Turner Part 7

Opinions are divided, as usual, as to the truthfulness of his art to the spirit of French scenery, and a comparison between _The Light-towers of the Heve_ in our woodcut, and the drawing which he made on the spot (now in the National Gallery) will show how greatly his imagination altered the literal facts of a scene. One who has patiently followed his footsteps in many parts of England and on the Continent testifies to the puzzling effects of Turner's imaginative records. He seeks in vain on the face of the earth the original of Turner's later drawings, but he can never see these drawings without finding all that he has seen.

Indeed, to understand them rightly, they must be considered as poems in colour suggested by pictorial recollections of certain scenes on the rivers of France. Most of them are arrangements of blue, red, and yellow, some of yellow and grey, all exquisitely beautiful in arrangement of line and atmospheric effect. Nor has he in any other drawings introduced figures and animals with more skill and beauty of suggestion. The whole series palpitates with living light, although the pigments employed are opaque, and each view charms the sense of colour-harmony, although the colours are crude and disagreeable. It has always appeared wonderful to us that, with his power over water-colours and delight in clear tones, he should have been content to work with such chalky material and impure tints; it is as though he preferred to combat difficulties; but they were drawn to be engraved, and as long as he got his harmonies and his light and shade true we suppose he was content. The great skill with which he could utilize the grey paper on which these drawings were made, leaving it uncovered in the sky and other places where it would serve his purpose, conduced to swiftness of work, and may have been one of his motives. The drawing of Jumieges, of which we give a woodcut, is one of the loveliest of the series, with its mouldering ruin standing out for a moment like a skeleton against the steely cloud, before the fierce storm covers it with gloom.

In these yearly visits to France, Turner was accompanied by Mr. Leitch Ritchie, who supplied the work with some description of the places. They travelled, however, very little together; their tastes in everything but art being exceedingly dissimilar. "I was curious," says his companion, "in observing what he made of the objects he selected for his sketches, and was frequently surprised to find what a forcible idea he conveyed of a place with scarcely a correct detail. His exaggerations, when it suited his purpose to exaggerate, were wonderful--lifting up, for instance, by two or three stories, the steeple, or rather, stunted cone, of a village church--and when I returned to London I never failed to roast him on this habit. He took my remarks in good part, sometimes, indeed, in great glee, never attempting to defend himself otherwise than by rolling back the war into the enemy's camp. In my account of the famous Gilles de Retz, I had attempted to identify that prototype of 'Blue Beard' with the hero of the nursery story, by absurdly insisting that his beard was so intensely black that it seemed to have a shade of blue. This tickled the great painter hugely, and his only reply to my bantering was--his little sharp eyes glistening the while--'Blue Beard!

Blue Beard! Black Beard!'"

[Ill.u.s.tration: JUMIeGES.

_From "Rivers of France."_]

We do not know when Turner became first acquainted with Mr. Munro of Novar, one of the greatest admirers of the artist and collectors of his later works, but it was in 1836 that we first hear of them as travelling together, when, it is said, "a serious depression of spirits having fallen on Mr. Munro," Turner proposed to divert his mind into fresh channels by travel. They went to Switzerland and Italy, and Mr. Munro found that Turner enjoyed himself in his way--a "sort of honest Diogenes way"--and that it was easy to get on very pleasantly with him "if you bore with his way," a description which, meant to be kind, does not say much for his sociability at this period.

Indeed, he had been all his life, and especially, we expect, since he left Twickenham, developing as an artist and shrivelling as a man, and after this year (1836), though he still developed in power of colour and painted some of his finest and most distinctive works, the signs of change, if not of decline, were also visible. He was also getting out of the favour of the public, who could not see any beauty in such works as the _Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons_, of 1835, or _Juliet and her Nurse_, of 1836.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGHTING TeMeRAIRE.

_Exhibited in 1839. National Gallery._]

His fame began to oscillate, tottering with one picture and set upright by another. As long, however, as he could paint such pictures as _Mercury and Argus_, 1836, and the _Fighting Temeraire_, of 1839, it was in a measure safe. He was still a great genius to whom eccentricities were natural, but the _Fighting Temeraire_ was the last picture of his at which no stone was thrown. This is in many ways the finest of all his pictures. Light and brilliant yet solemn in colour; penetrated with a sentiment which finds an echo in every heart; appealing to national feeling and to that larger sympathy with the fate of all created things; symbolic, by its contrast between the old three-decker and the little steam-tug, of the "old order," which "changeth, yielding place to new"--the picture was and always will be as popular as it deserves. It is characteristic of Turner that the idea of the picture did not originate with him, but with Stanfield. Would that Turner had always had some friend at his elbow to hold the torch to his imagination.

[Ill.u.s.tration: decoration]

[Ill.u.s.tration: decorative bar]

CHAPTER VIII.

LIGHT AND DARKNESS.

1840 TO 1851.

Turner was now sixty-five years old, and his decline as an artist was to be expected from failing health and stress of years. For little less than half a century he had worked harder and produced more than any other artist of whom we have any record. Nor would he rest now, although his failing powers of body and mind required stimulants to support their energy.

Mr. Wilkie Collins informed Mr. Thornbury that, when a boy--

"He used to attend his father on varnishing days, and remembers seeing Turner (not the more perfect in his balance for the brown sherry at the Academy lunch) seated on the top of a flight of steps, astride a box. There he sat, a shabby Bacchus, nodding like a Mandarin at his picture, which he, with a pendulum motion, now touched with his brush and now receded from. Yet, in spite of sherry, precarious seat, and old age, he went on shaping in some wonderful dream of colour; every touch meaning something, every pin's head of colour being a note in the chromatic scale."

We have spoken of Turner as declining as an artist, but we are not sure that he did so till about 1845, when, Mr. Ruskin says, "his health, and with it in great degree his mind, failed suddenly." Down to this time his decay seems to us to have been more physical than artistic, but with the physical weakness there had been, we think, for some time a deterioration of the non-artistic part of his mind. His decay, though so unlike the decay of others, appears to us to have nothing inexplicable about it if we consider him as a man who had never had any sympathy with the current opinions and culture of his fellows, and who, by some strange defect in his organization, was unable to think without the use of his eyes. That his eyesight failed there is no doubt, but that it did not fail in the one most essential point for a painter, viz., perception of colour, is, we think, proved by his latest sketches in water-colour, which show none of that apparently morbid love of yellow which appears in his later oil pictures, and testify to that perfect perception of the relations and harmonies of different hues which can only belong to a healthy sight. Instead of declining, this faculty of colour seems to have increased in perfection almost to the last. If we compare the sketch in the National Gallery of a scene on the Lake of Zug, done between 1840 and 1845, with one of the 'Rivers of England' _Dartmouth_, two drawings wonderfully alike in composition and in general scheme of colour, no difference in this faculty can be observed; the later drawing is only a few notes higher in the scale. As Mr. Ruskin says, "The work of the first five years of this decade is in many respects supremely and with _reviving_ power, beautiful."

But still the decline of his non-artistic mind, never very powerful, had been going on for years, or at least such reasoning power as he possessed had exercised less and less control over the imperious will of his genius, which impelled him to pursue his efforts to paint the unpaintable. He had begun by imitation, he had gone on by rivalry, he had achieved a style of his own by which he had upset all preconceived notions of landscape painting, and had triumphed in establishing the superiority of pictures painted in a light key, but he was not content.

His progress had always been towards light even from the earliest days, when he worked in monochrome. Sunlight was his discovery, he had found its presence in shadow, he had studied its complicated reflections, before he commenced to work in colour. From monochrome he had adopted the low scale of the old masters, but into it he carried his light; the brown clouds, and shadows, and mists, had the sun behind them as it were in veiled splendour. Then it came out and flooded his drawings and his canva.s.ses with a glory unseen before in art. But he must go on--refine upon this--having eclipsed all others, he must now eclipse himself. His gold must turn to yellow, and yellow almost into white, before his genius could be satisfied with its efforts to express pure sunlight.

So he went on to his goal, becoming less "understanded of the people"

each year, painting pictures more near to the truth of nature in sun and clouds, and less true in everything else. But it was about the everything else that the people most cared. They did not care for sunlight which blinded them, and to which the truth of figure, and sea, and gra.s.s, and stone, had to be sacrificed. They liked pictures which could give them calm enjoyment, records of what they had seen or could imagine, not of what Turner only had seen, and what seemed to them extravagant falsity.

Such, roughly put, was the condition of things when a champion arose to scatter Turner's enemies to the four winds. He, Mr. Ruskin (1836), an undergraduate at Oxford, of the age of seventeen, was one not of "the people," but of those comparatively few lovers of art and colour who saw and appreciated the artistic motives of Turner, and who reverenced, as a revelation of hitherto unrecorded, if not undiscovered, beauties of nature, those pictures at which the world scoffed. We cannot here enter further into the discussion involved, but the att.i.tude of the two parties, the one represented by "Blackwood's Magazine," and the other by "Modern Painters," can be judged by the following extracts. The n.o.ble enthusiasm aroused by the treatment of _Juliet and her Nurse_ by the critics, had suggested a letter in 1836, which gradually increased into a volume, not published till 1843, and in the meantime the undergraduate had gained the Newdegate, and earned the right to call himself "A Graduate of Oxford" on his t.i.tle-page.

This is what Maga said in August, 1835, of Turner's picture of _Venice, from the porch of Madonna della Salute_, a picture in his earlier Venetian style:--

"Venice, well I have seen Venice. Venice the magnificent, glorious, queenly, even in her decay--with her rich coloured buildings, speaking of days gone by, reflected in the _green_ water. What is Venice in this picture? A flimsy, whitewashed meagre a.s.semblage of architecture, starting off ghostlike into unnatural perspective, as if frightened at the affected blaze of some dogger vessels (the only attempt at richness in the picture). Not Venice, but the boat is the attractive object, and what is to make this rich? Nothing but some green and red, and yellow tinsel, which is so flimsy that it is now cracking..... The greater part of the picture is white, disagreeable white, without light or transparency, and the boats, with their red worsted masts, are as gewgaw as a child's toy, which he may have cracked to see what it was made of. As to Venice, nothing can be more unlike its character."

[Ill.u.s.tration: VENICE. THE DOGANA.

_In the National Gallery._]

This is what the Graduate of Oxford says, after stating his dissatisfaction with the Venices of Ca.n.a.letti, Prout, and Stanfield:--

"But let us take with Turner, the last and greatest step of all--thank Heaven we are in sunshine again--and what sunshine! Not the lurid, gloomy, plaguelike oppression of Ca.n.a.letti, but white flushing fulness of dazzling light, which the waves drink and the clouds breathe, bounding and burning in intensity of joy. That sky--it is a very visible infinity--liquid, measureless, unfathomable, panting and melting through the chasms in the long fields of snow-white flaked, slow-moving vapour, that guide the eye along the mult.i.tudinous waves down to the islanded rest of the Euganean hills. Do we dream, or does the white forked sail drift nearer, and nearer yet, diminishing the blue sea between us with the fulness of its wings? It pauses now; but the quivering of its bright reflection troubles the shadows of the sea, those azure fathomless depths of crystal mystery, on which the swiftness of the poised gondola floats double, its black beak lifted like the crest of a dark ocean bird, its scarlet draperies flashed back from the kindling surface, and its bent oar breaking the radiant water into a dust of gold. Dreamlike and dim, but glorious, the unnumbered palaces lift their shafts out of the hollow sea--pale ranks of motionless flame--their mighty towers sent up to heaven like tongues of more eager fire--their grey domes looming vast and dark, like eclipsed worlds--their sculptured arabesques and purple marble fading farther and fainter, league beyond league, lost in the light of distance. Detail after detail, thought beyond thought, you find and feel them through the radiant mystery, inexhaustible as indistinct, beautiful, but never all revealed; secret in fulness, confused in symmetry, as nature herself is to the bewildered and foiled glance, giving out of that indistinctness, and through that confusion, the perpetual newness of the infinite and the beautiful.

"Yes, Mr. Turner, we are in Venice now."

Unfortunately the brave young champion was too late, the eloquent voice that could translate into such glowing words the dumb poetry of Turner's pictures had scarcely made the air of England thrill with its musical enthusiasm when black night fell upon the artist. The sudden snapping of some vital chord, of which that same Graduate of Oxford only last year pathetically wrote, took place, and the glorious sun of his genius disappeared without any twilight; he was dead as an artist, and dying as a man. Neither his work nor his life could be defended any more. But the voice that was raised so late in his honour did not die, its vibrations have lasted from that day to this; and if the champion himself seems to be in some need of a defender now, if mouths that once were full of his praise are silent or raised only for the most part to depreciate, it is only what came to Turner and what comes to all who use their imagination too freely to enforce their convictions. A time must come when the spirit of a.n.a.lysis will eat into the most brilliant rhetoric; the false and true, which combine to make the most beautiful fabric of words, cannot wear equally well. To us it is always painful to differ from Mr.

Ruskin, to whom we owe the grasp of so many n.o.ble truths, the memories of so many delightful hours; and if a time has come when our faith in his dogmas is not absolute, and we feel that he has misled us and others now and again, we cannot close reference to him and his works in this little book without testifying to the great and n.o.ble spirit which pervades his work, and recording our admiration of a life devoted to the service of art and man and G.o.d with a pa.s.sionate purity as rare as it is beautiful.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VENICE, FROM THE Ca.n.a.l OF THE GIUDECEA.

_Exhibited in 1840. South Kensington Museum._]

But before night fell, in the interval between 1840 and 1845, Turner painted a few pictures of remarkable beauty both in colour and sentiment--pictures which no other artist could have painted, and which we doubt if he could himself have painted before--pictures generally attempting to realize his later ideal of Venice, which even now, in their wrecked beauty, fascinate all who have patience to look at them, and watch the apparent chaos of yellow and white and purple and grey gradually clear into a vision of ghost-like palaces rising like a dream, from the golden sea. Besides these he painted at least three others of unique power: one a record of what few other men could have had the courage to study or the power to paint; one showing the pa.s.sion of despair at the loss of an old comrade; and another the boldest attempt to represent abstract ideas in landscape that was ever made. We allude to the _Snowstorm_; _Peace, Burial at Sea_; and _Rain, Steam, and Speed_.

Mr. Hamerton says, in connection with the first of these:--

"Let it not be supposed that these works of Turner's decline, however they may have exercised the wit of critics, and excited the amus.e.m.e.nt of visitors to the Exhibition, were ever anything less than serious performances for him. The _Snowstorm_, for example (1842), afforded the critics a precious opportunity for the exercise of their art. They called it soapsuds and whitewash, the real subject being a steamer in a storm off a harbour's mouth making signals, and going by the lead. In this instance, nothing could be more serious than Turner's intention, which was to render a storm as he had himself seen it one night when the 'Ariel' left Harwich. Like Joseph Vernet, who, when in a tempest off the island of Sardinia, had himself fastened to the mast to watch the effects, Turner on this occasion, 'got the sailors to lash himself to the mast to observe it,' and remained in that position for four hours.

He did not expect to escape, but had a curious sort of conscientious feeling, that it was his duty to record his impression if he survived."[45]

Of the second, which was painted to commemorate Wilkie's funeral, it is related that Stanfield complained of the blackness of the sails, and that Turner answered, "If I could find anything blacker than black I'd use it."[46]

The history of his late Swiss sketches and the drawings he made from them has been recently told by Mr. Ruskin in his valuable and interesting notes to his collection of Turner's drawings exhibited last year (1878), and these notes and the almost equally interesting notes of the Rev. W. Kingsley, contained between the same covers, testify not only to the supreme beauty of his later work, but also to the n.o.bler motive which inspired its production, viz. the desire to "record" as far as he could what he had seen after "fifty years' observation." The days of strife and emulation were over, and a humbler, sweeter spirit made him "put forth his full strength to depict nature as he saw it with all his knowledge and experience." Characteristically, as all through his life, this better spirit showed itself rather in his water-colours made for private persons, than in those oils which he exhibited for the judgment of the public.

We wish we had s.p.a.ce here for Mr. Ruskin's splendid description of Turner's picture of _Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying_--a work which seems to us to ill.u.s.trate what we have said of his manner of decline in a remarkable way. There is no doubt about its splendour of colour, the grandeur of its sea, and the force with which its sentiment of horror and wrong and death is conveyed; but it shows a childishness, a want of mental faculties of the simplest kind, which is all the more extraordinary when brought in contrast with such gigantic pictorial power. The sharks are quite unnecessary, the bodies in the water are too many, the absurdity of the chains appearing above it is too gross; the horror is overdone and melodramatic, or, in a word, one of his finest pictorial conceptions is spoilt for want of a little common sense, of a little power to place himself in relation to his fellows and see how it would appear to them. Again, we cannot help wishing that he had had a friend at his elbow like Stanfield, who would have saved him from the laughter of small critics. He was not fit to manage such a work on such a subject by himself.

In his picture of _War--the Exile and the Rock-limpet_, with its extract from the "Fallacies of Hope"--

"Ah! thy tent-formed sh.e.l.l is like A soldier's nightly bivouac, alone Amidst a sea of blood ...

...But can you join your comrades?"

we see the same mental helplessness. It verges on the sublime, it verges on the ridiculous. We should be sorry to call it either; but it is childish--not with the grand simplicity of Blake, but with the confused complicity of Turner. Mr. Ruskin says that Turner tried in vain to make him understand the full meaning of this work, and we are not surprised.

Such pictures as these had occurred now and then all through his career--pictures in which the means employed were utterly inadequate to express the sentiment duly, such as the _Waterloo_,--pictures in which the acc.u.mulation of ideas was confused and excessive, as the _Phryne going to the Bath as Venus, Demosthenes taunted by aeschines_; and he had shown some hazy symbolism in connection with sh.e.l.l-fish in these verses:--

"Roused from his long contented cot he went Where oft he laboured, and the ... bent, To form the snares for lobsters armed in mail; But men, more cunning, over this prevail,

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SLAVE SHIP.

_In the possession of Miss Alice Hooper, of Boston, U.S._]

Lured by a few sea-snail and whelks, a prey That they could gather on their watery way, Caught in a wicker cage not two feet wide, While the whole ocean's open to their pride."