In the middle of the run of "[The American Cousin]" I left the stage and married. Mary Meredith was the part, and I played it vilely. I was not quite sixteen years old, too young to be [married] even in those days, when every one married early. But I was delighted, and my parents were delighted, although the disparity of age between my husband and me was very great. 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 had married me loved to paint. I remember sitting to him in armor for hours and never realizing that it was heavy until I fainted!
The day of my wedding it was very cold. Like most women, I always remember what I was wearing on the important occasions of my life. On that day I wore a brown silk gown which had been designed by Holman Hunt, and a quilted white bonnet with a sprig of orange-blossom, and I was wrapped in a beautiful Indian shawl. I "went away" in a sealskin jacket with coral buttons, and a little sealskin cap. I cried a great deal, and Mr. Watts said, "Don't cry. It makes your nose swell." The day I left home to be married, I "tubbed" all my little brothers and sisters and washed their fair hair.
ELLEN TERRY AT SEVENTEEN
After her marriage to George Frederick Watts
From a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron
[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 we know it to-day—were known as Beauty, Dash, and Talent. There were two more beautiful sisters, [Mrs. Jackson] and [Mrs. Dalrymple]. [Gladstone], [Disraeli] and [Browning] were among Mr. Watts' visitors. At Freshwater, where I went soon after my marriage, I first saw [Tennyson].
As I write down these great names I feel almost guilty of an imposture! 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 famous painter. I was, if I was anything at all, more of a curiosity, of a side-show, than hostess to these distinguished visitors. Mr. Gladstone seemed to me like a suppressed volcano. His face was pale and calm, but the calm was the calm of the gray crust of Etna. To look into the piercing dark eyes was like having a glimpse into the red-hot crater beneath. Years later, when I met him again at the Lyceum and became better acquainted with him, this impression of a volcano at rest again struck me. Of Disraeli I carried away even a scantier impression. I remember that he wore a blue tie, a brighter blue tie than most men would dare to wear, and that his straggling curls shook as he walked. He 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 flew back to the garden-party at Little Holland House, and Disraeli. I know I must have admired him greatly, for the only other time I ever saw him he was walking in Piccadilly, and I crossed the road, just to get a good look at him. I 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 beg your pardon," and passed on, not recognizing me, of course; but 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 any one else's. It was "Venetia" which first made me see the real [Lord Byron], the real Lady Byron, too. In "Tancred" 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 be neglected. Can any one with a pictorial sense fail to be delighted by their pageantry? Disraeli was a heaven-born 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 us in his novels is big and swelling, but only to a hasty judgment is it hollow.