Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  Joan spoke. “It’s all this harrying of him, everyone wanting something; and his setting up of the Guild, and all the pains he’s taken to make it legal so they might make a go of it; and that wretched Whistler taunting and gibing him with his hateful law suit. And I’ve––I’ve tried to protect him, tried my best, but he can be so very naughty and wilful, you know he can, sir.”

  Simon leaned forward and took one plump hand in his, but his voice was all professional demeanour. As tired as he was Joan required it of him, and he was not used to failing friends or anyone else. “Joan, no one could have proven more tender or faithful than you; no care more solicitous. There was nothing more you could have done. And––although its severity is great, this is not the first occasion.”

  “But at Matlock Bath in ’71 it was inflammation of the bowels that made him––not himself.”

  Simon checked her as gently as possibly. “Mrs. Simon and I visited him during that time.” He had discerned, as had Acland, another physician friend of Ruskin’s, that the collapse Ruskin had suffered shortly after Joan’s wedding was just as much of the mind as of the body, though both precipitated by the strain, he thought, of over-work.

  Privately Simon had wondered if his cousin Joan’s “leaving him” through her marriage had not also been a stimulus to the earlier collapse; Ruskin’s aged mother was then dying and he was soon to be quite alone. There was, he thought, adequate fore-warning of a sensitive nature stretched to the limit, and then beyond.

  “I think perhaps you may have seen in his past illnesses a harbinger of the shadow which has fallen on him now. And the letters he sent the week prior to this episode, perhaps even earlier…you read many of his letters, Joan, and would have seen the change in them.”

  “But his fancies so often get the best of him in his letters!” Her defence was feeble; she had already shown him a letter Ruskin had sent to his friend George McDonald the morning before this attack. It was a series of dashed exclamatory clauses, beginning “Dear George––we’ve got married––after all after all––but such a surprise!”

  Ruskin’s bride was none other than Rose LaTouche, dead these twenty months. McDonald, alarmed, had written to Joan upon receipt, only to learn that Ruskin had already plunged into the chasm.

  They sat in silence for so long that Joan’s voice when she spoke slightly startled him. “I’ve been ever so grateful for your coming, sir. We all are; my darling Coz too, if he could but tell you. You’ve been an unspeakable comfort to us. I only wish you hadn’t need to go, but that’s selfish of us, with all you’ve thrown over to be here.”

  She was struggling mightily to compose herself, and Simon felt how alone she was. “I am only sorry that I cannot remain longer. I am but a letter, or if need be, telegram away.”

  He was leaving Ruskin in the care of the local man, Benson, a young and able enough chap. Simon’s diagnosis, with which the rural physician readily concurred, was morbid inflammation of the brain, leading to acute mania. Acute mania. Benson took notes like a stenographer as Simon paced the drawing room where their initial meeting was held. At last Benson hazarded a question. “Should I need help, sir, advice on any matter, could I presume to write you at London?” After being assured that Simon expected periodic reports, Benson nodded in relief, and offered, “I fear our Lancashire medical men would have but one opinion––‘send him to an asylum.’”

  Simon finished his tea. He must arise at dawn to catch the train, and wanted to write up his final notes and see the patient before then. His wife had cabled that there were rumours afloat in London that Ruskin was dead, and he needed to compose his press statement to the contrary.

  “Is there anything more?” he asked her.

  “Yes, sir, there is. It’s––the accounts, sir.” For the first time that afternoon, Simon tilted his head in puzzlement.

  “Coz looks to all the payment himself, sir; the servants, the grocer, the butcher. Now we have the nurses to pay, and all the extra food costs as well.” She blinked away welling tears. “I’ve no real money of my own sir, none, nor has Arthur. With Coz as he is, there’s no one to pay the accounts.”

  Arthur Severn was what––a watercolourist––with not, Simon knew, two shillings of his own to rub together. He had made himself interesting to history by being Joseph Severn’s son, and as the elder Severn was Keats’ confidante and nurse in his final days in Rome, some dim lustre had settled upon the sloping shoulders of his offspring. Inoffensive chap, but ineffective too, thought Simon, and now fast in his own bed with sciatica while Joan faced all this uproar unsupported. Beyond this, if worse came to worst, who knew what fanciful causes or unexpected beneficiaries might be named in Ruskin’s will, and Joan and her family forgotten? He had given her the Herne Hill property at London as a wedding gift, but she had no funds to maintain it on her own. She might fear being turned out of Brantwood, and perhaps left with nothing.

  “Of course. I see. You must write at once to Mr. Ruskin’s solicitors at London, petitioning them to instruct his bankers to release such funds as necessary to maintain the household around Mr. Ruskin in his infirmity. I will write my own letter supporting your petition.”

  He awoke to the fact that he carried over £30 in his pocket. Without being so indelicate as to gesture for it, he asked, “Have you immediate need? I always travel with resources, which I consider yours.”

  Baxter was alone in the bedroom with Ruskin when Simon entered for his final examination. The youth respectfully stepped aside while he measured the sleeping Ruskin’s pulse and brought the lamp near to check his colour.

  “I believe Mr. Ruskin will enjoy a quiet sleep tonight, Baxter,” Simon told him as he relinquished the bedside. Certain household proprieties had broken down in the sick man’s house, and certain boundaries had been temporarily breached. Not so with Baxter. He waited until spoken to to address himself to the physician.

  “I’m happy to hear that, sir.” Seeing that Simon was done, Baxter picked up a small canvas from the dressing table and resumed his seat at the bedside. He extended his arms and held the painting in front of his master’s closed eyes. Simon had never seen it at Brantwood before this visit, but had glanced at it once or twice in the last two weeks. It was a copy of Carpaccio’s St. Ursula, the lovely young martyr-to-be gently asleep in a pillared bed. He remembered it from the Accademia in Venice. Simon watched Baxter for a few moments as he held the painting. Ruskin had in recent years flirted with Catholicism, and spent weeks living in Assisi in a Franciscan monastery. This was perhaps more evidence of his late-in-life attraction to the early Church.

  “Does Mr. Ruskin have a special devotion to St. Ursula?” he asked at last.

  Baxter turned his head and looked up at him. “Begging your leave, sir, but it’s her, sir. Miss LaTouche. She who’s dead.”

  Rose LaTouche. Ruskin’s lost will-o’-the-wisp. Simon had seen her socially once or twice, and known for years of Ruskin’s frustrated love for the girl. Obsession might be the precise term. Two obsessives, drawn and repelled and drawn again together, and now parted in death. Or were they? He looked again at the sleeping face of St Ursula. Ursula died for her faith, he recalled, and seemingly so did Rose LaTouche; she had every ear-mark of extreme religious devotion appropriate to a martyr. The visible sign to a physician’s eyes was the perpetual self-abnegation that manifested itself in fasting. Simon knew of other cases of fashionable young ladies of society who voluntarily starved themselves, sometimes to the point of death, but Rose was no simple victim of vanity. He suspected her death indeed had been caused by the accumulative deleterious effects of self-starvation––he had heard that at dinner she oftentimes could force herself to consume no more than half a biscuit and a strawberry––but it was the intransigence of her religious views that had caused her, and those who loved her, so much grief.

  He wished he had been less brusque when he advised Ruskin long-distance about Rose LaTouche’s wasting illness; harassed with his a
ttempts to contain a London cholera outbreak he had initially written it off as adolescent hysterics. From the descriptions of her ailments he expressed his extreme a priori scepticism of any actual disease, and even had suggested the female LaTouches guilty of “co-feminising twaddle.” Not that Ruskin, poet and cloud-watcher that he was, attended to his words. That was one of the problems with Ruskin; he asked advice of everyone and listened to nobody.

  Simon studied Baxter as he held the painting before his master’s unseeing eyes. “You were with Mr. Ruskin in Venice last winter, were you not?” he asked.

  Baxter again turned his head to speak. “Yes, sir, I was. From Brantwood last July to Venice through the winter, then to Verona on the way back, and then to London, and finally here again.” There was some little pride in his voice as he related this route.

  It would be neither appropriate nor discreet to question a servant about his master’s behaviour. Simon was quiet, hoping Baxter shared the loquaciousness of his Irish brethren.

  “I carried the professor’s paints and kit for him, sir, each day that he went to the palace to copy the painting. And I heard him––speak to it, his copy, that is, sir, in his rented rooms. It’s Miss LaTouche.”

  At Shady Hill on a recently passed Sunday night Norton sat at his desk to write to John Simon.

  My Dear Friend

  Yesterday I had a most tender note from Ruskin. I had hardly read it when I saw in the paper a telegram announcing his serious illness. I felt that I had had his last words of love, & sweeter words for the close of twenty years affection could not be written. Tonight I hear that he is dead.

  I believe you will have written to me. If not, I pray you do so, tell me what you can of his last days.

  It is not all pain that the long fever of life is at end. But what a heart is stopped! Blessed is the peace of death!

  Ever your affectionate

  C.E.N.

  The night before Norton had refolded the slight letter from Ruskin and returned it to its envelope. The sweetest concerns and tender affections poured forth from his friend in the intimacy of their correspondence. Holding the envelope in his hand he raised his eyes to the windows of his study. It was the second day of March, and winter had a firm grip on Shady Hill’s lawns, blanketed with snow. The wall clock read nearly five, and there was still light in the afternoon sky. It was Saturday. From the parlour he could hear his sister Grace, lately come to live with him, reading to the children, her voice low and patient amid their chirping enthusiasm for David Copperfield’s adventures.

  He had saved Ruskin’s letter for last, and now turned to the newspaper, which he carried to the striped upholstered chair closest to the windows. The front page of the Boston Evening Transcript was dominated by the Eastern Crisis between Turkey and Russia. He read of the Turkish field army gathering in Gallipoli, and then a long piece about England’s complications with Russia in the matter. His eye travelled with these cabled news stories to a small heading entitled “Personals” where he saw the line:

  John Ruskin’s illness is brain fever.

  He read the cable report again. He turned his head and saw Ruskin’s letter upon his desk blotter. He rose and went to the top of the cabinet on which yesterday’s unread Transcript lay folded. He opened it standing by the cabinet and under the glow of the gas light scanned the front page where the foreign cables were printed. At the very bottom of page one was a single sentence:

  John Ruskin, the well known writer on art, is dangerously ill from overwork.

  On Friday night Norton had come home from Harvard where he had taught a class of nearly 200 young men about the treasures of Ravenna. He had had dinner with the children and with Grace––she not at the top of the table opposite him; her heart was too large and sensibilities too fine to sit in Sue’s place––and then he had taken the children out for a moonlit walk to listen for the owl they had heard hooting the night before. He had retired to his study and worked on an article on Venice and Saint Mark’s he was writing for the Atlantic Monthly. At half past eleven he grew tired and took himself up through the quiet house and to bed. All this without opening the paper. All this without seeing Ruskin was then, even then, gravely ill. Now on Sunday he had heard Ruskin was dead, one of the few losses left to him which could diminish his own life. He had long ago promised Joan that at Ruskin’s death he would come and help her burn her cousin’s questionable letters and papers. Mastering his grief he struggled to compose a letter to her about their great mutual loss. He was to suffer three days of misery before he found the report to be false.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The Lamp of Truth

  Whistler vs. Ruskin

  In the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, Westminster

  Monday 25 November 1878

  “I shall endeavour to persuade the court that the manner in which Mr. Ruskin has written of Mr. Whistler was absolutely calculated to discredit Mr. Whistler as an artist, and I might add, parenthetical to the action, as a gentlemen. The plaintiff must naturally suffer from this abuse in the public estimation, and perhaps his livelihood will be irrevocably damaged because of it.”

  At ten-thirty in the morning the room was stifling with coal-stoked heat and overpopulation. The legal teams of plaintiff and defendant in the action were numerous in themselves, and scores of followers of each camp had squeezed in behind them, leaving a small throng unseated in the corridor. Every chair and bench inside the courtroom was filled, and many were standing in any available and otherwise unoccupied territory.

  John Humffreys Parry, Serjeant-at-law and Whistler’s lead counsel, stayed a moment before the jury box and fixed his dark eyes upon the occupants seated there. He possessed the well-modulated voice of a trained orator, which combined with the natural solemnity of his face to arrest the court’s attention.

  “Mr. Whistler, an acclaimed and widely collected artist, is according to Mr. Ruskin––a personage no less than the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford––not only a ‘cockney’ and an ‘impudent coxcomb’, but perhaps most damning of all, approaches ‘wilful imposture’. Is the vehemence and viciousness of this language calculated to spare the public, or scourge an honest artist? It shall be for you, our esteemed jury, to determine the appropriate damages for this injury.”

  Back at the table of the plaintiff, James Anderson Rose, Whistler’s personal solicitor, looked beyond Parry at the twelve stolid property-owning Englishmen returning the barrister’s gaze. Rose would not allow his own eye to linger, but as an art collector himself he doubted that there was a man amongst them possessing the necessary sensibilities to appreciate a talent as rare, original, and peculiar as Whistler’s.

  Rose owned a number of Whistler’s etchings and believed wholeheartedly in his friend’s artistic vision. He had more than once in the past come to the artist’s legal and financial aid. A few of those etchings he had gladly accepted in lieu of past payment. Perennially short of funds, Whistler had urgent need for at least £1000 and had not been able to supply a retainer. In preparation for this action Rose, in his solitary moments, had been forced to consider how the entire costly legal team would be recompensed if they lost this case. Today Rose let no such notion of failure distract him. He sat quietly erect in his chair, clad in a waistcoat of superior cut but tastefully sombre hue. His movements of wrist and eye were minimal as he took notes with his slender gold-washed pen.

  Parry turned from the jury and made eye contact with Rose, in which instant Rose conveyed his approval of the renowned barrister’s opening remarks. Rose knew that Whistler, seated next him at the table, had leaned forward and Rose turned his head and with an understated nod assured his client.

  There were, he had learnt from notes passed to him by his clerks, more than a dozen London newspapers represented in the room, and half that number again from the papers of the principal American cities, their correspondents all furiously scribbling with a stenographer’s speed.

  Not onl
y was the main floor of the courtroom full. The gallery was brimming with fashionable young ladies, their tightly gathered skirts á la polonaise in demure aesthetic shades of nut-brown or moss-green. Rose had discreetly watched them file in and assume their places, and thought them more likely acolytes of Ruskin than of Whistler. Had they been presented with Ruskin’s improving little volume, Sesame and Lilies, at an impressionable age, or, if he were mistaken, had they swooned over Whistler’s likeness in the illustrated papers? Between the society element and the press contingent, Rose felt the entire atmosphere uncomfortably close to theatre.

  Theatre or no, neither side had stinted in procuring counsel. Although Rose had written the actual brief, Whistler’s case would be argued by John Humffreys Parry, Serjeant-at-law, the highest rank attainable by a barrister. Ruskin in turn had engaged London’s most prestigious law firm, Walker Martineau & Co., and would be represented by Sir John “Sleepy Jack” Holker, a lugubrious Lancashireman and counsel of the British Crown––the nation’s attorney general.

  The courts had matched their hands. Lord Huddleston, the presiding judge, was nothing less than a baron; his exceedingly popular young wife “Lady Di” had even graced the proceedings this morning with her appearance in the gallery.

  The legal point before them was a pretty one. Certainly Ruskin’s words were ungentlemanly. Few would attempt to argue that they were not delivered in the form of an insult. But was the incendiary Fors passage prima facie privileged? Was not in fact the critic protected by his right to speak forthrightly on a publicly exhibited work, ostensibly placed there for criticism? And had not Ruskin displayed similar if perhaps not equal intemperance in past utterances in Fors? Whistler’s team would have to prove actual malicious intent.

  The first to be called was to be Whistler himself, and Rose hoped his client’s more acerbic side would be held in check during the following examination and cross examination.