Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  Freed from the omnipresent Ruskins, Effie hoped here, in Byron’s magical watery setting, the intimacy she hoped for might now be attained. Dr. Simpson in Edinburgh had told her to have children, that this would help her health and cure her restlessness. But she had not been confident enough to tell him that her husband never did more than nuzzle her neck. Her mother had never asked and she could not bear to broach the topic with her. Indeed she felt ashamed to admit this; it seemed a reflection on the desirability of her person. Here in Venice they shared the same bed, and if John was pleased with his work or with her, he might hold her in his arms. But he kept his hands either upon her shoulders or at his own sides, and never would kiss her mouth. If she tried to press her body against his he pulled away. He held himself always back, and then bidding her goodnight, would turn away. She could not understand why, after laying next to her for some minutes, he sometimes got up and actually left the bed. For what purpose did he leave?

  “John,” she said one night as she was readying for bed, “I want––a child.”

  It had taken enormous strength to nerve herself, but she had said it. It was shortly after they had arrived in Venice and the delight of being there was full upon them both. Their bedroom was airy and the bed a fantasy of gilding and grinning cherubs.

  He had just entered the bedroom and after pausing went to his side of the bed. She began to go to him but was checked by his look. She sat down instead near the foot of the bed.

  “We have before discussed this,” he said. They had been in Venice but a few days and his brain was teeming with ideas and impressions about the fabric of the city. The enormity of what he needed to discover to tell the truth about Venetian architecture––about the Venetian character––seemed staggering. Now this distraction.

  “I don’t want a discussion,” she answered, confident in her claim and unwilling to beseech him. In fact he had posed argument after argument against it; demolishing her feeble attempts to persuade him. Even the need to persuade him shamed her. He had cited the necessity that she be a good travelling companion; the dangers to her of pregnancy and child-bearing; the sacrifice of her beauty. His argument varied and the result, never. She stood up and faced him. “I want to know what is––wrong.”

  Effie thought perhaps she knew. Impressed by his filial devotion she had written him during their engagement You who are so kind to your parents will be a perfect husband to me.

  I find I am always happiest when I am most dutiful, he had responded.

  Perhaps her in-laws’ disapproval had acted as a curb to their son’s ardour.

  He was silent, and she went on. “Is it––for your parents? I know they did not wish you to wed me.”

  John’s mouth began to twist. He looked as if she had uttered the worst blasphemy against God.

  He was, in fact, not thinking of sacrilege, nor even of her opening demand for a baby. He heard only the accusation against his parents, and could not speak for himself. Her words moved his own concerns and reservations into the recesses of his consciousness. He saw his father’s white head and thought of the old man’s tireless toil, a toil underpinning and making possible his son’s aspirations. If his father’s monetary generosity had been sometimes grudging it had at least been constant, supporting both him and Effie on this trip and in their London lives. He was stung by a sense of impropriety that was unconcealed in his answer.

  “How can you dare speak of them in this respect––as kind as they have been to you since girlhood––as if they were now obstacles to your personal felicity?”

  Effie’s response was swift. “I don’t question their kindness, now or in the past.” The table had been turned and she would fight to regain her ground and press her point. “Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin have been great friends to me, but not, I think, to our union.” She stepped towards him. “And there has been no union for us. None.”

  She watched her husband’s face, blue eyes wide but immobile. “You were, and still are, too much theirs, John. I know if they had to “lose you” to marriage, I would not have been their choice. That I was yours, just enough to get your way in the matter, has not been enough for you to truly defy or deny them.”

  But John had turned away in distaste and confusion. The passionate declarations he had written during their engagement, the fantastical and fevered longings he had suffered, were phantoms he could no longer recognize as having been inspired by the exacting and insistent woman standing before him. The once-delicious fears she had engendered in him, of losing himself in her, of being powerless before her, were the only remnants of his earlier captivation that remained.

  He must say something, buy time and distance, and in order to obtain them risked sounding ridiculous.

  “I shall make you my wife when you reach twenty-five,” he said at last.

  That was five years from now.

  One afternoon when the rain had turned to sleet Ruskin took shelter from his outdoor labours in the Accademia. In the winter light the place was duskier than usual, but he had from prior visits intimate knowledge of the rooms and corridors and the paintings they held. The galleries were unheated and he warmed his freezing fingers above the candle he had bought from the drowsing cicerone. He found himself in the room with Carpaccio’s St. Ursula series, and he visited each panel in turn. There was the golden-haired princess slumbering in her bed, starting out on her pilgrimage, meeting the pagan prince she was promised to, massed with her attendant 11,000 virgins, striding boldly to her virgin martyrdom. He went back to the painting of young Ursula asleep, asleep and waiting. Her face was inexpressibly tender, delicately mystical, receptive. He had never seen a woman look like that.

  Effie kept intact her Scottish reserve and beliefs. She read her Bible in St. Mark’s during Roman services, and refused all invitations for Sundays. Her letters home were filled with news of parties she had gone to, lace she had bought at a bargain, principesse who had complimented her taste in dress. To the world around them, to even Charlotte, she looked half of a happily married couple. Some afternoons John would accompany Charlotte and her to the Accademia and explain the paintings to them. On one of these visits she wandered into the room which housed a set of pretty and old panels of a blonde girl in her bed, and what looked like the girl’s martyrdom. She thought it the kind of thing John would like but when he saw her before it he walked away without describing it to her.

  Sometimes he took them out in the lagoon in their gondola. Effie tried oaring it herself once, proud to master the balance required to turn the vessel, and John watched approvingly. But then he’d written of it to his father. Mr. Ruskin, who kept the Sabbath so strictly that he rarely wrote even a letter upon that day, was enough alarmed at such unladylike behaviour to do so.

  And the Ruskins could be so ridiculous, Effie thought. In letters to them both Mr. Ruskin was grumbling about the expense of the vacant town house in Park Street––a place neither she nor John had ever asked for––complaining that they had spent less than six weeks there, and then it had sat empty all this time. It wasn’t her fault her illness drove her home to Bowerswell, nor that John immediately decamped to Denmark Hill. She had to laugh at their sense of economy––Mrs. Ruskin paid fully £30 per annum to her cook, while boasting how cheaply she ran the household––while Mr. Ruskin begrudged every cent John pleaded for to buy precious manuscripts here, now offered for a pittance by desperate Venetians.

  Far worse, she had made the mistake of mentioning in a letter to them that she had gone to the Protestant service there, at which John’s mother had immediately leapt to the conclusion that John had attended Mass. Every moment he spent in Catholic countries made Mrs. Ruskin anxious, and the hours he stood lost in contemplating the framed Madonnas, Crucifixions, Depositions, Dormitions, and Lives of the Martyrs were, she feared, working on his brain. In England the tracts of the Puseyites and the Oxford Movement were swaying young people to Catholicism, and his mother knew that four of his friends from Christ Chur
ch College had abandoned the Anglican Church for that of Rome. A flurry of letters from them both was necessary to reassure her that John had not been corrupted. Effie would have laughed at his mother’s lack of confidence in him if the entire small matter had not been made so absurdly serious to all.

  Venice had always drawn from Ruskin a confusing mixture of responses. Each subsequent return had deepened his knowledge of the battered yet dazzling creation risen from the mud flats of the Adriatic. It was a landscape wholly artificial, utterly man-made, anchored on piers of Istrian pine in fortified mud flats, a centuries-long cobbling together of precious stones and coloured smalti and looted treasure, elusive and shimmering and rotting all at once. No one but Turner could convey the visual effects of its aqueous setting: the shifting light upon the sparkling silver or oily virescent waters; the limitless expanse of luminosity––sea reflected in sky and sky in sea––crowning or mirroring the monuments along the Grand Canal. Northern Lombard and southern Arab culture had collided here, with the Gothic their architectural offspring.

  Now the more he looked the less he felt he knew. He spent days paging through ancient maps and cracked volumes in the vast and vastly contradictory resources of the Biblioteca Marciana, the library of St. Mark’s. The history of La Serenissima, and thus of its buildings, was as twisted and convoluted as the progress of the serpentine canals. The story of Venice’s miraculous buildings, the zenith of Gothic architecture, could not be teazed out through its innumerable state archives. It must be read in its stones.

  “Signore Ruskin! Una lettera importante...”

  He and George Hobbs were in the cemetery on Murano, where he was drawing amongst the crumbling marble of the graves. Now here was come a breathless Domenico, by another gondola, across the lagoon after him. He feared the worst at Denmark Hill until he saw the address written in his father’s hand, the “urgent” on the reverse decidedly firm.

  Turner was dead.

  He was old; it was to be expected. His body had betrayed him with the years, and so too had his mind. It was to be expected. This brilliant Sun whose meridian had illuminated landscape and seascape with its unmatched gift was now returned to the eye of the Father whose message of supernal loveliness only he could convey.

  He sat down on a gravestone and wept.

  Turner had painted these very walls surrounding him, showing them violet in a long twilight. Cemetery wall, Doge’s Palace, Loire valley, Rhine cliff face, all had lost their great witness.

  When he had recovered himself he read the details of his father’s letter.

  Turner had left every painting, every drawing, every scrap of paper he had ever scribbled upon and which he still owned, to the British people. It was to be preserved, kept together, shown together, and made free for viewing. Tears of astonished gratitude sprang to his eyes; he had to wipe them again. He could have no more Turners fresh from the easel, but they would all be saved, the entire contents of the miserable little house on Queen Anne Street, the scores of oils, the thousands of watercolours, the tens of thousands of drawings.

  Turner had left no painting to him, and it would have stung if he had not the great fact of the national bequest to recur to. His earthly Master had instead designated nineteen guineas be given him, for the purpose of buying a mourning ring to wear in remembrance.

  With a gift such as that, his father reminded him, no one could ever say he had been paid to praise.

  Disturbed Imagination. Ruskin was listing the vital characteristics of the builder of true Gothic design. A disturbed imagination fostered that sense of the grotesque that delighted in the fantastical and ludicrous, as well as sublime, images elemental to the Gothic temperament. The other essential elements were Savageness, or Rudeness; Love of Change; Love of Nature; Obstinacy; and Generosity.

  Savageness was reflected in the fierce weather and rugged environs against which the northern builder, the inventor of the Gothic style, must shelter himself; and more importantly the honest and desirable imperfections inherent in work created by hand from original expression. Paired with savageness was a Love of Change, delighting in a multitudinous variety of form and ornament. Love of Nature engendered a loving observation of leaves, flowers, and vines, inspiring endless variations of these same to be worked upon the capitals of columns, and in other decoration. Obstinacy took the form of natural, active rigidity, as exhibited in the northern lightning-bolt depicted not as a curving arc but a forked angularity, and seen too in the strength of will and resoluteness of purpose––that natural obstinacy––of the Gothic peoples, the English, French, Danish, and German. Generosity endowed architecture with a lavish and costly ornamentation, an uncalculating bestowal of its labour, both in reflection of Nature’s abundance and as a sign of sacrifice of materials and time.

  He measured, sketched, and jotted notes all day as he explored the nature of Gothic. He climbed into the filthy and forgotten recesses of church alcoves and campaniles, and risked his life upon their roofs. His fingers froze drawing window jambs in January cold, and no matter how warm his stock, or how tightly wrapped, his throat was chilled in the bitter air. He returned to the hotel each afternoon with a portfolio crammed with information which he must then order when the impressions were still fresh. His stomach troubled him, a bitter taste lingering in his mouth; and his pulse was oftentimes fast, or irregular. Writing so much, drawing so much, had caused dark floating objects to appear to swim before his eyes; one looked terrifyingly like a serpent.

  There was a feeling almost overpowering––an instinct perhaps––driving him with an inexpressible passion to embrace the city, to absorb it. It felt a physical drive like hunger or thirst. He wanted to draw all of St. Mark’s, stone by stone, to feel it in his fingers. To eat it all up into his mind, touch by touch.

  “Read me something,” Effie asked John one day when lashing rain had driven him inside. He sat at his desk and had momentarily paused to rest his cupped hands against his eyes. “Something from what you’re working on.”

  He rustled loose pages, found a folder with a slender notebook and opened it.

  “Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England...”

  Chapter Eleven

  The Lamp of Life

  London: July 1850

  “Her Majesty has asked that your painting be temporarily removed from the Academy exhibition so that she herself might examine it.”

  It was William Dyce who delivered this astonishing request to Millais. Dyce was older, a member of the Academy, but a great admirer of the Nazarenes. At this year’s private view he had taken his friend Ruskin’s arms and forcibly propelled him back to where Millais’ painting hung, imploring him to take a second look.

  Millais was speechless for a moment. It was awkward to be both the young hope of the Academy and by his newest works a rebel to its mores. His entry for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition had from the first viewing engendered vitriolic censure. He had had the audacity––the blasphemous audacity, according to his harshest critics––to depict the Holy Family in a completely naturalistic manner. His untitled painting of Christ with his parents showed the working interior of St. Joseph’s carpenter shop, down to the dirt under the saint’s fingernails. The shop floor was littered with wood curls and the walls hung with ordinary and quite prosaic tools. St. Joseph and an assistant were seen planing a door, while in the centre of the canvas the boy Jesus, who has cut his palm with a nail, held his hand up for his kneeling mother to see. Another boy in furred loincloth, St. John, hastened with a basin of water.

  No less a personage than Charles Dickens attacked the Christ-child as a “hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a night-gown” and the other commentators were little kinder. The questioning but generally admiring reception given his ‘Isabella’ was not to be repeated with this new effort. He had found a carpenter’s shop in Oxfo
rd Street where he slept in a cot so he might detail the interior before the work of the day commenced. He bought sheeps’ heads from the local butcher to assure the veracity of the flock, representative of Christianity, seen through the open doorway of the shop in his painting. His commitment to fidelity was so great that he pricked his own finger and squeezed out the blood onto the upraised palm of the boy posing as the Child so that he might capture the actual colour red.

  Now the Queen wished to see it, free from the inconvenience on her royal person and the Academy viewing-public, of arranging a special view at the Academy’s quarters in Trafalgar Square.

  “I hope it will not have any bad effects upon her mind,” he wrote to Hunt that evening.

  When the royal personage stepped into the empty room where the summoned painting awaited her, she wasted no time in approaching. The President of the Royal Academy attended her, careful to keep his own eyes on the disputed work, and not search Her Majesty’s for sign of approbation or censure. After glancing over the whole of the active canvas she settled before the kneeling figure of Mary embracing her little son, his wounded hand exposed to her gaze. The thirty-one year old Queen was already mother to seven children. Studying the painting, she noted the suffering and prescience that marked the holy virgin’s face. It was exactly the face of motherhood, thought Victoria.

  “Gabriel did it,” Millais said. “He went and asked his brother, and Collinson, and Woolner, into our Brotherhood––our Brotherhood––without asking us; dodges hanging his pictures with ours at the Academy, yet put “PRB” first on his ‘Mary Virgin’, and now I know it was he who tipped off the papers about the name. It had to be.”