Born, at Woodford, Essex, 23 July 1823. Educated privately. First poems written about 1839. For some time engaged in scientific studies. Assistant Librarian, British Museum, 1846–65. Married (i.) Emily Augusta Andrews, 11 Sept. 1847; settled in Hampstead. Wife died, 5 July 1862. Married (ii.) Mary Byles, 1865; settled in Sussex. After death of second wife, removed to Hastings. Removed to Lymington, 1891. Died there, 26 Nov. 1896. Buried there. Works: “Poems,” 1844; “Tamerton Church Tower,” 1853; “The Angel in the House” (anon.; 2 pts. “The Betrothal,” “The Espousals”), 1854–56; “Faithful for Ever,” 1860; “The Victories of Love,” 1863; “Odes” (anon.; priv. ptd.) [1868]; “The Unknown Eros” (anon.), 1877; “Florilegium Amantis” (selected poems), ed. by R. Garnett [1879]; “Poems” (4 vols.) [1879]; “How I Managed and Improved my Estate” (anon.), 1886; “Poems” (2 vols.), 1887; “Principle in Art,” 1889; “Religio Poetæ,” 1893; “The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” 1895. He translated: St. Bernard “On the Love of God” (with M. C. Patmore), 1891; and edited: “The Children’s Garland from the Best Poets,” 1862 [1861]; “Bryan Waller Procter: an autobiographical fragment,” 1877.

Personal

  He is a man of much more youthful aspect than I had expected,… a slender person to be an Englishman, though not remarkably so had he been an American; with an intelligent, pleasant, and sensitive face,—a man very evidently of refined feelings and cultivated mind…. He is very simple and agreeable in his manners; a little shy, yet perfectly frank, and easy to meet on real grounds.

  In March, 1847, her relatives left the south of London for Hampstead, and shortly afterwards Emily became engaged to Coventry Patmore. They were married on the 11th of September, 1847, in the parish church of St. John’s, Hampstead, and spent their honeymoon, some of the incidents of which are described in “The Angel in the House,” at Hastings…. The beauty of her life and the charm which her refined and intellectual nature gave to the simplest domestic details converted many to a belief in that higher standard of home, which is now often taken for granted. She was the bright, poetical, artistic wife, who dressed gracefully and rejoiced in her good looks because they made others happy. At the same time she was the practical wife, who strove to keep a bright heart without overstepping her income, and who understood something of cooking and needlework. Her artistic perception kept her from believing that nothing could be beautiful unless it was costly, and her good sense preserved her from the folly of expecting to satisfy a healthy appetite from an empty blue china dish. Her influence for good went far beyond her own little family circle. She was always teaching by example, and there are many now reaping the advantage of those silent lessons.

  When I came, a mere lad, to work in the Library of the British Museum, I was introduced to all my colleagues with one, doubtless accidental, exception. I was some time before finding out who the tall, spare, silent man was who, alone of the assistants, sat in the King’s Library; who, though perfectly urbane when he did converse, seemed rather among than of the rest of the staff, and who appeared to be usually entrusted with some exceptional task, now cataloguing a mighty collection of sermons from the King’s Library gallery, now the pamphlets of the French Revolution…. His composition was rapid. I have frequently seen twenty or more lines which he had written, he said, in the last half-hour, and re-fashioning was rarely needful, though he was an unwearied corrector in minor details…. Patmore did not go much into society. I have heard him speak, however, of meetings with Carlyle and Ruskin, Browning and Palgrave. The three latter were numbered among his friends, and he was at one time intimate with Tennyson, the MS. of whose “In Memoriam” he rescued from the kitchen of a lodging-house.

  He was so very loyal to his restricted friendships, that a fresh incongruity is to be traced in the notorious fact that he had sacrificed more illustrious friends on the altar of caprice than any other man in England. He had been intimate with Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Millais, and Mr. Ruskin, yet each of the intimacies closed early, and each was broken off by Patmore.

The Angel in the House, 1854–56

  Of course it is very good indeed, yet will one ever want to read it again? The best passages I can recollect now are the ones about “coming where women are,” for the simile of the frozen ship—and the part concerning the “brute of a husband.” From what I hear, I should judge that, in spite of idiots in the Athenæum and elsewhere, the book will be of use to its author’s reputation—a resolute poet, whom I saw a little while back, and who means to make his book bigger than the “Divina Comedia,” he tells me.

  The volume published last year, with the title of “The Angel in the House, Part I.,” inspired us with the hope that a poet of no ordinary promise was about to lay down the leading lines of this great subject, in a composition half narrative and half reflective, which should at least show, as in a chart, what its rich capabilities were, and give some indication of the treasures that future workers in the same mine have gathered in, one by one. But two Parts have been already published, and he has only got as far as the threshold of his subject; while the age is no longer able to bear poems of epic length, even with, and much less without, epic action. He has encumbered himself besides with the most awkward plan that the brain of poet ever conceived.

  The gentle reader we apprise, That this new Angel in the House contains a tale not very wise, About a person and a spouse. The author, gentle as a lamb, Has managed his rhymes to fit, And haply fancies he has writ Another “In Memoriam.” How his intended gathered flowers, And took her tea and after sung, Is told in style somewhat like ours, For delectation of the young. But, reader, lest you say we quiz The poet’s record of his she, Some little pictures you shall see, Not in our language, but in his…. Fear not this saline, Cousin Fred; He gives no tragic mischief birth; There are no tears for you to shed, Unless they may be tears of mirth. From ball to bed, from field to farm, The tale flows nicely purling on; With much conceit there is no harm, In the love-legend here begun. The rest will come another day, If public sympathy allows; And this is all we have to say, About the “Angel in the House.”

  It is a most beautiful and original poem,—a poem for happy married people to read together, and to understand by the light of their own past and present life; but I doubt whether the generality of English people are capable of appreciating it.

  It is curious that this enthusiastic singer of domestic life should himself be one of the last writers with whom we can feel thoroughly at home; but assuredly the most sensible impression we have derived from every reperusal of the “Angel in the House” has been one of astonishment at the amount of beauty which the last reading had left for us to discover.

  The more essential passages of Mr. Coventry Patmore’s … “The Angel in the House”—are classic, and very high in that noble rank. He plays with this power of his art in the brief metre, the symmetrical stanza, and the colloquial phrase. He has here accepted the dailiest things and made them spirit and fire. There has been something said against these colloquialisms; and indeed they would not be tolerable in hands less austere and sweet. The newest Philistine, who is afraid of the reproach of Philistinism, who denies Philistinism in the name of a Philistine, and ultimately receives a Philistine’s reward, has been known to make light of some of Mr. Patmore’s couplets, which he finds too “domestic.” But such “domestic” couplets as those in “Olympus,” for instance, are a smiling defiance of Philistinism. So are the brilliant stanzas, made of life, sense, and spirit, in which the very accessories,—the spoilt accessories—of a modern English wedding are rendered grave and blithe, and the bridegroom is restored to the dignity of the sun.

  That the general reading public should have been captivated by the unexceptionable sentiments, the conventional piety, the idealisation of that pure home-life which the Englishman likes to believe can only be found in his own country, and by the facile gracefulness of diction which adorns many of the stanzas of the “Angel,” was natural enough. But that poets like Tennyson and Browning, thinkers like Ruskin and Carlyle, should have accepted the work as a serious contribution to English poetry, will remain—like Blackwood’s attitude towards Keats—one of the incomprehensible mysteries of criticism.

General

  Your pages abound with unmistakable testimonials of no common genius;—not one which does not proclaim the mind and heart of a Poet.—I honestly, and without compliment, think the promise you hold out to us—is perfectly startling, both from the luxuriance of your fancy, and the subtle and reflective inclinations of your intellect. It rests with yourself alone to fulfill that promise—for no less honestly, I may say, tho’ with respect, that I doubt if very large and material alterations in the faculty we call taste, are not essentially necessary to secure you the wide Audience and the permanent Fame which must root themselves in the universal sympathies, and the household affections of men.

  I wrote to Patmore after reading his book “Faithful Forever,” which he sent me, saying all that I (most sincerely) admired in it, but perhaps leaving some things unsaid; for what can it avail to say some things to a man after his third volume? “Of love which never finds its published close, what sequel?” And how many?

  A carpet-knight in poetry, as the younger Trollope latterly is in prose, he merely photographs life, and often in its poor and commonplace forms. He thus falls short of that aristocracy of art which by instinct selects an elevated theme. It is better to beautify life, though by an illusive reflection in a Claude Lorraine mirror, than to repeat its every wrinkle in a sixpenny looking-glass.

  Neither “The Angel in the House” nor the “Odes” are quite satisfactory as wholes; the foundations of the former are sandy, its view of domestic relations is open to grave exception, and it remains incomplete because it could not be completed. The “Odes” are enveloped in a cloud of mysticism. But these imperfections are more than redeemed by exquisite and surprising beauties of detail; and if the writer had possessed a more equable and symmetrical genius, he would hardly have exhibited the depth of insight, the energy of thought, or the intensity of descriptive power in which, among his contemporaries, he is rivalled only by Browning.

  His most constant theme is woman and love in their purer existence: woman, intelligent, winning, worshipping, comforting, confiding; love, in its power of enchantment, elusive, pervasive and controlling. What in all his word-pictures would place Patmore’s woman for a moment with Longfellow’s Evangeline, for poetic charm of surroundings, for pathetic interest of situation, for delicious home qualities; or with the women of our own reverential Whittier, for tenderness, constancy, wholesome sweetness; or with Tennyson’s, for play of emotions, exquisite purity of mood, elegance and grace of womanhood? Of the women of Browning, Patmore knew nothing; he never saw them so as to know them. To pass from subject matter, our poet reminds us of Wordsworth in ground treatment of theme; but there the resemblance ends.

  The “Sponsa Dei,” this vanished masterpiece, was not very long, but polished and modulated to the highest degree of perfection. No existing specimen of Patmore’s prose seems to me so delicate, or penetrated by quite so high a charm of style, as this lost book was. I think that, on successive occasions, I had read it all, much of it more than once, and I suppose that half a dozen other intimate friends may have seen it. The subject of it was certainly surprising. It was not more nor less than an interpretation of the love between the soul and God by an analogy of the love between a woman and a man; it was, indeed, a transcendental treatise on divine desire seen through the veil of human desire. The purity and crystalline passion of the writer carried him safely over the most astounding difficulties, but perhaps, on the whole, he was right in considering that it should not be thrown to the vulgar. Yet the scruple which destroyed it was simply deplorable; the burning of “Sponsa Dei” involved a distinct loss to literature.

  He probably looked forward with the same keen assurance to the verdict of posterity as did Southey; and posterity it is all but certain will be as ruthless in the one case as in the other.

  We have never met with anything in literature more full of a pathetic desiderium than the poem called “Departure,” more instinct with tenderness and compassion for the heart of childhood than the “Toys.” These things will live.

  The Laureate of Home and the Domestic Affections.

  Whether the nerve of the mass of mankind is open to conviction by the lovely austerity of Mr. Patmore’s music is at least doubtful. For a minority of mankind the music of no poet touches the nerve more exquisitely. By some not insensitive to the best in modern poetry, the odes of Mr. Coventry Patmore would be accepted as the most exacting of all tests of a delicate apprehension. The eye falling upon the pages of “The Unknown Eros” perceives the absence of the ordinary elements of lyrical effect—of the stanzaic structure with its obvious correspondence of verse and regular return of rhyme. Instead of the ordinary lyric form which is a multiplicity of similar parts, Mr. Patmore’s odes develop a real complexity of speech. The page presents a broken flow of apparently discrepant lines, varying in length from one and two beats to as many as five and seven. But the ear soon divines that there is a celestial music most cunningly involved by this apparently capricious method of composition…. To those who had grotesquely misconceived the author of “The Angel in the House” as a domestic sentimentalist, “The Unknown Eros” revealed a personality among the most vivid and virile of our literature. The odes suggest an intellect trenchant and delicate; an emotion wide and sensitive as the sea.

  All his studies, his introspection, his reading of the Fathers of the early church like St. Augustine, his dabbling in physical science, his explorations into what he calls “that inexhaustible poetic mine of psychology”—all these are used but to sound his three mysteries, the three motifs of all his music: God, Woman, Love. Throughout the procedure his intentions are as limpid as crystal…. If in verse execution and technique Patmore be defective, his vitality is so imperious that we yield out of sheer weakness to his mannerisms.

  To me at least it always seemed that Patmore had obtained a far deeper insight into the feminine soul than is given to any but a very few men; nor do I think that this is more largely due to his natural qualifications for his task than to the privilege of a specially close union, both of heart and mind, with a wife of unusual power and delicacy of feeling. It was in fact the combination of original interest and discernment with exceptional advantages of circumstance that served to raise him above most of those masculine writers who have had similar aims. Scarcely ever can a poet have owed to his wife so large a debt.