The Project Gutenberg EBook of Turner, by C. Lewis Hind
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Title: Turner
Five letters and a postscript.
Author: C. Lewis Hind
Release Date: December 23, 2012 [EBook #41694]
Language: English
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MASTERPIECES
IN COLOUR
EDITED BY - -
T. LEMAN HARE
TURNER
1775-1851
"MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR" SERIES
ARTIST. AUTHOR.
VELAZQUEZ. S. L. BENSUSAN.
REYNOLDS. S. L. BENSUSAN.
TURNER. C. LEWIS HIND.
ROMNEY. C. LEWIS HIND.
GREUZE. ALYS EYRE MACKLIN.
BOTTICELLI. HENRY B. BINNS.
ROSSETTI. LUCIEN PISSARRO.
BELLINI. GEORGE HAY.
FRA ANGELICO. JAMES MASON.
REMBRANDT. JOSEF ISRAELS.
LEIGHTON. A. LYS BALDRY.
RAPHAEL. PAUL G. KONODY.
HOLMAN HUNT. MARY E. COLERIDGE.
TITIAN. S. L. BENSUSAN.
MILLAIS. A. LYS BALDRY.
CARLO DOLCI. GEORGE HAY.
GAINSBOROUGH. MAX ROTHSCHILD.
TINTORETTO. S. L. BENSUSAN.
LUINI. JAMES MASON.
FRANZ HALS. EDGCUMBE STALEY.
VAN DYCK. PERCY M. TURNER.
LEONARDO DA VINCI. M. W. BROCKWELL.
RUBENS. S. L. BENSUSAN.
WHISTLER. T. MARTIN WOOD.
HOLBEIN. S. L. BENSUSAN.
BURNE-JONES. A. LYS BALDRY.
VIGÉE LE BRUN. C. HALDANE MACFALL.
CHARDIN. PAUL G. KONODY.
FRAGONARD. C. HALDANE MACFALL.
MEMLINC. W. H. J. & J. C. WEALE.
CONSTABLE. C. LEWIS HIND.
RAEBURN. JAMES L. CAW.
JOHN S. SARGENT. T. MARTIN WOOD.
LAWRENCE. S. L. BENSUSAN.
DÜRER. H. E. A. FURST.
MILLET. PERCY M. TURNER.
WATTEAU. C. LEWIS HIND.
HOGARTH. C. LEWIS HIND.
MURILLO. S. L. BENSUSAN.
WATTS. W. LOFTUS HARE.
INGRES. A. J. FINBERG.
COROT. SIDNEY ALLNUTT.
DELACROIX. PAUL G. KONODY.
_Others in Preparation._
[Illustration: PLATE I.--A SHIP AGROUND. From the oil painting by Turner
in the Tate Gallery. (Frontispiece)
This beautiful sea piece is essentially Turner--the result of his
personal observation. It was painted after he had freed himself from the
desire to rival and outvie his predecessors, and before he became
obsessed by the passion to paint pure sunlight. "A Ship Aground" is a
pendant to "The Old Chain Pier, Brighton," which also hangs in the Tate
Gallery.]
TURNER
FIVE LETTERS AND A POSTSCRIPT
BY C. LEWIS HIND
ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT
REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR
[Illustration: IN SEMPITERNUM.]
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.
CONTENTS
LETTER I
Page
Explanatory 11
LETTER II
His Life: An Impression 26
LETTER III
His Art: The Furnace Doors Open 41
LETTER IV
The Flame Ascends 48
LETTER V
The Flame Leaps, Expands, and Expires 62
POSTSCRIPT
Turner and Two Others 72
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Plate
I. A Ship Aground Frontispiece
From the Oil Painting by Turner in the Tate Gallery
Page
II. Hastings 14
From the Oil Painting by Turner in the Tate Gallery
III. Norham Castle 24
From the Oil Painting by Turner in the Tate Gallery
IV. The Fighting Téméraire 34
From the Oil Painting by Turner in the National Gallery
V. Venice: Grand Canal (Sunset) 40
From the Water-Colour by Turner in the National Gallery
VI. Arth from the Lake of Zug 50
From the Water-Colour by Turner in the National Gallery
VII. Lausanne 60
From the Water-Colour by Turner in the National Gallery
VIII. Tivoli 70
From the Oil Painting by Turner in the Tate Gallery
[Illustration: Drawing of Turner]
LETTER I
EXPLANATORY
Yes: I remember that morning at Exeter when I surprised you making a
drawing of the west porch of the cathedral. Timidly were the unrestored
figures of angels, apostles, prophets, kings and warriors--very old,
very battered--taking form in your sketch-book: timidly, for even then
you were beginning to be troubled by the blur that rose, after an hour's
work, between your eyes and the carven kings and saints.
Your sister passed into the cathedral to her devotions carrying white
flowers for the altar: we stayed in the sunlight. I cannot remember how
Turner became the subject of our talk; but I think it was my mention of
his drawing of the west front of Salisbury Cathedral done when he was
twenty-three--one of the set exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1799,
which hastened his election to an Associateship of the Royal Academy.
Those were the days of the tinted architectural drawings, but in that
magnificent Salisbury, the details indicated, yet not insistent, the old
stones yellow in the sunshine, grey-blue in the shadow, Turner was
already on the track of Light, the goal of his art life. He had not yet
formulated any principle, that was not Turner's way; but those small,
bright eyes of his had already perceived that there is light in shade as
in shine. Girtin, that marvellous boy, his friend and fellow-student,
was still alive; but art was in a poor state in England, in 1799,
and we can well believe that this drawing of Salisbury made Turner a
marked man. I could dispense with the lamp-post boys playing with hoops,
as indeed with every figure in every picture by Turner. But he needed
such strong foreground notes, and he, like the older landscape painters,
troubled little about figures. Claude used to say, with a laugh, that he
made no charge for them. Their use was to throw back the middle
distance.
[Illustration: PLATE II.--HASTINGS. (From the oil painting by Turner in
the Tate Gallery)
One of the so-called "unfinished" pictures that, after half a century of
seclusion in the cellars of the National Gallery, were removed to the
Tate Gallery, and opened to public inspection early in February 1906.
This great "find," as it was called, of twenty-one Turners was the
sensation of the year in art circles. Hastings was a favourite subject
with Turner.]
Then we talked of Turner's water-colours. Had he never composed the
"Liber Studiorum"; never produced gorgeous dreams of glowing colour in
his oil pictures; never with veils of luminous paint flashed sunrise
upon white canvases; never done a moonlight, or white sails billowing
over a wet sea, he would, in his water-colours, have earned the title of
father of modern landscape and of Impressionism.
You, who had seen nothing of Turner's work except the plates, good in
their way, but far from being the real thing, in Mr. Stopford Brooke's
edition of the "Liber Studiorum," hinted that you found the master
old-fashioned. Corot, Monet, and Harpignies were your idols in
landscape. That was not strange when I consider that your childhood was
spent in Jersey, and your youth at Moret and in Paris, and that on your
twentieth birthday, a few months ago, you were articled to an architect
of Exeter, your France-loving father's native place. So the Master
seemed old-fashioned, did he? And you were a little sceptical of my
enthusiasm.
"Ah," I said, "if you could see a range of Turner's water-colours from
the first boyish drawing of Lambeth Palace exhibited at the Royal
Academy when he was fifteen, through the plodding period of his
development, cumbered with ungainly figures, but set in the Turnerian
air and against infinite distances, as in the winding Thames from
Richmond Hill, ever moving towards the light, on to his later visions
when buildings, hills, and clouds shimmer in iridescent vapour! Then the
figures of men and women disappear, and after fifty years of observation
of Nature those old eyes see only the chromatic glories of the
reflections and refractions of imponderable sun-rays. The lovely colours
linger so delicately on odds and ends of paper that it seems as if a
breath must blow them away. If you could see the sapphire, opal and
amethyst tenderness of his 'Study on the Rhine,' the misty hills
rainbow-tinted, the sun flushing the steep castle rock and making a
golden pathway over the sea, you would feel that this barber's son,
morose, mean, in whose muddled brain moved until his last day
magnificent ideas, has given to the world the whole history of
water-colour, from the tinted drawing, to the flame of an effect seen
and caught in a moment of ecstasy."
You were still sceptical! I acknowledge that there were others in
Turner's day who also broke new paths--Cozens, and of course Girtin, of
whom Turner is reported to have said, "Had Tom Girtin lived I should
have starved." As an old man he would mumble of "Poor Tom's golden
drawings." I acknowledge that since Turner's day the channel that he
flooded has broadened and gushed forth into many tributaries; but he was
the first, modelling himself on Claude, to start in pursuit of the sun,
to break the rays, and flush the land.
I quoted a Frenchman, M. le Sizeranne: "All the torches which have shed
a flood of new light upon Art--that of Delacroix in 1825, those of the
Impressionists in 1870--have in turn been lit at his flame."
I quoted Constable--generous Constable--"I believe it would be difficult
to say that there is a bit of landscape now done that does not emanate
from that source."
I quoted Pisarro, telling how during the war of 1870 he and Monet came
to London, studied Turner at the National Gallery, and found in Turner
and Constable "practical certitude in matters of technique which they
had but vaguely suspected and discussed at the Café Guerbois." What
would they have said had they known that Ruskin, the champion of Turner,
the foe of Impressionism, when, in 1856, he sifted the nineteen thousand
Turner water-colours, drawings, studies, and the "unfinished" paintings,
had condemned the sunshine and atmosphere canvases now in the Tate
Gallery to half a century of obscurity, because in his opinion they were
"unfinished." Turner purposely left them unfinished and elusive as
sunrise itself, momentary impressions of the glory of the world. The sun
is new each day, ever uncompleted: so are these records of the flame of
Turner.
"They are golden visions," said Constable, speaking of the Venice
pictures, "only visions, but still one would like to live and die with
such pictures."
Turner, to whom the world of men and women was a place to escape from,
brooded on scenes that open a pathway to tired eyes leading away
somewhere west of the sun and east of the moon; he loved distances,
lakes that feel their way round hills to infinity, and sunsets that are
a world in themselves. Even in his dark "Calais Pier" he must open the
inky clouds to a blue sky swaying above the bituminous sea. In the
"unfinished" "Chichester Canal" you may sail over that happy waterway,
beyond the spire, on and on whithersoever your fancy leads; in the
"unfinished" "Petworth Park" you may tramp away with the hunter and the
hounds past the sentinel trees to that vast sky flaming and beckoning;
in the "unfinished" "Norham Castle Sunrise" the poet-artist dreamed the
mystery of dawn, and as he saw the miracle unfolding, he told his dream
to you and to me; he saw the blue mists parting before the sun-rays
rising behind the castle; saw the opalescent sky reflected in the
water; saw, perhaps, in the mind's eye, the strong red note that the
picture needed, and quickly set that cow standing knee-deep in the
shallows. Turner gave all of himself to the making of this lovely
impression, for Norham Castle, which he drew and painted so often, was
his mascot. Sketching on the Tweed with Cadell, the Edinburgh
bookseller, as they passed Norham Castle, Turner suddenly swept off his
hat to the ruins. "I made a drawing of Norham several years ago," he
explained. "It took; and from that day to this I have had as much to do
as my hands could execute."
There, I remember, I paused, noting that you were again passing your
hands about your eyes. Troubled, you said that the blur had returned,
and that you must work no more that day. So we walked towards the river.
On the way we saw Italian workmen in blue trousers paving a road from
cauldrons of molten asphalt. We watched the little flames leaping from
the bubbling mass, and I drew from the sight an image of the art life of
Turner: how he stoked his furnace with Poussin, Vandevelde, and de
Loutherbourg, and so brought to life his dark early works such as "The
Shipwreck" and "Calais Pier"; how as he fed his fire with Claude, Crome,
and Wilson the furnace glowed, and the world saw the ardour of "Ulysses
Deriding Polyphemus," and the splendour of "Dido Building Carthage";
then when the flames leapt towards the sky there was pure Turner, the
Turner of the "Téméraire" and the Venice dreams, a "Hastings" that has
lost all earthly form; a dream boat passing between Headlands at
Sunrise, and the later water-colours--the red Rigi, the blue Rigi, the
blue and gold "Arth from the Lake of Zug," the moonlight Venice, and the
atmospheric magic of the Lake of Uri.
When we regained the Cathedral close we met your sister returning from
her devotions. She said: "What have you been discussing this summer
morning?"
"I have been discoursing on The Flame of Turner," said I.
"Ah!" said she, "there's a Turner in the Museum here."
We went to the Museum and stood before "Buttermere Lake, with a part of
Cromach Water, Cumberland--a Shower." You were silent. What a
catastrophe--after my dithyrambs about the flame of Turner and his slow
soar to light, that I should show you, as your first Turner, that work
of his early stoking period, painted at twenty-two, before he learned
the method of oil painting and the ways of the sun. The lake has almost
gone, the trees have blackened, only the rainbow dimly lingers. The
flame of Turner? The chrysalis husk of Turner!
That poor "Buttermere Lake" is still the only picture by Turner that you
have ever seen. And now that you are far from here, walking and digging
in Sparta, and sailing in insecure little crafts to the Islands, I hold
it a duty to write you in detachments this interminable letter
explaining as well as I can what I mean by the Flame of Turner. Your
sister will read the letters to you, ill-starred student, who, at the
beginning of your art career, must not use your eyes for twelve months
on penalty of blindness.
When, after the last visit to the oculist, you hurried from the lawyer's
office in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where I witnessed your Will, I did not
tell you that a few yards away rests a glorious Turner, "Van Tromp's
Barge entering the Texel" and sailing in golden pomp eternally through
the Soane Museum. I saw it on my way to your lawyer's office. The
picture is alone and I was alone with what Turner loved--a sportive sea,
an arching sky, gold overhead, gold on the water, and a ship sailing
home golden-hulled beneath golden sails, with flags flying at the mast,
and a cunning wraith of indigo cloud sweeping down the sky to give the
glamour value. You did not see the golden Van Tromp. I had not the heart
to show it to you.
[Illustration: PLATE III.--NORHAM CASTLE. (From the oil painting by
Turner in the Tate Gallery)
One of the most beautiful of the impressionistic Turners that were
removed from the cellars of the National Gallery early in 1906, cleaned,
and hung in the Turner Room at Millbank. Once, when passing Norham
Castle, Turner took off his hat to the ruins. His companion inquired the
reason. "I made a drawing or painting of Norham Castle several years
since," answered Turner. "It took; and from that day to this I have had
as much to do as my hands could execute."]
Now you are far from Turner. I can follow your track to Olympia, and
along the path by the wood, above the excavations, to a rough sign-post,
where I stood two years ago and read the words "To Arcadia!" Somewhere
beyond Arcadia you are, and some day these letters will fall, one by
one, into your hands.
LETTER II
HIS LIFE: AN IMPRESSION
Once in our walk from Exeter Cathedral to the river you paused and asked
what kind of a man was this amalgam of poet-artist and suspicious
tradesman. And I, who had been so long studying his works, and dipping
into the lives of him by Thornbury, Hamerton, Cosmo Monkhouse, Sir
Walter Armstrong, Mr. W. L. Wyllie, and others, tried to give an
impression of the man Turner--a blur of his sayings, letters, habits,
and the comments of his biographers. Some of them have bewailed that his
was not a pattern life, such as would edify a Y.M.C.A. audience. Nature
produces such useful lives by the hundred thousand: she makes but one
Turner. The Church had blessed neither his union with Mrs. Danby, nor
with Mrs. Booth, and, in his later days, he preferred rum and water with
sea-faring men in Wapping or Rotherhithe to dreary dinner-parties in
dreary houses in the West End of London, which does not seem to me
strange. We must take him as he was and be grateful. It was Nature's
whim to link this great artist-soul to the starved soul of a petty
tradesman. As an artist he is with the immortals: as a man he was true
son of the covetous, kindly barber of Maiden Lane, Strand, keen on
halfpennies, a driver of hard bargains. The father haggled with his
customers, the son with engravers and picture buyers. Secretive,
suspicious, ambitious, sometimes mean, yet capable of great kindnesses
and sacrifices, was this little hook-nosed man in an ill-cut brown coat,
and enormous frilled shirt, with feet and hands notably small. Kind?
Yes. Did he not in the Academy of 1826 cover his glowing picture of
"Cologne--The Arrival of a Packet Boat--Evening" with a wash of
lamp-black, because it "killed" two portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence
hanging alongside. "Poor Lawrence was so unhappy," said Turner. "The
lamp-black will all wash off after the Exhibition." But Turner's moods
were capricious. Like all blessed or cursed with the artistic
temperament, the mood of the moment usually governed his actions. Six
years after the lamp-black incident he had a grey picture hanging beside
Constable's "Opening of Waterloo Bridge," and Turner (you may imagine
the fury in his bright eyes) watched his brother artist heightening with
vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of his City barges.
Presently, when Constable had gone away, Turner put a round daub of red
lead upon his grey picture, which he afterwards shaped into a buoy.
Constable said when he returned, "Turner has been here and fired a gun."
Turner liked a joke, and if it was sometimes at the expense of another,
that was but the way of his class.
From first to last he loved but one thing with heart and soul--his art.
His affection for his father, and for Mr. Fawkes of Farnley Hall, were
but interludes in his passion to interpret Nature, to make her conform
to his visions, and to excel his predecessors and contemporaries.
Certainly, in his way, he loved his "old dad," who lived with him until
his death, looking after the picture gallery of unsold works in Queen
Anne Street, and helping in the preparation of his canvases. Of his
father he was wont to chuckle, "Dad taught me nothing except to save
halfpence." The death of the old man was a great blow.
The love affair which Thornbury relates amounts to nothing--no human
thing ever really interfered with his art. His schooling at Brentford
and Margate was infinitesimal--but for a landscape and sea painter, what
education could have been better than the river and the boats at
Brentford and the sea and ships at Margate. He remained illiterate to
the end. When he wrote a description of St. Michael's Mount for the
publication called "Coast Scenery," Coombes complained that "Mr. T----'s
account is the most extraordinary composition I have ever read; in parts
it is absolutely unintelligible." As Professor of Perspective at the
Royal Academy he was unable to express his ideas, but, says Thornbury,
"he took great pains to prepare the most learned diagrams."
Throughout his life he extended and amended that amazing poem called
"Fallacies of Hope," portions of which he tagged to his pictures in the
Royal Academy Catalogue. It is doggerel with occasional glints of the
beauty, pomp, and wonder of the world that showered when he used his
rightful methods of self-expression--eye and hand. The romance of the
ancient world of myth and architecture tingled in this secretive,
slovenly, Jewy man; but when he essayed to learn Greek, in the happy
days at Sandycombe, the attempt had to be abandoned. The slow brain
could not master the verbs.
Ambition was strong within him. No toil was too long or too severe. He
travelled England and Europe, sketched everything, stored the forms of
buildings and effects of light and colour; and could recall what he had
garnered at an instant's notice. In painting he pitted himself against
the dead, against his contemporaries, against twenty miles of country,
against the very glory of the sun, wrestling with each in turn, and
chuckling as they succumbed.
He saved his money and in later years hoarded his pictures. He refused
to pass potential purchasers to his studio, but Gillott, the pen-maker,
bearded the lion in Queen Anne Street, pushed past Mrs. Danby, joked
with the old man when he growled, "Don't want to sell!" and carried off
in his cab some five thousand pounds worth of pictures.
Turner re-bought his canvases when they came up for sale at Christie's,
worked without cessation, practised all manner of petty economies, and
finally left his pictures to the nation and his fortune of one hundred
and forty thousand pounds to found a home for "decayed male artists of
English parents and of lawful issue, with an instruction for a Turner
medal at the Royal Academy, and a monument to himself in St. Paul's
Cathedral."
The will with its four codicils was a bewildering document. For years it
was wrangled over in the courts, and in the end a compromise was
effected. The fortune went to the next of kin, the pictures and drawings
to the nation, and twenty thousand pounds to the Royal Academy. Ruskin
summed up the compromise thus: "The nation buried, with threefold
honour, Turner's body in St. Paul's, his pictures at Charing Cross, and
his purposes in Chancery."
If Turner, as he eyes the landscape of the Elysian Fields, retains aught
of earth-life frailty, he must look angrily down upon the Turner
section of the National Gallery, upon the rooms beneath, reached by a
winding staircase, where some of his water-colours are crowded, upon the
sunlight canvases at the Tate Gallery; and at certain provincial
exhibitions whither some of his works have overflowed from the National
Gallery. For he stated explicitly in his will that the pictures should
be kept together in a room or rooms to be added to the National Gallery,
to be called Turner's Gallery, and to be built within ten years of his
demise.
I still hope that the Turner Gallery may be built. Perhaps the hope will
become a reality. What a sight Turner's pictures chronologically
arranged would be, from the dim experimental pieces and the "Moonlight:
A Study at Millbank," to those four works, splendid failures, now at the
Tate Gallery, that he painted the year before he died, when the mind of
the old man, having flamed from the embers to express the opalescent
loveliness of Venice, the grey tumult of the sea in the Whaling series,
the glory of the sun flashed in stains of luminous colour upon white
canvases, harked back, in the shadow of death, to the old legends he had
always loved, and painted them as of yore, but now blurred and
tumbling, mighty ruins rising from blue lakes by great rivers and
arching pines, with an impossible Æneas relating his story to an
unrealised Dido, or being admonished by a Noah's-Ark Mercury. The
imagination remains gorgeous if chaotic; at seventy-five he still
reaches towards the unattainable, still seeks in visions a way of escape
from the materialism and stupidity of the world.
[Illustration: PLATE IV.--THE FIGHTING TÉMÉRAIRE.
(From the oil painting by Turner in the National Gallery)
Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839. In the previous year a party of
friends, including Turner, were bound for Greenwich by water. They
passed a steam-tug towing a superannuated battleship. "That's a fine
subject for you, Turner." said Stanfield. The painter took the hint, and
produced "The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken
up."]
What a triumph to see the range of oil pictures with the water-colours
stepping daintily through the stages of his development to those latter
dreams of the Rhine and Swiss lakes, fairy scenes that live, as by a
miracle, on pieces of mere paper; also the proofs of the "Liber," with
Mr. Frank Short's interpretations of the drawings that were never
engraved, bringing the number up to a round hundred; also the tall
books, one cold, beautiful steel engraving on a page, such as "Château
Gaillard" in the volume called "Turner's Annual Tour, 1834," a view
which charms the eyes dulled by grey London and makes the feet impatient
to be off to Richard Coeur-de-Lion's castle on the bend of the Seine.
The portraits, sketches and caricatures, too, of Turner of Maiden Lane,
Hand's Court, Hammersmith, Twickenham, Queen Anne and Harley Streets,
Chelsea, and of all the world--they should hang near his life-work.
You will see him, when the good time of the Turner Gallery comes, as a
pretty youth, painted by himself, no doubt a flattering likeness, which
hangs in the National Gallery. It is a bust portrait, full-face, with
large estimating eyes, somewhat amazed, a heavy nose, and a dropping
under-lip. An attractive boy; but you must remember that Turner the
idealist painted it, and that he had worked for a time in the studio of
Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Nearer to the Turner that one visualises is the sturdy middle-aged man
seated under a tree, cross-legged, pencil in hand, in the painting by
Charles Turner. The brickdust face is clean-shaven, the nose
unmistakably Semitic; the hair is long, and the whiskers straggle to the
collar. A drawing rests upon his knee; he looks forth with an eye like a
sword, considering how he shall change the landscape. The sketch by
Maclise is a delight. Turner sits on a stool up in the clouds,
painting; the tail of his coat flaps over towards the earth, his boot is
crooked into the support of the easel, and beneath him rises the sun
with the word "Turner" blazoned amid the rays. But the best of the
series, because it has that touch of caricature which often approaches
nearer to life than a reasoned drawing, is the portrait by William
Parrott made on Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy in 1846, when he was
seventy-one. Turner is painting furiously upon his picture. The frame
stands on the floor. The top is but an inch shorter than the battered
beaver hat crushed over upon his big head. His Mrs. Gamp umbrella leans
against a chair. His fellow-Academicians stare at his picture and at his
colour-box, puzzled. "How does he do it?" they whisper.
In those days the members of the Academy were allowed four varnishing
days. In his latter years Turner would send his pictures merely laid in
with white and grey and complete them on the varnishing days. There was
brown sherry at luncheon, and Wilkie Collins describes the old man as
"sitting on the top of a flight of steps, or a box, like a shabby
Bacchus nodding at his picture." But he could paint a "Rain, Steam, and
Speed" and "The Sun of Venice going to Sea" in spite of the brown
sherry, and his lonely bachelor life.
But brown sherry or no brown sherry, to his dying day he never lost
interest in the love of his life, light. At seventy years of age, when
he is described as stooping, looking down and muttering to himself, he
would pump Brewster as to all he knew on the subject of light. Those
were the days of the infancy of photography, and Mr. Mayall, who was
experimenting with daguerreotypes, tells how the old man, whose eyes
were then weak and bloodshot, would sit in his studio day after day
asking questions. He pretended that he was a Master in Chancery.
[Illustration: PLATE V.--VENICE: GRAND CANAL (SUNSET)
(From the water-colour by Turner in the National Gallery)
This twilight impression of the Grand Canal is one of the twenty Venice
water-colours catalogued and described by Ruskin, and arranged by him
for exhibition in the rooms on the ground floor of the National Gallery.
"Turner's entirely final manner" he calls it "A noble sketch; injured by
some change which has taken place in the coarse dark touches on the
extreme left."]
LETTER III
HIS ART: THE FURNACE DOORS OPEN
There is a small, neglected room in the National Gallery where certain
beginnings and failures in art are entombed. If you were to stroll into
that sepulchre on a dark day, I fear you would exclaim that "Buttermere
Lake" is bright compared with those other early Turners "Morning on
Coniston Fells" and "Moonlight: a Study at Millbank." Even on early
March afternoons, when the sun strikes through the tall windows and
falls upon "Moonlight at Millbank," little is visible on the small,
sooty canvas except the full moon, looking like a discoloured white
wafer stuck upon the dim sky. Turner developed slowly. This veritable
nocturne, and the pictures that followed it shows how slow and difficult
was his mastery of oil as a medium.
In the early nineteenth century Claude, the Poussins, Salvator Rosa, and
Cuyp were the idols of landscape art, which was still regarded as a
sort of interloper in the realm swayed by religious and mythological
pictures, portraits, genre works, and "Dutch drolleries." The academic
pioneers in landscape had imposed themselves upon Nature and upon the
English gentry who were the patrons of art. Landscape might be
classically beautiful according to Claude, classically sublime according
to Salvator, homely and mildly sunny according to Cuyp, conventionally
maritime according to Vandevelde. Turner as a youth was not the man to
break tradition. The cunning tradesman in him preferred the well-beaten
path. It was his destiny to compete against the popular idols in turn,
to sweep past them to Nature herself, and so onwards and upwards to the
sun, the source of all light and colour. "Looked on the sun with hope"
is one of the few simple and suggestive lines in his "Fallacies of
Hope."
Averse in his beginnings, like Velazquez, to experimentalising, he was
content to bide his time, to plough the furrows of other men, with the
indwelling determination to plough them better. He admired with
generosity; he never depreciated. "Vandevelde made me a painter," he
said, years later, and of a golden-brown Cuyp he exclaimed, "I would
give a thousand pounds to have painted that."
If ever, exiled student, we visit the National Gallery together on the
Turner quest, I shall take you first to that room where, from the grave,
he challenges Claude of Lorraine. Turner bequeathed "The Sun Rising in a
Mist," painted when he was thirty-two, and "Dido Building Carthage,"
painted when he was forty, to the nation, on condition that they should
hang for ever "between the two pictures painted by Claude, the 'Seaport'
and the 'Mill.'" There you have a glimpse into the mind of Turner, his
fine envy of others, his confidence in his own power. A Frenchman, M.
Viardot, incensed at the idea that any one should approach the throne of
the Lorrainer, suggests that such o'ervaulting pride was a proof of
Turner's insanity. I will not answer such foolishness, but British
candour compels me to say that I do not think Claude suffers by the
comparison. Turner became great when he became himself, not when he was
trying to outvie others--Titian, Morland, Gainsborough, Crome--to name
but four. In the year that he painted "The Sun Rising in a Mist" he was
trying in his "Country Blacksmith" to trip Wilkie, and in "The Sun
Rising in a Mist," as Mr. Wyllie shows, the figures are taken almost
exactly from Teniers, and the snub-nosed, high-pooped ships from
Vandevelde. His time was not yet. He was learning furiously, brooding
upon and correlating his impressions of Nature, storing them for future
use, shredding the permanent from the trivial. I think of him on that
tossing trip to Bur Island in a half-decked boat with Cyrus Redding,
silently watching the sea, absorbed in contemplation, climbing to the
summit of the island in a hurricane of wind, where he "seemed writing
rather than drawing." Not yet could he say to a companion, looking at a
black cow against the sun, "It's purple, not black as it is painted";
not yet had the sun begun to flood his drawings; not yet were the "brown
tree school" angry because forms lost their details in the blinding
light of his pictures. But in "Dido building Carthage," painted in 1815,
the same year as the popular "Crossing the Brook," of which he thought
so highly that he talked in his ironic, humorous way of being wrapped
up in it as a winding-sheet, there are signs that he was feeling the
fascination of colour.
Some day you will stand at the entrance of the great Turner Room in the
National Gallery and rest your eyes on the six huge dark pictures on the
left wall. The dull and uninspiring "Waterloo" is later than the others;
but to me it is just as unattractive as its companions--as I think it
will be, light lover, to you. "The Tenth Plague" and "The Deluge" I
never look at except when I wish to be reminded that from the chrysalis
rises the butterfly, from the black furnace the loveliness of the flame.
The "Death of Nelson" is dark and decorative, "Calais Pier" and "The
Shipwreck" are dark and tremendous. "Nobody is wet," said Ruskin, and
nobody feels that he is looking on the real Calais, or on a real
shipwreck, yet what power they have. These funereal wild waves were made
in Harley Street; light, to the slow-developing Turner, was still a
studio convention. But nobody else could have made those seas. They are
by Turner, but not by the true Turner, who strove through the veiled
sun to the source of light itself.
In "Crossing the Brook," which faces the entrance doorway, painted when
he was forty, Turner has marched onward. The gates have opened to the
far horizon, and he now gives us the Turnerian fifty miles or so of
country outstretching to infinity on a few feet of canvas. If you were
with me, I would whisper in your ear my division of "Crossing the Brook"
into pleasing and unpleasing passages--the pleasing being the fleecy
clouds in the blue sky, the faint miles of Devonshire, the wooded hills
rising from the river, and the bridge that spans the water: the
unpleasing passages are the worried foreground, the ugly rocks, the
figures, and the black mouth of the tunnel. Yet it is a picture of which
one becomes fond. Who can but be entranced by the distance, Turner's
sign mark, the open gate that lures us away from the troubled foreground
of the world.
I turn from the sanity of "Crossing the Brook" to the right wall, and
straightway I am elated, it is always so, at the sight of one of the
magnificent dreams that the old Wizard forced oil paint and brushes to
portray. In the centre of the wall hangs "Ulysses and Polyphemus."
The furnace doors are open, from them stream a fury of glow, and in the
fire are the dazzling shapes of Turnerian romance.
LETTER IV
THE FLAME ASCENDS
When we visit the National Gallery I will place you with your back to
the dark "Calais Pier" and "Shipwreck" wall, and waving my hand across
to that glorious trio, the "Ulysses," the "Bay of Baiæ," and the
"Carthage," I will say but one word--"Turner!"
Here indeed is the magician weaving his spells, breaking the laws of
light and shade, toying with history, caring nothing so long as he can
picture the dreams of the pomp and beauty of the world of imagination
that dazzled a sullen man, pottering about in a dingy London studio.
"Ulysses deriding Polyphemus" has been called operatic and melodramatic;
it has been remarked that the galley of Ulysses, far from the influence
of the sun, is in full light, and that the dark shadows thrown by the
stone-pines in the "Bay of Baiæ" are unnatural. Turner needed those
deep blacks in the foreground; he wanted the galley of Ulysses to be
in the light: so the old rascal forced truth to suit his vision. His
success is his expiation. He never copied Nature or followed history.
His way was to use Nature and history to suit his conception, the right
way for a genius; but not for Brown, Smith, and Jones. Anachronisms
abound in his works; he elongated steeples, rebuilt towers and towns,
changed the courses of rivers (he in paint, as Leonardo with the
pencil); but he caught the spirit of place. To me the "Ulysses deriding
Polyphemus" is the very heart of romance. Unlike life, yes; all the best
things are unlike life. I withdraw my remark that there is not a figure
in a picture by Turner which I would not rather have erased, withdraw it
in favour of the vast, impotent Polyphemus writhing on the cliff. When
Turner painted the figures of gods and goddesses in the likeness of men
and women he was bored; when he painted a giant monster like this
Polyphemus his imagination inspired him. Asked where he found his
subject, he invented two silly lines of doggerel and said they came from
Tom Dibdin. His lonely visions were not for the chatter of a dinner
party. They may be tracked in that little red book found by Thornbury in
his studio, where, amid notes about chemistry, memoranda as to colours,
and prophylactics against the Maltese plague, are certain scraps of
verse, something about, "Anna's kiss," "a look back," "a toilsome
dream," "human joy, ecstasy, and hope."
[Illustration: PLATE VI.--ARTH FROM THE LAKE OF ZUG.
(From the water-colour by Turner in the National Gallery)
"Elaborate and lovely," wrote Ruskin. "We sleep at Arth, and are up, and
out on the lake, early in the morning; to good purpose. The sun rises
behind the Mythens, and we see such an effect of lake and light, as we
shall not forget soon."]
Here I pause to ask myself how I can possibly give you, who have never
seen it, an idea of the Turner room at the National Gallery. I close my
eyes and visualise the route. I ascend the stairs, and am detained by
two Turners that have, against his will, overflowed into an outer
room--the beautiful heat-hazy Abingdon, and distant London, seen from
Greenwich. Almost reluctantly I walk into the large gallery, and pass
from the glorious sunrise in Ulysses to the glorious sunset in "The
Fighting Téméraire," painted just ten years later. Claude and the others
have been left far behind. Here is Turner the visionary, alone with the
sun and the sea, untroubled by the necessity of painting the puny figure
of man, but glorying in the symbols of man's power, the new tug dragging
the stately old battleship to her last berth, a theme near to his
heart--the end of a period in man's history flickering out in the
ageless glory of Nature.
Pages, chapters, have been written about the untruth of this picture.
"His light and shade," says Mr. Wyllie, "is very seldom correct. His
tones are almost always wrong. The place where the sun is setting in the
'Téméraire' is the darkest part of the picture." But what does it
matter? This is his vision, of the absolute end of man's work in this
daily death of Nature. Who would have one inch changed? About this, as
about almost all the pictures, there is a story. The Téméraire "killed"
a portrait by Geddes hanging above it, whereupon Geddes began to lay in
a vivid Turkey carpet on his canvas. "Ho! ho!" cried Turner, who loved a
fight; and the unfortunate Geddes watched him loading on orange,
scarlet, and yellow with his palette knife.
I close my eyes to the splendour of the "Téméraire" and see "The Burial
of Wilkie," a silvery blue sky and sea shimmering with delicate
reflections, the mourning, black-sailed vessel severed by the flare of
the torches, their brilliancy and the black of the sails forming vast
tracks of light and gloom on the water. On Varnishing Day Stanfield
urged that the sails were untrue. Turner grunted--"Wish I had any colour
to make 'em blacker."
Then I see the "Snowstorm--Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth making
Signals in Shallow Water and going by the lead," which _Punch_ called "A
Typhoon bursting in a Simoon over the Whirlpool of Maelstrom, Norway,
with a ship on fire, an eclipse, and the effect of a lunar rainbow."
Turner is now sixty-seven. He is prepared to push paint to its ultimate
limit so that he can achieve the impossible. To study the effect of this
hubbub of snowstorm and gale he put to sea in the tempest, and made the
sailors lash him to the mast for four hours. It was the hostile
reception of this picture following the attacks on others in previous
years, the jeers of _Punch_, the shafts of _Blackwood_, that inspired
Ruskin to compose "Modern Painters." The first volume was published the
following year, 1843, but that colossal work had its beginnings in a
letter Ruskin wrote in 1836 defending Turner's picture of Venice called
"Juliet and her Nurse."
Turner was famous long before "Modern Painters" was published, and
although that pæan of appreciation has carried his fame to the ends of
the English-speaking world, the riot of its praise has tipped the pens
of some critics with gall. The "Slave Ship" exalted so eloquently by
Ruskin, and now in Boston, was described by George Inness, the American
artist, as "the most infernal piece of clap-trap ever painted."
The aged Turner suffered from the criticisms of the "Snowstorm." Ruskin
tells how he heard the old man one evening muttering to himself
"Soapsuds and Whitewash." On the "Graduate of Oxford" attempting to
soothe him, he burst out--"What would they have? I wonder what they
think the sea's like? I wish they'd been in it!"
Beneath the "Snowstorm" at the National Gallery hang two pictures,
shining with a radiance not of the earth, "The Sun of Venice going to
Sea," and "The Approach to Venice," wrecks perhaps of what they were,
but still lovely, in one all the pomp of Venice, in the other all her
haunting and elusive beauty. A little further along the wall in the
direction of the "Ulysses" is the parent picture of Impressionism, that
incomparable presentment of movement, mist, and moisture, aptly named
"Rain, Steam, and Speed." The fools called this a phantom picture,
complained that the locomotive has not the appearance of metal. Turner
was not painting the fact of an engine; but the effect of an engine
rushing through rain and mist. "My business," he once said to Cyrus
Redding, "is to draw what I see: not what I know is there."
In the years 1845 and 1846, when his sense of form began to fail, but
not his sense of colour, he re-saw the sea and the sun, to the exclusion
of other aspects of Nature. Of the thirteen pictures painted in those
two years, all but three were of Venice or of Whalers.
I wish, after our visit to the National Gallery, I could have taken you
to the Old Masters Exhibition, and there bid you look at his "Mercury
and Hersé," painted in 1811, when he saw with the eyes of Claude.
Pleasant are the blue lakes, the distances and the veiled horizon, the
faint hills and the arching sky; but they are derivative as the
drawing-master trees and the wooden foreground with its score of dummy
figures, its posed Mercury, its unrealised Hersé, and its architectural
litter. When you had absorbed this "Mercury and Hersé" of 1811, I would
have turned your gaze to the "Burning of the Houses of Parliament" of
1835, the real Turner, seeing with his own eyes the fury of burning
buildings, an orgy of flames roaring up to the star-sown sky. The far
end of the stone bridge, a nocturne in the palest blues and yellows,
drops into the fire, half the sky is aglow, half is a night blue, and
the gold and sapphire are reflected in the water, where dim boats push
out from the shade into the dazzle, and thousands of figures, mere
suggestions of forms, watch the two towers, molten silver, standing
solitary and self-contained like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego in the
flames.
It was such spade-work as the "Liber Studiorum" that enabled him to
triumph in such an impossible subject as "The Burning of the Houses of
Parliament." Imagine what this series of drawings meant! Claude's "Liber
Veritatis," to rival which the "Liber Studiorum" was designed, was a
mere record of his pictures. Turner's "Liber Studiorum" was a survey of
Nature, classified under six heads,--architectural, pastoral, elegant or
epic-pastoral, marine, mountainous, and historical or heroic. These
divisions were suggested by "Dad." "Well, Gaffer," said Turner, "I see
there will be no peace till I comply; so give me a piece of paper." He
made each drawing in sepia; he etched the essential lines, and he
trained a school of engravers (not without quarrelling) to engrave them.
Men have loved the "Liber." Connoisseurs, like Mr. Rawlinson, have
specialised in it. I know an enthusiast who spends hours in the course
of the year, smoking his pipe, gazing at (a poor impression, but his
own) No. VII., "The Straw Yard," that hangs on his study-wall against a
reproduction of Girtin's "White House at Chelsea," and he wonders which
he would save first if the house caught fire. I have been a quarter of
an hour late for an appointment through returning twice to a certain
house to enjoy again Mr. Frank Short's engravings of two of the
unpublished drawings--the "Crowhurst" and the "Stonehenge." But I never
knew what the "Liber" really was until I saw Mr. Rawlinson's
collection, the depth and velvety richness of a very early state of the
"Raglan Castle," and the large and still simplicity of the "Junction of
Severn and Wye." Some day it may be your privilege to see them; but
first we will descend to the ground floor of the National Gallery and
please ourselves by making a choice among the seventy and more sepia
drawings for the "Liber" that hang on the wall of the first room.
But I doubt if you will have patience to go through all, for around, and
in little rooms beyond, are the water-colours.
[Illustration: PLATE VII.--LAUSANNE. (From the water-colour by Turner in
the National Gallery)
It may be Lausanne: it may be Berne, or merely a Turnerian Swiss dream
of flushed spires, and a dim foreground where anything may be happening.
This is one of the water-colours permanently on view at the National
Gallery. The others are preserved in two large cabinets in an inner
room, and shown in detachments at intervals of three months.]
LETTER V
THE FLAME LEAPS, EXPANDS, AND EXPIRES
When I think of Turner it is the later water-colours that flash before
me. The oils are magnificent, tremendous, wrought in rivalry and for
fame: the water-colours, lyrical impressions, moods of elation inspired
by beauty, are himself. We will go straight to the six studies that hung
on the wall by the fireplace, essential effects selected with unerring
instinct from the unessential, called "Running Wave in a Cross-tide:
Evening;" "Twilight on the Sea;" "Sunshine on the Sea on a Stormy
Evening;" "Breaking Wave on Beach;" "Sunset on the Sea;" and "Coasting
Vessels." The very titles are lyrics. Yet they are not more beautiful
than other interpretations, pushed into the region where feeling and
vision merge into ecstasy--those I have already mentioned, and some, my
particular favourites, hanging on the wall to the left of Ruskin's
bust--the "Pilatus," the careful alchemy of "Carnarvon," and the
atmospheric veils that part above the "Lake of Uri." Year by year other
of his water-colours shine out momentarily at exhibitions, such as at
the last Old Masters, when we saw the blue and gold "Lake of Thun," and
the visionary "Lake of Zug" about which Ruskin wrote so enthusiastically
in "Modern Painters"; and the "apocalyptic splendour" of the "Zurich" at
Messrs. Agnew's.
But one never reaches the end of his achievement in the National Gallery
collection. A selection of the four hundred is permanently on view, but
a greater number are stored in cabinets in an inner room, whence once in
three months an assortment is withdrawn for exhibition. Apart from these
there are the thousands of drawings and studies disinterred from the tin
boxes which have been arranged chronologically by Mr. A. J. Finberg, in
a hundred vast drawers, preparatory to his long labour on the _Catalogue
Raisonné_.
Mark their range and you will realise that the whole world was his
province. Think of the books he illustrated--the Rivers, Harbours, and
Southern Coast Scenery of England, the Rivers of France, to name but
four--travelling often on foot, with his luggage in a handkerchief tied
to the end of a stick, flushing in the inn at night transparent washes
of colour on paper, flowing tint into tint, knowing exactly what to do,
sponging, scraping, using knife and finger, anything to force the
material to express his vision. Once after a Rhine tour he appeared at
Farnley Hall with a roll of fifty-three water-colours, painted at the
rate of three a day.
I must show you the map of England and Scotland compiled by Mr. Huish,
showing Turner's tours. It is covered with the lines of his tracks; you
may see where he trudged or coached, and note the fourteen cathedrals,
twenty-seven abbeys, and sixty-six castles which he drew. Similar maps
might be made of France, Italy, and Switzerland.
Thinking of his wanderings, I look from the window of one of the Turner
water-colour rooms near to the bust of Ruskin, who arranged and
catalogued them; I look from the window and see a line of the new,
dandy, taximeter cabs, and plan a little journey through London we two
would take, if you were here. We would visit Van Tromp at the Soane,
and then drive straight to the South Kensington Museum, where there are
golden dreams by Turner such as the "Royal Yacht Squadron, Cowes"; but
we would not tarry with the oils, for I should be impatient to show you
the wall of water-colours, some behind protecting blinds,--the early
"Wrexham," ageing houses and grey-blue tower; the perfect suggestion of
the spirit of place called "Sketch of an Italian Town," and the
fairy-like blue, gold, and purple "Lake of Brienz," pure flame of
Turner.
Then we would speed to Millbank, enter the Tate Gallery, and stand in
Room VII. where the recovered sunshine Turners hang in radiant array.
Ruskin, you will remember, after Turner's death, separated the "finished
from the unfinished." The "finished" are in the National Gallery; the
"unfinished" are among the forty-four at Millbank. Fifty years ago they
were deposited, hidden from public gaze, in the National Gallery; early
in 1905 they were examined by order of the trustees, cleaned, restored,
and found to be brilliant and fresh, as on the day when the greatest
landscape painter the world has known, painted them.
These forty-four pictures should be sorted. Some show but the tumbling
splendour of his decline when he fumbled with his visions, and produced
such chaotic failures as the two Deluges, the "Burning Fiery Furnace,"
"The Angel standing in the Sun," "Undine," and "The Exile and the Rock
Limpet." The holiday crowd, when I was last at the Tate Gallery, laughed
as their forerunners laughed when the pictures were first exhibited.
Their laughter enabled me to understand why Turner was secretive and
boorish in old age, when his imagination outsoared his dwindling power
to express his dreams in paint. Many visitors giggled and made flippant
comments, just as _Punch_ did when the old lion's eyes began to fail and
his hand to tremble. Had Turner ceased painting when he was nearing
seventy he might have been spared much, but he could not stop. His
inward eye still saw gorgeous scenes, and amid the grime of his dingy
house in Queen Anne Street he struggled with such unearthly themes as
this Deluge in the evening and the morning, and Napoleon in the sunset
of his exile. These are the pictures of his magnificent decline at
which the crowd laughed, and at that riot of forms, so glorious in
colour, called "Interior at Petworth." But they did not laugh at the
"Norham Castle, Sunrise," a flush of the prismatic varieties of light
against the blue mists of dawn, or at "The Evening Star," a nocturne
thrown off long before Whistler popularised the word, done at the period
when, the crepuscular hour of bats and owls obsessing Turner, he
produced those small moonlight mezzotints, wonderful, dim, silver
things, that were found in his house after he was dead. They did not
laugh at the "Hastings," delicate blues and golden greys, with splendour
in the upper sky, and the whole canvas aflame with the orange sail of
the boat drawn up on the beach; or at the Yacht racing, an impression of
sails against a tumbling sea, or at "A Ship Aground," the ground-swell
rolling by the helpless vessel, and the sun setting angrily behind a
bank of cloud; or at the Tivoli, an imaginative classical landscape
probably painted as a pendant to the "Arch of Constantine." The setting
suggests the scenery of Tivoli; but when Turner's imagination was fired,
he cared little about topographical accuracy.
That day I waited until closing time, loth to leave these visions,
noting with what art he had piled the chrome on the white ground in
"Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands," the delicacy of the faint
hues, the gold in the sky, the gold on the cliff, splashed yonder with
blue, and the golden boat sailing ever on.
The hour drew near five. The attendant appeared, drew the curtains one
by one over the sunshine pictures, hiding them with red hangings, all
but the four large valedictory scenes from classical mythology, and the
other splendid failures which have no curtains.
When I left the Gallery and stood upon the terrace overlooking the
Thames and thence towards Chelsea, I saw, in the mind's eye, the print
published after Turner's death that I had picked years ago from a
twopenny portfolio in the Brompton Road, showing the little house by
Cremorne Pier where he died, under the assumed name of Booth. The sun
shines upon the building. The Thames flows in front of it. It is said
that as long as strength held he would rise at daybreak, and wrapped in
a blanket, stand upon the roof watching the colour flush the eastern
sky.
[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--TIVOLI. (From the oil painting by Turner in
the Tate Gallery)
An imaginative classical landscape probably painted as a pendant to the
"Arch of Constantine, Rome," which also hangs in the Tate Gallery. It
has been suggested that the phantom figures are Tobit and the Angel. The
setting suggests the scenery of Tivoli; but when Turner's imagination
was fired, he cared little about topographical or historical
accuracy.]
The Chelsea hiding-place was discovered, but he was sinking when a
friend found him. He died on December 18, 1851, at the window, looking
upon the river, propped upon his couch. A full, and, I think, with
occasional lapses--the lot of all--a happy life, for his work never
ceased to be less than absorbing. He died in the light, having run his
race to the goal.
The account of that dinner at David Roberts' house, not long before his
death, when he tried to propose his host's health, "ran short of words
and breath, and dropped down in his chair, with a hearty laugh, starting
again, and finishing with a 'hip, hip, hurrah!'" shows that the power to
enjoy, and the sense of fun, had not withdrawn from the solitary genius,
the "very moral of a master carpenter, with lobster red face, large
fluffy hat and enormous umbrella," who wrestled with the sun, read Ovid,
and Young's "Night Thoughts," tramped Europe in pursuit of beauty, and
who was seen on the old Margate steamer studying the movement of the
water, and the boiling foam in the wake of the "Magnet," and making his
luncheon off shrimps strewn over an immense red handkerchief spread
across his knee--Turner.
POSTSCRIPT
TURNER AND TWO OTHERS
Climbing the stairs to the flat, I passed a girl who was toiling
upwards.
Pressing the button of the electric bell I watched her ascend the last
flight. She paused. I inferred that our destination was the same, noted
that she carried a satchel, a thick notebook, and a paper-covered
sixpenny reprint. Mildly curious as to the title of the novel, I
dissembled, and read "Endeavours after the Christian Life," by James
Martineau. Therewith the stone staircase faded away, the stone walls
opened to the past, and I saw my youth, and the figure of my father
returning one night to the old home, his face illumined, his eyes
shining; heard again the earnest words between him and my mother; how he
had been at Martineau's valedictory address, how with the teacher's
communication telling of deep things of the spirit moving within him he
had avoided friends, unable to return suddenly to earth, and how he had
walked home as if with wings. Those were the days when the "Endeavours"
was a costly, exclusive, and somewhat revolutionary book. A few quick
years, and lo! it becomes one of Allenson's sixpenny series, bought by
the hundred thousand.
The door of the flat opened, Martineau slept again with his forefathers,
the saints of all time, and the girl and I passed into the modest room
dedicated to one who was no saint. Yet I do not know. If a saint be he
who by his life makes this world for others more wonderful, more
beautiful and better worth living in, then Joseph Mallord William Turner
was a saint. Which is strange.
I did not speak of saints to our hostess, for Turner is her god, and a
god is greater than a half-god. There is one severe note in her
room--the bust of Cæsar on a pedestal; all the rest is beauty--sheer
beauty. I wonder what a far-horizon Colonial, who had never seen
Turner's later water-colours, would feel in this room; walls covered
with sensitive copies of those flushes of radiant colour, waning blue
dawns, purple mysteries of eve, sunlighted Swiss lakes, dream buildings,
rainbow reaches of the Rhine, opalescent distances stretching past
headlands into infinity.
The head of Cæsar, from his tall pedestal, surveyed these lyrics in
colour, as strange to him as would have been the "Endeavours after the
Christian Life," that paper book, tightly clutched, hidden from view, in
a girl's hand. Then twilight came, the lamp was lighted, and I went away
to carry out an idea that had just shaped itself.
I had never seen the house in Queen Anne Street where Turner lived with
Mrs. Danby and the cats. Should I find the house changed--houses rather,
for he owned three, two in Harley Street, and one in Queen Anne Street,
communicating mysteriously at the back, and leaving the corner building
in other hands.
As I walked through the Bloomsbury Squares I thought not of Turner, but
of another, a man, very old, very frail, bent almost double, with the
face of a spirit and the eye of a seer, whom years ago I had met on this
very spot, creeping round the railings which encircle the grass and
trees--James Martineau, still lingering in the world which his spirit
had long outsoared. I saw, in the mind's eye, that shrivelled
octogenarian figure, and I asked at three shops for the "Endeavours
after the Christian Life," found it in the fourth, and under lamp-post
and by lighted windows, turned the familiar pages and read fragments.
The chapter headings stirred old thoughts, and there was one passage in
the discourse on "Immortality" that seemed the voice of the dead
murmuring as I went westward through the dark squares, saying that we
see here only the partial operation of a higher law, that we witness no
extinction, but simply migrations of the mind, which survives to fulfil
its high offices elsewhere, and find perhaps in seeming death its true
nativity.
As I walked that voice stilled the tumult of the traffic, companioned me
through unfamiliar streets, until I knew by the brass plates on the
doors, and the lighted rooms shining through holland blinds in upper
stories, that I was in Harley Street, and near to Turner's house. Which
was it?
A frock-coated, shining-hatted, prosperous personage, carrying a small
black bag, was inserting a latch-key in one of the brass plate doors. As
I advanced, his black bag swung up to cover his watch-chain.
"Which was Turner's house?" said I.
"Turner! What Turner? Was he a medical man?"
"No! the great Turner, I mean the Painter."
He collected himself, reflected, and said: "Ah! I do remember something!
Yes, there is a tablet on the house yonder."
I peered up at the dwelling and saw, half way to the roof, a medallion,
and the lamplight shining upon the first letters of the name Turner.
This was the house of him who interpreted the feel of Nature, the
movement of sea and wind, the glory of the sun, the mystery of its
veiled face, the pomp of the world, the magic influence of light so
transcendently that we say: "Yes! this magician was initiate! This queer
Englishman was near to the eternal dream of his Maker."
As I stood in the dark street and looked up at Turner's house, the
Shades gathered about me. A wizard in words joined this son of a London
barber, and that saint whose works have gone into a sixpenny edition.
This was the house that Ruskin knew. Behind these walls, were stored the
pictures and water-colours in praise of which the most eloquent, the
most inspiring, the most wilful and bewildering book that has ever been
written upon art, was composed. Book? A library! The index alone of
"Modern Painters" fills one volume. On the doorstep of this house Turner
once stood and said to his disciple, who was about to start forth on a
foreign tour--"Don't make your parents anxious. They'll be in such a
fidge about you." He did not understand literary enthusiasm, and I doubt
if he ever read a page of the copy of "The Stones of Venice" that Ruskin
presented to him.
Three ghosts in a walk through London! Three great figures that trailed
through the nineteenth century--a wizard in paint, a wizard in words, a
wizard in holiness. Which is the greatest? Ruskin and Martineau
explained, taught, chided, interpreted, and uplifted. Turner just acted,
was content merely to express himself, to state his wonder at the wonder
of the world. Is not his influence the most enduring? A man of few words
and those mostly incoherent, who taught nothing, believed nothing, gazed
on the sun with hope, and did superhuman things. His prayers were his
pictures.
The plates are printed by BEMROSE & SONS, LTD., Derby and London
The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh
Transcriber's notes:
The following is a list of changes made to the original.
The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one.
depreciated. "Vandevelde made me a painter"
depreciated. "Vandevelde made me a painter,"
painter the world has known, painted them
painter the world has known, painted them.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Turner, by C. Lewis Hind
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