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
“Time but the impression stronger makes,
As streams their channels deeper wear.”
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.’