They were ladies something in looks like those familiar paintings by Watts or by some of the old Italian masters he loved. Watts has painted Mrs. Tennyson more than once and recorded her beautiful spiritual aspect and delicate features, and he has also painted her correspondent Mrs. Cameron, a woman of a noble plainness, carrying herself with dignity and expression, and well able to set off the laces and Indian shawls she wore so carelessly. Mrs. Tennyson was more daintily attired: she wore a quaint little gimp high to her throat; her dresses were of violet and grey and plum colour; a white net coif fell over her brown hair. Her hair never turned grey; she remained to us all, a presence sweet and unchanged in that special and peaceful home shrine to which no votary ever came more warmly true and responsive than Julia Cameron, her neighbour in the Island for so many years. Mrs. Cameron was one of the well-known family of Pattle sisters, beautiful and gifted women who were able to illustrate their own theories. They were unconscious artists with unconventional rules for life which excellently suited themselves.
My own first meeting with Mrs. Cameron was not very long after that youthful stay in Chapel House, one summer’s day when my father took my sister and myself to Sheen to see his old friend. I remember her, a strange apparition in a flowing red velvet dress although it was summer time, cordially welcoming us to a fine house and to some belated meal, where the attendant butler was addressed by her as ‘Man’ and was ordered to do many things for our benefit; to bring back luncheon-dishes and curries for which she and her family had a speciality. When we left she came with us bareheaded, with trailing draperies, part of the way to the station as her kind habit was. A friend of mine told me how on one occasion she accompanied her in the same way, carrying a cup of tea which she stirred as she walked along. My father, who had known her first as a girl in Paris, laughed and said ‘She is quite unchanged,’ and unchanged she remained to the end of her days; generous, unconventional, a more loyal friend never lived.
Alfred Tennyson, writing to his wife in 1855, says ‘I dined with Mrs. Cameron last night, she is more wonderful than ever in her wild beaming benevolence.’
There are several mentions of this most interesting, most emphatic lady in Sir Henry Taylor’s ‘Autobiography.’ Sir Henry, who was her chosen ideal among many, says:
‘In India, in the absence of the Governor-General’s wife, she has been at the head of the European Society, for Mr. Cameron was a very high official, succeeding Lord Macaulay as legal member of Council.
‘Does Alice,’ he writes to a friend, ‘ever tell you, or do I, how we go on with Mrs. Cameron, how she keeps showering on us “her barbaric pearls and gold,” Indian shawls, turquoise bracelets, inlaid portfolios, ivory elephants, &c., and how she writes us letters six sheets long all about ourselves.... It was indeed impossible that we should not grow fond of her, and not less so for the many, whom her genial ardent and generous nature has captivated since.’
It is very difficult to describe Mrs. Cameron. She played the game of life with such vivid courage and disregard for ordinary rules, she entered into other people’s interests with such warmhearted sympathy and determined devotion, that, though her subjects may have occasionally rebelled, they generally ended by gratefully succumbing to her rule, laughing and protesting all the time.
Sir Henry quotes her saying to someone with whom she had disagreed: ‘before the year is out you will love me as a sister,’ and he adds that she proved the truth of this prophecy. She must have been a trying sister at times, especially when her relations and adopted relations were ill. She longed to cure them on the spot; she would fly in an agony from one great doctor to another, demanding advice and insisting on instant prescription and alleviation. ‘Culpable carelessness, profound ignorance,’ were the least of her criticisms of family physicians whom she had not sent in herself. She would eloquently describe the anxious hours she spent in waiting-rooms, obtaining opinions from great authorities who had not even seen the patient. Sir Henry’s stepmother (Mrs. Cameron had barely known her) says:
I think I might have found good Mrs. Cameron’s loving letter difficult to answer, and though I have a sort of scruple about refusing kindness and charitable love, yet I cannot help being glad you saved me....’