Art and Religion: Hopkins and Bridges

THEY MET AT Oxford University in 1863. Queen Victoria was forty-four and in the twenty-sixth year of her sixty-four year reign. Lord Palmerston was prime minister. London had just opened the world's first underground railway, running from Paddington to Farringdon Street. Royal Albert Hall was built. Otto von Bismarck was prime minister of Prussia. The American Civil War was in its second year. British explorers Speke and Grant established that the source of the Nile was in Uganda and named it Lake Victoria. All cultured people drew and played a musical instrument and spent a good deal of time peering at rock formations or gazing at the sky, and many of their journal entries concerned dramatic armadas of clouds. Charles Dickens was between the novels Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Britain's poet laureate, was at the height of his popularity following Idylls of the King. Christina Rosetti had just published Goblin Market and other poems. Elizabeth Gaskell was establishing a reputation as a novelist with Sylvia's Lovers. Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables was an international best seller. Another best seller in England was The Elements of Drawing by John Ruskin, a book that would greatly influence ways of seeing nature and weather for an entire generation of readers.

Gerard Manley Hopkins entered Oxford University and his residential college of Balliol in April 1863 for the eight-week Trinity term. Hopkins was eighteen, very smart, and the oldest of eight children from an upper-middle class family. His father, Manley, owned a firm of marine insurance adjusters. Manley was also a poet and had become the self-taught author of practical manuals, a novel, a history of Hawaii, and Hawaii's consul-general in Great Britain—especially impressive achievements for a man who quit school at the age of fifteen. Gerard Hopkins himself was ginger-haired, perpetually pleasant, highly self-disciplined, and reportedly effeminate in his manner—he was aware of the irony of his middle name and generally did not use it. He was five-foot-three and so slight that his head seemed too large for his weedy frame. Although later he often would be characterized as ill and frail—his nickname in high school was "Skin"—he seems to have been healthy as a young man; he swam in the cold ocean, regularly took twenty-five-mile hikes, and would climb to the highest limbs of a tree with the ease of scaling a ladder. A high school classmate wrote of Hopkins that he had been "the nicest boy" at Highgate School: "Tenacious when duty was concerned, he was full of fun, rippling over with jokes, and chaff, facile with pencil and pen, with rhyming jibe or cartoon; good for his size at games and taking his part, but not as we did placing them first."

Robert Seymour Bridges went to Corpus Christi College from Eton six months after Hopkins for the fall, or Michaelmas, term. He was one month shy of his nineteenth birthday. His father had died when Robert was just a boy, and though Robert was the eighth of nine children, enough of an inheritance remained that a job and a livelihood were never nettlesome questions for him. For much of his life Robert was a gentleman of leisure. His fine features were called patrician, and he was considered so stunningly handsome that there were Oxford classmates who could not take their eyes off him and thought him "the possessor of the most beautiful face ever seen in a man." Sixty years later, his obituary in the London Times still spoke of his "great stature and fine proportions, his leonine head, deep eyes, expressive lips, and a full-toned voice, made more effective by a slight, occasional hesitation in his speech." He was over six feet tall and wide-shouldered; he was a...