The simple mind and the single outlook are now too
rare to be considered as near possibilities, while the task of tempering
a mind to a comprehensive adequacy to modern experience is not an easy
one. The desire to escape and the desire to be lost in life were
probably never so intimately associated as they are now; and it is a
little preposterous to ask a moth fluttering round a candle-flame to see
life steadily and see it whole. We happen to have been born into an age
without perspective; hence our idolatry for the one living poet and
prose writer who has it and comes, or appears to come, from another age.
But another rhythm is possible. No doubt it would be mistaken to
consider this rhythm as in fact wholly divorced from the rhythm of
personality; it probably demands at least a minimum of personal
coherence in its possessor. For critical purposes, however, they are
distinct. This second and subsidiary rhythm is that of technical
progression. The single pursuit of even the most subordinate artistic
intention gives unity, significance, mass to a poet's work. When
Verlaine declares 'de la musique avant toute chose,' we know where we
are. And we know this not in the obvious sense of expecting his verse to
be predominantly musical; but in the more important sense of desiring to
take a man seriously who declares for anything 'avant toute chose.'

It is the 'avant toute chose' that matters, not as a profession of
faith--we do not greatly like professions of faith--but as the guarantee
of the universal in the particular, of the _dianoia_ in the episode. It
is the 'avant toute chose' that we chiefly miss in modern poetry and
modern society and in their quaint concatenations. It is the 'avant
toute chose' that leads us to respect both Mr Hardy and Mr Bridges,
though we give all our affection to one of them. It is the 'avant toute
chose' that compels us to admire the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins[5];
it is the 'avant toute chose' in his work, which, as we believe, would
have condemned him to obscurity to-day, if he had not (after many years)
had Mr Bridges, who was his friend, to stand sponsor and the Oxford
University Press to stand the racket. Apparently Mr Bridges himself is
something of our opinion, for his introductory sonnet ends on a
disdainful note:--

'Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display
Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!'

[Footnote 5: _Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins_. Edited with note