Falling Rocket by Paul Thomas Murphy

Author:Paul Thomas Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2023-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Having in this way proclaimed the great danger that his public posed to him with its doubt and misunderstanding, Ruskin then courted that danger all over again by recommencing his thunderings, beginning with a denunciation of James Anthony Froude, his acquaintance and a fellow disciple of Carlyle, for his progressive view of history so opposed to Ruskin’s regressive one, and by shifting to a lengthy passage by the French politician Jules Simon detailing stomach-turning poverty in the industrial districts of northern France. This Fors letter appeared in March.

That winter the plague cloud particularly beset him. January 4, 1880: “The want—for a whole winter—of one pure sunrise! unbelievable and horrible—but fact. How we bear it is the wonder—.” January 9: “The hell-fog unbroken… fretful and despairing and can’t go on with anything—but pull my lips, and stare at the pitch cloud—and wonder if it’s the Devil—or the Bishop of Manchester or me, that it’s sent for.” February 29: “The Abyss of darkness in the whole sky today, without fog—is quite awful.” March 12: “But the curse on the sky is my chief plague—If only spring were spring! But it’s too hard on me, this devil in the wind and clouds and light.”

During this dark time Ruskin took dark pleasure in news from Glasgow. At the end of January 1880, a painting, A Symphonie in Blue and White, described in the newspapers not only as Whistler’s work but as “the Cause Célebre” of Whistler v. Ruskin, was auctioned off and fetched a paltry twelve pounds and ten shillings. The painting was almost certainly a fake—and certainly not the Falling Rocket. If Whistler, then in Venice, learned of this sale, he would certainly have spoken up. Ruskin, too, should have known better. But when a correspondent sent him the details, Ruskin believed the painting he had condemned had in effect been condemned again. He was gleeful: “more pleased… than perhaps some of my friends would think it virtuous to be.” Replying to his correspondent, Ruskin could not disguise his absolute disdain for Whistler:

the principal annoyance in the whole matter to me was the way my best friends wrote as if Mr. W. was really something of a dangerous match and antagonist—and their expecting me to answer or debate with him—so that I need not expect my friends to sympathise with any dignities of mine; but they might expect me to express virtuous forgiveness and the like, of which there is no shadow (or light) whatsoever in my mind, but entire satisfaction in all that you tell me in its bearings.

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