Hopkins's Identity

BOOK REVIEWS ual. The aftermath was cultural homophobia—or heterosexism as it has been called by Gloria I. Joseph—which we one hundred years later are still fighting. Homosexuals who have fought the cross-sex grid, effeminacy stereotyping, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination generated by Wilde's trials can only hope such actions will be corrected as we enter the next Wilde century. Roberto C. Ferrari Hillsborough Community College, Tampa Hopkins's Identity Jude V. Nixon. Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Contemporaries: Liddon , Newman, Darwin, and Pater. New York: Garland, 1994. xviii + 324 pp. $51.00 Franco Marucci. The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994. xiv + 267pp. $44.95 CHRONOLOGICALLY, Gerard Manley Hopkins is eminently Victorian . Indeed, he is one of the few Victorian authors whose birth (1844) and death (1889) both fall within the years of Victoria's reign. But because his poems were not published tiU 1918—seventeen years after the end of her reign and six years after Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch had anthologized the poetry of the period in his Oxford Book of Victorian Verse—he was, early in this century, more often classified as a modern writer than a Victorian one. In 1936 Michael Roberts's The FaberBook of Modem Verse placed Hopkins alongside Auden, Thomas, and Eliot. It was, of course, not simply the accident of posthumous publication that accounts for Hopkins's ambiguous place in Uterary history, but also his eccentric style, seemingly more modern than Victorian. Although contemporary anthologists and Uterary historians have resolved the question of his historical identity in favor of the Victorian, he remains a pecuUar rather than an eminent Victorian, and critics continue to debate his relationship to his age. What sort of a Victorian was he? This is the question posed in two new books on Hopkins: Jude V. Nixon's Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Contemporaries: Liddon, Newman, Darwin, and Pater and Franco Marucci's The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins. ActuaUy, they are not quite new. Two of Nixon's four chapters previously appeared as journal articles, and Marucci has translated from the original Italian a book first published in 1981. 391 ELT 38:3 1995 Nixon stresses the Victorian side of Hopkins by showing how he was influenced by four prominent contemporaries: Henry Parry Liddon, John Henry Newman, Charles Darwin, and Walter Pater. AU except Darwin Hopkins knew personally, at Oxford. While there, Hopkins attended Liddon's Bampton lectures, which, Nixon argues, influenced Hopkins's concept of Christology. When Hopkins abandoned AngloCatholicism for Roman Catholicism, he moved from the influence of Liddon to that of Newman, particularly of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. In addition to these religious influences there was the aesthetic influence of Walter Pater, Hopkins's tutor for Greats. In this instance Hopkins diverges from his mentor by developing "an aesthetic of renunciation that sees beauty more as a motivation to action and awe rather than passive contemplation." Nixon has a harder time making a case for the influence of Darwin on Hopkins's scientific thought, for not only were they strangers, but Hopkins refers to Darwin only three times in his letters. Nixon describes Hopkins's response to Darwin as one of "obUque confrontation" and concludes that instead of regarding evolution as a challenge to his faith, Hopkins reconciled some, though not all, of its premises to his religious and poetic principles. The four chapters of Nixon's book, each dealing with the influences of the four contemporaries, are separate essays on a common subject with few cross references and little in the way of a cumulative argument, other than that Hopkins responded sensitively to the religious, aesthetic , and scientific ideas of his age. As such they reveal their origins as autonomous essays written for different occasions, the two on Liddon and Newman having already appeared, the one on Darwin forthcoming in a collection titled Hopkins and Critical Discourse, and only the Pater essay special to this book. For those readers interested only in the relationship between Hopkins and one of the four, this...