Tennyson’s Gift

‘So she’s choosing the big red flowers?’ said Watts’s devoted fans and perpetual support, Mr and Mrs Prinsep, when they first saw the picture. ‘Good for her! Mm, you can smell them, Il Signor, you can, really.’

Watts judiciously stifled his impatience. The relationship between an artist and his patrons is an unequal one, despite the flattery on both sides. The patrons flatter the artist (calling him ‘Il Signor’, for example) because they can afford to be generous; the artist flatters the patrons because he likes eating, and lying down in the forenoon.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the red flowers are mere ostentation. I abominate red flowers. They should all be painted white. No, Ellen, representing Woman in the Abstract, chooses between the superficiality of the scentless camellia and, ahem, the sincerity of the humble perfumed violets.’

‘Does she?’ they said, eager to understand. ‘Oh. But what violets? Where?’

‘There.’ He pointed.

‘Oh yes. I mean, no. Sorry, I can’t quite –’

‘There.’

‘Oh yes.’

There was a short pause, while the Prinseps conferred sotto voce, and Watts looked out of the window at the fields, pretending he couldn’t hear.

‘Perhaps he should make the violets bigger, what do you think?’

‘Dare one suggest it?’

They looked at each other, and then at Watts, who was now biting his nails. They decided against.

‘It is a stupendous picture, Il Signor!’ Mrs Prinsep exclaimed, making Watts smile broadly with relief. ‘A great success! You are a genius, and we are privileged to sit at your feet. Come! Let us dine from the best fowl the capital can provide, and you our master shall taste the liver wing!’ But this was all a month ago, and from Sara’s adulation Watts must return bathetically to the present scene, in which the returned Ellen sank to her knees, clutching his trousers like a waif. His artistic reverie had changed nothing, apparently. Here was all the trouble with marriage, in a tiny shell: when you got back from your mental wanderings, the little wife was invariably still there.

‘Are you still acting?’ he whispered, at last.

‘How could I choose Viola?’ she whimpered. ‘Of all the heroines!’

He didn’t know what to say.

‘But the pose was quite lovely, nevertheless. You have a decided talent, my dear. And the moral of that is, waste not want not, for tomorrow I will sketch you in that exact position for my projected masterpiece, “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Hope”.’

Ellen sniffed.

‘Ah,’ he continued, warming up at once (he loved talking about art). ‘You make no remark? Of course. But think, if you will, of the supreme challenge of depicting the Absence of Hope! For you see, if I merely leave Hope out, it won’t do at all! Critics will argue with justice that my picture equally well represents “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Railway Carriages” or “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Soup”!’

Ellen nodded to show she understood, though secretly she thought the absence of hope was a challenge to everybody, and Watts was the usual cause of it.

She rallied a little. ‘I don’t know why, Viola just came out,’ she snivelled. ‘But the point was, I wanted to do Lady Macbeth or Lady Ann or something. I want you to take me seriously! I want it dreadful bad!’

‘I see. And the moral of that is –?’

‘That I want you to take me seriously. I’m your wife and I love you.’

‘And Viola won’t do?’

‘No. Because she’s too much like me. Viola loves an older man, and he doesn’t see her for what she is.’

‘I know. The Duke Orsino. And the moral of that is –?’

‘Whereas, you see, I don’t want to watch and wait like Viola. I am not patience on a monument. George, we have been married five months.’

‘Ah.’ Watts winced at the use of his name. ‘Could you not call me Il Signor? The Prinseps call me that.’

She seemed calmer now, and Watts took her hand. He was a kind man by inclination, but unfortunately if an allegorical picture of G. F. Watts were to be considered, it would show ‘Inclination Untutored by Practice and Doomed to Disappointment’, for he had spent his first forty-seven years unmarried, depending largely on the generosity of patrons, and letting other people pay for the luxury of his high-mindedness. In short, he had never been made to care. His most vivid emotional engagement had been, in childhood, with a small caged cockney sparrow, which he tragically murdered by trapping its head in a door.

Watts never recovered from the guilt or the grief of that accident. His emotion on the subject of that little squashed bird made Alfred Tennyson’s great In Memoriam look like nothing. It had hindered him for years; disqualified him from happiness. This complex of emotions had now stretched a dead hand into his marriage, too. For whenever he thought about touching his wife in a marital way, the ghost of poor wronged Haydon (for whose suicide Watts was really not responsible) rose up and cried, ‘Remember Westminster!’ thereby throwing him completely off his stride.

‘Let’s go to Freshwater,’ said his wife brightly, as if she had just thought of it (she hadn’t). ‘I want to leave London dreadful bad. Let’s go tomorrow. I could pose for you there, and for your friend Mrs Cameron, who is beginning to like me a little, I think. You know how well I pose. You know how well I embody an abstract when I set my mind to it. Mrs Cameron needs sitters for her photography. The summer is too hot for London, especially considering your headaches.’

Watts looked unconvinced, so Ellen continued with her list of reasons, realizing she needed to butter him a little.

‘You could paint Mr Tennyson again – it must be months since the last time – and then Mrs Cameron could take your photograph, making you look so very handsome, my dear! You have such excellent temples, George! And then we can all pose for each other and never stop having fun and larks!’

Ellen was accustomed to getting her own way. Her drop-dead prettiness had a miraculous effect on men of all ages, turning princes and politicians into fawning servants at the merest wiggle of her prominent but tip-tilted nose. This quality was to be her great salvation in life: that a childhood spent portraying Shakespearean nobility had led her to expect slavish devotion as her due. She need only turn the full force of her ingénue good looks on Il Signor, and like all other mortal men he felt privileged to kiss the hem of her gown, or carry her picnic hamper that extra mile up Box Hill. Beauty has power but no responsibility. It is terribly unfair, but there you go.

‘Would you?’ was generally Ellen’s way of saying ‘thank you’. ‘Would you really?’ she said, as she strode ahead of her puffing volunteer minion. Once at Little Holland House, the First Lord of the Treasury pointed out that the wheel of Ellen’s carriage was running badly. ‘Oh please don’t feel you have to do anything about it,’ she had assured the astonished prime minister, and although everybody else laughed like rills down a mountainside, Ellen was puzzled. She was quite sure she hadn’t meant it to be funny.

How could Watts deny her a trip to the Isle of Wight? What was good enough for the Queen must be good enough for his princess. ‘I don’t know about the larks,’ he said, ‘but I agree it is a good plan. What a shame Mrs Prinsep cannot accompany us, she would love to see Julia. I have never known sisters so fond and close.’

‘Except mine,’ objected Ellen.

‘What? Oh yes, well, the Terrys,’ said Watts, in a tone that suggested the emotional closeness of Terrys did not count.

‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘it will be refreshing to see Mrs Cameron, and she is bound to make us welcome. You know how Mrs Cameron loves to give, give, give!’ (‘Which is fortunate,’ thought Ellen, ‘when you prefer to take, take, take.’)

‘Such selfless generosity,’ he continued, as though reading her mind, ‘is not within the means of all of us. Poor men must rely on the currency of talent to buy their friends. And I am a very poor man, Ellen, I never misled you about that. A very poor man. Yet I esteem Generosity above all other human traits, above Faith and Hope and Discretion and Fortitude and Purpose –’

‘George,’ said Ellen quietly. ‘You’re doing it again.’

‘I apologize, my dear. Ah, ‘tis love, ‘tis love that makes the world go round!’

He slapped his knees and stood up, his wife’s emotional outburst now forgotten.

‘Do you know, I feel quite restored already. Where’s that new bucket of gouache? I believe I can feel an allegory coming on!’

Three

‘I don’t suppose they’ve hung that lovely wallpaper at Farringford yet,’ said Julia aloud.

It was Friday midday at Dimbola, and Julia Margaret Cameron was having her ‘quiet time’ – a daily hour by the clock when she eschewed all household duties (including photography) and sat at her westward-facing bedroom window scanning the chalk downs for a sight of Alfred. Ah, Alfred, Alfred! She could hardly wait to see his reaction when he found all her roses had been painted white. The servants had assumed it was one of her artistic whims (‘Mr Il Signor Flipping Watts is behind this!’), but it was a valentine to Alfred, of course. A white rose means ‘I am worthy of you’. And if Alfred didn’t know that, then at least he would recognize the reference to the flower garden scene in Maud.

The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;

And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late;’

The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’

And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’

Julia loved Maud. She had bought copies for everyone. She had posted them indiscriminately to people she hadn’t even met. When she saw Watts’s ‘Choosing’ picture of his wife for the first time, she recognized at once that Ellen’s attire was an exact replica of Maud’s in the poem:

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,

Come hither, the dances are done,

In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,

Queen lily and rose in one;

Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,

To the flowers, and be their sun.

It was not surprising that silly little Ellen had not endeared herself to Mrs Cameron, when everyone fell at her feet in this nauseating way, and geniuses painted her in the exact guise of Alfred’s ideal woman. Julia did most things precipitately; and thus she had rushed into a decision about Ellen – that she was a spoiled child, hopelessly unserious, whose background was not only common, but very possibly Irish.

As she sat in her bedroom now, all around were testimonials to her impulses. The house itself had been bought on a whim – two houses, in fact, joined together with a castellated tower, and all overgrown with ivies and roses. She had bought it, obviously, to be nearby to Tennyson in case he ever needed a leg of mutton in a hurry, or a loan of a violet poncho. The small window in which she sat was not a natural bay, but had been flung out one night when the fancy took her, and had ever since rested on stilts. In her room were intricate Indian pelmets to remind her of life in Calcutta. Yes, the sound of sawing never really left off at Dimbola Lodge, and the god of Carpentry smiled on Julia Margaret Cameron just as broadly as the gods of Art and Friendship.

Moreover, on her back this morning she wore half a cherry-red shawl, having given the other half to a shopkeeper at Yarmouth two days ago who happened to admire it. ‘What a lovely X,’ was the wrong thing to say to Julia Margaret Cameron, as her friends had long since recognized. In fact visitors to Dimbola were now careful not to exclaim over any object that was not actually bolted to the walls or holding up the ceiling.

At her feet, primly knitting a length of chain-mail with outsize needles, sat Mary Ann Hillier, the local girl (employed on impulse, of course) who posed so well in religious mufti, with her face tilted up to a sublime, framing light. Mary Ann had an unvaryingly stupid countenance, unfortunately, which properly captioned would be ‘What?’ or ‘Huh?’ Yet Mrs Cameron discovered great spiritual depth in Mary Ann’s vacant, open-mouthed expression, and appended all sorts of poetic tags to it. One of her latest shimmering Mary Ann pictures was called ‘The Nonpareil of Beauty’, which had been such a hit with the other servants that below stairs Mary Ann was now known as the nail-paring.

Mary Ann ignored their jibes; she knew she was invaluable. Where would Julia’s photography be without Mary Ann? Mrs Cameron could hardly rely on Farringford to provide decent photographic subjects – it was the general talk of Dimbola that Emily drove all the Carlyles and Ruskins away with her terrible meals; if not, Tennyson sent them scarpering for the ferry soon afterwards by guzzling all the port, blowing smoke in their faces, and reciting Maud till they fell off their chairs.

A railway had been mooted, to bring more people to Freshwater, and Tennyson opposed it with every inch of his body. A visitor once averred in his hearing that a railway link would be ‘dandy’, but Tennyson dismissed this as the opinion of an ignoramus.

‘That man clearly has no idea how one thing leads to another,’ he declared. It was Charles Darwin.

Mrs Cameron had a wistful fleeting vision of a carriage-load of celebrities descending on Freshwater, and then regained control of herself. She grabbed a piece of paper and made a note for more photographic subjects featuring those only constant and reliable resources: Mary Ann, a pool of light, a lily and a cheesecloth shift.

‘The Angel at the Sepulchre’ (she wrote),

‘The Angel Just Outside the Sepulchre’,

‘The Angel on Top of the Sepulchre, Looking Down’,

‘The Angel at the Sepulchre Saying Move Along Now Please, There’s Nothing to See.’

She put a line through the last one on grounds of blasphemy, but was generally satisfied. The important thing when there were no lions around was to make do.

Up in London, of course, her sister Sara Prinsep had lions galore. Little Holland House abounded in lions. It even had a resident lion (couchant, of course) in the person of the eminent painter G. F. Watts. Sara knew how to tame these large-bearded luminaries. You had to flatter them senseless, and then give them big slabs of meat for their dinner. She was a great success, the hostess with the mostest. In fact it was the mark of a very poor day if the amiable Thoby Prinsep inquired over his teatime bread and butter, ‘Who’s for dinner tonight?’ and his wife replied, ‘Oh, just some Rossettis, you know, left over.’

The trouble, as Julia saw it, was that whereas Sara only knew how to feed these lions, Julia could lend them immortality. Life could be terribly unfair. But as Julia was always telling that wretched Irish servant Mary Ryan when she whined about not being photographed as much as the favoured Mary Ann, ‘The beautiful are dearer to God’s heart, that’s all, Mary. We who are not beautiful have an obligation to serve, and to receive the charcoaled end of the joss-stick.’ At which the actually not bad-looking Mary Ryan would turn away with her eyes narrowed like letter boxes, and hum ‘Oh God our help in ages past’.

Julia rested her hand on Mary Ann’s head, and the girl looked up beatifically – light from the window striking her features in that thrilling Bellini-ish way that it always did. It was quite a knack the girl had, and it did not go unrewarded with privilege. While the other servants were expected to wear their hair tidy and pinned, Mary Ann wore hers free and flowing. Its tresses, shining gold and silver mixed, spilled over her shoulders like a stream in torrent. And right now, the stupid girl was steadily knitting it into the chain-mail while it was still attached to her head.

‘I fear Alfred does not come today, Mary Ann. He is late! He is late!’ said Julia. Mary Ann said nothing. She was wondering whether to unpick three inches of chain-mail. She tugged at the attached hair, but the stitches merely tightened, holding her more securely in place. Still she held her tongue. She had learned from experience that when she opened her mouth and spoke, her Isle of Wight accent rather ruined the Pre-Raphaelite effect. When you owned a profile suggestive of angels and madonnas, it was daft to undermine it with ‘Our keerter went to Cowes wi’ a load o’ straa.’

Meanwhile, on the train to Brockenhurst, a single lion was on its way. G. F. Watts had fallen asleep over his old pocket edition of Tennyson’s poetry and was warmly dreaming, his great domed forehead resting lightly against the window glass and his tired eyelids pressed gently on tired eyes. All around (interestingly) the languid air did swoon. Ellen studied him from the seat opposite, and folded her arms. She found it odd to be married to a man so attached to the horizontal, when her own body sang with energy, vigour and bounce. She had heard many times that Julia and Sara’s father was ‘the biggest liar in India’. How peculiar, she reflected, that these women were now so fond of the biggest lie-er-down in England.

On his lap, the Tennyson lay open at The Lotos-Eaters, a poem that endlessly delighted Watts and infuriated Mrs Cameron – concerned as it was with becalmed sailors succumbing to a lifetime of postprandial snooze, ‘propt on beds of amaranth and moly’ (whatever that was).

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have

To war with evil? Is there any peace

In ever climbing up the climbing wave?

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave

In silence; ripen, fall and cease:

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

It was the line about ever climbing up the climbing wave that particularly appealed to Il Signor. He felt he knew the sensation, and that he had learned to ride waves not fight them. Also, ‘There is no joy but calm’ had always been his personal motto until Little Miss Act Five Scene Two Terry had kicked the ottoman from under him. The Lotos-Eaters was a great poem, all right. Besides which, on train journeys it always helped lull him to sleep.

In his dream, however, things were less reassuring. He was still in a railway carriage, but Ellen was dressed prettily in a red coat and feathered hat like the child in John Everett Millais’s painting ‘My First Sermon’. This seemed perfectly natural. Outside the window, the landscape (which should have been Hampshire) was all cliffs and wind and wild flowers, alternating with long stretches of blue coastal sea. Another of the passengers was the dead painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who studied Watts through the wrong end of a telescope and whispered ‘Remember Westminster’. It was very unsettling. Meanwhile the sound of the carriage wheels was saying, over and over, a passage from Maud:

‘Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South,

Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth.’

‘Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South,

Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth.’

Ellen watched him as he twitched in his seat, merely remarking to herself that it was the most animated she had seen him in a considerable time. She returned to her own reading matter, but could not concentrate. Watts had given her a book of proverbs to digest on the journey, bought at Waterloo for the knockdown price of threepence. Watts did not notice that a knockdown present gave his wife very little gratification; he always loved to tell her how little his presents had cost. It was another area in which they would never see entirely eye to eye.

She flicked through the book of proverbs idly.

‘It is a silly fish that is caught twice by the same bait.’

‘Northamptonshire stands on other men’s legs.’

‘Cheese digests everything but itself.’

So many picture opportunities for her dear husband! How would he manage Northamptonshire’s borrowed legs, she wondered. The section on Gratitude included the interesting commandment, ‘Throw no gift again at the giver’s head’ – which was a precept which came just in time for Ellen, since the ungrateful young woman was just about to hurl this ghastly book straight at her nodding spouse.

What is the point of a book without pictures or conversation? Ellen tried to read Tennyson’s latest poem Enoch Arden (Watts knew better than to turn up at Freshwater without it). But she had trouble with that as well. Its story was the usual cheerless Tennyson stuff, but with slightly more event than one had learned to expect. It concerned a fisherman who undertakes a voyage, leaving his family, and stays away for umpteen years because shipwrecked on a desert island. Back at home, his wife waits and waits (years pass), and keeps putting off another suitor, but finally concedes that Arden will not return. And then, what do you know? Arden is rescued! He comes home, learns that his wife has remarried, and dies in grief alone. But he makes a friendly landlady promise to tell the whole story after his death, so that everybody can feel really guilty and morbid, including the kiddies.

Ellen huffed, and put the book back in her bag. The whole thing seemed bizarre to her. If she were shipwrecked abroad and returned to find George remarried, she would dance the sailor’s hornpipe and set up house with a parrot. Ellen was the least morbid person who ever lived. Those pink tights, for instance. She thought Watts had found her verve attractive; she hoped that was why he had asked her to marry him. But then as his first act as a married man he had asked her to pose for ‘Choosing’ and she was forced to realize the extent of his self-deception. Given the choice between the big showy camellia and the humble scented violet, Ellen had a decided floral preference, and the violets were in the bin. ‘Choosing’ was a blatant case of authorial wish-fulfilment. It was so funny it was almost sad.

She looked at Watts. In his dream, he was trying to talk to Haydon as though there was nothing between them, but Haydon was pale and accusing, with a long white finger and a jagged crimson slash at his neck. Ellen kicked him lightly on the shin. Her husband only frowned. Haydon was talking about gouache costing a thousand pounds a pint. Ellen decided on the ungrateful course proscribed by proverb, and with some force threw the book again at the giver’s head. Nothing.

In his dream, the railway carriage bucked in the air as though jumping a river. And at that point, Watts felt a terrible wrench to his face, as though someone were trying to pull his head off. He jerked, he saw an ungraspable vision of the absence of hope; and woke to discover that for some reason Ellen had fallen against him and grabbed his beard to steady herself.

Half an hour to go, and still no Alfred. Julia’s daily letters had been written (a servant chased the post-boy up the road), so the rest of the time was hers. But it went against the grain, this quiet time. She had promised her dear husband that she would sometimes take things easy, but temperamentally it was quite beyond her. Besides – as she often pointed out to him, as he lay in his bed with his beard spread across the counterpane, a volume of Greek verse under his hand – dear old Cameron took things quite easily enough for both of them.

‘Why do you write so many letters, Julia?’ Alfred had once inquired. ‘I would as soon kill a pig as write a letter. You write to your sisters every day. Do they reciprocate? I can’t believe they do.’