Literary Views And Reviews

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25537, 3 July 1948, Page 3

Literary Views And Reviews

four women RUSKIN’S WIFE Tbe cf . Release. The Story of Rhskih. Effie Gray, and John JS®™? il!aLs - Told for the Firsi iS®.* 11 ,Their Unpublished Letters. d J?y Admiral Sin Wdliam James, G.C.B. John Murray. 264 PP.

iaS4u is a remarkable book, in at three ways - In the first place it r»a^«y S i neW light on one of the most Paytful episodes in literary history, skln s . wife left him for Miltais, and it vindicates a woman who was much wronged then and has been wronged in the version of the affair generally accepted ever since. That the positions of Effie Gray and John xtuskin are reversed and that it is he who is now to be as heavily condemned as she was does not follow rrom the evidence now opened. It may do, when the evidence is completed: e.g. when the paper composed oy Ruskin for the divorce action ana now held m the Bodleian Library can be Admiral James describes VL 3S an ‘‘famous document,” casting the entire blame for the physical failure of the marriage and for its process to ruin upon Effie Gray. If this description is verified. Ruskin’s part in the matter will become a darker one; it is a miserable and essentially pathological one now. Those who now figure as the authors of the worst mischief are Ruskin's parents, especially his mother, who first resisted, then favoured the marriage, then, jealous, possessive, vindictive, created an emotional environment from which a normal lover and husband and a wiser, braver son might have rescued it, but not Ruskin. This incapacity, this helpless submission, and his silence as his parents spread lying reports of the affair, are the charges that, at present, stand against Ruskin. Second, the book is remarkable as a study of a domestic environment which has its obvious parallel in the one ruled by Elizabeth Barrett’s father, but some less obvious parallels are closer. Effie Gray wrote her letters, as often delightful as dis-

tressing—she enjoyed the world in which her husband moved —from a, house in which the air was poisoned. Third, this is a social document, in its wider significance. Whoever wants to reproach Victorianism with what was worst in that age—narrowness, hypocrisy, snobbery—may turn to these letters for their evidence, superfluous but still telling: but he will be a dishonest researcher if he takes no heed of the rest. This was a great age. and the greatness is here, too. Admiral James, grandson of Effie Gray and Millais, who had a happy married life of 40 years, has done an admirable piece of work here. The vindication of its very attractive heroine is only a part of the achievement. The book is very well illustrated with reproductions of drawings and other works by

Watts. Millais, and Ruskin. MONMOUTH’S MOTHER Lucy Walter: Wife or Mistress. By Lord George Scott, 0.8. E. George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. 232 pp. Lucy Walter. Lord George Scott’s ancestress, was either Charles H's wife or she was not. If she was, Monmouth was legitimate; and a not unimportant chapter of history has to be reinterpreted accordingly. The case against the marriage, which, if it occurred, was solemnised in Liege during Charles’s exile, rests of course on the evidence of partisans. Lord George Scott has no trouble in showing that Clarendon and James 11, for example, are unreliable witnesses, nor any in showing that a great smoke of scandal was raised against Lucy Walter, whose fame is clear enough when the smoke is blown away. What is more troublesome is to establish convincing evidence that Charles and Lucy were married. There is, for instance, that collection of papers, which sounds as if it had been irvent?d by a novelist —found and destroyed, marriage certificate and all, by the Duke of Buccleugh (Lord George Scott’s grandfather). So the story goes; or rather, stories. For Lord George Scott records several of them; and they do not hold up or hold together at all well. No great matter, perhaps. Proof of the marriage was less the author s object than to disperse that great smoke; and he has done it in a really fascinating book, not less fascinating to the ordinary reader than to the historian. DOMESTIC PIECE i Tempestuous Petticoat. By Clare Leighton. Gollancz. 253 pp. The household Miss Leighton recalls for us, her mother its astonishing, delightful centre, in many ways recalls Matthew Pocket’s, in “Great Expectations.” There is a significant difference: Mr Leighton was so deaf that he had an immunity denied to Matthew Pocket. He was otherwise, too, less sensitive than that distracted man and found it not impossible, amid disorder and tumult, to scratch on at his adventure stories for boys. Mrs Leighton, meanwhile, surrounded by vast, dishevelled heaps of drawings, cuttings, . fashion-plates, m.s. jottings, and scraps I of food overlooked, and attended by half-a-dozen dogs, poured into the ear of her amanuensis, “Walmy.’ and so on to paper the endless stream of her sentimental-sensational serials for Lord Northcliffe’s popular papers. . . . All her heroines had names ending m ine”: Aline. Ellaline, Bettine. Her son used to laugh and speculate on the coming of the day when she would have to invent names like Lanoline or Vaseline: "It’s all very well for you to be amused.” she reproached my brother. “Actually I did call one of my heroines something without this ending. And what do you suppose happened? Why, that was the very story I was writing when I quarrelled with Northcliffe, which only goes to prove that there is something in the superstition. Never again will I be so stupid as to tempt Providence in such a matter.” Mrs Leighton is more than a figure of fun, however, the affectionate, never withering fun that irradiates this period piece and characterises her within it. She was beautiful, courageous, and pathetically tenacious. Death struck’hard at her; the age began to run past her. She. held on—truly, an invincible Edwardian.” CHARLOTTE M. YONGE Victorian Best-seller: The World of Charlotte M. Yonge. By Margaret Mare and Alicia C. Percival. George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. 292 pp.

If the work of the two collaborators here is to be separated at all, it may be conjectured that Miss Mare has done the greater part of the research on the Victorian social background to which —it is their joint and very just thesis —Charlotte Yonge was minutely and sensitively faithful. As a study in which this is exhibited in a close comparison of the social texture of the novels with contemporary evidences, nothing more illuminatmgly exact could be wished for—nor anything, of the kind, more enjoyable to read. Economics, religion, family life and rala ,-, tionships. "travel, times, and taste, and “clothes and conventions’ are only some major themes of a treatment which is as much to be praised for its breadth as for delicate precision At the same time this is a biography of Charlotte Yonge. the first to exceed the limits of a sketch. Finally, it ranks as a critical study; but in this respect the authors are for the most part content to rely on the interpretative value of their central thesis. The illustrations, including a colour-plate of the Richmond portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, are excellent. Liam O’Flaherty, who blames Hollywood and New York for keeping Americans at about the mental age of 12, says the best and only thing is to destroy both cities. “It’s as simple as that.” A Hollywood paper reported O'Flaherty under the heading, VENIING HIS EIRE.” H. L. Mencken, who never had much good to say of William Jennings Bryan as a statesmamphilosopher. has lately said this for him as an orator: he was the only public speaker Mencken ever heard who spoke extemporaneously m perfect English. No matter how involved or complicated the sentence, the verb was always right, the sentence always finished off correctly.