Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  And he dreamt of Rose as a young girl, attempting to sell him a set of keys that were snatched from them both, and crushed.

  He stopped numbering the days in his diary.

  He went to Abbeville, and lost himself each day in drawing the spalling beauties of Northern Gothic churches. He saw an antelope which reminded him of Rose. One night in his room he was frightened to see the wallpaper resolve itself into leering faces.

  January 3rd 1869 was Rose’s twenty-first birthday. No message came.

  He was working on a book drawn from a linked series of essays as an expression of his new cosmos. He employed the goddess Athena, and the gods Apollo and Hermes in an attempt to unite the worlds of nature, society, and self. He wrote of the birth of Hermes almost as the birth of Christ, and used Hebrew figures as well as the inventions of Dante and Shakespeare to point a path to the key of all mythologies: all true visions by noble persons reverberated in every other; lent new depth, shading and perspective to the grandest conceptions of the spirit and imagination, as the seed contains the flower.

  But The Queen of the Air contained the specific as well as the grand, and he examined closely two strains of myths––that of the Dove, and that of the Serpent.

  The strain of writing it was too great; he must retreat to Switzerland or risk collapse. Norton was now living in London. Ruskin asked his friend to see it through the presses, and fled.

  Poring over the manuscript, Norton felt passages pierce his heart like arrows. Bereft from the death of his wife, he himself stayed alive only for his young children’s sake. Faced now with the legal aspects of seeing Ruskin’s book through to publication, Norton inquired if he had made a will. Not yet, Ruskin wrote back, but all my work’s posthumous now.

  In her bedroom at Harristown Rose LaTouche read her slender copy of The Queen of the Air, marking the margins with pencilled comments as she did so. Almost as soon as she began reading she realised it had been written for her, and began to be fearful as she turned the pages. Their love was impossible, why could he not leave her alone? She wanted to feel close to him yet, even though they could never wed––why did he drive her away with his words? She looked down at the slender volume, afraid to go on, unable to stop.

  The author was decrying those who would not attend to the wisdom of a pre-Christian age and dismissed the sincerity of those who, through their accident of birth, had no other gods to worship but Pagan. How cruel and unpardonable it was for such readers to claim, ‘There is no God but for me.’ Later she found a passage in which he derided the “insane religion, degraded art, merciless toil” of the modern age; “the race itself still half-serpent...a lacertine breed of bitterness.” By it she could only write, “Poor green lizards! They are not bitter; why not say serpentine?” She knew he meant Lacerta, her mother’s pet-name; and he went on in ways that horrified her about creeping serpents; dark oriental mysteries concerning snakes; of poisoned life lashing through grasses. She could not understand it, she wrote; and it all was so terribly heathenish.

  At the end of the first week of January 1870 Ruskin walked up the steps of the Royal Academy at twelve o’clock. Entering the first gallery he saw a woman, alone. It was Rose.

  She turned from the canvas she was standing before and caught sight of him. She started and fled. He would not let her escape. Catching her up in the next gallery of green landscapes he held out his hand. Her eyes were wild with fear and her small nostrils flared. Wordlessly he drew from his breast the silk wallet he carried each day. Within were two thin sheets of beaten gold which enclosed her most treasured letters to him.

  “Here are my most precious belongings––they are yours. Take them.”

  Her eyes did not leave his face, did not register the offered wallet.

  “No.”

  If she would not have them back––? “No?” he asked, barely able to frame the word.

  “No,” she breathed.

  Yet her thin frame was so rigid that there was nothing of hope in it. He slid the wallet back next to his heart and left.

  He wrote no diary entry for January 7th, only marking the worst day of his life with a cross.

  The next month she wrote him.

  I will trust you, she said, I do love you. I have loved you, though the shadows that have come between us could not but make me fear you and turn from you. I love you, & shall love you always, always––& you can make this mean what you will. I have doubted your love, I have wished not to love you. I have thought you unworthy, yet––as surely as I believe God loves you, as surely as my trust is in His Love, I love you––still, and always. Do not doubt this anymore. I believe God meant us to love each other, yet Life––and it seems God’s will––has divided us...I am forbidden to write to you, and I cannot continue to do so––And now––may I say God bless you?

  In Siena Ruskin greeted Charles Eliot Norton as he always had, with both hands outstretched and pulling him close. Norton, holding Ruskin at arms’ length, was struck by his friend’s otherworldliness. Ruskin was not of this sphere, Norton thought, but a 12th century angel who had somehow lost its wings and been waylaid on this Earth, to his sorrow.

  Ruskin took his friend’s arm. They walked through the same arches Dante had passed, and wandered the hills above town where sudden fireflies flitted and shone like flying candles against the golden twilight. They spoke of the paintings of Mantegna, of Raphael, Luini, and Lippi; they watched in silence as the colours of the striped facades beneath them paled into blue dusk. Even Norton, at Ruskin’s elbow, grew indistinct. Everything began to meld and mingle before him. Everything––the faded crumbling stone, the hidden birds calling in the dark cypresses, the rising scent of wild thyme bruising beneath their feet, the fearful glitter of the fireflies about their heads––seemed to merge. It was intoxicating to eyes, ears, and nose; it made Ruskin dizzy. How things bind and blend themselves together!

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Lamp of Power & The Lamp of Beauty

  London: 1865

  If Ruskin could not focus his mind to work he could still work through others.

  Miss Octavia Hill sat at tea with him in the front parlour. It was not a room which gave Ruskin special delight. His father had long ago selected the red flocked paper covering the walls, and the ungiving, almost-purple chairs upon which they sat. But the room had large windows opening to the cedar of Lebanon outside, and the table before them was set with his favourite blue and pink Staffordshire china service. On the work table they had just turned from lay a few pages cut from one of Ruskin’s medieval missals. Miss Hill had copied their delicate paintings and these had appeared in Volume V of Modern Painters.

  “One feels so strongly the call to be of service, the dire need of so many,” she said. Miss Hill was not yet thirty and had known Ruskin for nearly fifteen years. She had been an early and enthusiastic reader of his books on art and architecture, and, unlike many of his initial readers, had responded warmly to their embedded social message. She also possessed enough artistic skill so that when they met he had been happy to train her in copying medieval miniatures to illustrate his writings; he employed a number of able young persons in this way. She had received a regular allowance to paint for him, and he helped her found a small school for girls so that she might be more fully employed.

  “Think of the shameful instance of that woman dying in that unventilated basement hovel––the rent she paid to her drunken land-lord––the hordes of children playing in and around open sewers throughout London––children raised in savagery, with no hope or prospect of living to adulthood in such filth.”

  Ruskin sat back and smiled at her. “I believe, my dear Octavia, that you have a solution to propose to me?”

  Miss Hill did not flush, and did not even pause. “I do indeed, and would not risk the telling of it to anyone but you.” She replaced the china cup in its scalloped-edge saucer. She was not a demonstrative speaker, but being quietly forceful none the less need
ed both small hands free.

  “I have found three houses off the Marylebone High Street, on Paradise Place. They would require considerable work to make them habitable to a decent standard, but I believe the owner could be assured of a 5% annual return on his investment, for I should only rent to poor working women of the highest character.”

  There, it was out, and before him. Here––and on the ill-named Paradise Place––was Ruskin’s chance to experiment with his ideas on ethical political economy, and here too was an energetic, strong-minded, trustworthy discipline of his social doctrine to execute it.

  “How much is the lease-hold?” was how he answered.

  “₤1,500, and it would be a dead loss; and then there will be the expenses to clean and modernize the lodgings.” Miss Hill was meticulous in her copying and equally so in her planning.

  His father’s old friends had attempted to advise him on the wise disposition of his sudden wealth. Ignoring them Ruskin had promptly lost a good deal of money in buying up mortgages which turned out to be faulty.

  “It is important that the venture not come to a smash,” he said.

  “The initial investment is––well, I suppose lost; but I believe I can promise the owner a firm 5% return per annum on rents from the women.” She looked at him brightly, eagerly, until she became aware she had held her gaze a moment too long for seemliness. She glanced down and smoothed her skirt with her hands, then shifted her brown eyes away to the damask draperies.

  Ruskin already owned property in working-class Marylebone. He had been left with the problem of how to accommodate the elderly servants his parents had accumulated over the years. The Daily Telegraph had claimed it was now impossible to find good servants, and Ruskin answered this charge in a number of letters pointing out the necessity of first being worthy of being served. His direct action was to buy up a few suitable properties in Marylebone and so provide homes for the superannuated members of Denmark Hill’s staff.

  A five per cent return was what he had written was a just and proper rate of return on such investments; anything beyond was criminal, predatory.

  He had already made up his mind, but sat there silently, with his eyes upon Octavia Hill. Her person was tidy, with a level of comeliness common to good health and natural vitality. She was highly intelligent. Her social aims and values were his own. She was devoted to him.

  Why then, he asked himself as he looked at her, did he feel nothing, no stirring of emotion or even affection beyond what he might bestow upon any industrious do-gooding maiden lady of his acquaintance? She, or any number of other young ladies he associated with, could be a perfect help-meet for him. He had only to move his chair closer to hers, and take one of those capable small hands in his own. Soon she would no doubt be the one to take him in hand, to worry and fret over him, make of his comfort a project that like all else she undertook she would make a success of. This bustling little woman before him had a heart filled with warmth, ready, perhaps yearning, to love: Why could he not accept it? He was acutely aware of a limiting factor more important than Miss Hill’s creditable appearance, aspirations, or emotional capabilities, a limitation or absence in her very fibre that precluded any romantic imaginings. Miss Hill lacked poetry.

  He asked no further question, and returned to the venture on Paradise Place. “Then let it be so. I will tell my attorneys to attend to it tomorrow.”

  Carlyle had been like water flowing under a glacier to him, unseen but there, helping to advance the massive ice sheet to its goal. His was a light in which he saw himself differently. He stopped appending “by the author of Modern Painters” to his published works. And now that his own father was dead, he began calling the old man Papa.

  Over the last few years Carlyle had become as well his closest friend, even displacing Norton in his trust. Norton, clinging to his doomed American ideals of democracy and equality, could not enter into sympathy with much of Ruskin’s political thinking. When Carlyle completed his six volume study of Frederick the Great the old man confessed that he felt actual despair at the thirteen year burden of its writing having been lifted. He recognised in Carlyle the slough of stupefaction he himself had laboured under when Modern Painters was concluded.

  There was only one topic he could not speak to Carlyle freely about, one pain he could not seek comfort for without risking impatience or misapprehension. He could not hazard speaking about his Rose.

  Sitting up one night at Cheyne Row, Ruskin rehearsed his physical symptoms and told Carlyle he thought he was dying. The old sage drew from his pipe and finding it cold, rapped its contents out against the fire-breast. “Moulting is the better term, my boy. Keep writing.”

  In London Ruskin went to a lecture on Shakespeare and was left wondering how truthful was the speaker’s suppositions of the bard’s intent. Walking from the lecture hall he was struck that perhaps he himself had read too much into the work of Turner.

  Turner’s art was the first light Ruskin had ever grasped toward, the fountainhead of illimitable truth and splendour at which he had endlessly replenished himself. Every following passion was rooted in the wake, and watered in the shallows of that grand discovery. And what harvest had this adoration reaped? He had made of Turner’s genius an elaborate scaffolding encompassing a world of his own devising, one of complex and even conflicting artistic and moral principles and precepts, which, coincidentally, the artist himself had had no interest in. The scaffolding which bore Ruskin aloft to such heights of wonder lacked a steadying foundation, and was never high enough or long enough to enclose the limitless world it had been erected to surround. Every attraction and attachment he had formed, whether to the human heart or to human creativity, had ended in frustration. How the power of his intellect, the passion of his longing, heart-ache, rejection, confusion, and misapprehension, had been squandered by those he had most yearned to bless! How he had squandered himself! Everything and everyone he believed in betrayed him in the end.

  If he thought he could see Rose he would go to Ireland and lay down at her gate–– beg her father to take him as a common herdsmen––anything to place himself near her. He was so sick for the sight of her he would risk being dragged away from their very door.

  Forbidden Ruskin’s letters, there was yet a way to speak to Rose, and that was through his published writings. Sesame and Lilies discussed the social inequities which troubled him, and dealt too with the proper education and responsibilities of the young. But it was his focus on the upbringing of girls that marked the book. He examined the characters and actions of Shakespeare’s heroines, calling the catastrophe of every play the fault of a man, and the redemption, if redemption were to be found, brought about by the wisdom and virtue of a woman. He urged that adolescent girls be kept away from modern magazines and novels, but set loose in old libraries to find their way amongst their treasures. He spoke of the essential Queenliness of womanhood, and the necessity for queenly action amongst women. He urged them not to be cruel. It was meant as a letter to one girl.

  Its commercial success surprised him. The numbers of intellectuals and artists who had waded through the five volumes of Modern Painters, or the economists and social reformers who had reviled or endorsed Unto this Last was minute compared to those dutiful mothers and doting aunts who now swept into their local book sellers to place Sesame and Lilies into the hands of their female charges.

  His mother had for years insisted the family move out of the house each spring that Denmark Hill might be thoroughly cleaned. He now took advantage of this annual inconvenience by pulling from his walls fifty paintings, forty of them Turners. The jewel of the collection was Turner’s ‘Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying’ which his father had presented to him as token of the achievement embodied in the first volume of Modern Painters. He had it and the other Turners unceremoniously crated up, along with paintings by Copley Fielding and a few others he had collected over the years. As the packers hammered down the lid over John Brett’
s ‘Val d’Aosta’, he could not but recall Maria LaTouche’s rapturous response to seeing it upon her first visit with Rose to Denmark Hill.

  He was heedless of their disposition. They might end up in Paris, or Moscow, or Boston; he cared not. He sent them all off to Christie’s, and wrote the auction catalogue descriptions himself. He reaped the better part of 6,000 guineas for this expurgation.

  At the end of each decade he re-read Thomas Carlyle’s complete works, making notes of new impressions and changes in his understanding. He began this time with Sartor Resartus––and wrote his Papa that he had nearly all his clothes to make fresh––but more shroud-shape than any other.

  In August at breakfast on his terrace in Lugano, Ruskin opened a telegram brought to him by a panting boy. In recognition of his contribution to art criticism his alma mater had elected him Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, and thus the University’s first professor of art. In his new capacity he would prepare and deliver a series of lectures upon art-subjects, intended for undergraduates of that institution but open also to the public at large.

  His first thought was the amount of pleasure news of his appointment would have given his dead father. His second was that it might yet give pleasure to a certain someone who had dealt him his greatest pain.