Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  He was wearied now, and nearly sleepy. He had not slept well in months. But there was more of Ned to see, the Merlin. ‘The Beguiling of Merlin’, Ned called it, with the old and unwise sorcerer sinking to the earth amongst a fall of blossoms under the charms of the unscrupulous enchantress Nimuë. Both figures were swathed in dusky draperies, and Nimuë bore the strikingly beautiful face and form of Maria Zambuco, the woman with whom Ned had made such a fool of himself. The eyes of victim and prey were locked, Merlin’s long-fingered hands powerless to rise against the female to whom he had lost his heart. How terrible was love! Ruskin looked at his haggard face, the dark-rimmed eyes suffering under the pitiless gaze of the temptress he had succumbed to. Merlin, the great adept of Arthur’s court. Stricken, stricken.

  Ruskin roused himself and turned to view the end wall. A group of Whistlers hung there, but he had turned directly in line with one. It was marked by Whistler’s signature, the wings of a butterfly or moth, painted on the rippling wood of the frame. The canvas within was dark, of an indistinct blackish green. A golden sprinkling of dots and smears, bright as phosphorescence, ran down one side and dropped into a void of blackness. They were specks of fire falling through an impenetrable murk, like sparks of destruction glittering in an unholy night, thought Ruskin. Hell-fire. There was a foulness to the work, something innately unwholesome, like the worst of the plague winds darkening the skies of modern Britain. Ruskin felt held in place by the very sense of revulsion that urged him to look away. He pulled out his programme. ‘James McNeill Whistler. Nocturne in Black and Gold’. Ruskin exhaled sharply, and a Mayfair matron with her son up from Cambridge caught the great man’s single ejaculatory verdict: “Coxcomb,” he uttered, and turned on his heel and left.

  Whistler lay sprawled in a lounge chair in the dim smoking room of the Arts Club. His dark, curly-haired head lay cushioned on a pile of shapeless crewel-worked pillows, and––heedless of the upholstery––his polished boots on the arm of the next chair. With his narrow silver-crowned walking stick he idly beat the top of the low table before him, nearly upsetting a shallow copper ash-tray. If the walking stick had been a sabre Whistler’s resemblance to a bored dragoon in mufti would have been complete.

  The smoking room was called the “Dugout” by its frequenters for its small size and knotty wood panelling, but was empty and smokeless today. It was nearly six p.m., Whistler had had no lunch, and with yet another dunning bill in his pocket reminding him of his overdue account here, he felt little inclination to rise and seek out tea. In an upstairs room he had just lost ₤15 at cards to an art dealer named Wilmer, whom he had been attempting to entice into making good on a prior expression of interest in stopping by Whistler’s studio to view some works in progress.

  George Boughton rounded the corner into the Dugout, clutching a folded-open magazine, which he thrust into Whistler’s hand. It was the new number of the Architect, and Whistler scanned the piece “Mr. Ruskin on the Grosvenor Gallery.” Whistler’s own name leapt out at him, and he read:

  For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsey ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approaches the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.

  A long moment passed, far longer than required to read two sentences. Whistler raised his eyes to see Boughton, almost pop-eyed, staring at him, waiting for his reaction. Whistler quietly handed the folded magazine back.

  “His style of criticism is debased.”

  Then Whistler began to laugh. Boughton stood by, eyeing his friend. Whistler was pugnacious and relished comment on his work, and typically the harsher the comment the better he enjoyed it, for it cleared the path for him to expound his own theories on art.

  “Hand me a gasper, George, and read it once more,” Whistler said, and Boughton dutifully opened his enamelled cigarette case and laid it on the table before them. Boughton rolled them extremely thin, and for his efforts had won a place as Whistler’s favoured tobacco benefactor. Boughton was provincial, American, a complete hack as an artist, even tempered and steady. He regarded Whistler as a genius, and besides keeping his friend in cigarettes, lent him canvas and oils without expecting repayment.

  Boughton read the excerpt again as Whistler sucked the life from his cigarette.

  “And that’s it, there’s no more of this, that’s all he said of me?” asked Whistler. He turned his head and looked towards the library room. “Do we take that blasted Fors? Anyone here read it?”

  Whistler rose and both men went from room to room in the club. Fors Clavigera was not a publication the Arts Club subscribed to, but old Meriwether had by chance brought his own copy from home to peruse in the quiescence of his club and they lifted it from him and carried it back to the Dugout. Albert Moore and Joseph Boehm came with them, intrigued by the search and clewed in by Boughton’s digest. Moore had exhibited his paintings at the Grosvenor as well, and Boehm was a sculptor and friend of many year’s standing, currently adding some decorative embellishments to the exterior of Whistler’s new London home to satisfy the requirements of the Metropolitan Board of Works who had found the plain white façade too severe.

  The little party gathered around the lounge chair Whistler had reinhabited. Boughton dropped the offending journal on the small table between them. It was a modest production, eighteen or twenty pages, closely printed on pale yellow paper. “Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain” was the subtitle, “by John Ruskin, LL.D. Letter the Seventy-ninth July 2nd 1877”.

  Whistler conned the plain cover with a quick glance. “Workmen and labourers,” he snorted. “Ha!” The scavenger hunt about the club’s rooms had restored his spirits, and he seemed almost sanguine. “He means ‘Antediluvian dreamers snug in their Oxford and Cambridge redoubts.’”

  Boehm looked down at the light yellow cover. “For the workmen of Britain? What honest labourer can throw his chink around like that?”

  “Yes, ten pence an issue! It’s not much value for money,” agreed Boughton, weighing the slight publication in his hand.

  After his cursory glance at the cover Whistler leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. Boughton rifled through the pages, picking out key themes, scanning paragraphs. It was a wildly discursive colloquy, and Boughton had an image of Ruskin as a heedless boy running on a beach, snatching up one shell or shiny pebble after the next, only to cast the first down and reach for another.

  “Here, here it is, the Grosvenor bit,” said Boughton. “…Sir Coutts Lindsey is at present an amateur both in art and shopkeeping. He must take up either one or the other business, if he would prosper in either. If he intends to manage the Grosvenor Gallery rightly, he must not put his own works in it until he can answer for their quality; if he means to be a painter, he must not at present superintend the erection of public buildings, or amuse himself with their decoration by china and upholstery…”

  There was a hoot of laughter from Whistler, and snickers from the other men.

  Boughton went on scanning and reading. “Ah…puffing on about Burne-Jones…his ‘is simply the only art-work at present produced in England which will be received as “classic”…the best that has been or could be…I know that these will be immortal…’––Oh, here’s a scold coming––‘the mannerisms and errors of his pictures, whatever may be their extent, are never affected or indolent. The work is natural to the painter, however strange to us…Scarcely so much can be said for any other pictures of the modern schools: their eccentricities are always in some degree forced; and their imperfections gratuitously, if not impertinently, indulged.’”

  Boughton took a breath and slowed down, and read again the damning two sentences. Then abruptly as the attack began, it was over. Boughton read a few more bits aloud. Rusk
in went on to Tissot’s paintings, citing their dexterity but chiding him for producing “mere coloured photographs of vulgar society” and Millais, in which he lamented how much greater his achievement would have been if he “had remained faithful to the principles of his school when he first led its onset…you will never know what you have lost in him…”

  The concluding passage was a maudlin tale of a race horse, a Derby contender, grown ill upon being separated from his stable-mate kitten, and the resumption of his appetite and fulfilment of his owner’s racing dreams when his feline castellan was returned to him. It was bathos of the sort a desiccated unmarried aunt would tell a fretful child to assure him of eventual happy endings. Coming on the heels of the vituperative attack on Whistler made it seem even more absurd.

  “He is cracked,” said Whistler, unfolding his legs.

  “Yes,” agreed Boughton, but in a very different tone. “The great Ruskin is cracked.” The once-inerrant had erred, grievously in this case, but Whistler (as usual, it seemed to Boughton) did not appear to grasp the significance of the situation–the Master’s utterance as it pertained to him.

  Moore clucked his tongue. “And this was the man who as a boy proclaimed the genius of Turner when everyone else accused the man’s seascapes of looking like soap-suds!” He shook his head and rapped out the contents of his meerschaum into the ash-tray.

  Boehm’s response was more measured. “His is the greatest voice in art criticism, not only here, but the world,” he said. But he too shook his head. “It is some gibe.”

  “He’s hopeless,” answered Whistler. “The enemy of art today is convention, and Ruskin’s blathering only confirms the narrowness of his conceptions. He knows nothing. Once again the cause of us doers and workers is at stake against the mere writers and praters. Mine is modern painting. It doesn’t ‘mean anything’ nor does it intend to entertain or scold the viewer in relating a story. I seek to convey an atmosphere, nothing more.”

  They had all heard this before. Boughton still stood, now with pursed lips, above his friend, and looked down at Whistler’s grin. “I believe this to be actionable.”

  Whistler blinked. His single lock of white hair stood out from his dark curls like a tongue of Pentecostal fire.

  “I’m a painter and no solicitor, you’ll have to obtain a professional consultation––ask Rose or any other good man––but this”––here Boughton waved the offending number of Fors–– “coming from such a one as Ruskin, this might be libel.”

  “Libel?”

  “Yes, and if it hinders your sales or in any way injures your reputation, it might be actionable.”

  “With a settlement?”

  “Yes, should you win; a settlement, damages, court costs, everything.”

  Whistler’s eyes, which had been glued to Boughton’s face during this startling allegation, now dropped to the floral tracery of the maroon carpet. He hadn’t sold a major painting in two years, and was far from having the resources to embark upon the Venetian trip which he hoped would result in a series of always-lucrative etchings. His greatest client and patron, Frederick Leyland, was now sending him bills for materials and incurred expenses in the unauthorised (so said Leyland) decoration of his fantastic Peacock Room. Leyland, once so warm a friend, was so enraged he had threatened to publicly horsewhip Whistler should they meet. The building of Whistler’s new home and studio in Chelsea, which he had rashly pursued despite his financial difficulties, was straining him even further. And he feared that Maud Franklin, his long time model and mistress, was again with child.

  His friend spoke again. “But it all hinges on whether or not it’s actionable.”

  Whistler rose and lit a second cigarette. “Well, that I shall try to find out,” he answered, and left.

  Away in America, less than a mile from Harvard Yard, Charles Eliot Norton took his seat in a green wicker chair on the deep piazza of his ancestral home, Shady Hill. He placed on the glass top of a wicker table the morning’s post, sorting through art-journals, a paper on linguistic studies, book sales circulars, and a slender packet from London. Within this last was the July number of Fors Clavigera, which Ruskin’s publishing agent shipped Norton punctually each month.

  Norton knew the letters of Fors were titularly intended for the ‘companions’ of The Guild of St. George, recently created by Ruskin to test his ideas of a return to a hand-labour based agrarian society of artisans and farmers, living a simple yet ennobling life circumscribed by mediaeval precepts, obedience to God, and to their Master, Ruskin himself. The reality was that the ‘companions’ were few, and the actual subscribers tended to absorb the contents of Fors seated in plush chairs in well-furnished library and drawing rooms rather than at deal tables in country cottages.

  Norton settled into his chair with a pot of strong tea before him and began to read. The issue opened with Ruskin’s examination of the relationship of labour to recompense, and the seemingly ever-increasing demands placed on men in industrial society. “What are all our machines for, then?” he posed. “Can we do in ten minutes, without a man or a horse, what a Greek could not have done in a year, with all the King’s horses and all the King’s men? ––And is this the result of all this magnificent mechanism, only that we have far less leisure?”

  A long and scathing review of the current exhibition hung at the Royal Academy came next. This was followed by a lengthy passage about the ugliness of the contents of the citizenry’s houses, and the deleterious effects upon the impressionable minds of their children. Pedagogy being Norton’s special genius he read slowly and carefully. To counteract the vulgar ugliness of modern life children ought to be exposed in school to great art, and made to pay attention to Nature’s own mysterious beauties. The physical plant of learning was not to be overlooked: “In these large airy rooms let us place a few beautiful casts, a few drawings, a few vases or pretty screens…Then, whatever you can afford to spend on education in art, give to good masters, and leave them to do the best they can for you; and what you can afford to spend for the splendour of your city, buy grass, flowers, sea, and sky with. No art of man is possible without these primal treasures of the Art of God.”

  After the bullying and the ranting, a passage of almost ethereal beauty and sensibility.

  Norton had now reached nearly the end of the issue, and came to the review of the Grosvenor Gallery show. His tea was grown cold, and when he raised his eyes again the afternoon sun had abandoned the lawn before him. Norton himself wrote much art criticism and many reviews, and his own pen could be biting, even caustic; but here Ruskin’s dripped pure venom. He felt old and tired and almost inexpressibly sad, yet the one word which formed in his head made its quiet way to his lips: “madness.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The Lamp of Truth

  Lancashire: Friday 22 February 1878 Midnight

  Ruskin had been so absorbed in his diary that the fire had died in the grate. He knew his hands were cold but did not mind them. His lamp was out of oil and when it sputtered he did not refill it but rummaged quickly through his desk drawers to find the stub of a candle to light his work. The pinpoint brilliance of the unshaded flame made him squint, and he looked away from his diary entries. His gaze fell upon his father’s gold watch on the blotter before him. At an oblique angle to the face he could not read the time to see which numerals the sweeping hands approached, held, and overtook.

  For weeks Ruskin had foundered in a stony and cold state of mind, his thoughts muddy and poisoned. He felt seized from without, and no effort of his own could make it quit hold of him. An absolute coldness and obtuseness of thought alternated with hours of dreamy scatterment and bewilderment, hours in which he looked internally for something precious he had lost and could not quite name. Today had been Good Friday. The bleak commemoration of the earthly Christ’s death and descent into Hell had shadowed every hour of Ruskin’s day. Now, past midnight at his desk in his frigid bedroom, he began to play a new and favo
urite game, one which like many of his pleasures promised danger.

  He sat surrounded by beloved books, and in the divination of Sortes balanced each on its spine and let it fall open. With eyes closed he ran his finger down the page, stopping when inspired, and read the passage his finger marked for significance. He began with the Bible, then had opened one book and then another, seeking patterns and correspondences in the texts. It all gave him such joy.

  When he finished looking at the books he turned his narrowed eyes to the guttering candle. He recalled writing a letter that morning, full of rapturous happiness at the news it bore, but now was unable to remember what the news was, or to whom addressed. Tintoret’s words came again into his head and mouth, and he said them aloud in the near darkness. E faticoso lo studio della pittura, a sempre si fa il mare maggiore: The study of painting is laborious, and the sea always gets larger. The sea was endless before Ruskin.

  Flaring candle light struck the gold case of his father’s watch, and forced his eye to it. The dazzle and sparkle frightened and then enraged him. He picked up his pen and re-dipped it to return to his diary as distraction. There was too much in the pen, nine million words had issued from its split lip, with many more aching to spill forth; the world could not contain them all. He put the pen down again. He focussed on the white face of the watch, crowded with numerals chasing each other around the dial. The tick was infernally loud, and the longer Ruskin looked at the piece the louder it grew. It filled his brain. He slammed the palm of his open hand into the candle flame, mashing it into a hot pulp. He stood up, suddenly, upsetting the chair. Now he knew: Time would be meaningless in the eternity of Hell Fire. The Devil was coming for him. Tonight, and in this room, Beelzebub would present himself and try to claim him. Like an Old Testament hero Ruskin knew, too, what he must do to prepare. He must throw off his clothing and greet his tormenter in the same state in which he had entered this world, naked. Naked, but not helpless, for Ruskin would be called upon to grapple with and overpower his foe. It would be mortal combat, not for the deathless Evil One, but for Ruskin if he lost.