FROM FRIEND TO FRIEND.

BY LADY RITCHIE.

I.

A child who was, I suppose, once myself sat on the stairs in an old house at Twickenham with a thrill of respectful adventure looking up at the carved oaken figure of a Bishop with benedictory hands standing in a niche in the panelled wall. The house was Chapel House in Montpelier Row, inhabited in those days by a Captain Alexander who had fought in the Peninsular War, and who christened his children by the names of the battles, and my sister and I were spending the summer there while my father was in Germany. We enjoyed the old house and garden, and the youthful companionship of Vittoria Alexander, my contemporary. When I read the address on some letters which have been lately shown me by the present Lord Tennyson, one of those wonderful mental cinemas we all carry in our minds flashed me back to the panelled rooms and the dark hall and the oak staircase and the benedictory Bishop. Among those who passed before him treading the broad steps after the Alexanders had left, came the Poet Laureate and his wife, who lived for a time at Chapel House, where their son Hallam was born. But Tennyson wished to live in the country, and they did not stay very long at Twickenham. An early letter written from thence, introduces a whole party of friends living in those days of peace. It is dated June 25, 1852, and was despatched by Mrs. Tennyson to Mrs. Cameron, her neighbour at Sheen.

‘My dear Mrs. Cameron,—Thank you. It was very pleasant being at Kew Gardens, still we should have liked two pleasant things instead of one.... We are by every post expecting a letter about a house which may send us in another direction, but I am not going to drag you house-hunting even on paper. My husband would, I am sure, listen with most hearty interest to you. The East is a great inspiring theme. Would that his brother Horatio were doing something there ... he would have made a grand soldier of the old school. You would like him if he were not too shy to show himself as he is. He is living with his mother, but we will with all pleasure bring him. I am going to let Mrs. Henry Taylor know when we can say with any certainty when we shall be at home.

‘Hoping that you and they will be able to come to us,

‘Very sincerely yours,

‘Emily Tennyson.’

This was but the beginning of the long life’s friendship and confidence between the two friends. As one reads on through letter after letter it almost seems as if the writers were actually present.

They were ladies something in looks like those familiar paintings by Watts or by some of the old Italian masters he loved. Watts has painted Mrs. Tennyson more than once and recorded her beautiful spiritual aspect and delicate features, and he has also painted her correspondent Mrs. Cameron, a woman of a noble plainness, carrying herself with dignity and expression, and well able to set off the laces and Indian shawls she wore so carelessly. Mrs. Tennyson was more daintily attired: she wore a quaint little gimp high to her throat; her dresses were of violet and grey and plum colour; a white net coif fell over her brown hair. Her hair never turned grey; she remained to us all, a presence sweet and unchanged in that special and peaceful home shrine to which no votary ever came more warmly true and responsive than Julia Cameron, her neighbour in the Island for so many years. Mrs. Cameron was one of the well-known family of Pattle sisters, beautiful and gifted women who were able to illustrate their own theories. They were unconscious artists with unconventional rules for life which excellently suited themselves.

My own first meeting with Mrs. Cameron was not very long after that youthful stay in Chapel House, one summer’s day when my father took my sister and myself to Sheen to see his old friend. I remember her, a strange apparition in a flowing red velvet dress although it was summer time, cordially welcoming us to a fine house and to some belated meal, where the attendant butler was addressed by her as ‘Man’ and was ordered to do many things for our benefit; to bring back luncheon-dishes and curries for which she and her family had a speciality. When we left she came with us bareheaded, with trailing draperies, part of the way to the station as her kind habit was. A friend of mine told me how on one occasion she accompanied her in the same way, carrying a cup of tea which she stirred as she walked along. My father, who had known her first as a girl in Paris, laughed and said ‘She is quite unchanged,’ and unchanged she remained to the end of her days; generous, unconventional, a more loyal friend never lived.

Alfred Tennyson, writing to his wife in 1855, says ‘I dined with Mrs. Cameron last night, she is more wonderful than ever in her wild beaming benevolence.’

There are several mentions of this most interesting, most emphatic lady in Sir Henry Taylor’s ‘Autobiography.’ Sir Henry, who was her chosen ideal among many, says:

‘In India, in the absence of the Governor-General’s wife, she has been at the head of the European Society, for Mr. Cameron was a very high official, succeeding Lord Macaulay as legal member of Council.

‘Does Alice,’ he writes to a friend, ‘ever tell you, or do I, how we go on with Mrs. Cameron, how she keeps showering on us “her barbaric pearls and gold,” Indian shawls, turquoise bracelets, inlaid portfolios, ivory elephants, &c., and how she writes us letters six sheets long all about ourselves.... It was indeed impossible that we should not grow fond of her, and not less so for the many, whom her genial ardent and generous nature has captivated since.’

It is very difficult to describe Mrs. Cameron. She played the game of life with such vivid courage and disregard for ordinary rules, she entered into other people’s interests with such warmhearted sympathy and determined devotion, that, though her subjects may have occasionally rebelled, they generally ended by gratefully succumbing to her rule, laughing and protesting all the time.

Sir Henry quotes her saying to someone with whom she had disagreed: ‘before the year is out you will love me as a sister,’ and he adds that she proved the truth of this prophecy. She must have been a trying sister at times, especially when her relations and adopted relations were ill. She longed to cure them on the spot; she would fly in an agony from one great doctor to another, demanding advice and insisting on instant prescription and alleviation. ‘Culpable carelessness, profound ignorance,’ were the least of her criticisms of family physicians whom she had not sent in herself. She would eloquently describe the anxious hours she spent in waiting-rooms, obtaining opinions from great authorities who had not even seen the patient. Sir Henry’s stepmother (Mrs. Cameron had barely known her) says:

I think I might have found good Mrs. Cameron’s loving letter difficult to answer, and though I have a sort of scruple about refusing kindness and charitable love, yet I cannot help being glad you saved me....’

II.

The real neighbours in life do not depend on vicinity only, they have a way of continuing to be neighbours quite irrespective of their different addresses. The Tennysons had ever a very faithful following of old friends wherever they happened to be, none more faithful than Julia Cameron.

As I have said the first letter quoted from Twickenham was followed by a life-long correspondence. Mrs. Tennyson had hurt her wrist in early youth and writing was often difficult to her; though until her son grew up almost the whole of her husband’s correspondence depended upon her.

Mrs. Cameron on the contrary loved her pen. She wrote a large and flowing hand. She allowed herself more space in life and on paper than is usually accorded to other people. I remember her offering to write for my father. ‘Nobody writes as well as I do’ she said.

It was in 1854 that the Tennysons first settled at Farringford. Those must have been happy days for Mrs. Tennyson, though the trial of delicate health was always there. She sends to her friend, describing the sights to be seen from her drawing-room windows:

‘The elms make a golden girdle round us now. The dark purple bills of England behind are a glorious picture in the morning when the sun shines on them and the elm trees....’

Again:

‘It is tantalizing to have a big smooth rounded down just in front of a large window and to be forbidden by bitter winter blasts to climb it. It is a pity the golden furze is not in bloom, for when it is, it makes a gorgeous contrast to the blue Solent.... Alfred has been reading “Hamlet” to me and since then has been drawn to the bay by the loud voice of the sea.... There is something so wholesome in beauty and it is not for me to try to tell of all we have here in those delicate tints of a distant bay and the still more distant headlands. These I see every day with my own eyes, and so many other things with his, when he comes back from his walk.’

Of her two boys she writes:

‘People say they are winning children, even those who are neither poets nor mothers. What should I do if I had not a poet’s heart to share my feelings for the children?’

We get a pretty glimpse of Alfred one Christmas time putting on little Hallam’s coatee, a present from Mrs. Cameron, needless to say.

‘Thanks, thanks, thanks,’ says Mrs. Tennyson. ‘And for my frill, as Alfred calls it, and for the big beautiful ball which charms Hallam beyond measure and delights baby too, only with so much of fear in the delight that he dare not approach the giant without having Mother’s hand in his. I do hope that I shall hear you are all well and that things grow brighter and brighter as Christmas comes on, for I cannot accept old Herbert’s gloomy version of things. I will admit most thankfully that griefs are joys in disguise, but not the converse except as a half truth, and half truths are the most dangerous of all. God wills us to be happy even here ... only let us give happiness its most exalted sense. I often think one is not told of joy as a Christian virtue as one ought to be. This however is rather by the way, for joy can subsist with sorrow, and happiness cannot be without happy circumstances.’

Another Christmas brings more acknowledgments for other gifts, and also friendly reproaches. ‘The only drawback is the old complaint that you will rain down precious things upon us, not drop by drop, but in whole Golconda mines at once.’ Mrs. Cameron pays little attention to such warnings, for the next letter from Mrs. Tennyson begins with thanks again. ‘Why will you send us these beautiful things which are so beautiful?’

Mrs. Tennyson was afraid of wounding her friend; she tried reprisals perhaps, which we may guess at as we read Mrs. Cameron’s own reproaches and eulogies combined in a letter concerning an Easter gift:

‘It was really an Easter Day offering to my spirit which seemed to tell me of “a bride in raiment clean” and “a glittering star” such as I may through God’s grace be some day, but now I am a grandmother with every vestige of grace gone, not preserving, as you do, a youthful figure; and truly I am not worthy of the lovely jacket and therefore I shall bring it back.... Mr. Jowett has been sitting with Charles and when he would long for the open air comes to cheer and enliven him. Truly he has a sweet virtue.’

Her name for Jowett was ‘little Benjamin their ruler.’ Her picture of him in her gallery will be remembered.

Mrs. Cameron the Martha friend loved to work for the Mary friend. We read of a hat with a long feather and broad blue ribbons to be ordered in London—then messages and details about furniture from the mistress of Farringford.

‘I have tried many times to get some violet-coloured cloth, because Alfred has always admired the violet covering in your dining-room. Will you do me the kindness to get me some sufficiently good?’

Then she goes on to give news of her home, of the bay-window being added to the study, ‘that dear little room hallowed by so many associations which should scarcely be touched even in improvement.’

‘Are you afraid of our falling leaves,’ she writes, urging Mrs. Cameron to come to stay with them. ‘We sweep them up diligently every day for the good of our own little ones and there would be an increased diligence for the sake of your poor sick lamb. I am so glad you returned thanks in Church. I am sure the world would be better if we claimed our right of brotherly sympathy with all, for it is only those who give theirs beforehand, who think of claiming it....’

One letter dated January 1, 1855, might have been written word for word to-day.

‘Many, many happy New Years to you, my dear Mrs. Cameron, and to all you love. How vain is this wish for thousands on this particular year! It is difficult to interest oneself in any common events. Only one’s friends can take off one’s thoughts from the war....’

Mrs. Tennyson envies someone who has sent out a shipload of help.

‘Ah, well! We may all do our little if we will but do what we have to do, and not waste our time in vain longings for that which is given to others to do. You can never have been guilty of this in all your life....’

III.

Mrs. Cameron sometimes writes to Tennyson as well as to his wife. Here is a quotation from a long letter written in 1855.

‘Dear Alfred,—It is so tantalising to be in your neighbourhood without being able to get to dear Farringford that I must write to you from this. If we stayed longer I am sure I should slide away and make a run for your coast, but we go home to-morrow when our week will be completed. Where are we if we are your neighbours? Not near eno’ and yet not far. In one of the loveliest homes in England, where from the Tower you can see the dear Isle of Wight, the Parnassian Needles, and the silver thread of the outline of Alum Bay. Where are we then?...

‘Well, Canford is our dwelling-place during this Holiday week. This Manor, this Hall and this cricket ground have witnessed nothing but sunshine Holiday and midnight revelry all the twenty-four hours round.

‘The youthful host, Sir Ivor Guest, has had perfect success in his entertainment. Everybody has been charming and everybody has been charmed.

‘There has been great beauty here amongst the young Wives and young Maidens.

‘Amongst the young Wives “the Queen of Beauty” is Mrs. Hambro (one month younger than my Juley), frolicsome and graceful as a kitten and having the form and eye of an antelope. She is tall and slender, not stately, and not seventeen—but quite able to make all daisies rosy and the ground she treads seem proud of her.

‘Then her complexion (or rather skin) is faultless—it is like the leaf of “that consummate flower” the Magnolia—a flower which is, I think, so mysterious in its beauty as if it were the only thing left unsoiled and unspoiled from the garden of Eden. A flower a blind man would mistake for a fruit too rich, too good for Human Nature’s daily food. We had a standard Magnolia tree in our garden at Sheen, and on a still summer night the moon would beam down upon these ripe rich vases, and they used to send forth a scent that made the soul faint with a sense of the luxury of the world of flowers. I always think that flowers tell as much of the bounty of God’s love as the Firmament shows of His handiwork.’

(After this digression the writer returns to Mrs. Hambro.)

‘Very dark hair and eyes contrasting with the magnolia skin, diamonds that dazzle and seem laughing when she laughs, and a costume that offers new varieties every third hour,’ completes the sketch of the heroine.

The letter also goes on to describe at length each of the ten members of the Guest family and many more visitors and relations, and is too long to quote in its entirety; but I cannot omit the description of:

‘all the young men and maidens standing in a circle in the High Hall and singing.

‘They all have splendid voices. All the boys play on flutes, violins and flageolet, singing every manner of Yankee chorus, glee and song, they dance and toss india-rubber balls, the grand hall seems almost too noble for this with its

and its measureless roof, it seems fitted for the organ’s pealing sound, for the delight of anthem, and the joy of praise and prayer, and for reading of great and good Poems. I did once persuade them to reading in that Hall. I read your Ode on the Duke, and it sounded solemn and sweet there. You know how dear Henry Taylor valued it, and I treasured in my heart your answer to his praise of it. I enclose you his little note to me about “Maud” because you said you would like to see it. I read also your lines to James Spedding. I read “St. Agnes,” too, in that Hall. Those chants are worthy of that edifice.

‘The Hall and staircase are both as beautiful in their way as anything I have ever seen anywhere. The whole was built by Sir Charles Barry, the architect.

‘The house has immense capacities. Last Sunday we slept ninety people here, Lady Charlotte told me, tho’ nothing extraordinary was going on.

‘We dine every evening twenty-six in number. Conversation is not fertile, but the young hearts don’t need it.’

This was the year in which ‘Maud’ was published.

Poets always feel criticism, and the reviews of the poem stung Tennyson cruelly, with their misunderstanding of his personal attitude towards war.

‘Is it not well,’ writes his wife, ‘that he should speak anger against the base things of the world, against that war which calls itself peace slandering the war whence there is the truer peace? Surely it was well, for he has not spoken in anger only; if he has spoken against baseness and evil in the world he has also sung what every loving and noble heart can understand of its love and blessedness. But you are right, I do hope that in more unmixed and fuller tones, he will one day sing his song....’

Mrs. Cameron’s daughter Julia was engaged to Charles Norman in 1858.

‘It is like a book,’ says Emily Tennyson, ‘all so perfectly happy and yet I feel ungrateful when I say so, for so long as one believes in truth and love, so long must one believe in the possibility of happiness, and I myself, having so much of the reality, should most of all dare to believe in the possibility for others. Let them be married soon—I may be pardoned for a horror of long engagements.’

In 1859 the Camerons were still on Putney Heath, but Mr. Cameron was preparing to visit his estates in Ceylon, of which disquieting news had reached him.

‘Charles speaks to me of the flower of the coffee plant. I tell him that the eyes of the first grandchild should be more beautiful than any flower could ever seem,’ so Mrs. Cameron used to exclaim pathetically, and she wrote to her friend:

‘As for me I have been fairly drowned in troubles and cares, and the waters seem to pass over one’s soul. The 20th November is now fast approaching and whilst it approaches I am not at all more prepared in heart or in deed. I have not had courage to make the necessary preparation. To-day the portmanteaux have been dragged out, and they stand to me threatening, to Charles promising departure.’

Mr. Cameron was seized with illness about this time.

‘I tell him this should be a warning to him not to leave home and home care and comforts. He assures me that the sea voyage is the best thing for him and Ceylon is the cure for all things. I look upon this illness as the tender rebuke of a friend. He requires home and its comforts. He has been having strong beef-tea thickened with arrowroot six times a day!...’

Here is Mrs. Cameron’s menu when the invalid, her husband, was recovering. What would nurses of to-day say to it?

‘The patient has poached eggs at eight, gets up at eleven, has his dinner; gravy soup and curry, at one, mulligatawny soup and meat at five, a free allowance of port wine, averaging a bottle a day. Ten drops of Jeremie’s opiate every morning, a dose of creosote zinc and gum arabic before his meals, and a dose of quinine after each meal.’

Notwithstanding home comforts and his wife’s remonstrance, the invalid started with one of his sons while she remained with the younger children. To add to her troubles Sir Henry Taylor was also very ill at this time and suffering terribly from the complications of asthma.

Mrs. Cameron says:

‘He bears what he calls a hedgehog in his chest with a most divine patience, even as a good husband would bear with a bad wife, and I fear he will have his hedgehog in his chest till death do them part.’[1]

Julia Cameron’s chief comfort seems to have come from her correspondence with Mrs. Tennyson.

This was an eventful year for the Camerons. The first grandchild, their daughter’s child, was born.

‘May she ever be the delight of your lives,’ wrote Mrs. Tennyson; ‘I can fancy the proud happiness of the little Uncles. After all this excitement, sorrowful and joyful, after the anxious watching of so many hours you need care yourself I am sure, so now take a little thought for yourself and so best thought for those who love you.’

Already in 1859, not burglars on the lawn such as those Horace Walpole describes, but Cockneys were beginning to wander across the Farringford grounds. We read of two who are sitting on one of the gates in the garden, watching Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson under the cedars. Alfred is actually speaking of moving, so averse is he to these incursions. Later on he went for a change to Staffa and Iona. Mrs. Tennyson stayed at home with her young children, urging him to prolong his tour.

Her nerves were not able to bear much strain nor the fatigue of journeys—we read of great surges of pain when she tries to write, of sleepless nights and weakness. Hospitable as she was by nature and by a sense of duty also, the entertaining of guests was very tiring at times.

We hear of many visitors, familiar names—Lushingtons, Frank Palgrave, Simeons, Edward Lear (who called his house at San Remo Villa Emily after the most ideal woman he had ever known), Woolner the sculptor, who stays for some time, and we read of the portraits he was taking of his hosts.

‘Alfred is charmed with the medallion of me and I think myself, if such a picture can be made of my worn face, that, if Lady Somers and the Queens and Princesses of Pattledom were successfully done, it would set the fashion.’

She goes on to say:

‘Words fail Mr. Woolner, all eloquent as he is, when he speaks of the Pattle sisters, especially of beautiful Mrs. Jackson and her three beautiful daughters.’

Among her guests Mrs. Tennyson specially enjoyed Jowett’s visits. She says:

‘He stays this week on condition of being allowed solitary mornings for work. You know this suits me well who also have work, not a little, to do. In the evening Alfred or he read aloud, and we are very happy.’

One year there is a mention of a very important personage departing from Farringford to London—‘“Tithonus,” the companion poem of “Ulysses,” going to-day to Thackeray for the Cornhill.’

There had been a plan for buying a house at Freshwater for the Camerons, and the Tennysons are helping in the negotiation for securing the land before Mr. Cameron’s return. Lawyers, business agents, purchases, furnishings take up much of the correspondence. Some people look upon business as a bore, Mrs. Cameron took it as the battle of life.

‘The garden is being laid out,’ Mrs. Tennyson writes; ‘Merwood proposes that you should have a hedge of black bay and copper beach which his wise man Pike tells him make an evergreen hedge almost impenetrable, but it is too hard a frost for planting. The ice is so thick that Hallam announces an iceberg.’

Then Mrs. Cameron writes:

‘C. is indeed well pleased to hear that all seems to prosper at Freshwater Bay for us. Yes, how dear it will be for our children to grow and live happy together playing mad pranks along the healthy lea.’

Then she continues:

‘Two days ago, in one of those rare bright days which sometimes make autumn delicious, Henry Taylor walked about his own garden for an hour with Lord John Russell discoursing politics, and suffered in no way.’

It is a pretty account of Mrs. Cameron going to meet the postman through the pouring rain to get news of her husband: ‘It was as if heaven’s blessing descended on me when I read of his well-being.’

She adds:

‘Last night I dreamt he had returned and was delighted to be at Freshwater and that you, dear Alfred, in the emotion of joy at seeing him, walked round him three times, and I said “Why don’t you then embrace each other?” And Charles answered, “I can’t trust myself at my age to give way to my emotion,” but when Mrs. Tennyson entered he kissed her hand.

‘Now I feel full of gratitude, and the soft sweet feeling of returning spring on the earth is scarcely softer than the sensation in my heart of returning peace.’

IV.

The Prince Consort came to see the Tennysons when they first arrived at Farringford, and found them in confusion, the departing occupant being still there with some of his furniture.

There is a letter from Mrs. Tennyson to Matilda Tennyson written in the spring of 1862 after the Prince’s death, in which we read:

‘We hear that the poor Queen is better, she begins to take interest in things out of doors, to ask about the birds that he loved.’

Then again:

‘The Queen sent for Alfred, she looked calm and pale like a statue, and spoke very sweetly and sadly. Alfred was touched even to tears. He does not remember much of what she said, he remembered himself saying thanks, and expressing his happiness of being of use.

‘When Alfred said “He would have made a great King,” the Queen answered “He always used to say to me it was no matter whether he or I did the right thing, so long as the right thing was done.”’

When the dedication of the ‘Idylls’ came out the Princess Royal wrote:

‘I cannot separate King Arthur from the image of him I most revere upon earth—as to the dedication I cannot say what I feel.’[2]

The following letter was written by Mrs. Tennyson to Tennyson’s mother, describing the first visit from Farringford to the widowed Queen.

1863.

‘Father, Mother and children all went, being shown the pretty grounds, the dairies, the kitchen where the Princesses amused themselves, the gardens of the royal children and the fort Prince Arthur had made. On returning to the Palace the Queen sent for us all; we heard soon after we had come into the drawing-room a quiet shy opening of the door and in she came; she gave me her hand, and I found myself on my knees, but I don’t exactly know how I got there. Alfred talked most eloquently; we talked of everything in heaven and on earth almost, Jowett, the farm, the millennium. Her face is so beautiful, not a bit like her portraits, small and child-like, yet so simple, full of thought and feeling—her eyes are full of love, it does one good to look upon her.’

There is a sentence concerning another ruler then living whose reign is not over.

‘We have just come back from seeing Garibaldi, a noble-looking man with a grand high square forehead, like the great men of the Elizabethan days, strong and sweet with kindly simple manners. He stroked Hallam’s head and said it was a good thing that the boys lived in the country, his own had grown up strong in the fine air of Caprera.’

One quaint story is connected with the meeting of Garibaldi and Mrs. Cameron. She longed to add a portrait of the Liberator to those she had already taken of the other great men of the time. Hearing that he was to come again to the Island she begged the Tennysons to invite him to sit to her. Mrs. Tennyson wrote in reply that he was only coming for a few hours. The Seelys were driving him over, and that during his brief visit to Farringford he could not be asked to spend most of the time posing in a dark room; they were sure Mrs. Cameron would understand the impossibility of suggesting such an arrangement. Garibaldi came with cordial interest, spoke in Italian, planted a tree, and was talking quietly to Tennyson, when Mrs. Cameron joined them unannounced, and then quite suddenly went down upon her knees, holding up her two hands in supplication. ‘Who is this poor woman? What does she want?’ asks Garibaldi much puzzled by Mrs. Cameron’s entreaties, not the less when she exclaims to explain her stained finger-tips, ‘General, listen to me! This is honourable Art, not Dirt!’ Alas! the moment was inopportune and we have no portrait of Garibaldi by Mrs. Cameron!

V.

The gaiety and youth of Freshwater in the ’seventies still reaches one as one thinks back. The place was full of young people. Two of Mrs. Cameron’s five sons lived at home and Hardinge, her special friend and adviser, used to come over from Ceylon from time to time to gladden his mother’s warm heart, to add up her bills, to admonish her, to cheer and enliven the home.

The two Tennyson boys were at Farringford. The Prinseps were at the Briary with a following of nephews and charming girls belonging to the family; neighbours joined in, such as Simeons from Swainston, Croziers from Yarmouth; officers appeared from the forts, and as one remembers it all, a succession of romantic figures come to one’s mind, still to be seen in the pictures of Mrs. Cameron’s devising. In those days she seemed to be omnipresent—organising happy things, calling out, summoning one person and another, ordering all the day, and long into the night, for of an evening came impromptu plays and waltzes in the wooden ball-room, and young partners dancing out under the stars. One warm moonlight night I remember the whole company of lads and lasses streaming away across fields and downs, past silvery sheepfolds to the very cliffs overhanging the sea. Farringford, too, gave its balls, more stately and orderly in their ways. The rhythmical old-fashioned progress of the poet’s waltz delighted us all. An impression remains of brightest colour and animation, of romantic graceful figures, a little fanciful—perfectly natural, even when under Mrs. Cameron’s rule.

She was a masterful woman, a friend with enough of the foe in her generous composition to make any of us hesitate who ventured to cross her decree. The same people returned to the little bay again and again. Some members of my own family, christened by her with names out of Tennyson and Wordsworth, or from her favourite Italian poets—Madonna this, Madonna that—used to join us Easter after Easter—and the friendly parties went roaming the Downs to the Beacon or towards the Briary.

The Briary, where the Prinseps from Little Holland House were living, belonged to Watts the painter, for whom Philip Webb had built it. They were interesting people, all living there, and curiously picturesque in their looks and habits, to which the influence of the Signor, as we called Mr. Watts, contributed unconsciously.

He and Mr. Prinsep wore broad hats and cloaks, and so did Tennyson himself and his brothers. People walking in the lanes would stand to see them all go by.

Meanwhile Mrs. Cameron’s correspondence never ceased, however interesting her visitors were and whatever the attractions of the moment might be. She would sit at her desk until the last moment of the despatch. Then, when the postman had hurried off, she would send the gardener running after him with some extra packet labelled ‘immediate.’ Then, soon after, the gardener’s boy would follow pursuing the gardener with an important postscript, and, finally, I can remember the donkey being harnessed and driven galloping all the way to Yarmouth, arriving as the post-bags were being closed. Even when she was away from Freshwater, Mrs. Cameron still chose to rule time and circumstance.

She sends word to Tennyson:

‘Dear Alfred,—I wrote to you from the Wandsworth Station yesterday on the way to Bromley. As I was folding your letter came the scream of the train, and then the yells of the porters with threats that the train would not wait for me, so that although I got as far in the direction as your name, I was obliged to run down the steps, and trust the directing and despatch of the whole to strange hands. I would rather have kept back my letter than have thus risked it, had it not been for my extreme desire to hear of your wife. Day after day I get more anxious to hear and then I write again, and thus I write, not to bore you by satisfying my own heart’s wish, but to know if I can be any help or comfort. I have been writing one of my longest letters to Sir John Herschell to-day, but won’t inflict the like upon you.’

(Then come many pages of the reasons which prevent her from writing.)

After she came to live near the Tennysons, Mrs. Cameron had no sense of ever having done enough for them or more than enough. She would arrive at Farringford at all hours, convenient and inconvenient, entering by the door, by the drawing-room window, always bringing goodwill and life in her train. She would walk in at night, followed by friends, by sons carrying lanterns, by nieces, by maids bearing parcels and photographs. Hers was certainly a gift for making life and light for others, though at times I have known her spirits sink into deepest depths as do those of impressionable people. Torch-bearers sometimes consume themselves and burn some of their own life and spirit in the torches they carry. When Julia Cameron took to photography, her enthusiasm was infectious and her beautiful pictures seemed a revelation. She was an artist at heart and she had never felt satisfied till she found her own channel of expression in these new developments. Watts greatly encouraged her, and I heard him say of one of her pictures of himself, that he knew no finer portrait among the old Masters.

One of her admirers, F. D. Maurice, wrote:

‘Had we such portraits of Shakespeare and Milton, we should know more of their own selves. We should have better commentaries on “Hamlet” and on “Comus” than we now possess, even as you have secured to us a better commentary on “Maud” and “In Memoriam” than all our critics ever will give us.’

Browning, Darwin, Carlyle, Lecky, Sir John Herschell, Henry Taylor with his flowing beard were all among her sitters and still reveal themselves to us through her. She photographed without ceasing, in season and out of season, and she summoned everyone round about to watch the process.

‘I turned my coal-house into my dark room,’ she wrote, ‘and a glazed fowl-house I had given to my children became my glass house, the society of hens and chickens was soon changed into that of poets, prophets, painters, children and lovely maidens. I worked fruitlessly but not hopelessly.... I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me, and at length the longing was satisfied.’

Miss Marie Spartali, a very beautiful young lady who had come over to pose to Mrs. Cameron, described finding her absorbed in another sitter—her own parlourmaid, Mary Hillier, draped and patient, representing some mythological personage. There was a ring at the outer bell (focussing in those days took long and anxious minutes), and as Mary Hillier could not be allowed to move, Miss Spartali went to the door, where the visitor, seeing this stately lovely apparition dressed in wonderful attire, exclaimed ‘Are you then the beautiful parlourmaid?’ This little ancient joke is still quoted against the beautiful lady.

How familiar to all, who were forced by the photographer into the little studio, is the remembrance of the mingled scent of chemicals and sweetbriar already meeting one in the road outside Dimbola! The terrors of the studio itself are still remembered, the long painful waiting, when we would have trembled had we dared to do so, under her impetuous directions to be still.

This is her own description of her art, writing to Mrs. Tennyson:

‘I send you dear Louie Simeon’s letter to show how they all value the likeness of the father of that house and home. It is a sacred blessing which has attended my photography. It gives a pleasure to millions and a deeper happiness to very many.... While the spirit is in me I must praise those I love.’

The coffee crop had failed in Ceylon several years and the money difficulties became very serious for the Camerons. Photography might have paid better if the photographer had been less lavish in her gifts and ways. She was a true artist in her attitude towards money.

She, the most recklessly generous of women, was able to write:

‘I myself have never felt humiliated at the idea of receiving charities, for I always feel about friendship and love that what it is good to give it is also good to take.’

‘I do not mean to let you ruin yourself by giving the photographs away,’ Mrs. Tennyson wrote: ‘I cannot pretend to say that I do not prize a kindness done to mine, more than if it were done to myself, still I feel bound to point with a solemn finger to those stalwart boys of yours, saying “Remember.” I see that I shall have to set up a shop for the sale of photographs myself all for your benefit.’

To these remonstrances the photographer would answer: ‘I have always tried to get my husband to share my feelings—so long as illness and death are mercifully spared us. Death is as to deeper wounds—only a grain.’ Julia Cameron was not a woman of to-day. She seemed to belong to some heroic past. She has told me how as a girl she and her sister, the dearest of them all, used to wander forth and kneel to pray on the country-roadsides.

Once when her eldest son went through a painful operation, which lasted some time, she had held his hand in hers through it all, and he said he could not have endured it if she had not been present. ‘As to my bearing it,’ she said simply, ‘what is there one cannot bear if one can give one grain of helpful support to any sufferer?’

Of a friend in great trouble she writes:

‘I am not sure that time with him will soften the calamity. God grant it may, but with some

In the case of my absence from my boys, the more it is prolonged, the more the wound seems to widen.’

It was during her husband’s absence that she wrote:

‘I found when I was with you the tears were too near my eyes to venture to read out aloud Charles’s letters. I am in very truth very unhappy. I assume vivacity of manner for my own sake as well as for others, but the only real vivacity now at this moment in me, is one to conjure up every form of peril and my heart is more busy when sleeping than when waking. When waking I fag myself to the uttermost by any manner of occupation hoping thus to keep the wheels of time working till I hear again.’

VII.

The legends are endless of Mrs. Cameron’s doings at Freshwater, and to this day the older villagers tell of them—of the window she built and equipped in the room destined for Sir Henry Taylor. It was an east room; she thought it looked dark in the afternoon and she determined that a western window should be there when her guest arrived next day. The village carpenter and his assistant builder sawed and worked late into the night, in the early morning the glazier was summoned; when the passengers arrived from the three o’clock boat the window was there, the western light was pouring in into the spare room through the panes, and Mrs. Cameron’s faithful maid was putting the last stitches to the muslin blind. Another inspiration of hers was a lawn, also spread in a single night, for Mr. Cameron to stroll along when he went for his morning walk next day.

She used to bring wayfarers of every sort in from the roads outside. We still may recognise some of the models living at Freshwater—the beautiful parlourmaid, King Arthur who in robes and armoured dignity appears so often in her camera, and who still meets travellers from the little steamer that runs from Lymington to Yarmouth Pier. Indeed wayfarers of every sort were made welcome by her. After my father’s death she welcomed us to her cottage, where fires of hospitality and sympathy were lighted and endless kindness and helping affection surrounded us from her and from Farringford through that cold and icy winter. When spring had passed and when at last summer was over, we gratefully returned to the sheltering bay where such good friends were to be found.

The Camerons’ departure for Ceylon in 1875 will long be remembered—the farewells, the piles of luggage. Mrs. Cameron grave and valiant, with a thousand cares and preoccupations. Mr. Cameron with long white locks falling over his shoulders and dark eyes gleaming through spectacles, holding his carved, ivory cane in his hand and looking quietly at the preparations. There were animals—a cow I have been told among them, bales and boxes without number, their faithful maid Ellen and their son Hardinge, that spirited prop and adviser, ordering and arranging everything. He travelled with them, for he was on his way back to his post in the Civil Service at Colombo. Many of us came down to Southampton to see them off in the vast ship manned by Lascars, crowded with passengers and heaving from confusion into order.

I can still see Mr. Cameron in his travelling dress looking quietly up and down the quay at the piles of luggage, at the assembled friends; he held a beautiful pink rose which Mrs. Tennyson had given him when he stopped at Farringford to take leave of her. A member of Mr. Cameron’s family whom I had never seen before, for he had lived in India, had come from London with his wife and was standing taking leave with the rest of us. He was strangely like Mr. Cameron, with white hair and bright fixed eyes; and even then, starting though they were for the great venture, Mrs. Cameron came forward and said to me that I must go back to town with her step-son and he would look after me.... I remember presently finding myself sitting in the railway carriage sadly flying home, away from the good friends of many a year, and vaguely wondering at the likeness of Mr. Cameron sitting on the opposite seat. Then at Waterloo, after putting me into a hansom, even the likeness departed and I never saw either of the two again.

VIII.

It is pleasant to read of the happy progress of the travellers.

From Julia Margaret Cameron to Alfred and Emily Tennyson.

1875.

‘... I now continue my letter in revived spirits, having left the month of partings behind, and having entered to-day the month of meetings. I think Ewen will send forth my Benjamin to greet me. My Har, endowed with double my prudence, has hitherto prevented me from telegraphing to tell my boys that we had actually started. I resisted at Freshwater. Resisted at Southampton. Hardinge prevented me at Gibraltar, prevented me at Malta. He says Aden is the best spot, for we can then announce we have got over the Red Sea.

‘I need not say how often and often I am with you both in thought. I need not tell you that amidst all this bustling world of 380 people, my husband sits in majesty like a being from another sphere, his white hair shining like the foam of the sea and his white hands holding on each side his golden chain.’

(They travel on to Malta.)

‘A real gem of the ocean; everything glittered like a fairy world, the sapphire sea, the pearl-white houses, the emerald and ruby boats, the shining steps, 132 in number, from the Quai to the town, all was delicious. As Har observed, I was the most childlike and exuberant of the party—only one thing disappointed me, that I did not telegraph to my Ceylon boys. We visited the Cathedral of St. John. How delicious the silence was after the life on board! What a holy joy to kneel down in that solemn silent temple and feel oneself alone with one’s God!’

Her sympathy for the ship’s captain must not be omitted:

‘We have daily prayers and the Sunday evening service is specially imposing, with the dark ocean around, “The lamps filled with everlasting oil” above and the ship lamps hanging on the deck and the one voice, like St. John in the Wilderness, crying to everyone to repent.’

She raises subscriptions for a harmonium on board as a token of gratitude to the captain—‘one in a thousand.’

Mr. Cameron would not land at Malta; it had painful memories for him, he had been there as a child with his beautiful mother, Lady Margaret, and his father who was Governor of the Island. ‘Our voyage is fabulously beautiful,’ she says, and she dwells on the pleasure it gives them to make it easier for an invalid on board by bestowing their most comfortable chair upon the suffering lady.

As they glide through the Suez Canal Mrs. Cameron writes:

‘It is an honour to the French nation that in the face of all assertions of impossibility from men of all countries, Lesseps persevered and achieved this mighty enterprise. Whilst I write we pass a pier and at the end of it is a whole flock of camels, with camel drivers waiting to see if any one cares to cross the Desert; no one does care, so we glide on.

‘The only time I crossed, my Har was a baby in my arms whom I never for one instant put down. We crossed through a beautiful starlight night. I have never forgotten the rising of the morning star nor the utter silence, one seemed to lose the idea of time and to feel in a land that could have had no beginning and still less could have no end.’

As she finishes her letter the young moon is hanging over the vessel.

‘O what good it does to one’s soul to go forth. How it heals all the little frets and insect stings of life, to feel the pulse of the large world and to count all men as one’s brethren and to merge one’s individual self in the thoughts of the mighty whole!’

Here is another letter written a year later to Mrs. Tennyson:

Easter, 1876.

‘My Own Beloved and Sweetest Friend,—This day’s post brought me your letter, so strong in love, so feeble in calligraphy, in the wielding of that pen which is meant to say so much but which now trembles in the hand which used never to tire. Its very trembling is expressive of all that you have it in your heart to say. How glad I am that your sons, that Alfred’s sons, should be what they are! How truly does an answer seem to be given in them to your life of holy prayer! I do so devoutly wish that you could spend next winter here, the air is so uplifting and so life-giving. I think my illness on arrival was the result of all that I suffered mentally and bodily, the hurry of that decision, the worry of all minutiæ, the anguish of some partings, the solemnity of all, the yielding to my husband’s absorbing desire, and the yearning need to live with my absent children, all this is satisfied and beyond all this, beyond the inward content, there is certainly a strength given by the aspect of nature in this Island.’

After describing Ceylon and its beauties, the mother returns to the theme she loves best of all, that of her son Hardinge, who had just paid her a visit.

‘He wore for my sake his very brightest looks and you know there is no cheer like his. His spirits dance with intellectual freshness and buoyancy, all his talk is mirth and wide pleasantry and his voice is full of song.

‘He has to travel in districts, sleeping in the open and my imagination represents the invasion of beasts and reptiles. He walks through long grass where I fear snakes for his beloved feet. He says alligators on the river-side are the only beasts he sees, alligators ten or twelve feet long.’ (Here many pages follow partly concerning Ceylon and the people who then lived there, partly concerning Freshwater and its politics.)—‘And how is your dear Alfred, dearest of all and greatest ever in your heart beyond all; above all, I hope not bothered about anything.’ ‘Worries, for him, are as if these vast sublime mountains, instead of standing steady as they do, rearing their eternal heads to the sky, were to be swayed by the perishable chances of the little coffee estates at their feet.

‘What is time in the eyes of Him to whom a thousand years are but as yesterday and who pities us when we vex our immortal souls with fears of more or less gold, and good crops, one year or another?

‘Think of us in a little hut with only mud walls, four thousand four hundred feet above the level of the sea.’

It was in her youngest son’s bungalow on the Glencairn estate that Mrs. Cameron died, early in 1879, only a short time after her second return to Ceylon. She had been warned not to return, but she longed to be near ‘her boys.’ The illness only lasted ten days. When she lay dying, her bed faced the wide-open window; it was a glorious evening and some big stars were shining. She looked out and just said ‘Beautiful’ and died, her last word, a fitting end to her reverent soul on earth. Her body was taken in a low open cart, drawn by two great white bullocks, and all covered with white cloth, over two ridges of mountains, and buried in the little churchyard at the bottom of the valley, between Galle and Colombo, where Hardinge was living. After this Hardinge took his father and his mother’s maid, the faithful Ellen Ottingnon, ‘old E,’ to live with him there. It was in May of the following year that Mr. Cameron died, and he too was carried over the mountains and buried in the same churchyard.

‘I can’t describe to you the beauty of that valley entered by a narrow pass,’ writes Mrs. Bowden Smith who sent this record. ‘High mountains surround it and the rolling green grass lands and a great river runs all along it. The little church stands on a knoll not far above the river, which flows into a lower river, also a dream of beauty. They could not have found a more beautiful resting-place.’

Lady Tennyson survived her friend seventeen years:

wrote Edith Sichel at the time.

And some one who loved her, speaking lately, said to me:

‘Though her vocation was to be a poet’s wife she reminded me of a holy Abbess of old, and there was something almost cloistral about her.’

She had a gift we all felt, of harmonising and quieting by her presence alone; often too tired to say much, she could contribute the right word to the talk for which Farringford was always notable. I have a special memory of once dining with the Tennysons in the company of George Eliot and Lord Acton, but it was Mrs. Tennyson’s gentle voice which seemed to take the lead.

Tennyson had said: ‘I felt the peace of God come into my life at the altar before which I married her.’ And after more than forty years of marriage he dedicated his last book to her.

The following paper left by Lady Tennyson concerning her husband might seem almost too intimate to quote here, if it did not give so truly the atmosphere at Farringford that one does not venture to omit it.

‘... He felt intensely the sin and all the evils of the world and all its mystery, and still kept an unshaken faith in the God of perfect love, perfect wisdom and infinite power, with that confident assurance of man’s immortality which pointed to a hereafter where all would be reconciled. “Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” In the life of Christ he found his Christianity; undisturbed by the jarring of sects and creeds. Politics were to him patriotism, and passionately did he feel for all that concerned the welfare of the Empire. Party, as far as his own personal opinion went, was unintelligible. That all should work conscientiously and harmoniously for the common good, each with such differing powers as God has given to each, recognising the value of the difference, this was his highest idea of Empire. He honoured all honest work.’

FOOTNOTES