Tennyson’s Gift. Lynne Truss
whereas Ellen turned hell-cat when offered assistance, especially in the form of Watts’s edifying proverbs. Alas, he was a man who dearly loved a verity. ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure,’ was the sort of thing. ‘Fine words butter no parsnips,’ the great allegorical painter now consoled himself, for instance – and was instantly preoccupied conceiving an enormous fresco for Covent Garden Market, of tough root vegetables turning their ungreased backs, perhaps, on a bunch of spouting poets with long hair and big shirts.
Ellen had let her nose go red, which was too bad. Such a ruddy child was quite wrong for the Victorians’ popular aesthetic of alabaster flesh. In ‘Choosing’, his latest portrait of her, Watts had allowed her a certain pinky flush, to reflect the surrounding camellias, but he now believed this a profound mistake, and intended to overpaint with a light green at the earliest chance. Overhearing two grand comic novelists at Little Holland House discussing the flesh tones in the picture, he had been quite wounded by their remarks.
‘Know what she’s been doing,’ said one great comic novelist, nudging with his elbow.
‘Very good, I must remember that,’ said the other. Dickens and Trollope, someone said they were.
Despite its lovely pinkness, then, ‘Choosing’ had few happy associations for Watts. For one thing, it had been a tremendous bother to get the violets into the picture (in Ellen’s awkwardly raised left hand), and in any case the allegory failed. Not since ‘Striking a Careless Pose’ (in which a tall king cuffed a young servant who had dropped something), had one of G. F.’s notions misfired so badly. Ellen was supposed to be choosing between the big scentless showy camellia and the humble perfumed violet, yet it was quite clear from the composition of the picture that her preference for the camellias was pretty strong already. Meanwhile the humble symbolic violets were so extremely shy and retiring that whatever they represented in the picture (marriage? humility? Watts?) got no look-in whatsoever.
‘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