Anthropocentrism and the Soul of Hopkins’s Ecopoetics

Julia F. Saville

Victorian Poetry, Volume 56, Number 2, Summer 2018, pp. 129-146 (Article)

Published by West Virginia University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2018.0008

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/705106

Access provided by Ebsco Publishing (9 Oct 2018 12:45 GMT)

Anthropocentrism and the
Soul of Hopkins’s Ecopoetics
JULIA F. SAVILLE

T oday, anthropocentrism—­that “[c]oncern for ourselves at the expense of

concern for the non-­human world”—is considered by many ecologists
to be one of the fundamental ­causes of environmental degradation that, left
unaddressed, threatens potential disaster.1 As Andrew Dobson puts it, to “de-
throne ­human interests as the centerpiece of po­liti­cal life and extend ethical
concern deep into the natu­ral world,” we need a “radically changed state of con-
sciousness,” one that refuses exploitative practices characteristic of “human-­
instrumental” thinking and cultivates a sense of self dependent on and enriched
by “the widest pos­si­ble identification with the non-­human world” (pp. 31, 38).
The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, vibrant with cele­brations of flora
and fauna, kingfishers and skylarks, the “low lull-­off” of the ocean and “cordial
air” of the woods, seems calculated to inspire precisely such a change of con-
sciousness, such a sense of selves dependent on and enriched by nonhuman
being for which ecocritics such as Dobson call.2 What is more, the value that
his poetry attributes to nonhuman nature is not to be understood as merely
aesthetic; on the contrary, while he certainly encourages a greater apprecia-
tion of natu­ral beauty and marshals a finely wrought poetic practice to make
his case, the crucial importance of his ecopoetics lies in the substantive ethi-
cal value it attributes to nonhuman being. Paradoxically, this is also ­because
the health of the ­human soul is one of his leading concerns.
Chris­tian­ity, like the Platonism that preceded it and the Cartesianism
that followed, is often perceived as authorizing anthropocentrism on the basis
of humanity’s claim to a soul (psuchē) or mind (psyche).3 Yet as I ­will show in
this essay, the h­ uman soul in Hopkins’s conception of it, far from endorsing
­human dominance over the natu­ral world, is immersed in natu­ral rhythms and
energy systems, responsive to their alterity and inscrutability, and depends on
natu­ral phenomena for its well-­being. For Hopkins’s poetry reflects a virtue
ethics in which an Aristotelian Catholic’s view of soul as the shaping energy
or instress of the body merges with a belief in God’s immanence in all being,
the sanctity of which is therefore unquestionable. Unlike the Hegelian “beau-
tiful soul” derided by Timothy Morton for its ethical quiescence, hy­poc­risy, and
129
130 ∕ VICTORIAN POETRY

lack of critical self-­awareness,4 Hopkins’s soul bears moral obligations not simply to
re­spect but to celebrate, revere, care for, and defend the natu­ral world—­obligations
that, if not fulfilled, indict the ethical worth of ­human being in itself.
Although Hopkins, like many of his poetic pre­de­ces­sors, was deeply con-
cerned about the spiritual well-­being of Victorian Britain, the conditions he
faced w­ ere somewhat dif­fer­ent from ­those addressed by earlier soul-­poets. In
Victorian Soul-­Talk, I have argued that in the de­cades between the Reform Acts
of 1832 and 1884, British poets such as the Brownings, Arthur Hugh Clough,
and Algernon Charles Swinburne, along with their American interlocutor,
Walt Whitman, used a vibrant poetic soul-­talk to assert their par­tic­u­lar sense
of moral responsibility for the spiritual well-­being of the body politic.5 Each with
a par­tic­u­lar understanding of soul, its provenance and constitution, t­ hese po-
ets exploited the rich aesthetic potential of language to create poetry with
striking sensory appeal, encouraging readers to experience the complex effects
of po­liti­cal decisions on public spirit.6 This, however, was before the chang-
ing po­liti­cal landscape and the new science of psy­chol­ogy transformed “soul”
and a relatively homogeneous “soul politic” into the private, individualized
“psyche” and a vastly increased and diversified voting public.
In relation to ­these poets, Hopkins is an outlier. His conception of soul—­
aside from its immersion in Ignatian, Scotist, and Augustinian scholasticism—­
owed much to his study of the classics at 1860s Oxford, where curricular reforms
­were contributing to an intellectual climate challenging to metaphysics. ­Under
the leadership of Benjamin Jowett, theories of soul found in, for example, Plato
and Aristotle w ­ ere stimulating newly liberating civic and aesthetic debates
advanced by writers such as Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Oscar
Wilde.7 Furthermore, in an intellectual climate in which new fields such as psy­
chol­ogy ­were separating from philosophy, and proponents of British positivism
and utilitarianism debated warmly with enthusiasts of German idealism,
terms with overtly metaphysical and religious connotations, such as the “soul”
or “psuchē,” ­were often replaced by more empirical, secular alternatives such
as “self,” “psyche,” and “mind,” which displaced collective ethical alliances
between souls, their spiritual fellowship, and their godhead with an emphasis
on individual well-­being. Reflecting this moment of cultural transition, Hop-
kins’s talk of soul is generally confined to his poetry and devotional writings.
In the former, his soul-­talk seems akin to Romantic and earlier Victorian pre­
ce­dents, but in the latter, his highly specific meditations on the soul’s compo-
sition and functioning help us to understand the importance of his poetry for
articulating vital connections between humanity, the natu­ral world, and di-
vine Being.
 Saville ∕ 131

In relation to earlier soul-­poets, Hopkins’s mature poetry is also po­liti­

cally belated since it postdates the events that preoccupied his pre­de­ces­sors:
the midcentury domestic reforms such as factory legislation and early de-
bates about extension of the franchise, or foreign affairs such as British
involvements with Risorgimento Italy, abolition and the U.S. Civil War, or
Second Empire France. Radical founder-­members of the Old Mortality essay
society—­such student contemporaries of Swinburne as T. H. Green and Pater,
who had enthusiastically debated ­these affairs in the 1850s—­were now Hopkins’s
tutors. As a young man, he himself discussed po­liti­cal affairs only rarely and then
in private correspondence, where he reflects an occasionally radical but mostly
conservative Toryism rather than the egalitarian or demo­cratic spirit of the ear-
lier soul-­poets.8 In due course, however, he came to share a number of com-
mon concerns with them from which his ecopoetics emerged.
Already in 1871, while in Jesuit training at Stonyhurst, Hopkins decried
the social injustices of the “old civilization,” which he considered “in ­great mea­
sure founded on wrecking” (Corres., 1: 210). In his notorious “red letter” to
Robert Bridges, written shortly ­after the fall of the Paris Commune, he ex-
presses sympathy not only with communism (and, by implication, the Com-
munards who had been massacred in spring) but with the working class in both
­England and France. “­England,” he writes, “has grown hugely wealthy but this
wealth has not reached the working classes; I expect it has made their condition
worse” (Corres., 1: 210). ­Later, through his parish work during the early 1880s in
large manufacturing towns such as Liverpool and Glasgow, he developed an
acute awareness of the degradation of the urban-­industrial environment inhab-
ited by the working poor.
To Hopkins, physical and moral degradation ­were interrelated and mutu-
ally exacerbating. Confiding in his friend and fellow poet Richard Watson
Dixon, he writes in December 1881 that this experience “laid upon [his] mind a
conviction, a truly crushing conviction, of the misery of town life to the poor
and more than to the poor, of the misery of the poor in general, of the degrada-
tion even of our race, of the hollowness of this ­century’s civilization” (Corres., 1:
505). He complains of the foul, smoky air and the filth of the rivers in the big
towns, seeing ­these as direct evidence of more pervasive moral degradation and
lack of self-­respect. In a riposte to Bridges, who, having recently returned from a
tour of Italy, complained of the filth of Italian monks, Hopkins points to the
shameful condition of Britain itself: “Is it not dirty, yea filthy, to pollute the air as
Blackburn and Widnes and St. Helen’s are polluted and the ­water, as the Thames
and the Clyde and the Irwell are polluted? The ancients with their im­mense
public baths would have thought even our cleanest towns dirty” (Corres., 2: 981).
132 ∕ VICTORIAN POETRY

Hopkins had small faith in the state’s ­will or ability to alter ­these condi-
tions: in his view, cynicism and expediency pervaded con­temporary politics,
where princi­ple was too readily sacrificed to practical interests, particularly to
trade and commerce (Corres., 1: 210). The Liberal Gladstone, for instance, was
to Hopkins a mere “truckler” to other Eu­ro­pean superpowers and economic
constituencies such as the Freemasons. His reckless administration of foreign
affairs contributed to the shameful demoralization and depletion of the w ­ hole
British Empire (Corres., 1: 431). In poetry, however, Hopkins saw the potential for
ethical intervention. To be sure, when he thought of poetry as an aesthetic pas-
time, he considered it an indulgence incompatible with his profession as a priest.9
But when he experienced it as an expression of his intense devotion to Christ, a
form of giving glory to God, or as a form of public ser­vice, he wrote freely.
Indeed, ­toward the end of Hopkins’s life, he declared passionately to
Bridges and Dixon that poetic production and public awareness of poets con-
tribute significantly to popu­lar education. As with his poetry, the highly wrought
language of his prose—­his accentual phrasing, alliteration, assonance, and vi-
brant imagery—­renders the energy supporting his convictions palpable to his
readers. “What are works of art for?” he asks, continuing,
To educate, to be standards. Education is meant for the many, standards
are for public use. To produce then is of ­little use ­unless what we produce
is known, if known[,] widely known, the wider known the better, for it is
by being known it works, it influences, it does its duty, it does good. We
must then try to be known, aim at it, take means to it. . . . ​Besides, we are
En­glishmen. A g­ reat work by an En­glishman is like a g­ reat ­battle won by
­England. It is an unfading bay tree. It w
­ ill even be admired by and praised
by and do good to t­ hose who hate ­England, . . . ​who do not wish even to be
benefited by her. (Corres., 2: 813)
In the claim “Education is meant for the many,” in overlaid echoes and sound
patterns of the phrasing “standards are for public use. To produce then is of ­little
use ­unless what we produce is known,” and in the urgent rhythm of the phras-
ing “it dóes its dúty, it dóes góod,” all the passion of the poet’s conviction can
be felt: poetry can be a virtue-­inspiring public good. This affective energy, as
I hope to show, exemplifies Hopkins’s own conception of soul as an energy made
manifest through the body. Theorized in scholastic terms, soul is a metaphysi-
cal conduit to divinity and a tripartite ethical resource composed of f­ree w ­ ill,
aided by conscience, and motivated by power­ful inclination with the potential
for virtuous action (but, notably, also for error). The complexity of this soul
and its expression in poetry with pedagogical power to cultivate ­human rever-
 Saville ∕ 133

ence for all va­ri­e­ties of being have their roots in Hopkins’s classical education
at Oxford and ­later in his training as a Jesuit priest.
Soul-­Talk at Oxford: Aristotle, Plato, and the Question
of Public Ethics
“Soul,” its characteristics and provenance, is one of many preoccupations evi-
dent in Hopkins’s undergraduate essays, particularly in his studies of Plato and
Aristotle ­under the tutorship of the Hegelian idealist T.  H. Green and the
Aristotelian Robert Williams. In an essay on the “[c]onnection of Aristotle’s
metaphysics with his ethics,”10 Hopkins observes that from an Aristotelian per-
spective, the physics of m­ atter and the metaphysics of form “meet preeminently
in man, whose essence is a body of ­matter informed by a soul” (Ox. Ess., p. 264).
Notably the usage of “form” in such discussions is Aristotelian and refers not
to the shape of ­matter as in ­today’s discussions of literary form, but to the cre-
ative force generating that material shape. Similarly, the verb “inform” implies
a shaping or imbuing with energy. The body is therefore a manifestation of the
soul, and bodily signs indicate the latter’s well-­being and beauty. As Hopkins
himself ­later puts it, “even bodily beauty, even the beauty of blooming health,
is from the soul, in the sense, as we Aristotelian Catholics say, that the soul is
the form of the body” (Corres., 1: 374); “looks” are therefore “the soul’s own
letters” (“On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young ­People,” PW, p. 192).
For Aristotle, humanity is physically “the highest piece of organ­ization
in the world” or “the highest realization of form.” Having agency, humanity can
act as a cause, and its actions have an end peculiar to it: “a property wh. is not
common to trees or beasts,” namely, “mind” (Aristotle’s psuchē or soul) (Ox.
Ess., p. 264). Mind is an end realized through “the concrete science of morals,”
the Nicomachean Ethics being in Hopkins’s opinion the “first systematic work
on Morals” (Ox. Ess., p. 265n2). Notably h ­ ere, as a mere “property,” “mind” does
not attribute to humanity any necessary ethical value above ­those beings who
do not possess it, such as “trees or beasts.” Rather, humanity must exert itself to
realize its highest end: “the fullest action of . . . ​mind,” including “a sheaf of fac-
ulties, capacities, or potentialities,” each with its own end or virtue. In due
course, Hopkins’s own brand of virtue ethics takes shape as the periodical train-
ing of the soul, through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, to act justly in the ser­
vice of God.
Contrasting Aristotle’s preoccupation with the soul’s relationship to the
body, Plato theorizes the transcendent soul. In tutorial notes for Williams (“Pla-
to’s Philosophy—­R. W.,” Ox. Ess., pp. 235–255), Hopkins compares Plato’s
ideal, immortal soul with Aristotle’s “enmattered” version (Ox. Ess., p. 246).
134 ∕ VICTORIAN POETRY

Each has its own appeal for the poet, Plato exemplifying an inspiring idealism
and Aristotle a clear-­sighted empiricism informing the Roman Catholic incar-
nationist doctrine to which Hopkins ­later subscribed. He notes the ­free, spec-
ulative mythmaking that gives rise to diverse versions of the Platonic soul: “all
is mythe with him and his mythes overlap, contradict ­etc.” (Ox. Ess., p. 246).
If the soul in Phaedo is nonmaterial and ­simple (without parts), happily freed
from the body in death to allow the unencumbered phi­los­o­pher to attain abso-
lute truth,11 in the Timaeus “it is split into two parts, rational and irrational”
(Ox. Ess., p. 246), while in the Republic it becomes a tripartite soul comprising
reason, spirit, and appetite or desire. The “kernel of all t­ hese mythes,” Hopkins
concludes, is that in Plato “[o]ur souls alternate betw. a transcendental and a
phenomenal . . . ​life,” so that “[o]ur bodies . . . ​are the tombs of our souls” (Ox.
Ess., pp. 246–247). Since for Plato ­matter is “a kind of malignant evil,” the health
of soul depends on ascetic living: “every­thing materialistic is bad, so that one
must be an ascetic” (Ox. Ess., p. 237). For all the Aristotelianism informing
Hopkins’s incarnationist views, and the consequently sensual, phenomeno-
logical character of his poetics, the tripartite Platonic soul still echoes in his
description of soul’s ethical operation. Furthermore, Plato’s metaphysics linger
in Hopkins’s private ascetic practice, his repre­sen­ta­tions of the soul impris-
oned in the body (“Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-­house, mean h ­ ouse
dwells” [PW, p. 148]), his painstakingly crafted poetic technique, and his in-
spired natu­ral images of transcendence, such as “the heaven-­háven of the
rewárd” or “that glory in the heavens,” where his Christ is immanent (PW,
pp. 128, 149).12
In Hopkins’s undergraduate writing, soul lends a definitive individualism
to his virtue ethics, largely s­ haped by his re­sis­tance to “the Empirical and Utili-
tarian schools” and their consequentialist goal of the greatest happiness. For
instance, while reading Plato’s Republic, he questions Socrates’s analogy between
justice (or right action) as practiced by individuals and justice as a concern of
the city-­state. The analogy, in his view, does not hold, for a state can have “no
consciousness, . . . ​no conscience. To say that the government is the state con-
science wd. be a fallacy” (Ox. Ess., p. 207).13 The ac­cep­tance of this analogy
within Greek thought, he surmises, lies in the Greeks’ emphasis on the com-
mon good and the underdevelopment of their conception of individual char-
acter (Ox. Ess., pp. 207–208). However, following the development of private
ethics among the Epicureans and Stoics, Christian ethics become ­shaped pri-
marily by “the new relation of the soul to God,” from whom “the soul is consid-
ered to receive all its relations of morality” (Ox. Ess., p. 225). According to this
view, the individual’s relation to the collective is secondary to the soul’s
 Saville ∕ 135

relation to God, ethical be­hav­ior being primarily a ­matter of individual ­free

­will supported by conscience and the cultivation of per­sis­tent self-­reflection.
The soul’s relation to God also introduces a salutary humility into ethics: “the
soul is h ­ umble by comparing itself to God” as it is invited “to refer itself in all
­things to Him” (Ox. Ess., p. 226).
Although as an undergraduate Hopkins believed that “personal moral-
ity conditions po­liti­cal before po­liti­cal personal” (Ox. Ess., p. 256), he modi-
fied this view when he encountered firsthand the plight of the urban poor and
recognized the collective effort needed for social change; for instance, in one
of his Liverpool sermons, he describes the kingdom of heaven in strikingly
civic republican terms as a contractually based commonwealth, a “meeting of
many for their common good, for which good all are solemnly agreed to strive”
(SD, p. 56). Characterized by justice, reciprocity, and mutual well-­being, derived
from and conducive to individual civic virtue, such a state is the source of col-
lective pride: “[H]ow bright a ­thing [is] a wellordered commonwealth, where all
the citizens, ­every least member of the state, is glorified by one equal justice!
­every man a just man, an honest man, an honourable man! for just means hon-
est and honest means deserving honour” (SD, p. 57). The failure of both British
leadership and citizenry to enter into such an agreement becomes the basis of
Hopkins’s environmental critiques in his post-1875 poetry. Spiritual apathy—­
manifest as failure to cultivate “one equal justice” inclusive of all being—is cast
in solidly collective terms, as a failure of po­liti­cal as much as personal ethics.14
Soul’s Instress and Its Inscapes: From Parmenides to the
Ignatian Spiritual Exercises
As Hopkins continued his post-­Oxford studies, first as a teacher at Newman’s
Birmingham Oratory (1867–1868), then during the vari­ous stages of his Jesuit
training, his journals and notes rec­ord the emergence of his “private doctrine
of ‘instress’ and ‘inscape,’ ”15 the theory through which he visualizes the energy
that not only constitutes the soul as humanity’s conduit to divine Being but
is also manifest as divine immanence in all beings. Hopkins’s thinking on
the pre-­Socratic Parmenides, Johannes Duns Scotus, and physicists such as
­Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell reveals the diversity of learning
that informed this doctrine and the negotiation between Aristotelian empiri-
cism and Platonist idealism that it entailed. But it is perhaps the notes made
during his Long Retreat of November–­December 1881, when he performed the
Spiritual Exercises, that reveal most clearly the ways that talk of soul intersects
with instress and inscape to actualize an ecocritical poetics that is unexpectedly
challenging to anthropocentrism.16
136 ∕ VICTORIAN POETRY

A particularly illuminating passage occurs in the first week of the retreat,

as Hopkins performs the Fifth Exercise, the “Meditation on Hell,” visualizing
the consequences of forgetting “the love of the Eternal Lord.” Musing on the
difference between literal and figurative forms of suffering, t­ hose of the senses
and t­ hose of the imagination, Hopkins weaves the terms “instress,” “stress,” and
“scape” into his talk of soul to imagine the corporeally experienced spiritual
agonistics involved in a fall from grace. “Instress” appears first as a verb implying
internal pressure actualized physically, as in the observation, “The soul then can
be instressed in the species or scape of any bodily action . . . ​and so ­towards the
species or scape of any object” (SD, pp. 136–137). The prepositions, both “in”
and “­towards,” imply soul as a doubly directed energy, experienced as si­mul­ta­
neously shaping the agent’s action and affecting the object on which the agent
acts. This instress is specifically characterized by its pervasiveness and intensity.
“Scape” (or “inscape”), used h ­ ere as a noun, is the individualized structure or
shape held together by soul-­energy instressed and is also glossed elsewhere by
Hopkins as the individualized “design” or “pattern” by which a being is distin-
guishable (Corres., 1: 334). As this discussion progresses, “instress” appears as a
noun in a description of “the stress of God’s anger . . . ​that called into being fire
against the Dev­il, . . . ​an intensification of or terrible instress upon the sub-
stance of one, Satan.” Shortly afterward, a definition follows: instress, divine in
origin, is “all that energy . . . ​with which the soul animates and other­wise acts
in the body” (SD, p. 137).
In Hopkins’s earlier musing on Parmenides’s monism, where the terms
“inscape” and “instress” are first used, he glosses Parmenides’s “­great idea”—­that
“Being is and Not-­being is not”—as meaning that “all ­things are upheld by in-
stress and are meaningless without it” (Ox. Ess., p. 311). He thereby suggests that
“instress” can manifest itself as the energy of consciousness or cognition through
which humanity seeks to make meaning of the world, for as he continues, “To
be and to know or Being and thought are the same”; therefore, in thought—­and
presumably in writing—­each word is an acknowl­edgment of Being, and each
sentence asserts it through verbs (Ox. Ess., p.  315). Daniel Brown, studying
Hopkins’s thoughts on Parmenides in relation to currently evolving physics, ob-
serves that the vocabulary of stress in that context “strongly suggests the mecha-
nistic concept of the field that Faraday pioneered.” As Brown explains, “Instress
can be represented according to the ontology of Faraday’s theory as a discrete
point, a knot or vortex, of energy in the field of being, and par­tic­u­lar stresses,
such as ­those of grace, . . . ​as lines of force in this field. The field model allows
Hopkins to represent being or stress not only as dynamic but also, in the manner
of Parmenidean monism, as an entirely consistent and continuous princi­ple”
 Saville ∕ 137

(p. 238). In other words, Hopkins works t­ oward a worldview in which all beings,
­human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, are linked by the energy of
“instress,” both their own physical energy and the psychic or soul-­energy that
­human consciousness brings to them and generates from them, through media
such as poetic language.
­Later in his notes on the “Meditation on Hell,” Hopkins inserts supple-
mentary thoughts describing vari­ous functions within the soul, and again the
terms “stress,” “instress,” and “scape” recur, suggesting a continuity between the
soul’s interior energy, its source in the godhead, its actions in the world with-
out, and that world’s effects on soul itself within. Three dynamics characterize
soul through their combined operations: a rational, elective ­will, or voluntas ut
arbitrium; a conscience that acts as the guide to the arbitrium; and an irrational,
affective w ­ ill, or voluntas ut natura. The arbitrium, literally an arbiter or judge,
is the source of soul’s individual being (in Hopkins’s words, “man’s personality
or individuality”) and the aspirational “tendency in the soul ­towards an infi-
nite object” or God (SD, pp. 138–139). Through the arbitrium, “inchoate posi-
tive stress” is individualized into “the strain of desire, pursuit, and also
consciousness of self” (SD, p. 139). In the afterlife, the individual’s accomplish-
ments remain with the soul as “scapes and species,” and by instressing ­these,
God indicates his approval or dis­plea­sure t­ oward the life lived (SD, p. 139).
While on the one hand the arbitrium decides action (SD, p.  142),
on the other the voluntas—­t hat “faculty which is affected well or ill ­towards
­things”—­involves the soul’s inclinations or proclivities, its “fainness, the con-
trary of which is lothness” (SD, p. 142). Although, according to Christopher Dev-
lin, S.J., the elective ­will’s choice is “an expression of the ­whole man” (in SD,
p. 116), it is the affective ­will that supplies the impetus for and ethical inflection
of this choice.17 To rouse the affective ­will and shape its inclinations is poten-
tially to encourage the elective ­will to make ethical choices, the two dynamics
working in tandem. But to leave the affective w ­ ill to pursue its inherent pro-
clivities unrestricted is to risk undermining the power of the elective w ­ ill to
strive ­toward right action. It is h ­ ere that poetry can play a part by vitalizing
the soul through its own inscapes and power of instress.
A last passage from the retreat notes is worth mentioning for the further
insights it offers into the disciplinary connections and continuities underpin-
ning Hopkins’s conception of psychic energy. Taken from the “Notes on the
Rules for the Discernment of Spirits,” the segment considers the diverse states
of soul that make individuals more or less successful at resisting sin, with-
standing spiritual desolation, and deriving spiritual consolation. Just as earlier,
Faraday’s concept of the field and the forms of stress it entailed offered
138 ∕ VICTORIAN POETRY

Hopkins suggestive analogies for conveying the Parmenidean idea of Being,

along with consciousness as a form of Being, so now he draws on heating and
cooling meta­phors from thermodynamic theory to express va­ri­e­ties of psychic
energy.18 If heat is associated with psychic health and coolness is associated
with insensibility, then “Tepidity,” Hopkins concludes, is
the state of a soul that, being in God’s grace, is content to live not ac-
cording to grace but according to nature. So that while we strive, though
we commit faults, we are not lukewarm; when we give up struggling and
let ourselves drift, then tepidity begins. Fervour . . . ​is properly the being
on the boil, the shewing the stir of life not shared by all other t­hings,
and the being ready to pass by evaporation, into a wholly spiritual con-
dition. Freezing is the earthly blockish insensible condition of a soul
which may indeed be melted by warm breath but must first be so melted
before it can sway to it. (SD, p. 208)
According to this analogy, “tepidity,” a state of moral complacency in
which the voluntas, or personal inclinations, dominate the f­ ree w ­ ill, can be
counteracted by “fervour,” or striving for moral betterment. It is to this end that
poetry might prove to be “like a g­ reat b­ attle won by E
­ ngland” or “an unfading
bay tree” (Corres., 2: 813). By encouraging souls in such fervor, poetry marshals
aesthetics to educate its readership in a renewed reverence and responsiveness
­toward the natu­ral world as the locus of divine immanence and diverse being.
Thus, private meditation on the condition of the individual soul and its ethi-
cal development, exemplified in the Spiritual Exercises, may be expanded into
a public discourse directed at spiritually refreshing and invigorating the com-
monwealth of British souls.
Soul’s Instress in Poetic and Environmental Inscapes
When Hopkins was an undergraduate, before the “doctrine of ‘instress’ and
‘inscape’ ” had become the dominant structuring princi­ple of his thought, he
already viewed poetry as an art designed to energize the mind with fresh per-
ceptions. In an early essay, “Poetic Diction” (1865), he describes it as differing
from prose in its capacity to bring “concentration,” “vividness of idea,” and
“liveliness” to both thought and its expression. He believes that “the princi­ple
of parallelism” or structured recurrence in poetic expression—­including
rhythm, meter, and rhyme—­invites an equivalent recurrence in thinking (Ox.
Ess., p. 120). B
­ ecause poetry stimulates thought, it challenges “the highest pow-
ers of man’s mind,” its structure forcing us to “appreciate each syllable” and “to
dwell on all modifications” (Ox. Ess., p. 121).
 Saville ∕ 139

Hopkins’s Roehampton lecture notes of 1873 also emphasize structural re-

currence, but now instress and inscape begin to play a leading role. For instance,
in the first lecture (“Rhythm and the Other Structural Parts of Rhe­toric—­
Verse”), Hopkins opens with a focus on rhythm and a definition of verse as
“speech having a marked figure, order/ of sounds in­de­pen­dent of meaning. . . . ​It
is figure of spoken sound.”19 As he proceeds, “[s]tress or emphatic accent”—­a de-
fining feature of En­glish in which “­every word has its emphatic accent which is
quite essential to it”—­becomes a central interest. If words, he suggests, are
thought of as “heavy bodies,” each with “a centre of gravity round which it is in
balance,” then that center of gravity would be “accent of stress” (p. 269). Further
described as “the bringing out of the sound of a syllable, especially of its vowel-­
sound,” this “accent of stress” appears as a par­tic­u­lar variety of “instressing” or
infusing a syllable with soul-­energy (p. 271). Rhythm, Hopkins explains, may be
accentual and defined by beat, or it may be quantitative and defined by time, or,
where beat rhythm is superimposed on time rhythm in counterpointing, the two
very dif­fer­ent rhythmic structures resonate against each other, allowing the
poet an enhanced range of sonic and therefore affective nuance (p. 276).
Joseph Phelan, in his recent study of t­ hese lecture notes, argues that the
most likely prototype for Hopkins’s rhythmic experiments was Anglo-­Saxon and
medieval alliterative verse—­one among diverse forms revived during the surge
of prosodic experiment in the early nineteenth c­ entury and also a surviving relic
of the lost era of En­glish Catholicism.20 It was therefore particularly suited to
Hopkins’s proj­ect of reviving Britain’s lost spiritual vitality.
In the second set of lecture notes (“Poetry and Verse”), instress and in-
scape once again play a leading role when Hopkins identifies poetry’s recurrent
patterns as inscapes of language. Poetry, he declares, is “speech only employed to
carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake—­and therefore the inscape
must be dwelt on.” Furthermore, “repetition, oftening, over-­and-­overing, aftering
of the inscape must take place to detach it to the mind and in this light poetry
is speech which a­ fters and oftens its inscape, speech couched in a repeating fig-
ure and verse is spoken sound having a repeating figure” (Journals, p. 289).
Through such theory, Hopkins attributes to poetry a par­tic­u­lar power to
instress readers’ souls with affective energy, inclining them to right choices in
the interests of glorifying God. Since, in his view, the purpose of the world
and of our being in the world is to give glory to God, then once we have “said
from our hearts / Glory be to God / we have answered the end of our being”
(SD, p. 28). Yet, as impassioned speech from his own soul to the souls of ­others,
many of Hopkins’s best-­loved poems bring to life a Britain in which souls, far
from distinguishing humanity as possessed of inherent dignity and moral
140 ∕ VICTORIAN POETRY

worth, have through cynicism and apathy lost both the literal energy of vital
being and the self-­reflective consciousness linking humanity to all other be-
ings. Two sonnets that express this state of affairs with par­tic­u­lar force yet
have garnered relatively l­ittle attention from ecocritics are “The Sea and the
Skylark” and “In the Valley of the Elwy,” companion pieces set in Wales.21 Each
represents a spiritually tepid humanity eclipsed by a natu­ral world whose vi-
brant energy can be viscerally experienced through poetry’s sonic patterns.22
“The Sea and the Skylark,” dated “Rhyl May 1877” (although radically
revised in the early 1880s [MacKenzie, PW, pp. 372–373]), evokes the environs
of a rapidly expanding resort town on the north coast of Wales, southwest of
Liverpool, where Hopkins was sent by his superiors for five days’ rest.23 The
octave opens celebrating the vigor and longevity of two exemplars of vibrant
being—­one inanimate, the other animate:

On (r and ear two noises too old t)nd

Trench—­r!ght, the tide that r-mps against the shore;
With a flood or a fall, low lull-­off or áll róar,
Frequenting ­there while moon ­shall w(r and wend.
Left hand, off land, I h(r the lark ascend,
His rash-­fresh re-­winded new-­skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt músic, till none’s to spill nor spend. (PW, p. 143)

Plunging the reader into a stereophonic encounter with unrestrained sound,

the sonnet is ­human centered only in its voicing by the poet, but the orienta-
tion, indicated in the title change (from “Walking by the Sea” to “The Sea and
the Skylark” [PW, pp. 372–373]) diminishes ­human agency. It casts the speaker
as a listener, a temporary sounding board on which the sound waves of the two
age-­old “noises” resonate.
Textual markings demand fine discriminations from Hopkins’s listener-­
readers, who must instress the verbal inscapes while si­mul­ta­neously animat-
ing the inscapes of the beings heard: for instance, the first two iambs appear
metrically the same but differ in “accent of stress,” since the circumflex on the
first “(r” calls for added weight, thereby distinguishing between two auditory
experiences. The “noises” thus converge on the listener, making her, in Brown’s
words, “an open system,” whose motions and being depend on interactions with
external forces or stress (Brown, p. 262). Thus, the two noises, mediated through
the sensuality of poetic inscapes, stir humanity’s subliminal psychic energy while
asserting their own being.
 Saville ∕ 141

The prelude of echoes “oftening” and “aftering” in the opening line

(“(r” and “ear”; “two,” “too,” and “to”; and “t)nd” and “Trench”) recur in
the lines immediately following, as they voice first the sea’s sound and then
the skylark’s song. The patterning of ­these “noises,” resonant with Isaiah’s
“joyful noise from the sea” that gives glory to the Lord (Isa. 24:14), are both self-­
distinguishing (each instressing its peculiar pitch) and also mutually harmoniz-
ing (each implicitly participating in an inferred network of si­mul­ta­neously
resonating physical energies). For instance, the sea surges rhythmically with “a
flood or a fall, low lull-­off or áll róar,” its distinctiveness emerging in alliterated f
and l; the skylark calls in “crisps of curl off wild winch whirl,” where c and w are
leading patterns, but l echoes the sea’s sound; furthermore, the “score” and
“pour” of the skylark’s ­music, audible rather than vis­i­ble rhymes, pick up and
harmonize with the “fall” and “áll róar” of the sea. By implication, both sea and
skylark belong to a vigorous natu­ral world that supports differences that, by
their contrasts, generate and sustain energy.
Each being is, moreover, responsive to a wider cosmos: the tide’s rhythms
match the moon’s, the former’s “Frequenting” echoing in the internal rhyme of
the latter’s “w(r and wend.” Likewise, the lark’s ascent to the skies—­again
blending sonically with the sea’s “frequenting” and “wend[ing]”—is both re-
quired by and produces the refreshing effect of its liquid singing: “I h(r the
lark ascend, / . . . ​and pour / And pelt músic, till none’s to spill nor spend.” As
fallen humanity’s medium for instressing its own pitch, words yoke meanings—­
for instance, “rash-­fresh, re-­winded new-­skeinèd score”—­evoking the inten-
sity of surrounding energy. Thus, the language of Hopkins’s octave echoes
the implicit glorias of both sea and skylark.
The sestet, maximizing the force of the sonnet’s turn, introduces the con-
trast of h
­ uman inconsequence. By permitting extra stress in many feet, sprung
rhythm intensifies the bitterness of the declarations: “Hòw thése | twò sháme |
this shál | low and frἅil | tówn! / Hòw ríng | rìght óut | our sór | did túr | bid
tíme, / Bèing púre!” Stress, the syntactical period, and the caesura demand a
breathing space ­after “pure”—­the term that anchors the virtue ethics structur-
ing the sonnet. “Pure” implies the unadulterated joy in being that assents to and
affirms immanent being. By contrast, the “shallow and frἅil town” embodies
energy directed ­toward unreflective consumerism and “pro­gress,” where the lat-
ter implies entrepreneurial and industrial enterprise, including the acquisition of
material wealth that for many ­people in the late nineteenth ­century constituted
success.24 For in the upbeat promotional discourse of Black’s Picturesque Guide to
Wales, Rhyl is described as “altogether a modern creation, . . . ​a cheerful, thriv-
ing, fash­ ion­
able town” designed for the “con­ ve­
nience and amusement” of
142 ∕ VICTORIAN POETRY

holiday makers from large manufacturing towns such as Liverpool.25 The utility,
comfort, and amusement that Hopkins implicitly disdained in utilitarian po­liti­
cal ethics (Ox. Ess., p. 257) predominate in the account of five ­hotels, a newly
erected “commodious church,” and a likewise “commodious Railway Station . . . ​
advantageously situated close to the town,” as if churches and trains, as goods
and ser­vices, share an equivalent value (Black’s Picturesque Guide, p. 34).
Visualizing a pre­industrial age of spiritual vitality, Hopkins matches the
patterning of Anglo-­Saxon alliterative verse with a former state of grace: “| Wé, |
lìfe’s príde | and cáred-­| for crówn, / Have lóst | that ch,r | and chárm | of
éarth’s | pàst príme.” Voweling on (or assonance) and alliteration, along with
the increased stress of sprung rhythm, sonically enhance the link between hu-
manity as “lìfe’s príde and cáred-­for crówn” and “éarth’s pàst príme.” If humanity
enjoys divine ­favor, we per­sis­tently squander it. What is lost, however, is not
materially mea­sur­able but a disposition ­toward supreme Being, a joyful delight
in life: “that ch,r | and charm,” where the circumflex echoes or “­afters” the
“(r” through which we may still hear and be revitalized by exemplars of that
energy.
By contrast, prosaic repetition expresses humanity’s current condition,
where nouns and verbs, beings and ­doing, lose their distinctiveness: “Our make
and making break, are breaking.” For humanity, to make seems inevitably to
involve destroying, and in turn being destroyed, for spoiling and corruption are
inherent to our being. No longer striving to give glory to an ideal greater than
ourselves through a just or honorable life, the soul with its capacities of f­ ree w
­ ill,
moral conscience, and affective desire becomes tepid, so that in a reverse evolu-
tion, we revert to primal ­matter with no claim to ethical value or privilege.
In contrast with “The Sea and the Skylark,” its underappreciated
companion, “In the Valley of the Elwy,” uses “cordial air” as a structuring
meta­phor for virtue ethics in which just action is accepted as a civic obligation
for which a physically healthy natu­ral environment provides the paradigm and
support. Once again the octave actualizes exemplary vibrant being, while the
sestet, turning, offers the counterexample of a community impervious to the
sustaining loveliness of its surroundings. Hopkins explains the provenance of
this structuring rationale in a letter to Bridges of 8 April 1879: “The kind p­ eople
of the sonnet w ­ ere the Watsons of Shooter’s Hill [near Greenwich], nothing to
do with the Elwy. . . . ​The frame of the sonnet is a rule of three sum wrong, thus:
As the sweet smell to ­those kind ­people so the Welsh landscape is not to the
Welsh; and then the author and princi­ple of all four terms is asked to bring the
sum right” (Corres., 1: 352). Where counterpoint and sprung rhythm in the ear-
lier sonnet generated rhythmic urgency, h ­ ere they produce a lilt to match the
 Saville ∕ 143

spiritual comfort they describe. For instance, in the opening line, time
rhythm—­anapestic and iambic—is overlaid by beat rhythm maintaining the
pentameter’s required five feet, while foregrounding the lyric speaker: “Í re |
mémber | a hóuse | where áll | ­were góod / To mé, | God knóws, | desér |
ving nó | such thíng” (PW, p. 143). Counterintuitively, the stress on the open-
ing “Í,” rather than conferring authority, identifies the speaker as a self-­
conscious witness to his own unworthiness. Other techniques likewise disturb
expected patterns of meaning; for instance, the two initial inversions (trochees)
displace rising anapests and iambs, disrupting the complacence of singsong; the
enjambed line end highlights the habitual virtue of the h ­ ouse­hold before rov-
ing over to identify the current beneficiary of their goodness: “me.”
Although spiritual, the grace of hospitality is experienced bodily: “Cóm-
for | ting sméll | bréathed at | vér*| éntering, / Fétched frèsh, | as Í | suppóse |
off sóme | swèet wóod.” Beat rhythm brings stress to both the immaterial “sméll”
and the act of its incorporation (“bréathed”) as the domestic ambiance enters
the individual body, connecting it in turn to the more extensive freshness and
sweetness of the natu­ral world without. This choice of smell as the sense that
conveys spiritual comfort reiterates Hopkins’s earlier use of it to illustrate the
relation between soul (scent) and body (wine) as paradoxically both distinct but
indistinguishable (“The probable ­future of metaphysics,” Ox. Ess., p. 287).
In the second quatrain, the continuities between fresh air and kindness
to outsiders are elaborated as protective and life fostering:

That cordial air made ­those kind peopl& hood

All 0s a bev;f eggs the mothering w!ng
­Will, or mild nights the new mórsels of Spring:
Wh>t séemed of c#urse; séemed of ríght it shóuld.

A productive ambiguity arises in the first two lines, which leave unclear ­whether
“­those kind ­people” act as the protective hood to ­others by virtue of their cor-
diality or are themselves protected by the hood-­like ­wholesome air. Dissolving
bound­aries between benefactors and beneficiaries, the air equalizes them as
sharers and reciprocators—an effect heightened by the repeated elisions that
dissolve syllables and spaces distinguishing words even as alliterative and vowel
patterns link and differentiate semantic entities. Reminiscent of the Holy Ghost
that “over the bent / World broods” (“God’s Grandeur,” PW, p. 139) and antici-
pating the “Wild air, world-­mothering air” of “The Blessed Virgin compared to
the Air we Breathe” (PW, p. 173), fresh air’s ethical value inheres in its power to
foster all being, animate and inanimate.
144 ∕ VICTORIAN POETRY

The point is reiterated in the sestet’s turn to the specific region of the Elwy
River valley, the first tercet presenting the prob­lem. Two lines, dense in sonic
patterning, evoke Eden. The l’s and v of “Lóvely” echo in “vales”; garment-­like
“air” rhymes with “wear,” reiterating the “hood” of the “cordial air” in the octave,
while affirming “woods” and “waters” as the “world of Wales.” By contrast, the
absence of patterning, the prosaic plod, and shortness of line 11 (“Ónly | the ín |
mate does nót | correspónd:”) capture the dull imperviousness of the valley’s
inhabitants to its loveliness. Freighted with associations of incarceration, social
withdrawal, and the absence of ­free assent to being, “inmate” is perhaps an
oblique reference to the anti-­Catholicism rife in Wales during the 1870s and
1880s.26 But the closing prayer for unresponsive, deficient humanity reverts to
the octave’s lyrical patterning. The image of a divinity “swaying considerate
scales” recalls the defining princi­ple of justice recurrent in Hopkins’s virtue
ethics, at the same time suggesting souls lacking in moral weight, in need of
divine grace to supplement their spiritual deficit.
Although only a small sample of a poetic oeuvre rich in displays of po-
tentially vibrant exchange between ­human and nonhuman worlds, t­ hese two
sonnets convey vividly some of Hopkins’s freshest ecological insights: First, de-
spite humanity’s claim to ethical privilege by virtue of its soul, our failure to ex-
ercise soul’s ­free ­will for the greater good is evidence of our equally power­ful
inclination to ­favor the ephemerality and inconsequence of material self-­interest.
Thus the very soul that might seem to authorize anthropocentrism on the basis
of its potential for ethical action is in fact also the liability that proves such an-
thropocentrism to be unwarranted. Second, and correlatively, quite aside from
the aesthetic and utilitarian value of nonhuman nature, it has a dangerously
under-­recognized ethical value: namely, that it fosters long-­standing, unexpected
networks of being, without which being of all va­ri­e­ties is impoverished.

Notes
1 Patrick Curry, qtd. in Andrew Dobson, Green Po­liti­cal Thought, 4th ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2007), p. 42.
2 Although ecological study of Hopkins is a relatively new field, it has inspiring lead-
ership in John Parham’s deeply informative, insightful book, Green Man Hopkins:
Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination (New York: Rodopi, 2010).
3 Patrick Curry, Ecological Ethics, 2nd ed. (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2011), p. 57.
4 Timothy Morton, Ecol­ ogy without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 101, 118, 121.
5 Julia F. Saville, Victorian Soul-­Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic (Cham,
Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
 Saville ∕ 145

6 Herbert  F. Tucker observes that “by 1840 . . . ​­matters of soul ­were the peculiar
province of poetry—­bodies being left to natu­ral science, po­liti­cal economy, and, of
course, the novel.” Tucker, “When the Soul Had Hips: Six Animadversions on
Psyche and Gender in Nineteenth-­Century Poetry,” in Sexualities in Victorian Brit-
ain, ed. Andrew  H. Miller and James Eli Adams (Bloomington: Indiana Univ.
Press, 1996), p. 167.
7 Linda Dowling notes the effect of “the Platonic vocabulary of ‘souls’ ” on the lives
of young men at Oxford in the 1860s, especially apologists of male love, such as
Symonds and Pater: Hellenism and Homo­sexuality at Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 80–81.
8 Hopkins’s politics are, in this re­spect, closer to ­those of Thomas Carlyle, John
Ruskin, and Benjamin Disraeli than to the Brownings, Clough, Swinburne, or
Green.
9 Early in Hopkins’s Jesuit ­career, he confessed to Dixon that he saw poetry writing
as a distraction from his Jesuit duty and “resolved to write no more, as not belong-
ing to [his] profession” (Corres., 1: 317). He l­ ater reiterates this to Bridges: “It always
seems to me that poetry is unprofessional” (Corres., 2: 681).
10 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Connection of Aristotle’s metaphysics with his ethics,”
Ox. Ess. pp. 263–266.
11 Socrates in Plato, Phaedo, ed. Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (New-
buryport, Mass.: Focus, 1998), 64c.
12 For a supple discussion of the body as both the soul’s prison and its route to God,
see William A. Cohen’s chapter “Soul: Inside Hopkins,” in Embodied: Victorian Lit­
er­a­ture and the Senses (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 112–115.
13 Hopkins ponders the viability of continuity between private and po­liti­cal ethics in
three essays written in roughly the same period: “Account of the dialogue of Plato’s
Republic . . . ​(II, x–vi),” written for Jowett in Lent term 1866; “The Pagan and
Christian virtues,” written for Pater in May–­June  1866; and “The possibility of
separating . . . ​{ethics} fr. . . . ​po­liti­cal science,” written for Williams in Autumn
1866–­Spring 1867. For the dating and context of each essay, see Lesley Higgins,
introduction to Ox. Ess., pp. 16–21, 47.
14 Sjaak Zonneveld offers a penetrating reading of such ethical failure, both po­liti­cal
and environmental, in Hopkins’s “Tom’s Garland”: The Random Grim Forge: A
Study of Social Ideas in the Work of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Assen/Maastricht,
Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1992), pp. 120–123.
15 I take the phrase from Daniel Brown’s excellent study of the philosophy and phys-
ics underpinning t­hese concepts: Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry
(Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1997), p. 42.
16 I agree with Brian J. Day that Hopkins’s “ecological and economic views owe at
least as much to his spiritual beliefs as they do to science and social philosophy,”
although the poet’s investment in the latter signals the range and versatility of his
engagement with modernity. Day, “Hopkins’ Spiritual Ecol­ogy in ‘Binsey Poplars,’ ”
VP 42, no. 3 (2004): 181.
146 ∕ VICTORIAN POETRY

17 As Devlin remarks, both Scotus and Ignatius made a distinction between elective
and affective ­will, and both also presented choice and desire as inseparable. While
Hopkins took par­tic­u­lar note of this elective and affective duality whenever it
arose in the Spiritual Exercises, he tended to privilege elective ­will or dutiful choice
over the delight of affective ­will’s desires and sympathies, setting the two in opposi-
tion instead of in unison (in SD, pp. 118–119).
18 Jude V. Nixon offers a detailed study of Hopkins’s mobilization of energy tropes in
“ ‘Death blots black out’: Thermodynamics and the Poetry of Gerard Manley
Hopkins,” VP 6, no. 2 (2002): 131–155.
19 Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed.
Humphrey House and Graham Storey (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 267.
20 Joseph Phelan, The ­Music of Verse: Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-­Century Poetry
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 1–12, 118–133.
21 Parham offers suggestive ecocritical interpretations of many of the poet’s most
anthologized poems but makes only brief mention of “The Sea and the Skylark”
(Green Man Hopkins, p. 160) and omits “In the Valley of the Elwy.”
22 For compelling discussions of Hopkins’s repre­sen­ta­tion of nature as resilient, au-
tonomous, and available to subtle interactive relationships with humanity, see
Day’s “Hopkins’ Spiritual Ecol­ogy in ‘Binsey Poplars,’ ” and Mariaconcetta Costan-
tini, “ ‘Strokes of havoc’: Tree-­Felling and the Poetic Tradition of Ecocriticism in
Manley Hopkins and Gerard Manley Hopkins,” VP 46, no. 4 (2008): 487–509.
23 Alfred Thomas, S.J., reports that Hopkins was sent to Rhyl in May 1877 “for the
good of his health”: Hopkins the Jesuit: The Years of Training (London: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1969), p. 178.
24 Regenia Gagnier provides a succinct account of the shift in priorities from moral to
material well-­being in the late nineteenth c­ entury in “Production, Reproduction,
and Plea­sure in Victorian Aesthetics and Economics,” in Victorian Sexual Dissi-
dence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999),
pp. 128–130.
25 Black’s Picturesque Guide to Wales (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1876),
p. 34.
26 Paul O’Leary attributes the rise in anti-­Catholic agitation to the Vatican Council
and declaration of Papal Infallibility of 1870: “A Tolerant Nation? Anti-­Catholicism
in Nineteenth-­Century Wales,” in From Medieval to Modern Wales: Historical Es-
says in Honour of Kenneth O. Morgan and Ralph A. Griffiths, ed. R. R. Davies and
Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 2004), pp. 204, 206.
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