ONE REMEMBERS HIM IN the ‘nineties, an odd figure in a drawing-room presided over by the most exquisite of women, short, untidy, in a suit of ugly, yellowish tweed, with the unfailing pipe, a pipe of the grimiest, clutched in his fingers when it was not between his lips. The lower part of the face was poor, the mouth and chin covered by a short beard: but the brow was splendid, and there was the width between the eyes which never goes with insignificance. The expression was simple and candid: indeed, a simpler soul never lived. He had won the praise most sweet to him, the praise of his peers, but he had no consciousness of wearing the purple. His admirations were very frank and simple, and he was humble in the pleasure he took in the work of other people who were far from being on a level with himself. This quality he shared with W. B. Yeats, whose interest in the work of lesser poets has always been inexhaustible.

I remember how delighted he would be with a chance poem picked up out of the Pall Mall Gazette. At that time one often saw him in juxtaposition with Coventry Patmore, who was an extremely arrogant poet, and a terrifying person to the young aspirant who would write poetry or had written something he or she hoped was poetry, even though of a minor order. Patmore had an enormous opinion of Francis Thompson: he had no tolerance for the minor poet.

Coventry Patmore, by Sargent. 1894.

Coventry Patmore would have hailed Francis Thompson as his peer in poetry: and the contrast between the two was startling. Poor Francis Thompson, so simple, so human, so humble, never crushing one with the air of being immortal to one’s mortality; and the arrogant, overbearing old poet, whose presence in the room was like a frost to those he did not honour.

Patmore was somewhat wild in his obiter dicta. He would talk to few people and listen to few people; but he would talk to and listen to Francis Thompson by the hour. I remember to have heard him say that Francis Thompson talked better than he wrote, and that his prose was better than his poetry, both sayings no doubt obviously extravagant; for Patmore was violently generous to the younger poet, as was his way once he was stirred to admiration. On the appearance of “Poems,” he wrote in the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW an article which welcomed Francis Thompson into the band of the elect.

I can imagine nothing stranger than to see these two as companions—Francis Thompson as I have described him, Patmore with his manner of a cold and lofty arrogance which Sargent has caught so wonderfully in his great portrait. Sargent, that tremendous painter of character, has painted Patmore eight feet high, or that is the impression the portrait gives. He was not really above the common height, but for one whom he dismayed he might have been as high as the mountains—and casting a very cold shadow. With Patmore one was within the circle or one was not; outside the circle no one existed. It was the oddest thing to think of Francis Thompson within his sanctities.