Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  The sage and prophet of Chelsea wrote such an enthusiastic letter that Ruskin at once responded by asking if he might drop by number 5, Cheyne Row of an evening and pay his respects in person. “I have read your paper”, Carlyle wrote, “with exhilaration, exultation, often with laughter, with bravissimo! Such a thing flung suddenly into half a million dull British heads on the same day, will do a great deal of good. I marvel in parts at the lynx-eyed sharpness of your logic, at the pincer-grip (red hot pincers) you take of certain bloated cheeks and blown up bellies...”

  Ten years ago Carlyle had likened Ruskin to a bottle of beautiful soda water which incautiously drawn, might expel itself in the eyes of the unsuspecting and discomfited bearer. The younger man was mercurial, unanchored, and was squandering a fine intellect on endless musings on art rubbish which had profited––who? A dainty, dilettante soul, with a poet’s temperament, thought Carlyle upon their first meeting; and he, who had at age fourteen walked eighty miles to begin his own intellectual life at the University of Edinburgh, had read little since to undermine his first impressions. Now Ruskin was putting his shoulder to a heavier wheel, grinding the corn that might truly nourish men’s souls, should they allow themselves to partake of it.

  Carlyle was in the middle of his massive multi-volume history of Frederick the Great of Prussia, his right hand at this point so palsied that his niece must take down his words for him. Stop in his task he could not; were he blind, deaf, and dumb he should find some manner of recording the fruits of his labours.

  His three volume history of The French Revolution, which had at last made his reputation, had been published a quarter century ago, after an exhausting gestation requiring two additional years to reconstruct the manuscript of the first volume. While in John Stuart Mill’s keeping it had been burnt as waste paper by an unlettered house maid; what had there been to do but sit down and write it again? Grieving would have availed him not; nothing profited man but work. Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe, he had instructed the youth of the last generation. Eschew romantic self-absorption for a life dedicated to self-disciplined development of moral qualities.

  Carlyle’s satiric touchstone, his Sartor Resartus––the Tailor Re-tailored––had been variously attacked and ignored when it had been serialized years ago. Carlyle remembered receiving two––two!––letters of support for it, one from Emerson in America and another from an Irish priest. His semi-autobiographical, and to critics, hallucinatory ramblings about the nature of faith and reality, in the guise of a philosophy of clothing, so bewildered readers of Fraser’s Magazine that many threatened cancelling their subscriptions.

  He knew the critics––blockheads who dared not un-stopper their ears, who had once condemned his own works for their outrageous language, fantastic juxtapositions, and verbal wordplay––had been after Ruskin before, but never like this. Now, and unexpectedly, they were yoked together, and Carlyle exulted in finding himself in a minority of two.

  Jane Carlyle greeted Ruskin when he arrived to renew their acquaintanceship. Her visitor bore an armful of lilies for her. As she took them she saw that their dark pollen had come off on Ruskin’s hands. Their fragrance filled her head as she turned from him to find a vase. Unbidden she recalled the morning following her wedding thirty-five years ago. At dawn her new husband had ripped through the garden of their bridal home, tearing blossoms from plants, shredding them in rage and frustration in shamed fury at his failure in the marriage bed. Theirs had been a five year courtship, and it ended with Carlyle’s hands stained with pollen from ravaged flowers. Nor were they ever to be truly man and wife. She had yearned for children and these, and much else, were to be denied her. It had been the great secret, and the great tragedy, of their lives.

  After Turner died, Ruskin was asked continually when he would commence the definitive study of the man and his work. He had for years quietly assumed he would undertake such a task, but with the old man gone, Ruskin’s scheme for the book collapsed like a skeleton deprived of ligaments and flesh. Some vital breath had gone out of him at the loss, a loss he felt more heavily every year. A great lamp of Art had been extinguished that might never be re-lit. At Turner’s death more of nature and her mysteries were forgotten in that one long sob than could be learnt again by the eyes of a whole generation to come. Turner had seen everything, remembered everything, spiritualised everything in the visible world. Five volumes of Modern Painters had explicitly and implicitly argued Turner’s enormity of vision and aptitude. There was nothing Ruskin could now add that a thoughtful viewer could not himself discover before one of Turner’s best pictures. He felt with keen acuteness the futility of any kind of summing up, felt even the indecency of the attempt.

  Yet he had never known where he stood in Turner’s firmament, whether the old man thought him pest, champion, collector, or humbug. Of Ruskin’s written work Turner had ever been silent. He had defended and extolled the master’s pictures since he was seventeen years old, and Ruskin had no idea if––beyond his initial letter to him––Turner had ever read a single word of it. But one day on a visit to Denmark Hill Turner did something which gratified his host as much as any spoken encomium. Pausing before Ruskin’s watercolour of the ‘Falls of Schaffhausen’ he pointed for a long moment at the churning white waters. Ruskin had seen, and faithfully recorded. The wordless commendation embodied in that single gesture of acknowledgement would suffice.

  And Ruskin had no desire to plunge deeper into the biographical details of the man. This son of a Maiden Lane barber had come by his dejection of spirits honestly. His mother was carried off mad from the house when Turner was but five, to die, raving, in an asylum four years later. For decades he had attached snippets of his endless poem, the Fallacies of Hope, to his canvases. Blustering, secretive, and melancholic, the mounting bleakness of his inner vision was mirrored in the whirlwind, maelstrom, shipwreck, disaster, and ruin of his canvases, a turmoil redeemed by glaring sun that to Turner was God. It was the light that first caught one’s eye, pulling one towards a Turner picture. And great light, Ruskin knew, always implies great shadow––somewhere.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Lamp of Power & The Lamp of Beauty

  London: Spring 1861

  Dearest St Crumpet––You can’t think how fusty the carriage was from Prato to Florence––but of course you can, you can think of EVERYTHING, including fusty carriages should you like, but Mama says you’re too fine a gentleman to bother with such ––but we are here now and tomorrow we go and see Mr Giotto’s Campanile at the Duomo and I shall look at it with care just as you told me, and make Emily and Percy look too. And I am trying to draw what I see in the sketchbook you gave me and hold my pencil that way you showed me. And trying not to get scolded, I wanted to give my hat the blue one to a little dusty girl that was in the garden of the hotel but Bun––Miss Bunnett stopped me. She is Bun to me and so you are delicious Crumpet, but I think I should add the St for respect. I wish St Crumpet you were with me too. And that it were not so hot, it is too hot for Irish roses. Love––your Rosie-posie.

  Ruskin felt a sudden flush spring upon his cheek; his ears burned. “I am not alone,” he said aloud. “I shall not be alone.”

  He read the letter again. She had never called him “Dearest” before, nor ended as she had–– “Love––your Rosie-posie.” His Rosie. His love. Rosie posie, Rosie fair, Rosie light and sweet as air. He thought of her oval face and more-slightly pointed chin; the tiny white-gold curls at the nape of the slender neck; eyes neither blue nor grey but some un-named alloyage possessing the smokiness of dusk; the lips perfect in profile but a little too full, almost petulant when she turned to you––a glistening rosebud, offering itself. The gravity of her gaze, like that, he imagined, of St. Ursula as a child. The face he had first loved when she was ten and he, nearing forty, had called at her mother’s request to meet the children and perhaps consent to give them a drawing lesson or two.

  For that first lesson at
Denmark Hill he had sketch books and new-sharpened pencils all prepared, and meant to begin the initial lesson with the elementary rules of perspective and the analysis of the essential qualities of triangles. The company was so delightful that the pencils remained untouched. After trooping the female LaTouches up to his mother––confined by infirmity to her bedroom suite, she gave the girls each a kiss for being able to identify two obscure passages in Exodus––he had relished taking them out into his gardens. The older Emily showed polite interest, but Rose devoured all she saw. Her pink cheeks and dancing eyes spurred him to drollery, and when they reached the pig-pens he soberly introduced them to the grunting black-and-white spotted denizens, insisting they were most intelligent and spoke perfect Irish. Even Maria LaTouche burst out laughing, but Rose laughed loudest and most charmingly of all.

  They traced their way back to the house, past the kitchen gardens and flower beds to where golden-cheeked peaches grew pleached against a red brick wall. The September heat carried the fragrance of the ripe fruit to his nose. There had been peaches too, long ago at Herne Hill, but he had been forever forbidden to taste them lest he suffer stomach-ache. Here in the gardens of a vaster house he plucked the reddest peach before him and held out it to Rose. Before her mother could stay her she had taken the fruit in her teeth.

  Back in his study he had shown the trio the paintings. This was, after all, what they had truly come for, the eighty Turner oils and watercolours, and the sheaves of drawings by Prout and Hunt.

  Emily had glanced over his cases of minerals and crystals before seating herself in a chair by the window. But Rose stood, sometimes on tiptoe, fast by his side as he spoke about the paintings with her mother. Mrs. LaTouche was silent for some time, and then turned to him with simple directness. The rustle of her dress released a faint and wholly agreeable fragrance from the Violetta di Parma toilette water she used.

  “You who live with, and for Art”––he could hear the capital letter, yet it was not at all insincere––“will not easily believe that this hour will live before me, and my Rose, for many years to come.” She inclined her head ever so slightly to John Brett’s ‘Val d’Aosta’, showing herself in possession of a better eye than Ruskin had deemed probable.

  When he took a few Turner drawings down from the patterned walls so he could point out the line work and shadowing, Rose leaned in over his arm and clung to it. He found himself addressing her more and more, and by the time tea was served Rose placed herself at his right, not at all shyly.

  Before she and her mother and sister left he ran back upstairs and pulled a copy of his King of the Golden River from his shelves and gave it to her. It was, he told Rose LaTouche, a book he had written long ago for another little girl.

  As his friendship with the family deepened, Maria LaTouche, mother of this remarkable creature, intrigued him. Mrs. LaTouche was more than what he had expected, in all ways: more pretty in her rather monumental way, more self-assured, more knowledgeable about things that delighted him––she recognised and quickly named Hylocomium splendens amongst the mosses in his garden––than any absurdly rich Irish banker’s wife had a right to be. John LaTouche was of Huguenot stock, and had prospered hugely in the Irish private banking system, but was no fast-riding hard-drinking squire. Ruskin almost wished he were.

  From nearly their first meeting he had found LaTouche a fervent evangelical, free and easy only in the number of times he professed his gladness in his own salvation. LaTouche bore that happy certainty that all those who differed from his steadfast belief of Biblical inerrancy were destined for the eternal torments of Hell. Ruskin knew he was suspect on theological grounds in John LaTouche’s eyes. More troubling was that LaTouche did not understand his fascination with his youngest child and feared his influence over her.

  He recalled sitting shoulder to shoulder with Rose as he guided her drawing pencil, feeling her soft breath upon his hand as she bent over it. A gentle aroma of the lamb stew which had made her dinner clung about her. Her thin frame was almost elfin, the wrist slight and blue-veined. It had made him giddy to study her. He held his breath as his eye travelled along the curve of the tiny ear lobe; he inhaled sharply as it traced the delicate folds and crevices of her small pink ear.

  “And do you like teaching me to draw?” she had asked. The girl’s mother had several times told her how important was this sad man with his sandy whiskers. Being able to make him happy must be a difficult thing to do, Rose imagined. She cocked her head at him, smiling as she awaited his answer.

  “There is nothing that gives me greater pleasure,” he returned, with an exaggerated gravity that he hoped hid the truth of his answer.

  “More than teaching Emily or Percy?” she demanded.

  A lie was out of the question.

  “Yes. More.”

  She looked down at her drawing pad. “Good. When I am naughty I feel I would rather break a thing than share it with them, and I don’t like to share you.” She turned her luminous face back to him and wagged her pencil his way.

  Harming such a creature was impossible. She could no more be harmed than sunlight could be. One might shut out the sun or gouge out one’s eyes but it would shine regardless.

  Now Rose was thirteen, and in Italy, and he might never see her again. But knowing her––simply knowing she lived, and loved him, righted his ship. Hers was the steady hand on the keel, and Heaven––if there was such a place––knew he was ripped from his mooring these days. She was worthy of all adoration; she commanded it.

  He could not work. Everything Ruskin put his hand to slipped from his grasp; his mind would spy an avenue of thought or pose a question worthy of investigation and within days or weeks find itself down a blind alley. He was given to enthusiasms and used to working on many projects at once, any of which he abandoned without regret when things more compelling crossed his path. But there had always been the steady drumbeat of his major efforts keeping time for him, setting the pace. After nearly twenty years of labour and twenty-five hundred pages Modern Painters was ended, all five volumes of it, the last painfully wrenched out of him just to please his father, who feared not living to see the completion of his son’s magnum opus. He felt indeed he hadn’t actually finished it; he simply could not go on. For this last volume he had thrown away half of his unruly text––cutting out all the wisest parts as too good for this generation––and most of the meticulous illustrations he had made were spoiled in the engraving process and not used. And now he was spent.

  He had written in a phrenzy of white heat, and his youth and young manhood had been consumed by the creation of systems, the codification of art-theory, the teasing-out of the laws––exact laws, he had ascertained––upon which true aesthetic criticism must be based––nothing less than discovering and then laying down rules for what was beautiful. For naming Beauty itself. And what did he have to show for it? Society matrons who wished to ‘show him off’ at parties he despised.

  He was still sick at heart––at stomach too, if he allowed himself––at finding sketches whose indecent subject had revolted him as he worked with the Turner Bequest. In his will Turner had named him as an Executor with power over his gift to the nation of a staggering 19,000 drawings. He had laboured for months in the dank basement of the National Gallery sorting and labelling these works, rescuing from mildew those haphazardly stored by Turner––always careless of his own work––or even worse those rotting under the auspices of the Gallery itself.

  He reckoned that as many as 10,000 drawings might be considered for future exhibition, and all were in dire need of being carefully pressed flat from the rudely rolled state Turner had stashed them in, crammed in the dust and debris of his Queen Anne Street lodgings. Many were falling to pieces from worm or mouse holes, and he grieved as works he had admired when newly drawn that now crumbled at his touch. He hiked his shirt sleeves to the elbows to protect them from filth, and his hands dirtied so quickly that he must wash them every few min
utes.

  He had never before been confronted with the totality of Turner’s output and his head was splitting each evening when he ascended into the London darkness. Studies of mountain ranges, village scenes, ocean mist rising or city rain falling, trials with light, shading, technique, and paper types, reams of paper on which blotches of colour had been laid down to gauge the effects upon each other: in fine, thousands of experiments. Opening each new tin transport box occasioned exquisite discoveries. Every scribble, incomprehensible to others, held reams of meaning to Ruskin, and he alone could classify or categorize them. Every step of Turner’s pilgrimage was preserved there in its naissance, from youthful sunny pastorals to his mature masterworks depicting plagues, deluges, and the futility of human effort; all scraps tracing the grievous metamorphosis of this Titan’s urge towards catastrophe. It was as if the great old man still spoke to him, and with fevered assurance he traced the origins of scores of favourite works to many hundreds of preparatory fragments.

  When his labours were nearing an end, he began finding them. Sorting through deposited loose sheets of landscape studies and pencil drawings of buildings, his eyes had been assaulted by the discovery of depictions of the intimate parts of a woman’s anatomy. Detached from any larger figure study, sometimes floating as it were in space, he would be confronted by detailed studies of pudenda with fleshy folds springing with curling hair.

  The first drawing he found was on the reverse of a detached sketch-book sheet bearing two small studies of sun-lit water glistening over stream rocks. There on the verso of the masterful sketches was something he could not decipher. A cleft of mossy rock? No. He turned the paper, then stared.