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."

Dreadful Duel. In the later stages of the marriage it became clear to John and Effie that separation was the only way back to life and freedom. Each one, separately and privately, seems to have set about trying to get rid of the other. The question was, how? Divorce was impossible except on the ground of adultery, a legal procedure regarded as unthinkably damaging socially. A dreadful, though never mutually acknowledged, duel began. As Effie came to see it, Ruskin was bent on forcing her to leave him not merely by his neglect but by throwing her at various gentlemen friends, including Millais, hoping to involve her in what she quaintly referred to as a "scrape." She, on her part, meticulously maintained a spotless reputation. For years she had not dared to tell anyone that she was, in the euphemism of the age, a wife in name only. Eventually she understood that in abstinence lay salvation, via a virtuous annulment. Where once she had wanted Ruskin to consummate the marriage, she now deliberately made herself as unpleasant to him as she could.

Effie won--apparently. When, encouraged by Millais, she finally fled to her parents and faced a public separation, she was able to prove that an annulment was justified. The scandal fell mainly on Ruskin, who had to pay damages for his marital neglect. But in falling chastely in love with Millais, was Effie not really falling into Ruskin's trap? Or was she merely a scheming baggage who outrageously embroidered her basic grievances for public consumption? The book leaves the matter in Piran-deloquent doubt.

Millais sided with Effie, but he is a bad witness. He traveled in Scotland with the Ruskins to paint John's portrait, and his letters, which had steadily praised Ruskin, abruptly shifted to bitter criticism at precisely the time when he seems to have fallen in love. An extraordinary and crucial figure was Effie's precocious ten-year-old sister Sophie, who carried scabrous tales back and forth among Effie, Ruskin and Ruskin's parents. At one point, Sophie told Effie: "He says, you are so wicked that he was warned by all his friends not to have anything to do with you."

Tell and Tell. In choosing and fitting together the pieces of this biographical jigsaw, the author has shown rare dignity. She has submerged such feminine solidarity as she may have felt for Effie in a measured view of the manners and morals of both parties and of the age in which they lived. For all its peephole pettiness, the story stirs the mind like a psychological melodrama and flows as smoothly as any contrived 18th century novel of manners. Whoever was right, whatever their pangs and posturings, the Ruskins emerge as vivid and graceful correspondents. If no book like this ever celebrates the famous domestic wrangles of the present day for future readers, part of the blame must be placed on the telephone.

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