by Phyllis Rose
At last the lunette-shaped, sufficiently white canvas arrived and work began on the portrait. The Ruskins, their servant Crawley, Millais and his brother, William, all went out to the rocks of Glenfinlas. Effie read Dante aloud while John posed and Millais painted. William and Crawley fished. Millais painted very slowly, no more than a square inch a day, but what he painted was exquisite. However, the rains returned, and the painting, which had to be done en plein air, was perforce put aside. There was little to do but play battledore and shuttlecock inside the barn. Ruskin worked on his index. He was in a wonderful mood. He had begun to record snatches of Effie’s conversation, preserving the disgusting things she said.
In that tiny cottage, the three of them lived together in disconcerting proximity. Millais could not help but see the neglect which Ruskin bestowed so lavishly upon his wife. He saw her unhappiness. Once, he suggested delicately to Ruskin that his wife ought not to be left alone so much, but Ruskin told him plainly that it was a woman’s business to keep herself occupied. By the end of the summer, Millais knew, too, about the absence of a sexual tie between the Ruskins; either he deduced it from their living arrangement or was told about it by Effie. As they passed wet day after wet day in each other’s company, Millais became her confidant.
In the evening, Ruskin and Millais started discussing architectural detail. Millais sketched some ornamental details for churches, and Ruskin was stunned by his talent in this field. One of Millais’s designs was of a magnificent window in which three pairs of angels strain towards each other, their arched bodies framing the main sections of the window, their joined lips forming the pointed tops, their clasped hands defining other edges. All the angels have Effie’s face. The erotic intensity of this drawing says more than all of Millais’s letters about what was going on inside him. To Holman Hunt he complained about depression, low spirits, absence of enjoyment in everything but Mrs Ruskin’s drawing lessons. To Ruskin he explained his despair as resulting from Holman Hunt’s decision to travel in the Holy Land: he would miss Hunt dreadfully. A letter arrived with the news that Deverell, a friend of his, an unsuccessful painter, was in dire straits, and the news provided Millais with an outlet and excuse for his grief. He spent a whole morning in tears. Then an evening.
That Ruskin remained unconcerned about the sexually charged situation in the little cottage is best explained by his own apparent immunity to sexual feeling. But, in addition, Millais did not seem to him a threatening presence, being on the verge of hysteria much of the time. Ruskin saw him painting until his limbs were numb and his back ached, refusing to take exercise in the usual way, but then taking off, on sudden whims, for seven-mile runs. ‘Sometimes he is all excitement, sometimes depressed, sick and faint as a woman, always restless and unhappy. I think I never saw such a miserable person on the whole,’39 he wrote to his father. Ruskin perceived the despair but not the cause. It did not occur to him one could get so upset about a woman. That Hunt was behind it seemed more plausible, and Ruskin became sufficiently concerned about Millais’s state to write to Hunt and beg him to defer his trip to the Middle East. ‘I never saw so strange a person, I could not answer for his reason if you leave him.’40 Millais, alerted by Effie about this letter, quickly wrote to Hunt to say that he was naturally sad at his going away, but by no means to postpone the trip on his account.
In the third week of August, William Millais departed, his vacation over. Effie accompanied him as far as Perth in order to visit her mother, taking along the landlord’s wife as chaperone, especially for the return to the Trossachs, when she would otherwise have been alone. Ruskin had suggested that instead of the landlord’s wife Effie take Millais for company. Millais, astonished at the impropriety, firmly refused and at this point, he, too, became convinced that Ruskin was trying to throw him and Effie together and to provoke her to compromise herself. After his brother’s departure, Millais moved back into his rooms at the inn, despite their higher cost.
As the summer drew to its end, the painting of the portrait went on, meticulous inch by meticulous inch. The weather got worse, and Millais constructed a kind of tent to protect him from the elements – which served only to funnel the wind onto his back. He was working on the background, leaving the figure of Ruskin to be filled in later. Even Ruskin was aware that the summer had produced a change and now thought of his marriage as a mistake he had made. ‘When we married, I expected to change her – she expected to change me. Neither have succeeded and both are displeased. When I came down to Scotland with Millais, I expected to do great things for him. I saw he was uneducated, little able to follow out a train of thought – proud and impatient. I thought to make him read Euclid and bring him back a meek and methodical man. I might as well have tried to make a Highland stream read Euclid, or be methodical.’41
The little group which had been together for so long finally disbanded in late October, the Ruskins heading for Edinburgh, where John was to deliver a series of lectures to the Philosophical Society. Millais was supposed to remain behind to finish the portrait, but he soon decided the project was hopeless and headed back to London after a brief stop in Edinburgh to see Effie. He would have given up the painting altogether, but Ruskin informed him that he would consider it an insult to his father as well as himself if Millais left it unfinished.
Millais’s thoughts were on Effie and the terrible position she was in. He imagined her back in London besieged by rakes who would take advantage of Ruskin’s neglect in the way he had not allowed himself to do. He imagined her succumbing at last to one of her admirers, giving Ruskin the chance he wanted to get rid of her with all the dishonour on her head. He begged her mother to make sure that one of her sisters was always with her for the sake of her reputation.
This paranoia, which Effie shared, was not entirely unjustified. Effie knew by now that Ruskin had no intention ever of consummating their marriage. When they had discussed the matter on her twenty-fifth birthday, which was in May of 1853 – in other words, before the summer in the Highlands – he told her his feelings had changed since they had set this date for consummation six years before. As Effie reported it to her mother, he said it would be ‘sinful to enter into such a connexion, as if I was not very wicked I was at least insane and the responsibility that I might have children was too great, as I was quite unfit to bring them up’.42 They hated each other so much they could hardly talk. Ruskin offered his friend Furnival the following conversation, recorded at about this time, as evidence of Effie’s depravity.
Effie is looking abstractedly out of the window.
John. ‘What are you looking at, Effie?’
E. ‘Nothing.’
J. ‘What are you thinking of then?’
E. ‘A great many things.’
J. ‘Tell me some of them.’
E. ‘I was thinking of operas – and excitement – and – (angrily) a great many things.’
J. ‘And what conclusions did you come to?’
E. ‘None – because you interrupted me.’43
This record of domestic bickering may not prove Effie’s depravity, but it vividly shows what a stalemate the Ruskins had reached – from his point of view, every question kindly asked and every reply given with a snap, all day long, an unpleasantness in small things matched by obstinate opposition in large ones and combined with a vulgar ingratitude which led her to refer to him and his parents as that ‘batch of Ruskins’; from her point of view, constant neglect, an inhuman coldness that amounted to brutality, implacable dislike and disapproval which considered itself charitable in calling her insane, a cruel desire to break her spirit. In Edinburgh, she threatened him with the law, and he taunted her in reply – even if he did take all the blame, she would have to go home, lose her position and ‘make a great piece of work’ for her father.44
Effie, who had told her husband in Scotland that she could face with greater equanimity the prospect of going to Hell than returning to live with him in Camberwell, returned to Camberwell in the winter of 18
53. In her eyes, her situation was that of the heroine of a Gothic novel, trapped in a castle where everyone is hostile to her, trying to drive her mad. Everyone wanted her to compromise herself, so she could be divorced. The elder Ruskins were determined to get rid of her in order to have John to themselves. On the afternoon of New Year’s Day 1854, she and John visited his parents; the ‘batch of Ruskins’ planned a trip abroad in which she was not to be included. When they got home to Herne Hill, Effie told John she did not wish to begin the New Year in the uncomfortable state they had been in and tried to negotiate a sort of truce. John said that his marriage to her was the greatest crime he had ever committed, because he had acted in opposition to his parents. His pity and polite behaviour to her were adopted, he said, because he considered it a duty to be kind to one ‘so unhappily diseased’.45 He had already revealed to her the ‘true reason’ why he had not consummated their marriage on the first night – that he found her body disgusting. He had also told her it would be sinful to have children with such a deranged, vile and unnatural woman. Now he taunted her to renew her friendship with Millais.
At the same time, he continued to sit for Millais for the Glenfinlas portrait. ‘Surely such a quiet scoundrel as this man never existed,’ Millais wrote to Effie’s mother. ‘He comes here sitting as blandly as ever, talking the whole time in apparently a most interested way.’46 Millais now continued to work on the painting in fear that if he stopped the Ruskins would somehow hurt Effie.
How much of this frenzied villainy was in the heads of the two lovers? It is a strange fact of the moral life that we never attribute bad motives to ourselves and yet do so most readily to everyone else we know. In the matter of the Ruskins, people would say – Queen Victoria among them – that Millais was an evil man who seduced a woman while painting her and while she was married to another man. Others would say that Effie left Ruskin when someone better came along. Others, in defence of Effie and Millais, would say that Ruskin had thrown them together in an attempt to get rid of Effie. All these things happened, and yet all the statements are in some measure untrue, because they imply a conscious intentionality that was lacking. Ruskin did bring his wife together with Millais, did encourage their intimacy and did wish to be rid of her. Yet he could hardly have known when he took Effie to Gower Street to meet Millais, when he defended the Pre-Raphaelites, even when he suggested the party in the Trossachs, that Millais, that frail, under-educated child, would steal his wife away from him. Millais may have taken a liking to Effie while he was painting her and become enamoured of her after spending four months with her in Scotland, but he did not press himself on her. Indeed, he consciously kept out of her way: after their meeting in Edinburgh in the autumn of 1853, he did not see her again for eighteen months. And can we believe of Effie that she decided to get free of Ruskin when someone better came along? No doubt the idea of marrying Millais crossed her mind, but as reassurance, not motivation. Had she not had such a hope, her position would have been appalling – to return to her father’s house with (as she saw it) the best of her youth gone, her reputation ruined, no prospects for marriage, which was the only way of supporting herself she had, not only deprived of the luxuries she had become used to, but a positive burden on her hard-pressed father. None of them, moving from day to day, taking advantage of now this, now that situation offered by life for the increase of their comfort and diminution of their misery, saw or planned the whole sequence of events upon which they were embarked. If they had acted upon consideration and not on instinct, from one moment to the next, from one small decision to the next, they could not have behaved so naturally in the melodramatic and scandalous situations they found themselves in. If Ruskin, for example, had seriously thought of foisting Effie onto Millais, he could hardly have suggested as nonchalantly as he did that Millais accompany Effie to Perth from Brig O’Turk and back again, alone.
On March 1, 1854, Effie went to her friend Lady Eastlake, whose husband, Sir Charles, was president of the Royal Academy, and disclosed her marital situation, asking what course to take and whether the law could help her. If economic considerations – her reluctance to place another financial burden on her father – played a part in keeping Effie from trying to get out of her marriage any earlier, sheer ignorance of the legal possibilities played a part, too: any kind of divorce was uncommon; of her own situation she could have been aware of no analogues, no precedents for action. But Lady Eastlake rather thought the law could help her and instructed Effie to bring her parents into her confidence, which she did in a letter of March 7, signed ‘Effie Gray’. She had more faith in Lady Eastlake’s practical savvy than in her parents’, but for the sake of her future reputation she had to act in concert with them. Her father decided he must come to London and talk to Mr Ruskin. Effie convinced him he had to talk to lawyers first. She also persuaded him that Mrs Gray must come to London, too, despite the expense of another fare. While the Grays were making arrangements for Effie’s return to her parents, worried always that their letters would fall into the hands of the Ruskins, war had been declared in the Crimea and John Ruskin went on sitting for his portrait by Millais.
On April 14 the Grays arrived by boat from Dundee. (Mr Gray as a director of a shipping company could get sea passage more cheaply than railway seats.) He consulted lawyers, who reassured him that the case would not be difficult to make: an annulment was possible if the marriage had lasted three years without being consummated. Effie was examined by one of the two doctors whose evidence was necessary for the proceeding and was found to be a virgin. The doctor was ‘thunderstruck’. A reader of Ruskin’s books, he had always thought the man something of a Jesuit, but now he thought him mad.
Although Effie went into London almost every day to see her parents, Ruskin had no idea they were in town. Since he was spending all day, from breakfast to dinner, in his parents’ house at Denmark Hill and returning to his own house only to sleep, it was not hard to evade his scrutiny. He and his parents were planning a tour of Switzerland in early May, and Effie was to go and stay in Perth with her parents. When she sent off her luggage, he did not notice her sending more than usual. On the morning of April 25, he accompanied her and Sophie, her little sister, who had been staying with them, to King’s Cross Station and put them on the train for Edinburgh, unaware that Effie was leaving for anything more than what had become, for them, a routine stay with her parents while he went abroad. He did not know that the Grays had left London by an earlier train and were waiting for Effie at Hitchin, the first stop outside of London.
At Hitchin, Sophie jumped out of the train and embraced her parents. Mrs Gray took her place on the train to the north, and Mr Gray, with Sophie, returned to London in order to deliver a package from Effie to the lawyers and to take advantage of the cheaper steamer fares on their own return trip the next day. At six o’clock that evening, two lawyers visited the home of the elder Ruskins and asked to see Mr Ruskin and his son. One served John with a citation to court in Effie’s suit of nullity, and the other handed to Mr Ruskin (for forwarding to his wife) a packet from Effie containing her keys, her account book, her wedding ring and a letter of explanation.
Effie’s escape had been planned with a foresight and executed with a smoothness to gladden the heart of a general, but then, the enemy had been unaware of the state of war and some people would blame the Grays for deceitfulness. The forthright thing to do, many people thought, would have been to inform Mr Ruskin of the suit before the lawyers’ appearance. But as Effie conceived the event she was like a fairy-tale princess, caught in an evil enchantment and when dealing with witches, goblins or evil monks, one doesn’t stop to discuss things in a civilised manner. For his part, Millais rejoiced that Effie seemed likely to obtain her own ‘order of release’, and, with perhaps dubious taste, said he trusted it would bring her as much satisfaction as the reverse situation – getting a husband back – does in the painting.
The day after the dramatic flight and serving of the papers, Mr Ruskin
called upon his solicitor, Mr Rutter, and a proctor (a solicitor for the ecclesiastical courts) named Mr Pott. Between them old Ruskin and Rutter managed the case; John did not involve himself. Since he had no wish to get Effie back, he was advised not to defend himself. Nevertheless, he felt moved to write for the proctor a statement of his side of the case, including an offer to prove his virility at the court’s request. The document was never used in court and remained in the solicitor’s desk for seventy years.47 This self-defence is oddly moving, for its childish, one-eyed certainty as much as for its bewildered inability to trace the disintegration of the marriage.
Had she treated me as a kind and devoted wife would have done, I should soon have longed to possess her, body and heart. But every day that we lived together, there was less sympathy between us, and I soon began to observe characteristics which gave me so much grief and anxiety that I wrote to her father saying they could be accounted for by no other way than by supposing that there was slight nervous affection of the brain. It is of no use to trace the progress of alienation. Perhaps the principal cause of it – next to her resolute effort to detach me from my parents – was her always thinking that I ought to attend her, instead of herself attending me.48
Ruskin was neither the first nor last to charge insanity in the face of unacceptable behaviour, but in this case the lawyer rejected it as a possible defence for reasons which shed an interesting light on Victorian assumptions about sex: he argued that the irritation of Effie’s brain might just as easily be understood as the result of the lack of consummation as its cause.
When the truth about the Ruskin marriage became known, the general indignation it aroused suggests that for certain segments of London society, sexlessness after marriage was every bit as shocking as sex before marriage. Ruskin was called a scoundrel, a blackguard, a wicked man, for all the world as though he had been keeping a string of mistresses or a second wife and family in Chelsea. Indeed there were some, like old Lady Charlemont, lady-in-waiting to the queen and wife of a notoriously unfaithful husband, who could scarcely comprehend the nature of this sexual offence. When Lady Eastlake called upon her to tell her the news (as Lady Eastlake did with a great many people in her selfless effort to purvey Effie’s side of the story), Lady Charlemont heaped upon Ruskin ‘every possible and impossible wickedness of motive and aim that has characterised the roué part of the novels of the last half century’, but not Ruskin’s particular wickedness, which novels had not yet caught up with.49
