Light, Descending Read online

  John had seen those paintings, and was incensed. Not only was the reviewer––a Scottish Presbyterian minister––ignorant of fine art, his flippancy was nothing short of vulgar. John had stood in awed wonder before Turner’s pastoral scene of the god Mercury lulling the shepherd Argus to sleep so he could abduct the lovely Io. Turner had painted the landscape with infinitely and suggestively subtle variations; the pale and vaporous blue of the heated sky was striated with grey and pearly white, the whole melding into glowing and aerial space. As to ‘Juliet’, her small ebullient figure anchored the foreground of a Venetian sky phosphorescent with fireworks, a scene imbued with the transitive beauty of uncertain light.

  He thought he would write a letter to the editors of Blackwood’s “Maga”, as its readers called it, and enlighten Rev. Eagles. Turner, John Ruskin wrote, was as an artist just as free as Shakespeare to re-imagine his settings; his imagination was in fact Shakespearean in its mightiness.

  “This is powerfully put, my boy,” said his father as he held the draught. John had come into his father’s velvet-draped study to show him his rebuttal, and the old man had begun reading it at his desk. John James had risen slowly from his chair and now stood before his son with the expanse of the carved mahogany desk between them. “‘He is a meteor, dashing on in a path of glory which all may admire, but which none may follow; and his imitators must be, and always have been, moths fluttering about the lights, into which if they enter they are destroyed.’”

  John James Ruskin lowered the papers and pulled his spectacles down his nose. Fluttering moths! Of course it was beautifully expressed, and showed off the boy’s facility with the language, but the passion of it, the declaration of Turner’s supremacy, struck him as a bit rich for the blood. He looked up at John, who watched all expectancy, his fair skin colouring as he studied him. “Quite a lot of heat in there,” he told his son. “It’s perhaps, too warm.”

  “How can I let him call Mr. Turner’s Venice ‘thrown higgledy-piggedly together,’ and ‘thrown into a flour tub’? My descriptions tell what Turner really painted!”

  His father removed his reading spectacles and lay them upon the blotter as he considered. It wouldn’t do to have the youngster embarrass himself. “Why not let Mr. Turner make that decision? I might send him your letter in care of his agent and see what he thinks. If he approves you may send it on to Blackwood’s.”

  The great painter wanted none of it.

  My dear Sir,

  I beg to thank you for your zeal, kindness, and trouble you have taken on my behalf, in respect to the criticism of Blackwood’s Magazine for October, respecting my works; but I never move in these matters, they are of no import save mischief and the meal-tub, which Maga fears for by my having invaded the flour tub.

  JMW Turner

  P.S. If you wish to have the manuscript returned, have the goodness to let me know. If not, with your sanction, I will send it on to the possessor of the picture of Juliet.

  In January John left for Oxford. His mother came with him, with an assumption of the correctness in her accompanying her child to university that went unquestioned in the family circle. John’s health, in all their eyes, was delicate; he was given to colds and stomach-upsets. She and Mr. Ruskin had been their boy’s almost sole tutors, and knew him best. Mrs. Ruskin had given him all the Latin she could, and Mr. Ruskin insisted on only the best verse for the boy, Shakespeare and Pope and of course that luminary of every Scottish family, Sir Walter Scott. John James enrolled his son as a Gentleman-Commoner at Christ Church, a sort of purchased rank. The fees were higher, the lodgings better, and it allowed John in without an examination, which, given the sketchiness of his home-schooling, his father suspected the boy might not pass even granted his natural brilliance.

  The Gentlemen-Commoners sat apart at separate tables to dine. John’s fellow scholars were a sporting crowd of horse-race-mad young lords. A trunk of new clothes had been made for his going up, and he had as well his Gentleman-Commoner gold-tasselled mortar-board and silk gown. John was sandy-haired, blue-eyed, tall and straight; he presented well. His brown-velvet-collared greatcoat was each day set off by a bright blue stock about his neck.

  Mrs. Ruskin, with cousin Mary as companion, took lodgings on the Oxford High Street, and expected John for tea every evening, of which expectation he did not disappoint her unless he must. His father joined them on weekends as his business travelling allowed. The family came home briefly to London to celebrate John’s 18th birthday, and it was then his father presented him with an actual Turner watercolour. It was a summery, sunlit view of London’s Richmond Bridge, the round-arched stone bridge in the middle distance, genteelly dressed picnickers in the foreground. He had hoped for some time for such a gift, and though it was not what he would have chosen for himself––he would have asked for a mountain, any mountain, by the great man––it was a specimen of his work.

  Late at night in his rooms at Peckwater Quad he thought about Beauty, of what constituted it, of the almost physical pleasure it gave him to stand before a lovely prospect in the woods, or before Turner’s glowing Richmond Bridge view. He had been forbidden to bring it back to Oxford with him, but he had drawn a little sketch of it to help him in his recalling. He wrote poems to Adèle, away in France, which she would never see. He drew flowers and branches in the Physic Garden, and considered a treatise on the philosophy of architecture he might write.

  Virgil bored him, and Milton he found parasitical. Sophocles was dismal and Tacitus too hard. Terence was simply dull. Plato he loved, from the first line. The great theme of Thucydides––the suicide of Greece––he felt with ringing sympathy of heart and brain. His father paid for tutors to help lift his Latin and Greek, with whom he worked long into the dim Oxfordshire afternoons puzzling out the finer points of grammar.

  The chief activities of the other Gentlemen-Commoners were drinking, gaming, and horse-racing, rounded out by cock-fighting, badger-baiting, and boating. The ability to scale the heights of brick walls after the college gates had been locked each evening was also highly prized. They did no work and paid scouts to write the most cursory of essays for them. Nevertheless they treated John with amused benevolence, born, he assumed, of curiosity. He had shown them the first week that he could hold his liquor; that counted for something. The swells had sounded him out by inviting him to one of their rooms for an informal party. The daily drinking of sherry at home, coupled with his discreetly choosing one of the smaller glasses, alternated with draughts of cold water, allowed him to match his hosts, toast for toast. Yet they ragged him for his nightly visits to his mother, for the very fact that she had followed him to Oxford, and that nearly every Sunday his father came up too. His parents so wanted him to “get on” with the new crowd that he forced himself to find reasons to be in their company merely to satisfy their desire for fresh stories of his aristocratic neighbours.

  After a day spent drawing the venerable buildings of his academic setting, John returned to Peckwater Quad to learn, to his disgust, that two of the Gentlemen-Commoners, having waged a day-long race against each other from Oxford to London and back, had killed three horses between them in doing so. But his mother was delighted because one day young Lord March asked to borrow a pencil of him.

  Each week the undergraduates were required to write an essay on a philosophical subject, the finest to be read aloud in hall by its author on Saturday afternoon. John worked at these, and when one week his tutor told him that his piece on Juvenal had been selected, felt proud to be able to publicly represent his fellow Gentlemen-Commoners to the rest of the Christ Church student body. He was sitting between lounging Lords Desart and Emlyn when his name was called. He sensed, more than saw, their recoil––of pleased surprise, he imagined––as he stood, pulled down on his jacket to straighten it, and made his way to the rostrum. He delivered his piece with confidence and even, he hoped, élan. He returned to their tables expecting the jovial congratulations of the other Gentle
men-Commoners. Winding back through the blackened oak trestles, he found every man of them scowlingly alert and glaring at him. Some were hissing, and a few were pounding the stone pavers with their boots in protest. He felt the blood rushing to his face but forced himself not to hasten back to his seat. By actual application to his studies, he had committed the grossest lèse-majesté against the order of Gentlemen-Commoners. A foot darted out from beneath a bench as he neared his table, and tripped him. He saved himself from a complete fall only by ramming his hands upon the shoulders of Lord Kildare, one of the number who had formerly shown particular tolerance of the tradesman’s son. The pages of his essay fluttered over the table. John swept his hands together with clawed fingers and drew the papers into a crumpled mass.

  Late that night a remonstrative bonfire was lit outside his window. The glare of flames woke him, and as he stood at the casement watching the scouts and porters hastening to put it out he wished he had not already consigned his Juvenal essay to his room’s fire-grate. He would have liked to have been able to toss it gracefully from his window into the flames where his fellow matriculants, watching from the shadows of the arcades, could have witnessed his embarrassed admission of innocence.

  But he won them over, all and for good, the following night. Already asleep behind his closed bedroom door, he was awakened by drunken shouts, laughter, and the stamping of feet up the stairwell. He rose and tied on his dressing-gown as the party stormed his small parlour. It sounded as though his furniture was being hurled about the room; he heard pottery crash. “Come out, you little donkey,” cried the voice of the ringleader. He took a breath and opened his bedroom door. His table had been upset, chairs overturned, his papers scattered, and his books freed from their now-splintered cases. Five Gentlemen-Commoners stood reeling in the wreckage.

  John gave his waist tie an extra tug and came forward smiling. “Gentlemen, I am sorry that this evening I am not quite prepared to entertain you as you might wish, but as you know, my father is in the sherry trade, and he has put it in my power to invite you all to wine tomorrow evening. Will you come?”

  More congenial was the small group of scientific men he met in other Oxford circles. The first he found was Henry Acland, a medical student who shared his interests in geology and natural science. After this his circle expanded greatly through the offices of an unexpected benefactor. One autumn afternoon he was drawing poppy seed pods in the walled enclosures of the Physic Garden when a shadow fell over his sketch pad. John craned his neck over his shoulder.

  “An excellent representation,” said an elderly gentlemen with a fringe of white hair upon his bald head. “Mind you see the pods of Papaver somniferum in the next bed; they are nearly ripe for opium-cutting!”

  John stood to face his onlooker. The old man was gowned, and he recognized him as the famed mineralogist and fossil-hunter who also served as Canon of Christ Church.

  “Dr. Buckland,” said John. “John Ruskin, sir, of Christ College.”

  Buckland smiled and nodded. He reached for John’s sketch pad, which he willingly surrendered. After flipping through a few pages he handed it back.

  “I give a dinner, first Friday of each month. I’d like you to come.”

  “I would be honoured, sir.”

  The old man laughed. “Don’t be honoured. Be hungry. See you at seven, then.”

  A week later John presented himself at the stone house in the corner of Tom Quad. The door was opened by a curtsying maid. John stepped into a dark-panelled reception hall lined with horns and hats. Directly in front of him hung the mounted head of a rhinoceros, impressively vast, with tiny glass eyes peering from the thick folds of the heavy hide. A soft felt hat was hanging jauntily from its horn. Racks of antlers of deer, elk, moose, and the long spiral horns of some beast he could not name––an antelope from the depths of Africa, he imagined––were fastened on all three other walls. Men’s hats hung from many of the appendages. There was even a grey silk woman’s bonnet, ribbons trailing, stuck on the tip of a twelve-pointer. Instead of taking his hat, the maid gestured to the possibilities. “If you’d be so kind to choose a prong to your liking, sir,” she said, and then vanished for the remainder of the evening.

  He could hear voices, which grew loud when a door opened onto the hall. Buckland stuck his head out. “Mr. Ruskin. Come in and meet the rest of the party.”

  John stepped over the threshold and paused. A crocodile grinned at him, gigantic jaws gaping, exactly at eye level. It was hanging over the dining table, suspended from the coffered ceiling by slender wire cables. It was also covered with dust, a dust that coated much but not all of the room’s extraordinary contents. John’s nose was assailed by the mingled aromas of that same dust, combined with a pronounced animal muskiness, leavened by sweet briar pipe tobacco and cedar wood. No dining room could have been more distinct from that at Herne Hill and his mother’s scrupulously exacting standards of cleanliness and decorum. He stood there mutely, blinking, his eyes fastened on the fearsomely fascinating teeth of the crocodile, and found himself smiling back at it. A couple of men rose from chairs and came forward.

  “Quite the reception, don’t you think?” asked a tall, thin man a few years older than himself. “I’m Henry Liddell,” he said as he extended his hand. John had seen him before; Liddell was a tutor at Christ Church.

  “Liddell here has started on a Greek Lexicon, to be the most complete compendium of Greek to English ever attempted,” said their host.

  John shook Liddell’s hand and said, “In that case, sir, my own tutors may soon have their considerable burdens lessened.” Liddell laughed at this with a self-deprecating wave. John felt he had gained sudden admission not only to this curious scientific sanctum but its circle of convivial acolytes.

  Dr. Buckland turned to a shorter man, also young, with brown hair and a heavy brow. “Ruskin, this is Charles Darwin. You would have thought he might have contributed to my collections here, but in sad fact, no. A few beetles was the most I could get out of him. I’ll have to send him back around the world, just for my sake.”

  Buckland began riffling through a splaying stack of printed journals piled willy-nilly on the end of a sideboard. “Ruskin’s of a like mind to we fellows. Ah––here you are, already represented in my collection.” He looked over his spectacles at John before returning to the journal in his hand. “‘Remarks on the Present State of Meteorological Science”, by John Ruskin. And were you not the very young author of a paper on the colours of the Rhine, and another on the strata of Mont Blanc, which appeared a few years back in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History?”

  John nodded. Darwin took the proffered issue in his hands. “You’re another natural philosopher, then?” he asked, looking back at John. “I hope someday to do something meaningful in the sciences myself.”

  John had read the initial paper the naturalist had presented at the Geological Society of London about his voyages on the Beagle, returned less than a year ago. These two men were ten years his senior and already establishing themselves in their fields. Buckland was betting he’d be worthy company, and John felt keenly both the honour of the expectation and the pleasure of being suddenly surrounded by like-minded men.

  Buckland passed glasses of claret. John had a chance to look about him; the delight he felt was akin to being eight years old again and set free in the laboratory of a playful sorcerer. One table by the window held an assortment of magnifying glasses, beakers, and a tiny still with writhing copper tubing. A stuffed hyaena with a snarling snout stood guard on a low bookshelf crammed with books. A hotchpotch of mounted owls, hawks, and sea birds in every attitude of flight or repose sat on tables and tall clocks or were hung from the ceiling. One long sideboard was covered with the skinned pelts of small animals pinned to drying boards, and another with dishes and trays holding fossils, minerals, sea shells, and unidentifiable lumps of earthen-coloured matter. Under all of this was an ancient and trailing table covering, which of a sud
den moved. John watched as a high-domed tortoise, as large as a platter, lumbered out. Buckland took something from the dinner table and stooped and held it out to the creature. “Aldabrachelys gigantea gigantea,” murmured Buckland. “The Aldrabra Giant Tortoise. Not as great as those Darwin noted in Galapagos, but worthy none the less of its appellation. This is a youngster, of course. She may live 200 years.”

  “If she can avoid the soup-pot,” Darwin interjected. Buckland shrugged towards something to one side of Ruskin as the tortoise’s beak chomped down on the offered greenery.

  John looked at an old spinet which held an upside-down tortoiseshell, now empty of its occupant, and cradled in a silver ring. A long-handled silver ladle rested against the inside of the thick shell. “No punch tonight, Ruskin,” Buckland told him, “we save that for Summer evenings, and of course use the bowl as well for turtle soup.”

  John nodded. A movement within a double rack of wire cages on the adjoining wall caught his eye. He stepped towards one and saw an odd, heavy-bodied, crescent-shaped animal with a long jaw and tail and something very much resembling armour covering its body. It turned slowly round as if to give its observer a better look. John raised his fingers to the wire cross-works and the animal closed its eyes meditatively.

  “A North American armadillo, from the deserts of Arizona, and naturally needing indoor warmth,” said Buckland. “Primitive creatures, and thus excellent for study. They make fine eating.”