by Phyllis Rose
Effie sat in Perth receiving reports of people’s reactions. Millais reported, via Mrs Gray, that George Richmond, the painter, who had always been a friend of Ruskin’s, professed to be quite turned round by the news, and, after having thought of Effie as frivolous and unworthy of such a mighty man of intellect, had now begun to think better of her. Earnest, good Dr Acland of Oxford, whose habit of allowing his baby to breakfast with them when the Ruskins came to visit had made Ruskin so ill, took a long time to make up his mind. He was sympathetic to Effie’s plight and believed Ruskin guilty, but his conscience forced him to cite the fifth chapter of Matthew to the effect that there were no grounds for divorce but fornication. Thomas Carlyle, whose position in marriage was so similar to Ruskin’s, gave an interesting opinion: no woman, he said, has any right to complain of any treatment whatsoever and should patiently undergo all misery inflicted upon her by her husband.
April was a good month that year for news to spread in the London art world: the Royal Academy was having the private viewing of its annual exhibition – where everyone who counted made an appearance – on April 28. The story wafted through the crowded rooms. Lady Eastlake talked about Effie with a blushing Millais. The irony was lost on few people that the year before they had been discussing The Order of Release and now were discussing the model, the artist and the critic.
At the Water Colour Exhibition on April 29, the landscape painter David Roberts caught sight of John Ruskin himself, accompanied by his father. Roberts made his way to them through the crowd, engaged them in conversation, and did not shrink from the delicate subject. Ruskin, unwilling to admit that anything was wrong, merely said that his wife was in Scotland, but old Mr Ruskin provided a complete account of his son’s marriage: John had been trapped into marriage, being at the time attached to a French countess who had refused him, so that he was not hard to catch; they had overlooked that; they had overlooked Mr Gray’s lack of money; they had overlooked Effie’s extravagance. Mr Ruskin told Roberts more about Effie’s temper and her father’s railway shares and then said, ‘Come along, John. We shall have to pay for it – but never mind we have you to ourselves now.’50 Naturally the reference to the French countess made Effie smile when the story got to Perth, for she knew the lady was only plain Miss Domecq, whose fortune had procured her as husband a French baron of questionable character. Of all the gossip, Millais had this to say: ‘One great battle with the Russians will swamp the little talk there will be for the present.’51
Millais had had a sitting scheduled with Ruskin for April 27, two days after Effie’s escape, but Ruskin wrote to request a postponement until the following week. He cancelled that date, too, and postponed the final sittings – only his hands remained to be painted – until he returned from his trip to Europe with his parents. Millais worked with the greatest reluctance. He had more to do on the background, and, instead of returning to the memory-laden site at Glenfinlas, he wanted to find a similar waterfall in Wales and finish the background there. Ruskin would have none of that. Truth to nature was truth to nature, and you could not paint the gneiss of Scotland from different rocks in Wales. In another desperate attempt to wind up the wretched business and to avoid Ruskin, Millais suggested that he use another model for the hands. Again, Ruskin was indignant and held Millais to the strictest Pre-Raphaelite fidelity. His hands were unique, he said, and it would be absurd to stick other people’s fingers onto his body, as indeed it would have been.
At moments, Millais thought about refusing to paint the hands at all – his hands would refuse to immortalise Ruskin’s. He fantasised about using his hands to throttle Ruskin, not to paint him. At other times he consoled himself that no man living could do a better painting. But he would not be happy until the picture was finished. ‘It really is a misery to me and prevents me from thinking of other things. I almost fancy sometimes it will never be finished but will last all my life.’52 One has heard of tribes with rituals of sympathetic labour, but surely this is an unusual case of sympathetic separation: Millais had to effect his own divorce from Ruskin.
Effie’s divorce was expedited quickly. Accompanied by her father, she returned secretly to London to make her deposition to the court. In 1857, when the Matrimonial Causes Act was passed, a special court would be established to try cases of divorce, but at this time divorce was available only through an Act of Parliament – a very expensive procedure and used but rarely – or, in special cases like Effie’s, through the ecclesiastical courts, which decided whether in fact a marriage had ever been legitimately contracted. Plaintiffs and defendants did not make appearances in the courtroom but gave their testimony privately to the proctors who then presented the depositions to the court. This procedure did away with the pain and shame of having to tell one’s wretched story in public, although it did away with courtroom drama, too. Effie made her deposition and was examined by court-appointed doctors (Queen Victoria’s accoucheur, Dr Locock, was one of them), then returned to Scotland to wait. Ruskin, in Switzerland, helped matters along by submitting a document that acknowledged certain basic facts of the situation, such as that the marriage had not been consummated and that he believed his wife still to be a virgin. On July 20, Effie received a letter pronouncing her ‘free from all bonds of matrimony’. Legally, the marriage never existed. It had been contracted on false grounds, because, according to the official Decree of Nullity, ‘John Ruskin was incapable of consummating the same by reason of incurable impotency.’53
Ruskin resented the charge of impotence. The virility which he had not chosen to exercise in his marriage he had offered to prove in court. For the rest, he was unconcerned. He considered his behaviour in his marriage foolish but guiltless, and the foolishness lay in having married Effie in the first place. She was a spoiled and trivial woman who grew to hate him because he refused to accommodate her petty social goals. He was certain that her behaviour had gotten worse in the six months preceding her departure because she had conceived a passion for someone whom she thought she might marry, if she could get a divorce from him. What kind of shocking behaviour? Well, for example, when he was drawing, she did not come and sit beside him but went about her business and then complained that he left her alone all the time. But all this troubled him really very little. His domestic calamities were a hundred times less important to him than Turner’s death and the destruction of certain thirteenth-century buildings in Italy; those had been the real sorrows of recent years. Finally, he cared much more about Millais than he did about Effie. He only hoped for Millais’s sake that the artist did not marry her, as Ruskin feared he would do from a false sense of chivalry. It never occurred to him that he might lose Millais’s friendship.54
The Ruskins returned from abroad in October and Ruskin did the final sittings for his portrait, which was finished, at last, in the following month. It was displayed for a while in Millais’s studio before being sent to the Ruskins at Denmark Hill. Mr Ruskin paid Millais £350 for it. Like everyone else who saw it, the Ruskins thought it a marvellous painting, although John jokingly objected to the figure blocking the landscape and thought Millais had falsely given him a squint, and his parents thought he looked a little too yellow and bored. But the Eastlakes proclaimed it worthy of Van Eyck.
John Ruskin wrote to thank Millais and requested his new address, because, as he said, he would surely want to write to him often. Millais didn’t answer. Ruskin wrote again, ‘Why don’t you answer my letter – it is tiresome of you and makes me uneasy.’ The artist responded with his address but added, ‘I can scarcely see how you conceive it possible that I can desire to continue on terms of intimacy with you. Indeed I concluded that after the finishing of your portrait, you yourself would have seen the necessity of abstaining from further intercourse.’55 Ruskin was astonished – and hurt. He wrote a formal reply to Millais. He said he took Millais’s disinclination to continue their friendship to mean one of two things: that Millais believed he had had an unfriendly purpose in inviting him to the Highlands
or that Millais himself had cause to feel guilty about his behaviour. He thanked Millais for this final lesson in human folly and ingratitude.
Millais wanted to see Effie in July, as soon as she received her decree of annulment, but she, with her anxious sense of propriety and her desire not to give people food for gossip, refused to see him until the following spring. Effie said she was reluctant to marry again. She said she was particularly reluctant to marry Millais, who had been so unfairly involved in the ugly business. Nevertheless they quickly reached an understanding and were married in early July of 1855.
The wedding took place in the home of the bride’s parents in Perth at two o’clock in the afternoon. The new minister of Kinnoull, Mr Anderson, presided. The bridesmaids were Effie’s two little sisters and her cousin, Eliza Jameson. The room was not the one she had been married in before. After the ceremony, the couple was taken by carriage to the Glasgow train. The curtains of the carriage were drawn so no one could see in. This was useful, since the bridegroom was upset.
It was all like a dream, he said. Before the ceremony he’d been feeling feverish and out of sorts, with an exaggerated sensation of going to an evening party at the age of fifteen. His brain and soul were exhausted with dwelling on unpleasant possibilities. When they had signed the wedding contract, Millais wanted to throw down his pen. He felt he was playing a part in a farce. By the time they got onto the train, it was clear that the excitement had been too much for him. Instead of getting the comfort brides may expect to enjoy at such moments, Effie had to give her new husband all her sympathy. He cried dreadfully. He said he didn’t know how he had gotten through it. He said it had added ten years to his life. Effie bathed his face in eau de cologne, held his head, opened a window. Eventually, he seemed a little better, but his dread is understandable. For all the romance and melodrama he had been involved in, he knew no more about women and sex than Ruskin had when he got married. And look what happened to Ruskin!
But within two months of the wedding Effie was pregnant. They had rented a house next door to Effie’s parents in Perth and lived there for the first two years of their married life. Eventually, they would have eight children – four boys and four girls. Eventually, he would become Sir John Everett Millais and president of the Royal Academy. Their marriage would seem to be happy, except that when they travelled in Italy, Everett (for so Effie called him, to distinguish him from her first husband John) was never enthusiastic enough to suit Effie, who remained an Italophile. They would have built for themselves a sumptuous neo-Renaissance mansion opposite Kensington Gardens. He would be making £25,000 per year. From his deathbed, he would even prevail upon the Queen to receive his wife at court again. But although he was a commercial and popular success, critics no longer thought so highly of his work as they once had. The meticulous Pre-Raphaelite had become sloppy and hasty, as well as sentimental, giving visual form to the domestic pieties of his time. The talent which had once been used to paint the foam on the rushing water at Glenfinlas now painted soap bubbles delighting a little girl, and the painting Bubbles – to Millais’s own horror it is true – was used as an advertisement for Pears soap.
Ruskin continued to praise Millais’s work in the Academy showings of 1855 and 1856, thus proving to most people his disinterestedness and lack of petty malice. However, when he began attacking Millais in 1857, his disapproval had all the more weight. Millais himself felt it couldn’t be connected with their personal entanglement. Other critics, whether or not following Ruskin’s lead, have dated Millais’s decline from 1857, the year he exhibited Sir Isumbras at the Ford, and this date follows so closely upon his marriage that it has been hard for people, who, as Millais said, will always be unkind if they can, to resist the deduction that Effie was responsible for her husband’s betrayal of his talent. One wicked wit went so far as to suggest that if Ruskin had stayed married to Effie, he would have written Bubbles. But it may be useful to think of George Eliot’s reminder that there were ‘spots of commonness’ in Lydgate which made him susceptible to Rosamund’s trivialisation and which explain why his wife was not wholly to blame (if blame is relevant) for his ending up a fashionable doctor and abandoning the high dedication of his youth. My own guess is that just as it took Ruskin’s insistence as well as Millais’s talent to finish the Glenfinlas portrait, it probably took two – or maybe even three – to paint Bubbles.
NOTES
1.I’m told that English radicals are so accustomed to this happening that whenever it rains on a demonstration they point to Heaven and say, ‘See. He knows which side His bread is buttered on.’
2.Mary Lutyens, The Ruskins and the Grays (London: John Murray, 1972), 106. My chapters about the Ruskins could not have been written without Mary Lutyens’s three brilliantly edited collections of their letters, of which this was the last to be published.
3.Quoted in Peter Quennell, John Ruskin: The Portrait of a Prophet (London: Collins, 1949), 56–57.
4. From Ruskin’s statement to his proctor in the nullity suit, published in J. Howard Whitehouse, Vindication of Ruskin (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950), 15. Effie revealed the facts of her marriage to her parents in a letter of March 7, 1854, including the information that after six years, Ruskin had told her his ‘true reason’ for not making love to her, ‘that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April’. See Mary Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins (London: John Murray, 1967), 156.
5. See Mary Lutyens, Young Mrs Ruskin in Venice (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1966), 21. (Published in England as Effie in Venice.)
6.See Michael Brooks, ‘Love and Possession in a Victorian Household: The Example of the Ruskins’ in The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978), 82–100, for a discussion of how the elder Ruskins’ smothering affection worked against independence in their son.
Freud’s brief essay ‘Medusa’s Head’ suggests a psychoanalytic approach to Ruskin’s alleged fixation on pubic hair. To Freud, the bizarre imagery of the mythic Medusa’s head, surmounted by snakes instead of hair, expresses a man’s horror at seeing a woman naked and perceiving that she has no penis. His castration anxieties aroused, he fastens attention on her pubic hair and transforms it (symbolically) into an over-abundance of the thing whose absence so terrifies him. Hence the imagery of hair as snakes, to express the terrifying aspects of female sexuality. It might be noted that in his later years Ruskin frequently mentioned the Medusa and was obsessed by visions of snakes. See Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press) 18: 273–74.
7.R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 53.
8.Quoted in Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley (New York: Mason/Charter, 1975), 86.
9.See A. Dwight Culler, ‘Introduction’ in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, John Henry Cardinal Newman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Edition, 1956).
10.Chitty, The Beast and the Monk, 87–88.
11.James Atlas gives a recent example in his biography of Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz and his wife, an uneasy couple, were visited one night by Norman Jacobs, who had just read Léon Blum’s Du mariage and described to them Blum’s theory of why couples suffered on their wedding night from what he called ‘physical disharmony’. ‘It was because men tended to confine their sexual experience to prostitutes before marriage, Jacobs explained, while their wives lacked any sexual experience at all. Delmore and Gertrude became increasingly tense as Jacobs talked on, and when his enthusiastic peroration ended, a terrible silence ensued. Not until that moment did it occur to their well-meaning visitor that he may have been describing a situation all too familiar to his auditors.’ James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Avon Books, 1978), 117.
Even in this decade, when pre-mari
tal sex is the rule rather than the exception, there may be wedding night trauma, though of a different kind. Can society’s sudden approval quench one’s private pleasures as society’s disapproval did before?
12. James Anthony Froude, My Relations with Carlyle (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 23; also 4–7, 17, 21, 22. On her deathbed, so that Froude would not doubt her sincerity, Geraldine Jewsbury repeated the accusation with details: ‘The morning after his wedding-day he tore to pieces the flower garden at Comely Bank in a fit of ungovernable fury.’ Froude was convinced by the solemnity of the deathbed scene and by the singularity of the details that, despite Geraldine’s reputation as something of a flibbertigibbet, she was relating absolutely what Mrs Carlyle told her. And to doubt Mrs Carlyle was impossible. A more vivid but less reliable source of information about the Carlyles’ intimate life is Frank Harris, who, in his autobiography, cites as his source Sir Richard Quain, a physician who attended the Carlyles in their later years. Sir Richard (according to Harris) had examined Mrs Carlyle when she was in her late forties and found her to be a virgin. Mrs Carlyle was also alleged to have described to the doctor how Carlyle on their wedding night ‘lay there, jiggling like’ until she started laughing and he ran out of the room with one contemptuous word: ‘Women!’ Frank Harris, My Life and Loves (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 209–11.
