Hopkins' soul marched quietly over the borderland to victory.
But little remains to be said. The poems have been permitted to speak for themselves, and if their faults are conspicuous enough, so, too, is their unique and magnetic attraction. No doubt this is in the nature of an acquired taste. They were not written for the public (during their maker's lifetime scarcely one of them was permitted to steal into print); they were written for the consolation of the poet and of a few chosen friends. And to such readers no concessions need be made. Coventry Patmore, Robert Bridges, and Richard Watson Dixon were of this elect little company. All were convinced of Father Hopkins' rare poetic ability, of the even "terrible pathos" (the words are Dixon's) which tempered his work; although Patmore (himself an experimentalist) was never quite won over to the metrical ingenuities and idiosyncrasies of his "new prosody." "System and learned theory are manifest in all these experiments; but they seem to me to be too manifest" wrote the worshipper of the Unknown Eros: "I often find it as hard to follow you as I have found it to follow the darkest parts of Browning."[1]
Gerard Hopkins' exceedingly delicate and intricate craftsmanship—and not less the singularity of his mental processes—must, indeed, produce in many minds an impression of artificiality. Yet nothing could be further from the fact, for in
- ↑ Patmore's final verdict upon Father Hopkins, written barely two months after the latter's death, is worth remembering: "Gerard Hopkins was the only orthodox and, as far as I could see, saintly man in whom religion had absolutely no narrowing effect upon his general opinions and sympathies. A Catholic of the most scrupulous strictness, he could nevertheless see the Holy Spirit in all goodness, truth, and beauty: and there was something in all his words and manners which was at once a rebuke and an attraction to all who could only aspire to be like him."
