horsewhipping Ruskin

There’s not a strict correlation between the presence of a figure in my writing and his or her presence in my mind. Among the thinkers thus underrepresented in my writing are Mikhail Bakhtin, Ivan Illich, Iris Murdoch, Lesslie Newbigin, and, above all, John Ruskin. But Ruskin is the only one of those figures who, in my considered opinion, ought to have been horsewhipped — at least once and possibly twice.

In Trollope’s Doctor Thorne, a certain Mr Moffat gains the love of one Miss Augusta Gresham and the promise of her hand in marriage … but then ends the engagement when he thinks he has the chance to marry a much richer woman, leaving Augusta hurt and humiliated. Consequently, Miss Gresham’s brother Frank acquires a whip, goes to London, finds Mr Moffat on Pall Mall, and gives him a thorough thrashing.

It is my contention that a member of the family of Euphemia Gray Ruskin should have done the same to John Ruskin. He deserved it, and in the long run it might have been good for him.

The story is a famous one and endlessly debated. Ruskin and Effie Gray married in 1848 when she was nineteen and he twenty-eight. In the six years of their marriage they never had sex, and while Ruskin gave various reasons for his disinclination to bed his own wife — the primary ones being that he disliked babies and did not want to be distracted from his work — the real reason came out after, in their sixth year of marriage, Effie told John that it was time for them to have children. To this John replied that her angry insistence on the point proved that she was insane, and if she had children she would therefore be unfit to raise them. (Apparently in Ruskin’s view the only fit mothers are reluctant ones. I mean that seriously.) At this point Effie sought an annulment of their marriage — something she should have done years earlier; her forbearance towards her strange unhusband was remarkable — and in order for that to happen some uncomfortable enquiries had to be made.

Faced with demands from legal authorities, the Ruskins told the true story. In Effie’s words, Ruskin “had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening.” Ruskin effectively admitted this: “It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it.” Neither of them ever made a more specific statement — this was the Victorian era after all — but we do know that the doctors who examined Effie to prove that she was virgo intacta (a requirement for an annulment) said that she was perfectly normal in every respect; and that after her marriage to the painter John Everett Millais, who found her greatly desirable in every way, she bore eight children.

Many have wondered what Ruskin found so objectionable about Effie’s body, and we will never know the truth, but of all the explanations suggested the one that seems likeliest to me is that until he saw her naked he did not know that women had pubic hair. (His understanding of the nude female body would have been derived largely from sculptures.) Some have scoffed at this explanation, saying that banter with other boys would have long since informed him of this point, but Ruskin grew up in a narrowly pious and morally rigid home and had few friends of his own age; yukking it up with the lads was never his style. Others have speculated that he was horrified by menstruation, but if that had been the problem, it would have gone away after a few days; and in any case that does not seem to fit the language they use, e.g. “had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was.”

Whatever the cause of his disgust, Ruskin knew that Effie very much wanted children, and if he was unprepared to give them to her he should have ended their non-marriage immediately. But he did not. He strung her along for half-a-decade, and for this he deserved a Frank Gray (on the model of Frank Gresham) to whip him up one side of Pall Mall and down the other.

But it never occurred to him that Effie’s desires should play any part in his decision-making. It’s essential to note here that Ruskin’s parents both infantilized and idealized him, their only child: they believed him to be a genius and felt it their absolute duty to nurture that genius. He lived chiefly with his parents until their death, making most of his European journeys with them, and even when he was married to Effie the couple lived near the elder Ruskins and John spent most of his time not with his wife but with his parents. From his earliest days they gave him this sense that his gifts was exceptional (about which they were correct) and that the greatness of those gifts meant that everything and everyone should be sacrificed to their cultivation (about which they were not correct). Ruskin seems to have chafed, occasionally, at being treated always as a gifted child, but he was so used to it that it seemed totally normal to him to instruct Effie that they would abstain from sex for five years so that he could focus on what he always called “my work.”

Effie’s unhappiness at this travesty of a marriage was utterly bewildering to Ruskin. Once Ruskin wrote to his father with what his great biographer Tim Hilton calls “the honesty of the totally self-engrossed,”

Even when poor Effie was crying last night, I felt it by no means as a husband should, but rather a bore. However, I comforted her in a very dutiful way — but it may be, perhaps, on the other hand, that I am not easily worked on by these things.

He cannot even think of her unhappiness as real but rather only as a means of “working on” him. His complete neglect of her in the presence of other people — he often seemed not even to know that she was there — was what led her to enjoy the attentive company of Millais, something that happened so often that a number of people thought that Ruskin was actively encouraging Effie to take the painter as her lover. In fact he was merely oblivious; oblivious through a combination of indifference and self-absorption. And then of course when she finally left him he complained ceaselessly about being unjustly and inexplicably “abandoned.” I find no evidence that he ever saw things in any other way, that he ever understood that he had wronged Effie.

A score or so of lashes from a thick cutting whip in the hands of someone who loved Effie was just the thing, in my view, to teach Ruskin that he was not the only person in the world with feelings and interests. I’m not sure he could have learned the lesson in a less harsh way.

I said at the outset that he deserved whipping once for sure and possibly twice. What might have been the second occasion?

It is my belief that Ruskin learned one thing only from his miserable experience with Effie: that he was a pedophile. Hilton frankly uses this term to describe Ruskin in middle-age, and he is right to do so; but it is highly unlikely (Hilton and I agree on this) that Ruskin would ever have had sexual intercourse, or anything remotely approximating it, with a prepubescent girl. The very idea of sexual intimacy seems to have terrified Ruskin, and I am not even sure that he would have wanted to see a girl naked. He found delight in the mere presence of young girls, and enjoyed bantering with them, singing with them, writing letters to them and receiving affectionate replies; I am not convinced that he ever wanted more than that, even from Rose La Touche, whom he met when she was ten and fell in love with soon thereafter, though he was slow to recognize and name his own feelings. Eventually, on her eighteenth birthday, he proposed marriage to her. He was forty-six.

Rose’s attitudes towards Ruskin oscillated between affection and fierce anger — the latter prompted at least in part by letters from Effie Millais, who had been asked by Rose’s parents to tell them what kind of person Ruskin was and who, it appears, minced no words. (Only small portions of the correspondence among all the people discussed here have survived, which is a story for another day.) But it seems to me that the complexity of Rose’s attitudes towards Ruskin arose from something more fundamental to her character than her assessment of his: an obsession with purity that was central to her (and her father’s) understanding of the demands of the Christian life. Rose was constantly ill and extremely thin from her teen years to her death at age twenty-seven, and while doctors never figured out what the problem was, it has often since been speculated that hers was a case of holy anorexia. As with Ruskin’s repulsion from Effie’s body, we’ll never know with certainty.

I mention all this because, at his age and with his experience, Ruskin should have known that his attentions and importunings were not healthy for Rose; a more attentive and charitable man would have withdrawn, thinking her health more important than his own desires. But Ruskin continued, in matters of love anyway, to be driven by the same absolute self-regard that had made Effie’s life so miserable. Aside from his discovery of his pedophilia, he learned absolutely nothing from that travesty. The only thing that might rescue him from a second thrashing is the fact that Rose was a very troubled young woman through and through, and it is not clear how much Ruskin had to do with that. My reading (for what that’s worth) suggests to me that the course of Rose’s life would have run much the same if she had never met Ruskin, and that he never occupied the central place in her imagination that she occupied in his.

In the last months of her life, Rose and Ruskin got to spend a good deal of time together; her parents had withdrawn their objections to the relationship, knowing that their daughter was dying and willing to make one last throw of the dice, in case the presence of Ruskin might give Rose a reason to live. But it did not work. And what passed between them in those final meetings no one will ever know.

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The indulgence of Ruskin’s parents, and the catechism with which they instructed him — You are a great genius, and it is our duty to nurture that genius —, ought to be interesting to anyone compelled by Ruskin’s writings, because they have everything to do with what is great in his work, and, equally, with what is frustrating about it. For Ruskin learned at an early age to trust his instincts implicitly, to believe that his every flight of imagination winged its way unerringly to some previously unseen truth. This made him a disastrous husband; in his work the results were mixed. In situations in which almost every other writer would wonder whether he was going too far, or making a claim too bold to be defended, Ruskin never had second thoughts. Indeed, “First thought, best thought” could have been his motto.

Because he really was a genius, all of Ruskin’s writings have at least moments and sometimes extended passages of great brilliance; because he wasn’t as intellectually perfect as he thought he was, none of his writings is wholly satisfying. Probably his most successful book from beginning to end is The Seven Lamps of Architecture, but the more characteristic Ruskin excellences come in single magnificent chapters studded like diamonds in intermittently interesting works. “The Nature of Gothic” from The Stones of Venice and “The Two Boyhoods” from the fifth volume of Modern Painters are the most famous examples, but there are many others. Like his friend George MacDonald, he is a very excerptable writer. Ruskin is a far greater figure than his contemporary George Meredith, but Oscar Wilde’s famous line about Meredith — “His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning” — could be used about Ruskin also, especially in the wild farrago that is the Fors Clavigera.

When Ruskin says something outrageous — as when he insists in Unto This Last that the inept workman should be paid just as much as the excellent one — my experience of his work makes me stop and think: Wait, could this be true? You can’t safely assume that what Ruskin says is true — or that it is false. You have to think about it. And that makes an encounter with Ruskin immensely valuable, more useful, in an important sense, than a consistently wise or consistently foolish writer would be. When reading Ruskin I often find myself thinking that a particular idea or example he offers would have occurred to no one else in the world; what a friend of Samuel Johnson said about him — “No man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson” — is equally true of Ruskin, at least most of the time. I find his writings on political economy and social malformation the least interesting of his works because they so often remind me of Carlyle, whom Ruskin virtually worshipped, and I would rather read Carlyle than an imitator of Carlyle, even when that imitator is himself a thinker of great stature. But on every other topic Ruskin was sui generis.

If thinkers other than Ruskin had come up with some of his most distinctive ideas, they would surely have dismissed them as eccentric, impossible, outré. Ruskin, by contrast, believed his ideas to be touched by genius simply because they were his. The very traits that made him an abominable husband and lover helped to make him an irreplaceable writer. I’ll keep reading him and learning from him and being inspired by him as long as I live; but I will also think quite regularly that he should have been horsewhipped, at least once.