Word Painting

I've now reached the selection of letters in Catherine Phillips's edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins - The Major Works and very interesting they are - especially those to Robert Bridges. The great Jesuit emerges here as a gentle, friendly sort of chap, as driven as ever, but humanly so. At least the intensity comes down a little from the selected Journal entries which are astonishingly rich. At moments, indeed, it was easy to see some paragraphs (from the Journal) as being as good as the poems - a bit like Keats's letters in that respect.  

Just one line as an example (though I'm tempted to quote endlessly) in which GMH is describing a pigeon: I saw one up on the eaves of the roof: as it moved its head a crush of satin green came and went, a wet or soft flaming of the light. I mean crush alone hits you where it hurts, but then wet puts you on the floor. And as for flaming...

(Attentive readers will note how quickly I run out of any real critical vocabulary. This is just Wow and if you don't recognise that there's no point in going much further.)

The Journal is essentially made up of pages of this sort of thing, and I couldn't help thinking of that bit towards the end of de Botton's The Art of Travel when he recommends following Ruskins's advice on word painting as a writing exercise, and as an exercise in seeing the world. It would appear that this notion went beyond Ruskin in the late nineteenth century and was common practice. I'm certainly tempted to make an attempt or two myself just for the fun of it. Simply an awareness of how many miles short of GMH I would fall would be salutary and add to my appreciation of just how astonishingly good he is.