Beyond The Blue Glass

Splendid news that Geoffrey Hill has been elected to Keble's Chair. Fr Aidan Nichols OP has a characteristically excellent essay on Hill in Volume II of Beyond The Blue Glass, which of course takes its title from Hill, and Hill himself has lately expressed sympathy with "the radical Red Tories of the nineteenth century", castigating both the Thatcherite Tories and Blairite New Labour for their indistinguishable materialism.

However, in The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, Fr Ian Ker takes issue with Hill's theory as to the monosyllabic rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins's verse. "The significance of Corpus Christi processions is not made clear" by Hill, and the revival of plainsong was yet to come. Any Jesuit church in a position to have Sung Mass and Sung Vespers on Sundays would have used little or no Gregorian music. And Hopkins's spirituality would have been fundamentally, if not exclusively, Ignatian, with no revival of contemplative prayer among Catholics until the twentieth century.

Instead, Fr Ker describes "the actual religious forms and language in which Hopkins was immersed as a convert and a Jesuit." That was the public but extraliturgical vernacular devotions that were the staple of corporate lay piety between the beginnings of the Catholic Revival and the Second Vatican Council. It was the public recitation of the Rosary, of various Litanies, of the Stations of the Cross, and so forth, that was the more 'typical' Catholic service from the ordinary lay Catholic's point of view, even though obligatory only in a social or cultural sense. But this socially and culturally definitive form of piety would have been new to Hopkins when he crossed the Tiber.

Furthermore, in the Society of Jesus that Hopkins entered, daily attendance at these Litanies was made compulsory in 1556, and constituted the only communal act of daily worship in a Jesuit community. This form of prayer was "simple, brief, strikingly monosyllabic", while ejaculatory prayer was "even terser", and would again have been "unfamiliar to a convert" while, like the Rosary and Litanies, constituting "the common possession of all Catholics."

Apart from that, though, a superb appointment.