Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  It was poor dead Walter Deverell who had first found her. He had want of models ––all these young painters did, but most especially those working in the style of Pre-Raphaelitism; there was a rare and certain aspect they sought. Deverell had caught a glimpse of Miss Siddal in the millinery shop in Cranbourne Alley. Pale skin, masses of copper hair. And so slender as to be convincing as a maiden disguised as a page. He thought she would do, and perfectly, for the part of Viola in the scene from Twelfth Night he wanted to paint. She went on to sit for Hunt before Gabriel had claimed her.

  It was Gabriel––who could scarcely draw himself––who began teaching her to draw; but that was, Ruskin thought upon consideration, one of the reasons her art was developing along such interesting lines. Both Gabriel and Miss Siddal were original in expression. Figures devoid of almost any modelling, a colouration either ghostly or garish, extreme flatness of plane in which the subject was presented. And what subjects! Gabriel of course went back and back again to Dante, she to the gristliest of old folk tales, and both of them to Shakespeare’s bottomless font.

  When he first saw her work Ruskin offered to buy up all her drawings from Gabriel on the spot. He had already engaged Gabriel to make him a series of paintings taken from Dante, and the thought of discovering and fostering a new and unique ability such as Miss Siddal’s could only add relish to the association––Gabriel himself was so contrary that he rejected half of Ruskin’s advice yet took all his money. Gabriel had hazarded to suggest the sum of £25 for the lot, but Ruskin would not accept them for less than £30. Gabriel asked him around to Chatham Place more frequently after that, and at last the drawings’ creator was now before him.

  “My proposition is simply this: that you leave off your labours trimming bonnets and turn whole-hearted and single-mindedly to your art. I will pay you an annual sum of £150, and ask in return that I be given first pick of all your output.”

  Gabriel clapped his palms upon his knees. A turn of Miss Siddal’s head and a glance of her odd-coloured eyes silenced him before he spoke. It was her decision to make, Ruskin could see, and it made him all the more hopeful about her ability to maintain and express her distinct artistic perception.

  He had a pretty clear idea of how Gabriel had described him to her earlier––as perhaps an undeniably queer chap; that his pamphlet about Pre-Raphaelitism had actually been all about Turner and a little about work; but that certain people listened to him nonetheless. And he had money in his pockets.

  “I should rather sell my work on its merits, piece by piece,” she said to him, “than accept your offer of annual support.” Yet by the time Ruskin had left Chatham Place––needing to cover his nose and mouth against the foulness of the low-water-mark Thames––she had agreed.

  As he drove home to Denmark Hill Miss Siddal occupied his thoughts. The passivity of her face suggested to his mind the stateliness of white marble monuments to long-dead Florentine princesses. But pale as her skin was it had the warmth, and apparent smoothness, of ivory.

  There was something otherworldly about her, he realised, something close to unsubstantial. She was like a reflection of a golden mountain in a crystal lake, he thought.

  Then he recalled a moment during their interview when she had parted her lips without speaking. He had met her image prisoned in a frame years before he had met the original––the singing, ecstatic Ophelia, floating down the flower-strewn river in her madness. His lost Millais had painted her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Lamp of Power &The Lamp of Beauty: 1858-1871

  Turin: Summer 1858

  The girl had flung herself down on a mound of warm sand, her brown arms thrown over her head, her long dark hair falling in loose tangles over face and shoulders. Her ragamuffin companions still ran and played along the river bank, and their sharp Italian cries rang in the hot afternoon air. She did not lift her head to their calls. Her faded black dress––little better than a rag––lay high upon her naked legs. The bodice of the dress was stretched tight over her ribs, showing breasts scarcely protrudent. Here and there about her arms and thighs sand was stuck in tawny patches.

  She had the complete ease of a basking serpent, and Ruskin thought he had never seen anything more beautiful. He had come to Turin to gaze at formal splendour, but the beauty of a slum child stopped him in his tracks. One of the boys she had been playing with now approached and in dialect unintelligible cried out at her––an insult, he imagined, for she sprung up like a roused snake and shrieked back her answer. She was Alecto, and raced in angry justice after the taunting boy. He watched her until she was out of sight.

  Ruskin had left the Alps, for the first time a little discontented with them, understanding at last his father’s lack of sympathy with mountain ranges. To his surprise he found himself rather looking forward to visiting again the hoary capital of the Sardinian kingdom, of touring the palace––which as a youth with his parents he had chafed at wasting his time in––and walking in the laddered shade of the colonnaded piazzas. In Alpine basins he had been searching for specific views captured long ago by Turner, disappointed that the master––despite the warnings he recalled––had not recorded what was before him in ravine or mountain pass with complete fidelity; had in fact augmented or subtracted from the scene for sake of visual balance within four final gilded edges.

  Most of all he came to Turin to behold again a painting by Paul Veronese. He had not written kindly in the past of ‘The Presentation of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon’, finding it guilty of luxury and idolatry. Now he was working, slowly and not very effectively, on the final volume of Modern Painters and wished to see it anew. Its imagery was troublesomely impressed on his mind and once before it he might understand why.

  The massive Mannerist canvas was crowded with figures of courtiers, counsellors, slaves, camels and dogs, all looking, pointing, turning, or gesticulating. The backdrop of all this focused activity was a perfectly symmetrical classical archway opening to a cypress-dotted landscape. The young golden-haired hero sat at the extreme upper left corner of the piece, perched upon an impossibly high throne with an eagle and an imperturbable lion at his feet; the royal object of his royal gaze, splendid in her silks and pearls as large as quails-eggs, knelt in astonishment at his majesty in the far right.

  The energy of her intent struck him; this was a Queen who must come to Solomon’s court and see for herself, and having seen had no choice but to drop almost swooning into the arms of her waiting-women in acquiescence of his wisdom and prosperity so revealed. The glow of colour in the Queen’s face, the amplitude of her gesture of surrender, the tender, almost juvenile profile of curly-haired Solomon, the black yet gleaming armour of an attendant knight, the richness of the ruched fabrics of the Queen’s women, hung round with ropes of pearls all excited him beyond expectation. The Queen of Sheba’s tiny white dog, boldly confronting the viewer, delighted him.

  He saw in it a triumphal procession of benediction pouring forth from Apollo-headed Solomon, King of Wisdom, down his chain of counsellors to the questing Queen and her train, enveloping all in his beneficent gaze. Every creature was beautiful to its type, King, Queen, warriors, priests, serving women, camels, birds, and dogs; all fulfilled perfectly their linked roles in a sumptuous economy forming under Solomon’s gaze.

  Ruskin was transported. Veronese he saw, was in all his worldliness no less than an archangel ordained by God with the gift of covering so many yards of canvas with magnificent figures in exquisite colouration. He was like Titian noble in his sensualism, and the frank animality of his conceptions led not to turpitude but spirituality. Veronese was boldly animal, like Homer and Shakespeare, or Tintoret, Titian, Turner––and confronted with their vigour they made ‘holy’ painters like Francia and Fra Angelico anaemic. Man, he saw, was perfected animal, and his happiness, health, and nobleness depended on the due power of every animal passion, as well as the cultivation of every spiritual tendency.

  He wou
ld not run off to the Vaudois valleys but stay and copy such portions as were within his ken. He paid to have a scaffolding erected to lift him to the painting’s level. He had not the slightest compunction in temporarily obscuring its view for others; he had seen the few seconds’ attendance the English and American visitors afforded it and there were two other large Veroneses in the gallery they could also dismiss.

  He dare not attempt the Queen of Sheba’s own head; in its perfection of beauty it was beyond him, but he felt confident in copying a life size version of the head of the chiaroscuro ebony servant girl bearing gifts of two bejewelled bird sculptures for their host. He then went on to a lovely lady in waiting, her golden plaits a natural crown around her head.

  He had dined well the night before, and drunk a half-pint of champagne prior to the Opéra Comique. The morning he had left outside the gallery doors was fine, and being flung open to that fineness through them came the strains of a band playing in the campo. There on his scaffold, two feet away from the triumph of Solomon’s court, Ruskin was struck with the gorgeousness of life.

  Could it, he wondered, be possible that all this power and beauty is adverse to the honour of the Maker of it? Has God made faces beautiful and limbs strong–and created fiery and fantastic energies––and created gold and pearls and crystals and the sun that makes them gorgeous––only that all these things may lead his creatures away from him? And is this mighty Paul Veronese, in whose soul there is a strength as of the snowy mountains––this man whose finger is as fire, and whose eye is like the morning––is he, as he had once thought, a servant of the devil? He would not believe it!

  The following Sunday he sought out the Waldenstein meeting house to hear service, the closest approximation to the various evangelical congregations he might find at home. It was a glorious, still, clear, Italian morning. He passed with some reluctance out of it into the confines of a new church built along the neo-Gothic lines he felt partially responsible for and which in this instance he judged both vulgar and unnecessarily large. It was a late morning service, conducted in French to seventeen old women, rounded out by a few decent looking French families and a handful of loutish Turinois men, one of whom spat over the rows of empty pews. The stranger from London sat behind them as a small preacher in a squeaking voice expounded upon the wickedness in every man’s heart and assured them that all those in Turin, in Italy, in the world, not within that chapel were damned.

  He thought of his mother’s intense fear of Roman Catholics, how every day he had spent alone in Florence or Venice she had prayed that he might not be ensnared by Popery. She might almost have him dead before Catholic.

  He thought of Homer and Plato and Xenophon and all those good and wise thinkers who lived and died before the advent of Christ. He thought of the kindness of his “non-believing” friends––the American scholar Charles Eliot Norton who revered Christ as a great exemplar but held the Reflections of Marcus Aurelius in as high esteem; Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning with their modest but sincere religious philosophies; Thomas Carlyle’s robust ethical but non-conforming mores––and could no longer accept that they were damned to eternal fiery torment. And he thought of the utter gorgeousness of Veronese’s conception that he had spent all week aloft studying, and of the human carnality of the man from whose mind and hand this masterwork had issued.

  He had raised his eyes to a window of the meeting house and the notion that all the tens of thousands of inhabitants of Turin at their various callings––in cathedral, church, café––were summarily damned struck him not only as impossible, but perversely absurd. He rose with the preacher in ringing mid-sentence and made his way out to the condemned city waiting in the light.

  Ruskin had been called to Manchester the year before. The Art Treasures Exhibition had shown thousands of works of British and European art from Michael-Angelo to Millais, a vast survey of the development of art. It was thronged by viewers. There was also a programme of addresses by distinguished commentators.

  He leapt at the invitation to participate. He enjoyed speaking, and surprised himself with his power of projecting his voice to the reaches of a crowded hall. Scorning the protection of the podium, he would walk to the very edge of the stage, hands thrust deep in his tailcoat pockets, rising up and down on his toes in rhythm to his ringing pronouncements. Hearing his audience laugh with recognition, or holding them silent in his thrall gave him a taste of the mastery actors enjoyed upon their stage.

  He saw the haze of Manchester long before his train joined its own smut with that of the endlessly spewing smokestacks of the cotton mills. Manchester was the throbbing industrial centre of the nation, home of that school of thought that embodied laissez-faire economics. As proof of the excellence of those economics, the age expectancy of its residents was the lowest in Britain, 26 years.

  As an intentional jab he had titled his address The Political Economy of Art. What was the ‘value’ of art? How should artists be recompensed? Who ‘deserved’ art? And perhaps most explosively, ought the state play any role in regard to art?

  He told them it must. Art was a most definite form of wealth, and young painters should receive a decent income for their efforts, enough to eliminate the suffering endemic to the starting artist and ensure they might raise a family. As an enlightened state Britain had a moral responsibility to acquire and conserve the greatest works of art it could procure for the benefit of posterity, and responsibilities too, to prevent the destruction of art and architecture in Italy and France. To acquire and preserve it the nation should stand on the cliffs at Dover and wave blank cheques in the eyes of the nations on the other side.

  In impassioned language he decried the rampant waste resulting from modern taste––young married couples melting down handsome heirloom silver-services to have them re-cast in highly wrought, “fashionable” styles; the funeral industry with its demands for pomp and show, the outrageous and competitive tyranny of women’s dress and its brutal exploitation of undernourished and overworked seamstresses––all must be seen as the selfishness and folly it is. In Art as in life, justice and prudence should prevail.

  He delivered his lecture over two evenings to a largely middle class audience that received it with warm enthusiasm. The Manchester Examiner and Times termed it “arrant nonsense.” The proponents of the famed economic theorists David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill scoffed at his words.

  It was then he realised that economics was too important to be placed solely in the hands of those defined as ‘economists’.

  An opportunity to expand on his lectures presented itself. His publishers were planning a new periodical, and invited him to contribute. Thackeray was to be editor, and it was hoped Carlyle, Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Browning, and Tennyson would also make an appearance in the pages of the new Cornhill.

  He needed time and quiet to teaze out his essays, and wanted nothing so much as the sharp air of the high Alps. He settled in Chamonix and amongst gentians and wild roses went to work.

  Once his main concern had been in instructing his readers how to look at art and architecture. But one could not stand before a landscape painting without considering the health of the water and soils it depicted, the lives and prospects of the field workers, the rightness or wrongness of the land usage, not even to the fate of the livestock.

  He had earlier looked upon the artisan guilds of the Middle Ages and attributed their superior artistic output to the sense of self-determination and control each man enjoyed over his own portion of work. He had contrasted the fruits of their creative impetus with the cheap, showy, and shoddy produce wrought from the gross exploitation of mill and factory workers engaged in repetitive, dangerous and spirit-breaking labour. Now he stepped back to glimpse the economic foundations of modern life.

  Wealth, he told his readers, is not the possession of a ‘large stock of useful articles’ as defined by John Stuart Mill; these articles must be of use to the owner. A horse, that most valuabl
e of beasts, is useless if no one can ride; a sword if no one can strike, meat useless if no one can eat. Anything of real value must avail toward life.

  Most astonishingly, Ruskin directly addressed the conscience of the consumer society made possible by mass production. In every object that is purchased, he insisted, the first consideration must be the condition of existence caused in the producers of that item; secondly, whether the sum paid is just to the producer, and lodged in his hands; and thirdly, to how much clear use, for food, knowledge, or joy, that this item can be put.

  THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.

  He laboured over four introductory essays, paring his expository to convey his thought as concisely as possible, and returned to London never as satisfied with any bit of writing as he was with these. Thackeray ran them beginning in the August 1860 issue of Cornhill Magazine.

  Reaction was swift and violent. The Saturday Review warned that “the world was not going to be preached to death by a mad governess,” named the essays “eruptions of windy hysterics” and Ruskin himself “a paragon of blubbering.” The Manchester Examiner and Times and the Scotsman were scarcely less rabid, and attacked Thackeray’s judgement as editor. What was just as maddening were those reviews which dealt with the new directness of his literary style and not the substance of the essays.

  The publishers of Cornhill deemed the papers too deeply tainted with socialistic heresy to suit subscribers, and ordered the fourth instalment to be the final. He was stunned. Not even his father, with his staunchly held capitalistic creed, had reacted as negatively as had the press; old Mr. Ruskin had even praised parts of the manuscripts for their elevated tone. Stingingly, he had the backing of none of his friends. The few that broached the topic commiserated about the harshness of the condemnations, but offered little support for the content of the essays. Thomas Carlyle alone was delighted with the papers, and unrestrained in his praise.