Tennyson’s Gift. Lynne Truss
question was that glory of the London stage, the sixty-guineas-a-week juvenile phenomenon, Miss Ellen Terry.
Watts was fed up; Ellen was fed up. He was forty-seven; she was sixteen, so they both had their reasons. But it was a bit rich to call Ellen ‘dramatic’ in the derogative sense, even so. ‘Dramatic’ had been a continual reproach from this weary grey-beard husband ever since that overcast day in February when foolishly they wed. Ellen wished ‘artistic’ carried the same force of accusation, but somehow it didn’t. Yelling ‘Don’t be so artistic!’ – though perfectly justified when your dreamy distant husband seriously calls himself ‘England’s Michelangelo’ and affects a skullcap – never sounded quite as cutting.
On the other hand, theatricality was certainly in the air. ‘Drrramatic, am I?’ demanded Ellen in a deep thrilling voice (the sort of voice for which the word timbre was invented). She clutched a tiny butter knife close to her pearly throat, with her body leaned backwards from the waist. It looked terribly uncomfortable, and Watts was at a loss, as usual. He stroked his beard. He adjusted his skullcap. Something was clearly ‘up’.
‘I only said Mrs Prinsep is very kind!’
Ellen groaned and whinnied, like a pony.
‘But she is our host, my patron. Really, Ellen, surely you see how lucky we are to live at Little Holland House! I hope I may live peacefully here for the remainder of my life.’
‘Painting huge public walls when they fall available, I suppose?’ she snapped. ‘For no money?’
‘Yes, painting walls. What insult can be levelled at the painting of walls? You make it sound trivial, Ellen. Yet when I beat Haydon in the Westminster competition –’
‘I know, you told me about Haydon and the Westminster competition, you told me so many times!’
‘Well, then you know that the poor man died at his own hand. Painting walls is of significance to some people, my dear. My designs for the Palace of Westminster were preferred to his, and Haydon was shattered, poor man. Walls let him down! Walls collapsed on him!’
Ellen narrowed her eyes.
‘But on the main point, my dear,’ continued Watts, ‘Why – why – should I want to earn an independent living from my art when we can abide here quite comfortably at someone else’s expense?’
And then Ellen screamed. Loud and ringing from the diaphragm, exactly as Mrs Kean had trained her. Watts ran to the door and locked it. This wayward Shakespearean juvenile was always transforming the scene into some sort of third act climax, butter knife at the ready. (The effect was only slightly ruined by the knife having butter on it, and crumbs.)
Watts collapsed on one of Little Holland House’s many scented sofas. He had married this young theatrical phenomenon in all good faith, assured by his snooty patrons that she would thank him for his protection; he had been in love with her profile, her stature – in short, her beauty with a capital B! But within five months he looked back on that marriage with confusion and even horror. This beauty was a real person; she was not an ideal form. She expected things from him that he could not even name, let alone deliver. This regular money argument, for example: it always went the same way. Here they were, comfortably adored and protected, and Ellen had to show off about it.
‘If you would let me work, George –’ she would say. And then all this sixty guineas nonsense would be rolled out again. Watts did not want sixty sullied guineas a week. He did not want to paint lucrative portraits, either. No, Watts was the sort of chap who loses his invoice book down the back of the piano and doesn’t notice for four and a half years. Watts wanted to live with the Prinseps, conceive great moral paintings of an edifying nature, sip water over dinner, and be told with comforting regularity that he was the genius of the age.
The sad thing was that when he married Ellen, he assumed she wanted the same release from her own career. After all, her career was the theatre. But he had learned that while you can take the child out of the theatre, it is a more difficult matter to extract the theatre from the child. She still dressed up quite often. She danced in pink tights. A couple of times she had sat next to him at dinner, dressed as a young man, and he had talked to her for two hours without in any way piercing her disguise, or noticing the absence of his wife.
‘My dear,’ he began, ‘If you continue with this, I shall have a headache.’ But she drew away from him and took a deep breath, so he gave up. If experience was to be trusted, Ellen would probably forge into a famous speech now, and – ah, here it was. ‘Make me a willow cabin.’
Make ME a weell-ow cabin
(so Ellen began, in the thrilling voice again, with fabulous diction)
at yourrr gate!,
(emphatic, with a little stamp of the foot)
And call-ll-ll
(this bit softly cooed) uppon my SOUL (a plaintive yowl of longing)
with-in the HOUSE!
(no nonsense)
Such a shame it was from Twelfth Night, Watts reflected, as the recital progressed. Watts had been rather touchy about Twelfth Night ever since he painted a huge allegorical picture for the wall of a railway terminus on the theme ‘If music be the food of love’ which had too much delighted his critics. A naked Venus with a bib at her neck sat down to a hearty lunch of tabors, fiddles and bagpipes. He still didn’t see what was so damned roll-on-the-floor funny about it. The bagpipes – the exact size of an Aberdeen Angus – looked particularly delicious. Venus burped behind her hand. The knife and fork were four feet long.
Meanwhile, Ellen continued:
Writeloyalcantonsofcontemned love
(breathless, fast)
And sing them … LOUD!
(long pause)
even in the dead of night
(airy, throwaway)
Halloooooooo your name to the Rreverrberrrate hills
(welsh R-rolling)
And make the babbling ‘gossip’ of the air
(an arch curtsey to Mistress Gossip, that rare minx)
Cry out!
(sharp)
‘Olivi-aaaaa!’
Watts liked Shakespeare, but only as stuff to read in bed. All this prancing about was too tiring. Acting was the lowest of all arts. Still, he thought Ellen’s performance was going rather well, and he had in fact just got his eyes closed, the better for listening to the poetry with, when the emotional undercurrent turned abruptly again and his wife burst into tears. She flung down the butter knife and left the room.
‘What’s wrong now?’ Watts asked, jerked awake. It was all beyond him. Settling back on his sofa, with skullcap pulled over his eyes, he thought hard about what he had just heard from Ellen’s lips. Yes, he thought hard. But on the other hand it would be fair to say that the expression ‘sub-text’ meant even less to Watts than to any other Victorian luminary you could mention. So what preoccupied him now was not the underlying tenor of Ellen’s theatrical performance, in particular its expression of tortured young female longing. Instead it was the following: should the ‘babbling gossip of the air’ wear a hat? Should she sit on a gold-trimmed cloud, to indicate the airiness of her babble? And pondering these important questions Il Signor Michelangelo Watts arranged himself comfortably – though unconsciously – in a well-practised foetal position.
If it was hard to keep up with Ellen’s stormy emotions, it was also impossible to contain them. The temperament of Mrs Watts was