MRS. CAMERON'S ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON.*
Mits. CAMERON'S photographic studies are well known for the rare skill with which she has contrived to give something of the effect of fine artistic design and purpose to pictures taken by the chemistry of light alone from living faces. There is no portrait of this generation known to the present writer which he appreciates so highly even for its purely artistic effect AA Mrs. Cameron's study of the late Sir John Herschel, to whom she has given much of the weird and visionary expression of the high-minded medimval seer or astrologer, as well as that of the modern astronomer and philosopher. The wise, pondering mind that loOks out into the universe with a sense of anxious responsibility for its forecast, no less than of scientific ardour and wonder,—which weighs its words with that deep senPe of the grave peril to mankind • Illustrations to Tennyson's Idylls of the King and Other Poems. My Julia Margaret Cameron. Two Parte. London : Henry S. King and Co. 1816.
involved in misleading judgments, with which the words of one who merely pieces together the dissected map of nature are never weighed,—is portrayed in this magnificent photograph as it has hardly ever been portrayed on the canvas even of the greatest painters. The same gift which enabled Mrs. Cameron to produce this great work of art has qualified her to arrange and pro- duce some extremely stately and noble illustrations of Tennyson's idylls of the King and other Poems, two parts of which are now before us. We find in them, however, a great inequality of merit. It seems to us that Mrs. Cameron's insight into the stately and noble qualities of intellect and will, is far more perfect than her insight into the simpler beauties of innocence and gaiety and child-like sweetness. There is in these two parts hardly an illustration of any scene of power where a lofty mind is imaged in a powerful face, in which her success is not, at the very least, con- siderable, and hardly two or three illustrations of subjects intended to embody simplicity, naiveté, and beauty of the gentler kind, in which she achieves any success. The pictures of King Arthur, especially those of him in life, are exceedingly fine. No nobler conception can well be imagined than the one Mrs. Cameron gives us of "the passing of Arthur,"—Arthur wist- fully and wrathfully gazing at Modred, the author of all the treachery which had rained his ideal kingdom, and hardly holding, though still holding to his faith in God, in the midst of that final agony of desolation. No one could easily find an expression
of face more completely blending the weird and ghostly anguish e the last great temptation,—the temptation to think himself forsaken of God,—with the wrath of a true judge and the horror
of a true knight at the embodiment of sin and treachery. That half-scared face with which mortal goodness sees the preternatural darkness of the catastrophe of all its hopes, is given him, but in it also gleams the expiring fire of a great nature and a great career, leaping up for the last effort. It seems to us scarcely possible to admire either of the illustrations of King Arthur too much, but in the last of the two the mixed elements of sovereignty, chivalry, judgment, and desolation are mingled with marvellous success. It is not merely the moment of the last blow at Modred, it is the whole of the wonderful picture of Arthur's forsakenness as Mr. 'Tennyson has given it to us which the illustration recalls :—
" I found Him in the shining of the stars, I marked Him in the flowering of His fields ; But in His ways with men I find him not,— I waged his wars, and now I pass and die.
For I, being simple, thought to work His will, And have but stricken with the sword in vain ; And all whereon I leaned in wife and friend Is traitor to my peace, and all ray realm Reels back into the beast, and is no more. My God ! non hest forgotten me in my death : Nay—God, my Christ—I pass, but shall not die."
Again, nothing can be finer in its way,—and here the success is not merely in depicting great qualities, but also in the delineation of small ones,—than Mrs. Cameron's illustration of the little novice conversing with Queen Guinevere in her shame and dejection. The little maid who took the Queen out of herself by a "babbling heedlessness " is as happily delineated here,—her kindliness, her vacancy, and yet active vacancy, as distinguished from passive -vacancy of mind,—as is Guinevere's stately dejection and the shadow of her self-abasement. Nothing can be better than the peculiar expression of conventual simplicity,—a genuine simpli- oity, and yet one of artificial manufacture, and mixed with that love of small gossip which so often distinguishes the convent, —in • the little novice's face. But it seems to us one of the few cases in which Mrs. Cameron has succeeded in an illustration of a subject of the non-intellectual kind. We cannot at all appreciate her illustrations of "The May Queen," or of "King Cophetua and the Beggar-maid," or of "Mariana in the Molded Grange," who, by the way, instead of looking like the picture of that sickness which comes of hope deferred till it ceases to be hope, looks as plump and jolly as the happiest of little women, when in a momentary fit of indigestion, as she regrets that last helping of apple-pie, could possibly look.
Indeed, Mrs. Cameron is evidently not at all at her best in the attempt to discriminate refined moods of mere sentiment. Perhaps the most skilful of these efforts is the one of Maud standing as a sort of embodied passion-flower at the gate covered with passion- flowers ;—and yet what has become of that "least little delicate aquiline curve in a sensitive nose" it is hard for the eye to see, though we will not be rash enough to say it is not there. (This is the picture, by the way, which has been so sadly burlesqued in Messrs. Henry S. King and Co.'s Cabinet Edition of Maud and Enoch Arden," where poor Maud is depicted as one
who might easily drive a man mad from the very opposite cause to that which actually drove the hero of the poem mad,—namely, from being the very essence of ugly common-place.) Maud is soft and delicate and tender enough, though it is hardly possible to give adequately to the picture those complex qualities which poetry has so much more power to portray. But the other illustrations intended to paint complex moods of sentiment seem to us artificial, and not fascinating. The Princess and her Court are exceedingly uninteresting, and the lady who sings of the "tears from the depths of some divine despair " looks decidedly a "strong-minded" woman, trying to persuade the world that she is not unsexed by her struggles for the "rights of woman" ;—and this she endeavours to prove by indulging in a vein of the morbidest feeling, and looking as susceptible and unstrung as she knows how. The young lady who is listening to "the horns of elf- land faintly blowing" has nothing particular in her face ; and as for the beggar-maid who comes and captivates King Cophetua in that "poor attire" which is so conspicuously adorned with five flounces, we are entirely unable to agree with the king's avowed opinion that she was "more beautiful than day." We cannot detect a single touch of the " lovesome mien" which so fascinated everybody, and her arms are certainly not so laid across her breast as to give any conception of simplicity in the attitude. Still less do the "May Queens" please us. The poem itself is to our mind one of the least agreeable of all Mr. Tennyson's poems ; we see more simplesse than simplicity in its glee and its pathos, more self-consciousness all through than is at all consistent with the intention to contrast the wild and wayward beauty of joyous health and life, with the pale and chastened resignation of early death. But granting the poem, the illustrations seem to us singularly little like it. Can this large-made and rather clumsy young woman be the " little" Alice who ran by her lover like a "flash of light?" She looks in all three pictures much more like a woman of twenty-eight than a girl of the age indicated in Tennyson's poem. There is none of the gaiety, or vivacity, or mischief in her looks which is painted in the May Queen, and the die-away expression in the third picture is a die-away expression which seems to be assumed of malice aforethought. In fact, these illustrations are to us simply distasteful. It was a very difficult subject, no doubt, for without the aid of colour it was very hard to convey some of the chief features of the poem. But even allowing for the difficulty, the studies do not seem to us well conceived. The illustrations are embodiments not of sentiment, but of sentimentality. Again, what sage like Merlin could possibly have been fascinated by such a Vivien as this,—not a little fairy of bewitching falsehood, but a gawky and plain, though wanton damsel ?
However, where there is so much that is fine, it is some- what cross-grained to dwell on what we cannot like, especially as we have not yet mentioned nearly all of the more successful efforts. In 'Elaine' we think Mrs. Cameron has suc- ceeded much better than usual with her love-lorn subjects. There is real tenderness and disappointed tenderness in Elaine's face, and the picture of the arrival of the fair corpse in Arthur's palace, and of Sir Launcelot and Sir Gawain and Sir Galahad coming to gaze on it, is a very fine one. The picture of Enid, again,—not the Enid in the white dress who is going to the old cabinet,—but the Enid who is singing the song, "Turn, fortune, turn thy wheel," is unusually gracious, patient, tender, and attractive. It is, to our minds, a face of far deeper beauty than Maud's, and singularly expressive of the boldness and yet depth of sweetness of that very chivalric Griselda. And again, the picture of Gareth nursed and watched by Lynette, who is repenting her of all her teasing, is a graceful one. But after all, these illustrations of Mrs. Cameron's must live chiefly by their noble delineations of Arthur and Guinevere, and of the scenes of higher tragedy in their fates. In these studies Mrs. Cameron's illustrations seem to us all we could ask. And if where a lighter fancy is required, she frequently fails, at least she fails only where failure matters least, and succeeds where success involves the highest triumph.
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