Inscape, Outscape, and Instress

Hopkins has long garnered critical interest (and in some cases disdain) for developing his own idiom to describe his perception of objects. There's something fitting about this unique vocabulary (in my own humble estimation) because, of course, he was trying to describe the uniqueness, the particularity of things. To describe his perception of individualities, of the essential and singular natures of things, he uses the term "inscape." To describe the force or energy that sustains this individuality, Hopkins uses the term "instress." These two words are used in a number of ways in Hopkins's writings, with a number of nuances and suggestions that my brief definition does not account for. Please read the definitions below from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and keep an eye out for the terms in your reading.

inscape, n. :

  Hopkins's word for the individual or essential quality of a thing; the uniqueness of an observed object, scene, event, etc. (see quots.).

1868   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 127   His [sc. Parmenides'] feeling for instress, for the flush and fore~drawn, and for inscape is most striking.

1868   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 129   The way men judge in particular is determined for each by his own inscape.

1879   G. M. Hopkins Lett. to R. Bridges (1955) 66   Design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling ‘inscape’ is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer.

1886   G. M. Hopkins Let. 7 Nov. (1956) 373   The essential and only lasting thing left out—what I call inscape, that is species or individually-distinctive beauty of style.

1944   Downside Rev. LXII. 185   The prefix ‘in-’ of ‘inscape’ is the operative part. ‘Inscape’ is the perception that comes only with contraction to a point. The inscape of a scene is not its correspondence with an externally conceived pattern; it is that scene experienced as absolutely unique, knit together in that oneness which is nameable only by relation.

1944   W. H. Gardner G. M. Hopkins i. 11   In the vagaries of shape and colour presented by hills, clouds, glaciers and trees he discerns a recondite pattern—‘species or individually-distinctive beauty’—for which he coins the word ‘inscape’; and the sensation of inscape (or, indeed, of any vivid mental image) is called ‘stress’ or ‘instress’.

1948   W. A. M. Peters G. M. Hopkins i. 1   ‘Inscape’ is the unified complex of those sensible qualities of the object of perception that strikes us as inseparably belonging to and most typical of it, so that through the knowledge of this unified complex of sense-data we may gain an insight into the individual essence of the object.

Derivatives

  inscape v. (trans.) .

1953   W. H. Gardner in G. M. Hopkins Poems & Prose 229   Twindles‥a portmanteau word inscaping ‘twists’ and ‘dwindles’.

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  inscaped adj.

1868   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 174   Two plants especially with strongly inscaped leaves cover the mountain pastures.

1868   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 177   The whole cascade is inscaped in fretted falling vandykes.

outscape, n. :

  The outward appearance of a region; the external world as affected by external factors.

1868   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 184   In the afternoon we took the train for Paris and passed through a country of pale grey rocky hills of a strong and simple outscape.

instress, n.

  In the theories of Gerard Manley Hopkins: the force or energy which sustains an inscape (see quots.).

1875   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 263   Standing before the gateway I had an instress which only the true old work gives from the strong and noble inscape of the pointed-arch.

1944   W. H. Gardner G. M. Hopkins i. 11   In the vagaries of shape and colour presented by hills, clouds, glaciers and trees he discerns a recondite pattern—‘species or individually-distinctive beauty’—for which he coins the word ‘inscape’; and the sensation of inscape (or, indeed, of any vivid mental image) is called ‘stress’ or ‘instress’.

1948   W. A. M. Peters G. M. Hopkins i. 14   The original meaning of instress‥is that stress or energy of being by which ‘all things are upheld’‥and strive after continued existence.

Derivatives

instress v. (trans. and intr.) .

c1873–4   G. M. Hopkins Note-bks. & Papers (1937) 226   You can without clumsiness instress, throw a stress on/a syllable so supported.  

instressed adj.

1876   G. M. Hopkins Wreck of Deutschland v, in Poems (1967) 53   His mystery must be instressed, stressed. 

instressing n.

1881   G. M. Hopkins Note-bks. & Papers (1937) 349   This song of Lucifer's was a dwelling on his own beauty, an instressing of his own inscape.