EMINENT VICTORIANS

Evening Star, Issue 19776, 28 January 1928, Page 24

EMINENT VICTORIANS

ELLEN TERRY'S RECOLLECTIONS INCIDENTS OF MARRIAGE WITH G. F. WATTS Born in 1848 in a theatrical family, Ellen Terry was on the stage as a mere child, and in 1864 was married to G. F. Watts, the artist. I was not quite sixteen years old, too young to bo married oven in those days, when everyone married early. But I was delighted, and my parents were delighted, although the disparity of age between my husband and me was very great (writes Dame Ellen Terry in'‘John o’ London’s Weekly’). It all seems now like a dream—not a clear dream, but a fitful one which in the morning one tries in vain to tell. And even if I could tell it, I would not. I was happy, because my face was the type which the great artist who married me loved to paint. I remember sitting to him in armor for hours, and never realising that it was heavy until 1 fainted!

The dnv of my wedding it was very cold. Like most women. 1 always remember what 1 was wearing on the important occasions of my life. On that day 1 wore a brown silk gown, which had been designed by Holman Hunt, and a quilted white bonnet, with a sprig of orange blossom, and 1 was wrapped in a beautiful Indian shawl. I “ went away ” in a sealskin jacket, with coral buttons, and a little sealskin cap. 1 cried a great deal, and Mr Watts said; “Don’t cry. It makes your nose swell. v The day I left home to bo married I “tubbed” all my little brothers and sisters, and washed their fair hair.

Little Holland House, where Mr Watts lived, seemed to me a paradise, where only beautiful things were allowed to come. All the women were graceful, and all the men were gifted. The trio of sisters—Mrs Prinsep (mother of the painter), Lady .Somers and Mrs Cameron, who was the pioneer in artistic photography as wo know'it to-day—-were known as Beauty, Dash, and Talent. There were two more beautiful sisters, Mrs Jackson and Mrs Dalrymplc. Gladstone, Disraeli, and Browning were among Mr Watts’s visitors. At Freshwater, where I went soon after my marriage, I first saw Tennyson. As 1 write down these great names I feel almost guilty of an imposture I Such names are bound to raise high anticipations, and my recollections of the men to whom some of the names belong are so very humble. I sat, shrinking and timid, in a corner —the girl-wife of a laraons painter. I was, if anything at all, more of a curiosity, a side-show, than hostess to these distinguished visitors. Mr Gladstone seemed to mo like a suppressed volcano. His face was pale and calm, but the calm was the calm of the grey crust of Etna. To_ look into the piercing dark eyes wms like having a glimpse into the red-hot crater beneath. Years later, when 1 met him again at the Lyceum and became bettor acquainted with him, this impression of a volcano at rest again struck me. Of Disraeli I carried away even a scantier impression. 1 remember that he wore a bine tie, a brighter blue tie than most men would dare to wear, and that his straggling curls shook as he walked. Ho looked the great Jew before everything. But “ there is the noble Jew,” as George Meredith writes somewhere, “as well as the bestial Gentile.” ‘When I first saw Henry Irving made up as Shylock, my thoughts flow back to the garden party at Little Holland House and Disraeli. I know I must have admired him greatly, for the only other time 1 ever saw him he was walking in Piccadilly, and I crossed the road just to get a good look at him. 1 even, went the length of bumping into him on purpose. it was a very little bump! My elbow just touched his, and I trembled. He took off his hat, muttered “ I bog your pardon,” and passed on, not, recognising me, of course; hut I had had my look into his eyes. They -were very quiet eyes, and didn’t open wide. I love Disraeli’s novels—like his tie, brighter in color than anyone olso’s. It was ‘ Yenetia ’ which first made mo see the real Lord Byron, the real Lady Byron, too. in ‘Tnncred’ I recall a. description of a family of strolling players which seems to me more like the real thing than anything else of the kind in fiction. It is strange that Dizzy’s novels should ho neglected. Can anyone with a pictorial sense fail to be delighted by their pageantry? Disraeli was a lioavcn-horn artist, who, like so many of his race, on the stage, in music, and elsewhere, seems to have had an unerring instinct for the things which the Gentile only acquires by labor and training. The world he shows ns in his novels is big and swelling, but only to a hasty judgment is it hollow.

Tennyson was more to mo than a magic lantern shape, flitting across the white sheet of my young experience, never to return. The first time I saw him lie was sitting at the table in his library, and Mrs Tennyson, her very slender hands hidden by thick gloves, was standing on a step ladder handing him down some heavy books. She was very frail, and looked like a faint tearose. After that one time I only remember her lying on a sofa. In the evenings I went walking with Tennyson over the fields, and ho would point out to mo the differences in the flight of different birds, and tell me to watch their solid phalanxes turning against the sunset, the compact wedge suddenly narrowing sharply into a thin line. Ho taught mo to recognise the bark of trees, and to call wild (lowers by their names. Ho picked me the first bit of pimpernel .1 ever noticed. Always I was quite at case with him. Ho was so wonderfully simple. It was easy enough to me to believe that Tennyson was a poet. He showed it iu everything, although lie was entirely free from any assumption of the poetical role. That Browning, with his carefully brushed hat, smart coat, and fine society manners, was a poet, always seemed to me far more incomprehensible than his poetry, which I think most people would have taken straightforwardly and read with a fair amount of ease, if certain enthusiasts had not founded societies for making Ins crooked places plain, and (to me) his plain places very crooked. These societies have terrorised tho ordinary reader into leaving Browning alone. The same thing has been tried with Shakespeare, but fortunately tbo experiment in tliis case has proved less successful. Coroners’ inquests by learned societies can’t make Shakespeare a dead man. At the time of my first marriage, when I met these great men, I had never had the advantage—l assume that it is an advantage!—of a single day’s schooling in a real school. What 1 have learned outside my own profession I have learned from rnv environment. Perhaps it is tin's which makes me think environment more valuable than a set education, and a stronger agent in forming character even than heredity. I should have written the externals of character, for primal, inner feelings are, I suppose, always inherited.

Still, my want of education may be partly responsible for the unsatisfactory blankness of my early impressions. As it takes two to make a good talker, so it takes two to make a good hero—in print, at any rate. 1 was meeting distinguished people at every turn, and taking no notice of them. At Freshwater I was still so young that 1 preferred playing Indians and Knights of tho Hound Table with Tennyson’s sons, Hallam and Lionel, and the young Camerons, to sitting indoors noticing what the poet did and said. I was mighty proud when I learned how to

prepare his daily pipe lor him. It was a long churchwarden, and he liked the stem to bo steeped in a solution of sal volatile, or something of that kind, so that it did not stick to his lips. But he and all the others seemed to me very old. _ There were my young knights waiting for me; and jumping gates, climbing trees, and running paperchases are pleasant when one is young. It was not to inattentive ears that Tennyson road his poems. His reading was most impressive, but 1 think he read Browning's ‘ Bide from Ghent to Aix ’ better than anything of his own, except, perhaps, ‘ The Northern Farmer.’ ITe used to preserve the monotonous rhythm of the galloping horses in Browning's poem, and made the words come out sharply like bools upon a road, it was a little comic until one got used to it, but that fault, lay in the car of the hearer. It was the right way and the fine way to road this particular poem, and 1 have never forgotten it. In after years 1 met Tennyson again, when with Henry Irving T acted in two of Ins plays at the Lyceum. When J come to those plays, 1 shall have more to say of him. Gladstone, too, came into my later file. Browning 1 saw once or twice at dinner parties, but got to know him no better than in this early period, when i was Nolly Watts, and heedless of the greatness of great men. One charming domestic arrangement at Freshwater was the serving of the dessert in a separate room from the rest of the dinner. And such a dessert it always wasl-Truit piled high on great dishes in Vcroncsu fashion, not the few nuts and an orange of some English households. It must have been sonic years alter the Freshwater days, yet before the production of ' The Cup,’ that I saw Tennyson in his carriage outside a jeweller’s shop in Bond street. “ flow very nice yon look in the daytime,’’ he said. “Not like an actress.” 1 disclaimed my singularity, and said I thought actresses looked very nice in the daytime. To him and to the others my early romance was always the most interesting thing about me. When T saw them in later times, it seemed as il months, not rears, had passed since I was Nelly Watts.

Once, at the dictates of a conscience perhaps over fastidious, I made a bonfire of my letters. But a few were saved from the burning, more by accident than design. Among them 1 found recently a kind little note from Sir William Vernon Harcourt, which shows me that I must have known him, too, at the time of my first marriage, and met him later on when I returned to the stage. “ Yon cannot tell how much pleased I. am to hear that you have been as happy as you deserve to be. The longer one lives, the more one learns not to despair, and to believe that nothing is impossible to those who have courage and hope and youth—J. was going to add beauty and genius.” (This is the sort of thing that made me blush — and burn my letters before they shamed me!) “My little boy is ,still the charm and consolation of my life. He is now twelve years old, and, though I say it that should not, is a perfect child, and wins the hearts of all who know_ him.” That little boy, afterwards in His Majesty’s Government, was known ns the .Right Honorable Lewis Harcourt. Many inaccurate stories have been told of my brief married life, and .1 have never contradicted them—they were so manifestly absurd. Those who can imagine the surroundings into which J, a raw girl, undeveloped in all except -my training as an actress, was thrown, can imagine the situation. Of one tiling J am certain. While I was with signor—the name by which Mr Watts was known among his friends f never had one single pang of regret for the theatre. .This may do me no credit, but it is true. I. wondered at the ntny Hie, and worshipped it because ol its beauty. When it suddenly came to an end J was thunderstruck, and refused at first to consent, to the separation which was arranged for me in much the same way as mvUiarriago had been. 'The whole thing was managed by those kind friends whose chief business in life seems to he the care of others. ]. don’t blame them. These are cases where no one is to blame. 11 Iheie do exist such things as honest misunderstandings,” as Charles Rcado was alwavs impressing on me at a later time. There were no vulgar accusations cm either side, and the words I. read in the deed of separation, “incompatibility of temper ” —a mere legal phrase —more than covered the ground. Truer still would have been “ iueompatbility of occupation,” and the interference of well-meaning friends. \Ve all suffer from that sort of tiling. Pray God one be not a well-meaning Jnend oneself! “ The marriage was not a nappy one,” they wall probably say after my death, and I forestall them by saying that in many ways it was very happy indeed. What bitterness there was effaced itself in a very remarkable way. t saw Mr Watts but once face to lace after the separation. We mot in the street at Brighton, and ho told me that I had grown I I was never to speak to him again. But years later, after I had appeared at the Lyceum and had made some success in the world, I was in tho garden of a house which adjoined Mr Watt’s now Little Holland House, and ho, in his garden, saw mo through the hedge. It was then that I received from him the first letter that T had had for years. In this letter ho told me that jio had watched my success with eager interest, and asked me to shako hands with him in spirit. “ What success T may have,” he wrote, “will he very incomplete and unsatisfactory if yon cannot do what T have long been hesitating to ask. If you cannot, keep silence. If yon can, one word, ‘Yes,’ will he enough.” J answered simply, “Yes.” After that ho wrote to me again, and for two or throe years we corresponded, hut I never came into personal contact with him.