GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS, R.A.
From a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, made about the time of his marriage to Ellen Terry
I wondered at the new life, and worshiped it because of its beauty. When it suddenly came to an end, I was thunderstruck; and refused at first to consent to the separation, which was arranged for me in much the same way as my marriage had been.
The whole thing was managed by those kind friends whose chief business in life seems to be the care of others. I don't blame them. There are cases where no one is to blame. "There do exist such things as honest misunderstandings," as [Charles Reade] was always impressing on me at a later time. There were no vulgar accusations on either side, and the words I read in the deed of separation, "incompatibility of temper"—a mere legal phrase—more than covered the ground. Truer still would have been "incompatibility of occupation," and the interference of well-meaning friends. We all suffer from that sort of thing. Pray God one be not a well-meaning friend one's self!
"The marriage was not a happy one," they will probably say after my death, and I forestall them by saying that it in many ways was very happy indeed. What bitterness there was effaced itself in a very remarkable way.
I saw Mr. Watts but once face to face after the separation. We met in the street at Brighton, and he told me that I had grown! I was never to speak to him again. But years later, after I had appeared at the Lyceum and had made some success in the world, I was in the garden of a house which adjoined Mr. Watt's new Little Holland House, and he, in his garden, saw me through the hedge. It was then that I received from him the first letter that I had had for years. In this letter he told me that he had watched my success with eager interest, and asked me to shake hands with him in spirit. "What success I may have," he wrote, "will be very incomplete and unsatisfactory if you cannot do what I have long been hesitating to ask. If you cannot, keep silence. If you can, one word, 'Yes,' will be enough."
I answered simply, "Yes."
After that he wrote to me again, and for two or three years we corresponded, but I never came into personal contact with him.
As the past is now to me like a story in a book that I once read, I can speak of it easily. But if by doing so I thought that I might give pain or embarrassment to any one else, I should be silent about this long-forgotten time. After careful consideration it does not seem to me that it can be either indiscreet or injurious to let it be known that this great artist honored and appreciated my efforts and strife in my art; that this great man could not rid himself of the pain of feeling that he "had spoiled my life" (a chivalrous assumption of blame for what was, I think, a natural, almost inevitable, catastrophe), and that long after all personal relation had been broken off, he wrote to me gently, kindly,—as sympathetically ignoring the strangeness of the position, as if, to use his own expression, "we stood face to face on the brink of an universal grave."
When this tender kindness was established between us, he sent me a portrait-head that he had done of me when I was his wife. I think it a very beautiful picture. He did not touch it except to mend the edges, thinking it better not to try to improve it by the work of another time.