Yet the organic progression for which we look, generally in vain, is not peculiar to poetic genius of the highest rank.  If it were, we might be accused of mere querulousness.  The rhythm of personality is hard, indeed, to achieve.  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 notes by
   Robert Bridges. (Oxford:  University Press.)]

It is from a sonnet written by Hopkins to Mr Bridges that we take the most concise expression of his artistic intention, for the poet’s explanatory preface is not merely technical, but is written in a technical language peculiar to himself.  Moreover, its scope is small; the sonnet tells us more in two lines than the preface in four pages.