Identifier: coventrypatmore00goss (find matches)
Title: Coventry Patmore
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors: Gosse, Edmund, 1849-1928
Subjects: Patmore, Coventry Kersey Dighton, 1823-1896 Poets, English -- 19th century
Publisher: London : Hodder and Stoughton
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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Text Appearing Before Image:
for him anywhere. And even Ruskin, though
in lesser degree, and with far less seriousness,
for the affection here lasted warmly to the end,
came in at times for fantastic denunciation. In
these sallies, fun and earnest were indissolubl
ymixed, yet it was very far indeed from bein
gall fun.
Patmore's austerity being, as it was, strongly
emphasized by his candour of speech and
virile intellectual independence, it is well to
note that he was by no means, at least in the
Puritan sense, ascetic. Nor, although so pas-
sionately a Catholic in all the fibres of his
being, did he limit his sympathies to his own
order. On the contrary, he was remarkably
ready to annex to Catholicism whatever he
approved of. The oddest example of this which
I recollect, was the remark, to which I haveal
ready made some reference, which he once
made about the boudoir novelists of the
eighteenth century, Crebillon fils and La Mor-
liere and Voisenon, They are not nearly so
vile as people pretend to think ; there is a
great deal that is Catholic in their conception
of love. And Plato had his Catholic touches
Text Appearing After Image:

The Lodge, Lymington


Personal Characteristics 209

in the Symposium, and all the first pagan
rapture in physical beauty was Catholic too.
For a long time Patmore hesitated whether he
should hang on the low landing which faced
his front door at Hastings a life-size cast of the
Venus of Milo or a reproduction of the San
Sisto Madonna. The ladies of the household
much preferring the latter, it was at length
put up, but Patmore remarked to me, with a
sigh, " The Venus would have been at least as
Catholic." In all these instances he per-
ceived in the innocent, sensuous form a symbol
which but added a whispered and exterior
benediction to that solemn sacrament of
marriage, which held so lofty a place in his
conception of spiritual life. Greek sculptors,
poets of the Renaissance, even the Crebillons
of the world of patch and powder, seemed,
to his broad vision, like those wild men who
knelt in the narthex of an ancient Christian
church, though they might never penetrate
into the fane itself.
A singular characteristic of Patmore's, which
demands record, were his occasional bursts of
waggishness in reference to things which are

14

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