Books: If Sex Were All

MILLAIS AND THE RUSKINS by Mary Lutyens. 296 pages. Vanguard. $8.50.

John Ruskin had a rare eye for beauty. Directed outward, it helped make him the greatest art critic of his century, as well as a generous champion of social reform who hoped to remove a measure of industrial ugliness from the Victorian scene. In private life, though, this intense esthetic susceptibility proved an acute embarrassment. It embroiled him in a number of skittish skirmishes with women, all pretty and all too young. Like a "just-fledged owlet," as he put it, he began by pining helplessly for Adele Domecq, the dazzling but unobtainable daughter of his father's business partner (Father was a sherry merchant). Much later in life, when he was past 50, he fell tragically in love with a nine-year-old girl named Rose La Touche.

Perhaps the most bizarre episode of all, though, concerns Ruskin's equivocal six-year marriage to a pretty Scottish lass named Erne Gray. It began in 1848 with mutual vows of temporary chastity; she was barely 20 and ailing, he wanted to travel before being burdened with children. It ended in 1854 with ferocious bitterness and an annulment that left Erne—still a virgin at 26—free to marry Ruskin's protege, Painter John Everett Millais.

Excuses, Excuses. Modern biographers have so grossly exploited the unseemly side of Victorian life that Millais and the Ruskins might be expected to emerge as just one more post-Freudian snigger at the sexual vagaries of yesteryear. In a sense, such treatment would be warranted. Ruskin did, after all, get through six years of marriage without bedding his wife. He later asserted that he had come to feel that Effie was unfit to be a mother.

Happily, in piecing together this story, frequently through quotations from Erne's outraged letters to her mother, British Biographer Mary Lutyens goes beyond mere sex, or the lack of it, to the daily arena of a marriage gone irretrievably bad. She examines relentlessly the small social grievances, the resentful pinprick rivalries that gradually engulf and demean everyone concerned. In the orgiastic 1960s, Ruskin's sexual abstinence would be regarded for Effie as a fate only slightly better than death. Effie lived in an age inclined to view "all that" more as a duty than a cheerful privilege, however, and she knew little of sex when she married.

In short, if sex had been the entire issue, Effie might have forgiven Ruskin his glaring sin of omission and settled down as just another glum Victorian helpmeet. But Ruskin, though a recognized genius and cultural lion, hated to go to parties (which Effie loved), could not bear to be disturbed at his work (Effie seemed to regard interruption as a woman's prerogative), and always said "I" instead of "we" when talking of their plans for anything. Worse, he plainly preferred his parents' company to her own. "All their conversation," she wrote, acidly describing an evening with her in-laws, "was about themselves and John's early signs of greatness which they related and he listened to with great complacency. His Father spouted John's Poetry at twelve and demanded John's admiration of the beauty of the metre, which John objected to giving."