A Literary Friendship

This book originated as a thesis submitted for the doctorat d’Etat at the Sorbonne; and like many published theses, it smells of the lamp. The author asks no questions except the scholarly where and when – the terrible why, which can transform a factual commentary into a speculative essay on the human condition, does not seem to have entered M. Ritz’s consciousness. More could have been said about a Victorian literary friendship between the Great White Whale of modern poetry and an irritable Laureate-to-be. This is M. Ritz’s comment on the one letter of his own which Robert Bridges did not destroy from the twenty-five years of correspondence between him and Hopkins:

. . . This last message of true affection, which reached Hopkins a few weeks before he died, must have brought him one of his last great joys. As he lay dying, Hopkins may have reflected that in spite of disagreements, conflicts and misunderstandings – fleeting shadows – there had burned in two noble hearts a strong fire of love . . .

Possibly. But Hopkins could just as likely have reflected wryly, though fondly, on a gap which affection could not bridge. In that difficult friendship Hopkins had made it his business to understand his friend’s neo- platonic outlook; yet it seems that Bridges never grasped what it might be for Hopkins to live simultaneously as a powerful intuitive nature-poet and a dedicated Jesuit. The fundamental aim of Hopkins’s work (to synthesise Christian and animistic experience) was entirely obscure to him. Apart from their mutual affection, the two poets seem to have found only one sure basis of agreement and understanding. Both were Victorian, and they shared the belief, implicit in their correspondence, that a good artist must also be always a gentleman.

1960 (222)