ge, loose-lipped mouth, the
long, thin, furrowed throat, the whole air of gentlemanly ferocity. But
the other, a sketch of the head in profile, gives us more than that;
gives us, in the lean, strong, aquiline head, startlingly, all that was
abrupt, fiery, and essential in the genius of a rare and misunderstood
poet. There never was a man less like the popular idea of him than the
writer of _The Angel in the House_. Certainly an autocrat in the home,
impatient, intolerant, full of bracing intellectual scorn, not always
just, but always just in intention, a disdainful recluse, judging all
human and divine affairs from a standpoint of imperturbable
omniscience, Coventry Patmore charmed one by his whimsical energy, his
intense sincerity, and, indeed, by the childlike egoism of an absolutely
self-centred intelligence. Speaking of Patmore as he was in 1879, Mr.
Gosse says, in his admirable memoir:

Three things were in those days particularly noticeable in the head
of Coventry Patmore: the vast convex brows, arched with vision; the
bright, shrewd, bluish-grey eyes, the outer fold of one eyelid
permanently and humorously drooping; and the wilful, sensuous
mouth. These three seemed ever at war among themselves; they spoke
three different tongues; they proclaimed a man of dreams, a canny
man of business, a man of vehement determination. It was the
harmony of these in apparently discordant contrast which made the
face so fascinating; the dwellers under this strange mask were
three, and the problem was how they contrived the common life.

That is a portrait which is also an interpretation, and many of the
pages on this 'angular, vivid, discordant, and yet exquisitely
fascinating person,' are full of a similar insight. They contain many of
those anecdotes which indicate crises, a thing very different from the
merely decorative anecdotes of the ordinary biographer. The book,
written by one who has been a good friend to many poets, and to none a
more valuable friend than to Patmore, gives us a more vivid sense of
what Patmore was as a man than anything except Mr. Sargent's two
portraits, and a remarkable article by Mr. Frederick Greenwood,
published after the book, as a sort of appendix, which it completes on
the spiritual side.

To these portraits of Patmore I have nothing of importance to add; and I
have given my own estimate of Patmore as a poet in an essay published in
1897