Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  Court reconvened at a quarter to two. Huddleston gave the longest and most contradictory and potentially confusing jury instructions Rose had ever heard. He pointed out that holding another up to hatred, contempt or contumely was libel. He stated that it was of the very last importance that a critic, having made up his mind about a work, be allowed to express it, and with unsparing censure if he honestly think it appropriate. He entertained the court with research he had taken upon himself with Mr. Johnson’s dictionary on the terms “cockney” and “coxcomb.” It was almost three o’clock before the jury stood and left the court.

  Rose encouraged Whistler to go out for a smoke. He and Parry would be ready to send a clerk after him when the jury re-emerged. Rose congratulated Parry on the manner in which he had conducted the case, then returned to his end of the table. With Huddleston retired to his chamber, the noise of the court room ascended minute by minute. Parry sat paging through his notes, and Rose too looked into a notebook. Although he had just congratulated Parry, and had warmly reassured Whistler before he left for his cigarette, Rose felt grave misgivings and neither read nor wrote.

  This court action was about far more than two pungent sentences published by a leading art critic about a younger painter’s picture. It was not even a generational divide, as both Ruskin and Whistler enjoyed both young and old adherents. But an openness to the modern, to the art and ideas of today did play a part in it. Look what had happened––was happening now––with painting and music and literature in France, or in Germany. The eyes of the English public were being wrenched open. French paintings were now appearing at London, in galleries such as the Grosvenor, and Paris saw the Third Impressionist Exhibition last year. An underground channel was being carved steadily by the artistic currents of foreign visionaries such as Monet, Cezanne, and Tissot, and the avant-garde represented by the American Whistler. One day––soon––the thinning earth above that channel would give way and the torrent be released.

  In the meantime questions of appropriate subjects for art came into it; the nature of beauty itself came into it. What was beauty? To fail to see the beauty in Whistler’s landscapes was more than a failure of taste; it was a failure of imagination, a misprision of possibility. The subtle colouration, gauzy line-work, the very picture frames which Whistler designed and himself decorated, lured the sympathetic viewer to enter a reverie of his own. Nothing was blatantly told but enough expressed to invite a glimpse, rare and choice, of the elusive genius of the place he caught up in his brushes and breathed upon the canvas. Whistler’s work showed there were many ways of seeing––just as there were many avenues of response to what was seen.

  And––blast it all! What had happened to the Ruskin who so championed Turner, a painter whose depictions in his later work of steam and fog and rain and swirling sea made him the target of so much condemnation? Could the man honestly not see the similarities––not in style, but in intent––between Turner and Whistler? Or had Ruskin seen the kinship all too keenly, and been secretly indignant that any other artist might encroach upon the territory of his idol? Was that behind the charge of “wilful imposture” in the Fors review––was Ruskin calling Whistler a pretender to Turner’s throne?

  The minutes ticked by. Whistler resumed his seat by Rose. Maddeningly, the jury sent notes out twice for further clarification from Huddleston, and it was not until half past four that the door opened and all twelve returned.

  The court was called to order, and the cacophony subsided as quickly as it had arisen. Huddleston looked across to the jury. “Are you all agreed?” he asked.

  The foreman of the jury, a tall wiry-haired owner of a dry-goods supplier, nodded.

  “We find a verdict for the plaintiff, with one farthing damages.”

  Huddleston brought his gavel down a final time. “I enter judgement for one farthing for the plaintiff, without costs.”

  The buzz of the crowd rising, speaking, beginning to move overtook the room. Rose stole a look at the defendant’s table. Bowen could not conceal the momentary smile of satisfaction on his lips. Walker Martineau and Co. had performed admirably for their esteemed client. Whistler had hoped for £1000 in damages, and received but a farthing. And Ruskin, who could have been made to carry the entire onerous court-costs for both sides, was instead off with less than the cost of a postage stamp.

  Whistler turned his head to Rose. “What…have we won, then?”

  “Yes, the jury has found for the plaintiff.” There was the grating of chairs being pushed back. Whistler sat motionless.

  “But––only a farthing damages?”

  Rose nodded. One farthing. A quarter of a cent. It was a contemptuous settlement, indicating the jury’s disdain of the entire matter. Whistler’s bill for the entire legal team would amount to over £200. There was now almost no likelihood of any of them seeing any of it.

  “But––it is a victory.”

  Rose nodded once more. Whistler raised his head, expanding the space around him, drawing those now beginning to cluster around the table in. “It’s a victory, a tremendous victory,” he proclaimed. He turned from Rose. “I have triumphed; art has triumphed,” he told the reporters.

  The “award” had been a rebuke. Rose had never known anyone who could make victory of defeat as easily as Whistler.

  Arthur Severn arrived back at Brantwood in a blinding snow. He had sat behind the defendant’s table for the duration of the trial, taking notes and making sketches, and had been prepared to testify if called. He had further been charged with bringing into court Ruskin’s Titian from its London home at Herne Hill. Now the task at hand was to inform Ruskin he had lost.

  Severn was momentarily taken aback when he entered the study at Brantwood where Ruskin sat. The few days away made the physical change in the man since his collapse dramatically evident. Joan had said he had aged a full decade in those few months, but Severn had not fully apprehended this until he was out of the man’s presence for a week.

  Ruskin was sitting, thin shoulders hunched, in one of his father’s heavy mahogany chairs, facing the fire. A shawl muffled his sharp shoulders, and his thickly slippered feet were resting upon a low stool. His beard––which he had been insisting he be allowed to grow long––was now compressed upon his chest beneath his lowered chin. His hands, so thin the blue veins were starting upon them, were wrapped around a china mug of some steaming liquid. The only aspect of the man not enfeebled was his voice; that rung loud and clear throughout the room.

  “Verdict for the plaintiff? That coxcomb. That fluttering moth.” He fell silent, only to resume with renewed vigour. “And my opinion––worth but a farthing? To credit my words as inflicting but a farthing’s worth of damage!”

  Severn could almost not stop himself at wondering aloud if Ruskin would have felt happier to have paid the full £1000, with court costs thrown in for good measure.

  Ruskin swung his head back to the fire. His opinion so impotent as to be worth but a farthing? Where, and how to strike? Sunder the last tie that linked him to a blind and ungrateful public! “And now it’s to be forgotten?” he asked the flames. “I’ll make them remember it, or my name’s not my own!”

  The following morning Ruskin resigned his Slade Professorship at Oxford, for

  I cannot hold a Chair from which I have no power of expressing judgement without being taxed by it by British Law.

  Madness proved a persistent houseguest. Alone at Brantwood save for Joan and her family, seeing almost no one, Ruskin considered what had befallen him. He had gone headily and heartily and––he admitted––thrillingly mad. He was entirely surprised, and not a little grateful. Madness now marked him with another unique and superb distinction; he did not in his lengthy periods of self-examination recall his dead father’s myriad black moods, his mother’s intense peculiarity, or the tale of his paternal grandfather’s gruesome demise. He saw no family link. He knew only that madness was eager to punish him for his sins against his p
arents and against his Rose, punish him too for the sins of his own flesh. Madness was a welcome castigator. Madness was as well a thief, grappling with Ruskin for his most cherished remaining possession: the splendid powers of his intellect, and he would not begrudge his victor.

  Yet Ruskin regained enough bodily strength and tranquillity of mind to resume a small portion of his writing efforts, and even an eventual return to his forsaken Oxford professorship. His Slade lectures were as subscribed as always, but his brilliant idiosyncratic pedagogy crystallised into laughable eccentricity. In the exaltation of conveying his ideas to impressionable undergraduates he did not notice that more students came to smirk than to listen. Laughter became the norm at his discourses, and he unwittingly played to it. One day a discomfited dean sat in the back of the lecture room and witnessed Ruskin as he ran, fully gowned, across the dais at top speed, flapping his arms to the riotous approval of the young men before him. He was demonstrating bird flight, with Ruskin himself no longer bound to Earth’s gravity.

  He resigned again in an uproar over vivisection, took up and discarded his monthly Fors, struggled to refine old works on gothic architecture or the Greek gods, and formulate new ones. His doctors continually cautioned him against work, which was to Ruskin his water and air; there was no life without it. But he had lost his ability to draw, it proved so taxing to eyes and head that this great pleasure of recording the seen world he must forbid himself. At Brantwood he devoted more and more of each day to clearing woods, hacking back invasive brush, or laying in the bottom of his free-floating blue boat and gazing at the clouds above Coniston Water.

  One afternoon when approaching the landing steps leading from the lake Ruskin was met by a large viper sunning itself. It lay curled on the very step he must mount, a direct challenge to his passage. He stared fixedly at the blunt nose of the still creature. It had been a long time since he had seen one. When he could hear anything above the beating of his own heart he heard the steady whoosh of young Tommy Davies scything grass in the upper garden.

  “Tommy. Tommy,” he called, focusing what strength he could to call up to the boy. In a moment Tommy stood above him on the grassy verge, resting the scythe on his shoulder as peered down.

  “Tommy. Come down. A serpent.”

  The boy jumped down, and all Ruskin could do was point at the basking adder. Tommy lifted his scythe over the adder and let it fall. With a start it slithered into the grasses by the steps, and at the second blow had coiled itself about the scythe blade, its chequered tan and black scales becoming a glittering coil of muscle as it avoided the sharp edge. Ruskin watched panting as Tommy swung and pounded the blade until the adder had taken a disabling cut. Ruskin found himself on his knees, grabbing a stone in his fist to crush the adder’s head flat. He was not speaking to the bewildered Tommy as he viewed the flattened mass and cried, “The last lock of Medusa’s hair!”

  There was something revelatory and sacred about his madness. In madness he found himself thrust into all the dark places he had ever imagined, and into places of alluring and almost insuperable beauty. It was as though he had been found at last by another self who had been searching for him for years. He linked arms with Madness, and walked. Even when their paths diverged––which it did for months and sometimes years––he kept well in sight of Madness, not wanting to be left behind: the man knew something and Ruskin was always interesting in learning. But the more Madness spoke to Ruskin, the less he could speak himself. The final eleven years of his life Madness spoke for him.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Lamp of Sacrifice

  Lancashire: Fall 1899

  If only he could lie down in Coniston Water, he felt he should get better.

  The wind whipping about him narrowed his blearing eyes to slits and blew his beard about his chapped and thirsting lips. The waters of Coniston were before and below him, and he stretched out his arms and pointed his mittened hands toward it. Down the slope he stumbled, tripping against bared roots and half-buried stones. Heedless. His ankle slipped within his shoe and the stone it turned against began to roll. He lurched sideways into the arching canes of a dog-rose. His mitten was torn off as the thorns bit his hand. He drew the naked hand before his eyes, his captive mitten lashing in the branch.

  A bright drop of red was forming on the tip of his finger, and four more along the tissue of skin on the back of his hand. His mouth twisted. A rose! Ah Rosie-Posie! Her yellow hair and oval face were hanging there in those stripped canes. Rose, Rose, most angelic in beauty, most terrible in heart, a heart of thorn. Stripped and barren of your lovely flesh like this rose of its flower. He howled. Did he howl? The wind blew his tears across his cheeks before he ever tasted salt.

  He blinked and raised his eyes across the lake to the hills. Great layers of slate- toned cumulous clouds smothered the rocky summit, his Vecchio, with streams of ice-grey cirrus clouds before them. Thick striations of clouds, one shifting over the next. Dots of black smoke arose, blossoming over hidden iron rails. He saw them spread and smear. No harm, no harm! A glint of late sun between cloud layers daggered his eyes, squeezing them shut. Shut he could still see the silvered waters of Coniston. Silver waters as Turner caught in his watercolour of the Grand Canal he cherished, no other painter had captured that; no, not his, given away now. Or did he still own that one? The Turners in the house, his life’s study, God’s joy, now speechless to him.

  The stone his shoe had dislodged was rolling, bounding from hillock to hillock, bumping other stones, gathering speed. It fled before him down the slope to the lake. He abandoned his hung mitten and went after it. Mad, mad, and tired of Madness: Let’s run him down to the water for holy baptism.

  Fra Angelico was with him too, painting angels with peacock eyes upon their wing tips. Carrying baskets of roses red and white and pink. Fra Angelico, man reading in a cone of light: books sanctify.

  St. Francis with my face. At Assisi in my cell. Outside the window is Coniston Water. I will lie down. Something comes across Turner’s silvered water.

  It is Rosie, Rosie in a boat rowing away from him. He will catch her, thrash arm over arm like a dripping Narcissus to her prow.

  Harpies screeching, calling his name down the long hill. Noli me tangere. A woman in a dark skirt. Two men. Screaming, waving. Joanie. Joanie will save him.

  finis

  Book Group Discussion Guide

  These questions have been created to spur discussion with others, or reflection within yourself. They are meant to enhance the experience of recalling what you have read, and how it affected you when you read it. The questions may also prompt consideration of how the meaning of the book might change or deepen with time. Following the questions is a list of important paintings mentioned in the novel.

  1. How did John Ruskin’s relationship with his parents affect his ability to go on and form normal attachments with others?

  2. Ruskin repeatedly feels misunderstood, even abandoned, by those he cares about. Do you think this is due to his superior intellect, his personal timidity, the friction between his own values and that of much of 19th century culture, or his seeming inability to truly connect with others?

  3. What advice would you have given him as he heads off to Oxford and his university career?

  4. John Ruskin became famous at a young age––twenty-four––with the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters, even though he remained anonymous on its title page. Throughout his life he had a love-hate relationship with his fame, which he oftentimes felt was rooted in his lesser works, or in the details of his personal life. How is his disregard or contempt for his reputation depicted in the novel?

  5. Ruskin appears to have been unable to physically express his love to a woman. Yet we know from his letters to Georgiana Cowper-Temple (later Lady Mount Temple, who does not play a part in this novel), that he was capable of sexual arousal and oftentimes satisfied his own urges. Do you agree with the author’s conclusion of why h
e did not consummate his marriage to Euphemia Gray?

  6. Euphemia Gray––Effie––makes perhaps the most important decision of her life when she decides to leave Ruskin. Although she married John Everett Millais a year later and he went on to fame and riches, Effie was never again welcomed at court or in many of the homes in which she had once been a valued guest. What do you think of her choice to leave? Could she have handled it differently?

  7. The circumscribed role of Victorian women made it difficult for intelligent and energetic women like Maria LaTouche to realise their full potential. As a married woman and mother she was fully occupied in running a fashionable household, and her elevated social class made it impossible for her to work outside the home except in a volunteer capacity. It was easier for a single woman, and one not “a lady”, like Octavia Hill, to undertake and accomplish meaningful work. Compare this with the challenges facing today’s working women.

  8. The treatment of mental illness was in its infancy during Ruskin’s lifetime. Today he would possibly have been diagnosed as having bi-polar disorder, or perhaps encephalopathy, and received psychiatric care and medication. Such treatment comes with its own costs and risks, however. Consider how such intervention may have changed Ruskin’s life and work, for better, and for worse.

  9. Rose LaTouche suffers from anorexia nervosa, stemming both from the desire to demonstrate her religious ardour through fasting, and the tensions she feels caught between her parents as they “battle for her soul”. Were you surprised that Ruskin’s physician John Simon recognized this condition, and had seen it in other young women?

  10. Which character, other than Ruskin, do you feel most strongly about? And why?

  11. Do you think Ruskin truly loved Rose, and was capable of being her husband as he said he wished to be? Or would their marriage prove as disastrous as his first?