Gerard Manley Hopkins

I found this very interesting, it is from the letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges. There are 2 things I did not know. First that GMH could be so satirical/funny. Second that he felt himself a communist (communism different before Stalin and Mao?) and thought about politics so much. Similarities of his descriptions of pressures building before the first war, and pressures now?

Stonyhurst College, Whalley, Lancashire. April 2, 1871. 

XXVI 

"My dear Bridges, — Our holidays have begun, so I will write
again. I feel inclined to begin by asking whether you are
secretary to the International as you seem to mean me to think
nothing too bad for you but then I remember that you never
relished ‘the intelligent artisan’. I must tell you I am always
thinking of the Communist future. The too intelligent artisan
is master of the situation I believe. Perhaps it is what everyone
believes, I do not see the papers or hear strangers often enough
to know. It is what Carlyle has long threatened and foretold.
But his writings are, as he might himself say, ‘most inefficacious-
strenuous heaven-protestations, caterwaul, and Gassandra-wail-
ings’. He preaches obedience but I do not think he has done
much except to ridicule instead of strengthening the -hands
of the powers that be. Some years ago when he published
his Shooting Niagara^ he did make some practical suggestions
but so vague that they should rather be called ‘too dubious
moonstone-grindings and on the whole impracticable-practical
unveracities’. I However I am aftaid some great revolution is
not far off. Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist.
Their ideal bating some things is nobler than that professed by
any secular statesman I know of (I must own I live in bat-light
and shoot at a venture). Besides it is just. — I do not rnean the
means of getting to it are. But it is a dreadful thing for the
greatest and most necessary part of a very rich nation to live a
hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delight, or hopes
in the midst of plenty— which plenty they make.! They profess
that they do not care what they wreck and burn, the old
civilisation and order must be destroyed. This is a dreadful
look out but what has the old civilisation done for them? As
it at present stands in England it is itself in great measure
founded on wrecking. But they got none of the spoils, they
came in for nothing but harm from it then and thereafter.
p.nglanH has grown hugely wealthy but this wealth has not
reached the working classes; I expect it has made their condi-
tion worse. Besides this iniquitous order the old civilisation
another order mostly old and what is new in direct
entail from the old, the old religion, learning, law, art, etc and
all the history that is preserved in standing monuments. But
as the working classes have not been educated they know next
to nothing of all this and cannot be expected to care if they
destroy it. The more I look the more black and deservedly
black the future looks, so I will write no more."

from :

https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.182404/2015.182404.The-Lett...