CREATIVE SCHOLARSHIP

Ruskin: A Novel
Octavia Randolph
Part the second: The Lamp of Truth
One
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 this new 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 only became sensate of this commission by the admiring glances and La Giaconda half-smiles of the Veronase 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. This first exhibition was an outgrowth of Sir Coutts and Lady Mary’s “artists’ dinners” where prospective exhibitors had come to meet and mingle with hopes of an invitation to show at the new venue. 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 had spent more than three years of his life resident in La Serenissima, and knew her 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 pallazi 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 Renaissance –the end of all honesty in architecture and painting, the beginning of 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 that 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. That brush with the carving of these looted doors recalled his then-eagerness to return 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 seemed to cling to his very garments. Even his home 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 drifting factory fires. Soon all of England would be despoiled, and the deadly pall of industrialism overshadow and pollute every virgin loveliness with its choking dust and blackness. 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 mildy astringant 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 Marie 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 nod 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 realized, 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 recognized 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 even attended on his words at open lectures he had delivered. None approached him though, for which he was grateful not to be interrupted 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! Much of course he’d seen before, but never quite together like this, and there were two new paintings as well, unfinished things, which in theory Ruskin didn’t approve of showing but the temptation must have been great–and an unfinished Burne-Jones could have as much finish as a handful of other painter’s completed works. 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 almost an salvific activity in itself. Surely these were what seraphim, 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.

All of Burne-Jones’ figures, be they kings or angels, were thus. All possessed a natural elegance of expression in their solemn but not sorrowing faces; and if the torsos and legs were unnaturally attenuated, well, it was the artist’s ideal scotching Truth, and if anything was to attempt to scotch Truth, if had better be a well-conceived and executed ideal.

He was wearied now, and nearly sleepy. He had not slept well in months. But there was more of Ned to see, the Merlin. The Beguiling of Merlin, Ned called it, with the old and unwise sorcerer sinking to the earth amongst a fall of blossoms under the charms of the unscrupulous enchantress Nimuë. Both figures were swathed in dusky draperies, and Nimuë bore the strikingly beautiful face and form of Maria Zambuco, who Ned had made such a fool of himself over. The eyes of victim and prey were locked, Merlin’s long-fingered hands powerless to rise against the female to whom he had lost his heart. His robes were midnight blue, with a sash fallen away from his neck to reveal the vulnerability of his throat. How terrible was love! Ruskin looked at his haggard face, the dark-rimmed eyes suffering under the pitiless gaze of the temptress he had succumbed to. Merlin, the great adapt of Arthur’s fabled court, wise man and magician and sage. Stricken, stricken.

He roused himself, turned from this to face the end wall. The Whistlers hung there, six or eight of them, but he had turned so as to be directly in line of one, and did not move. It was dark, very much so, of an indistinct blackish green. A golden sprinkling of dots and smears, bright as phosphorescence, ran down one side and dropped into a void of blackness. They were specks of fire falling through an impenetrable murk, vaguely illuminating some unknown or unspeakable terror. Sparks of destruction glittering in an unholy night. There was a foulness to it, something innately unwholesome, like the worst of the plague winds darkening the skies of modern Britain. Ruskin felt held in place by the very sense of revulsion that urged him to look away. He pulled out his programme. James McNeill Whistler. Nocturne in Black and Gold. Ruskin exhaled sharply, and a Mayfair matron with her son up from Cambridge caught the great man’s single ejaculatory verdict: “Coxcomb,” he uttered, and turned on his heel and left.

Whistler lay sprawled in a lounge chair in the dim smoking room of the Arts Club. His dark and curly-haired head lay cushioned on a pile of shapeless crewel-worked pillows, and–heedless of the upholstery–his polished boots on the arm of the next chair. With his narrow silver-crowned walking stick he idly beat the top of the low table before him, nearly upsetting a shallow copper ash-tray. If the walking stick had been a sabre Whistler’s resemblance to a bored dragoon in mufti would have been complete.

The smoking room was called the “Dugout” by its frequenters for its small size and knotty wood panelling, but was empty and smokeless today. It was nearly six p.m., Whistler had had no lunch, and with yet another dunning bill in his pocket reminding him of his overdue account here, felt little inclination to rise and seek out tea. In an upstairs room he had just lost £15 at cards to an art dealer named Wilmer, who he had been unsuccessfully attempting to entice in making good on a prior expression of interest in stopping by his studio to view a few works in progress.

George Boughton rounded the corner and entered the Dugout, clutching a folded-open magazine. He checked his speed and stood above Whistler, wordless. Their eyes met, and Whistler gave a tug to one of his moustaches as he began to greet his friend. But Boughton thrust the magazine into Whistler’s hand, and with an index finger stabbed at the lower left column. It was the new number of the Architect, and Whistler scanned the piece and saw the title, “Mr Ruskin on the Grosvenor Gallery”. In one indented block of text his own name leapt out at him, and he backed up to find the context: John Ruskin in his monthly Fors Clavigera, number 79, July 1877.

For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsey ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approaches the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.

A long moment passed, far longer than required to read two sentences. Whistler raised his eyes to see Boughton, almost pop-eyed, staring at him, waiting for his reaction. He did not toss the offending words across the room, as Boughton had expected, but quietly handed the folded paper back.

“His style of criticism is debased,” was what he said.

Then Whistler began to laugh. It began with a snort, and ended in a full-throated mirthless howl. Boughton stood by silently, eyeing his friend. Whistler was pugnacious by nature and relished comment on his work, and typically the harsher it was the better he enjoyed it, for it cleared the path for him to expound his own theories on the nature and purpose of art. Boughton had the right to expect a stream of witty invective, but his friend was oddly silent.

“Hand me a gasper, George, and read it once more,” he said, and Boughton dutifully opened his enamelled cigarette case and lay it on the table before them. Boughton rolled them extremely thin, and for his efforts had won a place as Whistler’s favoured tobacco benefactor. Boughton was provincial, American, a complete hack as an artist, even tempered and steady. He also regarded Whistler as a genius. Besides keeping his friend in cigarettes, he lent him canvas and oils without expecting repayment.

Boughton read the excerpt again as Whistler sucked the life from his cigarette.

“And that’s it, there’s no more of this, that’s all he said of me?” asked Whistler. He turned his head and looked towards the library room. “Do we take that blasted Fors? Any one here read it?”

Whistler rose and both men went from room to room in the club. Fors Clavigera was not a publication the Arts Club subscribed to, but old Meriwether had by chance brought his own copy from home to peruse in the quiescence of his club and they lifted it from him and carried it back to the Dugout. Albert Moore and Joseph Boehm came with them, intrigued by the search and clued in by Boughton’s digest. Moore had exhibited his paintings at the Grosvenor as well, and Boehm was a sculptor and friend of many year’s standing, currently adding some decorative embellishments to the exterior of Whistler’s new London home to satisfy the requirements of the Metropolitan Board of Works who had found the plain white façade too severe.

The little party gathered around the lounge chair Whistler had reinhabited. Boughton dropped the offending journal on the small table between them. It was a modest production, eighteen or twenty pages, closely printed on pale yellow paper. “Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain” was the subtitle, “by John Ruskin, LL.D Letter the Seventy-ninth July 2nd 1877”.

Whistler conned the plain cover with a quick glance. “Workman and labourers,” he snorted. “Ha!” The scavenger hunt about the club’s rooms had restored his spirits, and he seemed almost sanguine. “He means ‘Antediluvian dreamers snug in their Oxford and Cambridge redoubts.’”

Boehm looked down at the light yellow cover. “For the workman of Britain? What honest labourer can throw his chink around like that?”

“Yes, ten pence an issue! It’s not much value for money,” agreed Boughton, weighing the slight publication in his hand.

After his cursory glance at the cover Whistler leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. Boughton rifled through the pages, picking out key themes, scanning paragraphs. It was a wildly discursive colloquy, and Boughton had an image of Ruskin as a heedless boy running on a beach, snatching up one shell or shiny pebble after the next, only to cast the first down and reach for another.

“Here, here it is, the Grosvenor bit,” said Boughton. “…Sir Coutts Lindsey is at present an amateur both in art and shopkeeping. He must take up either one or the other business, if he would prosper in either. If he intends to manage the Grosvenor Gallery rightly, he must not put his own works in it until he can answer for their quality; if he means to be a painter, he must not at present superintend the erection of public buildings, or amuse himself with their decoration by china and upholstery…”

There was a hoot of laughter from Whistler, and snickers from the other men.

Boughton went on scanning and reading. “Ah…puffing on about Burne-Jones…his ‘is simply the only art-work at present produced in England which will be received as “classic”…the best that has been or could be…I know that these will be immortal…’–Oh, here’s a scold coming–‘the mannerisms and errors of his pictures, whatever may be their extent, are never affected or indolent. The work is natural to the painter, however strange to us…Scarcely so much can be said for any other pictures of the modern schools: their eccentricities are always in some degree forced; and their imperfections gratuitously, if not impertinently, indulged.’”

Boughton took a breath and slowed down. “For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsey ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approaches the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”

As abruptly as the attack began, it was over. Boughton read a few more bits aloud. Ruskin went on to Tissot’s paintings, citing their dexterity but chiding him for producing “mere coloured photographs of vulgar society” and Millais, in which he lamented how much greater his achievement would have been if he “had remained faithful to the principles of his school when he first led its onset…you will never know what you have lost in him…”

The concluding passage was a maudlin tale of a race horse, a Derby contender, grown ill upon being separated from his stable-mate kitten, and the resumption of his appetite and fulfilment of his owner’s racing dreams when his feline castellan was returned to him. It was bathos of the sort a desiccated unmarried aunt would tell a fretful child to assure him of ultimate happy endings. Coming on the heels of the vituperative attack on Whistler made it seem even more absurd.

“He is cracked,” said Whistler, unfolding his legs.

“Yes,” agreed Boughton, but in a very different tone. “The great Ruskin is cracked.” The once-inerrant had erred, grievously in this case, but Whistler (as usual, it seemed to Boughton) did not appear to grasp the significance of the situation–the Master’s utterance as it pertained to him.

Moore clucked his tongue. “And this was the man who as a boy proclaimed the genius of Turner when everyone else accused the man’s sea-scapes of looking like soap-suds!” He shook his head and rapped out the contents of his meerschaum into the ash-tray.

Boehm’s response was more measured. “His is the greatest voice in art criticism, not only here, but the world,” he said. But he too shook his head. “It is some gibe.”

“He’s hopeless,” answered Whistler. “The enemy of art today is convention, and Ruskin’s blathering only confirms the narrowness of his conceptions. He knows nothing. Once again the cause of us doers and workers is at stake against the mere writers and praters. Mine is modern painting. It doesn’t ‘mean anything’ nor does it intend to entertain or scold the viewer in ‘relating a story’. I seek to convey an atmosphere, nothing else.”

They had all heard this before. Boughton still stood, now with pursed lips, above his friend, and looked down at Whistler’s grin. “I believe this to be actionable.”

Whistler blinked. His single lock of white hair stood out from his dark curls like a tongue of Pentecostal fire.

“I’m a painter and no solicitor, you’ll have to obtain a professional consultation–ask Rose or any other good man–but this”–here Boughton waved the offending number of Fors– “this, coming from such a one as Ruskin, this might be libel.”

“Libel?”

“Yes, and if it hinders your sales or in any way injures your reputation, it might be actionable.”

“With a settlement?”

“Yes, should you win; a settlement, damages, court costs, everything.”

Whistler’s eyes, which had been glued to Boughton’s face during this startling allegation, now dropped to the floral tracery of the maroon carpet. He hadn’t sold a major painting in two years, and was far from having the resources to embark upon the Venetian trip which he hoped would result in a series of always-lucrative etchings. His greatest client and patron, Frederick Leyland, was now sending him bills for materials and incurred expenses in the unauthorised (so said Leyland) decoration of his fantastic Peacock Room. Leyland, once so warm a friend, was so enraged he had threatened to publicly horsewhip Whistler should they meet. The building of Whistler’s new home and studio in Chelsea, which he had rashly pursued despite his financial difficulties, was straining him even further. And he feared that Maud Franklin, his long time model and mistress, was again with child.

His friend spoke again. “But it all hinges on whether or not it’s actionable.”

Whistler rose and lit a second cigarette. “Well, that I shall try to find out,” he answered, and left.

Octavia is a member of the William Morris Society, the Pre-Raphaelite Society, The Society of Architectural Historians, the Bibliographic Society, and the Authors Guild.