His friend Norton had asked Ruskin to name the things that made him what he was, and he, not at all in jest, wrote back
What?––an entirely puzzled, helpless and disgusted old gentleman. Good nature and great vanity have done all of me that was worth doing. I’ve had my heart broken––ages ago, when I was a boy––then mended––cracked––beaten in, kicked about old corridors, and finally I think, fairly flattened out. I’ve picked up what education I’ve got in an irregular way––and it’s very little. I’ve written a few second rate books which nobody minds; ––I can’t draw––I can’t play nor sing––I can’t ride, I talk worse and worse,––I can’t digest. And I can’t help it. There,––Goodbye.
He couldn’t explain himself, and he couldn’t explain to his father his abrupt giving away of no less than 77 Turner watercolours and drawings, all bought by the old man’s generosity for his son’s delight and now stripped from the walls of Denmark Hill and laying in boxes at Oxford and Cambridge. Ruskin said he did not wish to actually possess them, only to know that they were safe, and where he could see them; just as he wished for the safety of Chartres Cathedral. John James could not understand his son’s linking a gigantic, mediaeval, and more or less public edifice with Turner’s fragile works on paper, with which his son had an intimate and longstanding relationship. Every Turner sketch of Venice was sent away.
Nor could Ruskin explain why that same spring he broke down in the middle of a lecture on Tree Twigs at the Royal Institution. The evening had begun well. His notes, while perfectly ordered, served as departure points for his address, mere touchstones to refer to: Every leaf a tree––harmony of disparate parts––deceits of the eye in registering distant trees––Turner’s superiority in the painting of foliage––green contains every shade needed to convey all parts of non-flowering vegetation in all light––Turner’s treatment of shaded grass, sunlit grass, branch shadows on grass––
He saw then in his mind’s eye some novel and exciting connexions between the economic distresses of Welsh miners and the deforestation and profaning of Athenian sacred groves. His voice seemed to grow louder; the hall had not the good resonance of some venues. He was aware he was waving his hands, and perhaps he was shouting. Then it was quiet and he heard only the pumping of his own blood in his eardrums. A disturbance at the side door drew his eye; a man, tall and thin, was entering, removing his hat as did so. His hair was a tangle of yellow curls, and his mouth set in a familiar quizzical smile. The speaker could only stand there, hand in air, and watch. It was his own lost Millais, self-exiled for years beyond the realm of his influence. With him was...a lady. Effie’s tart pink bonnet had trailing pink ties edged with lace. Ruskin watched them sway under her pointed chin as the couple moved in and claimed seats from the file of empty ones in the very first row. When she was settled she looked up at him: What a tight smile on her face!
He stood at the wooden podium before five hundred listeners, but he had forgot they were there. He was silent a long time, and they were staring back at him. He searched the faces before him. A craggy old man with a white beard sat like a beacon, staring at him with burning eyes. If Carlyle had not been there in the audience he did not think he could have mastered himself to completion. The dreadful apparitions in the first row vanished as he lowered his head to accept the applause of his listeners; raising his eyes he saw the flash of pink skirt shut out by the closing side door.
He was still stung by the public’s rejection of his Cornhill papers, but could not turn from his conviction that these were his most vital utterances to date. He had them published in book form bearing a title taken from the Gospel of Matthew, Onto this Last. No one bought it.
No one understood his frustration at having the few certainties he clung to being ignored. He felt, as he had once written to Mrs. Browning, exactly like an old woman locked up with a score of wicked children who never let her alone to do her knitting.
As soon as I’ve got a house of my own I’ll ask you to send me something American––a slave perhaps. I’ve a great notion of a black boy in a green jacket and purple cap––in Paul Veronese’s manner...
Charles Eliot Norton lowered the letter from Ruskin and looked out over the snow-carpeted garden of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Norton loved Ruskin, and knew he was loved by the man, which made the constant prick of the spur that Ruskin lately employed all the more painful. Nor was this the only extravagance in the letter. Norton had written to announce that despite all expectation to the contrary he had been blessed with finding love with a like-minded woman, and to tell Ruskin of his forthcoming wedding. For if Norton had Yankee breeding, high intelligence, and limitless work capacity as scholar and magazine editor to recommend him, he was, despite being several years his correspondent’s junior, also of uncertain health, slight, stooped, and already balding. Winning the love of an intelligent, kind, and sagacious woman was a triumph he had not allowed himself to consider possible, and yet now Susan would wed him in a few short months.
And his dear friend Ruskin wrote back, frankly and without a trace of shame, that he was jealous of Susan and wanted Susan to be jealous of him.
I don’t think I shall like her, he admitted, especially if your having a wife makes you write less to me, even though I don’t write you as much as I once did since we differ so much about your horrid war. Norton sighed at this conflation. Before the advent of the war to preserve the Union Ruskin had teazed that he would never deign to visit America, for he could not countenance stepping foot in any country so miserable as to possess no castles. That humorous pretext had hardened into an almost violent prejudice against the American democratic ideal. Norton read on in the letter, more rambling and digressive than most. Ruskin reminded Norton that he was writing him on the shortest day, the solstice, with Christmas nearly there, and told him piquantly and defiantly that he’d become a Pagan, and was now searching for Diana in the glades, and Mercury in the clouds, but he wouldn’t make sacrifice to either of them if it meant killing an animal. Norton folded the narrow papers; he would answer tomorrow when he could re-summon his natural enthusiasm.
Alone in his rented villa in the sheltering declivity of Mornex, Ruskin thought of buying a hilltop above Bonneville, where he might build a home of his own and escape every pressure. It would give him a chance to design a dwelling of unique character, and to experiment with a plan for damming glacier run-off to give him water and improve agriculture for the peasants. The commune authorities were sceptical and the old farmers whose parcels he hoped to assemble amused.
Then in March, still at Mornex, he received a letter from Rose that staggered him. He had long confided his religious misgivings to Mrs. LaTouche, and felt his confidences safe with her. Now she had shown portions of a recent letter to her daughter.
Rose scolded, “How could one love you, if you were a Pagan?” and went on in fearful agitation over the fate of his soul. For the first time he felt exasperation at the precociousness of a fourteen year old lecturing him. For decades he had wrestled to discern spiritual truth, and she was sputtering pieties from her father’s evangelical tracts at him.
Rose LaTouche could not understand her parent’s unhappiness, and her parents could not understand each other. That her mother should be so distressed with her father, and her father so sorrowful over her mother, was something that hurt the girl’s head attempting to puzzle out. The facts were that John LaTouche had gone to London and been baptised by Charles Spurgeon at his Baptist Tabernacle, an unnecessary and provocative act in the eyes of Maria LaTouche, for her husband had, as all the family, received that sacrament as a child.
“And that is where we were wronged as children,” was her husband’s retort. “Only thinking adults can receive valid baptism, freely understood, freely accepted. Infant baptism is but another of the great errors of Popery––another yoke of Rome––which we must free ourselves from. No infant can judge for himself.”
“But loving pare
nts can,” answered Maria LaTouche. They had argued this point all week, and she was exhausted by it. Now, as they faced each other in the centre of her bedroom she struggled to keep her voice down. “Our own parents had us baptised as infants. What were we but loving parents when we took our three to the font?”
“Ignorant, misguided wretches!”
His face was red and she could barely stand to look at him.
“I’ll not have you say that our considered, reverent observance of our faith’s sacrament was made out of ignorance! Next you’ll be saying you wed me out of ignorance––there will be no end of your back-tracking and fault-finding!” In her anger she was close to tears and wished she had not said this last. He seemed not to have heard it, or if he had, deemed it unworthy of comment.
It was just before the dinner hour when these voices were raised. Rose had changed her pinafore and was starting down the broad stairs when she heard them. Her hand had stiffened upon the polished banister, and yet she had let it go and found herself standing just outside her mother’s closed bedroom door.
“Percy I have likely lost,” she heard her father go on, “due to my own inability to awaken to the truth in time. But Emily and Rose––especially Rose, marked by God to be His Holy Prize––how can I stand by and consign her to eternal Hell-fire?”
Her mother’s voice was piercing. “Hell-fire! How dare you presume to judge our daughter––judge Percy or Emily––three good children––”
Rose could listen no more. She burst in with a shriek, and ran, sobbing, to her mother. The girl twisted her fists in her mother’s skirts as tiny children do, struggling to bury into the silken folds. Maria LaTouche had her arms around her in a moment, but Rose lifted her head and broke and ran to her father. He stooped to lift her up but she fell at his feet, shaking and sobbing.
“Now, now, my Rose,” he said, as he knelt and took her in his arms. “Don’t cry. I have a surprise for you. Reverend Spurgeon is coming here, to Harristown. Coming all the way from London, to meet His Holy Prize.”
A truce was called in the household until Rev. Spurgeon arrived. The following week he swooped down upon Harristown to receive a dignitary’s welcome. Within his first two days he was driven through a quarter of Harristown’s parkland, with stops at tenants’ farms so he might view living conditions. John LaTouche took him round to the school he helped fund, and Mrs. LaTouche gave a sumptuously tasteful dinner in which he met the local gentry. Spurgeon was a portly, vigorous man just entering middle age, and enjoyed a fine meal. He and LaTouche talked late into the evenings about the latter’s charitable efforts and aspirations, and the host was not found wanting by his guest. LaTouche cared about fallen women, about education for poor children, about care of the widowed and ill. And he was an immensely rich banker, able to act upon his precepts. If ever there was a modern Croesus sent to extend Christ’s message here on earth, it was John LaTouche, thought Charles Spurgeon.
Their honoured visitor had the most luxuriant curling brown whiskers Rose had ever seen. She was always being told to stand up straight and Rev. Spurgeon certainly did; he kept his head directly above his spine and moved his neck slowly, as if to show his beard to best advantage. She was certain he must use a curling iron on it as her mother did her fringe-hair at her forehead. On the second morning of his visit Rose, down in the garden, saw Rev. Spurgeon at his open window, still wearing his night-shirt and doing his setting-up exercises for the day. She was surprised he did not wear his curled whiskers in a net overnight, as her Mama did her fringe-hair.
He smiled a great deal, and was given to lowering himself to the children’s level when he spoke to them. Rose liked that he had as many different voices as an actor at the Pantomime. He used a sort of everyday one when he was speaking to her parents about Harristown and its countryside, another richer, slower voice when he presided at grace at the big dining table, a third, more high-pitched jolly one when he spoke to her and her siblings, and so on. Rev. Spurgeon’s kindest, quietest voice he reserved for when her father brought her alone before him.
The preacher had already examined the children to his satisfaction over their Scripture, and Rose knew it was a special honour for her to attend him alone with just her father.
“Now, my dear, your father tells me what I can see myself: That you are an exceptional child, both quick, and good. But that also you are troubled in heart.”
She was seated with Spurgeon on a stiff little sofa in her father’s study, with her father sitting opposite in a wing chair. Their guest was much younger than her father; no gray yet streaked the preacher’s chestnut hair, yet her father treated him with more attention and respect than he had the Crown Prince when he had visited. She did not want to say the wrong thing in front of either of them.
“I want to be good,” Rose began. “I want to love God, and Mama and Papa and Percy and Emily, and the world and the poor––and I want everyone to love God too. I want everyone to be happy, and I want to make them happy.”
“And you do, I am certain; being good is a true path to happiness; your own and other’s.”
“If I pray enough will I be happy, and make others happy too?”
“Prayer is a true path to serenity, and there can be little happiness without serenity.”
“I have a friend, St. Crumpet––Mr. Ruskin, that I want to be happy, too.”
John LaTouche shifted in his chair, and Spurgeon glanced at him, but his host remained silent.
“You take quite a bit upon that little head, Rose,” Spurgeon told her. “Mr. Ruskin is a man of many and complex parts.” Rose cocked her head and he went on. “You are not responsible for his happiness, nor goodness, only your own.” Spurgeon looked up at the girl’s father for an instant. “And I would warn you that we must be careful of those we think our friends. Sometimes friends can lead us astray.”
Rose was still, looking raptly at the preacher. He looked back at her with perfect and practised steadiness.
She felt there was something wonderful in the way he looked at her, the same way he looked at adults, giving her all his attention. She felt him take one of her hands in his own.
“But we always have a choice, Rose. Let your father, and your heavenly Father, be your guide. Your earthly father can help you make that choice, and your heavenly father will reward you. It is Heaven or Hell. God or fiends.”
Rose let go of the preacher’s gaze and hung her head. “Oh, I am a naughty one! And when I am naughty I make everyone so unhappy. And I must make God sad too. How wicked of me! When I am good I make Mama and Papa glad. I want to make everyone happy. I want to be perfect. I will be perfect!” Rose had jumped up upon her feet at this last, no longer able to sit still.
Spurgeon could not help but let out a gentle laugh. Rose looked at him as if she might burst in tears. He too stood, and placing his hands upon her shoulders, deepened his voice.
“I lay hold of you for Christ,” he told her. Rose opened her mouth as if to gasp; her father reached towards her lest she swoon. But she straightened at once, and reached up with her small hands and drew the preacher’s hands to her lips and kissed them.
Spurgeon had tears in his eyes at his next words. “You are indeed a Holy Prize. I claim you for Christ.”
Ruskin surrendered his hopes for his Alpine paradise. His father found the scheme absurd and told him so in every letter. None of his friends encouraged or approved, and the practical obstacles to its purchase, construction and maintenance began to seem so daunting he capitulated. And where after all, would he get the money? He could hardly ask his infirm father, grieving over his absence, to give him funds to build a house away from him.
After Rev. Spurgeon left Harristown, Rose began pressing to take communion at Sunday service. She dare not ask for a second baptism–––and in another tradition, as her father had done––but wished fervently and repeatedly to profess her spiritual worthiness by receiving communion. Maria LaTouche was adamant that Rose must
wait until her Confirmation; that was the accepted order. A difficult period ensued in which John LaTouche repeatedly took Rose for chats with Rev. Hare, the local vicar, who knew the girl’s seriousness of mind and was inclined to grant her request. Finding herself outnumbered but not yet outmanoeuvred, Maria LaTouche responded by penning, and insisting the girl read, a quantity of religious pamphlets reinforcing the wisdom of adhering to the Anglican Church’s ordained schedule. Her father countered by urging Rose to fast and pray, two acts of which his youngest had more than usual experience for her age. He finally took her to again see Rev. Hare, and the exhausted Rose cried out her difficulties so movingly that he walked her home with the assurance that she should receive the memorial of Christ’s death at the service next morning. For, as she had herself persuaded him, being heavy-laden and penitent, it was meant for her.
Rose went to bed light of heart for the first time in many weeks; even the knowledge that her mother was at that hour locked in a heated debate about her with her father could not quell her giddy happiness. The morning was so darkened by rain that Mrs. LaTouche called it an omen, and Rose felt a pang seeing her mother’s red-rimmed eyes when she went up to hug her goodbye. But she went off with her father and governess and was received of her first Communion that day.
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