the stigma of meter 53
meter as a spiritual and national form was more markedly visual than his own
instructions, and his critical legacy, have led us to believe.
As Linda Dowling and Cary Plotkin^18 have argued, the visual nature of the
English language was hotly debated in the late nineteenth century (a philo-
logical discourse that any reader of his Oxford notebooks, available in Lesley
Higgins’s new edition, will see interested Hopkins intensely). The New English
Dictionary began to codify the representation of speech with visual signs in its
first fascicle (A–Ant) in 1884, but as much as twenty years earlier Hopkins
had attended lectures by linguist Max Müller on the science of language at
Oxford (1863–67) and had been recording his own etymologies in his note-
books. Plotkin argues that both Müller and Richard Chevenix Trench studied
language as “a means of investigating and penetrating human history and
human nature” along the lines of Grimm, Schlegel, and Humboldt.^19 From
Müller, it is widely accepted that Hopkins gleaned his understanding that “nu-
merically limited roots that are uncovered as the primary elements of language
groups are phonetic types produced by a power inherent in human nature.”^20
This concept was increasingly important to Hopkins toward the end of his
life, but in his earliest notebooks and poems at Oxford—as he considered his
conversion to Catholicism—he was more concerned with language, and in
particular with the English language, as the highest form of a nation’s civiliza-
tion and the preservation of language as a form of national salvation. This was
the subject of work by Trench, an early editor of the New English Dictionary,
who had done a great deal to establish English’s superiority through his moral
and spiritual explanations of English etymolog y. His two texts, On the Study of
Wo r d s and English Past and Present, argued that the written history of English,
inscribed in its letters, should in no way be subordinated to the mere sounds of
words; the important ancestry of English words could only be represented in
script:
A word exists as truly for the eye as for the ear, and in a highly advanced
state of society, where reading is almost as universal as speaking, as
much perhaps as the first as for the last, that in the written word more-
over is the permanence and continuity of language and of learning, and
that the connection is most intimate of a true orthography with all this,
is affirmed in our words “letters,” “literature,” “unlettered,” even as in
other languages by words entirely corresponding to these.^21Trench made a case for textual philolog y as opposed to the new science of
English phonolog y. In text, the English language presented traceable etymo-
logical paths to the roots of a particularly English morality and character. In
On the Study of Words, he wrote that language is a testament, a “faithful . . .
record of the good and of the evil which in time past have been working in the
minds and hearts of men,” and that English may be considered “a moral