Ideas of Inscape and Instress

E. Ruskin and Hopkins’ Ideas of Inscape and Instress

   As we have noted, Hopkins first used his characteristic aesthetic terms, inscape and instress, in the 1868 notes on the philosopher Parmenides which he made while teaching at Newman’s Oratory School in Birmingham.  There is no indication that the terms were specifically derived from or inspired by Parmenides.  In fact, they appear to be familiar terms to Hopkins when he first wrote them….It is…not unlikely that these terms, while exhibiting a Ruskinian core, were created by Hopkins in the context of his study of classical Greek philosophy. 69  As Fike suggests, perhaps the term inscape is a cognate of the Greek verb skopein (to look attentively) or the noun skopos (that upon which one fixes his or her look). 70  In any case, the essential point is that Hopkins’ use of inscape implies many of the elements of Ruskinian aesthetics discussed above.  It implies unity and, in that unity, the typical form by which one species of thing is distinguished from other species.  It also implies individual forma which distinguishes an individual object form other objects of the same kind.  As Fike states:

   The term is thus designed to cover precisely the discovery that Hopkins had made at the climax of his attempt to train himself as an artist;  namely, that there are individual characteristics in an oak, for example, which make it unlike any other oak in existence.  There was no term in English to express this kind of reality, so Hopkins coined a term.  Regularity and irregularity are thus implied in the term….”71

   The idea of inscape, then arose out of Hopkins’ aesthetic concerns and, as we have seen, his aesthetics were shaped by Ruskin.  Inscape, in its deepest root, refers to beauty…There is also continuity between Hopkins’ unique term instress and his early aesthetic theory.  Hopkins used instress variably, but it has two essential meanings.  It refers to the force that holds the inscape of an object together as well as to the effect or feeling produced by inscape within the beholder of a particular object.  As W. A. M. Peters wrote:

   The original meaning of instress…is that stress or energy of being by which ‘all things are upheld,’ and strive after continued existence.  Placing ‘instress’ by the side of ‘inscape’ we note that the instress will strike the poet as the force that holds the inscape together; it is for him the power that ever actualizes the inscape.  Further, we observe that in the act of perception the inscape is known first and in this grasp of the inscape is felt the stress of being behind it, is felt its instress…We can now understand why and how it is that ‘instress’ in Hopkins’ writings stands for two distinct and separate things, related to each other as cause and effect; as a cause ‘instress’ refers for Hopkins to the core of being or inherent energy which is the actuality of the object; as effect ‘instress’ stands for the specifically individual impression the object makes on man. 74

The poem as sacrament: the theological aesthetic of Gerard Manley Hopkins

 By Philip A. Ballinger

Peeters Press Louvain  W. B. Eerdmans   2000