The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives

by Diane Johnson

  Whether Felix grew up to be like his Mama, or his Grandpapa, or his Papa, it is impossible to say. An old solicitor at the firm that always took care of Henry’s business remembers that he was a “tall thin man who always appeared to wear a long black cloak.” Just before his twentieth birthday he entered the Bank of England and there worked with distinction, whatever working with distinction in a bank may involve, as Manager of the Dividend Department, for more than forty years, and received a table service when he retired. He was happier than Papa, or Arthur, or so it may be hoped, in that he married a pretty girl named Alice and had two children. Now they are all dead.

  •

  Henry Wallis was a good fellow. He had a lot of friends. Henry had wanted to become a great painter. He had studied hard at the Royal Academy and at Cary’s Academy of Art, and in Paris at Gleyre’s Atelier and at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He had done patient, beautiful drawings of all the statues in the Louvre, to perfect his knowledge of anatomy, and drawn from models, and learned to use charcoal, the pencil, watercolor, oil. He had learned to paint in the Pre-Raphaelite manner, so beautifully clear, fine as a photograph, radiant with feeling, with the sort of patient passion it took in those days to paint in that manner. It was Henry who painted The Death of Chatterton and The Dead Stonebreaker, famous paintings, and everyone thought he would become the equal of Hunt or Millais. But somehow he did not.

  •

  After Mary Ellen’s death, Henry took to wandering, ostensibly to paint. Did paint; sent his fine little canvases back to England for the Royal Academy shows each year for another twenty years, nearly. But fewer and fewer of them. Partly it was that he had never repeated his Chatterton and Stonebreaker successes. Needed England perhaps, and fellowship, and the encouragement of a pretty and devoted woman. And he was never elected to the Royal Academy, a disappointment; one of those uncomfortable ambivalences lurking deep at heart. Henry did not believe in the R. A.—exclusive, conservative, a silly club that kept talented unconventional painters out; foolish snobs; a legion of untalented painters whose works do not hang in the Tate today. Holman Hunt and Dante Rossetti were never R. A. But Henry would have liked to belong. Anyone would.

  Partly, Henry was not successful because he got absorbed in his wanderings. Things caught his eye, all sorts of things: a fragment of Titian’s canvas, leaves of a fine old Koran; “I bought a few days ago some old lace that you would enjoy immensely. It has been part of altar clothes. I think the pattern is wonderfully rich. It was at an old shop in the Jews quarter. I saw at the same time some net would do for collars but was not sure it was genuine. I will ask some lady about it and if good will buy you some. I picked up some bits of old silk brocade with silver worked in it, and a large piece of tapestry enough to cover the side of a room for 12,” he writes to his mother from Rome in 1863.

  He liked beautiful bits of things and he liked to observe foreign customs in strange places: “On Christmas Eve I went to the Sistine Chapel in the evening. Men are obliged to go in evening dress and the ladies in black with veils of the same color. There was a grand mass at which a lot of cardinals attended, who looked very picturesque in their red silk dresses. They evidently found the ceremony wearisome as they yawned a good deal. It was curious that the congregation were Protestants, being nearly all English.”

  He began more and more to spend his time making watercolor sketches of old buildings, like the perfect English traveler: “Your drawing in the last Old Water Colour [exhibition] was of a favorite facade of mine,” Holman Hunt writes him, “but I don’t know how you escaped the bad odour in the opposite mosque. Edith nearly got her death there.”

  Henry continued to exhibit at the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, of which he was a member, and he began to draw pictures of the beautiful ceramic vases and tiles he saw in foreign museums, and to collect pots and fragments of pots for himself. As he did so he became increasingly interested in the romance of these pots; old glazes, traditional designs; the meaning of the forms. His taste was perfect; he had money and could travel; he began to learn more about pottery, and to think more about pottery. His was the good Victorian’s fascination with the archaeological and the artist’s fascination with exquisite craft.

  Pottery finally preoccupied him altogether, and, as his old friend Albert Van de Put of the Victoria and Albert Museum wrote of him in a memorial pamphlet, he ultimately became “a prominent personality, whose memory will be cherished for its embodiment of sterling qualities with a rare knowledge and experience of the ceramics of Southern Europe.” About these he wrote some seventeen books and articles, and “none more enlightening or beguilingly suggestive are likely to be written than the series of volumes, mostly in themselves artistic productions, which are Mr. Wallis’s tribute to the potter’s art. Everywhere peeps out the wisdom begotten of pilgrimages to little known museums, in quiet old cities: of the quest-ceramic pursued between Berlin and Bitonto, and from Sèvres to Fostât, sketchbook in hand; of discussions with conservatori; and of arguments with all and sundry: canonici, sacristani, ciceroni, Fellâhîn. Mr. Wallis’s real knowledge of ceramics in certain departments would have equipped two or three professed archaeologists to treat thereof with greater appearance of learning, but with the dryness still supposed, in certain quarters, proper to the exposition of all manifestations whatsoever of art or science.”

  And so on. Henry: traveling alone, sketchbook in hand, until he was over eighty. Little letters from Mary Meredith tucked away in a trunk at home, with her parasols, where he could always look at them.

  And though he had his little sketch of her, and he had Felix, who resembled her, no doubt as the years—fifty, sixty years—went by, it became harder and harder to remember what she had looked like. For company in those foreign places, Egypt, Italy, he had canonici, conservatori, ciceroni, sacristani, Fellâhîn; but whether, ever, of another pretty woman, we cannot say.

  •

  His friendship with the Pre-Raphaelites and other painters of his day continued undiminished throughout his and their lives, and is recorded by scraps of correspondence here and there. They are all busy with painting. In 1867 Henry wants to borrow a suit of armor from William Morris—Morris can’t remember but he thinks Hughes has it, and Henry can get it from him—“only fisticuffs to be avoided, it is not respectable; and you can’t expect that any body who has had my armour for say 8 years can think it belongs to any body except himself.”

  In 1871 Henry is planning a picture of Shelley, in whom he has always been interested; he had been given some of the hair from Shelley’s head by Peacock, and has given two hairs of this to William Michael Rossetti, who has lost them. Dante Gabriel Rossetti thinks that Robert Browning has a bust of Shelley that Henry could use as a model, and writes to Browning, who says that Henry may come and see it any time. “I remember I made some rough sketches myself for a picture of it, which I projected calling ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley. Cor Cordium,’ followed by the quoted incident,” Rossetti says. This, or another time, Rossetti writes that he is in “consternation at the state in which I hear the bust has reached you. I am quite confident that . . . I gave full directions for the thing to be sent on to you and at any other time should have remembered to inquire again if it had been done but was in a confused state of mind just then.” Henry must have known about Gabriel’s confused states of mind.

  For another painting, subject unknown, Algernon Swinburne suggests Henry ask Burne-Jones for his memories. Burne-Jones replies, “I should be very glad to be of any help, but Swinburne has surely much overestimated my knowledge, though not my interest in the subject—I greatly question if I can be of any good to you, but if you will tell me when you shall be in I will come and talk it over and see more exactly what you mean. If one had a perfect memory of what struck one’s imagination most as a child, doubtless that would [be] a good direction to work in, but unfortunately for any help in this way I had the stupidest of infancies and childho
od, and don’t think I was taught or told anything but Hymns—how the word makes one creep.” Henry missed finding Burne-Jones at home and Burne-Jones was “aggravated to find your card the other night and to think that the only night you had come to see me for a year I should be dissipating at Rouge et Noir—it was at the Lyceum and very harmless, and I must say you had your revenge for any annoyance the journey out here cost you.”

  William Michael Rossetti introduces Henry to Baron Kirk [?]. Henry introduces someone named Hotchkiss to Holman Hunt, who has promised to look at Hotchkiss’s sketches and help him. A physician in Moorgate Street writes to Henry agreeing to see without charge another of Henry’s friends, an American painter, and adds that “at any time I shall be very happy to see without Fee, any poor artists whom you may send to me.” They are all very kind to one another.

  Holman Hunt wonders if Henry may have an Egyptian scarf like one he had begun to use in a portrait and which had been stolen:37 “It was of substantial silk—which the silk in Oriental shops are not now—it was about 7 feet long and 2 feet broad at either end was an extent of about 20 inches with stripes of hyacinth color 1—1/2 inch wide 3 or 4 inches apart and between these were bars of gold color half an inch wide (not gold fibre) the body of the scarf was of a delicate pink tint, formed by a shot of whiter woof upon a sort of strawberry cream warp: in the middle space there was no pattern.” Another friend supplies it in time.

  How very 1890’s these men are now, with their exquisitely developed aesthetic sensibilities. They had grown with the times. Or, perhaps, the times had grown with them, for had they not begun all this fifty years before?

  •

  Henry, the father of one of Peacock’s grandchildren, seems to have kept up with Peacock family affairs; and they seem to have regarded him most cordially. There are a few records of the acquaintance. It is to Wallis that James Hanway writes in 1866, after his article on Peacock in the North British Review, that he hopes “Peacock’s people and his friend Howes were satisfied with the line I took about him. . . .” In 1874 Edith writes “to ask you a favour, which is this, have you any Photo, or likeness of my Mother which you will give to me? I have no likeness of any kind of her and I much desire to get one. I understand that the miniature of her taken as a girl with long curls, was given either to you or Harold by Mary Anne Rosewell; this should surely have come to me as it was painted for my Father at the same time that one was painted of him for Mamma, this latter I have. If you or Harold object to give me that miniature, then will you please lend it to me that I may have a copy made of it? when I will faithfully return it to you again.” And she asks also for a photo of her brother Harold. In 1906 Henry writes to Felix that he has given some advice to Edith in the matter of a Peacock manuscript which was being auctioned and which Edith felt to be hers: “As to the MS of The Last Day of Windsor Forest I have suggested to her that if she thinks she can claim a lien on it she might ask the auctioneer to withdraw it, but I don’t suppose she will. I have asked Quaritch if he can buy it for me for a low sum to do so.”

  Edith’s daughter, Mrs. Hall Thorpe, remembered old Henry Wallis coming to call on her mother as late as 1911.

  •

  One of Henry’s worthy projects was to be honorary secretary of a committee for the preservation of St. Marks in Venice in 1880. In this he seems to have been joined by another enthusiast, William Morris, who writes rather crossly, “I understood when I saw you last that we were to meet here at 1/2 past 4 today; so I came; but after waiting til 1/4 past 5 concluded thare [sic] must be some mistake.” But Morris has good news about the committee: “Ruskin written to by Jones has telegraphed to say that he joins; Burne-Jones joins . . . Civil note from the American legation on Lowell’s part accepting. Also from Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College in Oxford accepting.”

  Beside Morris, Henry has letters from such various figures as Turgenev, and Charles Eliot Norton, who adds a postscript: “May I ask you to see that, in future issues of the statement, my initials are given correctly?” Norton suggests Henry ask William Wadsworth Longfellow, but Longfellow declines on the grounds that “anything that looks like foreign interference will do more harm than good with the sensitive Italians.” They, or something, seem to have succeeded in preserving St. Marks anyhow.

  •

  Throughout their lives these men assist one another’s little projects. Henry has for a long time been interested in ceramics. Eyre Crowe writes that he has done as Henry asked in looking at some pottery at Alwick Castle near Aberdeen. He sends some sketches and asks about Felix. Henry sends a scrap of Titian’s canvas to Sir John Gilbert, in case the paint and the ground and grain of the canvas would interest him. The great archaeologist W. M. Flinders Petrie writes from Cairo that a dealer there is selling a “fine Rameses II green brick” and some other things he thinks Henry would be interested in, and offers to have them shipped back with his own things. Poor old William Bell Scott writes “to my old friend Henry Wallis” that he is at last giving up the lease of his Chelsea house and selling off some things, “and if you want the little early Italian pots you once called to see or anything else I advise you to go” to the sale. “There are a number of Hispano: Moros if you still collect such, and a remarkable Majolica platter with the subject of Jupiter and Juno in an interesting position (not improper) on it.” “The Hispano Mooresque Water vessel I have presented to the SK Museum. I expect things will go dirt cheap. All my Nankin [?] ware will go with the rest and the wine in the cellar, among wch is 3 or 4 dozen very old Port, really regretted by me, but impossible to send down here.”

  William Bell Scott is old. They are all old now. The nineteenth century draws to a close.38 George Meredith has become the most famous author of his day.

  •

  George Meredith as he grew old got deaf. As Henry got old, it is said, he got “difficult.” But to him it seemed that the world had gotten difficult. War threatened. Automobiles were everywhere, and more soot than ever, crowds, and violence. Once an ardent democrat, Henry now wonders about Democracy. He writes to Felix, when he is over eighty: “It appears we are returning to a state of barbarism, and encouraged thereto by the present government. I am inclined to agree with those who say that constitutional govt. has become such a squalid farce that the only remedy is the government of the strong man—cld. he only be found! But he must be something different than the cackling Kaiser, who is what Carlyle wld have called a simulacrum.”

  On Christmas day 1914, the world was well embarked on the most grotesque madness of its history (until then). Henry is eighty-four now and doesn’t much leave home:

  My dear Felix,

  Thanks for your good wishes, and the same to Alice and Violet.

  But with all this savagery going on it seems rather a mockery to talk of the Christmastide as it was understood in the days of Charles Dickens?

  •

  Now only a few can remember the days of Charles Dickens. Henry and one or two of his friends are left, that is all. They are all old. Peter Daniel is nearly ninety, poor fellow, and cannot move, he is so weak and crippled. George Meredith has been dead for a decade; Mary Ellen for half a century.

  Henry had been a disciple of the Pre-Raphaelites and their friends, Arthur Hughes and Brett and Seddon. In the 1850’s there had been the Hogarth Club—Henry and Swinburne, Burne-Jones, Morris, and F. G. Stephens as secretary.

  But now, half a century later, Arthur Hughes writes Henry:

  My Dear Wallis

  I am laid up on my last illness—and so despairing at leaving my dear people in dire want and trouble (all from my want of care and dutifulness) that I try to think among the old pictures I have—there might be one that you remember with favour, such as Botticelli “Calumny” old copy—or the St. Jerome I lent the Burlington Club—reproduced in Burlington Magazine—Do you think at a modest price you could add such to your collection?

  Affectionately your
s

  Arthur Hughes

  And, when Henry replied a few days later,

  Alas and Yes it was this Hughes who wrote the dismal letter.

  How to thank you I hardly know, for the kind thought.

  I am awfully sorrowful and I am very sorrowful too by the evidently diminished sight as shown by your writing. But you have done supreme work with those eyes—and I hope there are loving other eyes to read to you about you at hand.

  This is only to thank and acknowledge this mornings letter.

  Affectionately yours,

  Arthur Hughes

  Hughes’s letters are dated November 1915, to an eighty-five-year-old Wallis, who takes a fall shortly thereafter, and cannot answer a letter from another old friend, Peter Austin Daniel, who is eighty-eight. Hughes was right about Henry’s sight, which had failed so that his writing was a mere scrawl, and this apparently embarrassed him. In his last letters he always apologized for being illegible and would add “in haste,” as if to explain it.

  In the year of his death, Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema writes to Henry: “It was truly nice to receive your wishes on my birthday; I felt much gratified. One loses so many friends who depart for ever that those who remain are somehow doubly precious especially when life feeds principally on recollections.”

  F. G. Stephens is dead, even his son Holly is old now, who writes that Henry and Felix are his oldest friends alive.

  •

  1916. The world is still full of the sound of gunfire and bombs, and women wear drab dresses, and it is Christmas eve of 1916. But Henry hears neither gunfire nor bells.