Ruined by respectability
Richard Shone
JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS. A BIOGRAPHY by G. H. Fleming Constable, £20, pp. 318 Is there a Viagra for limp biographers? If so, a truck of it should be delivered to Gor- don Fleming's door. In spite of a highly seductive subject, he seems incapable of making a go of it. Just when you feel he's getting a little flushed and perky he quickly subsides, exhausted from effort. He's a stranger to subtlety and indifferent to analy- sis. A life of Millais — and this is the first for a hundred years — should flash with pic- tures of his brilliant success, touch us with the socially fearful courtship of Effie Ruskin, go out on a note of lazy scintillation with Millais as one of the 'great men' of late Victorian society. But no, Fleming's biogra- phy stretches away like grey linoleum down an institutional corridor.
Without a doubt, John Everett Millais was the most precocious, if not the most zealous, of the group of artists — Rossetti and Hol- man Hunt among them — who founded the reforming Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was an ambitious and technically gifted youth who produced a series of tours de force that includes Christ in the Carpenter's Shop, Lorenzo and Isabella, Ophelia, Autumn Leaves and The Blind Girl — images of radi- cal realism that are inextricable from the history of the English imagination. All these works were accomplished by the time Mil- lais was 27. They have a hallucinatory sharp- ness of observation and an acid edge to their palette which have assured their continuing power. They are not undermined by senti- mentality or plonking message — even the Blind Girl, that pathetic figure, concertina on her lap, resting below a rainbowed sky, bypasses its mawkish potential for a beauti- ful statement of facts and is all the more affecting. But when Millais died in 1898, knighted, President of the Royal Academy, internationally honoured, he was most pub- licly recognised as the painter of Bubbles and of The Boyhood of Raleigh, adroit addi- tions to the myth of childhood that app- ealed to generations but are now, perhaps, part of the undergarments of art history. Millais' decline is one of the sorriest of many such sorry stories in British painting. Here, truly, were gifts squandered, purpose imperfectly understood, the second-rate positively delighted in.
The seeds of this descent into triviality were evident early on. As a talented and beautiful youth, petted by his family, indulged by his colleagues, Millais beamed with the pleasure he found in himself. This arrogant esteem hardened, over the years, into an unbecoming self-sufficiency. Millais was no intellectual, had nothing vivid to say about the Old Masters, read narrowly, dis- liked 'abroad' and cultivated a gentlemanly philistinism that made him welcome throughout English society. Bluff, sporty, professional, 'He answered,' one witness remarked, 'to the stage idea of a superior officer . . . the personification of John Bull'. This change from the ardent and irrespon- sible youth to the stock Englishman of his titled maturity, as seen in his statue outside the Tate Gallery, lies at the centre of any account of Victorian painting.
There appear to be two overwhelming reasons for Millais' bid for respectability, beyond the unintelligent conservatism of his temperament. Both involved scandal. When he began to exhibit as a Pre- Raphaelite, his works were roundly con- demned; the aureoled youth who could do no wrong was given the sharpest slap in the face by an unprepared public. The Sewells of the day unsheathed their daggers. 'This picture is revolting,' boomed the Times in 1850 of Christ in the Carpenter's Shop. Most reviewers concurred (the Manchester Guardian was an exception); worse came from Charles Dickens in Household Words who called it 'mean, odious, repulsive'. Abuse heaped up and in the following year, as Fleming recounts, the Times again let fly at Millais' Royal Academy exhibits 'in one of the most devastating notices in the histo- ry of British art'. Shell-shocked, PRBs called on Ruskin, not then personally known to them, for a defence. He obliged in two letters to the Times and such was the young critic's reputation that the tide began to turn. In 1852, only the Times demurred from the general praise of Ophe- lia as 'startling in its originality'. Three weeks later the same paper made an extraordinary about-face and in a second review of the RA exhibition admitted Mil- lais"genius'. Thereafter, the young painter had a smoother passage: commissions piled up; 'genius' rang in his ears like a street- vendor's cry below his window; soon he could contemplate marriage and a family.
This last led to the other scandal of Mil- lais' life. His growing friendship with Ruskin (the subject of a great portrait of 1854) brought him naturally into contact with Effie, Ruskin's virgin wife. Her cele- brated flight from her husband, made with the collusion of her parents, is told here at length and with some new detail. But only by reading between the lines — for Flem- ing is a poor portraitist — does one realise that Effie was a meddlesome and canny woman whose natural sharpness was exac- erbated as the years passed, by the Queen's refusal to receive her, a divorcée, at court (a decision only revoked when Millais, on his deathbed, begged HM to welcome Lady Millais at Windsor). Although a publicly spotless marriage ensued and many chil- dren filled the nursery in the grand house in Palace Gate, Kensington, Effie began to spend long periods away from her attentive husband, usually in parental comfort in her native Scotland, the excuses for her absence running as thin as Trossachs driz- zle. It is tempting to blame part of Millais' decline as a painter on this capricious woman (though Fleming argues she invigo- rated his art); and certainly 'the pram in the hall' and the expense of Millais' coun- try pursuits contributed to his immense productivity. But as Sickert shrewdly observed (in an exhilarating article not mentioned here), Millais was 'always rat- tled' and worked prodigiously like someone whistling to keep up his courage. By the 1880s and 90s the whistling came to a stop and, though there were touches of his old brilliance, mechanical portraits and dreary landscapes filled his final years. Fleming's enthusiasm for these later works will doubt- less be tested in next year's show of Millais' portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.
It is bad enough for Millais to have been the great hope of British art and not to have guessed he had failed. But to have his first biography, a bleaching of linen by his son, followed a century later by the lacklus- tre conscientiousness of Professor Fleming, is surely more than poor Millais deserves.
While reading this book, I turned again to C.R. Leslie's life of his friend John Con- stable, published in 1843 when Millais was 14. As a picture of the unfolding artist, nothing could provide a greater contrast. Leslie reveals Constable's continual self- questioning, his unworldliness, his refusal to be hoodwinked by cultivated philistinism. Few in England grasped the implications of his art; the French, to their eternal credit, did so. In England, it was Millais who became the ne plus ultra of respectable pic- ture-making — to England's eternal cost.
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