Hopkins's Inwardness

The Great Inscape

Gerard Manley Hopkins coined the term ‘inscape’, and meant, it seems, several things by it. On the one hand it refers to the inner beauty, or specialness and in integrity, of a thing, or phenomenon, or person; the spiritual truth of it. Here’s Catherine Phillips:

In Spring 1868 [immediately prior to joining the Society of Jesus] Hopkins spent a month walking in Switzerland with Edward Bond, a friend from Oxford. At the time Switzerland did not allow Jesuits to enter the country and Hopkins seized what he realized was the one opportunity he would have of seeing it. His Journal notes of the trip show his detailed observations of nature. The descriptions are highly compressed, with some words used in personal, idiosyncratic ways as in his mature poetry. The terms ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’ appear quite frequently. The first examples we have of these words actually occur in Hopkins’s notes on Parmenides written in February 1868, but the manner in which they are used there suggests that they were by then well established in his vocabulary. Unlike ‘idiom’, for example, apparently used for the first time in February 1870, they are not defined, and at times are scarcely definable in context. Both terms appear to have several meanings, and since they were used in private notes they are not applied with philosophical rigour. ‘Inscape’ is often used of the characteristic shape of a thing or species. An artist’s analysis, it is sometimes linked with comparisons that are superficial and only visual as if to give practical hints to help in drawing (‘Rushing streams may be described as inscaped ordinarily in pillows—and upturned troughs’, for instance). More importantly on other occasions it is used of the crucial features that form or communicate the inner character, essence, or ‘personality’ of something; one portrait is preferable to another, for example, because it conveys not just a passing mood but the personality of which that mood is part.

The drawing angle is, it seems, important: after seeing an exhibition of Whistler’s art, Hopkins noted: ‘he excels in his feeling for what I call inscape (the very soul of art).’ The soul of art. But it is not just a visual matter. Amazed by violets, Hopkins wrote in his journal ‘The bluebells in your hand baffle you with their inscape, made to every sense’. Omnisensual.