern (or "law") within the cloud, cathedral, or painting. Yet Hopkins was also privy to the ways in which Pater offset the lessons of Modern Painters with Platonic theory and Hegel's Asthetik. Ruskin's immediate focus was landscape painting and the natural world; Pater's interests were both broader, in cultural terms, and different, because art for him was essentially artifice—a restructuring of sensation and emotions into a foreign medium made possible by the artist's recognition of the "hidden causes" of life and motion, the "truth of nature" underneath the "visible surface."⁸⁷ "The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive," he wrote during the months he was coaching Hopkins: "[i]t must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relation between itself and them. It struggles with these forms until its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall back into its place, in the supreme, artistic view of life."⁸⁸What is Hopkins's search for inscapes in tress, bluebells, and sonnets but an engagement with their essential forms until the secrets of pattern and structure are won from each?

Soon after meeting Pater, Hopkins intensifies and refines his search for the law of aspects, and he does so with a new sensitivity to composition and form, sensation and impression. The terms "inscape" and "instress" may have sprung fully grown from his mind, but their final theoretical gestation is recorded in D.XII. As previously mentioned, these "Notes on Gk. Philosophy" begin with a review of Pater's thoughts on the subject, his essential lessons about the Idea and form. Then, on 9 February 1868, Hopkins combines the Ruskinian notion of "relation" with Pater's emphasis on expression, impression, prepossession,⁸⁹ and form to puzzle out the meaning of words and works of art. His conclusion: "The further in anything, as a work of art, the organisation is carried out, the deeper the form penetrates, the prepossession [of feeling] fuses the matter, the more effort will be required in apprehension, the more power of comparison, the more capacity for receiving that synthesis . . . [of] impression which gives us the unity with the prepossession conveyed by it."⁹⁰ These animadversions on "words" then give way to a series of notes on pre-Socratic philosophers, the second of which, "Parmenides," introduces and explains the terms "inscape" and "instress." Only when Hopkins understands for himself the relationship between impression, form, and inscape, does he truly comprehend the origins of beauty.

The essential paradigm of intertextuality outlined in this discussion is one of answering. Exposure to Pater's conversations and published works catalyzed Hopkins's thinking and writing—often in antithetical directions. The "underthoughts" which link Hopkins's canon to Pater's are verbal witnesses to a very rare phenomenon: a friendship, an understanding and rapport based upon personal and intellectual ties lessened by time but never severed. As Marius the Epicurean explains, "the saint, and the Cyrenaic lover of beauty, it may be thought, would at least understand each other better than either would understand the mere man of the world. Carry their respective positions a point further, shift the terms a little, and they might actually touch."⁹¹