Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

In the Hilary Term of 1870––the day of his birthday, 8 February––he stood in the Sheldonian Theatre where thirty-one years ago he had read aloud his school-boy poetry that had won him the Newdigate Prize. He was to have made his Inaugural Address in the theatre of the new Oxford Museum, but the size of the waiting crowd dictated the impromptu switch to the larger Sheldonian. He had not imagined he should stand there again.

  He found lecturing as freeing to the imagination as ever, and devised dramatic ways of capturing his audience’s attention––laying glass over a Turner water-colour and drawing directly upon it to illustrate the master’s perspective techniques; summoning scouts to rapidly enter holding aloft a sequence of bold line drawings on the development of ecclesiastical architecture, appearing with arms laden with blossoming tree branches for a talk on colour harmony.

  During term Ruskin took up lodgings near Oxford. Out walking a country lane he struck up a conversation with an amiable old man, and asking him if he could send him one of his books as a token, was told that he had never learnt to read. For response he took him in his arms and kissed him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Lamp of Power & The Lamp of Beauty

  June 1871

  The wedding breakfast was winding to its close, and the dancing was soon to begin. The bride had signed the church register “Joan Agnew” and had been Mrs. Arthur Severn for three hours. Now she was in her bedroom pinning on her travelling hat. Joan smiled at herself in the glass. What a lovely morning she had had! Her dear Coz had given her and Arthur the most heartfelt of toasts at the table. Coz looked dapper in a new grey suit with a rose in the button-hole, and a bright blue stock about his throat. How dear he was––as dear as her own dead father––and more generous than she would have ever hoped.

  Ruskin had made Arthur Severn wait three years for his cousin Joan, years in which the aspiring watercolourist was forbidden to write to her. Severn had duly reappeared and Ruskin, granting what he had not been himself given, rewarded his faithfulness with the young woman’s hand. As a wedding present Ruskin conveyed to Joan the lease on his London childhood home, with his sole request that she save Herne Hill’s third floor––his old nursery––for his own use. Margaret Ruskin had taken a shine to Joan’s new husband, and had given Arthur a sum of money, to be spent only on furniture, and that mahogany. After the engagement was formalized the suitor had been allowed upstairs of an evening to Aunt Margaret’s rooms for a chat, and come down many times with a “tip” of a guinea or two which the old lady drew from the netted purse under her pillow. If young Arthur Severn had not felt it unusual to accept a gratuity from his future kin, Joan’s own experience as poor relation in an eccentric household did not equip her to sense the impropriety of either offer or acceptance.

  Now Joan Agnew Severn was heading off on her wedding trip. Ruskin had arranged that as well. She and Arthur were to spend their first married week not in the anonymous privacy of a hotel or rented cottage, but in Yorkshire under the consecrating roof of a country vicar who had communicated to Ruskin his interest in the paintings of Turner. When Joan had suggested that she and Arthur were anticipating a six weeks’ honeymoon tour, Ruskin paled. Her cousin made her promise that upon their return she would go on living with him and his mother at Denmark Hill.

  Five days after her wedding, Joan, in Yorkshire, opened a letter from Denmark Hill. She had written two letters home this first week, one to her aunt and one to her cousin himself. It was not enough.

  O Doanie, Ruskin wrote, using one of his pet names for her, Me was fitened dedful for no ettie––no ettie––no ettie––Sat-day––Sun-day––Mon-day––Two’s-day––so fitened...Today––no ettie again––me so misby–misby–misby...Oh me miss oo––more than tongue can tell...

  They’d used baby-talk between them for years; her cousin enjoyed it, and she indulged him. But reading this, she turned to her new husband and murmured, “John is not well.”

  Heedless of the new couple’s honeymoon privacy Ruskin wrote a second letter and told them he would join them––that they should meet him half way at the spa town Matlock in Derbyshire. He arrived in the first few days of a July that may as well have been November. The skies were cold and dark, and waiting for Joan and Arthur to arrive Ruskin wondered if these were the sorts of winds that had once brought the plague.

  He left the hotel early to sketch; there was a bank of wild roses he had seen. The morning sky seemed devoid of actual light and he could not get in the right position to the spray of thorn and bud he wanted. His paper blew and creased in the dry wind and his pencil point kept breaking off under the pressure of his hand.

  He returned to the hotel and wanted no lunch. In his room he lay upon his bed perspiring. Water came into his mouth and great waves of bile forced their way out. Then Joan was there, and Arthur too. After a long time Henry Acland came and they spoke of their days together at Oxford. He was very hot and Acland held his hands and forced open his lips. He could not stop shivering.

  When he opened his eyes there was a bowl of goldfish Joanie had brought him, goldfish and a bowl of purple grapes. He looked at them for days. Joanie sang Scottish songs to him.

  When he could speak again he recalled from his boyhood a place in the Lakes where he and his father and mother had all been happy.

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

  Chapter Twenty

  The Lamp of Truth: 1877-1878

  London: Summer 1877

  Ruskin determined to view the paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery alone. The faintness and bouts of dizziness were less frequent, and if he were mindful and above all avoided chatter and disruption, the viewing might allow him to add a few words about the gallery’s maiden exhibition to the issue of Fors he had nearly completed. He must go alone, and view the imagined extravagances and, he suspected, vulgarities of this new gallery without the yammering distraction of a companion. It was enough he would dine afterwards with Ned and Georgiana Burne-Jones; their undemanding company soothed and comforted him.

  He finished his toilette in the top floor of the old Herne Hill house––“my old nursery-room, feeling like my true home” he had told his diary––by wrapping his habitual blue stock about his throat before pulling on a light coat appropriate to the June weather. The stock was silk, of corn-flower blue: a colour to be found in the miniatures gracing a medieval missal. It suited him, and his eyes, still blue and bright, brighter perhaps than loving friends should like to see. It was old-fashioned, that wearing of a stock, but he would no more surrender it than go out in public in his dressing gown. He caught a glimpse of himself in the looking glass by the door of his aerie and for the briefest of moments shuddered. He had gone out into the streets in his dressing gown, not here in London, but months ago in Verona, gone out of his rented rooms into the campo wearing his dressing gown of Turkey-red damask, and became aware of this lapse only by the admiring glances and La Giaconda half-smiles of the Veronese he passed. And he had written about this episode––why not?––in the following issue of Fors. Odd, how the attention wandered!

  He kissed the sleeping image of St. Ursula and left.

  The Grosvenor Gallery on New Bond Street had opened in May. The product of Sir and Lady Coutts Lindsay’s cultural aspirations (and Lady Mary’s considerable fortune) was yet another alternative to the strictures of the selection committee over at the Royal Academy. It was purpose-built, and at great expense, as an art gallery, contained the suspect innovation of a restaurant, and had been hailed by several reviewers for its “Venetian atmosphere.” As Ruskin approached the massive mahogany doors he wondered how Sir Coutts’ decorators had conjured Venice.

  Venice! Ruskin was lately returned from nine months wandering that hoary ruin, from glimmering September through the dank and frosty depths of winter and out again to the brilliance of May. He knew La Serenissima for the fickle and painted mistress she was––the allure of glittering mosaic and
glinting water distracting the eye from the crumbling of rotten stone, the silent leaching of lime from ancient palazzi stripped naked of their marble by mercenary Austrians or the rapacity of Venetians themselves, the faded indecency of the hollow-eyed empty warehouses, once splendid with the world’s mercantile treasures.

  Thank God back in the ’40’s and ’50’s he had been there to document what he could. He had made notebook after notebook of measured drawings, delicate sketches of marble and limestone tracery, whole aspects of buildings before they fell to the brutal hands of the “restorers” and were spoilt forever! And what was left carted away, booty taken from this greatest repository of booty––doorways and archivolts prised out, window jambs, porphyry roundels, well heads, downspouts, even chimney pots wrenched off, crated up and shipped away for the delectation of American oil magnates and Liverpool button manufacturers. This very Grosvenor Gallery doorway had been ripped from the main portal of Santa Lucia in Venice! And hideous it was, too, the work of Andrea Palladio, that standard bearer of the Rinascimento––the end of all honesty in architecture and painting, the beginning of “Classical” conceit and corruption made manifest in stone and tempera.

  But the paintings of Venice! In Doge’s Palace and locked chapels in forgotten side canals they remained, in their majesty and quiet dignity––the Bellinis, the Tintorets, the intimate Annunciations and Visitations and Nativities and poignant palm-bearing martyrs. And above them all, Carpaccio, in the Accademia, with his cycle of the life and death of the little bear, Ursula, Celtic princess trothed to a pagan British king, choosing God and death.

  Venice. His fingers brushed the raised carving of the entry door, and he recalled his Christmastide in Venice, tourists fled, few shops and restaurants open, even the beggars gone. Where? He’d walk each night as was his wont, fog rising from still canals, the dark water smoking and invisible beneath it, unlit calles forcing him to grope the peeling stone building fronts with his hands to make his way from campo to campo, the stone powdering under his fingertips. Walk back to his rented rooms in the Calcina, back to the gimcrack gilded furniture and the sputtering coal fire and his copy of St. Ursula, sleeping. Waiting for him.

  Too much, too long had he studied that Carpaccio, crossing the palm of the superintendente of the Accademia to take it from the wall and set it up in an unused side room where it was his alone. The young princess-saint asleep in her high-canopied bed, receiving from the brilliant angel in her doorway the dream of the quest which would lead her to martyrdom. How he laboured over his copy, morning after morning with pencil and water-colour wash and over-glaze. His hand had trembled each time his brush touched her face. She was so like––so like––another, who now slept, and eternally. He had spent too long on it, and too long in that city of glorious decay. His wits had strayed.

  Today he had walked part of the way, a mistake. It was no longer possible to breathe deeply in London without the stink of sulphur burning one’s nostrils and stinging one’s lungs. A mephitic stench clung to his garments. Even his home at Coniston Water in the Lakes was fallen prey. Fewer and fewer clear days graced Brantwood; it too was being swallowed up by the miasma of locomotive smoke and the ghastly belchings of factory fires. Filth and more filth, all to line the pockets of industrialists and the madness of consumers clamouring for ever cheaper and more degraded goods. England was as good as gone, and at this rate, could any part of Europe escape? Could even the Alps survive?

  Now he was inside, blinking against the sky-lit harshness of the main gallery room beyond. A mildly astringent odour of freshly brushed shellac wafted to his nose. He picked up his programme and scanned the list of exhibitors: Burne-Jones of course; Watts; Poynter; Alma-Tadema; Moore; that clever girl Maria Stillman (she could show some of these men a thing or two about colour and subject!); Sir Coutts and Lady Mary Lindsay (that was rich––showing their own work in their own gallery); Whistler; the Frenchman Tissot; Millais…

  Millais. There was genius! Natural, God-granted greatness, cast aside, lost and mired and squandered now in cranking out chocolate-box prettiness. Millais, a young David, his harp a paint-brush, fountainhead of the little band of truth-seekers who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who Ruskin had taken up as a younger brother––and then who had fallen in love with Ruskin’s wife! He blinked again. That was twenty years past. More.

  It was Saturday afternoon, late, an unfashionable time to be out, and there were blessedly few viewers in the main gallery. But the absence of attendees meant that the full force of the decoration of the place hit him without the mitigation of human figures in the foreground. All was of a matter of course, achingly new; the aniline dyes from the surplus of upholstery stung his eyes. The walls were covered in patterned crimson, the floors with Persia carpets. Tables and benches in white alabaster, looking for all the world as if your hand would freeze if you touched them, stood next to couches of dark green velvet. There was gaslight blazing overhead, and glass globes fashioned in rainbow colours, and looming vases of flowers and Minton china and painted silver stars and moons upon the ceiling coving.

  He caught himself swaying under this assault, and sat down, perching on the edge of a velvet couch. From one of the entryways to the smaller galleries emerged the leonine figure of Sir Coutts, handsome as an actor. The baronet scanned the gallery and with a start of recognition caught sight of Oxford’s Slade Professor of Art. One paragraph, nay one epigram, from the Master’s pen could assure the success of his venture. The standard press had so far been kind, but should Ruskin endorse it––!

  Smiling, Sir Coutts began to stride forward to meet the eminent personage, but was checked in his progress with a single yet severe shake from Ruskin’s head. He was here as Art Critic, and must not be fawned upon or distracted. Sir Coutts retreated, with a word to one of the uniformed attendants to be attentive to any needs or requests of Mr. Ruskin’s. Ruskin rose and addressed himself to the task at hand.

  Yes, he would write about this exhibition in this month’s Fors. A representative slice of modern art-commerce lay around him. Here was a fit battleground on which to examine and joust with the pressing matter of honest value for work honestly done. Words began forming in his head, not rushing nor tumbling but an orderly march to conscious utterance. He had the unerring ability––an absolute ability––to ascertain from the opening word the conclusion of every sentence, regardless of length, subsidiary clauses, digressions––and drive towards it with utmost confidence. Not an ability he of a sudden realised, for that implied the acquisition of a skill––it was instinct with him.

  An hour passed.

  It was not all new work shown at the Grosvenor; some had been displayed in other galleries or in their artist’s studios or the drawing rooms of fashionable London and Manchester and Birmingham. But there was enough fresh work, and fresh artists, and artists known to be “the coming thing” to offer variety, and enough really well-known men, like Watts and Millais, to pull a cross section of the art-viewing world through the looted doorway. It did not all exert the same demands on him; sight and time were too precious to be thrown away on amateur production or wrong-headedness. He studied his programme and planned the visit to leave the best for last, as a treat, and made his steady way through the rooms, stopping when warranted.

  He was aware of a little murmur as he was recognised by the few viewers, some polite coughing and subtle gesturing behind him, and an almost imperceptible parting of onlookers making way before him. Some of them knew him by sight, or from photographic prints, and perchance some had attended on his words at lectures he had delivered.

  They’d stored up their treasure in him by his early works, many of which he now thought useless, and worse, damaging to their readers; and it galled him that those juvenile efforts, his language over-shot and over-laid with gilding, or rabid with Protestantism, were read more frequently than those that would do them, and society, real good. He allowed himself a short sharp glance back at his fell
ow gallery excursionists, overdressed and self important, yet with vague and timid eyes. As a group they failed miserably in comparison to the nobility of character evinced in the average Venetian portrait of the 15th century. No wonder there were no good portraits these days; there were no faces worth painting. Yet to their credit this afternoon’s art viewers left him blessedly unmolested, for which he was grateful to be uninterrupted in his course of effort.

  Near the end of his circuit he quickened his pace. His eyes felt tired and one was watering a little. In the past he had admired the realism of the veins in the Carrara marble depicted by Alma-Tadema’s evocations of the ancient world. Today he passed by some "Roman" scenes of the Dutchman's, inhabited by sloe-eyed, milky-fleshed young women clad in film of gossamer, wanton and vacuous at once.

  That Tissot––he had an eye, and a hand too, but was soul-starved for want of worthy subjects. Airless, trivialized studies of vulgar “smart” society, young women with an awful macadamized look of hardness; the men cachectic “swells” who might be guilty of Uranism.

  What a relief to escape to the room dedicated to darling Ned’s work! This invitation to exhibit had been important to Ned; since his nude ‘Phyllis and Demophöon’ had been removed in an uproar from the Old Water Colour Society exhibition seven years ago he had scarcely been able to show anywhere. Now he was given a single gallery room to himself, save for a few pieces by that odd American-French chap Whistler.

  The crowd was thicker here, more viewers in fact than in any other room, which irked him for his own sake but made him happy for his friend.

  The centre piece of Burne-Jones’ work was the six-panel ‘Days of Creation’, each panel presenting a life-size angel bearing a luminous globe in which was depicted the work of God’s hand for that day. He felt the tension draining from his body as he stood before Ned’s angels, placidly presenting the handiwork of the Creator. Fiat lux. Their round eyes and finely drawn lips belonged to neither man nor woman, rollicking putti nor sword-bearing archangel; and their manifest and yet neutral beauty made gazing upon them an almost salvific activity in itself. Surely these were what cherubim, if they possessed any corporality whatsoever, would resemble, an unknown and impossible mixed sex, lacking all carnality but combining the physical perfection of an idealized youth and maiden.