The Lamp of Power & The Lamp of Beauty
My Dear Mr. Ruskin
Rose, you will be glad to learn, is making some advance. She seems quite her normal self (save for any outdoor exertion of any kind, of course) until about 5 o’clock each day, but then the change comes about her, and she gets so listless and restless and unable to occupy her thoughts, in fact claims when she can speak that even thinking hurts...
Almost as soon as he arrived home Rose had sent Ruskin her first scrap of writing in Greek, the salutation Peace be to you. He had it daily in his breast pocket. Then came her inexplicable physical collapse, now in its fourth week, reported through anxious yet chatty letters from Maria LaTouche. These, in attempting to quell Ruskin’s fear, served to inflame it. The shortening days of autumn with their constant memento mori did nothing to shore up his frame of mind. He shut himself in his rooms in Denmark Hill or wandered about alone in the dripping garden, stopping long before the peach tree from which he had plucked ripened fruit to feed her.
His parents, recalling his own break-down at Oxford––would they never stop blaming themselves for it?––offered outspoken assessments that the study of Greek had proved too demanding for a girl of thirteen, which Ruskin vigorously refuted, barely able to stay civil. The Dublin doctors summoned by the LaTouches put an end to all “brain work” for Rose, and Ruskin counselled her by letter to attempt some simple hand crafts to help focus her thoughts. She was not allowed to write back––the exertion being thought too much for her––but his letters to her were encouraged, and he wrote her every day.
He wrote at first of subjects that he knew would interest and absorb her, the meaning of certain Greek verbs, or his insights into certain favourite passages of the Bible. But soon her mother was imploring him to keep to lighter topics, and he wrote all his way to Switzerland where he fled with his manservant, writing to Rose in detail of the wayside flowers in Alpine valleys, and sending her a trefoil sprig of oxalis, a folk symbol of the Trinity. For his effort he was rewarded by a short note in her own hand, enclosing a shamrock, that Irish symbol of the same, with the direction, “A Dieu, dearest St C, and my shamrock will tell you what you wish to know.”
This then, the language of flowers, was to be a secret language between them, and Rose the greatest flower of them all.
By November Rose’s painful head-aches began to stop, and she could more readily eat. As she gained strength she was permitted to walk downstairs, and to sit by her mother as she read aloud. Mrs. LaTouche was fearful of over-stimulation, and only by degrees were Rose’s pet cats allowed, first one and then the second, into the drawing room. The girl responded gratefully to their soft tread in her lap, and would hold them, purring in her arms, for an hour altogether. Rose had asked almost from the start for her dog Bruno, and at last one day her father brought him in on a lead. She was sitting in the music room with her mother when she heard the unmistakable scratching of Bruno’s nails on the parquet floor of the hall. The cats scattered.
“Bruno!” Rose cried, and reached her arms towards the open doorway. Her mother laid a gently restraining hand on her lap lest she forget herself and try to jump up.
“Here he is,” answered her grinning father as they entered. Rose laughed aloud as the hound panted and strained at his chain, licked her face, and beat her legs with his bushy tail. She threw her arms around Bruno’s shaggy pied coat, and when she looked up saw both her parents smiling at her. Bruno promptly lay down at her feet in adoration. She felt completely happy.
Maria LaTouche placed her arm around her daughter’s thin shoulders. “There now,” she said. “You have Bruno and everything. Are you feeling more yourself?”
When Rose was twenty-six and dying, she would look back on this first collapse and recall her mother asking her that. How funny that is, she recalled thinking; I cannot be anyone else. But she answered, “Yes, Mama, I do.”
Her prayer-time proved a problem. Maria LaTouche held that during this crisis her daughter’s prayers should be of the briefest and simplest. But Mr. LaTouche insisted on carrying in the large family Bible and reading aloud from it, stopping to discuss points of Scripture with Rose, questioning and correcting her. The girl’s head hurt again at how angry her mother was with her father; she could see it in her mother’s eyes, as she waited for the Bible lessons to be over.
Mrs. LaTouche read all the letters, arriving daily, from Ruskin to Rose, first to herself and then aloud to her daughter. Even when the girl was feeling stronger she was permitted to write back only once a week, regardless of her delight in a certain letter, or how much she wanted to say Hello to her St. Crumpet. In late November she was allowed walks outdoors, and in December she could ride her pony again.
On a December morning when the air was soft Rose found a letter addressed to her from Ruskin in the silver salver by the door as she was heading out. There was one as well for her mother from him, so she didn’t feel naughty in taking the one meant for her and reading it before she did. She opened it on the way to the stable where her pony Swallow was waiting, but when she rounded the corner saw her mother’s mare being saddled too. She poked the letter in her habit pocket and buttoned it up, and though she knew her mother meant to join her, let Michaels help her onto Swallow and trotted off.
It was fine to have St. C there in her pocket, talking to her, so she thought, right through her waist––she felt him. And Swallow must have known he was there too, because the black pony was in such spirits to have that distinguished personage also upon his back that he danced and skittered under his doubled burden. Rose almost thought she along with St. C too might end up in the new-ploughed stubble, and that only made her laugh the more. Down the lane she could see her mother waving at her, and saw how quickly the long legs of her mother’s hunter were closing the distance between them.
Mrs. LaTouche came up alongside, and Rose’s pony quieted immediately. “Why, Rose, what is making you laugh so? I almost thought Swallow was going to toss you, for a moment.” But she was smiling at her, not cross at all.
Ah, the pang of not being able to tell the secret of the hidden letter! Rose pressed her lips together hard, to keep from telling, and smiled back. If she were truthful the letter would be taken from her before she could finish it. “Nothing, Mama,” she lied. “I’m only happy to be out.” But she was no longer happy. She knew now she could never show the letter with its broken seal to Mama: how disappointed she would be. She could not bear disappointing either of her parents.
The next week she got another letter from Ruskin in which he scolded her for sending him her “best love” from the bottom of her mother’s letter, saying that love could not be best or worst, just love. But that was her Mama’s invention, the “best love,” she wrote back, she never sent a bit of it, she didn’t like sending messages on other people’s letters, didn’t he notice––she liked to say it herself, and besides he knew he already had her love, as much of it as he pleased. And that he should have the happiest Christmas there in Switzerland, and they were finally going to London now she was well.
He spent his Christmas day alone, shattering icicles in a ravine.
In his room in Lucerne the night after Christmas Ruskin paused in his diary entry to admire the brilliance of Venus through the small diapered-paned window over his desk. Despite his parent’s entreaties that he return to Denmark Hill for the Christmas holidays he had––wilfully he knew, and at cost to himself in sorrow for their sorrow––extended his Swiss sojourn. The LaTouches had been in their Mayfair town house for two weeks now, and both Mrs. LaTouche in her frequent letters and Rose in her sporadic ones had expressed their desire to see him over Christmas.
He yearned to see Rose, to watch her come to him in her quick graceful steps, the heels of her little white shoes barely touching the floor. He yearned for the slender arms cast around his neck, and the shy sweet kiss that would follow. But he could not bear their parting. He might have an hour, an afternoon, with her and her mother or sister, and then the rest of life intruded, the carriage was called, the enchantment ended. Here in Lucerne, knowing she was growing steadily stronger, knowing she was now for the winter living at London just a few miles from his own home, he felt more ease than he could at Denmark Hill itself. He loved the thought of her.
He was trying desperately to work, to settle upon some task worthy of his efforts, and all his thoughts recurred to Rose. Carlyle was urging him on with his new political economy essay, and there was the geological study he also worked at, and the seemingly endless correspondence, hours of it each morning beyond the obligatory daily missive to his father.
He felt exactly that he was a youth of seventeen who had awakened to find himself a middle-aged man, with every desire of his youth intact but no capacity to accomplish them. As a youngster he had grieved that he had not yet the tools to spend his days immersed in metaphysical writing; in his forties he wished he could flirt, dance, and ride. Wrong at both ends of life. He wanted to see Rose, but she disturbed his work and thought.
Two days after he had sat at his window looking at Venus a letter from Rose arrived, the longest letter she had ever yet written him. It was dated 26 December. He began reading it standing in his room but sunk down upon his bed when she spoke of looking out her London window that night past the yellow glow of street gaslights to the immense and shining globe of Venus. She had been gazing West at Venus at the very hour he had. This was the perfect sympathy the child had with him––she seemed always to mirror, or even to anticipate him in act and emotion.
To her Venus was as the Christmas Star, bringing tidings of hope and joy to struggling humanity, and she hoped it would bring her St. Crumpet hope and joy too, because she knew he was not happy. She wrote at length about the Star as a sign of Peace, that inner peace which is the goal of all, and paraphrased passages from Isaiah, and wrote of Old Testament prophets, and of the love of Jesus. She said she had dreamed of him, and that she felt herself with him in his room there in Lucerne, and that she thought their rooms were not so very different. She went on for pages in serious childish fervour, and with such sweetness and concern for his well-being he felt faint by the time she reached her closing passage, in which his Posie-Rosie-Posie apologized for the blottiness of her pen.
He wished he had had some precious casket in which to store this letter, the Star Letter as he called it. It was not the call to faith he heeded––she was parroting her father there––but the utter tenderness to him he cherished.
In the morning when he wrote his father he wondered to him––Was Rose what you and her mother think––an entirely simple child? Or was she what he suspected, more subtle, more sweet and mysterious, than St. Catherine of Boulogne, that patron of artists and temptations?
He readied for his return to London. Rosie would be 14 beginning of January, and he had already chosen his gift for her, his 13th century manuscript from Liège, a Psalter and Book of Hours with an Ave to the Virgin naming her as a royal Rose. In it he inscribed:
Posie with St C’s love 3rd January 1862
Lizzie dead. Please come at once. ––William Rossetti
Ruskin sat in the jolting hansom repeating the words scrawled on the note which had reached him at Denmark Hill half hour ago. Lizzie dead. Last year Death took his dear Elizabeth Barrett Browning, greatest of female poets, and now in this cruel winter had snatched the girl whom he had hoped would become Britain’s greatest female painter.
The cab clattered over Blackfriars Bridge. The stench of the Thames, pungent even in February, forced his hand to his nose as he alighted at Chatham Place. Blast Rossetti for ever bringing that delicate girl here, with its charnel-house odours and rising damp.
He was not the first caller. The downstairs door was open and unattended and he climbed the narrow stair to their lodgings. Men’s voices told him Madox Brown was there as well as William Rossetti. He did not hear the voice of Gabriel.
He must have looked stricken, for William Rossetti crossed the floor to him and clasped him in an embrace that was as much physical support as comfort. But he waved away the offered chair.
“When did it happen,” was what he found himself saying in way of greeting.
“Early this morning.” William’s voice was raspy and he was hastily dressed, his hair barely combed. “Gabriel found her unresponsive when he returned last night, and brought a doctor at once. He and two other medical man worked hours trying to revive her, but her stupor only grew deeper. Just before dawn her pulse could be felt no more.”
Ruskin shut his eyes for a moment.
William went on. “There was a nearly-empty bottle of laudanum by her side.”
Lizzie always had difficulty sleeping, everyone knew she relied on the opiate to ease her way. The drug however demanded ever-increasing dosages to remain effective.
He could barely frame his next question. “Was it––”
William came to his aid. “It was not thought to have been, no. We hope they will rule death by misadventure.”
Ruskin looked across the room to the closed bedroom door. “Why was he not here? Why was she alone, once again alone?”
“She was not alone, not all evening, at least,” answered William. “She and Gabriel dined at a restaurant with Swinburne. Gabriel brought her back here and then went off to the Working Men’s College to teach his drawing class. When he returned he could not rouse her.”
Ruskin did not believe William’s defence of his brother. He imagined Gabriel Rossetti rushing to the arms of one of his jades after dumping off his sickly wife. He had loved Rossetti, had championed both his poetry and his art, and hoped to bring the expression of his talents to a higher plane. For years he had forgiven his protégé’s moral waywardness, his ignoring sound art-advice. He had given more out-of-pocket money to Rossetti than to any other artist, with no hope of such “loans” ever being repaid, and had not only repeatedly urged Rossetti to marry Lizzie and end her precarious social status, but had actually given him funds––twice––to do so. And once he finally married her his depictions of Lizzie took on a new radiance and truth; instead of exaggerating the few faults of her face and thinking them beauties, as he did with other sitters, he painted her just as she was, perfectly capturing her romantic and fragile nature.
“Where is he now,” he asked, looking at the closed door. At last Madox Brown spoke. Ruskin had never liked his paintings, despite Rossetti’s efforts to bring him round on his friend’s talent.
“He’s much too broken up to see you at present.” Ruskin registered a minor note of triumph in his voice as Brown denied him the opportunity to comfort Rossetti in person.
Ruskin turned back to William and raised his hands the slightest bit. “Let me see her,” he said.
William nodded and turned to the closed door, and opened it without entering so that Ruskin might be alone with her.
He had of course never before seen the bedroom, but it was as he might expect from such a pair. Velvet curtains, rusty with age, were imperfectly drawn against the feeble morning light falling from the single latticed window. The walls lacked any paper but were covered over in great extravagant sketches in charcoal by both Lizzie and her husband. The old bed was carved of dark wood and the hangings upon them threadbare and faded. A striped rag rug and a newer floral one by Morris lay upon the worn boards of the floor. A cupboard with a few pieces of pottery and a clothes press completed the furnishings, save for a tiny and uneven table by the bed upon which a lamp burned. It was shabby with the profligacy of ill-spent love and talent and dreams unrealised.
Ruskin approached the bed. Lizzie lay on one edge of it. Whatever horrid exertions the doctors had resorted to in attempting to revive her, there were no signs left of it on her face or in the room. She looked more than ever like the 13th century Florentine lady Ruskin had first thought she embodied, a face and form that Dante would have loved.
She was dressed in a white night-dress and the pale coverlet was pulled up almost to her shoulders. Her thick red hair had been smoothed from its centre part and softly framed her oval face. Her complexion was always very pale, and it was no paler now. Her gentle lips looked soft and barely closed. Only her eyelids told Ruskin she was dead. In life they were almost translucent, as if the luminous agate-coloured eyes beneath could still be discerned with her eyes closed. This morning they were utterly opaque, windows shut against the new day.
He raised his eyes and saw in the corner the child’s cradle he had not seen before. Last year Georgiana Burne-Jones had told him of coming to see Lizzie a few days after her baby had been born dead, and being stunned by finding the grieving mother huddled over the empty cradle by the coal fire. Her husband Ned was proceeding her on the stairs, and as they entered Lizzie had raised her head and called out, “Hush now, Ned! Don’t wake her, she’s finally asleep.”
Every effort towards love was futile. He bent forward and pressed his lips against the cool forehead.
What, he asked himself, if Rose should die, and leave him adrift? He could not voice the question to himself without staggering above a pit of desolation waiting to swallow him whole. The LaTouches had been in London several months, and now were returning to Ireland. Ruskin had not seen them as much as he could have while they were in residence in Mayfair, in hopes of making their departure less crushing when it came. His body responded in sympathy. He could not sleep, his digestion was troubling, his teeth ached, his face hurt.
Still, on the morning of their leave-taking he presented himself at their door. A horse cart laden with trunks and crates was just pulling away, and the family barouche and a hansom stood waiting outside the house.
The door opened as he mounted the steps, and the girls’ governess Miss Bunnet appeared with a small handbag. Rose and Emily were just behind her.
“St. Crumpet,” cried Rose as she spotted him. She ran to him thinking how strangely he looked at her; she didn’t know if he was going to laugh or cry. “I knew you would come. Mama said you mightn’t as you haven’t been for ever so long, but I knew you wouldn’t let me go!” She pulled herself out of his arms and they stepped aside to let Miss Bunnet go on to the carriage. He just looked at her, said nothing, just looked steadily at her, and so she threw her arms around him again just to change things.
Ruskin felt himself clutch at her shoulders, and the water coming into his eyes. Then Mrs. LaTouche, smiling in her veil and travelling dress, came out on the threshold and fetched them both inside for a proper good-bye.
At Denmark Hill that afternoon Ruskin’s old friends Dr. and Mrs. John Simon came to tea. His mother was too crippled with joint pain to come down stairs, and he sat nearly silent at the table with them and his father, all his mind following the LaTouches on their way to the coast. When the Simons left he had to bear his father’s criticism on his unsociable behaviour. In a day Rose would be back wandering the woods of Harristown picking anemones, or perhaps even plucking crayfish from the Liffey as he had taught her. If his physical heart had been wrenched from his breast he could not have felt more hollow.
As the days passed he decided to draw her. As skilful as he was as a draughtsman, as accurately as he could render architectural perspective or the sinuous curves of a convolvulus, he felt he had little gift for drawing any living being. How much less could he hope to capture Rosie’s beauty. He thought of the gold of her hair. If one were to attempt painting it he should turn to Perugino and use real gold threads to catch the effect of sunshine upon it. Still, he would try. He needed no sitter; her image was graven upon his heart. Flos florum Rosa––Rose, the flower of flowers.
In May, completely unexpectedly, came a startling invitation from Maria LaTouche. She offered him the use of a little cottage on the Harristown property, henceforth to be completely at his disposal. Ruskin remembered it well: it was just beyond the gates of the park, and had a garden, and fields, and was as well within sight of the Liffey. Rose, she had written, would walk by it each morning on her way to the village school she was now beginning to attend.
He was wild with delight. At the same time, thinking of actually living at Harristown in such close proximity to Rose seemed utterly fantastic. How could he hope to work there? How in fact could he leave his failing parents, his eighty-one year old father suffering now from the painful spasms of gravel, his mother unable to walk? But he wrote his letter of acceptance and proceeded with plans to take Georgiana and Ned Burne-Jones, too poor to travel on their own, to France and Italy.
He was in Paris when Mrs. LaTouche’s letter retracting her offer reached him. After consideration she and Mr. LaTouche had decided that their parochial Irish neighbours might misunderstand such an arrangement, & etc. He fired off a letter to Rosie, angry she had not fought harder for the scheme.
He was not to see her for more than three years.
Everywhere Ruskin looked he found destruction, war, or idiocy. Continental travel afforded a temporary respite until he happened upon the ongoing assaults of brutal restorers attacking cherished 14th and 15th century buildings, or found valleys and villages he had loved as a boy choked up with shoddy new construction and suburban sprawl. The Swiss lakes were no longer as clearly pristine as he had found them in boyhood, when he had filled his travel diaries with descriptions of their colours. Even Venice, which to the untrained eye seemed to have escaped the 19th century, filled him with despair, the accursed steam-powered passenger boats––i vaporetti––exhaling soot while depriving gondoliers of their honest living.
The entire world was unravelling. America was ripped asunder, North from South, with war resulting in appalling carnage. The French were fighting the Austrians, and Poland and Russia seemed teetering upon the brink. Prince Albert, but forty-two, was suddenly dead from typhoid fever, plunging Queen and country into mourning. And mechanization was running amok. The double-hulled steam leviathan Great Eastern––that final fruit of the prematurely dead megalomaniac engineer Brunel––five times larger than any ship ever built, was now plying the Atlantic, belching coal smoke from the labours of 200 stokers working day and night. Ships were dropping telegraph cable from gigantic reels into deep and formerly silent ocean waters and linking Britain and America. No place was safe from the intrusion of modern engineering, and the thought made Ruskin shudder.
For the first time he felt unable to keep up with scientific innovation and thought. Chemistry was advancing so quickly that seven new elements had been detected––all, he thought wryly, ending in “ium”––and all manner of specialist laboratory equipment developed for ever-narrower purposes. The broad spectrum of his natural philosophy interests in geology, meteorology, and botany demanded an ever-deepening commitment to adopt new systems and methods. He simply could not withstand the onslaught of novel information, discoveries, and techniques.
He liked Darwin personally but despised the man’s reductionist theory applied to mankind. And Industry itself was pushing the hand of the theorists. The new railway cuttings scoring Britain revealed dramatic layers of sediment which had to have taken aeons to deposit. Deeper mines brought heretofore never-seen fossils to the surface. The earth was far older than the Old Testament reckoning of six-thousand years; the tangible scientific evidence was there for all who cared to see. With a bitter humour he realised that at least he was now spared the crisis of belief that swept the Christian world as it tried frantically to recalibrate Biblical inerrancy with scientific fact.
The full use of his talents and powers was what he required, yet in his fractured state he grasped at anything that might absorb his attention temporarily. Rising at four, he lost himself in the work at hand. He spent silent hours meticulously drawing a hummingbird’s feather in microscopic detail. He arranged and rearranged his vast collections of minerals and crystals, experimenting with original systems of classification. He composed music inspired by the Epicurean fatalism of the newly-published Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, finding solace in its imagery of fragrant roses and admonitions to seek the earthly joys that had so far escaped him. He would answer correspondence, write in his diary, walk or drive for hours, visit a picture gallery, sit in a darkened box in a music hall where some well-trained singer might win his admiration. He filled his days with ceaseless activity.
His friend Norton had asked Ruskin to name the things that made him what he was, and he, not at all in jest, wrote back
What?––an entirely puzzled, helpless and disgusted old gentleman. Good nature and great vanity have done all of me that was worth doing. I’ve had my heart broken––ages ago, when I was a boy––then mended––cracked––beaten in, kicked about old corridors, and finally I think, fairly flattened out. I’ve picked up what education I’ve got in an irregular way––and it’s very little. I’ve written a few second rate books which nobody minds; ––I can’t draw––I can’t play nor sing––I can’t ride, I talk worse and worse,––I can’t digest. And I can’t help it. There,––Goodbye.
He couldn’t explain himself, and he couldn’t explain to his father his abrupt giving away of no less than 77 Turner watercolours and drawings, all bought by the old man’s generosity for his son’s delight and now stripped from the walls of Denmark Hill and laying in boxes at Oxford and Cambridge. Ruskin said he did not wish to actually possess them, only to know that they were safe, and where he could see them; just as he wished for the safety of Chartres Cathedral. John James could not understand his son’s linking a gigantic, mediaeval, and more or less public edifice with Turner’s fragile works on paper, with which his son had an intimate and longstanding relationship. Every Turner sketch of Venice was sent away.
Nor could Ruskin explain why that same spring he broke down in the middle of a lecture on Tree Twigs at the Royal Institution. The evening had begun well. His notes, while perfectly ordered, served as departure points for his address, mere touchstones to refer to: Every leaf a tree––harmony of disparate parts––deceits of the eye in registering distant trees––Turner’s superiority in the painting of foliage––green contains every shade needed to convey all parts of non-flowering vegetation in all light––Turner’s treatment of shaded grass, sunlit grass, branch shadows on grass––
He saw then in his mind’s eye some novel and exciting connexions between the economic distresses of Welsh miners and the deforestation and profaning of Athenian sacred groves. His voice seemed to grow louder; the hall had not the good resonance of some venues. He was aware he was waving his hands, and perhaps he was shouting. Then it was quiet and he heard only the pumping of his own blood in his eardrums. A disturbance at the side door drew his eye; a man, tall and thin, was entering, removing his hat as did so. His hair was a tangle of yellow curls, and his mouth set in a familiar quizzical smile. The speaker could only stand there, hand in air, and watch. It was his own lost Millais, self-exiled for years beyond the realm of his influence. With him was...a lady. Effie’s tart pink bonnet had trailing pink ties edged with lace. Ruskin watched them sway under her pointed chin as the couple moved in and claimed seats from the file of empty ones in the very first row. When she was settled she looked up at him: What a tight smile on her face!
He stood at the wooden podium before five hundred listeners, but he had forgot they were there. He was silent a long time, and they were staring back at him. He searched the faces before him. A craggy old man with a white beard sat like a beacon, staring at him with burning eyes. If Carlyle had not been there in the audience he did not think he could have mastered himself to completion. The dreadful apparitions in the first row vanished as he lowered his head to accept the applause of his listeners; raising his eyes he saw the flash of pink skirt shut out by the closing side door.
He was still stung by the public’s rejection of his Cornhill papers, but could not turn from his conviction that these were his most vital utterances to date. He had them published in book form bearing a title taken from the Gospel of Matthew, Onto this Last. No one bought it.
No one understood his frustration at having the few certainties he clung to being ignored. He felt, as he had once written to Mrs. Browning, exactly like an old woman locked up with a score of wicked children who never let her alone to do her knitting.
As soon as I’ve got a house of my own I’ll ask you to send me something American––a slave perhaps. I’ve a great notion of a black boy in a green jacket and purple cap––in Paul Veronese’s manner...
Charles Eliot Norton lowered the letter from Ruskin and looked out over the snow-carpeted garden of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Norton loved Ruskin, and knew he was loved by the man, which made the constant prick of the spur that Ruskin lately employed all the more painful. Nor was this the only extravagance in the letter. Norton had written to announce that despite all expectation to the contrary he had been blessed with finding love with a like-minded woman, and to tell Ruskin of his forthcoming wedding. For if Norton had Yankee breeding, high intelligence, and limitless work capacity as scholar and magazine editor to recommend him, he was, despite being several years his correspondent’s junior, also of uncertain health, slight, stooped, and already balding. Winning the love of an intelligent, kind, and sagacious woman was a triumph he had not allowed himself to consider possible, and yet now Susan would wed him in a few short months.
And his dear friend Ruskin wrote back, frankly and without a trace of shame, that he was jealous of Susan and wanted Susan to be jealous of him.
I don’t think I shall like her, he admitted, especially if your having a wife makes you write less to me, even though I don’t write you as much as I once did since we differ so much about your horrid war. Norton sighed at this conflation. Before the advent of the war to preserve the Union Ruskin had teazed that he would never deign to visit America, for he could not countenance stepping foot in any country so miserable as to possess no castles. That humorous pretext had hardened into an almost violent prejudice against the American democratic ideal. Norton read on in the letter, more rambling and digressive than most. Ruskin reminded Norton that he was writing him on the shortest day, the solstice, with Christmas nearly there, and told him piquantly and defiantly that he’d become a Pagan, and was now searching for Diana in the glades, and Mercury in the clouds, but he wouldn’t make sacrifice to either of them if it meant killing an animal. Norton folded the narrow papers; he would answer tomorrow when he could re-summon his natural enthusiasm.
Alone in his rented villa in the sheltering declivity of Mornex, Ruskin thought of buying a hilltop above Bonneville, where he might build a home of his own and escape every pressure. It would give him a chance to design a dwelling of unique character, and to experiment with a plan for damming glacier run-off to give him water and improve agriculture for the peasants. The commune authorities were sceptical and the old farmers whose parcels he hoped to assemble amused.
Then in March, still at Mornex, he received a letter from Rose that staggered him. He had long confided his religious misgivings to Mrs. LaTouche, and felt his confidences safe with her. Now she had shown portions of a recent letter to her daughter.
Rose scolded, “How could one love you, if you were a Pagan?” and went on in fearful agitation over the fate of his soul. For the first time he felt exasperation at the precociousness of a fourteen year old lecturing him. For decades he had wrestled to discern spiritual truth, and she was sputtering pieties from her father’s evangelical tracts at him.
Rose LaTouche could not understand her parent’s unhappiness, and her parents could not understand each other. That her mother should be so distressed with her father, and her father so sorrowful over her mother, was something that hurt the girl’s head attempting to puzzle out. The facts were that John LaTouche had gone to London and been baptised by Charles Spurgeon at his Baptist Tabernacle, an unnecessary and provocative act in the eyes of Maria LaTouche, for her husband had, as all the family, received that sacrament as a child.
“And that is where we were wronged as children,” was her husband’s retort. “Only thinking adults can receive valid baptism, freely understood, freely accepted. Infant baptism is but another of the great errors of Popery––another yoke of Rome––which we must free ourselves from. No infant can judge for himself.”
“But loving parents can,” answered Maria LaTouche. They had argued this point all week, and she was exhausted by it. Now, as they faced each other in the centre of her bedroom she struggled to keep her voice down. “Our own parents had us baptised as infants. What were we but loving parents when we took our three to the font?”
“Ignorant, misguided wretches!”
His face was red and she could barely stand to look at him.
“I’ll not have you say that our considered, reverent observance of our faith’s sacrament was made out of ignorance! Next you’ll be saying you wed me out of ignorance––there will be no end of your back-tracking and fault-finding!” In her anger she was close to tears and wished she had not said this last. He seemed not to have heard it, or if he had, deemed it unworthy of comment.
It was just before the dinner hour when these voices were raised. Rose had changed her pinafore and was starting down the broad stairs when she heard them. Her hand had stiffened upon the polished banister, and yet she had let it go and found herself standing just outside her mother’s closed bedroom door.
“Percy I have likely lost,” she heard her father go on, “due to my own inability to awaken to the truth in time. But Emily and Rose––especially Rose, marked by God to be His Holy Prize––how can I stand by and consign her to eternal Hell-fire?”
Her mother’s voice was piercing. “Hell-fire! How dare you presume to judge our daughter––judge Percy or Emily––three good children––”
Rose could listen no more. She burst in with a shriek, and ran, sobbing, to her mother. The girl twisted her fists in her mother’s skirts as tiny children do, struggling to bury into the silken folds. Maria LaTouche had her arms around her in a moment, but Rose lifted her head and broke and ran to her father. He stooped to lift her up but she fell at his feet, shaking and sobbing.
“Now, now, my Rose,” he said, as he knelt and took her in his arms. “Don’t cry. I have a surprise for you. Reverend Spurgeon is coming here, to Harristown. Coming all the way from London, to meet His Holy Prize.”
A truce was called in the household until Rev. Spurgeon arrived. The following week he swooped down upon Harristown to receive a dignitary’s welcome. Within his first two days he was driven through a quarter of Harristown’s parkland, with stops at tenants’ farms so he might view living conditions. John LaTouche took him round to the school he helped fund, and Mrs. LaTouche gave a sumptuously tasteful dinner in which he met the local gentry. Spurgeon was a portly, vigorous man just entering middle age, and enjoyed a fine meal. He and LaTouche talked late into the evenings about the latter’s charitable efforts and aspirations, and the host was not found wanting by his guest. LaTouche cared about fallen women, about education for poor children, about care of the widowed and ill. And he was an immensely rich banker, able to act upon his precepts. If ever there was a modern Croesus sent to extend Christ’s message here on earth, it was John LaTouche, thought Charles Spurgeon.
Their honoured visitor had the most luxuriant curling brown whiskers Rose had ever seen. She was always being told to stand up straight and Rev. Spurgeon certainly did; he kept his head directly above his spine and moved his neck slowly, as if to show his beard to best advantage. She was certain he must use a curling iron on it as her mother did her fringe-hair at her forehead. On the second morning of his visit Rose, down in the garden, saw Rev. Spurgeon at his open window, still wearing his night-shirt and doing his setting-up exercises for the day. She was surprised he did not wear his curled whiskers in a net overnight, as her Mama did her fringe-hair.
He smiled a great deal, and was given to lowering himself to the children’s level when he spoke to them. Rose liked that he had as many different voices as an actor at the Pantomime. He used a sort of everyday one when he was speaking to her parents about Harristown and its countryside, another richer, slower voice when he presided at grace at the big dining table, a third, more high-pitched jolly one when he spoke to her and her siblings, and so on. Rev. Spurgeon’s kindest, quietest voice he reserved for when her father brought her alone before him.
The preacher had already examined the children to his satisfaction over their Scripture, and Rose knew it was a special honour for her to attend him alone with just her father.
“Now, my dear, your father tells me what I can see myself: That you are an exceptional child, both quick, and good. But that also you are troubled in heart.”
She was seated with Spurgeon on a stiff little sofa in her father’s study, with her father sitting opposite in a wing chair. Their guest was much younger than her father; no gray yet streaked the preacher’s chestnut hair, yet her father treated him with more attention and respect than he had the Crown Prince when he had visited. She did not want to say the wrong thing in front of either of them.
“I want to be good,” Rose began. “I want to love God, and Mama and Papa and Percy and Emily, and the world and the poor––and I want everyone to love God too. I want everyone to be happy, and I want to make them happy.”
“And you do, I am certain; being good is a true path to happiness; your own and other’s.”
“If I pray enough will I be happy, and make others happy too?”
“Prayer is a true path to serenity, and there can be little happiness without serenity.”
“I have a friend, St. Crumpet––Mr. Ruskin, that I want to be happy, too.”
John LaTouche shifted in his chair, and Spurgeon glanced at him, but his host remained silent.
“You take quite a bit upon that little head, Rose,” Spurgeon told her. “Mr. Ruskin is a man of many and complex parts.” Rose cocked her head and he went on. “You are not responsible for his happiness, nor goodness, only your own.” Spurgeon looked up at the girl’s father for an instant. “And I would warn you that we must be careful of those we think our friends. Sometimes friends can lead us astray.”
Rose was still, looking raptly at the preacher. He looked back at her with perfect and practised steadiness.
She felt there was something wonderful in the way he looked at her, the same way he looked at adults, giving her all his attention. She felt him take one of her hands in his own.
“But we always have a choice, Rose. Let your father, and your heavenly Father, be your guide. Your earthly father can help you make that choice, and your heavenly father will reward you. It is Heaven or Hell. God or fiends.”
Rose let go of the preacher’s gaze and hung her head. “Oh, I am a naughty one! And when I am naughty I make everyone so unhappy. And I must make God sad too. How wicked of me! When I am good I make Mama and Papa glad. I want to make everyone happy. I want to be perfect. I will be perfect!” Rose had jumped up upon her feet at this last, no longer able to sit still.
Spurgeon could not help but let out a gentle laugh. Rose looked at him as if she might burst in tears. He too stood, and placing his hands upon her shoulders, deepened his voice.
“I lay hold of you for Christ,” he told her. Rose opened her mouth as if to gasp; her father reached towards her lest she swoon. But she straightened at once, and reached up with her small hands and drew the preacher’s hands to her lips and kissed them.
Spurgeon had tears in his eyes at his next words. “You are indeed a Holy Prize. I claim you for Christ.”
Ruskin surrendered his hopes for his Alpine paradise. His father found the scheme absurd and told him so in every letter. None of his friends encouraged or approved, and the practical obstacles to its purchase, construction and maintenance began to seem so daunting he capitulated. And where after all, would he get the money? He could hardly ask his infirm father, grieving over his absence, to give him funds to build a house away from him.
After Rev. Spurgeon left Harristown, Rose began pressing to take communion at Sunday service. She dare not ask for a second baptism–––and in another tradition, as her father had done––but wished fervently and repeatedly to profess her spiritual worthiness by receiving communion. Maria LaTouche was adamant that Rose must wait until her Confirmation; that was the accepted order. A difficult period ensued in which John LaTouche repeatedly took Rose for chats with Rev. Hare, the local vicar, who knew the girl’s seriousness of mind and was inclined to grant her request. Finding herself outnumbered but not yet outmanoeuvred, Maria LaTouche responded by penning, and insisting the girl read, a quantity of religious pamphlets reinforcing the wisdom of adhering to the Anglican Church’s ordained schedule. Her father countered by urging Rose to fast and pray, two acts of which his youngest had more than usual experience for her age. He finally took her to again see Rev. Hare, and the exhausted Rose cried out her difficulties so movingly that he walked her home with the assurance that she should receive the memorial of Christ’s death at the service next morning. For, as she had herself persuaded him, being heavy-laden and penitent, it was meant for her.
Rose went to bed light of heart for the first time in many weeks; even the knowledge that her mother was at that hour locked in a heated debate about her with her father could not quell her giddy happiness. The morning was so darkened by rain that Mrs. LaTouche called it an omen, and Rose felt a pang seeing her mother’s red-rimmed eyes when she went up to hug her goodbye. But she went off with her father and governess and was received of her first Communion that day.
Her father expected her to return from this service in a state of elation, and was not the least alarmed by his daughter’s extreme light-heartedness. She seemed to have given gravity itself the slip, and by the end of the day no one would have been much surprised if Rose had been observed treading upon the ceilings. Only her mother was concerned. On Monday Rose awoke with a head that ached so badly she cried out that it would burst. She could not bear the slightest sound, and the merest crack of light was agony to her. Everything, she told her mother, hurt her, and thinking hurt worst of all. She wanted no one in her room but her mother, and Mrs. LaTouche, cursing both herself and her husband for the mental exertion and spiritual anguish Rose had been subjected to, stayed with her day and night. Weeks of invalidism followed. Rose claimed she could not eat––food hurt her, she insisted. The physicians her worried parents imported tried tempting her with delicacies and threatening her with noxious solutions. They failed equally with both. Rose, all but mute, was not listening to them. She grew very thin but was never afraid. She knew if she were left alone He would guide her.
When Rose could speak again she would whisper to her mother things she knew would happen to her during that day to come. When things happened as she predicted her mother began to ask the doctors to leave her alone. Still, they forced her to take things she didn’t want and knew were bad for her. At last they asked her why she was so firm, how she knew what was good for her and what bad. Although it was very strange and very hard to say Rose had to tell them that God was telling her what to do.