Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  “It was understood when I engaged this house for you that it was unsuitable for overnight guests, unless they be willing to use the empty room. It is important to Mrs. Ruskin’s peace of mind that she knows John’s dressing room be warmed by a fire. By removing him to the attic he has been deprived of this comfort and she of her assurance that his health be safeguarded by basic precautions.”

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Ruskin. I find it totally unacceptable that my mother, who has had a dreadful sea voyage from Perth, and is after all my mother, be expected to sleep amongst the servants in the attic. John is not being asked to sleep in the attic, merely dress there, but to assume my mother should is––an impossible notion.”

  She was shocked at her own boldness. Mr. Ruskin’s stocky body jerked, and with his white hair mussed from having run his hand through it he looked shocked in the literal sense as well.

  “Well––well!” he sputtered. “Huh!” But he turned and left just the same.

  John Ruskin was puzzling out the underlying tenants of Obedience as it pertained to true architecture when he heard his wife’s voice behind him.

  “John, I am not feeling very strong yet, and I’m thinking that I should like to return to Perth with my mother for a rest.” Effie stood on the threshold of her husband’s small study on Park Street and delivered this news to his back.

  He replaced his pen in his ink-pot, but did not turn to her. The friction escalating between his wife and his parents could not be confined to Denmark Hill; it invaded his rooms here, disturbing his efforts. Effie had revealed herself to be entirely too much of a presence around them all. Her liveliness had grown to be restlessness, and her quickness of opinion hardened into obduracy. It was galling to feel the rightness of his parents’ original objections to her, although when he had admitted his growing reservations to them they had behaved beautifully in comforting him. He had not mentioned that the marriage had not been celebrated; it did not seem important compared to the larger issues of attitude and behaviour. John had chosen a girl extraordinarily unlike himself, simply because she seemed willing to have him. He had learnt that pining for a young woman and living with her were two very different states. Both were disruptive to his work but at least after procuring her hand he felt the surging return of work-energy. The distractions of actually having a wife were still to be solved. Effie kept herself busy during the day but at night when he finally came to bed he must be alone with her. Her very presence next to him felt a silent reproof.

  His chair grated slightly as he pushed it back. He did not rise, but turned and spoke to her where she stood in his doorway. “I find that an excellent idea,” he answered.

  Effie and her mother set out by rail for Scotland a fortnight later. She was still enervated by illness and hungered for loving and familiar surroundings. At home in Perth she felt certain to regain her health and spirits. Recent European events were also hopeful; Louis Napoleon had been elected President of France, and at this stabilizing news Mr. Gray’s railway shares at once became more valuable.

  Several of the younger children were ill with whooping cough when they arrived at Bowerswell, and she was thrown into nursing them. Then the unthinkable happened, and seven year-old Robert, the darling of the family, died. She kissed his still hot-brow and recalled how he had kissed her at her wedding. And she got a letter from John telling her he had moved back to Denmark Hill.

  Chapter Nine

  The Lamp of Life

  London: Spring 1849

  “I’m going to try for the Academy show.” Millais was cleaning his brushes over the porcelain basin when he turned his head and delivered the news to Gabriel. The latter, clad in loose dark blouse and brown over-smock, had just finished modelling for the large new work upon his friend’s easel.

  “You’ll send in ‘Isabella’? Benissimo! That’s striking right at the heart! They’ll have to take it, unless they’re blinder than we think. It’s by far the best thing you’ve yet done.”

  Even incomplete it was a riveting work, startlingly new and yet redolent of the early Italian masters. Millais had taken for his subject Keats’ tragic poem Isabella; Or the Pot of Basil. In Keats’ reworking of Boccaccio’s story a young sister of a wealthy Florentine mercantile family falls in love with her brothers’ clerk, Lorenzo. Her elder brothers aspire to an advantageous match for Isabella, and murder Lorenzo and bury his body in a shallow grave. After Lorenzo’s ghost appears to her, she finds her beloved’s body. To keep one part of him near her, she cuts off his head, which she plants in a large pot in which she grows basil. She lovingly tends the basil until her brothers, discovering her secret, steal the pot, upon which she herself dies. Millais had chosen to illustrate a key early moment in this romantically morbid work––that where Isabella and Lorenzo sit side by side at table under the conniving eyes of her brothers, and the unsuspecting presence of other members of her family.

  His painting was peopled with the artist’s friends and family, who generally posed one at a time so he could give them their due of time and attention. Gabriel had just sat for hours holding a small fluted Venetian glass to his lips. Gabriel’s brother William had already sat for the ill-starred Lorenzo, Millais changing his hair from dark to blond to emphasize his vulnerability. Millais’ own parents had sat for the two elderly people present, although he had aged them considerably, and so skilfully his mother laughed that it was like looking at herself twenty years hence.

  The subject matter, taken from a poem from the revered Keats, was striking enough. But it was Millais’ treatment that was arresting. He had grouped the twelve figures, four on one side, and eight on the other, around a table projecting out at an angle to the viewer. A flattened and deranged perspective resulted, the composition further dramatized by the white-clad, out-thrusting leg of one of the brothers in the immediate foreground, straining forward to teaze the greyhound who has laid its head in Isabella’s lap for solace. Millais had made the most of his models; the faces of each character in the drama were as highly individualised as in any Flemish painting.

  If this were not enough the scene was rife with symbolism. The doomed Lorenzo bent towards Isabella as she accepts the half of a blood orange he offers her. A majolica charger before them on the table bore a scene, minute but decipherable to a careful viewer, of Judith beheading Holefernes. Knowing the fate to befall, even the red wine in the drained glass that Gabriel had held might be blood.

  But it was the technique with which it was being painted that contributed the most telling particularity to the piece. Millais, taking a page out of the workbook of artists such as Turner, eschewed the practice of “dead colouring,” the blocking in of the canvas in sections of grey, green, or brown to serve as under-base for the design to follow. Instead Millais ordered the whitest canvas he could find, and then coated it with gesso of the brightest white he could mix––even heightening the effect of underlying brightness by painting onto this preparatory ground when it was still wet. Jewel-like colours of unabashed radiance was the result.

  “You’ll have good company, should the Academy take it,” Gabriel went on. “Hunt’s submitting his ‘Rienzi,’ too.” Gabriel was busy these days sitting for the rest of the Brotherhood, posing too for the eponymous, vengeance-swearing hero in Hunt’s painting. He had moved his studio from the rejected Ford Madox Brown’s to share one with Hunt.

  “And you?” Millais asked, wiping his hands as Gabriel slipped out of his costume. The small space was filled with the odour of mineral spirits and Millais flung open another window. “Your ‘Mary Virgin’ would make a perfect triad. What do you say?”

  But Gabriel shook his head. He had no inclination to subject his first major oil work, depicting Christ’s mother as a girl embroidering with her mother St. Anne, to the scrutiny of the Academy. Instead he was sending it to the less prestigious but jury-less and thus far more welcoming Free Exhibition. Like Millais, he had impressed family into modelling––his younger sister Christina for the
tenderly demure Mary, their mother as St. Anne. Gabriel was essentially still learning to draw, and Madox Brown and Hunt had helped him along on it. Although crude in certain aspects Millais admired the picture very much, as did Hunt––Millais did not hold much stock in the opinions of the four newer members of the PRB. He was proud of the fact that Gabriel had added the initials PRB to his signature, which he himself intended to do upon finishing his ‘Isabella.’

  When the Free Exhibition opened in March, ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,’ in a frame designed by Gabriel and inscribed with two sonnets he had written, attracted the attention of the Dowager Marchioness of Bath. She gave Gabriel 80 guineas for it, and asked him to re-colour the Virgin’s dress. The first painting signed by a member of the PRB had found a home.

  The entire Royal Academy was of course, packed. The private view was one of the most sought-after social events of each spring, and Millais and Hunt would ordinarily never have been there if their two paintings were not hanging within. They had seen them hung, days earlier, the galleries abuzz with workman on ladders covering the walls floor to ceiling with canvases, frame touching frame. Now they were back, in a flood of artists and patrons, aristocrats and rich manufacturers. And critics. The press was there in number, chatting with Academy officials, edging through the crowd attempting to get closer views, jotting down notes.

  Millais’ ‘Isabella’ had been favourably hung, just above “the line”––the natural line of viewing, and not “skied” up by the ceiling cornice. A few members of the Academy who liked and had faith in their work had seen to it that the paintings of Millais, Hunt, and Collinson be grouped together, “huddled for safety,” as Millais quipped, and there they lay against the totally obscured damask-covered wall of the Middle Room.

  The three young men tried to remain near their paintings, should they have the chance to explain anything, or be so fortunate to be asked by a prospective purchaser about its availability. But the crowd acted like a vortex whirling them slowly but inexorably away for introductions to so-and-so, or with the insistence that they come at once to see a certain painting in another room.

  By the next day the papers told them all they needed to know. Hunt’s ‘Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother’ was praised for the sincerity with which it illustrated Bulwer Lytton’s novel; and the novelist himself wrote to congratulate Hunt. Collinson’s little picture ‘Italian Image––Boys at a Roadside Ale-house’ was generally ignored. But Millais’ ‘Isabella,’ though attacked by the Athenaeum critic for the “want of rationality of its composition,” was acknowledged by many as nothing less than a visual document which in one canvas proclaimed the coming of a new and noble school of art.

  Effie stayed largely at Bowerswell, comforting, and being comforted by the rest of her family over little Robert’s death. She tried to regain her own vitality. Her allowance of course continued, and John wrote her urging her to ask for more money should she have need. The fact that she would have to ask it of Mr. Ruskin made the likelihood of her availing herself of the offer remote. John, she realised, was utterly dependant financially upon his father. His father had subsidised the printing of his earliest books, and although Modern Painters was bought and read by some the most important thinkers in the nation, the print runs were so minuscule that no royalties ensued. This meant that she too was utterly dependent upon Mr. Ruskin, and meant as well that she would never ask for more than her original allowance of £25 per quarter.

  In mid-April the three Ruskins left for the delayed trip to Switzerland. John was going on what was to be the crowning point of their honeymoon without her.

  The Channel crossing was stormy, but Ruskin preferred staying inside his brougham lashed to the deck of the steamer to huddling in the ship’s crowded cabin with his parents and the servants George and Anne. It was terrifically cold for April, and sleet sheeted against the brougham windows. He had a desperate head-cold coming on, and the pitching of the ship made reading impossible. Snow had delayed their crossing for days, but the fact that once through France they finally could cross safely into Switzerland made any discomforts bearable to him.

  They took the new train from Boulogne to Paris; his brougham and his parents’ carriage loaded onto the flat trucks provided for the transport of private coaches. They would hire horses as they went along. He, like his father, hated surrendering the privacy of their own vehicles, but his mother was unexpectedly impressed with the comforts of the new train, and the tin containers of hot water they were given with which to warm their feet under their lap-robes.

  His eagerness to return to the Alps made every border crossing of every Italian city-state a trial. Soldiers were everywhere; the king of Sardinia, Piedmont, and Savoy had declared war on Austria. An uprising in Brescia had been repressed by the Austrians with marked brutality. Venice drove the Austrian garrison out and proclaimed itself a Republic under Daniele Manin. Their passports were inspected innumerable times due to these unsettled conditions, and a certain number of petty bribes to petty officials were paid, to his disgust. Snow lay six feet deep in the mountain passes and his mother was terrified at each slippage of the carriages. At every inn, on every stage along the way, he continued on The Seven Lamps of Architecture, preparing his drawings and even etching the plates in washstand basins. If he was diligent he would have the manuscript ready to be published as a birthday gift for his father in May.

  Ruskin had been three years away from his Alps, and he returned to them with a lover’s fervour. His parents always tried to take the same routes they had in prior visits, see the exact views, to stop in the same rooms in the same inns. In his notebooks and diaries he would compare the rivers, the trees––great or scrub––, the flowers and grasses, the clouds crowning the summits or rolling in the valleys with his earlier observations of the place. It was not only factual data he sought, but a return of the feelings elicited by the scenery at first acquaintance. At fifteen he had stood here overcome with exhilaration, a revelatory awe that did not diminish, but enlarged, his sense of self. Great mountains had then bestowed upon him an inexplicable sense of joy, in them, and in himself. The verdant foothills of the Alps, the jagged frosted peaks, the deep and shrouded ravines and narrow rocky passes had instilled in him a keen sensation of rootedness, of safety, and of some kind of grand but unnameable invincibility. That feeling had leached away and he yearned to recover it.

  “I am in Switzerland,” he proclaimed while standing alone on a hill side. He repeated the phrase again and again until the boyhood evocation, his boy’s soul, seemed his once again.

  John wrote Effie regularly from France, and then from Switzerland. In their separation the act of writing renewed a sense of ardour and tenderness toward her. The idea of Effie, distant and waiting, charmed him. Holding the pen in his hand he could again summon the passionate excitement that had troubled his engagement. He began to feel himself a character in a novel by Walter Scott, a lover separated from his mistress through a long and complicated series of events external to them both. Such a man could be a hero––or could meet a hero’s death.

  Do you know, pet, it seems almost a dream to me that we have been married: I look forward to meeting you: and to your next bridal night, and to the time when I shall again draw your dress from your snowy shoulders: and lean my cheek upon them, as if you were still my betrothed only: and I had never held you in my arms. God bless you my dearest. Ever your devoted J Ruskin

  Effie wept at reading this. Was all that had been forfeited to be reclaimed? John wished a fresh start, to relive their bridal. She opened her heart to him in her response, describing her excitement, and then hurt at her seeming rejection, on their wedding night.

  My darling Effie I have your precious letter here: with the account so long and kind––of all your trial at Blair Athol––indeed it must have been cruel my dearest: I think it will be much nicer next time, we shall neither of us be frightened.

  Two people can inhab
it the same room at the same time in the same circumstances and come from it with vastly differing impressions. Shipwrecked men in a lifeboat labouring in running seas will discern doom, opportunity, and irony depending on their temperaments, self-regard, and expectation of an after-life. Effie’s girlish apprehension of the physical transformation from maiden to wife had been a mixture of appropriate anxiety and excitement. Now her husband offered that he, too, had been frightened, and Effie clung to this admission as evidence of a sensitive nature without questioning what it was he feared.

  Then, at last in Switzerland, at Jura, he wrote a letter that shocked her.

  Indeed we often and all think of you, and I often hear my mother or Father saying–– ‘poor child––if she could but have thrown herself openly upon us, and trusted us, and felt that we desired only her happiness, and would have made her ours, how happy she might have been: and how happy she might have made us all’...

  Had she been thus ‘written off’ by the elder Ruskins? Was her chafing under Mrs. Ruskin’s unbearable fussing, and her removal to Perth for the sake of her own health, the root and cause of some irreparable breech?

  In Geneva he wrote he had bought her as a birthday gift a bracelet of gold flowers at the best jeweller in town. And he asked if it would be irksome to her to read Sismondi’s 16 volume Histoire des Républiques Italiennes au Moyen ge and copy out for him every word that bore in the remotest degree on the interests and history of Venice.

  She went to Edinburgh to speak with a respected professor of midwifery at the university there. After listening to her symptoms he advised her to have children.