Hopkins, the Self, and God by Walter J. Ong, SJ (review)

~~u L.r. J. It' ..K:' iN LANAIJA l~OO intellectual companions as Frederick Maxse and John Morley, Stone's treatment of these is useful. To the extent that it causes him to dismiss or overlook or deny the important political element in the writings - especially the novels - it is tragic. It means that to the incoherence of the sometimes apparently random movement in time (or in the biographies of his friends - or even their friends) which is one of the flaws in this study there is, early, added a distortion of focus: the writing seems to be shunted aside to allow discussion of other things. Since part of this discussion involves reproducing more or less verbatim what is in the standard edition of the Letters, and available to any reader, any reader is likely to become restive quickly. The flatness of the generalizations is also rarely an asset to this study. We do not want to be told (about Meredith's fictionalized study of a Socialisthero in The Tragic Comedians), 'Meredith is not pretending that he is other than Victorian in his approach to nature and Society' (p 92). Putting aside that - very strangely in a study that discusses one of the mostradical and unconventional ofall unconventional Victorian writersthis comment smacks too much of an outdated notion of 'Victorian,' what could such a statement mean? If it has a meaning, is it not belied by Meredith's very choice of subject and theme? Is it conceivably 'Victorian' to study closely the odd interpenetration of the sex life and political radicalism of a Jewish Socialist? While Stone's study will be ofinterest to other Meredithians - who will, of course find other things to question than those few I have done - it is not likely to fill the need Stone perceived when he undertook it. The need remains for a substantial criticism of Meredith's writings in the context of the political activity of his period and espeCially that part of it with which he was fairly closely involved, and its absence is all the more frustrating now that Stone has laboured so arduously at this book on 'George Meredith 's politics.' (HARVEY KERPNECK) Walter J. Ong, SJ. Hopkins, the Self, and God University ofToronto Press. 180. $20.00 Derived from the Alexander Lectures delivered at the University of Toronto in 1980, this short book is marked by orality. The reader seems to have been spared no asides, summaries, recapitulations or by-the-ways. Design governs, of course, for Ong has distinguished himself through a long study of orality and literacy, spoken and written words, preaching and printing, printing and broadcasting. Into Ong's scheme of verbalizings Hopkins is fitted as a Victorian: the 'particularist aesthetics' of Tennyson, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelites are evident throughout Hopkins's poetry (and programmatic in 'Pied HUMANITIES 127 Beauty'), and extreme in his journals. A major shift of consciousness is thus signalled and entailed: 'Before the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, nowhere in the world could any human mind work the way Hopkins' does to produce his meticulously particularized verbal descriptions.' Somehow related to this attention to the outer world is the Victorian interest in and examination of states of consciousness. In support of Hopkins's placing as a Victorian Ong invokes more than the well-rehearsed names of Ruskin, Pater, and Newman. A deeply reactionary and widely read German Jesuit, Joseph Kleutgen (Die Theologie der Vorzeit, 1853), is presented by Ong as foil to Hopkins. Ong points out that Newman's theological independence was protected by his late conversion to Catholicism and his freedom from formal theological study as a Catholic. Hopkins, who converted while he was a student, was given full measure. Against that education Hopkins's admiration for Duns Scotus is a severe reaction, almost defiant. Father Ong is a Jesuit himself and, arguing for the basic continuity of Jesuit training from Hopkins's time to his own, he is able to present much of Hopkins's experience from within, as his own. Latin as the sole language of instruction ensures a conservatism of thought: for Father Ong it is astonishing how little of everything that Hopkins wrote is in...