by Phyllis Rose
They were happy in Venice, and although the absence of the elder Ruskins was surely an important factor in their happiness, the social climate of the Italian city figured importantly, too. John and Effie developed a way of living together which was satisfactory to both of them, but which would not have been so easily tolerated in England. They went different ways, meeting only for meals and sleep. John examined Venice inch by inch, standing on ladders to look closely at places that had not been closely examined since they were carved; Effie walked, toured the city less strenuously than her husband, and visited friends or received visitors. In the evening, she went out alone to small soirées or receptions. Pretty, lively, and interestingly neglected, she was a great social success. Particularly during their second stay in Venice in 1851–52, she was welcomed by the highest circles of Venetian society. Her eccentric husband was free to get on with his work, and she was free to amuse herself. Within limits. Sometimes she went to the opera house, the Fenice, which was a centre of social activity, but she behaved in a manner impeccably and peculiarly British: if John was not with her, she would receive no visitors in her box. Since the making of such visits was, for Venetians, the point of going to the opera, Effie’s behaviour was generally considered strange. But John’s behaviour on the few occasions he accompanied her was even stranger. One night, listening to Donizetti’s music, he leaned against the railing of their box and wrote his chapter on chamfered edges.
At first it mortified Effie that her husband left her constantly alone and forced her to face the public unaccompanied, but gradually she got used to it and even found compensations. Venice had just survived the Austrian bombardment and was in Austrian hands; the city was filled with soldiers. The officers were well bred and well dressed. Effie had many interesting, exotic young men to talk to; as a married woman and a foreigner, she was in the position to have them as friends. Venice was certainly not Perth. Effie learned to cherish her un-English freedom and to appreciate, too, her husband’s absence of jealousy. She and her companion, Charlotte Ker, were continually amazed at how much John would tolerate. He never got jealous when Effie talked to another man. He was a ‘model’ husband, ‘so free from petty faults & narrow mindedness although peculiar in many ways’.28 All this put a new colouring on her relations with the elder Ruskins:
For all I care they may have John as much with them as they please for I could hardly see less of him than I do at present with his work, and I think it is much better, for we follow our different occupations and never interfere with one another and are always happy.29
When they went back to London in 1850, before returning to Venice for a longer stay, they continued their Venetian way of living. John accepted no invitations. Effie went out alone. Hostesses who sought her famous husband had to admit that he was somewhat boorish on social occasions; by entertaining Effie, one had the best of everything, his name and her charming social presence. Both Effie and her mother realised how careful, in such circumstances, she had to be about her reputation. But she was careful.
Along with Venetian glass and laces, Effie brought independence back with her from Italy; it adapted to London but could not have grown there in the first place. Italian manners were different from English – not looser, as Effie thought at first, just different. Arranged marriages and the code of behaviour which allowed them to function were still the rule in the circles in which Effie moved in Venice. More divergence was allowed between husband and wife. In Venice she met many people who made gracious adjustments to bad situations, among them her closest friend on the second visit, the Countess Pallavicini, a young woman raised in Austria who had been married against her will to a rich and stupid Italian nobleman. Unhappy at first, she eventually found comfort in a child and in the brilliant group of people she entertained night after night at her home. In Paris John and Effie visited one of the Domecq sisters who had a separate suite of rooms from her husband and whose husband never entered her rooms except to take her out in the evening or to dine with her there. Everything seemed to be done differently on the Continent – they ordered these matters much better.30
That British propriety was narrower than that of the Italians was constantly being brought to Effie’s notice by letters from home. One day the weather was so beautiful that she went walking in the Piazza San Marco without a bonnet. She told her mother about this in a letter which Mrs Gray passed on to Mrs Ruskin and Mrs Ruskin showed to her husband who in turn wrote to his son to say that he was shocked to hear that Effie had been walking in the piazza without her bonnet. Or, again, one day, in an excess of energy and high spirits, she took a turn poling a gondola, but when report of this, offered as proof of what a good time they were having, reached England, Mr Ruskin wrote back reprovingly to say there could be nothing beautiful about a lady poling a gondola on the Grand Canal. It was not only Mr Ruskin who objected to Effie’s behaviour. Her brother George never could get used to the idea of his sister being left alone as much as she was. With a brother’s suspiciousness, he became acutely apprehensive when a certain gentleman’s name kept turning up in Effie’s letters. Conviction grew that his perverse brother-in-law was deliberately throwing men in Effie’s way in order to compromise her.
In 1850 the particular object of George Gray’s concern was an Austrian officer named Paulizza, a friend of both the Ruskins but especially of Effie. Paulizza was a young man of scientific inclinations and considerable expertise, extremely gifted and intelligent. He was one of the few people in Venice (or elsewhere) whose company John Ruskin enjoyed. Indeed, as John told Effie, he respected her more, finding that so talented a man as Paulizza liked her.
The Austrian was suffering from a malady which made it difficult for him to endure light, so that he could not read, write or draw, but lay for hours with a wet cloth on his forehead, thinking melancholy thoughts. He was very lonely and seemed to cheer up only in Effie’s presence. Probably he loved her, but it is clear from the way she wrote home about him, freely and guiltlessly, even self-righteously, that it hadn’t yet occurred to her she could love him. In February 1850 Effie offered her mother this description of her feelings about Paulizza and his about her:
He says he would like to be with us every moment in the day. He is very fond of me, and, as you say, were John unkind to me and not so perfectly amiable & good as he is, such excessive devotion might be somewhat dangerous from so handsome & gifted a man, but I am a strange person and Charlotte thinks I have a perfect heart of ice, for she sees him speaking to me until the tears come into his eyes and I looking and answering without the slightest discomposure, but I really feel none. I never could love anybody else in the world but John and the way these Italian women go on is so perfectly disgusting to me that it even removes from me any desire to coquetry which John declares I possess very highly, but he thinks it charming, so do not I. I tell him every word Paulizza says to me and tell the latter so too, so that they perfectly understand each other and after me I think that Paulizza likes John better than any one else here. However, be sorry for Paulizza if you like, but do not fear for me. I am one of the odd of the earth and have no talent whatever for intrigue as every thing with me must be open as the day.31
Nevertheless, Effie asked Charlotte not to write home about her friendship with Paulizza ‘as one does not know, amongst so many, what construction might be put upon what she says’. The situation, as everyone but Effie saw, was perfect for ‘intrigue’: the neglected wife in a foreign country, the handsome, devoted young officer, also far from home. But as far as Effie was concerned, such impropriety was only for Italians and bad novels.
When John and Effie were in London between stays in Venice, she saw a great deal of a man named Clare Ford, the son of their neighbour in Park Street. Again, brother George believed that John was purposely throwing his wife in the way of attractive men in order to tempt her to compromise herself, but Effie thought George was merely jealous. She might allow herself the pleasure of male company if she vigorously guarded her integ
rity. ‘What you say is perfectly true,’ she wrote in reply to one of many warnings from her mother, ‘and I am so peculiarly situated as a married woman that being much alone and most men thinking that I live quite alone I am more exposed to their attentions, but I assure you I never allow such people to enter the house and stop everything of the kind which might be hurtful to my reputation.’32 Her parents, however, continued to worry, particularly about frequent visits from Clare Ford, and eventually Ruskin himself had to write to his in-laws to defend his wife’s behaviour.
I quite agree in all you say of the necessity of great caution in a young married lady of Effie’s beauty and natural liveliness, but I am happy to be able to assure you that I have never seen the slightest want of caution on her part in the course of her various relations with young men of every character, but on the contrary, the greatest shrewdness and quickness in detecting the slightest want of proper feeling on their part followed by fearless decision in forbidding or otherwise preventing their farther intrusion upon her in cases which required such severity – so that she runs much more chance of being found fault with for prudery than coquetry.33
Paulizza died, and Clare Ford, with Effie’s persuasion, pulled himself together, abandoned his dandyish life in London, and entered himself in the Foreign Service, where he would have a distinguished career. But there were others. And how are we to understand Ruskin’s attitude towards them? It is hard to accept George Gray’s accusation that Ruskin was knowingly, consciously, throwing men in his wife’s way in order to compromise her. Nevertheless, his total absence of jealousy, which Effie purported to find such a relief, the very opposite of small-mindedness, must have seemed at times a wounding absence of concern. If he cared about her, would he not have been just a little disturbed about the attractive men who took up so much of her time? It would take a villain to have done what George believed Ruskin was doing, and true villainy is as rare as true genius. But, without consciously pushing Effie onto other men, John may have welcomed it when another came along to take her off his hands, to relieve any guilt he felt at leaving her alone, and to revive his flagging interest in her. For his liking for his wife increased in proportion with his admiration of her new admirer. Ruskin very much admired John Everett Millais, the young painter behind whose work he had thrown his prestige as an art critic by writing a complimentary letter to the Times in 1851.34 Millais, along with D. G. Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, was one of the leading members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young artists who banded together in 1848 in opposition to the Establishment art of their day, adopting the Ruskinian credo of truth to nature.35
Millais and Holman Hunt wrote to thank Ruskin for his defence of their work in the Times, and in return Mr and Mrs Ruskin paid a call on Millais at his parents’ home in Gower Street, where he lived and had his studio. Millais was then twenty-two, a year younger than Effie, ten years younger than Ruskin. From early childhood he had dazzled people with his draughtsmanship, and his career at the Royal Academy school was impressive; indeed he was something of a wunderkind in the art world. By the time he met the Ruskins, he had already painted Lorenzo and Isabella and the controversial Jesus in the House of his Parents, which emphasised Christ’s earthly ties with the working class by painting him in a carpenter’s shop. Before he saw them again, in 1852, he would create Ophelia with the tangled riverbank background painted from life in the country and the figure of a drowning Ophelia painted from Elizabeth Siddal lying in a tub of water in his studio.
Upon their return from Italy, the younger Ruskins moved into a house which Mr Ruskin had rented for them in Herne Hill, near the house in which John had grown up and, more to the point, near the elder Ruskins’ house in Denmark Hill. Not only had Mr Ruskin picked out his son’s house for him, he had ordered it furnished at exorbitant cost (£300) in taste both John and Effie found excruciating. John got into the habit of walking daily to his parents’ house in Denmark Hill and working in his old study. Effie was given the Ruskin carriage one day a week to go into central London, a hefty distance away. When Millais asked her to pose for one of the figures in a painting he was working on, she must have been delighted for the chance to escape from her suburban imprisonment, all the more galling after the delights and freedom of Venice.
The painting was prophetically titled The Order of Release. It was a historical piece, drawing on the Jacobite rebellion for inspiration. It depicts a kilted Scots soldier whose wife (Effie) presents the order for his release to a jailer. She has a rapturous, triumphant look on her face. She carries a baby on her arm. Presumably overwhelmed with emotion, he buries his head in her shoulder. A dog leaps up to share their joy. The likeness of Effie is exact, except for a change of hair colour from auburn to black, and when the painting was displayed in the Academy Exhibition in May of 1853, everyone who knew her recognised her. The painting was a great success: crowds of people always stood before it, straining to see. The critics by and large approved it, too, although one said the dog took up too much room, and another objected to Effie’s face, going so far as to say that he would rather stay in prison all his life or even be hanged than to live with such a woman. But his reaction was unique. Most people seemed aware of the special intimacy that can develop between artist and model, and from this moment gossip about Effie and John Millais started. Mr Ruskin, for one, told Effie that she was looking so beautiful at this stage of her life, he found it no wonder Millais was so interested in her. Mr Ruskin had a devastating way of offering praise which barely concealed a critique, and Effie, on whom nothing the Ruskins did was lost, believed that Mr Ruskin was trying to draw her attention to Millais’s interest in her in order to get her ‘into a scrape’.
Both John and Effie seemed to want to adopt Millais as a protégé. Effie had done this to good effect with Clare Ford; she had made him pull himself together and get serious about his career. Millais needed a different kind of handling. He was brilliantly talented, but somewhat nervous and fragile. Effie thought he needed a physical cure and sent him to her doctor in Edinburgh. John Ruskin decided his problem was a lack of education: Millais hadn’t read enough, his training was too exclusively visual, he needed to be taught mental discipline and method. So, for health and for the training of the mind, in the spirit of Oxford reading parties, the Ruskins planned a summer vacation in the company of Millais, his brother, William and Holman Hunt. John had finished three volumes of The Stones of Venice and needed a rest. On June 21, 1853, the party left London (without Hunt, as it happened) and after a short stay with Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan in Northumberland, reached Brig O’Turk, in the Scottish Trossachs, in early July. This was no weekend jaunt. They were to be together for four months.
Early on, Millais conceived the idea of painting Ruskin in quite a novel way – outdoors, standing in front of a rushing mountain stream. Ruskin, who had written that truth to nature was the highest goal of art and who described natural beauty so superbly in Modern Painters, would be pictured in the kind of setting he himself loved to write about – the rock, the rushing water, the lichens, all rendered with meticulous precision, just as he would wish. In the finished portrait Ruskin looks downstream away from the viewer, smiling slightly, wholly self-possessed. When he began working on the painting and still thought Ruskin a good fellow, Millais wrote to a friend that Ruskin looked ‘sweet and benign standing calmly looking into the turbulent sluice beneath’.36 Perhaps it is only when one knows the story of the Ruskins’ marriage that the contrast between the calmness of the figure in this painting and the turbulence of what he impassively regards seems intentional, ominous.
The painting of this portrait now became the ostensible focus of the trip. They all spent a couple of days walking about looking for the perfect place and found it, ‘a lovely piece of worn rock, with foaming water and weeds and moss and a noble overhanging bank of dark crag’37 at a spot called Glenfinlas, which would provide the title for the painting. Then they had to wait for the canvas to arrive from Edinbu
rgh. It was to be lunette shaped, and white, in the PRB fashion. Every day it rained, the implacable rain of the Highlands. To save money, the Ruskins and John Millais moved from the inn, where they were each paying £13 per week, to the schoolmaster’s house, where their quarters, though very cramped (Millais could open his bedroom door and shave without ever leaving his bed), were cheap, a pound per person per week. Millais still found Ruskin a ‘good fellow’ but regarded him warily. He was ‘not of our kind, his soul is always with the clouds and out of reach of ordinary mortals – I mean that he theorises about the vastness of space and looks at every little stream with practical contempt’.38 The acquaintance of Mrs Ruskin was a blessing. She was a delightful person, wonderfully kind. He painted her sitting by a waterfall. The canvas for Ruskin’s portrait came, but it was not white enough, and Millais sent to London for another. Swimming in a rocky pool, he banged his nose against some rocks and hurt it badly. The same day, piling rocks across a stream to make a bridge (such minor engineering feats were among their favourite diversions), he hurt his left thumb so badly that the nail came off. Mrs Ruskin succoured him in his distress. The day after his accidents, she cut his hair. He began to give her drawing lessons and found her remarkably talented. Ruskin was working on the index for The Stones of Venice.