THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 JIM TULLY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 MRS. JIM TULLY
 
 TURNER
 
 UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUMf 
 
 G. F. WATTS 
 
 BY J. E. PHYTHIAN 
 
 BURNE-JONES 
 
 BY J. E. PHYTHIAN 
 
 RODIN 
 
 BY FREDK. LAWTON 
 
 WHISTLER 
 
 BY FRANK RUTTER 
 
 ROSSETTI 
 
 BY FRANK RUTTER
 
 
 CROSSING THE BROOK.
 
 TURNER 
 
 J. E. PHYTHIAN 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 K-^ " , 
 
 f MODERN PAINTING, " G. T. WATTS, 
 "BURNC-JONES," ETC. 
 
 WITH TWENTY-FOUR. ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 MITCHELL KENNERLEY
 
 Art 
 
 Library 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 i 
 
 PAGE 
 I. ART, LIFE AND NATURE . I 
 
 II. LIFE AND LIFE-WORK . . . 36 
 
 in. TURNER'S READING OF EARTH . . 118 
 
 IV. AN EPIC OF HUMANITY . . .150 
 
 INDEX . . 193 
 
 850152
 
 I 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 
 
 THERE is a story, one that might be difficult to 
 authenticate, of a mediaeval monk, who, having de- 
 parted this life, and being asked in his next stage of 
 existence how he had enjoyed the beautiful world he 
 had just left, replied that he had never seen its beauty. 
 Had such a question been asked, under such con- 
 ditions, this might well have been the reply, for Ruskin 
 tells us that a monk of the Grande Chartreuse, when 
 asked why the windows of the monastery faced in- 
 wards on a courtyard, instead of outwards over the 
 valley, replied that he and his fellows had not gone 
 there to look at the mountains. Browning, in ' Fra 
 Lippo Lippi,' sets talking a monk who was alive to 
 the beauty of the world, and its wonder and power, 
 ' the shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades, 
 changes, surprises,' and who asked the captain of the 
 guard, a man who had seen the world, if he felt 
 thankful
 
 2 TURNER 
 
 For this fair town's face, yonder river's line, 
 The mountain round it and the sky above, 
 Much more the figures of man, woman, child, 
 These are the frame to ? 
 
 And though Lippi was a very unmonkish monk, 
 and, in his keen enjoyment of the beauty around him, 
 in advance, as the artist must needs be, of most of his 
 contemporaries, yet he and the other artists of his time 
 were but the harbingers of a day when men would 
 have a much deeper and wider appreciation of the 
 beauty of their dwelling-place than had been possible 
 in earlier ages. The story of how mankind has 
 gradually come into enjoyment of this priceless source 
 of happiness, which yet may be free to all, has often 
 been told, and need not be formally repeated here. It 
 will inevitably come up incidentally as we discuss the 
 art of Turner in the following pages ; but it is to our 
 immediate purpose to notice that, since Fra Lippo 
 Lippi's day, landscape, after occupying a merely sub- 
 ordinate position in the art of painting, has completely 
 achieved its independence. 
 
 Browning recognises the old subordination in the 
 words he puts into the Prate's mouth. The fair 
 town's face, the river's line, the mountain and the 
 sky, are the frame to the figures of man, woman and 
 child ; and in the< pictorial art of that time they were
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 3 
 
 never more than this. The beauty of nature, and of 
 nature as modified by the hand of man for his own 
 use, was never painted alone, entirely for its own sake. 
 To-day, the pictures in which there is only landscape, 
 or in which the figures are wholly subordinate to the 
 landscape, form, perhaps, the greater number of all the 
 pictures painted. Probably the word artist, which is 
 really one of very general significance, would at once 
 suggest to ninety-nine out of every hundred people a 
 landscape painter. 
 
 The word landscape is a very unsatisfactory one for 
 the purpose it has to serve. Its inadequacy is obvious 
 when we consider that writers, not unfrequently, but 
 not always without an apology, use the word seascape. 
 And if seascape, why not skyscape also ? Even land, 
 sea and sky do not in themselves exhaust the land- 
 scape painter's subject-matter. Nor do we reach the 
 end when we have included all easily visible, natural 
 objects, living and lifeless. Just as when cattle occupy 
 an entirely subordinate place in a picture, we do not 
 think it necessary to catalogue it as a ' landscape with 
 cattle ' ; so, if human figures occupy only such place, 
 we are content with the term landscape. Yet no hard 
 and fast line can be drawn. That dear old pedant 
 Polonius had all the divisions and subdivisions of 
 dramatic art at his tongue's end. We make land-
 
 4 TURNER 
 
 scape cover not only the world of earth, air and 
 water, with living things, including man, if they be 
 merely incidents in the general scene, but also, if 
 similarly incidental, the objects that are man's handi- 
 work, cottages, houses, churches, castles, boats and 
 ships on the sea in short, anything that is to be 
 seen ; so that, in common acceptation, a street-scene, 
 in which all of untouched nature that is in evidence 
 may be a mere vestige of sky above the house-roofs, 
 is a landscape. 
 
 All these considerations, it may be said, are but so 
 much commonplace. Yet it is necessary not merely to 
 have them in mind, but to insist upon them, when we 
 are approaching the art of Turner ; for if we are to 
 call him a landscape painter we must give a very 
 catholic interpretation of the range of the subject- 
 matter to be included within the term. The inadequacy 
 of the word becomes so obvious when we consider his 
 life-work, even if we exclude the pictures and drawings 
 that come clearly or doubtfully under other recognised 
 categories, that we cannot accept it as descriptive of 
 the content of his art, and hardly even as a label 
 negatively to mark off its content from that of works 
 that must strictly be classed as portraiture, genre, 
 history or what else. That Turner himself recognised 
 this is evident from the titles of some of his pictures,
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 5 
 
 such as The Bay of Ba'ue, Apollo and the Sibyl, and 
 The Sun rising in a Mist, Fishermen cleaning and selling 
 Fish. If we generalised such titles, and the contents 
 of the pictures, we should use such phrases as Landscape 
 and Mythology, Landscape and History, Landscape and 
 Genre, and very often the word landscape would 
 not be entitled to precedence. 
 
 Referring to an earlier volume of this series, the one 
 on G. F. Watts, I find myself repeating here, with 
 little more change than some elaboration and variation 
 of phrase, what was said there in the course of a com- 
 parison of Turner with Watts. The latter desired 
 to paint, and his desire was in the main accomplished, 
 an epic of humanity. It is obvious from Turner's 
 works, and from his literary efforts, that, in his own 
 way, he had the same purpose, with the difference I 
 quote from the earlier volume that what ' Turner 
 looked on and showed us from a distance, Watts 
 looked at and showed us from close at hand ; nay, we 
 may say, from within.' Elsewhere I have had occa- 
 sion to compare Watts' landscapes with the descriptive 
 language of the Psalmist, and the same comparison 
 holds good for Turner's pictures. His subject was 
 essentially the world as the dwelling-place of man. 
 Was the thought of God as within humanity and all 
 the phenomena of life and nature as constant with
 
 6 TURNER 
 
 Turner as it certainly was with Watts ? I cannot say. 
 With this possible reservation, the words of the great 
 hymn of praise are an exact literary parallel to many 
 if not most of Turner's paintings, and I will not merely 
 refer to the words, but will quote them, because they 
 will arouse the thought and feeling that are needed for 
 a fully sympathetic appreciation of Turner's work. 
 ' He watereth the hills from His chambers : the earth 
 is satisfied with the fruit of Thy works. He causeth 
 the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service 
 of man : that he may bring forth food out of the 
 earth ; and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, 
 and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which 
 strengtheneth man's heart. The trees of the Lord are 
 full of sap ; the cedars of Lebanon which he hath 
 planted ; where the birds make their nests : as for the 
 stork, the fir-trees are her house. The high hills are 
 a refuge for the wild goats ; and the rocks for the 
 conies. He appointed the moon for seasons : the sun 
 knoweth his going down. Thou makest darkness and 
 it is night : wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep 
 forth. The young lions roar after their prey, and 
 seek their meat from God. The sun ariseth, they 
 gather themselves together, and lay them down in their 
 dens. Man goeth forth unto his work and to his 
 labour until the evening. O Lord, how manifold are
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 7 
 
 Thy works ! in wisdom hast Thou made them all : 
 the earth is full of Thy riches.' 
 
 The drawing Datur Hora Quieti, reproduced as an 
 illustration to Rogers' Poems, may be instanced as one 
 of the great number of Turner's works that justify this 
 comparison. In fact, it should be said that the com- 
 parison ought not to have been given such prominence 
 unless his work as a whole justified it. But we need 
 not do more at the moment than take this single 
 illustration. The drawing is only a small one, but 
 the impressiveness of Turner's works is far from being 
 dependent on their size. He could express in inches 
 a sense of space and grandeur that artists of no mean 
 capacity could not give with feet of canvas to work 
 upon. The means by which he did this will be 
 considered later. Just now it is enough for us to 
 observe that this little drawing gives us rather a vision 
 than a vista ; and this not merely in the purely land- 
 scape elements, in the stretching away of hill and vale 
 and gleaming river to the faint, far-off horizon, with 
 the majesty above them of the setting sun among the 
 myriad cloudlets that owe to him their splendour of 
 varied colour, but also in the visible evidences of man's 
 life and activity. The ruined castle on the hill calls 
 up the thought of the coming and going of the 
 generations of men. How many feet have trod the
 
 8 TURNER 
 
 bridge, where in earlier days would be a ford, the castle 
 guarding its passage ? The church spire reminds us 
 that man has ever been a worshipper, however various 
 may have been the gods he has worshipped. The 
 boats by the river-bank bid us think of commerce 
 between city and city, between country and country, 
 between continent and continent, and of adventure and 
 discovery. The windmill tells of the gathering in and 
 use of harvest ; and, lastly, we have one pulse-beat of 
 this incalculable length of life, the close of the single 
 day, the ploughmen going homeward with their horses, 
 leaving idle till the morrow the implement of which 
 the invention preceded all written history ; for, once 
 again, the night is coming in which no man can work, 
 and there is given once more the hour of rest which is 
 both a fulfilment and a promise. 
 
 All Turner's work, when he had passed through 
 his apprenticeship his many apprenticeships, one ought 
 rather to say and when both the man and his art had 
 matured, was wrought in a mood of exaltation that 
 was not merely aesthetic. Can it be said that there 
 was a spiritual element in his art ? The reader may 
 have winced or smiled when I said that perhaps 
 the thought of God was not as constant with Turner 
 as it was with Watts. But whether we can find a 
 name for it or not, there was a thought, that quickened
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 9 
 
 ever into emotion, other than the mere sensuous feeling 
 for visible beauty. Men have ever been worshippers, 
 we have just said, however various have been the 
 objects of their worship. Again and again Turner 
 shows in his work that he recognised this enduring 
 human trait. Did he worship, and if so, what ? The 
 cynic may answer that he worshipped fame, and money 
 as an earnest of fame. Those who do not mistake a 
 man's weakness for his strength will look to his life- 
 work, and some of them may say that Turner 
 worshipped the sun, that the worship grew upon him 
 with growing years, till at last he sacrificed everything 
 to the endeavour through his art to pay tribute to the 
 splendour of the sunlight. It is surely best not to 
 limit and define. Who would trust any man's power 
 so to sound the depths of his own nature, so to explore 
 and map them out, as to be able to set forth in formal 
 terms that which he truly worships, that in which, the 
 mighty complex in which, he lives and moves and has 
 his being ? Here, at the moment, all we need is to 
 affirm that Turner, the artist, was a worshipper, that he 
 bowed down before, and therefore exalted himself in 
 the contemplation of, the invisible within the visible. 
 This is why there is in his work a beauty that nature 
 cannot show ; a beauty, one must hasten to say, not 
 surpassing, but different from that of nature, no
 
 io TURNER 
 
 mere imitation of what nature sets before us, but, like 
 music, a new creation. 
 
 This is true of all art, and of every artist, I may be 
 told. The reply is, yes, and pre-eminently true of 
 Turner. Is not every artist, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, a Platonist, seeking everywhere the types 
 of which visible things are but the imperfect forms ? 
 Could Plato have seen a Turner landscape would he 
 not at once have given to painting a place in his 
 Republic ? Art is infinitely more than imitation. It 
 begins, indeed, with departure from imitation ; so that 
 truth to nature, in the sense of a record, as exact 
 as possible, of visible things, is precisely the wrong 
 criterion by which to judge it. 1 have been trying to 
 keep away from it, have substituted for it just now 
 poor words of my own, but it must come for its own 
 sake and for the authority it bears. The artist, to be 
 worthy the name, must make to shine 
 
 The light that never was on land or sea, 
 
 he must have 
 
 The consecration and the poet's dream. 
 
 Here I can see myself being charged with empha- 
 sising at the very beginning of this little book the 
 * literary ' element in Turner's pictures. Such em- 
 phasis I at once admit, but take objection to the
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE n 
 
 epithet 'literary.' Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse describes 
 Turner as ' the great composer of chromatic harmonies 
 in forms of sea and sky, hills and plains, sunshine and 
 storm, towns and shipping, castles and cathedrals.' 
 Some of the forms rarely wanting in Turner's works 
 are omitted here, though named elsewhere. There 
 is no mention of men, women, children and animals. 
 The final significance of the Datur Hora Quieti, we 
 have seen, depends on the ploughmen going home 
 from their day's work. And if we interest ourselves 
 in these ' forms,' as well as in the chromatic harmonies, 
 are we confusing art with literature ? 
 
 Let us answer this last question by reference to 
 a literary counterpart of the Datur Hora Quieti the 
 opening verse of Gray's ' Elegy.' Here we have the 
 work of a composer of verbal, of literary harmonies. 
 The mere sound of the words would be harmonious 
 even if they had no meaning. How often one reads 
 aloud or recites both prose and verse merely for the 
 sake of the beauty of sound ! This is one purely 
 literary element in both prose and poetry. But 
 beyond this there is the meaning of the words ; and 
 the choice of the best words to express the meaning 
 is another literary element. But still there is the 
 meaning. Is the meaning literature ? The chief value 
 of the verse we are considering is that it calls up
 
 iz TURNER 
 
 sights and sounds that we have seen and heard and 
 that stir our emotions. The words are idle words 
 unless they evoke a picture ; they would be meaning- 
 less to one who had never heard the evening bell 
 or the cattle lowing as they returned to the farm at 
 milking-time ; or who had never seen as in Turner's 
 drawing the weary ploughman going homewards as 
 the darkness settled down. These things could be 
 seen and heard, and the emotion evoked by them 
 be felt without any translation into words. That is to 
 say, literature does but give expression to what exists 
 independently of it. Ruskin, in one of his Oxford 
 lectures, half regrets that we cannot use such a word as 
 ' spiriture ' or ' animature ' to denote that which exists 
 as thought or feeling before literary expression is given 
 to it, and to a large part of which, painting, just as 
 well as literature, and often better than literature, can 
 also give expression. 
 
 The spheres of literature and painting in this respect 
 are not identical, they do not exactly coincide in 
 fact they are very far from coinciding but they do 
 overlap. We are not concerned here to attempt a 
 delimitation of their respective spheres ; but only to 
 protest against painting being accused of trespassing on 
 the domain of literature whenever it does not content 
 itself with creating the visible harmonies which are
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 13 
 
 the counterpart of the harmonies of sound created by 
 literature. 
 
 That Turner sought to express through painting 
 such things as Virgil and Ovid, Scott, Byron and 
 many another had expressed in words is obvious ; and 
 no criticism of his life-work can be complete that does 
 not take account of his success or failure in this 
 respect ; and the success or failure is not to be 
 measured by merely quantitative comparison. Hamer- 
 ton says that all the meaning in the Liber Studiorum, 
 which was the subject of some of Ruskin's most 
 eloquent passages, could be packed into a couple of 
 sonnets, and then would not be worth much. Here is 
 the literary fallacy at work. We do not want 
 Turner's glowing art turned into even the most glow- 
 ing of words. A poem translated from one language 
 into another loses much of its value ; how much 
 greater must be the loss involved in translation from 
 one art to another ! Even if there be gain there is 
 also loss. We do not wish to break the Grecian 
 urn after reading Keats' ode to it. 
 
 To one of the best known of his imaginative 
 Italian landscapes, Lake Avernus, Turner gave the 
 sub-title The Golden Bough. Searching the picture 
 for an explanation of it, we find a female figure hold- 
 ing up in her left hand a bough which she has
 
 14 TURNER 
 
 evidently cut down with the sickle in her right hand. 
 I can well recollect the time when, as a boy, I used to 
 look at the engraving of this picture without any 
 knowledge of the mythological significance of this 
 figure, and yet was vaguely moved by it, and felt that 
 somehow it deepened the beauty of the landscape. 
 Even then it had an emotional value. How much 
 greater is that value now after one has read and read 
 again Dr. Frazer's ' Golden Bough,' in which the mean- 
 ing of the figure is explained with such fulness of 
 erudition. Dr. Frazer gives a reproduction of this 
 picture as a frontispiece to his book. Would he have 
 done so had he not felt that the picture had an 
 emotional value that no verbal poetry, that no learned 
 research, could supersede ? The figure bearing the 
 Golden Bough, the other figures dancing round a fire, 
 the others, again, seated with the classical vases near 
 them, the temples overlooking the lake, the fragments 
 of masonry all these are not to be dismissed as 
 1 literary ' intruders in the landscape, out of place in a 
 painting because their emotional effect upon us largely 
 depends upon our knowledge of the history of the 
 changing beliefs of mankind ; nor is that emotional 
 effect to be measured by estimating the amount of in- 
 formation of the kind we get from books, they immedi- 
 ately, by our merely looking at them, convey to us.
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 15 
 
 With mythological interest of this kind, with 
 historical interest, and with the interest we derive 
 from scenes of everyday life, Turner's work is replete. 
 Writers who have emphasised these elements in his 
 works, such as Ruskin and Mr. Stopford Brooke, have 
 been called subjective critics, presumably because they 
 interest themselves in the subjects of the pictures is 
 there also a suggestion that they read into Turner 
 something that is not there, but only exists in their 
 inner consciousness ? Turner, however, was a sub- 
 jective painter, in the sense both of putting in his 
 pictures records of human doings that he had ob- 
 served, or heard or read about, and of endeavouring 
 to express through his art his own thoughts and feelings 
 with regard to the significance of human life. It is 
 open to a critic to deal only with the pictorial element 
 in Turner's work, with that which corresponds to the 
 purely literary element in prose and poetry, and to 
 ignore what we will call the spiritual element. But in 
 so doing he will criticise, not Turner's work, not the 
 whole of what the artist set himself to do, but only a 
 part of it ; and often the pictorial and the spiritual 
 elements are so completely fused that neither can be 
 adequately appreciated and discussed without reference 
 to the other. The subjective critics may not succeed 
 in exactly interpreting Turner's meaning, just as
 
 i 6 TURNER 
 
 hearers may misinterpret preachers, and readers, 
 poets ; but they may be trusted to correct each other ; 
 at least they will be having regard to the artist's 
 obvious purpose ; and, after all, the proper function 
 of prophet, poet or poet-painter is not to impose his 
 own thought upon others as absolute truth, but to 
 make his individual, and therefore fallible contribution, 
 to the thought of mankind. Ruskin may have read 
 things into Turner ; the things themselves may be 
 none the worse for that. We owe more to him than 
 to those who have read nothing, of the same kind, in 
 Turner ; even though he have at times misinterpreted 
 his author we shall find Turner thus describing him- 
 self and though his own interpretations of life be not 
 as certainly right as he himself was inclined to think 
 them. 
 
 Cosmo Monkhouse speaks of Turner's art as full 
 of feeling for his fellow-creatures, and as showing 
 men at work in the fields, on the seas, in the mines, 
 in the battle, bargaining in the market, and carous- 
 ing at the fair. But he adds that the note of 
 domesticity is wanting, that we are never shown 
 men at home, and he thinks that this is attributable 
 to his never himself having experienced the charm 
 of home. The lack of this note in Turner's work, 
 he says, is one of the principal reasons why his
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 17 
 
 art has never been truly popular in home-lcving, 
 domestic England. 
 
 I have talked with many people who do not care 
 for Turner's art, but I have never once heard this 
 reason given for their indifference to it, or active dis- 
 like of it. The reasons almost unfailingly given are 
 the indistinctness, the lack of reality, the exaggeration 
 amounting to positive untruthfulness in his works. Nor 
 does one hear the works of Constable, Cox, De Wint, 
 and others of our landscape painters praised on account 
 of the incidents of home-life given in them, but for 
 their naturalness, for their reminding people of what 
 they themselves have seen. This, however, is, after all, 
 not very far away from what Monkhouse says. It is 
 not the lack of homely incident in Turner's work that 
 makes it unpopular there is, indeed, not a little of it 
 but the lack of a sense of the homely, familiar, 
 natural look of things. The story of the lady who 
 said to Turner that she never saw in nature such skies 
 as he put in his pictures, and of his reply, ' No, ma'am, 
 but don't you wish you could ? ' has not lost, nor is 
 likely for long enough to lose, its significance. Am I 
 the only Turner enthusiast who feels it at times a relief 
 to turn away from his chromatic harmonies to more 
 simply rendered landscape ? One feels at times, with 
 regard to Turner's work, somewhat as Dean Hole 
 c
 
 1 8 TURNER 
 
 must have felt when, in a gorgeous flower-garden, he 
 took a friend by the arm and said, ' Let us go into the 
 kitchen-garden and cool our eyes on the lettuces ! ' 
 
 But can we not turn away from pictures by Turner 
 that are stimulating and exciting to others by him that are 
 perfectly restful, and so find relief without going to other 
 artists ? Ruskin says, in * The Harbours of England,' 
 that nothing is so perfectly calm as Turner's calmness, 
 and instances the drawing of Scarborough, engraved in 
 that work. He shows that the effect of tranquillity is 
 obtained by elaborate artifices of reflection and repetition, 
 natural forms being modified, and various objects being 
 introduced, for the especial purpose. ' Observe,' he 
 says, ' the anxious doubling of every object by a visible 
 echo or shadow throughout this picture.' He tells us 
 further that 'the highest art is full of these little 
 cunnings, and it is only by the help of them that it can 
 succeed in at all equalling the force of the natural im- 
 pression.' This last sentence may be open to discussion ; 
 but it is enough for us to note here that it was by such 
 elaborate artistry that Turner sought to record the 
 impressions he had received from nature, that the 
 artistry is felt by the spectator even if he do not give 
 detailed account of it himself, such as Ruskin gives for 
 his benefit with the result that he says he never saw 
 anything like this, nor, he is sure, did Turner himself.
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 19 
 
 Does not this really mean for the spectator is assuredly 
 right that the effect produced is one of art, not of 
 nature, though it was suggested by nature ? We are 
 right in calling it a record of an impression received 
 from nature ; but the terms in which it is recorded are 
 not natural ones it is not a record of observed facts, 
 either of form, or light, or colour. Turner's art is not 
 merely full of artifice, it abounds in rhetorical eloquence 
 like the language of Ruskin, who, in his later years, 
 could poke fun at some of the purple passages of 
 ' Modern Painters.' W. D. Howells says that the only 
 time he ever doubted the existence of St. Mark's at 
 Venice was when he read Ruskin's description of it ! 
 It is not only that ' numerous person,' the man in the 
 street, who raises objection to what he feels to be an 
 excess of art in Turner's pictures. Mr. A. C. 
 Benson, in his Life of Rossetti, says that among the 
 papers of that poet and painter was recorded a con- 
 demnation of Turner by Whistler on the ground that 
 he did not meet either the simply natural or the decor- 
 ative requirements of landscape art which to Whistler 
 appeared to be the only alternatives. Is not this really 
 the position also of the man in the street, who is quite 
 willing that Turner or anyone else should see visions 
 and dream dreams, even though he himself is incredu- 
 lous of the light that never was on land or sea, but is
 
 20 TURNER 
 
 offended because the names of places that he knows are 
 given to pictures that bear only a very visionary resem- 
 blance to such places ? It is evident that Turner 
 mingled too much fact with his dreams for Whistler's 
 liking. The critics of Turner who called forth 
 Ruskin's passionate, youthful defence of him said 
 that Turner was not truthful. Ruskin showed how 
 much more truth there was in his works than in 
 those of any other landscape painter, among either 
 his predecessors or his contemporaries. The fact 
 remains that Turner was not truthful ; and the truth 
 in his works does but emphasise their lapse from 
 truth to put the matter paradoxically. They would 
 have been better, from the point of view of Whistler, 
 of some other critics and of the man in the street, 
 if they had lacked the truth which, with such copious 
 reference to geology, botany and meteorology, Ruskin 
 proved them to possess. 
 
 We cannot but feel that in not a few of Turner's 
 works, nature has been subjected to very formal 
 design, and arrayed in very obvious colour-schemes, 
 and we are inclined to say either that art will not bear 
 so much of nature or that nature will not bear so much 
 of art. Hamerton says that Turner was never enslaved 
 to nature. But should he not either have served her 
 somewhat more faithfully, or have more fully emanci-
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 21 
 
 pated himself from her ? Of course, the objection 
 that is here admitted is felt more in some of his works 
 than in others ; but I want frankly to admit that it can 
 legitimately be taken, in order to say at once that those 
 who give too much weight to it, and let it hinder them 
 from attentive study of Turner's work, suffer an incal- 
 culable loss. From no other landscape painter is there 
 so much to be learned about nature as from Turner, nor 
 has any other landscape painter given to us such 
 wonderful art. 
 
 It has often been said that Turner did himself every- 
 thing that had been done by all other painters of land- 
 scape. Redgrave, for example, in 'A Century of 
 Painters of the English School,' says, ' Turner's water- 
 colour paintings, indeed, epitomize the whole mystery of 
 landscape art. Other painters have arrived at excellence 
 in one treatment of nature. Thus Cozens in grand and 
 solemn effects of mountain scenery ; Robson in simple 
 breadth and masses ; De Wint in tone and colour ; 
 Glover in sun-gleams thrown across the picture, and 
 tipping with golden light the hills and trees ; Cox in 
 his breezy freshness ; and Barret in his classical com- 
 positions, lighted by the setting sun. These were men 
 that played in one key, often making the rarest melody. 
 But Turner's art compassed all they did collectively, 
 and more than equalled each in his own way.' In one
 
 22 TURNER 
 
 at .least of the instances here given and this is the 
 only one that for our immediate purpose we need to 
 consider Redgrave is assuredly wrong : Turner not 
 only did not more than equal, he never so much as 
 nearly approached, the breezy freshness of Cox ; and 
 this is but one instance of a general limitation in his 
 art ; in by far the greater portion of his work he does 
 not make us feel as if we were among the things he 
 paints ; we are merely looking, from the outside, at 
 representations of them. Are we right in calling this 
 a limitation, or is the feeling of reality only to be 
 sought face to face with nature herself, art having quite 
 another function ? If we answer this question by 
 reference to what art has done and is doing, we shall 
 decide that to convey the feeling of reality is one 
 function of art, and that failure to convey it is a limita- 
 tion in the art of Turner. It is conveyed in the art 
 of Constable, Cox, Millet, Corot, the Impressionist 
 School of Monet, and more and more by living 
 painters in all countries. This question is one of the 
 very greatest importance, with reference both to Turner's 
 art and to art in general ; and we must give to it the most 
 careful consideration. 
 
 The pleasure we derive immediately from nature does 
 not come to us solely through the sense of sight, but 
 through hearing, touch and smell also. It is rarely,
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 23 
 
 perhaps, that a picture even faintly suggests the last- 
 named sense. The most deceptively realistic painting 
 of flowers would hardly do it ; but I think the salty 
 freshness of the sea air is not unfrequently recalled 
 this, however, is a question of individual experience. 
 Sounds, such as those of breaking waves and running 
 water, of thunder and of the wind, of human and 
 animal noises, of the traffic of streets, are constantly 
 suggested by pictures ; and more regularly still is the 
 sense of touch awakened. The tread of the feet on 
 rock, soil, grass, carpeted room or what else, wind, 
 rain or sun on the face, the feeling to the hand of the 
 hardness or softness, roughness or smoothness, of all 
 the varied texture of different objects one need not 
 seek to enumerate in how many ways pictures can call 
 up the sense of touch. When Fuseli, going to see 
 Constable's pictures in his studio, asked Stroulger, the 
 Academy porter, for his umbrella, this meant, one thinks, 
 not merely that he knew he would see a picture of 
 a shower, but that he would feel as if the rain would 
 wet him. 
 
 Mr. Bernhard Berenson sums up the pleasure we 
 take in actual landscape as ' only to a limited extent an 
 affair of the eye, and to a great extent one of unusually 
 intense well-being' ; and says that 'the painter's problem, 
 therefore, is not merely to render the tactile value
 
 24 TURNER 
 
 of the visible objects, but to convey, more rapidly and 
 unfailingly than nature would do, the consciousness of an 
 unusually intense degree of well-being.' This means, 
 he says, 'the communication by means purely visual 
 of feelings occasioned by sensations non-visual,' and he 
 thinks that art is only at the beginning of systematic 
 success in this endeavour, but that such success is 
 at hand and that ' perhaps we are already at the dawn 
 of an art which will have to what has hitherto been 
 called landscape the relation of our music to the music 
 of the Greeks or of the Middle Ages.' 
 
 It is in his book on the Florentine Painters of the 
 Renaissance that Mr. Berenson thus discusses the 
 function of landscape painting, with particular reference 
 to the treatment of landscape in the works of Ver- 
 rocchio ; and where we are to look for the dawn 
 of a fuller art of landscape we learn when he says that 
 ;' Verrocchio was, among Florentines at least, the first 
 to feel that a faithful reproduction of the contours 
 is not landscape, that the painting of nature is an 
 art distinct from the painting of the figure. He 
 scarcely knew where the difference lay, but felt that 
 light and atmosphere play an entirely different part in 
 each, and that in landscape these have at least as much 
 importance as tactile values. A vision of plein air, 
 vague I must grant, seems to have hovered before
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 25 
 
 him.' That is to say, the promise of a fuller art lies 
 in what has been done by, and under the inspiration of, 
 the French Impressionist painters. Elsewhere, in 
 ' The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance,' Mr. 
 Berenson refers definitely to two of the Impressionists, 
 praising Cezanne for his exquisite modelling of the 
 sky, and Monet for communicating the very pulse-beat 
 of the sun's warmth over fields and trees, but alleging 
 that they lack the feeling for space, ' the bone and 
 marrow of the art of landscape,' of which Poussin, 
 Claude and Turner had so much that, though inferior 
 in other respects to some of the painters of our own 
 day, they are still the greatest European landscape 
 painters. 
 
 The greatest contribution to art made by the Im- 
 pressionist painters is that they are the first who have 
 systematically, of set purpose, made us feel that we 
 could breathe in their pictures. Of course this feeling 
 is aroused occasionally and to a limited extent in the 
 works of earlier painters, just as there was brotherly 
 love in the world before Christianity declared it to be 
 the very soul of religion. Burne-Jones, who thought 
 but little of the Impressionists, admitted that they gave 
 atmosphere, and atmosphere means breathing-space ; 
 but he said that this did not amount to much. It 
 counts for very much indeed in the sense of general
 
 26 TURNER 
 
 well-being. The breathing of pure air is not only one 
 of the cheapest unless made artificially dear by com- 
 petitive manufacture and commerce but one of the 
 greatest of the pleasures of life to a healthy individual. 
 To most people it is probably a sub-conscious pleasure. 
 Some people enjoy it consciously, and give it abundant 
 exercise, with incalculable gain to health and happi- 
 ness. And an art that reflects this pleasure inevitably 
 gives pleasure to those who are alive to it. 
 
 It is instructive for our present purpose to refer 
 to what Ruskin says in Modern Painters ' about the 
 landscapes of David Cox. He refuses to be offended 
 by Cox's loose and blotted handling, though elsewhere 
 he pours contempt on the ' modern blottesque ' style 
 of tree drawing. He would not have Cox's trees 
 drawn better than they are ; yet from Ruskin's main 
 point of view they are badly enough drawn, lacking, as 
 they do, individuality of form. No one but Cox, he 
 says, has so fully recorded the looseness, coolness and 
 moisture of herbage, the rustling, crumpled freshness 
 of broad-leaved weeds, the play of pleasant light across 
 deep-heathered moor or plashing sand, th" melting 
 of fragments of white mist into the dropping blue 
 above. He says further that what is accidental in 
 Cox's methods of reaching his ends answers gracefully 
 to what is accidental in nature. By the accidental in
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 27 
 
 nature we may understand Ruskin to mean the play 
 of light and shade that disguises form ; since form, to 
 him, was the all-important thing. Perhaps to Cox 
 certainly to the Impressionists what to Ruskin was 
 accidental was the essential thing. The disguising 
 of form is as much a result of light and atmosphere as 
 the display of it. A full sense of the presence of light 
 and atmosphere can only be rendered in art by the 
 partial disguise of form ; art, in this, following nature ; 
 and much that Ruskin praises in Cox's paintings, which 
 to him is only a record broken by accidents, resolves 
 itself really into such a subtle, illusive rendering of light 
 and air that we feel we could live and breathe in his 
 pictures ; that is to say, Cox, in Mr. Berenson's 
 phrase, communicates by means purely visual feelings 
 occasioned by sensations non-visual. 
 
 In ' Modern Painters ' Ruskin, after giving moderate 
 praise to Constable, handled him severely, because 
 Leslie had brought him forward as a great artist, com- 
 parable in some sort to Turner. His reputation is 
 said to have been 'most mischievous, in giving coun- 
 tenance to the blotting and blundering of Modernism.' 
 Constable, we are told, is a bad painter, giving a cheap 
 deceptive resemblance to nature. He ' perceives in a 
 landscape that the grass is wet, the meadows flat, and 
 the boughs shady ; that is to say, about as much as, I
 
 
 28 TURNER 
 
 suppose, might in general be apprehended, between 
 them, by an intelligent fawn and a skylark.' On the 
 other hand, * Turner perceives at a glance the whole 
 sum of visible truth open to human intelligence.' He 
 is the good painter who ' gives the precious non- 
 deceptive resemblance.' These two classes of truth, 
 the cheaply deceptive and the precious non-deceptive, 
 cannot be given, we are told, together ; choice must 
 be made between them. 
 
 We can often appeal from one Ruskin to another. 
 The Ruskin condemning Constable is not the one that 
 praises Cox ; and the Ruskin of over thirty years 
 after the first volume of * Modern Painters ' was 
 written, could praise a picture by Mr. H. W. B. Davis 
 ' which in last year's Academy carried us out, at the 
 end of the first room, into sudden solitude among the 
 hills.' What is this but deception undeceitful de- 
 ception ? And such pictures as this he traced to the 
 influence of Mr. Holman Hunt's Strayed Sheep, of 
 which he says in the same place the lecture on 
 Rossetti and Holman Hunt in * The Art of England ' 
 ' it showed to us, for the first time in the history of 
 art, the absolutely faithful balances of colour and shade 
 by which actual sunshine might be transposed into a 
 key in which the harmonies possible with material 
 pigments should yet produce the same impressions
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 29 
 
 upon the mind which were caused by the light itself.' 
 He particularly mentions the * natural green and 
 tufted gold of the herbage ' in this picture, and says 
 that he could not in any articulate manner explain 
 * what a deep element of life, for me, is in the sight 
 merely of pure sunshine on a bank of living grass.' 
 This is different in wording only from what Mr. 
 Berenson has been quoted as saying of Monet, 
 that he communicates * the very pulse-beat of the 
 sun's warmth over fields and trees.' And now we 
 can appeal to this later Ruskin to fix for us the 
 limitation, in this respect, of Turner's art, for he 
 says, ' all previous work whatever had been either 
 subdued into narrow truth, or only by convention 
 suggestive of the greater. Claude's sunshine is colour- 
 less, only the golden haze of a quiet afternoon ; 
 so also that of Cuyp : Turner's, so bold in con- 
 ventionalism that it is credible to few of you, and 
 offensive to many.' 
 
 A brief reference to the course of landscape paint- 
 ing after Constable and Turner, to the progress that 
 has led up to the Impressionist movement, and the 
 developments now succeeding it and in part made 
 possible by it, will help us further to realise what 
 was Turner's contribution to art. Constable's imme- 
 diate influence was greater in France than in his own
 
 30 TURNER 
 
 country. The exhibition of pictures by him in the 
 Paris Salon, during his own lifetime, stimulated the 
 French landscape painters to greater freshness and 
 naturalism ; and the indebtedness of the Barbizon 
 school to him is freely admitted across the Channel. 
 The forceful realism of Courbet, the broad, simple 
 realism of Millet, and the tender, poetic realism of 
 Corot, were immediately followed by that of such men 
 as Boudin, Jongkind, and Lepine, which again and again 
 reminds us of the water-colour drawings of David Cox. 
 I have just put side by side a sea-piece by Cox and one 
 by Boudin. A casual glance would suggest that they 
 were the work of the same artist ; but it is soon felt 
 that there is more atmospheric truth in the Boudin 
 than in the Cox ; one could breathe more freely in 
 the former than in the latter. Then came Monet and 
 Pissarro, both of whom were accustomed to paint in 
 the open air. In 1871, during the Franco-German 
 War, they were fellow-exiles in England, where they 
 painted on the Thames and in the London suburbs, 
 and studied carefully the works of Constable and 
 Turner. French landscape had already learned what 
 the former had to teach. But what would these 
 open-air painters, endeavouring, as they already were, 
 to paint light and air, have to do with Turner ? It 
 would be chiefly his oil paintings that they would
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 31 
 
 study, we may conclude. There would be little to 
 their purpose in the heavy, sombre earlier paintings. 
 Much in the Italy series would interest them ; but 
 among those to which they would go again and again 
 would assuredly be Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, The 
 Fighting Temeraire and Rain, Steam and Speed; and 
 the last-named would probably be the one from which 
 they would have most to learn; for it is in the very 
 forefront of the pictures by Turner in which there is 
 the minimum of conventionalism in both design and 
 colour ; in which one can really breathe freely, because 
 everything has been subordinated to the endeavour so 
 to represent misty, rainy atmosphere, fleeting gleams 
 of light and swift movement, that we have the feeling 
 of being within the picture, in the rain, and that the 
 engine, with its burden of carriages, before which the 
 hare is fleeing for its life, will soon thunder past us. 
 In Ruskin's phraseology, the material pigments pro- 
 duce the same impressions upon the mind which would 
 be caused by the scene itself. Alas ! Unless the in- 
 dexer be at fault, there is in ' Modern Painters ' not so 
 much as a passing reference to this picture ! 
 
 Monet and Pissarro, after painting for a time in our 
 English climate, where atmospheric effect counts for 
 so much, and after studying such pictures as this and 
 others, painted by men who were native to that
 
 32 TURNER 
 
 climate, went back to France, there to paint direct 
 from nature, and to develop a technique that enabled 
 them to render effects of light and atmosphere with a 
 truth of impression that none before them had 
 approached. They carried further one avoids saying 
 completed what Turner in his last years had begun, 
 when he made the endeavour to render sunlight 
 illusively almost the be-all and end-all of his art. 
 
 In one particular Impressionism is widely different 
 from the art of Turner. Its colour is natural ; 
 Turner's colour was conventional to the last. Work- 
 ing direct from nature, the Impressionists have re- 
 corded not the exact, unrelated colour of each 
 individual object, which Holman Hunt tended to do, 
 working up his picture bit by bit, but the natural 
 colours as they modify each other by juxtaposition. 
 Accurate observation of this kind was quite foreign to 
 Turner's art. His colour was not descriptive of 
 nature, it was visible music for which nature pro- 
 vided only the suggestion. The Impressionists, one 
 should say, have not been content with a mere record, 
 they have selected, harmonised, composed ; but record 
 is at the base of their work. It is often difficult to 
 realise, when looking at Turner's sketches in colour, 
 that all he did upon the spot was to make outlines and 
 notes in pencil, and that the colour was added after-
 
 ART, LIFE AND NATURE 33 
 
 wards. They look like memoranda rapidly made 
 with the scene or effect visible to the artist. The 
 colour is clearly conventional ; but, if we had no 
 knowledge to the contrary, we should take it to be 
 merely a convention into which the artist uncon- 
 sciously fell even when working from nature. There 
 is no question, however, that this was not the case. 
 His finished drawings, done from the sketches after a 
 lapse of time, are still more elaborately conventional, 
 and have lost entirely the freshness, the sense of 
 reality, the ' accidental ' quality, of the sketches. 
 They have gained in elaboration of form and colour- 
 music, while they still give us an often wonderful sense 
 of light, of vast spaciousness, of vistas stretching away 
 into the far distance. Their power impresses us, or 
 their loveliness charms us. Their colour thrills us, 
 not merely as if it were music, but because it is 
 music. Their masterly design gives to us a satisfying 
 sense of unity, of completeness ; they are visions ; 
 such, we feel, are nature, life, the universe, could we 
 but see the whole. 
 
 Another difficulty that many people feel with regard 
 to Turner's work should be mentioned here his 
 exaggerations. He is no more literally true to nature 
 in form than in colour. He exaggerates the steepness 
 and height of mountains, the size of buildings, the 
 D
 
 34 TURNER 
 
 straining of masts in the wind, and much else. Here 
 the answer has to be that it is only by such exaggera- 
 tion emphasis might sometimes be the better word 
 that the artist, with a tiny area of paper or canvas at 
 his disposal, with the impossibility of including all that 
 the eye can see as it ranges over the actual scene, able 
 only to hint at atmosphere and distance, by which we 
 instinctively gauge the height of objects, and to 
 suggest, not to give, movement, can make any 
 approach to impressing us as we are impressed by 
 nature herself. The artist would therefore be entitled 
 to a certain exaggeration were his function only thus 
 to impress us ; and complaint on this score, even by 
 those who ask from art nothing more than record of 
 how nature looks to us, merely shows lack of know- 
 ledge of the terms upon which alone art can accom- 
 plish this limited aim. If, however, we grant that art 
 has ends of its own to serve, then complaint, so long 
 as the exaggeration serves those ends, is out of the 
 question. We might as well object to chairs and 
 tables because nature has not provided them, and we 
 have to cut down trees to make them. 
 
 What has been said here about all these questions 
 makes no pretence to be an exhaustive study of them. 
 Nor is it supposed that no reader will remain uncon- 
 vinced by the arguments adopted. But such discussion
 
 ART, X LIFE AND NATURE 35 
 
 is a necessary preliminary to the study of Turner's art. 
 It will suffice if it enable the reader to approach 
 Turner knowing what he has to expect. It is for this 
 reason that I have let this discussion precede even an 
 account of Turner's life and of his development as an 
 artist, which is given in the following chapter. The 
 significance of the particulars there set forth will, 
 I think, be more easily grasped, with a general notion 
 of the relation of his art to life and nature already in 
 mind.
 
 II 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 
 
 THE date of Turner's birth is believed to have been 
 the 23rd of April, 1775 ; though there is no really 
 trustworthy evidence that this was actually the day. 
 What is certain is that he was baptized three weeks 
 after this date. The 23rd of April is St. George's 
 day, and also, traditionally, Shakespeare's birthday ; 
 and the coincidence has been commented on as such 
 coincidences often are. Ruskin compares Turner, 
 opening out to us the aspects of nature, with Francis 
 Bacon revealing to us the laws of nature, and Shake- 
 speare revealing those of human nature. To make 
 things complete, Bacon ought to have been born on the 
 same date ; but, unfortunately, he made the mistake of 
 being born on the 2 2nd of January. Happily it is not 
 possible to suggest that Turner wrote Shakespeare's 
 plays, or that Shakespeare painted Turner's pictures 
 unless, indeed, we suppose Turner to be a reincarnation 
 of Shakespeare ! One parallel between the two may 
 36
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 37 
 
 usefully ,be drawn. Shakespeare came into the world 
 when the genius of the nation was ready to find 
 expression in dramatic art ; and Turner when the 
 time was ripe for the rise of a school of landscape 
 art that can without exaggeration be called national. 
 Wilson, Gainsborough, and painters of lesser name had 
 shown the way. Paul Sandby, the father of water-colour 
 art, was their younger contemporary. John Cozens, to 
 whom in this branch of art Turner admitted his great 
 indebtedness, was born in 1752. Thomas Girtin, of 
 whom as a landscape painter in water-colour Turner 
 thought so much as to say that had he not died young, 
 he himself would have starved, was born in 1775. 
 Constable came but one year later than Turner. 
 John Crome, the founder of the Norwich School, was 
 born earlier than these three, in 1768. David Cox 
 and Samuel Prout came in 1783 ; De Wint in 1784 ; 
 Copley Fielding three years, and Robson four years, 
 later. These are but some of the chief of a numerous 
 company of English landscape painters who were 
 Turner's younger or older contemporaries. There is 
 nothing that we know of in his ancestry and parentage 
 to account for his genius ; but, granted the genius, he 
 could not have come into the world at a time more 
 propitious for its full flowering and glorious display. 
 It has been suggested that a taint of insanity in his
 
 38 TURNER 
 
 mother became genius in him. If we are to think, 
 thus, we must look for a similar taint in the Shakespeare 
 and Bacon families, and many others ; and we who 
 have not genius must lament that our mothers were 
 sane. Doubtless everything has its explanation, 
 including the genius of Turner. All we can do, 
 however, in his case, is to say that his genius is less 
 explicable by us than are now the varying courses 
 of the wind. 
 
 Joseph Mallord William were the Christian names 
 chosen for him by his parents. They were people of 
 humble circumstances ; his father being a barber, 
 carrying on business at No. 26 Maiden Lane, in the 
 parish of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, in which house 
 the future painter was born. A barber meets and talks 
 with people who, in diverse ways, move in, and are 
 conversant with, the great world ; and the very occupa- 
 tion of Turner's father may have made it possible for 
 him to entertain a high ambition for his son, when once 
 his genius had begun to make itself evident. The 
 neighbourhood of Maiden Lane was at that time quite 
 an artists' quarter ; and Stothard, the painter, was one 
 of the barber's customers. There might well be no 
 paternal objection in this case to a boy's developing an 
 evident faculty for drawing, such as so often has had 
 to be overcome by the sons of men of greater wealth
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 39 
 
 and higher position. Indeed, it is clear that this was 
 so ; for the elder Turner used proudly to declare that 
 his son was going to be an artist. 
 
 The father appears to have been cheery and chatty. 
 His son always showed sincere affection for him. 
 The mother's affliction must have robbed the home of 
 much of the best that the word home implies. But 
 that Turner regularly spoke of his father as ' Dad,' 
 suggests that the essentials of home were not wholly 
 wanting. Probably Turner would not have been * at 
 home ' in a conventionally orderly household. 
 
 Turner's earliest attempts at art do not seem to have 
 been more remarkable than those of many a child who 
 has not in later years proved to be a genius. Not 
 everyone who bites his bread and butter into the shapes 
 of animals, or turns wall-paper patterns into faces, is 
 destined to become a famous sculptor or painter. 
 Turner's first recorded work of art had a tea-tray for 
 canvas, spilt milk for pigment, and his finger for a 
 brush. The copying of a coat-of-arms that he saw at 
 the house of one of his father's customers seems to have 
 influenced the determination of a career for him ; and 
 the persistence and growth of his fondness for drawing 
 clearly showed the way he was to go. 
 
 That the greatest of imaginative landscape painters 
 should be born and spend his early years in Maiden
 
 40 TURNER 
 
 Lane, Covent Garden, has often been referred to as if 
 this were one of the cases in which what would not 
 have been expected beforehand had happened never- 
 theless. Let us not forget that the river and its 
 shipping, with their inexhaustible interest for a boy, were 
 close at hand. So were the parks, which certainly must 
 not be left out of account when we are considering what 
 might stimulate the child's powers of observation ; and 
 the open country was then within easy walking distance. 
 Also, he was by no means confined to the city. At 
 least as early as at the age of nine he had seen the sea ; 
 for there exists a drawing of Margate Church made by 
 him at that age. He had an uncle at New Brentford, 
 and was sent to school there that he might have the 
 benefit of country air. Early in life, therefore, he 
 knew town, country, river and sea. The things 
 with which he was most familiar in early years never 
 lost their hold upon him ; indeed, they profoundly 
 influenced his art. Witness his unfailing interest in 
 rivers and bridges and shipping ; if a town he visited 
 had a river flowing through it, he evidently speedily 
 made his way to its side. Ruskin traces *o his life in 
 London his fondness for introducing a large number of 
 figures into his pictures. We certainly feel oftener in 
 the case of Turner than of any other painter that we 
 should get unpleasantly jostled if we could step into the
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 41 
 
 busy scenes he has pictured. It is significant that he 
 never made his home anywhere but in London or its 
 immediate vicinity. Hamerton notes this in connexion 
 with the observation already quoted, which Turner's 
 life-work abundantly justifies, that his art faculty was 
 too strong for him ever to be enslaved to nature : that 
 his mind had never been overwhelmed by nature to the 
 point of sacrificing its human liberty and individuality. 
 His early years were, in fact, a forecast of what his 
 after years were to be : life in London with frequent 
 visits to we may say the greater world outside the 
 world of London ; and always early in life and all 
 through life, whether he was in the one world or the 
 other, he was busy drawing and painting. While at 
 school at New Brentford, he drew and drew and drew. 
 Trees, flowers, animals, birds, poultry, were wonderful 
 new things to him ; they must be drawn ; and drawn 
 they were, while his delighted schoolfellows did his 
 lessons for him ! To see as Fra Lippo Lippi saw and 
 to put down in his own way what he saw, was the 
 overmastering passion of his life ; and it prevented him 
 from acquiring even what would ordinarily be con- 
 sidered the minimum of the kind of knowledge that is 
 imparted by schoolmasters. His father taught him to 
 read. He was at school for a few months at New 
 Brentford when he was ten or eleven years old, and
 
 42 TURNER 
 
 again for a few months at Margate, and he learned to 
 write. Doubtless a modicum of the third of the three r's 
 was also conveyed to him though the New Brentford 
 schoolfellows are said to have done his sums for 
 him and with this scanty apparatus of learning, so 
 scanty that he could never easily express himself in 
 either speech or writing, he was sent forth upon his 
 way through life. 
 
 Whether Turner would have lost or gained had his 
 educational outfit been less slender it may be idle to 
 conjecture. More time given to books would have 
 meant less time given to observation and drawing and 
 painting ; and one of Ruskin's points about the truth 
 in his pictures is that with no knowledge of science he 
 was yet scientifically accurate when, and so far as he 
 cared to be accurate, it is necessary to add. More 
 reading might have made his mythological and histori- 
 cal pictures more learned ; but would it have made 
 them more imaginative ? Could classical scholarship 
 have bettered by one jot or tittle Apvllo and the 
 Python and Ulysses deriding Polyphemus ? All the 
 same, it may be admitted that more learning might 
 have saved him from some conspicuous failures in 
 pictures of this kind. Had he done his own sums at 
 school, and proceeded to the scientific study of geo- 
 metry and perspective, his lectures as Professor of
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 43 
 
 Perspective at the Royal Academy might have been 
 more coherent and more scientific ; but would there 
 have been in them so much to see, as one of his 
 colleagues, who happened to be deaf, said of them ? 
 It may be mentioned here that, lacking any exact 
 knowledge of his own language, he tried, and failed, to 
 learn Greek. He clearly read sufficient about classical 
 mythology, chiefly in Ovid and sufficient history 
 and poetry, for his imagination to be kindled, for him 
 to have a vision of the coming and going of the 
 generations of mankind, in the light of which, as well 
 as in that of the sun, he painted his pictures. His 
 attempts to write poetry may or may not mean that 
 more study of language in early years would have led 
 to his doing less of what he could do supremely well 
 in order to do more of what he could only have 
 done less well than many who though they have 
 striven earnestly have yet no name among the poets. 
 It is all mere matter for conjecture ; and there we 
 must leave it. That he had little Latin and less 
 Greek did not lessen Shakespeare's insight into human 
 nature and power to give it supreme dramatic expression ; 
 and Turner had far less, and needed less, of the 
 learning that can be got from books, to take him to 
 the very highest achievement in his own art. 
 
 Let us turn now to his early training in that art,
 
 44 TURNER 
 
 and consider it, not merely in the way of record, but 
 in relation to the life-work for which it prepared the 
 way. In doing this we shall find it useful to begin with 
 a reference to a famous passage in ' Modern Painters.' 
 
 This passage is the one in which Ruskin gives 
 advice to young artists, advice that Holman Hunt 
 found to correspond closely with the theory he was 
 working out of the relation of art to nature, and that 
 Hamerton tells us he followed for a time, and then 
 abandoned, because he found it to be wholly mistaken. 
 ' From young artists,' says the young Ruskin, 'nothing 
 ought to be tolerated but simple bonafide imitation of 
 nature.' They are not to ape the execution of masters; 
 they are not to compose, not to seek after the Beautiful 
 or the Sublime. ' They should keep to quiet colours, 
 greys and browns ; and, making the early works of 
 Turner their example, as his latest are to be their 
 objects of emulation, should go to Nature in all 
 singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously 
 and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how 
 to penetrate her meaning, and remember her in- 
 struction ; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and 
 scorning nothing ; believing all things to be right and 
 good, and rejoicing always in the truth.' 
 
 One would naturally conclude from this that Turner 
 began with bona fide imitation of nature. The fact is
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 45 
 
 that, alike in boyhood, youth and early manhood, he 
 did not do this, that he was constantly copying and 
 imitating the works of older artists ; and that when 
 he worked from nature, he selected, rejected and com- 
 posed. His progress was not from nature to art ; there 
 was, in fact, more truth to nature, even if also more 
 art, in his later than in his early work. Art mingled 
 with nature in his work from the very first ; and 
 nature was always expressed in terms of art. 
 
 The record of his early work substantiates what has 
 just been said. It might seem idle to take into account 
 what he did between the ages of nine and fourteen ; 
 but he had only reached the latter age when he was 
 sufficiently advanced to become a student in the Royal 
 Academy. At and soon after the earlier age he was 
 copying and colouring prints of old buildings, an 
 anticipation of some of the most important of his after 
 work, and he also sketched by the river-side and in the 
 country. When eleven or twelve years old, he had 
 lessons from a Soho drawing-master, with whom 
 flowers were a specialty. The brief spell of schooling 
 at Margate, already mentioned, was followed by lessons 
 in perspective. These would help to qualify him to 
 execute drawings for an architect, Mr. Hardwick, 
 into whose employ he entered in 1789, the year that 
 he entered the Academy Schools. The story of his
 
 46 TURNER 
 
 putting in the reflected light in the windows of a 
 building in an architectural drawing he was colouring, 
 and of his refusal to alter the colouring to the stereo- 
 typed monotonous grey leading to a breach between one 
 employer, Mr. Dobson, an architect, and himself, 
 suggests that he had already become keenly observant, 
 and was not likely for long passively to accept the 
 conventions of other artists. 
 
 He very early began to make money by his art. 
 His father, if he had the keen business instinct that is 
 attributed to him, would see that this consideration was 
 not overlooked. The boy's drawings were exhibited 
 for sale in the paternal shop-window ; and here again 
 the child was father to the man, for Turner's later 
 business dealings were keen to something more than 
 a fault. Colouring prints for John Raphael Smith, 
 engraver, miniature painter and printseller, and wash- 
 ing in backgrounds for Mr. Porden, another architect 
 who employed him, were also occupations of this 
 period. When someone at a later date spoke of the 
 drudgery he had thus gone through, he replied that he 
 could not have had better practice. 
 
 Of the greatest importance for Turner's art were the 
 evenings spent at the house of Dr. Monro, physician 
 to the Bridewell and Bethlehem Hospitals, whose 
 town-house was in the Adelphi. Really, a better
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 47 
 
 place than Maiden Lane for Turner's early home could 
 hardly have been deliberately chosen for him. Two 
 or three minutes' walk down to and across the Strand 
 towards the much-loved river would bring him to the 
 doctor's house, where that enthusiastic patron of art 
 was wont to gather young painters of an evening and 
 give them half-a-crown and a supper to make copies 
 of water-colour drawings for him. Sketches made 
 near the doctor's country-house at Bushey obtained 
 a like reward ; and, in making the sketches in the 
 country, Turner looked at nature in the light of the 
 drawings by Sandby, Cozens and others, that he copied 
 at the town-house. Hence, when Redgrave tells us 
 that Turner began his art by sketching from nature, we 
 must not think of him as going to nature in the way 
 in which Holman Hunt did in his youth, laboriously 
 to set down, with the minimum of composition, exactly 
 what he saw, but as reshaping nature to make it fit in 
 with certain well-established conventions of art, deter- 
 mined in part by a very limited knowledge of the 
 capabilities of the materials used by the artist. 
 
 As an example of his work at this time we may 
 take the first water-colour drawing, a view of the 
 archiepiscopal palace at Lambeth, which he exhibited 
 at the Royal Academy, in 1790, when he was fifteen 
 years old. It is very clever for a boy of that age. It
 
 48 TURNER 
 
 proves the truth of what he himself said, that what 
 others thought drudgery was indeed the best of practice 
 for him, for there is perfect sureness in the use 
 of the materials within the conventional limits then 
 inevitable. Yet there is nothing but convention. The 
 sky, the tree-drawing, the colour, the light and shade, 
 the composition, are not learned from nature, but from 
 art as practised by his seniors. In due time Turner 
 was to develop the art of water-colour drawing until it 
 became something undreamed of by the teachers of his 
 youth ; he was to establish his own conventions ; he 
 was to fill his mind with an inexhaustible store 
 of closely observed, natural facts, and to bring this 
 store into the service of his art ; but art and nature 
 were never to change the relative places they held 
 in his early work. The difference was to be that 
 an imperfect language quickly acquired by a brilliantly 
 gifted boy was to become a medium of self-expression 
 such as art had not previously known. 
 
 Among the young painters whom Turner met at 
 Dr. Monro's house Francia, Varley, Edridge, John 
 Linnell and others being also of the number was 
 Thomas Girtin, whose brief career has great artistic 
 and not a little pathetic interest. There is no reason 
 to think that Girtin could ever have been the rival 
 of Turner ; but the saying of the latter, already
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 49 
 
 quoted, that he would have starved had Girtin lived, 
 was only a well-deserved tribute over-generously ex- 
 pressed. Girtin had more than talent, he had genius ; 
 and his death in 1802, at the early age of twenty-seven, 
 leaving the field clear for Turner, who had learned not 
 a little from him, touches us the more by reason of the 
 great achievement of his friend. There was only 
 about two months between them in age, Girtin having 
 been born in February, 1775 ; and both were natives 
 of London, Girtin's father being a rope and cordage 
 manufacturer in Southwark. Girtin's first teacher was 
 an Aldersgate Street drawing-master named Fisher j 
 and he afterwards studied under Edward Dayes, a 
 water-colour painter and engraver, who appears to have 
 been jealous of his pupil's skill, and actually had him 
 imprisoned for refusing to serve out his indentures. 
 There certainly was room for jealousy, for Girtin sur- 
 passed all his predecessors in water-colour art, being 
 the first to abandon mere tinting for a fuller use 
 of colour. In this he was Turner's instructor. For 
 a time they ran an even race, the works of the one in 
 general features closely resembling those of the other. 
 Some say that by the time of Girtin's death Turner 
 had outdistanced him ; others that the race was still a 
 dead heat. At least there were signs of development 
 in Turner that were lacking in Girtin ; and we may 
 
 E
 
 50 TURNER 
 
 well attribute the difference to the robust constitution 
 of the former and the declining strength and failing 
 spirits of the latter under the insidious advance of pul- 
 monary disease. In what did the difference consist ? 
 The answer is clearly important to us, for it must show 
 the direction in which Turner was advancing. 
 
 The earlier English water-colour artists of the 
 eighteenth century, such men as Alexander Cozens, 
 Paul Sandby and J. R. Cozens, were draftsmen 
 rather than painters. When they worked in pure 
 water-colour they also used tempera they outlined 
 their subjects, laid in the shadows with Indian ink or 
 some other neutral tint, and then added colour in pale, 
 transparent washes. Their work had a modest aim ; 
 it was mainly mere illustration, intended to show the 
 look of places and buildings at home and abroad. 
 Imagination had little scope in what was expected of 
 the artist by his public, nor did the varying moods of 
 nature, her beauty or grandeur, her quietude or the 
 putting forth of her power in storm, enter into the 
 bargain. Places of antiquarian interest, ruined temples, 
 abbeys, cathedrals, castles ; the country-seats of the 
 English nobility and squirearchy ; picturesque views ; 
 such were the subjects in demand ; and the drawings 
 were often intended for reproduction in aquatint, and 
 as illustrations to such publications as Walker's
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 51 
 
 ' Itinerant ' and Byrne's ' Antiquities of Great 
 Britain,' the titles of which sufficiently indicate their 
 character. This was the art that Girtin and Turner 
 learned from their teachers ; such were the drawings 
 they copied for Dr. Monro; when they worked 
 direct from nature these were the methods they used. 
 Dayes, the teacher of Girtin, who has already been 
 mentioned, published 'Instructions for Drawing and 
 Colouring Landscapes,' in which he bids the student 
 to lay in the sky with Prussian blue and Indian ink, 
 the middle tints and shadows of the 'terrestrial part 
 of the drawing in grey, and only when this has been 
 done is colour to be added. Even then, 'great 
 caution will be required not to disturb the shadows 
 with colour, otherwise the harmony of the whole will 
 be destroyed, or at any rate, not to do more than 
 gently to colour the reflections.' Girtin and Turner, the 
 former leading the way, practically revolutionised the 
 art by at once painting the middle tints and shadows 
 in colour, instead of in the neutral tint, which was a 
 pure convention, for when objects in nature are in 
 shade or shadow their colour is only a variation of 
 that which they reflect in pure sunlight, with a 
 tendency, as recent observation has shown, to appear 
 to the human eye somewhat purple in hue in contrast 
 with the colour of highly illumined objects.
 
 52 TURNER 
 
 In this way, then, Girtin and Turner worked in 
 water-colour. But, as time went on, while Girtin's 
 colouring remained broad and sober, and while he 
 seemed to take the greatest pleasure in effects of 
 gloom and grandeur, Turner began to show that 
 strong feeling for light and colour which was to 
 become one of the most remarkable features of his 
 art, nay, in his interpretation of nature, its very 
 essence, the master-light of all his seeing. Thus, 
 while his genius was expanding, that of Girtin 
 seemed to be reaching its limit. It may be, as 
 already suggested, that the ebbing away of Girtin's 
 life sufficiently accounts for this. However this may 
 be, as Redgrave says of him, 'he had but one 
 manner, and that he had nearly perfected when he 
 died.' His companion, stronger, and always more 
 strenuous, lived on to do things that none had done 
 before him, and that no successor has, in the same 
 kind, even nearly approached. 
 
 This comparison between Turner and Girtin has 
 taken us to the year 1802, but there are details of 
 Turner's life and progress before this time that must 
 not be overlooked. We have seen him exhibiting a 
 drawing at the Royal Academy in 1 790, when only 
 fifteen years old. It should be noted here that he 
 began as a painter in water-colour only ; oil painting
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 53 
 
 was to come later, his first work in this medium not 
 being exhibited until 1 797. 
 
 About 1/93 he made the first of his many sketch- 
 ing tours. He would be accurately described as a 
 supertramp. He was a hard-working one. When, 
 like the common or highway tramp, he returned to his 
 workhouse, it was to work, not at mechanical tasks, 
 but at that which was the delight of his life : con- 
 verting into works of art what he had seen and 
 noted during his tramping. He preferred to be alone 
 on these expeditions. From early days he was little 
 if anything less than secretive in his life and work ; 
 and when the time came for him to die, he hid him- 
 self from his friends. The barest necessaries, tied in a 
 bundle, were his impedimenta ; his sketching materials 
 would not suffice the most bungling of amateurs for 
 doing nothing worth looking at. He" took the coach, 
 or rode a horse, or walked, as best served his purpose. 
 The simplest accommodation satisfied him. He had 
 learned to rough it at home, where his bedroom was 
 his studio, jealously forbidden to all would-be visitors. 
 We shall find him later having himself lashed to a 
 mast in order that he may watch the storm that is 
 threatening him with death. This makes it but a 
 simple thing that when in Devonshire with Mr. Cyrus 
 Redding and others, he should prefer to spend the
 
 54 TURNER 
 
 night in a country inn rather than seek more comfort- 
 able quarters in Tavistock. Bread and cheese and 
 beer served him for dinner and supper in one, says 
 Mr. Redding, who stayed with him at the inn, and 
 secured for himself the luxury of bacon and eggs. 
 They talked till midnight, by the light of an 
 ' attenuated ' candle. Then Turner went to sleep 
 with his head on the table, while his companion 
 stretched himself on a line of chairs. As soon as 
 the sun was up they were out exploring the neigh- 
 bourhood ; and it was then that Turner made a sketch 
 for one of his finest early oil paintings, Crossing the 
 Broo^. Many are the stories told of his persistence 
 in work, in season and out of season ; such as that 
 once, when a diligence in which he was travelling 
 stopped, he began to make a sketch from the window, 
 and stormed at the conductor because the vehicle 
 started again before the sketch was finished. We can 
 well believe in the literal accuracy of the story that 
 when a salute was fired from a battery immediately 
 beneath which he was sketching, the line he was draw- 
 ing at the moment pursued exactly its intended way ! 
 
 There is much in Turner's work that will be most 
 keenly enjoyed by the sketching tramp. Such an one, 
 however humble, will feel again and again as he looks 
 at Turner's works that, despite the vast disparity
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 55 
 
 between them, the great artist and he are brothers in 
 enjoyment. The daft organ-blower who threatened to 
 blow his favourite tune if the musician would not play 
 it had the soul of an artist. Turner tramped in 
 England, Wales and Scotland, in France, Switzer- 
 land and Italy, and fully to enjoy his work one must 
 tramp also and, it should be said also, fully to enjoy 
 tramping, to get from it all that can be got, one should 
 study Turner. 
 
 From what has been said on earlier pages it will be 
 gathered that the tramp will learn from Turner to 
 cultivate a wide catholicity of interest. We shall see 
 in a later chapter it has been hinted at already how 
 keenly Turner was interested in what he saw his 
 fellow-human manikins doing under the sun. Such 
 interest comes naturally to any order of tramp. He 
 has no need to learn it. But from Turner we can 
 learn to see it in relation to the beauty and splendour 
 of nature, as material for great epic art. 
 
 There are landscape painters who think that they 
 can best interpret nature by minimising or excluding all 
 human interest. But solitude is not solitude if there V 
 be no one all alone. Robinson Crusoe's island was 
 fully peopled until he was cast upon it. That there is 
 
 Water, water every where 
 Nor any drop to drink
 
 56 TURNER 
 
 is without meaning for an ocean that no mariner ever 
 crosses. Not that we always need figures or signs of 
 human life in pictures, which sometimes may be meant 
 to impress upon us the vast periods of geologic time. 
 Turner puts no figure when he shows us the waves 
 dashing against the basaltic columns of Fingal's Cave ; 
 yet surely the sense of the stupendous forces of nature 
 is enormously increased in his drawing of Loch 
 Coruisk by the tiny figures perched, insecurely as it 
 seems, on the rock immediately below the spectator. 
 
 When he was in the places where man lives and 
 works, Turner noted, and put in his pictures of them, 
 just such incidents as the passing tramp would note : 
 wayside happenings, other travellers, the carrier's 
 waggon, the stage-coach, droves of cattle, market- 
 people entering or leaving a town, idlers on the bridge 
 we shall say more of this hereafter ; sufficient at the 
 moment to note that Turner was a genuine and there- ' 
 fore a happy tramp. 
 
 Then, also, he shows himself a tramp in his treat- 
 ment of landscape, and this not merely in that he was 
 fond of the prospects that open out from a turn in the 
 road or the brow of a hill, but also in that, because he 
 merely made pencil notes as he went along, generally 
 adding afterwards the colour in even his sketches, he 
 was free to observe and store his mind with an endless
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 57 
 
 multiplicity of varying atmospheric effects and of 
 details of landscape. He saw everything, and nothing 
 came amiss to him. His tramps were really collecting 
 expeditions as much as those of the botanist and the 
 geologist ; and as they, in their inn at night, or when 
 they return home, arrange their specimens scientifically, 
 so he arranged his specimens the word is a hateful 
 one, but how avoid it here ? artistically. This 
 accounts for the immense range of Turner's records 
 that makes Ruskin's comparison of him to Shakespeare 
 and Bacon not only a possible but a justifiable one. 
 Only a sketching tramp could have done all in this 
 way that Turner did. The Pre-Raphaelites could 
 not do it, nor can the pleln air painters. The late 
 Walter Severn told the present writer it was at 
 Coniston, on the day of Ruskin's funeral that 
 Ruskin was once watching him paint a landscape, 
 and said to him, ' Severn, you try to do too much ; 
 you cannot paint rapidly moving clouds. I never 
 paint anything that is moving. I am always nervous 
 when I am painting anything that can move, lest it 
 should move on ! ' Happily Turner had a wonderful 
 visual memory. 
 
 Turner, then, to continue our biographical narrative, 
 began his tramping about 1793, aged, therefore, let 
 us remember, about eighteen. He set out to make
 
 58 TURNER 
 
 drawings for Walker's 'Copper-plate Magazine.' They 
 were to be from nature ; and he was to receive two 
 guineas each for them, with a modest allowance for 
 travelling expenses. He journeyed into Kent, to 
 Wales, and, the next year, to Shropshire and Cheshire, 
 returning by way of the Midlands. Shortly after this 
 he was away again to make drawings for Harrison's 
 ' Pocket Magazine.' This was the kind of thing, as 
 we have already seen, that the water-colour draftsmen 
 were set to do, and Turner, to begin with, did it with 
 no very great departure from orthodox topography. 
 He had his orders, a certain pattern was required, and 
 he supplied it. But he was both eager and quick to 
 learn, and thus early he had assimilated much of the 
 best in the art of his teachers, of the men whose 
 works he copied, and of those who were working 
 alongside him. These early drawings show surprising 
 skill in treatment and considerable range of effect. 
 His developing imagination is to be seen in some of 
 them, and was acknowledged in contemporary criti- 
 cism. He felt already that his art had a higher 
 mission than merely to give skilfully composed, 
 recognisable views of places, sufficient to satisfy 
 country squires and their dames and daughters, and 
 townsfolk who liked to be pleasantly reminded of the 
 country. Nature and life were beginning to speak to
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 59 
 
 him in deeper tones, and to say to him more intimate 
 things than most men could hear. 
 
 Thus early, also, we find a wide range of subject. 
 His training in architectural draftsmanship now stood 
 him in good stead, as it did also in later years. By 
 the year 1797, when he was twenty-two years old, he 
 had drawn many of the cathedrals, including Salisbury, 
 Canterbury, Rochester, Worcester, Ely, Lincoln, 
 Peterborough and York, the abbeys of Bath, Tintern, 
 Llanthony, Malvern and others, and many ruined 
 castles. The graceful forms and intricately beauti- 
 ful detail of Gothic architecture are sympathetically 
 rendered, and from the boyish experiment of light 
 reflected from windows he had passed to the subtle 
 play of light and shade that is part of the calculated 
 effect of architecture, and also goes far beyond calcula- 
 tion, enriching buildings, whether in ruin, or still 
 intact though weather-beaten, with endlessly changeful 
 beauty. Buildings, whether great cathedrals, abbeys and 
 castles, or the humbler churches, and the picturesque 
 houses of quiet old towns, count for much in Turner's 
 early, as in his later work. We shall see that 
 when, late on in life, he undertook to illustrate the 
 rivers of France, and only succeeded in illustrating two 
 of them, he rarely strayed away from the towns, or the 
 immediate neighbourhood of the towns, on their banks.
 
 60 TURNER 
 
 In these early days he also anticipated his later work, 
 in that if he drew a stream flowing through the 
 country, he almost invariably introduced a bridge. The 
 fascination of the Thames bridges he had known from 
 childhood seems always to have remained with him. 
 Ships and shipping, again, he was to paint early and 
 late, and the foundation of his accurate knowledge 
 of all kinds of craft, and of his ability to draw them, 
 was laid in these early years. 
 
 In 1 797, during a journey that extended to Cumber- 
 land, Northumberland and the South of Scotland, he 
 first found his way to scenery that ever afterwards 
 was to mean so much to him : the hill-country of 
 Yorkshire and Lancashire. Even now, when railways 
 have been carried along the dales, what a feeling of 
 remoteness there is in the upper reaches of the Ribble 
 and the Lune, of the Wharfe, the Swale and the Tees ! 
 What tiny objects are both the viaduct at Ribblehead 
 and the train that crosses it, as one looks down upon 
 them from the summit of Ingleborough ! Is it possible, 
 we ask ourselves, that there are human beings in what 
 looks less than even a toy ? Cosmo Monkhouse 
 rebukes Ruskin for saying of this first visit of Turner's 
 to the North, ' For the first time the silence of 
 Nature round him, her freedom sealed to him, her 
 glory opened to him. Peace at last ; no roll of cart-
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 61 
 
 wheel, nor mutter of sullen voices in the back shop ; 
 but curlew-cry in space of heaven, and welling of bell- 
 toned streamlet by its shadowy rock. Freedom at 
 last. Dead-wall, dark railing, fenced field, gated 
 garden, all passed away like the dream of a prisoner ; 
 and behold, far as foot or eye can race or range, 
 the moor and cloud. Loveliness at last. It is here 
 then, among these deserted vales ! Not among men. 
 Those pale, poverty-struck, or cruel faces ; that 
 multitudinous marred humanity are not the only 
 things that God has made. Here is something He 
 has made which no one has marred. Pride of purple 
 rocks, and river pools of blue, and tender wilderness 
 of glittering trees, and misty lights of evening on 
 immeasurable hills.' This is the pessimistic view of 
 human nature, and the optimistic view of nature other 
 than human in which Ruskin was brought up, and 
 which he attributes to Turner here, and as we shall 
 see later, elsewhere. There is no evidence that Turner 
 held it ; his work, indeed, with the unfailing interest 
 it shows in human life, as already mentioned here, 
 gives abundant evidence to the contrary. And Mr. 
 Monkhouse asks quite rightly, ' Can his experience 
 of mankind, of Dr. Monro, of Girtin, of Mr. Hard- 
 wick, of Sir Joshua Reynolds, of Mr. Henderson, 
 have left upon him such an impression of the failure
 
 62 TURNER 
 
 of God's handiwork in making men, that a mountain 
 seems to him in comparison as a revelation of un- 
 expected success ? ' Turner showed ,no desire to live 
 apart from 'that multitudinous marred humanity,' 
 indeed, as Hamerton points out, he preferred to make 
 his home where it was most multitudinous. 
 
 Yet, after all, the impression produced upon Turner 
 by the Yorkshire Dales and the Cumberland Fells 
 would surely be very much what Ruskin's words 
 suggest. Though man be not marred, he is a long 
 way from perfection, and though nature may not be 
 quiet to other ears than ours and not always to ours 
 and though she may be red in tooth and claw with 
 ravine, yet, generally, unless we examine her closely, 
 she is quiet and innocent and beautiful to us. It may 
 be a fallacy to think her perfect because she lacks the 
 particular imperfections of human nature ; yet escape 
 from those imperfections, so far as we can escape from 
 them without escaping from ourselves, does soothe 
 and strengthen us ; so that even though there may be 
 fallacy in the process, nature, in the phrase that 
 Matthew Arnold applied to Wordsworth's poetry, 
 has for us a healing power ; and nowhere more so, 
 surely, than on those Northern moorlands, whose vast 
 spaciousness, which seems to mingle with the sky 
 above them, uplifts us, without ever threatening or
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 63 
 
 oppressing us, as so often does the awful, impending 
 majesty of the precipitously towering mountains up 
 which man presses only at the peril of his life. 
 
 Both the writers just referred to are agreed as to 
 the influence of these scenes on Turner's art. Says 
 Monkhouse, 'The pictures of 1797-99 confirmed 
 beyond any doubt that a great artist had arisen, who 
 was not only a painter but a poet a poet, not so 
 much of the pathos of ruin, though so many of his 
 pictures had ruins in them, nor of the chequered fate 
 of mankind, though there is something of the 
 " Fallacies of Hope " indicated in the quotations to 
 his pictures as of the mystery and beauty of light, 
 of the power of nature, her inexhaustible variety and 
 energy, her infinite complexity and fulness. . . . 
 Altogether it is difficult to over-estimate the in- 
 fluence of the first journey to the North upon 
 Turner's mind and art, although he had almost 
 perfected his skill and shown unmistakable signs of 
 genius before.' Add to the quotation from Ruskin 
 given above the following lines and we have very 
 much what Monkhouse says : * I am in the habit of 
 looking to the Yorkshire drawings as indicating one 
 of the culminating points of Turner's career. In 
 these he attained the highest degree of what he had 
 up to that time attempted, namely finish and quantity
 
 64 TURNER 
 
 of form united with expression of atmosphere, and 
 light without colour.' 
 
 The last words in this quotation from Ruskin are 
 significant. Beginning as a draftsman, for whom 
 painting meant only tinting drawings, Turner had now 
 reached a middle point between the art that he had 
 merely adopted from his predecessors and his later 
 dreams of glowing light and colour. His power of 
 design, which is really an instinct for visible music, 
 becomes increasingly manifest ; into the design he was 
 able to bring a surprising wealth of the detail for 
 which he had such keen sight, and which he greatly 
 enjoyed; both the design and the detail received a 
 deeper significance from all-pervading effects of light, 
 and the colour, though far from what it was yet to 
 become, was both warmer and wider in range. 
 
 Ruskin speaks of the Yorkshire Dales as deserted. 
 They were not deserted, but merely sparsely populated ; 
 and doubtless Turner found their humbler inhabitants 
 by no means to be avoided as only so much marred 
 humanity. Certainly among the wealthy and cultured 
 people of the Yorkshire and Lancashire hill-country 
 he found some of his best friends, men who not only 
 recognised his genius, but gave him the help that freed 
 him from material cares, and made it possible for him 
 to go where he would to find in nature inspiration for
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 65 
 
 his art. From first to last Turner was singularly happy 
 in his friends. He had nothing to complain of in them ; 
 though, as one of them whom he first met in these days, 
 Dr. Whitaker of Whalley, soon found out, he himself 
 could inflict upon others the irritability of genius. 
 
 Dr. Whitaker, who was the Vicar of Whalley, in 
 Ribblesdale, was a man of means, and also a learned 
 antiquary, and was preparing at this time a history of 
 his parish, for which he wished to have illustrations. 
 It is probable that Turner was recommended to him 
 for this purpose by a Mr. Edwards, a publisher and 
 bookseller at Halifax. Anyhow, they met, and 
 Turner made three drawings, Whalley Abbey ^ Clltheroe 
 and Broivsholme, for the Doctor's book. After this 
 the Doctor published a ' History of Craven,' for which 
 Turner did an architectural drawing ; and these com- 
 missions were followed, at a later date, by another for 
 drawings to illustrate the same writer's ' History of 
 Richmondshire,' which was the occasion of Turner's 
 doing some of his very finest work. Hamerton, who 
 was a native of the Lancashire hill-country near 
 Burnley, with which the present writer happens to be 
 very familiar, writes with particular enthusiasm about 
 this part of Turner's life, which makes it permissible 
 and interesting to quote the following passage from his 
 ' Life of Turner.' The old mansion of the Whitakers,
 
 66 TURNER 
 
 the Holme (familiar to the present biographer from his 
 infancy) is situated in one of the most beautiful scenes 
 of Lancashire which still remain unspoiled by the 
 manufacturers. Near Burnley the vale is broad, and 
 is occupied by the noble demesne of Towneley, which 
 sweeps up the great waves of land before and behind 
 the Hall, and fills all the hollow between them with 
 rich meadows and a park full of sylvan beauty ; but as 
 you go from ToAvneley to the Holme the valley 
 rapidly narrows, till at last it becomes a gorge or 
 defile, with bold steep slopes which end in rugged 
 cliffs of perpendicular rock, as high as the sea-cliffs on 
 the wild Yorkshire coast. On each side of the glen 
 there are gullies or ravines formed by the watercourses, 
 and at the foot of one of these ravines stands the old 
 house yet, much altered and enriched, but still preserving 
 its main features. It is just one of those regions which 
 Turner would have illustrated nobly in his maturity.' 
 
 Alas ! since Hamerton penned this description, 
 thirty years ago, Burnley has not only encroached 
 upon, but appropriated the Towneley demesne. The 
 park is giving place to brick houses ; the once noble 
 trees that surround the Hall are dying ; and it is little 
 more than a melancholy satisfaction that the Hall 
 once the home of the famous Towneley marbles is 
 now used as the Art Gallery of the Burnley Corpora-
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 67 
 
 tion ; and that the dwellers in the smoky manufactur- 
 ing town have the enjoyment of what is left of the 
 beauty of the grounds immediately around it. Sooner 
 or later, one fears, the Holme will also be enveloped 
 and then disappear. 
 
 In 1799, Turner, then twenty-four years old, was 
 elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. Many 
 an artist who has been elected first to associateship and 
 then to membership of the Academy has ceased to be 
 even a name except to laborious students of records, 
 talent, by no means always great, having been quite 
 sufficient qualification for academic recognition. It does 
 not follow, therefore, that because Turner received these 
 honours his genius was fully recognised by his contem- 
 poraries. He might still have been the man born out 
 of due time that Ruskin made him out to be. But, 
 certainly, election to associateship at the age of twenty- 
 four, and election that must have been based chiefly 
 upon his work in water-colour, shows the Academi- 
 cians to have realised that this ex-student in their 
 schools had proved himself so early to be at least a 
 painter of very considerable talent. It may be assumed 
 that they had observed the remarkable advance in his 
 water-colour drawings during the previous two or 
 three years, to which reference has just been made. 
 One of these drawings was of Norham Castle, a subject
 
 68 TURNER 
 
 to which he returned again and again. Many years 
 after this time, when he was in Scotland making 
 drawings to illustrate Sir Walter Scott's poems, he 
 and the publisher Cadell, who had commissioned the 
 drawings, were walking along Tweedside, and Turner 
 raised his hat to Norham Castle. Cadell asked him 
 why he did so, and his reply was a reference to the 
 early drawing of it : ' That picture made me.' 
 
 Turner's diploma picture, Dolbadern Castle, one 
 result of a visit to Wales in the previous year, was an 
 oil painting of the Wilson type. . Hitherto, we have 
 seen Turner only as a painter in water-colour ; and 
 have found him, after his prentice days, during which 
 he imitated the art of other men, attaining the freedom 
 of self-expression. His work in oil followed the 
 same course, only he was much longer in coming to 
 his own in it than in water-colour. He began by 
 seeking to beat earlier landscape painters, both of his 
 own and of other countries ; and then there came the 
 confident sense of triumph, and he went on in his own 
 way ; although, as is shown by his leaving to the 
 nation by his will two of his own oil paintings and two 
 by Claude, on condition that they should hang side by 
 side, he never forgot that he had triumphed. 
 
 Is this the right way to speak about these things ? 
 I have been trying to show Turner's point of view. It
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 69 
 
 cannot be said to have been wholly a generous one. 
 The men with whom he entered into rivalry might 
 very well have done greater things, due regard being 
 had to their time and opportunity, than did Turner, 
 and yet he might have excelled them. This is not the 
 place to attempt an estimate of the relative contributions 
 to art of such men as the Poussins, Claude, the Dutch 
 landscape painters, Wilson and Turner ; but the 
 generations of artists ought not to be regarded as standing 
 one on the shoulders of another so that the topmost of 
 them may finally shout, and wave his hand in triumph. 
 There was something too much of this in Turner's 
 attitude towards his predecessors, and in Ruskin's 
 comparative estimates of them all. ^Turner started 
 from a vantage-ground his predecessors had won for 
 him. He would have been less than they if in some 
 ways he had not done greater things than they did. 
 
 Conversely, it may be said that he might in some 
 ways do less things than they and yet be greater. 
 There is a serene mastership in the works of many of 
 the earlier painters, a doing with perfection of accom- 
 plishment that which they set themselves to do, that is 
 often lacking in Turner's work. We are reminded of 
 what Browning makes Andrea del Sarto say 
 
 Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
 Or what's a heaven for ?
 
 70 TURNER 
 
 What Ruskin chiefly insists upon to prove Turner's 
 superiority over all his predecessors is the greater truth- 
 fulness to nature of his works, his more imaginative 
 interpretation of her beauty and power. He only 
 turned to oil painting when he had learned to interpret 
 nature for himself in water-colour. Moonlight, a study 
 at Millbank, which was in, the Academy Exhibition of 
 1 797, appears to have been his first exhibited picture 
 in oil. From the first there is evident the endeavour 
 more fully to interpret nature than any of his predecessors 
 had done ; and the endeavour, the struggle we might 
 well call it, was continued to the end. Turner's reach 
 ever exceeded his grasp. He was never long content 
 with any formula. He did not repeat, over and over 
 again, one particular thing that the critics and the 
 public had acclaimed, and continued to acclaim. It 
 was against the onslaught of the critics on his latest 
 pictures that Ruskin came out to defend him. What 
 is it that makes Turner's pictures, as we see them at 
 the National Gallery of British Art, so widely different 
 from all earlier landscapes, to whatever school they may 
 belong ? It is that whereas all other landscape painters 
 had been content to take just so much from nature as 
 was well within the compass of their art, Turner 
 flung himself upon nature with the splendid daring of 
 the patriarch wrestling with the messenger of God,
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 71 
 
 resolute not to let her go until she yielded up to him 
 her every secret. And if, as must be, not even a 
 Turner could win a final victory, so that nothing should 
 be left for others to achieve, how splendidly he wrestled, 
 and how many a fall he won ! 
 
 The oil paintings in the Turner rooms are hung 
 approximately in order of date. The difference be- 
 tween the early ones and the late ones is so great that 
 they might easily be taken for the work of two different 
 artists. The early ones are heavy and sombre-looking ; 
 the late ones are brilliant in the extreme. There is 
 a middle period, a time of transition, between the two. 
 Confining ourselves at the moment to the early ones, 
 among which may be mentioned, Jason in Search of the 
 Golden Fleece, Calais Pier, The Shipwreck, The Goddess 
 of 'Discord in the Garden of the Hesperides, The Death of 
 Nelson, The Sun rising in a Mist, and Apollo killing the 
 Python, we note that, in them, Turner, having the 
 old masters in mind, painting in rivalry with them, and 
 not having yet begun, even in water-colour, to attempt 
 to rival the brilliant colour of nature, was content with 
 but little colour and with low, even sombre tones. 
 The pictures are impressive, but we do not think of 
 them as beautiful. 
 
 These early oil paintings were soundly painted, and 
 have stood the test of time much better than the later
 
 72 TURNER 
 
 ones, in which his endeavour to obtain the greatest 
 possible brilliance led him, as we shall see hereafter, 
 to make many rash, even fatal, experiments. Redgrave 
 instances the early works to refute Ruskin's saying 
 that ' The Academy taught Turner nothing, not even 
 the one thing it might have done the mechanical 
 process of safe oil painting, sure vehicles, and permanent 
 colours.' It is certainly hard on the Academy to blame 
 it because Turner departed from a safe, academic 
 technique in trying new ventures. One might as well 
 blame the cartographers, if travellers lose their way in 
 hitherto unexplored countries. 
 
 In 1 80 1, Turner made his first extensive tour in 
 Scotland, going to Edinburgh, and then by way of 
 Loch Lomond into the Western Highlands. The 
 following year is memorable for several reasons. It 
 was the year, as we have already seen, of Girtin's 
 death. It was the year of Turner's election to full 
 membership of the Royal Academy. In it, also, he 
 made his first Continental journey. By his sketch- 
 books and his completed and exhibited works, we can 
 follow him to Calais, where, clearly, he was as keenly 
 interested in his new experiences as any schoolboy 
 would have been : witness the varied incidents of the 
 people and the shipping in Calais Pier, with French 
 Poissards preparing for Sea an English Packet arriving,
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 73 
 
 one of the finest of his early oil paintings. It was 
 exhibited in the following year. From Calais he 
 travelled into the south-east of F ranee, and made 
 studies for the beautiful Festival upon the Opening of the 
 Mintage at Macon, Bonneville and Grenoble, Geneva, 
 Chamounix, the Val d'Aosta, the Grand St. Bernard, 
 the St. Gothard Pass, the Bernese Oberland, Lucerne 
 and the Rhine are some of the principal items of this 
 tour. He had now only to see Italy but how much 
 that means ! and he would have seen all the various 
 types of scenery, and of cities and people, from which 
 the material for his pictures was to be taken, except, 
 of course, those for which his sources were other 
 men's records. 
 
 Become full R. A., Turner evidently felt that he was 
 now a person of some importance. He had already 
 found the Maiden Lane bedroom an inadequate studio, 
 and had taken one in Hand's Court, quite close by. 
 Another change had followed his associateship. He 
 went to the house No. 75 Morton Street, Portland 
 Road. Full membership demanded still greater things. 
 He took a house for himself, No. 64 Harley Street ; 
 and his father, now an elderly man, gave up the Maiden 
 Lane business and went to live with his son. Removal 
 to a fashionable quarter did not mean, however, that 
 Turner purposed to enter into the world of fashion.
 
 74 TURNER 
 
 Nothing could be farther from our tramp's intentions. 
 He entered into no social relations even with those 
 who were now his fellow-Academicians. They had 
 elected him, so he put the matter, because he had done 
 good work as a painter ; and he intended to go on 
 doing good work, and still better work. He did not 
 even trouble to thank them for doing the thing they so 
 obviously ought to do. He said to his father's old 
 customer Stothard, ' If they had not been satisfied 
 with my pictures they would not have elected me. 
 Why then should I thank them ? Why thank a man 
 for performing a simple duty ? ' Clearly Turner was 
 not equipped for the social amenities, for the ordinary 
 politenesses, that residence in Harley Street would 
 usually imply ; nor did his residence there in any degree 
 strengthen his equipment. He felt that an R.A. 
 must have his headquarters in a fashionable street ; but 
 he was quite contented with this one outward, visible 
 sign of his greatness, and refused to trouble himself 
 about any of the others, to the advantage, in most 
 respects, we may say, of his art. It was all-essential 
 that he should not cease to be a tramp. 
 
 During the next few years he did not wander very 
 far afield. He was now at work upon the large, early N 
 oil paintings already mentioned. Between 1803 and 
 1807, his sketch-books show him to have been to
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 75 
 
 Chester, in Sussex, and on the Thames, from Reading 
 down to the sea. We may mention here that the 
 exhaustive catalogue of the drawings in the Turner 
 bequest, prepared by direction of the Trustees of the 
 National Gallery, and going through the press while 
 these pages are being written, will enable the Turner 
 student closely to follow his wanderings from year to 
 year. All that is needful, and indeed possible, in 
 such a book as this, is to give a general account of 
 those wanderings by means of which Turner was ever 
 increasing his stores of knowledge, and of memoranda 
 which he could afterwards work up into paintings and 
 water-colour drawings. 
 
 In the year 1808 he was appointed Professor of 
 Perspective to the Royal Academy, and greatly amused 
 his colleagues by adding for a time P.P. as well as 
 R.A. to the signature on his paintings. His early 
 draftsman's work in architects' offices was now stand- 
 ing him in good stead. 
 
 In the year previous to this appointment he had 
 commenced an undertaking that was destined to have 
 a very distinct place of its own in his life-work. 
 This was the series of pen and wash drawings in 
 brown, prepared for reproduction by the process of 
 mezzotint engraving, to which he gave the title Liber 
 Studiorum. His great French predecessor Claude
 
 76 TURNER 
 
 had made a practice of reproducing his pictures in 
 brown as he finished them. These drawings he kept 
 by him as memoranda of his work, and on them he 
 noted for whom the picture had been painted. By 
 this means he was able easily to detect fraudulent 
 imitations of his works. As these drawings accumu- 
 lated, they formed a portfolio or book, to which he 
 gave the title Libra <F Invenzioni or Libra di Verita. 
 The book passed through various hands into the 
 Chatsworth collection, and about the year 1774 the 
 year previous to that of Turner's birth it was lent 
 by the then Duke of Devonshire to Richard Earlom, 
 an engraver, who reproduced the drawings in brown, 
 by means of etching and mezzotint. These reproduc- 
 tions were published under the title Liber Veritatis. 
 
 This was the work with which Turner entered into 
 rivalry. It is obvious that the conditions of the 
 contest were utterly unfair to Claude. We have not 
 to take into account merely that Turner held the 
 advantage of a large unearned increment both in art 
 and in the study of nature. Claude's drawings were, 
 as we have just seen, mere memoranda of pictures ; 
 and he had been dead nearly a hundred years before 
 they passed into the hands of the engraver. Turner 
 made for his work special drawings into which he 
 threw all his strength ; and, beyond this, he himself
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 77 
 
 etched some of the plates made from the drawings, 
 selected his own mezzotint engravers, and super- 
 intended their work. Is it too much to say that he 
 chose his own ground for a contest in which a dead 
 man was represented by a self-elected substitute ? 
 
 It is impossible to clear Turner of the charge of 
 some lack of generosity, even of justice, in this rivalry 
 with Claude. At the same time it must be borne in 
 mind that Claude's merit was very much over-rated 
 by critics of Sir George Beaumont's type, whereby 
 not only was there a risk of artists going to him, and 
 not to nature, for inspiration, but the work of living 
 artists, based upon a richer interpretation of nature 
 than was possible in Claude's day, was apt to be 
 depreciated. 
 
 It is significant also that the project of the Liber 
 did not wholly, or even, perhaps, mainly, originate 
 with Turner. It was discussed by him with a 
 brother-artist, William Frederick Wells, a member 
 of the Water Colour Society, whose daughter says 
 that Turner took up the scheme entirely on her father's 
 persuasion. It is possible therefore to emphasise, not 
 the rivalry with Claude, but the over-estimation of 
 him by the critics, which was felt by other artists 
 than Turner to be an injustice to themselves. 
 
 Mr. Wells' daughter also states that her father
 
 78 TURNER 
 
 suggested the six divisions of subjects that Turner 
 adopted for the work : Historical, Pastoral, Elegant 
 Pastoral, Mountain, Marine and Architectural. 
 Whether this be so or not, it is clear that Turner 
 knew his work to include something more than land- 
 scape, in the usual acceptation of the word. It is 
 also clear that he knew himself to be issuing to the 
 public a definite apologia for the art of his own day, 
 and his own art in particular. 
 
 The way in which the business part of the scheme 
 was carried out is not very pleasant reading. Turner 
 had sundry quarrels with his engravers, in which he 
 appears often to have been in fault. He was his own 
 publisher, and he would have done better to put the 
 job out, as the working-man said to the parliamentary 
 candidate who introduced himself as a self-made man. 
 The first number of the work appeared in 1 807. Others 
 were issued at irregular intervals until 1819, seventy- 
 one plates being published in all ; and then the 
 publication came to an end for lack of the public 
 support that Turner had not taken the best means to 
 obtain had rather acted so as certainly not extensively 
 to obtain. There were to have been one hundred 
 plates in the complete work ; and most of the re- 
 mainder, after those actually published, had been 
 carried far towards completion. Probably lack of
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 79 
 
 appreciation was not the only reason for the stoppage 
 of the work. On this point Mr. Frank Short says, 
 4 It must be borne in mind that during the twelve 
 years the Liber was being produced (1807-19) 
 Turner matured his art rapidly. At the time it was 
 begun he painted with a very limited range of colour, 
 and it is conceivable that at this stage of his career he 
 was more satisfied with "black and white" than later, 
 when he was beginning to feel his strength in powerful 
 colour. Black and white skilfully managed can be 
 made to suggest a good deal of colour, but to a strong 
 colourist it must always be a very restricted mode 
 of expression. So I think it is fair to suppose 
 that in straining its resources very hard Turner lost 
 patience, and thought how much better he could 
 employ his time with painting ; and this, I think, 
 would be a very strong reason for not carrying out his 
 entire plan.' Another reason that has been suggested 
 is that by 1819 Turner found a much readier sale for 
 his pictures than he had done in 1807 ; so that there 
 was no pecuniary inducement to complete the Liber. 
 
 He spared no pains to secure the best results in the 
 engravings ; and, in the pursuit of excellence, of the 
 most subtle rendering of effects, the resources of the 
 art were, as Mr. Short says, strained to the utmost. 
 There are notes by Turner in the margin of some
 
 8o TURNER 
 
 of the engraver's proofs which show that he was not 
 satisfied until exactly the effect he wanted had been 
 obtained. We may quote one of them to show to what 
 minute details his care extended. It is on a proof 
 of The Little Devil's Bridge. ' A slight indication 
 of a ray of bursting light under the bridge would 
 improve that part, and a few sharp white touches upon 
 the leaves marked X, because they are now two black 
 spots without connection with the stems of the trees.' 
 Here is a sensibility almost fit to be compared with 
 that of the princess in the fairy tale, who could not 
 sleep because of the lump made by a pea placed under 
 seven feather beds. We have only to think of this 
 fine musical sense as coming into play instinctively in 
 the water-colour drawings to understand why they are 
 so delicately beautiful. 
 
 There is a solemn tone in the Liber plates, to which, 
 it may be said, the dark monochrome lent itself. Here 
 again a true artistic instinct asserts itself. Ruskin saw 
 in this solemnity evidence of Turner's pessimistic view 
 of human life and labour. ' Observe,' he says, in the 
 course of an often quoted passage, ' the two disordered 
 and poor farm-yards, cart and ploughshare, and harrow 
 rotting away ; note the pastoral by the brookside, with 
 its neglected stream, and haggard trees, and bridge 
 with the broken rail ; and decrepit children, fever-
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 81 
 
 struck, one sitting stupidly by the stagnant stream, the 
 other in rags and with an old man's hat on, and lame, 
 leaning on a stick. Then the Hedging and Ditching, 
 with its bleak sky and blighted trees, hacked and bitten, 
 and starved by the clay soil into something between trees 
 and fire- wood ; its meanly faced, sickly labourers, 
 pollard labourers, like the willow trunk they hew ; 
 and the slatternly peasant woman, with worn cloak and 
 battered bonnet an English dryad.' If this were 
 really what Turner recorded we might take the plates 
 to be a comment on the effect of Napoleonic wars on 
 the English peasantry. But Ruskin will not let us 
 off so easily as that. Because Turner painted the 
 mill, and not the convent, of the Grande Chartreuse, 
 it must be because he had ' no sympathy with the 
 hope, no mercy for the indolence of the monk.' 
 ' Such are the lessons of the Liber Studiorum,' we are 
 told. We want a footnote by the later Ruskin with- 
 drawing this pessimism. There is plenty of cheerful- 
 ness in the Liber. The fisherman near Blair Athol 
 looks quite sprightly ; the only melancholy in the 
 Sheepwashing is that of the washed sheep quite tem- 
 porary ; the bathers in the pool below the Falls 
 of Clyde may be set off against the child sitting by 
 the stagnant pool ; Mr. Stopford Brooke, who shares 
 to some extent Ruskin's view of the general melan- 
 G
 
 82 TURNER 
 
 choly of the Liber, saying that it is rare to find 
 Turner dwelling on the joy rather than the sorrow 
 of man, nevertheless admits that ' The Castle above the 
 Meadows is a pretty plate, gracious and cheerful, and the 
 herd-boy who pipes on the grass, so much for his own 
 pleasure and absorbed in his music, gives the key-note 
 to the warm and happy place, and tells us what Turner 
 felt.' May we recall, in order finally to reassure 
 ourselves, that the later Ruskin, the Ruskin of Fors 
 Clavigera, could say that there was more joy than 
 sorrow in the world if we knew where to look for it ? 
 Taken together, with the variety of subject sug- 
 gested by the six divisions already mentioned, the 
 Liber plates are a compendium of Turner's outlook 
 upon life and nature. It was more probably of this, 
 than of any idea of their being taken as a jeremiad, 
 that he was thinking when, on hearing of anyone's 
 trying to get one or other of the subjects as especially 
 beautiful, he said, ' What is the use of them but 
 together ? ' Certainly, with reference to the criticism 
 of life in them, we shall give the right answer to his 
 question by taking the gay along with the grave. To 
 some of the subjects we shall have to refer hereafter. 
 In this little book we cannot discuss the beauty and 
 the meaning of all the plates ; but we can say that the 
 Liber is worth study as a whole, for the sake of its art,
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 83 
 
 of its interpretation of nature, and, whether we may 
 think it has little or much to teach us, of the interest it 
 shows in the joys and sorrows of human life. 
 
 Returning to the years immediately following the 
 initiation of the Liber, we find Turner, in 1811, 
 going for the first time to Devon, where he made his 
 notes for the Ivy Bridge, and, as already mentioned, 
 for Crossing the Brook. Shortly afterwards he was 
 again in Derbyshire and the North, and, a little later, 
 in Devon again. About this time we also find 
 sketches in Wharfedale, mention of which suggests 
 a reference to his friendship with Mr. Walter Fawkes 
 of Farnley Hall. They appear to have become 
 acquainted through the medium of Dr. Whitaker. 
 
 All Turner enthusiasts must, sooner or later, find 
 their way to Farnley. One seems to understand 
 Turner better after a visit there. And assuredly the 
 best way to make the visit, the most Turnerian way, is 
 to tramp there over the moors, as the writer has done, 
 getting a simple meal in a hamlet, and then going 
 down through the trees to where the hall stands part 
 way up the hillside above the left bank of the Wharfe. 
 The drawing of Farnley and the moors beyond it, as 
 seen from the hillside above Otley on the other side of 
 the river, hurts the lover of Wharfedale just a little, 
 perhaps, because Turner, we hope only with the
 
 84 TURNER 
 
 aim of giving in a small drawing some sense of 
 the wide spaciousness of the scene, has made us think 
 of Switzerland as well as of Yorkshire. We do not 
 really want the fir-trees and the goats ; and there is 
 rather more exaggeration of height than is necessary 
 for a true impression. Apart from these things it is 
 Wharfedale that we see. 
 
 Turner was always happy at Farnley, where he was 
 a frequent visitor, for Mr. Fawkes understood him, 
 and let him have his own way. He was fond of 
 fishing, and the Wharfe gave him plenty of sport. 
 We have already seen how much he delighted in the 
 scenery of the Dales. On such good terms were he 
 and his host, that the latter could even venture to ask 
 to see him at work on a drawing a request that 
 perhaps not another who knew him would have ven- 
 tured to make. The drawing that was the outcome 
 of this request is one of the things that have made me 
 say one understands Turner better after going to Farn- 
 ley. I have sat in a room in a house in Paris, in 
 which were impressionist pictures of the room itself, 
 and have found a comparison of the pictures with the 
 room and its contents a useful study in the methods of 
 impressionism. But the drawing that Turner did for 
 Mr. Fawkes was not of anything immediately to be 
 seen at Farnley or in the neighbourhood. Its subject
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 85 
 
 was a first-rate man-of-war taking in stores ; and 
 Turner had no memoranda to guide him in making it. 
 In about two hours and a half, according to Mr. 
 Fawkes' account of what he saw, after numerous 
 washings in and washings out, after, indeed, total 
 immersion of the paper in water, and then sundry 
 scrapings, there came into view a subtle drawing of 
 the great hull and the lower part of the masts and 
 rigging of the warship, with lighters in attendance on 
 her, and crisp wavelets playing about her bow, other 
 vessels away in the distance, and the whole scene 
 bathed in shimmering light. After seeing this draw- 
 ing, in the place where it was made, so far away from 
 sea and ships, one understands better though it still 
 remains somewhat in the regions of faith when 
 looking at the numerous sketches and finished drawings 
 in colour, at the National Gallery and elsewhere, that 
 all Turner usually did on the spot was to make out- 
 lines and notes in pencil. 
 
 Dr. Whitaker and Mr. Fawkes were far from 
 being the only people from whom Turner obtained 
 commissions. The Marquis of Stafford, Sir John 
 Leicester, afterwards Lord de Tabley, the Earls of 
 Yarborough, Egremont, Essex and Lonsdale, and 
 Sir John Soane were among those who gave him 
 commissions or bought pictures from him. At a
 
 86 TURNER 
 
 later date he had a staunch friend in Mr. Munro of 
 Novar. Turner never lacked those very useful 
 friends, people who were ready to exchange their 
 money for the products of his art, from the days 
 when his earliest drawings were sold out of his 
 father's shop-window. The fact that he left 
 1 40,000 at his death is often quoted to refute 
 Ruskin's statement that his genius had not been 
 appreciated. Even those who value most Ruskin's 
 interpretation of Turner's art will admit that the 
 young ' Graduate of Oxford ' did not discover him. 
 
 We must pass lightly here over biographical details 
 that do not materially affect Turner's art. In 1812 
 he left Harley Street for a house in Queen Anne 
 Street, which continued to be his headquarters during 
 the rest of his life. In 1814 he built a villa at 
 Twickenham, to which he gave the significant name 
 Solus Lodge, afterwards changed to Sandycombe 
 Lodge. Perhaps the alteration was made because, 
 while at Twickenham, he became quite surprisingly 
 sociable, particularly with a vicar in the neighbourhood, 
 the Rev. Mr. Trimmer, whom he afterwards made one 
 of his executors. 
 
 Thornbury tells amusing stories of Turner's father at 
 this time : how he took shillings from visitors to the 
 studio, which he went to open every day, saving
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 87 
 
 the cost of conveyance between Twickenham and 
 town by walking or by getting free lifts on a market 
 gardener's cart. Father and son were always on good 
 terms. The old man used to prepare the painter's 
 canvases and varnish the finished pictures, which drew 
 from Turner the jocular saying that his father began 
 and completed his works. Their home-life was of the 
 simplest deal table, horn-handled knives, mugs, 
 figure in the accounts of it. Talent now, and perhaps 
 then, would scorn what was quite good enough for 
 genius. 
 
 The Napoleonic wars alone would prevent Turner 
 for several years from travelling on the Continent ; but 
 even had this obstacle not been in the way, he had 
 plenty of work to keep him fully occupied at home. 
 He had many drawings to make for the Liber and 
 other publications, and the engraving of them to 
 superintend. His work in water-colour was much 
 more extensive than that in oil ; though, between 181 1 
 and 1818, he produced a number of oil paintings, 
 including one or two of the very finest. To the first- 
 named year, in which we have seen that he painted Apollo 
 Killing the Python, belongs also the beautiful Mercury 
 and Herse. Themes so diverse as Snowstorm : Hanni- 
 bal and his Army Crossing the Alps, Cottage Destroyed by 
 an Avalanche, and Ivy Bridge, Devonshire, were treated
 
 88 TURNER 
 
 in the following year. To 1813 belong the sym- 
 pathetic, almost realistic pictures A Frosty ^Morning, 
 Sunrise and The Deluge. A Carthage picture, Dido 
 and &neas leaving Carthage^ and a classical composition 
 Apuleia in search of Apuleius, appeared in 1814. In 
 the following year came Crossing the Broo^ and Dido 
 building Carthage. The former has already been 
 incidentally mentioned. The morning after Turner and 
 his friend Cyrus Redding had slept in the inn, the 
 latter pointed out to Turner a view along the valley of 
 the Tamar as a good subject for a picture. A few 
 pencil notes served at the moment, and the picture 
 was painted afterwards in London. It is a beautiful, 
 if slightly idealised and conventional rendering of a 
 typical English scene ; and the gradations of tone by 
 means of which the landscape is made to fade away 
 into the far-off, hazy distance are marvellously subtle. 
 It is remarkable also for the stateliness of its design, 
 and its quietly harmonious colour. The Dido building 
 Carthage is hung beside a Claude, according to the 
 direction in Turner's will. It has a fine sky, full of 
 hazy light, and much classical architecture of a scenic 
 description. A companion picture, The Decline of 
 Carthage, painted in 1817, has also a glowing sky. 
 They both show that Turner's mastery of light was 
 increasing. But they are only melodrama. Ruskin
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 89 
 
 roundly condemned them as ' nonsense pictures,' and 
 said of the latter, ' It is, in fact, little more than an 
 accumulation of Academy students' outlines, coloured 
 brown.' Still, though these pictures be not the best 
 'Turner,' no one but Turner could have painted them. 
 
 Between 1 8 1 6 and 1 8 1 8, he was still working chiefly 
 at home ; and we find him in Sussex, Yorkshire and 
 southern Scotland. In 1817 he made a tour that in- 
 cluded Waterloo and the Rhine, one outcome of which 
 was that grandiose failure, The Field of Waterloo. We 
 have always reason to be thankful if Turner escapes from 
 a figure-subject without meeting disaster. Apollo and 
 the T*ython is an oasis in the wilderness. In 1819 he 
 found time for a journey to Italy, and, in his sketch-books 
 and drawings, we can follow him to Turin, the lakes of 
 Como, Lugano and Maggiore, and Venice, Ancona, 
 Rimini, Rome, Albano, Nemi, Tivoli, Naples, 
 Pompeii. On his return journey he passed through 
 Florence, and crossed the Alps by the Simplon Pass. 
 
 The date of this journey marks a critical point in 
 Turner's career : the abandonment of reserved colour 
 for colour continually increasing in brilliance. The 
 change is immediately seen in the oil paintings of 
 1820, Rome from the Vatican and Rome : the Arch of 
 Titus, and again in the glowing Bay of Saief, Apollo 
 and the Sibyl of 1823.
 
 90 TURNER 
 
 We may conveniently describe here Turner's later 
 method of oil painting. Going forward from the 
 point that Girtin and he had reached together, Turner 
 had learned to obtain in water-colour such delicately 
 beautiful colour and such subtle effects of light and 
 atmosphere that he became ill-content with the lack of 
 scope afforded in these respects by the method of 
 oil painting which he had employed hitherto. He 
 had done with rivalling the old masters on their own 
 ground, and set himself to rival in oil his own great 
 achievement in water-colour. He covered his canvas 
 with a white ground, over which he scumbled and 
 glazed his pigments so thinly that they were almost 
 transparent, and the white ground told beneath them 
 like the white paper over which the transparent washes 
 of colour are taken in a water-colour drawing. He 
 ran the utmost risks in the endeavour to rival the effect 
 of nature's brilliant light and colour. He used to- 
 gether media of quite different drying quality, and 
 even used water-colour along with oil. By such 
 means as these he obtained marvellous effects of 
 colour and light ; but there could be no perma- 
 nence for pictures so painted, and we can only guess at 
 what many of them were when they left his easel, or 
 after he had worked on them at the Academy on var- 
 nishing day, as to which Redgrave says, ' At these
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 91 
 
 times such was his love of colour that any rich tint on 
 a brother painter's palette so tempted him that he would 
 jokingly remove a large portion of it to his own and 
 immediately apply it to his picture, irrespective of the 
 medium with which it was made up. From our own 
 palette he has whisked off, on more occasions than one, 
 a luscious knob of orange vermilion, or ultramarine, 
 tempered with copal, and at once used it on a picture 
 he was at work upon with a mastic magylph. Such 
 a practice, productive of no mischief at the moment, 
 would break up a picture when the harder drier began 
 to act on that which was of a less contractile nature.' 
 As was said on an earlier page, the Academy cannot 
 be blamed because Turner did such things as these. 
 He was simply flying in the face of well-understood 
 elementary facts as to the nature of pigments, and any 
 student could have told him what the effect would be. 
 In the unfinished oil paintings now exhibited at the 
 National Gallery of British Art we can see exactly 
 what was his method. In some of them, such as 
 Sunrise with a Boat between Headlands and Norham 
 Castle, Sunrise, the white ground is barely covered. 
 In the former, filmy blue and gold are playing over the 
 surface, with a touch of scarlet to suggest how the 
 colour-scheme is to be completed. In the latter there 
 are blue, gold, and delicate rose and green, while a
 
 92 TURNER 
 
 touch of dark brown on the cow in the river secures 
 bv contrast the feeling of glowing light. From 
 paintings thus just begun we can pass through others 
 more complete to those in which the final effect is 
 practically obtained, such as the beautiful Evening 
 Star, a solemn harmony of blue-grey, faded gold and 
 rose in the sky, a dark blue tone in the sea, and greyish 
 brown in the sand of the foreground. Ruskin put 
 aside these works because they were unfinished. Every 
 student of Turner is grateful for their having been 
 brought to light. We have now to all intents and 
 purposes the privilege that his contemporaries desired 
 in vain : we can see the painter at work in his studio, 
 the colour-musician composing it is hardly too much 
 to say that we can see the magician weaving his spell. 
 
 His drawings in these years were nearly all made to 
 be handed over to the engraver, and he was occupied 
 not merely with the drawings themselves, but in 
 superintending their reproduction. We have already 
 seen, in connexion with the Liber Studiorum, how 
 minutely critical he was of the engraver's work, and 
 all the engraver's proofs in connexion with the 
 numerous series of his drawings that were reproduced, 
 had to be submitted to him to receive his notes and 
 corrections often many times before he was satisfied 
 and would pass them. This, of course, necessitated
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 93 
 
 his working on the proofs themselves. Turner was, 
 indeed, not merely doing his own painter's work, but 
 was training a whole school pf engravers in the 
 interpretation of works in colour in terms of black 
 and white. Clearly, he had little leisure for the 
 exacting pleasures of London society, even if he had 
 any inclination for them. 
 
 In 1824 began the publication of the 'Rivers of 
 England ' series, Turner's drawings for which in- 
 clude some of his finest works, such as Totnes on the 
 Dart, Kirkstall Abbey^ and Norham Castle. Draw- 
 ings by Girtin and other artists were included in the 
 series, and Turner's own work in it did not wholly 
 belong to the period of publication. In 1826 he 
 commenced the ' Picturesque Views in England and 
 Wales,' for which he made over a hundred drawings. 
 The scheme was an ambitious one, like others upon 
 which he entered, far too ambitious to be adequately 
 carried through. What Turner accomplished is 
 wonderful enough. It is difficult to realise that it was 
 the work of one man's lifetime. What he desired to 
 do was more wonderful still. He wanted to make 
 this series an exhaustive Turnerian record of every 
 variety of English and Welsh scenery mountain, 
 moor, river, lake, and sea-coast were to be included, 
 so were towns and buildings, cathedral cities, country
 
 94 TURNER 
 
 towns, ruined castles and abbeys, and all these not in 
 any merely topographical way, but the various draw- 
 ings were to illustrate all the varieties of effect pro- 
 duced by differences of time and weather. Hamerton 
 takes trouble to show how little of all this programme 
 Turner actually carried out, that there are so many abbeys 
 and castles to so few cathedrals, only one mountain, and 
 neither a forest nor a trout-stream. This is true 
 enough. Turner set out upon his task as if he had 
 several lifetimes at disposal. He could not have 
 hoped to complete it except in the limited form of 
 studious selection, and this was not his way. His 
 reach was ever exceeding his grasp. The work 
 remains a fragment. But, when we patch together all 
 Turner's fragments of this kind, if even then they do 
 not prove a whole, they afford a wealth of illustration 
 of British scenery such as has hardly entered into the 
 waking dreams of any other artist. 
 
 In 1826, Turner announced the publication of a 
 series of mezzotint engravings by Thomas Lupton, 
 from original drawings of his own of the ports of 
 England. Twelve plates only were completed. In 
 the preface to the republication of the plates thirty 
 years later, with his introduction and notes, under the 
 title, 'The Harbours of England,' Ruskin says, 
 ' Had one of the parties in the arrangement been a
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 95 
 
 mere plodding man of business the work would have 
 proceeded, but between the two men of talent it came 
 very naturally to a stand.' Even so, we do not get 
 twelve ports illustrated, for places that cannot even by 
 courtesy be considered ports or harbours are included, 
 the series being Dover, Ramsgate, Plymouth, Cat- 
 water, Sheerness, Margate, Portsmouth, Falmouth, 
 Sidmouth, Whitby, Deal and Scarborough. The 
 colour, in the drawings, was restrained, but beautifully 
 modulated, as in the Whitby, in which we have a 
 harmony in blue and pearly grey, green, rose and orange. 
 In 1828 Turner was in Italy again, travelling by 
 way of the South of France, Genoa and Florence, 
 to Rome. He indulged so little in correspondence, 
 doubtless because it was difficult to him, and also 
 because his pen and pencil were always so busily 
 occupied, that when there are letters of his that show 
 us the man as we cannot see him through his paintings, 
 they are not to be passed over in any biography of 
 him. Two such letters belong to this tour. They 
 are both dated from Rome. One is to his fellow- 
 Academician Jones, and in it he says, 'Two months 
 nearly in getting to this terra pictura, and at ivork ; 
 but the length of time is my own fault. I must see 
 the South of France, which almost knocked me up, 
 the heat was so intense, particularly at Nismes and
 
 96 TURNER 
 
 Avignon ; and until I got a plunge into the sea at 
 Marseilles, I felt so weak that nothing but the change 
 of scene kept me onwards to my distant point. Genoa, 
 and all the sea-coast from Nice to Spezzia, is remark- 
 ably rugged and fine ; so is Massa. Tell that fat 
 fellow Chantrey that I did think of him, then (but not 
 the first or the last time) of the thousands he had made 
 out of those marble crags which only afforded me a 
 sour bottle of wine and a sketch ; but he deserves 
 everything that is good, though he did give me a fit of 
 the spleen at Carrara.' 
 
 The second letter is to Chantrey, and must be 
 quoted in full : 
 
 ' My dear Chantrey, I intended long before this 
 (but you will say Fudge !) to have written ; but even 
 now very little information have I to give you in 
 matters of Art, for I have confined myself to the 
 painting department at Corso ; and having finished 
 one, am about the second, and getting on with Lord 
 E.'s ; but as the folk here talked that I would show 
 them not, I finished a small three feet four to stop 
 their gabbling. So now to business. Sculpture, of 
 course, first ; for it carries away all the patronage in 
 Rome ; but all seem to share in the goodwill of 
 the patrons of the day. Gott's studio is full. 
 Wyatt and Rennie, Ewing, Buxton all employed.
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 97 
 
 Gibson has two groups in hand, l^enus and Cupid, 
 and The Rape of Hylas, three figures, very forward, 
 though I doubt much if it will be in time (taking the 
 long voyage into the scale) for the Exhibition, though 
 it is for England. Its style is something like the 
 Psyche, being two standing figures of nymphs leaning, 
 enamoured, over the young Hylas, with his pitcher. 
 The Venus is a sitting figure, with Cupid in attend- 
 ance ; and if it had wings like a dove, to flee away 
 and be at rest, the rest would not be the worse for the 
 change. Thorwalsden is closely engaged on the late 
 Pope's (Pius VII) monument. Portraits of the 
 superior animal, man, is to be found in all. In some, 
 the inferior viz., greyhounds and poodles, cats and 
 monkeys, etc. etc. 
 
 ' Pray give my remembrances to Jones and Stokes, 
 and tell him I have not seen a bit of coal stratum for 
 months. My love to Mrs. Chantrey, and take the 
 same and good wishes of 
 
 ' Yours most truly, 
 
 <J. M. W. TURNER.' 
 
 There are several interesting things in these letters 
 
 apart from their faulty grammar. There was plenty 
 
 of the boy left in Turner even at fifty-three. He 
 
 wants bracing up, so he has a swim in the sea at 
 
 H
 
 98 TURNER 
 
 Marseilles ! Both letters are brimming over with fun. 
 Some ordinary people may be glad to find that genius 
 is not above making puns. Evidently a very friendly, 
 really affectionate feeling subsisted between him and 
 some of his colleagues. He was particularly attached 
 to Chantrey, of whose bequest to the nation it is 
 impossible not to think when he and Turner are 
 mentioned together. The second letter brings vividly 
 before us the kind of entourage that Turner would 
 have in Rome at that time : Gibson's Hylas and the 
 Nymphs perhaps not going to be ready for the next 
 Academy Exhibition ! Turner did well to free 
 himself as much as he did from classical influence. 
 It is because he came and remained so much under it, 
 and because Constable never came under it, that the 
 latter seems to us so much more modern than Turner. 
 Would it have been better for Turner if he had never 
 seen more of Italy than Venice ? We should not like 
 to be without the beautiful topographical drawings 
 of Rome. The big oil paintings of Italy, with their 
 classical allusions, he might have painted as well 'out 
 of his head,' with the help of other people's sketches. 
 They are not Italy that is to say, they are idealised 
 Italy. It was another matter with his Venetian draw- 
 ings and paintings, as we shall see later. 
 
 Lastly, the second letter shows that no more in
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 99 
 
 Rome than in London or on a sketching-tour did he 
 let people see him at work. He painted a picture, 
 three feet by four, apparently the View of Orvieto, 
 now in the National Gallery, and showed it to 
 appease those who would fain have obtained access to 
 his studio to see what he was doing. 
 
 That this journey set him dreaming again, and that 
 he continued to dream, of legendary and romantic 
 Italy, the following list of oil paintings sufficiently 
 shows. In 1829 came Ulysses deriding Polyphemus 
 and the Loretto Necklace. Though the subject of the 
 former picture is Greek, the landscape is an idealised 
 Italian scene. In 1832 he exhibited Childe Harold's 
 Pilgrimage, Italy, that splendid work of romantic art, 
 through which he poured out what, but for some 
 mode of expression, would be pent-up feeling, almost 
 unbearable, at once so sweet and so sad. To the next 
 year belongs Venice: The Dogana, Campanile of 
 San Marco, followed in 1834 by Lake Avernus : 
 The Golden Bough; in 1836 came the beautiful 
 Mercury and Argus. Still the emotion was not 
 exhausted, though now he transferred the scene to 
 Greece, where, however, he had not been ; and the 
 landscape is the same as that of his ideal Italy in 
 Apollo and Daphne: The Vale of Tempe and 'The 
 Parting of Hero and Leander, exhibited in 1837, and
 
 ioo TURNER 
 
 in the Phryne going to the Public Baths as Venus, 
 of the following year. I must not compile a cata- 
 logue ; but after these came Agrippina landing "with 
 the Ashes of Germanicus, Proserpine: the Plains of Enna, 
 and 'Bacchus and Ariadne. 
 
 Other oil paintings of this period show that he 
 lived in England, in ' Actuality ' to quote Ruskin's 
 phrase, as well as in the Dreamland of Italy. Such 
 are the fine Line Fishing off Hastings, A Ship in 
 Distress off Yarmouth, St. Michael 's Mount, the 
 great Fighting Temeraire a splendid apotheosis of 
 England's Sea-power and Off the Nore : Wind and 
 Water, all of which, and others, came between 1835 
 and 1840. 
 
 All through this time he was also hard at work on 
 his water-colours, continuing series of drawings for 
 reproduction already begun, and beginning and carrying 
 on others, in addition to numerous independent draw- 
 ings. 
 
 In 1830 appeared the illustrated edition of Rogers' 
 ' Italy,' and in 1834 the ' Poems.' Thinking of the 
 exquisitely delicate and interpretative engravings from 
 Turner's works that these volumes contain, one regrets 
 that in such a book as this the subject of Turner's 
 engravers could only be so inadequately treated that it 
 is best left with the statement already made that we are
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 101 
 
 largely indebted to him for the training of a great school 
 of workers in this art. Turner's own drawings are 
 very delicately beautiful, though unequal in colour. Of 
 the Datur Hora Quiefi, discussed in our first chapter, 
 Monkhouse says it * is not in illustration of any of the 
 poet's verses, but is a more beautiful poem than ever 
 Rogers wrote.' Ruskin tells us, it will be recollected, 
 that after, when a boy, he had spent an evening at 
 Rogers' house, he was dismayed when it flashed upon 
 him that in conversation with the poet, he had praised 
 enthusiastically the illustrations to the poems, but had 
 said never a word about the poems themselves ! 
 Perhaps we may add, * The least said, the soonest 
 mended.' 
 
 In 1831 Turner was in Scotland again, to fulfil a 
 commission given him by Mr. Cadell, the publisher, to 
 make twenty-four drawings for an illustrated edition of 
 Scott's Poetical Works. The outline of his tour can 
 be traced : Rokeby, Appleby, Berwick, Abbotsford 
 where he met Sir Walter Edinburgh, Stirling, Loch 
 Long, Long Ard, StafFa, the Sound of Mull, the Isle 
 of Skye, Fort Augustus, Inverness. The hat-raising 
 incident on Tweedside, when Turner saw Norham, 
 has already been mentioned. Another story of this 
 journey is that when Turner was in the Isle of Skye 
 he saved himself from slipping down a steep slope by
 
 102 TURNER 
 
 clinging to a tuft of grass. I have previously men- 
 tioned the figures perched on a rock, in what looks 
 like a dangerous position, in the Loch Coruisk draw- 
 ing. Perhaps Turner's narrow escape partly accounts 
 for them. They certainly, as I have said, add to the 
 wild, dangerous-looking character of the scene. It 
 should be mentioned that before doing the illustrations 
 for Scott's poems, Turner had made drawings for his 
 4 Provincial Antiquities,' which was published in 1826. 
 Within the period 1826 to 1835 he was engaged 
 upon the drawings which were engraved for the book 
 published under the title 'The Rivers of France,' 
 containing letterpress by Mr. Leitch Ritchie. We 
 are told that though they both visited the scenes to be 
 illustrated, they travelled little together, as their tastes 
 in everything but art were exceedingly dissimilar. 
 Knowing what we do of Turner's faculty for roughing 
 it, to say nothing of his lack of sociability, this occa- 
 sions no surprise. Mr. Ritchie did, however, see 
 something of Turner's work, and says, ' I was curious 
 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, lift- 
 ing up, for example, by two or three stories, the
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 103 
 
 steeple, or rather stunted cone, of a village church.' 
 It is interesting to note that Mr. Ritchie felt the idea 
 given of the places they did visit together to be 
 forcible, the want of correct detail and the exaggera- 
 tions notwithstanding. 
 
 He used body-colour on grey paper for the draw- 
 ings he made ; and stayed his hand when he had 
 given a broad impression of the scene. The colour 
 was conventional, by no means true to nature, much 
 less to the particular locality in which he was painting ; 
 but effects of light and atmosphere were suggested 
 with all his wonderful skill. He never forgot that he 
 was working for the engraver, who, however, was left 
 to deal in his own way with detail at which the 
 painter had only deftly hinted ; but the drawings were 
 always designed in broad, simple masses, making easy 
 their reproduction in black and white. They are 
 effective in this way even when they are seen from 
 across a moderately-sized gallery, and when it is barely 
 possible to tell what they represent. They are, as 
 Hamerton says of them, colour-music in orange and 
 purple, red and green, with washes of cool grey to 
 refresh the eye, .and touches of burning scarlet to excite 
 it. But those who know France will agree with the 
 same writer, who knew it well, that the colour brings 
 to mind not France, but Turner. In many cases the
 
 104 TURNER 
 
 principal motive of the drawing seems to be its re- 
 markably beautiful, particular effect of light. 
 
 The title given to the book was misleading, for only 
 two French rivers, the Seine and the Loire, and these 
 always in or in the neighbourhood of the towns upon 
 their banks, are illustrated in it. There is not a single 
 drawing in which the river is seen flowing through 
 entirely open country. 
 
 Between 1833 and 1845 Turner made several 
 Continental journeys ; he sketched on the Meuse, the 
 Moselle, and the Rhine, he went again to Switzer- 
 land, the Italian Lakes, and Venice, to Switzerland 
 and the Rhine once more ; and his last journey abroad 
 was to the north of France in 1845. 
 
 From the work that was the result of these jour- 
 neys I single out the Venetian sketches and pictures, 
 which are among the most distinctively ' Turnerian ' 
 things the very climax of what was most individual 
 in his art. The unfinished Venetian sketches are 
 brilliant in light and colour, and in their effect of 
 atmosphere, perhaps the most impressionistic using 
 the word in a general, not a limited, technical sense of 
 all his works. How one lingers before the brilliant 
 sunlight in Venice, the Giudecca, looking out to Fusina ; 
 before the lovely morning light in the Suburb towards 
 Murano ; before the Venice from Fusina, with the rose,
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 105 
 
 gold and orange in the sky made intensely luminous 
 by the deep purple cloudlet dashed into the still wet 
 wash of colour ; before a drawing named simply 
 Venice, Suburb, with the faintly gleaming light of the 
 rising moon, the fading sunlight, and the darkness 
 beginning to steal over the waters ! Such impressions 
 as these are what we bring away from scores of 
 Turner's latest sketches, not only of Venice, but of 
 the Rhine, the Italian Lakes, Switzerland, and else- 
 where. 
 
 The fine Venetian oil paintings belong to the same 
 time ; the sketches, indeed, supplied the material for 
 them, as in the Approach to Venice, looking towards 
 Fuiina. The joyously radiant ' Sun of Venice' going to 
 Sen, Venice, Evening Going to the Ball, and Venice, 
 Morning Coming from the Ball, are odes to the sun. 
 In others of the Venetian oil paintings there is more 
 definite portraiture of the city ; but they are all, if not 
 all in the same degree, light and colour poems. 
 
 In Turner's last years his strength became stronger, 
 and his weakness more clearly showed itself. We are 
 puzzled when first we have to face the fact that while 
 he was doing the great things just mentioned, and 
 such other great things as Rain, Steam and Speed and 
 the Snowstorm which is great notwithstanding the 
 ' soapsuds and whitewash ' of contemporary criticism
 
 106 TURNER 
 
 he could produce such lamentable things as War: the 
 Exile and the Rock Limpet, and before this, in 1831, 
 Watteau Painting and Lord Percy under Attainder. 
 One is almost inclined to accuse the authorities of 
 malice in exhibiting these pictures. Soon, however, 
 we say to ourselves that genius is exceptional develop- 
 ment in a particular direction ; the indisputably great 
 things that Turner did come upon us like a flood ; and 
 we know it to be only the certainty of his genius that 
 makes possible the exhibition of these figure paintings, 
 which are as futile as his attempts at poetry. 
 
 In 1 842 he painted Peace : the Burial of Wilkic. 
 Other friends, who did not receive such memorial, 
 but were none the less missed, went one by one. 
 His father had died years before in 1829, and his 
 life became a lonelier one than ever. The glowing 
 pictures that have just been mentioned were the sunset 
 of his art, flaming up at the close of his own day. 
 The time was coming when he would ask to be taken 
 to the window to look for the last time at the sun 
 going down over the well and long loved river. 
 
 We need not go over again at any length the con- 
 troversy with regard to the closing scenes of his life. 
 Ruskin says that Turner was abandoned by his friends. 
 Hamerton replies that it was Turner who abandoned 
 them. He had gone to live in a house by the river-
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 107 
 
 side at Chelsea. His fellow-Academicians tried to 
 find out where he was hiding himself he was asked 
 once where the cabman should be told to drive him ; 
 but he was too sharp to do more than give a pre- 
 liminary direction, accompanied by a knowing wink. 
 Redgrave thinks that it was to enjoy solitude and his 
 lonely studies that he was accustomed to lodge in this 
 house under an assumed name ; and when we think 
 of the exclusiveness and secretiveness that marked his 
 life all through, we can readily believe that he was 
 happiest so. 
 
 We have seen him to be always a solitary, without 
 the qualifications of a society man ; and it may be that 
 if he had had them he would not have cared to put 
 them to much use. He was a prophet, if not a 
 Jeremiah : a prophet of the beauty and grandeur of 
 nature, and he also kept watch, not always over- 
 cheerfully it must be said, on man's mortality. 
 Prophets and seers are not usually clubbable men ; and 
 to pity Turner would be to wish, in effect, that he had 
 been more commonplace. As Mrs. Browning says, not 
 without cost and pain are poets made out of men. 
 We need not therefore construe too sadly the story of 
 Turner's death as told by his biographer Thornbury. 
 ' One day, as she his old housekeeper Mrs. Danby 
 was brushing an old coat of Turner's, she found
 
 io8 TURNER 
 
 and pounced on a letter directed to him, and written 
 by a friend who lived at Chelsea. Mrs. Danby, it 
 appears, came to the conclusion that Turner himself 
 was probably at Chelsea, and went there to seek for 
 him, in company with another infirm old woman. 
 From inquiries in a place by the riverside, where 
 gingerbread was sold, they came to the conclusion 
 that Turner was living in a certain small house close 
 by, and informed a Mr. Harper, whom she and 
 Turner knew. He went to the place and found the 
 painter sinking. This was on the i8th of December, 
 1851, and on the following day Turner died.' It 
 reads like evidence given at an inquest. The mere 
 externals of his death hurt us for a moment. Then 
 we remember that he died thinking of the sun, if not 
 with his eyes fixed upon it. 
 
 The fate of Turner's will may be described as a 
 leading case on the maxim that a man who is his own 
 lawyer has a fool for his client. He made it himself; 
 and he also made codicils to it. The law had its 
 revenge, getting a vastly larger sum in costs of litigation 
 than the testator would have had to pay to get his will 
 properly drawn. He saved guineas at the cost, after 
 his death, of thousands of guineas, and of the defeat 
 of a considerable part of his purpose. He wanted his 
 finished pictures to go to the nation to form a Turner
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 109 
 
 gallery. He wanted to found an institution for decayed 
 artists, and to institute a Turner medal at the Academy. 
 He left money for a monument to himself in St. Paul's 
 Cathedral. All these things have been construed 
 somewhat ungenerously, as being tainted with selfish- 
 ness ; and we may find it difficult to avoid wincing at 
 the provision for a monument. Could he doubt that 
 his work was memorial enough ; and that anything else 
 might well have been left to others ? Paid for by 
 himself, the monument has little value. He has been 
 blamed because he revoked bequests of money previously 
 made to uncles and cousins ; but surely this was a 
 matter for him to decide ; and Mr. Monkhouse makes 
 himself another man's judge in saying, ' We think the 
 next of kin should have had a great deal of his 
 money.' As a matter of fact they got it, as the 
 outcome of litigation that ended in a compromise. 
 The nation got all the pictures, both finished and 
 unfinished, the Royal Academy got ^20,000, the 
 Turner medal was provided for ; but his desire to 
 found an institution for decayed artists was unfulfilled. 
 If we are to hold inquest upon the benevolence or 
 selfishness of his motives, surely not merely generosity 
 but justice demands that we should credit him with 
 much goodwill to his fellows, and, on the other side 
 of the account, make allowance for an upbringing
 
 no TURNER 
 
 not calculated to draw out some of the best things 
 that are latent in all men, and for a life almost per- 
 force solitary and, in a measure, self-centred. 
 
 We have seen that it is possible to put a kindlier 
 interpretation on Turner's rivalry with some of the 
 earlier landscape painters than it has sometimes been 
 made to bear. He may have been jealous for the 
 reputation of contemporary art as well as for his own ; 
 and this is not incompatible with a consciousness of his 
 own high rank among his fellows, and eagerness that it 
 should be recognised. They do not seem to have 
 borne him any ill will. Mr. Monkhouse says that 
 'many of his fellow-artists and admirers followed him 
 to the grave ; nor amongst the crowd were wanting 
 a few old friends who in their hearts still cherished 
 him as " dear old Turner." ' Redgrave, who says 
 that Turner was quite aware of the greatness of 
 his own powers, and jealous of their recognition, 
 records also the help he gave to young artists, and 
 instances one interesting experience of his own when 
 he was a young associate of the Academy. Howard 
 told him frigidly that some of the members thought the 
 bosom of a figure in one of his pictures to be indeli- 
 cately naked and that he had better paint the dress 
 higher. Turner, seeing him at work taking a hint 
 that was equivalent to a command, asked what he was
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK in 
 
 doing, and on being told, said, ' Pooh, pooh, paint 
 it lower.' This puzzled Redgrave, and then Turner 
 added, ' You want white,' and turned away. ' What 
 could he mean ? ' the story proceeds, ' I pondered over 
 his words, and after a while the truth struck me. 
 The coloured dress came harshly on the flesh and 
 no linen intervened. I painted at once, over a portion 
 of the bosom of the dress, a peep of the chemise. 
 Howard came round soon after, and said, with a little 
 more warmth, " Ah ! you have covered it up it is far 
 better now it will do." It was no higher, however ; 
 there was just as much of the flesh seen, but the sense 
 of nakedness and display was gone. Turner also came 
 round again, and gave his gratified grunt at my docility 
 and appreciativeness, which he often rewarded after- 
 wards by like hints. Now this was not a mere 
 incidental change, but it was a truth, always available 
 in the future, the value of linen near the flesh a hint 
 I never forgot and continually found useful. Many 
 such have I heard and seen him give to his brother 
 landscape painters either by word of mouth or with a 
 dash of his brush.' Here we see Turner, not only 
 showing incidentally his genius, but behaving more 
 kindly to one of his younger brethren than did 
 Howard, a man of only mediocre talent. The narrator 
 of this story also says that the Academy schools ' were
 
 ii2 TURNER 
 
 usually better attended during his Turner's visitor- 
 ships than during those of most other members, from 
 which it may be inferred that the students appreciated 
 his teaching.' 
 
 The little tricks he played on his equals in nominal 
 rank on varnishing days need hardly be quoted against 
 him, such as making his own pictures more brilliant 
 after the hanging had been completed. These are 
 the commonplaces of not unkindly rivalry. One 
 of these tricks was playeti - upon Constable and 
 reference to it suggests the remark that in all the 
 biographies of Turner we read little or nothing of any 
 intercourse between these two contemporary landscape 
 painters, so different in their aims and methods, yet 
 each destined to take a high place in the history of the 
 art, Turner, we may say, the higher place, but 
 Constable to be more generally influential hitherto. 
 The story is that a sea-piece by Turner, a grey picture 
 with no positive colour in it, was hung next to 
 Constable's brilliant Opening of Waterloo Bridge. 
 Turner came along and put on his grey sea a dab 
 of red lead which he afterwards glazed and shaped 
 into a buoy. This took the colour out of Constable's 
 picture, and he exclaimed, when he saw it, ' Turner 
 has been here and fired a gun.' Thornbury says that 
 there was not much love lost between the two men ;
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 113 
 
 yet Constable could speak of one of Turner's pictures 
 as the most complete work of genius he ever saw. 
 
 If the question of Turner's relations with the other 
 sex be raised, we will say that if there must be blame, 
 there may well be more pity. I have not told hitherto 
 a story of his young days, how that he was engaged 
 to be married to the sister of a school friend at Margate, 
 that her stepmother disapproved of the match, inter- 
 cepted letters written to the girl by Turner, and 
 persuaded her that he had forsaken her, that she gave 
 her hand to another, and when Turner appeared again, 
 just before the time fixed for her marriage, and proved 
 his faithfulness, she refused to take back the promise to 
 the new suitor, thinking herself bound to him, although 
 Turner still had her affection. In this, and in other 
 things, Turner was sinned against, which may palliate 
 if it cannot excuse his sinning. He is said to have 
 had another disappointment later in life. We need 
 not think too hardly of him. Let us put to his credit 
 that he was fond of children, and that they were fond 
 of him. 
 
 Turner the man has been only less discussed than 
 Turner the artist, as the little already said here will 
 suggest ; and his very personal appearance may be made 
 a matter of controversy. Hamerton says that ' he was 
 a person of unprepossessing appearance, short and thick-
 
 ii4 TURNER 
 
 set, with coarse features and the general appearance of 
 the skipper of some small merchant craft living on shore 
 in the interval between two voyages.' So far as one 
 can judge from actual portraits, and the description of 
 those who knew him, this particular description is 
 very near to caricature to which, indeed, the pencil 
 subjected Turner along with most people of note. 
 Redgrave says that ' in person Turner had little of the 
 outward appearance that we love to attribute to the 
 possessors of genius. In the last twenty years of his 
 life, during which he knew him well, his short figure 
 had become corpulent his face, perhaps from continual 
 exposure to the air, was unusually red, and a little 
 inclined to blotches. His dark eye was bright and 
 restless his nose, aquiline. He generally wore what 
 is called a black dress-coat, which would have been the 
 better for brushing the sleeves were mostly too long, 
 coming over his fat and not over clean hands. He 
 wore his hat while painting on the varnishing days or 
 otherwise a large wrapper over his head, while on the 
 warmest days he generally had another wrapper or 
 comforter round his throat though occasionally he 
 would unloose it and allow the two ends to dangle down 
 in front and pick up a little of the colour from his 
 ample palette. This, together with his ruddy face, his 
 rollicking'eye, and his continuous, although, except to
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 115 
 
 himself, unintelligible jokes, gave him the appearance 
 of one of that now wholly extinct race a long-stage 
 coachman.' Except that we cannot see the colour and 
 the dirt, this description tallies closely with Sir John 
 Gilbert's sketch of Turner. Redgrave's comparison 
 to a coachman is far better than Hamerton's comparison 
 to a skipper, which the sketch does not in the least 
 suggest, though it is said the Chelsea people took him 
 for a retired admiral. Turner has distinctly what 
 is called a ' horsy look ' in the sketch. The expression 
 of sly, good-humoured cunning would not be unworthy 
 of a horse-dealer. 
 
 Putting Redgrave's description and Gilbert's sketch 
 together again, we see that Hamerton is quite wrong 
 in describing Turner's features as coarse. He had 
 regular features, of the kind that is indicative of strength 
 of character. The aquiline nose might be called 
 Jewish, and certainly he had much of the persistence 
 that marks that long-suffering race. George Dance's 
 sketch of 1800 shows a pensive-looking, distinctly 
 handsome youth, not unstudious in the matter of dress; 
 while in an early portrait by an unknown artist, we 
 see a really pretty boy, with features and expression 
 almost girlish. His own early portrait of himself 
 by no means suggests an unprepossessing appearance. 
 In all the portraits the well-formed mouth suggests
 
 u6 TURNER 
 
 determination ; while the lips are ready for a smile, 
 and the eyes for a twinkle. What Hamerton calls 
 coarseness is not in the features, but in the stoutness, 
 and in the red and blotchy skin, for which Redgrave 
 accounts by Turner's spending so much time in the 
 open air. 
 
 What has been said and quoted about his appear- 
 ance fitly leads up to what follows, which, with the 
 untidiness and lack of cleanliness in dress and person, 
 fully justifies our description of him as a tramp. His 
 house was in keeping with his person. Here is 
 Redgrave's description of it : ' The scene in his 
 rooms on the occasion of his funeral would have 
 saddened any lover of art, for the works left behind, 
 almost as much as for the genius that had passed away. 
 The gallery seemed as if broom or dusting-brush had 
 never troubled it. The carpet or matting (its texture 
 was undistinguishable from dirt) was worn and musty ; 
 the hangings, which had once been a gay amber colour, 
 showed a dingy yellow hue where the colour was not 
 washed out by the drippings from the ceiling ; for the 
 cove and the glass sky-lights were in a most dilapidated 
 state, many panes broken and patched with old news- 
 papers. From these places the wet had run down the 
 walls, and loosened the plaster, so that it had actually 
 fallen behind the canvas of one picture, The Bay of
 
 LIFE AND LIFE-WORK 117 
 
 'Baia; which, hanging over the bottom of the frame, 
 bagged outwards, with the mass of accumulated mortar 
 and rubbish it upheld. Many of the pictures 
 Crossing the Brook, among others had large pieces 
 chipped or scaled off ; while others were so fast going 
 to decay, that the gold first, and then the ground, had 
 perished from the very frames, and the bare fir-wood 
 beneath was exposed.' Turner's home was out-of- 
 doors. His house was his workshop ; and though he 
 did not keep his workshop tidy, he did work both 
 good and great.
 
 Ill 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 
 
 SIR WALTER ARMSTRONG ranks Turner higher as an 
 illustrator, a meditator, an interpreter of nature to his 
 fellows than as a creator. He points out what we 
 have already seen, that Turner valued his work rather 
 as a means to an end than as an end in itself. He was 
 careless about the use of materials, careless about the 
 preservation of his pictures. He left his oil paintings 
 to rot in the damp, literally in the rain that came 
 through the studio-roof; he sketched on both sides of 
 his paper, crumpled up drawings in his pockets, 
 crammed them into drawers. How different is all 
 this from the scrupulous care that possessors of his 
 drawings now take of them ! A gentleman was once 
 
 introduced to the present writer as ' Mr. , who 
 
 keeps Turner water-colours in his wardrobe ' ; that is 
 to say, the drawings were kept in the dark, so that 
 they might not fade, and were only brought out when 
 their owner wished to look at them or to show them to 
 118
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 119 
 
 others. Had Turner been above all things a creator, 
 it is argued, he could not have been so indifferent to the 
 fate of much of his work. 
 
 This line of argument is perhaps not convincing, but 
 let us gladly admit that Turner was a great illustrator : 
 that he made such a comprehensive record, expressed 
 in terms of art, of the look of heaven, earth and sea, 
 as far exceeds anything of the same kind done by any 
 other artist. With this, indeed, we have seen that he 
 is credited by everyone. 
 
 We have also noted the diversity of interest in his 
 pictures. The mingling in one work of such purely 
 artistic considerations as design, tone, colour, of record 
 of natural phenomena, often remarkably detailed, and 
 of figures interesting on their own account as well as 
 for purely pictorial reasons, is more common with him 
 than with any other painter. In the preceding chap- 
 ters I have had much to say about his art ; in the 
 next one I shall discuss separately the human incidents 
 in his pictures, which, if we bring them together men- 
 tally, we find to amount to nothing less than a human 
 epic. In the present chapter I wish to give such idea 
 as I can in a few pages of the immense range of 
 Turner's study and interpretation of the visible universe. 
 
 The title 'The Pageant of Nature' suggested 
 itself for this chapter ; but though there is much
 
 izo TURNER 
 
 pageantry, much brilliant display in nature, and though 
 Turner delighted in it, and left many a marvellous 
 record of it, both nature and Turner's interpretation of 
 it go far deeper than pageantry. The simplest words, 
 those that are most pregnant with meaning to the 
 imagination, those that the Hebrew writer used when 
 he told the story of Creation, are not too simple and 
 large for our immediate purpose. 
 
 George Meredith used the word Earth in such deep, 
 imaginative way. For literary parallels to Turner's 
 paintings we might go to him, as well, at least, as to 
 Ruskin's purple passages written to express his sense 
 of Turner's power. It would take a succession of 
 Turner drawings to follow the Venetian sunrise that 
 Beauchamp and Renee watched after the night on the 
 lagoon ; and such a succession of drawings could be 
 brought together. Turning to Meredith's ' Reading 
 of Earth ' which includes an ' Appeasement of 
 Demeter ' we find, in the * Hymn to Colour,' a verse 
 that is the equivalent in words of many a Turner 
 drawing. 
 
 Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes 
 
 The house of heaven splendid for the bride. 
 To him as leaps a fountain she awakes, 
 
 In knotting arms, yet boundless : him beside, 
 
 She holds the flower to heaven, and by his power 
 Brings heaven to the flower.
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 121 
 
 The admiring friends of Eugene Boudin, one of the 
 forerunners of the Impressionist School, praised him as 
 the Master of the Skies. The title was not undeserved; 
 yet how much more fully it was deserved by Turner ! 
 Boudin mastered little more than the almost illusive ex- 
 pression of vast, luminous spaciousness. One asks, not 
 what of all the sky has to show did Turner master, as 
 far as art could master it, but what did he leave un- 
 mastered ? to show that the question so put would not 
 be a foolish one, I may quote once more one of the 
 sanest of writers upon art, himself also a painter. 
 Redgrave says of Turner, ' Nature revealed to him a 
 flood of atmospheric light, a world of infinitely tender 
 gradations of tint and colour, gradations so minute as to 
 be almost inappreciable by other men, and such as it 
 seemed hopeless to realise by the practice which then 
 prevailed ; he had, therefore, to invent his own 
 methods. . . . Water-colour seemed to lend itself 
 most readily to the imitation of those effects in nature 
 he so much loved to represent nature lost in a blaze 
 of light, rather than dimmed with a twilight gloom 
 and thus it happens that his works in this medium 
 mostly embody some evanescent effect, be it flood of 
 sunshine bursting forth after storms, or careering in 
 gleams over the plain, the mountain, or the sea ; or 
 some wrack of clouds, some passing shower or rainbow
 
 122 TURNER 
 
 of promise refreshing the gladdened and glistening 
 earth.' It is going far to say that he saw gradations so 
 minute as to be almost unappreciable by other men ; 
 and yet it is but sober truth. 
 
 What a wide range of atmospheric effect there is 
 even in his oil paintings alone ! The heavy threaten- 
 ing gloom of the Calais Pier, the driving cloud and 
 misty rain of the Shipwreck, the vast aerial expanse of 
 changeful light and shade of the London from Greenwich, 
 the palpitating gleams of light through the rain-veil in 
 Rain, Steam and Speed, the tender morning light of the 
 Frosty {Morning, the golden morning haze of the 
 Abingdon, the glorious sunrise of Ulysses deriding 
 Polyphemus, the joyous, exhilarating splendour of the 
 morning in The Sun of Venice going to Sea, the symbolic 
 magnificence of the sunset sky, with its glowing sun 
 and softly shining crescent moon in The Fighting 
 Te'meraire, the fading sunlight and steady shining of 
 the full moon in the Agripplna landing with the Ashes 
 of Germanicus. I take but a few examples, the list 
 might be made a long one ; and Ruskin's eloquence, 
 describing the infinity of detail within the unity of 
 effect in any of these and other skies, could not exhaust 
 the wonder of them. 
 
 One faces the task of saying something about the 
 skies and atmospheric effects of the water-colour
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 123 
 
 drawings with diffidence that falls little short of 
 despair. Not a few who have written about Turner, 
 and have maintained a critical attitude, alleging, as 
 does Hamerton, that Ruskin was less a critic than an 
 artist in words, have given warnings against Turner 
 worship. Yet no artist but Turner could have called 
 forth Ruskin's eloquence, uncritical though it may be 
 held to be ; and no warnings have ever been given against 
 the worship of any of his contemporaries, or any of 
 his successors, from which it may be implied that there 
 was that in Turner, but not in the others, that might 
 well induce something at least akin to worship. And 
 this feeling comes over us chiefly when we look at, or 
 recall, or turn over pages of reproductions of, his water- 
 colour drawings. ' The more reproductions we can 
 have of the master's drawings,' Sir Charles Holroyd 
 has said recently, 'the more will it be possible to 
 study properly his great message, and the more will his 
 genius be recognized. I would like to see every one 
 of his nineteen thousand water-colour sketches and 
 lead pencil drawings reproduced, so that we could all 
 hold them in our hands and carry them about with us ; 
 for in them there is an unfailing beauty of composition, 
 and a glorious truth of effect and detail, by which 
 Turner managed to make complete pictures out of 
 even the fewest touches.' Among these thousands of
 
 i2 4 TURNER 
 
 drawings and sketches how many are there in which 
 the scene depicted is shown under some remarkable 
 atmospheric effect ; and no effect was too magnificent, 
 or too subtly beautiful, for Turner to shrink from the 
 attempt to translate it into the terms of his art. Hence, 
 both his faculty of sight and his power to interpret 
 what he saw were developed until, as we have quoted 
 Redgrave's saying of him, nature revealed to him a 
 world of gradations of tint and colour so minute as to 
 be almost inappreciable by other men, and his water- 
 colour paintings epitomised the whole mystery of 
 landscape art. 
 
 Before anything is said of particular drawings, there 
 are some general considerations to which reference 
 should be made. There is in nature infinite gradation 
 of light and colour, and there is also infinite variety of 
 form. If clouds actually the same in form are spread 
 over the sky, their varying position in relation to our 
 point of view gives to each an apparent shape different 
 from that of any of its fellows. Parallel lines of 
 cloud, and parallel lines of movement, appear to 
 converge ; and, though space be a vast abyss, the 
 belt of atmosphere that surrounds the earth and the 
 vapours within it follow the curve of the earth. 
 What wonderful rhythm of line and curve this means ! 
 How subtle the variations inevitably are ! There is
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 125 
 
 no confusion amid it all. We are conscious of this as 
 we watch the clouds. Their movement is visible 
 music. We see that it is ordered, and yet the 
 apparent variety of movement is so great that it would 
 be truer to say that we feel rather than see its order- 
 liness. Such variety in unity, of light, colour, form 
 and movement, means, for us, beauty, and more than 
 beauty or, if anyone will have it so, the fullest 
 meaning for which the word beauty can be used : 
 awe - inspiring power and majesty, magnificence, 
 splendour, dazzling brilliance, radiance, serenity. I 
 need not seek to exhaust the categories. Those of us 
 who have watched the skies have more or less vague, 
 visual recollections of the music they have played for 
 us. In Turner's works we have the recollections, 
 aided by notes taken at the moment, of a man with a 
 pre-eminent gift of observation, studiously trained and 
 developed through a lifetime ; and while we look at 
 them we are thrilled as our vague remembrances, one 
 after another, are made definite. 
 
 The Liber Studiorum alone, apart from colour, would 
 furnish us with all the examples we need to give. 
 Here are heavy rain-clouds which soon will cover 
 the sky from horizon to horizon, and wholly shut 
 out the higher heavens ; here a belt of them, obscur- 
 ing the summit of Criffel, and seeming to wage war
 
 126 TURNER 
 
 against the setting sun behind him, drives across the 
 Solway ; here as the sun goes down his beams shoot 
 out into a quiet sky behind the massive keep of 
 Norham Castle, and light the flanks of a bank of 
 cumulus cloud and the undersides of the long lines 
 of cirrus in the higher regions of the air ; here,' again, 
 the sun goes down, his light only softly veiled, not 
 hidden, by filmy vapour, so that his orb shows 
 perfectly, while the trees that rise in the foreground, 
 by their blackness against the light, intensify its glow- 
 ing radiance ; the tones fade away imperceptibly to 
 and beyond ' the bridge in the middle distance '- 
 we may as well identify the plate until land and 
 sky melt into one another ; here, again, the brilliant 
 sunshine fills the spray-laden air above the Falls of 
 Clyde, and plays in and out of the overhanging trees ; 
 night is passing into day, the dawn-light will soon 
 reach and dim the brightness of the waning moon, 
 while Rizpah watches over the bones of her children. 
 The limited scale between the utmost light and the 
 utmost dark at the disposal of art, as compared with 
 nature's scale, is often cited as being enormously to 
 the disadvantage of art. One of the glories of art, 
 however, consists in this limitation ; for, great though 
 it be, she can still awaken within us emotions as 
 strong as those we have felt when face to face with
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 127 
 
 nature ; nay, she can even, by selection and emphasis, 
 intensify those emotions. The Liber Studiorum plates, 
 even though they lack colour, almost produce upon us 
 an impression of reality. 
 
 If we pass from Turner's monochromes to his 
 drawings in colour, will the impression of reality be 
 greater ? This by no means follows of necessity. 
 The crudest colour is nearer to the fact of nature 
 than is mere black-and-white, but it is not so near 
 to the impression nature makes upon us. The crudity 
 lessens or even destroys all impression. Turner's colour 
 is never crude ; but it is always so conventional, so 
 obviously arranged, harmonised, as we do not find 
 it in nature, that while there is an increase of beauty 
 as compared with the monochrome, the feeling of 
 actuality is not heightened, but lessened. Frequently 
 we have to consider one drawing from the two stand- 
 points of decoration and actuality. This was Whist- 
 ler's difficulty, referred to in the first chapter. I 
 mention it here in order to say that actuality and 
 decoration seem to me to be more generally combined 
 in his skies, both in form and colour, than in the rest 
 of the landscape. It is as if he threw the whole 
 of his power into the sky, and fell back upon certain 
 conventions albeit beautiful conventions for the 
 rest. We may take the National Gallery drawing
 
 i 2 8 TURNER 
 
 of Arundel Castle for example. It is a showery 
 day. Masses of cumulus cloud are travelling over 
 the distant sea. There is some convention in the 
 colour of the clouds, but they give a strong impression 
 of light, atmosphere, and movement, whereas the 
 castle, the trees in the middle distance, the grass on 
 the hillsides, and the deer in the foreground, though 
 beautiful in colour, are yet so conventional as to give 
 far less impression of actuality than the sky. 
 
 One cannot if one would make of these chapters 
 water-tight compartments, so that what is the main 
 subject of one shall not be partly considered in the 
 others ; and in this and the preceding chapter I have 
 said so much about Turner's ' reading ' of the sky, that 
 little more need be added. And what can be said 
 where saying must mean so little except as an incentive 
 to seeing but that now with utmost delicacy and now 
 with utmost intensity of colour, with the most subtle 
 rendering of form, when form tells in the scene, with 
 suggestion of the countlessness of the cloudlets that 
 sometimes cover the sky, with almost illusive opening 
 out of the depths of space, with tenderest veiling of 
 haze, with power to recall, what to give is impossible, 
 a sense of the full splendour of the sun from which 
 man must turn away his eyes, with what is almost 
 a realisation of 'the hiding of his power,' and of the
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 129 
 
 short-lived triumph of the storm-clouds, with skill 
 beyond words to suggest the slow awakening of 
 day and the silent coming on of night, Turner 
 showed himself to be the master of the skies ? 
 
 One often asks oneself also if anyone but Turner 
 has ever painted the mountains. Let the question 
 stand, not to be answered in any absolute way in his 
 favour, but as a witness to the strength of the im- 
 pression his mountain work makes upon us. The 
 majesty of the mountains, their effect of giant power 
 in repose, their solemn grandeur when darkened by 
 the clouds, their glorious beauty when the sun illumines 
 them, how at one time they seem to threaten us with 
 a crushing weight that will annihilate our very being, 
 and at another they draw our spirits up towards God 
 and heaven surely all this has never been expressed 
 as fully by anyone as by Turner. And, beyond this, 
 he has seen and made record of what, even if the 
 feeling be, and be known to be but a pathetic fallacy, 
 we still feel to be the age-long brave but hopeless 
 struggle of the mountains against an inevitable fate. 
 
 The sight of distant mountains had a strong fascina- 
 tion for Turner, as it must have for all except those 
 who are wholly devoid of imagination. The reason 
 is not far to seek. We know that were we close to 
 those filmy undulations that break the level of the 
 K
 
 130 TURNER 
 
 horizon line, and look as if we could step over them as 
 over children's sand-castles on the shore, they would 
 rise high above us in rocky strength that incalculable 
 ages have not sufficed to wear away. We know they 
 are this, though they look so small. How vast there- 
 fore is the earth, of whose great round the fraction that 
 divides us from those far-off mountains is little more 
 than minute, while they themselves are not high 
 enough materially to roughen its surface ! Seen close 
 to, the mountains carry our thoughts upward. Seen 
 far away, they carry our thoughts to what is be- 
 yond them. Often one has looked long and long 
 from Dover at the French cliffs gleaming across the 
 Channel, and thought that, once landed there, no sea 
 would divide us from three of the great continents of 
 the world ! 
 
 None of our English coasts is less romantic in 
 itself than that of Lancashire. Yet what poetry it has 
 in the sight it affords of distant hills and mountains ! 
 Inland are to be seen the massive forms, like couchant 
 lions, of Rivington and Pendle ; while the summit of 
 Ingleborough Turner's Ingleborough we might almost 
 call it can be seen over the shoulder of one of the 
 nearer hills. Away to the south-west rise the Welsh 
 mountains, beginning with those that flank the Vale of 
 Clvvyd, and ending with the stately forms of those
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 131 
 
 that lie to the north of Snowdon and the Carnedds, 
 and nearly rival them in height. In clear weather, we 
 may look for the summits of the hills in that Celtic out- 
 post, the Isle of Man ; away to the north-west, oftener 
 than not, we can see Wordsworth's Black Combe, 
 like an ever-watchful sentinel of the land, and more 
 northward still, the Old Man of Coniston, Helvellyn, 
 and the ranges that stretch eastward till we come to 
 Ingleborough again. 
 
 Has not all this its place in the Reading of Earth ? 
 Turner found it so ; and though distant hills may have 
 always filled us with a deep, inexpressible longing, the 
 feeling has been intensified in some of us by Turner's 
 subtle rendering of the far-away sight of not a few of 
 those we have mentioned. Engravings of the two 
 Lancaster Sands drawings are before me. In one of 
 them a heavy shower has blotted out the distance ; in 
 the other the clouds have risen high above the moun- 
 tains as the sun goes down, and range after range dis- 
 closes itself. The literalist in one may complain that 
 behind the Coniston range, which is drawn with near 
 approach to accuracy, Turner's imagination has seen 
 another and vastly higher range. Yet, after all, we do 
 just see the Scawfell mountains behind Coniston, and 
 imagine a grandeur we know to be there. It is 
 rather hard on Helvellyn that this magnified Scawfell
 
 132 TURNER 
 
 should reduce him to insignificance, and those lofty 
 peaks to the eastward, beyond the limestones of 
 Arnside and Carnforth, do make the literalist to 
 shake his head ! But let the literalist be unhesi- 
 tatingly suppressed, for this is the very spirit of the 
 scene ; and the letter, when art would interpret nature, 
 does most surely kill, as sketches of my own, made 
 on the shore of Morecambe Bay, are proof positive to 
 me at least ! Yet Ruskin can praise the Hey sham 
 drawing as not ' losing for a moment the sincere sim- 
 plicity of the wild country and homely people, in any 
 morbid or strained idealisation ' ; and I am fain to 
 confess that the more literal rendering of the hills in 
 this drawing though even here there has been no 
 merely slavish adherence to the letter gets right 
 home to me. 
 
 Such drawings as these Ruskin classed as ' Actu- 
 ality, England at Rest.' In another group, which he 
 called 'Dreamland, Italy,' comes the drawing Turin, 
 from the Church of the Superga. Again we have a 
 view of distant mountains : this time of the Alps. It 
 is they, far away beyond Turin, not the city itself, 
 that arrest and hold our gaze. Italy is dreamland to 
 the Englishman. M. de la Sizeranne, in the course 
 of an essay on Turner's oil paintings, says that 'the 
 English are a race for whom the Continent is a sort of
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 133 
 
 Promised Land, the home of the Ideal, a Canaan 
 with its gigantic grapes, somewhat akin to what in art 
 and poetry China was for a long time to Japan, that 
 other satellite-isle gravitating around that other conti- 
 nent. The English do not tell you this in perfect 
 good faith they believe the contrary. But their art, 
 their works, betray their secret thoughts by showing 
 where their imagination lies Italy, the shores of 
 Provence, Spain, the mountains of Switzerland and 
 the Tyrol, the lands of the olive, the orange and the 
 grape. All that England does not possess haunts the 
 Englishman's spirit.' There is truth here, if also over- 
 statement. Turner, indeed, went to France, to Swit- 
 zerland and to Italy, and painted there ; but he painted * 
 most at home. Gainsborough, Constable, Cox, 
 Crome, and many another of our landscape painters, 
 never cared to leave home ; and was it not by Con- 
 stable's loving portraiture of England that the French 
 landscape painters were helped sympathetically to 
 interpret their own land ? Ought we to be so full of 
 insular self-satisfaction that the different beauty, the 
 romance, the venerable civilisations of other lands, 
 should make no appeal to our imagination ? Surely it 
 was not as M. de la Sizeranne says, a sure mark of 
 the Englishman that Turner dreamed of Carthage and 
 of imperial Rome.
 
 134 TURNER 
 
 Any man, of any nation, would be dull indeed, if he 
 looked at Turner's drawing of the Alps as seen from 
 the Superga and remained unmoved how much more 
 so if he looked upon the scene itself. What history 
 has been made on that plain, stretching away to the 
 foot of the mountains ! It may be that Hannibal 
 entered Italy by the valley we see ; perhaps his ad- 
 vance was watched from the hill where we are standing. 
 We may be sure that Turner thought of this. A 
 thunderstorm in Wharfedale made him think of the 
 great Carthaginian crossing the Alps. It is with the 
 mountains themselves, however, not with the history 
 that has been made upon and about them, that we are 
 concerned just now. Let us see how Turner has 
 interpreted them so wonderfully that one hardly tires 
 of looking at the drawing. Two columns of the 
 church show little more than half their length before 
 they reach the top of the picture. At once we get an 
 impression of great height. The sunlight falls steeply 
 down on them, but part of one of them is in shadow. 
 Hence comes a feeling of the vast sunlit space above 
 and around us, part of which, showing intervals of blue 
 sky between white fleecy clouds, illumined with 
 quivering light, is seen between the columns. The 
 diamond pattern on the pavement, the figures, the 
 balustrades that flank the unseen steps, the loop in the
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 135 
 
 river as it passes through the city, the long line of road, 
 all lead the eye towards the distant mountains. The 
 columns, hewn from them, or from such as they, seem 
 like an echo of their strength. Fold upon fold they 
 rise, after starting as the Alps do on the southern 
 side abruptly from the plain. Sunlight and shade, 
 softly veiled by the distance, play amongst them with a 
 subtlety that goes far to equal anything that our visual 
 memory can recall in nature itself should we, had we 
 been with Turner, have seen a tithe of the beauty of 
 form and light and colour that is in the drawing, and 
 more than which he saw ? On the highest part of the 
 range, stretching from end to end of the picture, lies 
 the snow, exquisitely gradated with the most delicate 
 touches of bluish grey. It is as if a garment were being 
 bleached to utmost purity for a goddess to wear. The 
 tenderness of the light and colour in the landscape is 
 enhanced by the vigorous colour of the figures the 
 Turnerian figures, we must say within the porch. 
 We need not criticise the drawing of them ; they are 
 there, not so much to be looked at, as that we may 
 pass from them to the splendour and solemnity of the 
 mountains that have seen the coming and the going of 
 countless generations of men, and teach us to regard 
 the brief lives and dubious deeds of individual men in 
 the light of the long, slow progress of humanity.
 
 136 TURNER 
 
 Travelling in the old, slow way, Turner had many 
 chances of sketching in the outskirts of the Alps, 
 where veteran travellers often rebuke those of this 
 hurrying age for not lingering. He made sketches in 
 pencil and chalk, and in water-colour, at Macon, 
 Grenoble, the Grande Chartreuse, Bonneville, and 
 elsewhere. In the Liber plate, The Alps from Grenoble, 
 we have another distant view of the mountains over a 
 level plain, but this time with a hill-side vineyard, not 
 a church porch, for foreground, and with a totally 
 different effect of light. The sun is now before us, 
 not behind us, and instead of lighting up the mountains 
 throws them into varying depths of solemn shade. 
 The sky, also, is more clouded, and two filmy beams 
 of light shining down upon the valley deepen the 
 sombreness and emphasise the strength of the mountains 
 behind them. A few inches of stained paper suffice 
 to give an impression of nature's vastness. 
 
 The drawings that Turner made among the Swiss 
 lakes are legion, and are remarkable for their beauty 
 of light and colour. The Central Alps are not 
 far away, are indeed often within sight, but their 
 terror and grandeur are either hidden or softened into 
 beauty by distance. The lower, tree-clad mountains 
 that enclose the lakes and are reflected in their waters 
 are beautiful in themselves, and lend their beauty to
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 137 
 
 the lakes, which are, indeed, usually only a feature of 
 the softer mountain scenery. It seems almost too 
 simple a thing to say that a lake, unless it had beautiful 
 surroundings, would be merely a natural reservoir, and 
 when we speak of the comparative beauty of lakes it 
 is really their surroundings that are in question. How 
 different it is with the sea ! It has beauty and 
 grandeur wholly independent of surroundings, due 
 only to itself and the skies above it. Vast expanse, 
 knowing no limit to the sight but the horizon, and 
 boundless to the imagination, and ceaseless movement, 
 culminating in the great storm-waves and the breakers 
 thundering on the beach or against the rocks, are what 
 the sea means to us. The lakes we love the best are 
 the exact opposite of this. We see the hills en- 
 circling them, and they are best when they are calm 
 with, at the most, only the ripples that lightly break 
 the reflections from their surface. Storms on such 
 lakes are not without danger, but they are so feeble 
 compared with those of the sea that the name seems 
 hardly applicable to them in comparison. 
 
 It was thus that Turner interpreted the lakes of 
 Switzerland and, we may add, those of Italy, as in 
 the beautiful Lafy of Nemi, with the water in the deep 
 hollow peacefully reflecting the tree-clad slopes that 
 descend steeply to its margin. What lovely dreams
 
 138 TURNER 
 
 of Constance, Zurich, Zug, Lucerne, Geneva, he has 
 left us ! To these lake drawings he gave the utmost 
 witchery of light and colour. He clothed Lucerne 
 in mystery, now of rose, and now of blue, now of 
 pearly grey. He gave his utmost range of colour to 
 a Constance sunset, and swathed the city of Zurich, 
 stretching away into the hazy distance, in luminous 
 vesture of blue and gold. How gloriously beautiful 
 is the sunrise, in stronger tones of blue and gold, in 
 the Arth from the Lake of Zug \ Again we see the 
 light of the rising moon reflected in the still water of 
 Geneva beneath the towers of Lausanne, and again, 
 mysterious play of light and shade in the gently 
 rippling water of Lucerne, as the moon shines brokenly 
 through night-clouds weird in form behind the preci- 
 pices of the Seelisberg. 
 
 From the lakes we may follow Turner to the final 
 grandeur and solemnity of the Central Alps. 
 
 There are few more impressive drawings by him 
 than those of the narrow Alpine gorges, just as than 
 such gorges there are few more impressive things in 
 nature. In them we are only less within the moun- 
 tains than when, now standing upright in caverns of 
 which we cannot see the roof, now bent double under 
 huge masses of shelving rock, we follow the course of 
 streams that have flowed for ages in the utter darkness
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 139 
 
 underground. Where the St. Gothard Pass narrows 
 from the meadows of Andermatt into the gloom of 
 the Schollenen gorge, and over the roaring waters in 
 the chasm below, the wind blows cold, and wraiths, not 
 wreaths, of cloud drive along, though we know that 
 those mighty walls of rock have stood apart for ages, 
 yet we can almost imagine that we see them closing in 
 upon us. Well may the legend have arisen that only 
 by Satanic help could the chasm have been bridged ! 
 Turner's drawings of the Pass and its frail-looking 
 bridge are full of this sense of impending horror. In 
 Mr. Rawlinson's unpublished Liber plate the curves of 
 the rocks, of which, as it seems, little more than the 
 bases are seen in the picture, might be curves of move- 
 ment. One huge, partly detached mass might even 
 now be leaning to its fall over the roadway, and we 
 wonder at the temerity of the mule drivers who linger 
 beneath it. There is no danger, we know ; but what 
 an awful sense of vast, impersonal power ! 
 
 Stupendous mass and energy are realised in the 
 glacier drawings. In the Farnley drawing of the Mcr 
 de Glace, and the Liber plate, Source of the Arvelron, 
 the firs into which masses of falling rock have crashed 
 look as if they were being worsted in a futile assault 
 on a stronghold of giants or to take them simply for 
 what they are, the obvious precariousness of their
 
 HO TURNER 
 
 existence, the ruin that has come upon some of them 
 and sooner or later must come upon them all, em- 
 phasises the immeasurable unseen force that slowly yet 
 certainly is bringing down the mountains, fractured and 
 riven by the ever returning frost. Was not the summit 
 of Snowdon once a valley in a mountain range mighty 
 as are the Alps to-day ! The Alps are only nouveaux 
 riches ; our mountains are a grand, old, but impover- 
 ished aristocracy. In my Cheshire garden is a granite 
 boulder, borne whence, and how long ago, on a great, 
 moving mass of ice, the geologist perhaps can say. 
 We go to Switzerland to learn what our own land has 
 been, as well as what Switzerland now is. Many life- 
 times may see no change in the mountains ; the move- 
 ment of the glacier is imperceptible ; none the less the 
 mighty forces of nature are doing their work. Turner's 
 drawings give us a sense of their activity. It is as 
 if we were shown in a moment that which it takes 
 them long years to do. They are studies in dynamics, 
 not in statics. In the water-colour sketch high up on 
 the Mer de Glace, the hummocks of ice might be 
 waves passing behind each other down into the unseen 
 reaches of the steeply descending valley. Such, indeed, 
 they are ; but not waves raised by the wind, and how 
 incredibly slow in movement ! The crack in one 
 of the peaks of ice almost makes us expect to see
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 141 
 
 the distant aiguilles more deeply fractured while we 
 look at them. 
 
 The clouds that gloom the scene in places, and 
 by contrast gift the sunlit heights with greater bright- 
 ness, do not merely visibly increase its grandeur ; they 
 always carry with them the thought of danger and 
 of death. And, mere vapour though they be, they 
 are the chief agents in the slow destruction of the 
 mountains. They are the armies of the sea sent 
 to humble its proud neighbour the earth. They come 
 from the sea, return to it, and come again. They let 
 fall the disintegrating rain, which, hardening into ice, 
 rends apart the rocks with resistless force. They form 
 the torrents which carry down the debris. They pass, 
 and leave great fields of snow behind them, which 
 form the swiftly descending avalanches, or the slow- 
 moving glaciers. It is of this constant warfare of 
 nature's forces that we inevitably think as we look 
 at Turner's Alpine drawings. 
 
 At times, indeed, he sounds a truce. Such is the 
 Superga drawing. In the illustration to Rogers' poem 
 'The Alps at Daybreak,' we can think only of the 
 glorious beauty, not of the latent terror of the scene. 
 Ruskin says that if he wanted to give the most faithful 
 idea possible of a certain geological structure he should 
 take up this drawing. He rightly condemns the
 
 142 TURNER 
 
 absurd figures : men and hounds chasing the chamois 
 over the great snow-fields with as little hesitation 
 or difficulty as if they were on level ground. Turner 
 has construed too literally in this instance his duty 
 as an illustrator. These hunters, who run and leap 
 where mere men would tread with utmost care, should 
 be spirits of the mountains. Let the absurdity pass ; 
 for how exhilarating it makes the scene ! Who would 
 not exclaim that the sun is rejoicing as a strong man 
 to run a race ! At once, as he rises into view, he 
 floods the scene with glory ; and so exquisitely is the 
 light rendered, that we imagine more than we actually 
 see : we credit the sparkle where only the gleam 
 is given ; we feel the invigorating freshness of the 
 morning air ! 
 
 Let us return to our own land. We have seen 
 that Turner was moved by the sight of the Lake 
 Mountains across Morecambe Bay. We might fol- 
 low him all over the island some of us have 
 literally done so and find him stirred here by its 
 beauty and there by its grandeur. Leaving the 
 grandeur for a moment, we may surely say that even 
 he could hardly exaggerate the beauty. He could 
 but use the means an artist has for lessening the gap 
 there must be between any fixed, literal rendering 
 of nature on paper or canvas, and her vastness of
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 143 
 
 space, fullness of light, and ceaseless movement and 
 change. Not that one wishes to claim for his 
 ' reading ' of our land a complete and exclusive 
 truthfulness. It always bears the stamp of his 
 idiosyncrasy ; it has not only his manner but his 
 mannerisms. We are always wise if we call in more 
 than one expert ; and, finally, not all the experts, 
 in these things, are to see for us ; their function is 
 to teach us to see for ourselves. And has not 
 Turner helped us to see the beauty of the hills and 
 valleys of Devonshire, as in Crossing the Broof^ and 
 such drawings as the Totnes ? In the Arundel and 
 the Brlghtllng Observatory, we have all the broad 
 spaciousness of the Sussex Downs with the wide 
 expanse of sky above and around them. There is 
 fine rendering of impression in such drawings of the 
 more robust landscape of the hill-country of Lanca- 
 shire and Yorkshire, as the Crook of Lune, the Kirkby 
 Lonsdale Churchyard, and the Richmond from the Moors. 
 One can find no words to express the sense that is 
 conveyed by the first of these three drawings of 
 beauty of colour and contour, of tenderest play of 
 light and shade in the warm afternoon sunshine, of 
 subtlest gradations of tone that carry our sight by 
 insensible degrees, as in nature itself, from the river 
 rushing tumultuously through the narrow gorge im-
 
 i 4 4 TURNER 
 
 mediately below us, along its course under the receding 
 hills, or over the valley, with its infinite suggestiveness 
 of trees and homesteads, to the distance mingled 
 of grey and blue and purple where Whernside shows 
 clear over the nearer fells, while the summit of 
 Ingleborough is veiled by glowing clouds ! As with 
 this drawing, so it is with others, with numbers 
 of these drawings of Lonsdale and Ribblesdale, of 
 Wharfedale, Swaledale, Teesdale, and the rest ; one 
 sits and looks long even at mere reproductions of 
 them, divided between the keenest enjoyment of their 
 beauty and an insatiable desire to be away in the dales 
 and upon the moors, where one has wandered for days 
 together with Turner often in mind. 
 
 So much alone we must say about Turner's render- 
 ing of the hill-country, which is beautiful, if often 
 spaciously and therefore solemnly beautiful, rather 
 than grand. We might seem to be making for an 
 anticlimax in turning to the grandeur of Britain after 
 that of Switzerland. Happily, for those who must 
 needs stay at home, impressiveness does not increase, 
 in mathematical ratio to increase in size. We must 
 take form, colour, and atmospheric effect into account. 
 The vast antiquity of our mountains, also, makes a 
 strong appeal to us. By as much lower than the 
 Alps as they are, by so much longer have they resisted
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 145 
 
 fate. And how much of power is left to them ! 
 Look at Turner's Gordale Scar and Hardrazv Fa//, 
 his sketch of Great End and Scatcfell Pikes do we 
 not hear the murmur of ' Glaramara's inmost caves ' ? 
 his Langdale Pikes, or the Ben Arthur of the Liber 
 Studiorum, and say if we need leave our island to 
 realise the power of the hills and of the forces that 
 war against them ! 
 
 We must not forget also, if we do no more than 
 mention it, that Turner follows the English river 
 than which, what is more beautiful ? from source 
 to sea, as well as showing us the greater Rhine, and 
 something of the rivers of France. 
 
 Hamerton, in summing up his estimate of Turner 
 as a landscape painter, says that he was ' a student of 
 nature whose range was vast indeed . . . yet not 
 universal, for he never adequately illustrated the 
 familiar forest trees, and had not the sentiment of the 
 forest, neither had he the rustic sentiment in its 
 perfection.' On the whole this is true, though 
 some of the drawings recently exhibited to the 
 public for the first time might have modified some- 
 what Hamerton's saying as to the forest trees. 
 Turner's travels hardly gave him the chance of 
 acquiring the sentiment of the forest, of the fear- 
 compelling loneliness and silence which Boecklin,
 
 146 TURNER 
 
 familiar with the forests of Germany, called in the 
 aid of a strange monster to express. Yet the land- 
 scape in Rizpah does not fall far short of this. That 
 Turner had not the rustic sentiment in perfection we 
 may readily grant. Even Ruskin did not maintain 
 that Turner had no limitations. Without crossing 
 the border between landscape and genre painting 
 Constable got into intimate touch with the daily 
 round and common task of simple country-life in 
 such pictures as The Hay- Wain, The Cornfield and 
 The Valley Farm. We are far removed in them from 
 the bustle and turmoil of life ; we are where men 
 work slowly, steadily, quietly, as the seed germinates 
 and the corn and the fruit ripen. We think of soil 
 and stones, of damp houses and of sudden showers 
 from trees when the wind stirs them after rain. How 
 plainly we should hear the ticking of the clock were 
 we in the house of The Glebe Farm! Of all this 
 there is nothing in Turner, except in some unfinished 
 drawings and paintings, such as are now to be seen in 
 the national collections, and here and there in smaller 
 finished works. And these exceptions reminding 
 us of Constable, and even of De Wint seem to show 
 that Turner was not devoid of the rustic sentiment, 
 but that it was overwhelmed by his feeling for the 
 epic grandeur and the idyllic beauty of nature.
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 147 
 
 Of his sense of the idyllic beauty of nature, and, 
 which concerns us now, particularly of the idyllic 
 beauty of the English lowlands and of the borderland, 
 where the hills are dying down into the plains, there 
 is no lack of evidence. 
 
 I must say little, but yet something, about Turner's 
 rendering of trees. It may seem a trifling subject 
 after mountains, lakes and rivers. But one brief word 
 shows them to have a significance that these do not 
 possess, and of a wholly different, a higher kind 
 they have life. And if the reader will look over the 
 illustrations in this book he will find that, although 
 Turner may often have treated trees conventionally, 
 he none the less interpreted their life sympathetically, 
 almost to the extent of animisim, or of the pathetic 
 fallacy again. He was carefully observant of their 
 vital structure, he showed them in peaceful youth, in 
 vigorous maturity, in dismembered and decaying age, 
 in the stark aspect of their death. 
 
 M. de la Sizeranne says, somewhat self-contra- 
 dictorily, that all that England does not possess haunts 
 the Englishman's spirit, and yet that Turner is English 
 in his passion for the sea, ' the great highway by which 
 England communicates with the world's immensity, 
 and through which the British Empire is in touch with 
 its colonies.' Only an Englishman, he thinks, could
 
 148 TURNER 
 
 have conceived the idea of painting The Fighting 
 Temeraire ; yet Turner had been familiar from child- 
 hood with the Thames and its shipping. Evidently, 
 in this particular at least, the common never became 
 the commonplace to Turner ; the passion for the sea 
 lasted to the end of his life. Is it exaggeration to say 
 that in his paintings, his drawings and his sketches he 
 interpreted its every mood from perfect calm to the 
 utmost fury of the storm, that he studied it under every 
 phase of light and colour, at all hours of the day from 
 earliest dawn until the coming of the deep blackness of 
 night that ends all seeing ? In the next chapter I have 
 something to say about Turner's interest in shipping 
 and the life of the sailor, and, inevitably, at the same 
 time, about his rendering of the sea in storm. I will 
 only say further here that as with the mountains, so 
 with the sea, it was with a sense of its dynamic 
 power, when driven to action by the wind, that 
 Turner was most impressed. So often does he re- 
 present it thus, that even when he shows it in what 
 looks like playful mood, lightly toying with the ships 
 and boats that venture on it, or when it is in perfect 
 calm, we feel as if there were deception, or but a 
 brief interval of quiet in a nature given to sudden 
 outbursts of ungovernable rage. The calm of the 
 Scarborough, in the ' Harbours of England,' and the
 
 TURNER'S READING OF EARTH 149 
 
 exhilarating mood of the sea in the Whitbj^ only 
 presage the wrath of the Liber plate, The Yorkshire 
 Coast, or of the Wrecl^ off Hastings. 
 
 I have endeavoured in this chapter to hint in words 
 at the range and beauty and power of Turner's picture- 
 reading of the earth. We have now to follow his 
 reading of the life of man, of whom the earth is 
 the dwelling-place.
 
 IV 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 
 
 I HAVE given in the first chapter of this book the 
 reasons for my writing this, the last chapter of it. 
 Not only in Turner's illustrations of poetry and history, 
 but again and again, almost invariably, in pictures that 
 are primarily landscapes, there is a human interest that, 
 when we consider it cumulatively, linking all the pictures 
 together, forms itself into a great epic of humanity. 
 The figures may be insignificant in size they usually 
 are ; they may be badly drawn, they are often 
 ludicrously badly drawn ; in many cases we might, if 
 we were so minded, ignoring any further meaning, 
 regard them, as we should sheep or cattle, as being 
 introduced merely for purely pictorial purposes, as 
 patches of colour and so forth. We may often, for such 
 purposes, wish them away. But in many instances, 
 figures, and ships or buildings in connexion with the 
 figures, count for so much in the picture, that it is im- 
 possible to think of them as merely incidental. Separate 
 150
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 151 
 
 consideration of what obviously meant so much to 
 Turner himself seems to me essential to an adequate 
 study of his life-work. 
 
 We may well begin with instances of his interest in 
 mythology. The landscape painter cannot fail to 
 wonder what is the source of the power and life and 
 beauty that confront him in the visible universe. 
 Turner's mere learning in mythology was slight enough. 
 This has already been said. But beyond the little he 
 learned from books there was his own communing with 
 nature and life ; and this is the stuff out of which all 
 mythologies have been made, and are still being made. 
 How the great sun-myth of Apollo must have appealed 
 to one who so often watched the morning victory of 
 the sun, and his defeat at nightfall ! Mr. Monkhouse 
 makes a slip, remarkable for him, in writing of Ulysses 
 deriding Polyphemus, when he says that the sun is 
 dying. In the picture itself the heads of the horses 
 of Apollo can be seen as they draw his chariot above 
 the sea-horizon. Apollo and the Python is one of the 
 pictures in which the figures absolutely dominate the 
 scene, and give to the landscape its significance. Here 
 is the old-time personification of the daily phenomena 
 that formed the subject-matter of many if not the 
 greater number of Turner's pictures and drawings. 
 In a rock-encumbered valley, flanked by precipitous
 
 152 TURNER 
 
 mountains, the conflict between the spirit of light 
 and the spirit of darkness is being waged. Were it 
 not that victory has plainly declared itself for the 
 former, we might well think the combatants unequally 
 matched. We should have trembled for this youth 
 when his huge and horrible foe advanced upon him, as 
 the Israelites must have trembled for David when 
 Goliath came forth to meet him. But this is a god, 
 there is a circle of light around his head ; he has no 
 fear of defeat. He has sent arrow after arrow into 
 the monster's coiling body, a great gaping wound has 
 opened out, and he is writhing in his death-agony. 
 His jaws are widely opened, but if they close it will 
 not be upon his foe. Calmly the god watches him, 
 with his bow in his left hand, and another arrow in 
 his right, to see if aught more be needed to complete 
 his victory. No, it is complete ! The monster that 
 in his struggles breaks down the trees, sends great 
 masses of rock hurtling through the air, and from 
 whose jaws foul vapours arise, has fallen helplessly into 
 a crevasse, and a pool of his poisonous black blood 
 is spreading over the ground. Yet this victory has to 
 be won again and again ; as the huge worm dies another 
 of the brood, small as yet, issues from his body ! 
 
 This great picture has compelled universal admira- 
 tion ; it has literally inspired with awe. Though
 
 '53 
 
 Turner went to literature for his subject, it was but for 
 the form of it that he went. He found in Ovid, and 
 what other poets he read, only their version of what he 
 had already learned from nature and life. It has been 
 pointed out that he made free use of his literary 
 material ; he shaped it, as he shaped the phenomena of 
 nature, to suit the needs of his own imagination. Tb 
 the title of the picture in the Academy catalogue he 
 appended lines of his own composing, which combine 
 two of the dragon-stories of Ovid's ' Metamorphoses,' 
 the one of Apollo and the other of Cadmus : 
 
 Envenom'd by thy darts, the monster coil'd, 
 Portentous, horrible, and vast, his snake-like form : 
 Rent the huge portal of his rocky den, 
 And in his throes of death, he tore 
 His many wounds in one, while earth 
 Absorbing, blacken'd with his gore. 
 
 The figure of the youthful god shows not only that 
 Turner could draw the figure quite competently if he 
 wished to do so, but that he could also make it finely 
 expressive. The frame and limbs of the archer are 
 relaxed after the strain they have just undergone, but 
 the head is thrown forward as he closely watches the 
 movements of his dying foe. M. Chesneau well says 
 that the strangely imaginative French painter, Gustave 
 Moreau, would have recognised in this figure the work
 
 154 TURNER 
 
 of a genius akin to his own. And while the god 
 visibly embodies all that is bright and pure and yet, 
 we may well say, he is a Greek god, and by no means 
 a St. George of Christian legend the dragon has 
 perhaps no rival in art as an embodiment of all that is 
 dark and loathsomely evil. 
 
 Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, is, in the significance of 
 its subject, a close companion to Jfpollo and the Python, 
 and no less wonderful in imagination. There were 
 eighteen years between the painting of the two pictures, 
 181 1 being the date of the latter, and 1829 that of the 
 former, which shows to the full the magnificent ren- 
 dering of light and colour to which Turner had then 
 attained. To the splendour of the sky at sunrise in 
 this picture reference has already been made. The 
 arrows of Apollo are shooting out in every direction 
 and driving back the forces of darkness which still 
 linger along the sea, and behind the ships and the 
 mountains. After what a night, upon that rocky isle, is 
 the sun rising again ! Ulysses the wanderer, and his 
 companions, seeking hospitality, had been imprisoned by 
 the one-eyed monster, Polyphemus the Cyclops, within 
 his cave ; two of the company he had killed and 
 devoured ; and threatened UJysses and the remainder 
 with a like fate. But Ulysses, having made him drunk 
 with wine, drove a blazing bar of wood into his eye

 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 155 
 
 and blinded him, and though he sat in the doorway of 
 the cave, Ulysses and his companions escaped by 
 hanging under the Cyclops' sheep as they passed 
 out of it. When they had reached their ships, 
 Ulysses cried out in derision of the monster whom he 
 had outwitted, and twice Polyphemus hurled a vast 
 rock which all but struck the ship of the derider. 
 This last scene is the one chosen by Turner for his 
 picture. Ulysses, waving the still blazing brand with 
 which he has blinded the monster, and loudly taunting 
 him, stands on the high poop of his vessel, a splendid 
 galley, furnished with both oars and lofty sails, but 
 such an one as the Greeks never built. Turner was no 
 plodding antiquary ; he has ever to be judged by the 
 letter, not by the spirit. Round the prow of the ship 
 water-nymphs are disporting themselves, while the rays 
 of the rising sun are reflected from them as if flashed from 
 sparkling jewels. High on the flank of one of the island 
 mountains is the vast, shadowy form of Polyphemus, 
 hardly distinguishable from the mountains themselves. 
 In the Odyssey, Ulysses says that he was a man 'of 
 monstrous size, who shepherded his flocks alone and 
 afar, and was not conversant with others, but dwelt 
 apart in lawlessness of mind. Yea, for he was a mon- 
 strous thing and fashioned marvellously, nor was he 
 like to any man that lives by bread, but like a wooded
 
 156 TURNER 
 
 peak of the towering hills, which stands out apart and 
 alone from others.' Turner's Polyphemus falls nothing 
 short of this description. It is as if the ' Theseus ' of 
 the Parthenon, increased a hundred times in size, were 
 beside himself with rage, for the monster, as he hears 
 the taunts of Ulysses, grips his head with one hand, 
 and raises high the other with impotently threatening 
 gesture. This is what Apollo looks out upon from 
 his chariot, as his horses those whose heads faced the 
 * Theseus ' on the Parthenon pediment bring him up 
 above the sea-horizon, and we may well think of him 
 as rejoicing to see brute force outwitted by cunning 
 intelligence. 
 
 These are the two finest of Turner's mythological 
 pictures, the ones in which his art showed itself easily 
 able to give to myth and legend pictorial expression 
 that, as the Greeks said the Zeus of Phidias added 
 something to the existing conception of him, adds 
 something to our sense of the wonder of the old tales 
 in which men expressed their sense of the wonder of 
 the universe. 
 
 Among other pictures of mythological purport, The 
 Goddess of Discord in the Garden of the Hesperides is 
 one that asks for more than mere mention, if only for 
 the terrible monster in it. The picture, painted in 
 1 806, was done in rivalry of Poussin. Its geology is
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 157 
 
 faulty, ^nd Ruskin had much to say against the 
 picture, his bias against classical landscape making 
 him somewhat unjust to it. In the fifth volume 
 of ' Modern Painters ' he corrected one erroneous 
 opinion about it that he had written in his earlier 
 notes on Turner's works. Faulty geology notwith- 
 standing or aiding : it is a magnificently impressive 
 composition. Into this gloomy mountain valley the 
 sun only obtains a scanty, grudged admission. Ate, 
 the goddess of discord, is receiving from one of the 
 Hesperides the golden apple w-hich she will throw 
 among the guests at the wedding-feast of Peleus } 
 angered because she alone among the deities has been 
 uninvited, and will thus create jealousy between Hera 
 and Athene and Aphrodite, with direful result in the ten 
 years' siege of Troy. The Hesperides, the Maidens 
 of the West, personified the westerly winds and sun- 
 shine that filled the earth with fruitfulness ; and the 
 Dragon, Ladon, personified the dry south wind, 
 blowing off the Sahara, and denying fruitfulness to 
 lands unsheltered from it. The maidens in Turner's 
 picture look as if they had been nurtured in a land of 
 healthfulness and plenty ; the dragon looks as harsh and 
 dry as the wind he personifies. It is as if life had 
 been given to a petrified skeleton. A jagged edge of 
 rock might be slowly crawling towards an overhanging
 
 158 TURNER 
 
 precipice. The bony thinness of his jaws and the 
 empty eye-socket have led to the suggestion that 
 Turner had studied the fossil remains of some extinct 
 monster ; but whatever basis in fact there may be, to 
 the imagination of the artist it is due that here is a 
 creature to which we can easily credit such blighting 
 malignancy that nothing could live where he had 
 dragged his scaly length, and in air into which he had 
 exhaled his poisonous breath. 
 
 The number of paintings into which mythological 
 figures are introduced is quite considerable. In most 
 of them, as in The Golden Bough, referred to on an 
 earlier page, the figures are small in size and merely 
 vivify the landscape. Yet, as was said with reference 
 to the picture just mentioned, we cannot feel the same 
 about the landscape, knowing what the figures signify, 
 as we should were they absent or without their par- 
 ticular significance. It is so with such large oil 
 paintings as The Bay of TSaice, with Apollo and the 
 Sibyl, Apollo and Daphne, The Vale of Tempe, Mercury 
 and Argus, Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, and 
 others. To an ideal rendering of Tivoli is given 
 a title, The Rape of Troserpine, that is perplexing 
 until we have discovered that what at first glance 
 seems to be a bonfire or a burning of leaves and 
 rubbish in one corner of the picture is meant to repre-
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 159 
 
 sent the god of the underworld carrying off in his 
 chariot the terrified maiden amid the cries and gesticu- 
 lations of her companions. We need not catalogue all 
 these pictures, or dwell upon the myths they rather 
 call to our minds than illustrate. It is enough to 
 show how constantly these things were in Turner's 
 mind. They evidence that exalted view of nature 
 which makes a great part of his landscape painting 
 describable as pageantry. 
 
 That misnamed work the Liber Studiorum includes 
 several mythological subjects. One of the plates 
 repeats the Jason oil painting ; and here, where we 
 have another dragon-contest, one huge coil of the 
 monster suddenly rising above the thicket so that 
 Jason can see it, not only the bones on the ground, 
 but the hollow, riven trees, are in sympathy with the 
 ' literary ' subject ; for, as Ruskin says, ' the painter 
 addresses thereby that morbid and fearful condition of 
 mind which he has endeavoured to excite in the 
 spectator, and which in reality would have seen in 
 every trunk and bough, as it penetrated into the deeper 
 thicket, the object of its terror.' The figure of 
 Jason is very expressive. His back is towards us, yet 
 we can see that his movement has been arrested by the 
 sudden sight of his foe, that he is ready at need to slip 
 back into hiding, or, if he find an opportunity, to rush
 
 160 TURNER 
 
 forward and deliver an unexpected blow. In the 
 Procris and Cephalus the landscape is tenderly beautiful, 
 and, as Mr. Stopford Brooke says, the trees seem to 
 be leaning as if in mute sympathy over the lover and 
 the dying maiden whom he has unwittingly slain. We 
 need only note that Syrinx fleeing from Pan, ^E sac us 
 and Hesperie, Narcissus and Echo and Cjlaucus and 
 Scylla are other similar subjects among the Liber 
 plates. 
 
 Some of the narratives of the Old Testament could 
 not fail to stir Turner's imagination ; they have epic 
 grandeur, and whenever we think of them we in- 
 evitably give them a landscape setting, among the bare 
 hills of Judasa, or the mountains of the southern 
 wilderness, or the pyramids and temples that flanked 
 the ebbing and flowing waters of the Nile. The 
 history and legends of the Jewish people, often so 
 scenically dramatic, could not fail to appeal to his 
 imagination, and lent themselves to pictures in which 
 the figures could be subordinated pictorially to the 
 landscape. Two of his latest works are Shade and 
 Darkness The Evening of the 'Deluge, and Light and 
 Colour The Morning after the Deluge. We might 
 have been sure beforehand that he would not, as he did 
 not, pass by the plagues of Egypt and the destruction 
 of Sodom. Rizpah watching the bones of her children
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 161 
 
 is a subject finely treated in both the oil painting and 
 the Liber plate. Illustration of the New Testament 
 was outside the scope of his genius. When he 
 painted a Holy Family he produced merely a poor 
 Reynolds, just as when he treated classical subjects 
 with figures filling a large part of the canvas he 
 produced merely weak imitations of Titian. The 
 temptation in the wilderness accounts for a small 
 drawing in which a figure perched high on a slender 
 Gothic pinnacle shows that Turner was either wholly 
 ignorant of Syrian architecture or was sublimely in- 
 different to archaeological accuracy indeed, he was 
 both. Pilate Washing his Hands is a picture that must 
 be written down a failure. The Apocalyptic Vision 
 was sure to appeal to his imagination, and he painted 
 an Angel Standing in the Sun, again without success. 
 Such pictures as these are interesting, not for their art, 
 but as showing how widely Turner's imagination ranged 
 and how high it soared. 
 
 Two quotations, appended by Turner to the titles of 
 pictures, will show how we ought to understand the 
 many architectural compositions, in which also some 
 actual historical incident is often introduced, taken 
 from Greece, Carthage, Rome or Venice. From 
 Byron's ' Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,' he quotes for the 
 picture bearing that title the lines :
 
 162 TURNER 
 
 And now, fair Italy, 
 
 Thou art the garden of the world, the home 
 Of all art yields and nature can decree 
 Even in thy desert what is like to thee ? 
 Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste 
 More rich than other climes' fertility, 
 Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin grac'd 
 With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced. 
 
 For Caligula's Palace and ^Bridge he gives lines of 
 his own writing, from the mysterious Fallacies of Hope, 
 which, if lacking the Byronic beauty and power, are 
 yet Byronic in spirit : 
 
 What now remains of all the mighty bridge 
 Which made the Lucrine like an inner pool, 
 Caligula, but massy fragments left 
 As monuments of doubt and ruined hopes, 
 Yet gleaming in the morning's ray, that tell 
 How Raise's shore was loved in times gone by. 
 
 Is the burden of all these pictures of Turner's the 
 cry, * Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity 
 of vanities ; all is vanity. What profit hath a man 
 of all his labour which he taketh under the sun ? 
 One generation passeth away and another generation 
 cometh : but the earth abideth for ever ' ? The 
 rise of cities and nations, followed by their inevitable 
 decline and downfall, seems to have oppressed Turner. 
 But that he had no vision of an ultimate goal to be
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 163 
 
 reached by humanity nothing like the prophecy with 
 which the English historian of the Holy Roman 
 Empire closes his book, calmly anticipating that in 
 the future will prevail ' the love of peace, the sense of 
 the brotherhood of mankind, the recognition of the 
 sacredness and supremacy of the spiritual life ' who 
 can say ? 
 
 Among the plates of the Liber Studiorum is one 
 entitled The Temple of Jupiter in the Island of Aegina. 
 Mr. Frank Short, who has so faithfully reproduced 
 some of the Liber plates, regrets that such a beautiful 
 composition should have in it the incident of a girl 
 dancing and beating a tambourine for the amusement 
 of a group of reclining Turks. The temple is in 
 ruins. In another version of the same subject the 
 temple is still intact. Again there is a dance : but 
 this time, as the title tells us, the people are dancing 
 the national dance, the Romaika. It is unnecessary 
 to point the moral of this contrast. 
 
 It was upon Carthage and Rome rather than upon 
 Greece that Turner drew for these historical com- 
 positions. Greece was to him rather the land of myth 
 and legend ; and while Italy also meant this to him, 
 the splendid achievements of Rome, of the Rome the 
 ruins of which he had seen and drawn and painted, 
 were at least equally dominant in his thoughts of Italy.
 
 164 TURNER 
 
 And while the vision of the triumphs of Rome rose 
 up before him, he saw also, and felt the tragedy of, the 
 fall of the great Phoenician colony in Africa, over 
 whose ruins Rome callously passed on to empire that 
 included well-nigh all of the world that was within her 
 knowledge. 
 
 There is quite a series of Carthage pictures, about 
 twenty in all. Several of them transport us to the 
 legendary days of Dido and ^Eneas. Then we come 
 to the fateful struggle with Rome. There was no 
 room for both these great cities in the basin of the 
 Mediterranean Sea. Turner painted a Hannibal 
 crossing the Alps. A picture by J. Cozens of the 
 same subject seems to have suggested it to him ; and a 
 magnificent thunderstorm that he and Mr. Fawkes 
 watched at Farnley gave him the effect that he 
 required. He had painted the building of Carthage ; 
 afterwards came a companion picture of the decline of 
 the city, with hostages being sent to Rome. There 
 are several Rome pictures, including a wonderful 
 dream of the splendour of the imperial city, Agrippina 
 landing with the Ashes of Germanicus. None of the 
 large pictures, however, shows perhaps as well how 
 Turner felt the great pulse-beatings of history as one 
 of the illustrations to Rogers' 'Italy.' He was no 
 scholar, acquainted with all the sequences of events ;
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 165 
 
 but the great issues of history moved him as a man, 
 and called forth his imaginative genius. There have 
 been several Romes. There is more than one 
 legendary Rome. Then comes the Republic ; then 
 the Empire ; then the Rome of the Papacy and the 
 Holy Roman Empire. Since Turner's day there has 
 come into being still another: Rome the capital of 
 reunited Italy. The illustration to Rogers' * Italy ' is 
 a vista through the Arch of Titus of the Forum, with 
 the three columns and fragment of entablature of the 
 Temple of Castor and Pollux, the Arch of Septimius 
 Severus, the temples at the base of the Capitoline 
 Hill, and, closing the distance, the modern buildings 
 of the Capitol. A funeral procession is crossing the 
 line of the ancient Via Sacra, accompanied by monks 
 and members of the Confratemlta. In the immediate 
 foreground, on a block of masonry which we may 
 suppose to have fallen from the Arch of Titus, is 
 inscribed, in huge letters, the magic name Roma ! Is 
 it presumptuous to think that Turner might do as one 
 has often done oneself, speak out the name, the very 
 sound of which evokes vast indefinite dreams of 
 purpose pursued, of power gained and extended, of 
 splendour increased, through century after century, 
 followed first by decay, then by a marvellous rebirth, 
 and claim to hold for all mankind the keys of heaven
 
 1 66 TURNER 
 
 and hell ? * I am in Rome,' are the words over 
 which the engraving from Turner's drawing stands : 
 
 Oft as the morning ray 
 Visits these eyes, waking at once I cry, 
 Whence this excess of joy ? What has befallen me ? 
 And from within a thrilling voice replies, 
 Thou art in Rome ! A thousand busy. thoughts 
 Rush on my mind, a thousand images , 
 And I spring up as girt to run a race. 
 
 A third great historic city, Venice, counts for more 
 in the art of Turner than either Rome or Carthage. 
 He might well, and did, turn to her again and again 
 for the sake of her marvellous beauty, to which both 
 nature and art contribute ; the former in the glorious 
 light and colour of her skies reflected from the so often 
 tranquil waters of the lagoons, and the latter in her 
 multitude of palaces and churches. Of this beauty 
 Turner gave many an imaginative rendering ; but he 
 also looked at the present for evidence of a splendid 
 past. He, in his art, apostrophised Venice as did 
 Shelley in his verse : 
 
 Sun-girt City ! thou hast been 
 Ocean's child, and then his queen. 
 Now is come a darker day ; 
 And thou soon must be his prey, 
 If the power that raised thee here 
 Hallow so thy watery bier.
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 167 
 
 Though his sketches may only present to us, in 
 Turner's way of presenting things, the Venice that he 
 knew, it is impossible, before more than one of the oil 
 paintings, such as the one where he has introduced 
 Canaletto painting, with the crowded shipping and 
 bustle of strenuous life, not to think of the Venice 
 whose argosies linked east and west in mutually gainful 
 commerce. 
 
 Incidentally, in the course of travel, Turner made 
 sketches of many other cities, and, whether this was 
 intentional or not, they appeal to our sense of history, 
 of the passing of the generations. Cathedrals, churches, 
 palaces, fortified bridges, city walls and gates, in 
 Turner's drawings as in themselves, speak to us of the 
 past. In one drawing of Lucerne, for example, he 
 forces the defensive walls and towers of the city into 
 such prominence that more than at the place itself we 
 are reminded of the heroic history of the little, moun- 
 tainous land. And what is more eloquent of the 
 troublous Middle Ages than are the two drawings of 
 Chateau Gaillard ? 
 
 Mention of this English fortress in France leads us 
 naturally to point out that the interest Turner's own 
 country had for him, as evidenced in his many English 
 paintings and drawings, was hardly if any less historic 
 than picturesque. Let us test this statement first by
 
 168 TURNER 
 
 further reference to what is perhaps the most popular^ 
 and certainly one of the finest, of Turner's oil paintings, 
 The Fighting Temeraire, of which Mr. Monkhouse 
 says, ' 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 " was and always 
 will be as popular as it deserves.' Mr. Monkhouse 
 has already been quoted as calling Turner 'the great 
 composer of chromatic harmonies in forms of sea and 
 sky, hills and plains, sunshine and storm, towns 
 and shipping, castles and cathedrals ' ; and the de- 
 scription is perfectly true. His works tell as 
 chromatic harmonies, and cause a thrill of pleasure, 
 when we are too far from them to see what they 
 represent. But the above eloquent appreciation of 
 The Fighting Temeraire shows that even where 
 Turner's art, both in setting forth the splendour of the 
 sunset and in composing a glowing colour harmony, 
 is at its highest, the appeal of the picture to other than 
 the sensuous emotions may be so overwhelmingly strong 
 as to make the beauty of art and nature subordinate, as
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 169 
 
 in truth they ever must be, in final estimate, to human 
 remembrance and hope, sorrow and joy, clinging 
 affection and self-sacrificing love. 
 
 Of the Cyclops and the sails and flags in Ulysses 
 deriding Polyphemus, Ruskin could say that he wished 
 them out of the way so that the landscape might 
 be better seen. He does not say this of the old ship 
 in this picture. And yet how he is moved by the 
 natural part of the scene, at which indeed one can look 
 and continue to look, as one looks over the sea at 
 sundown and on until the twilight and the dark ! 
 ' In this picture,' he says, ' under the blazing veil 
 of vaulted fire, which lights the vessel on her last path, 
 there is a blue, deep, desolate horror of darkness out 
 of which you can hear the voice of the night wind, and 
 the dull boom of the disturbed sea ; the cold deadly 
 shadows of the twilight are gathering through every 
 sunbeam, and moment by moment as you look, you will 
 fancy some new film and faintness of the night has 
 risen over the vastness of the departing form.' Yet 
 for him, as for Mr. Monkhouse, and surely for all who 
 see the picture, this slowly dying glory of the day is 
 but a solemn requiem for the noble vessel passing 
 to her end ; for he says again, ' Of all pictures of 
 subjects not visibly involving human pain, this is, 
 I believe, the most pathetic that was ever painted.
 
 lyo TURNER 
 
 The utmost pensiveness which can ordinarily be given 
 to a landscape depends on adjuncts of ruin ; but no 
 ruin was ever so affecting as this gliding of the vessel 
 to her grave.' 
 
 Charles Kingsley said that if he wished to know 
 if anyone were an English gentleman he would ask, 
 ' Does he know his Bewick ? ' Without making an 
 absolute test, one can unhesitatingly affirm, and, after 
 what has just been said and quoted about The Fighting 
 Temeraire, no reader is likely hastily to question the 
 saying, that one great help to making an English boy 
 into a patriot would be to bring him up on Turner, 
 whose pictures again and again echo the noble adjura- 
 tion, ' Love thou thy Land ! ' 
 
 That part of patriotism which consists in a resolve 
 to hold our land inviolate by the invader has surely 
 been stimulated in many, has been, as it were, set 
 visibly before them, by his pictures of our great naval 
 ports, with the warships entering or leaving them, and 
 by many a picture in which, looking out from the 
 shore, we see the great hulls and lofty masts of what 
 was in Turner's day a so much more picturesque, 
 if less appallingly destructive, first line of defence 
 than that which we have to-day. Can one ever look 
 at the grim monsters of our modern navy, lying in the 
 Medway or off Margate, or slowly steaming up the
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 171 
 
 Channel beneath the guns of Dover Castle, without 
 thinking of Turner ? Or, without thinking of him, 
 can one look at the long line of martello towers 
 stretching from Beachy Head by Pevensey Level 
 where William the Norman landed on towards the 
 cliffs at Hastings ? One almost expects to see, as in 
 Turner's drawings, a regiment of soldiers on the 
 march, or a horse-soldier riding at full speed. For 
 Turner painted along our shores when the risk of in- 
 vasion was, or just had been, no slight one ; when only the 
 power of this island-kingdom stood between Napoleon 
 and the dominion of Europe, which was the goal 
 of his ambition. Two of Turner's oil paintings, The 
 Battle of Trafalgar and The Field of Waterloo, celebrate 
 two of the victories that enabled the nations to breathe 
 freely again. 
 
 But the greater and the better part of patriotism 
 consists in neither defence nor defiance, nor even in 
 any but the most generous rivalry. If ever the day 
 comes when both the war of the sword and the war 
 of competitive commerce shall be but hateful memories, 
 when the unity of the nation shall be merged in ' the 
 parliament of man, the federation of the world,' there 
 will still be good reason for the call ' Love thou thy 
 Land ! ' And so long as our land remains sea- 
 surrounded, the sea must fascinate its people ; for it
 
 ij2 TURNER 
 
 can never be but that the thought of danger will be 
 connected with those that go down to the sea in 
 ships. What room for patriotism is there ! To the 
 landscape painter two kinds of industry, of work in 
 which men are mutually serviceable, are necessarily 
 most in evidence : that of the farmer and that of the 
 fisherman one must add that Turner often showed 
 his interest in the work of the builder. He sees also 
 the various ways in which both men and merchandise 
 are carried from place to place, from land to land, 
 from continent to continent. The toil of the sea, in 
 both its forms, was endlessly interesting to Turner. 
 He studied and drew and painted boats and ships with 
 the zest of a boy. Is there anything to tell of the 
 life of fisher-folk that he has not told ? He showed 
 them putting off to sea, with wives and children 
 bidding them farewell ; he showed them toiling at 
 their nets, battling with the storm, running home for 
 safety, landing their catch, cleaning and selling the 
 fish, mending their boats and nets, patching their sails. 
 He painted also the ships of commerce, from the 
 small coasting vessel that is beached in the bay for 
 the landing of its cargo, to the great merchantmen 
 that go voyaging to distant lands. He knew them all, 
 and loved them, as the sailor knows and loves them. 
 He had models of ships in his studio. All sorts of
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 173 
 
 craft, under all conditions of sailing and weather, can 
 be studied in his pictures. When the sailing ship, 
 except for pleasure's sake, has for ever disappeared, 
 what a store of antiquarian knowledge about it Turner's 
 works will be ! 
 
 In The Fighting Temeraire there is pathos ; but 
 there is that which goes deeper than pathos. For 
 those that go down to the sea there are storm and 
 danger and the agony of death ; and these are never 
 absent from our thought of it. Out of what depth 
 of human feeling came the Apocalyptic vision, ' and 
 there was no more sea ' ! It is with a sense of vast, 
 immeasurable, impersonal power that the sea affects 
 us. If it could be cruel, implacable, vengeful, it 
 would be less terrible. It brings man to death with a 
 blank unconsciousness that is infinitely colder than 
 indifference. To this horror Turner in many a 
 picture has given the most powerful expression. We 
 see ships helplessly huddled together in the storm, the 
 frantic effort to beat up against the wind on a lee 
 shore, the lifeboat pulling out to the vessel that is 
 throwing up signals of distress, the vessel breaking up 
 at the foot of the cliffs upon which stand spectators 
 powerless to help, fishing-boats hurled against the 
 rocks upon which their occupants leap, only, as seems 
 well-nigh certain, to be washed off again by the next
 
 174 TURNER 
 
 incoming wave. Of this last scene, the Coast of 
 Yorkshire, in the Liber Studiorufn, Mr. Stopford Brooke 
 says, ' The cliffs are lias, and drawn so well that it 
 would be possible for a geologist to name them, and 
 the highest of them, fronting the sea like a fortress, 
 has the haughty air of a defier of the storm. On it, 
 set a little inland, and in a space of clearer sky, 
 where the gale is for a moment less violent for 
 Turner knew the gusty nature of a north-east tempest 
 on that coast stands the lighthouse : the one witness 
 of the watchful struggle of man with nature and of 
 his monarchy over it. It dominates all the scene. 
 But it could not save the fisher folk from ruin, and we 
 are left by Turner to muse upon the helplessness of 
 man and on the sorrow of his toil.' If ever anyone 
 feels that Ruskin's eloquence adds to what Turner saw 
 and reported, it assuredly is not so with reference to 
 the description of what the sea finally meant to him, 
 that it was ' a very incalculable and unhorizontal thing, 
 setting its " water-mark " sometimes on the highest 
 heavens, as well as on sides of ships ; very breakable 
 in pieces ; half of a wave separable from the other 
 half, and on the instant carriageable miles inland ; 
 not in any wise limiting itself to a state of apparent 
 liquidity, but now striking like a steel gauntlet, and 
 now becoming a cloud, and vanishing, no eye could
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 175 
 
 tell whither ; one moment a flint cave, the next a 
 marble pillar, the next a mere white fleece thickening 
 the thundery rain. He never forgot those facts ; 
 never afterwards was able to recover the idea of 
 positive distinction between sea and sky, or sea and 
 land. Steel gauntlet, black rock, white cloud, and 
 men and masts gnashed to pieces and disappearing in 
 a few breaths and splinters among them ; a little 
 blood on the rock angle, like red sea-weed, sponged 
 away by the next splash of the foam, and the glistening 
 granite and green water all pure again in vacant wrath. 
 So stayed by him, for ever, the Image of the Sea.' 
 
 There are two stories, each connected with one 
 of Turner's pictures, that serve to show what intensity 
 of emotion was in him and obtained expression in 
 his work. The first is told of the picture, exhibited 
 in 1842, and bearing, in the Academy catalogue, 
 the title Snowstorm. Steamboat off the harbour mouth 
 making signals, and going by the lead. The author 
 was in this storm the night the 'Ariel' left Harwich. 
 The critics contemptuously dismissed it as ' soapsuds 
 and whitewash.' Ruskin relates that Turner was 
 spending the evening at his father's house on the 
 day this criticism came out ; and says, ' After 
 dinner, sitting in his armchair by the fire, I heard 
 him muttering low to himself at intervals, " Soapsuds
 
 176 TURNER 
 
 and whitewash ! " again, and again, and again. At 
 last I went to him, asking " why he minded what 
 they said ? " Then he burst out, " Soapsuds and 
 whitewash ! what would they have ? I wonder what 
 they think the sea's like ? I wish they'd been in it." ' 
 This was no outburst of mere mortified vanity ; it 
 expressed a bitter feeling that a deeply solemn purpose 
 had failed of comprehension. 
 
 This becomes clear from the story that Ruskin 
 repeats as given to him by the Rev. W. Kingsley, 
 who had taken his mother and a cousin to see 
 Turner's pictures, and could hardly get her to look 
 at any other picture than the Snowstorm, she having 
 been in such a scene off the coast of Holland. 
 4 When, some time afterwards,' says Mr. Kingsley, 
 ' I thanked Turner for his permission for her to see 
 his pictures, I told him that he would not guess which 
 had caught my mother's fancy, and then named the 
 picture ; and he then said, " I did not paint it to be 
 understood, but I wished to show what such a scene 
 was like ; I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to 
 observe it ; I was lashed for four hours, and I did 
 not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it 
 if I did. But no one had any business to like the 
 picture.' " But," said I, " my mother once went 
 through just such a scene, and it brought it all back
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 177 
 
 to her." " Is your mother a painter ? " " No." 
 " Then she ought to have been thinking of something 
 else." These were nearly his words ; I observed 
 at the time he used " record " and " painting," as 
 the title " author " had struck me before.' Ruskin 
 also notes the significance of the use of the word 
 4 author,' instead of ' artist.' It shows that Turner 
 felt such a scene to be no mere subject for a colour 
 harmony, but a deeply solemn experience, to be faith- 
 fully recorded if to do such things were one's life- 
 work ; but by no means to be regarded merely as a 
 magnificent spectacle by anyone whose work lay 
 elsewhere, and was almost certain within a period, 
 measurable in moments, to be ended by death. Are 
 there no other pictures before which we think of 
 Turner rather as author than as artist ? 
 
 The other story is the equally well-known but 
 equally significant one of his replying, when Stanfield 
 said that the sails in his Peace, The Burial of Wilkie, 
 were too black, * If I could find anything blacker I'd 
 use it ! ' Again we may take the hint. This is not 
 the only one of Turner's pictures in which the artist 
 expressed the full feelings of a man. In the details 
 of the magnificent Slave Ship no fear of becoming 
 melodramatic restrained him from expressing to the 
 utmost his horror of man's inhumanity to man.
 
 178 TURNER 
 
 Leaving the sea now, and travelling inland, we 
 have already noted that, were we with Turner, we should 
 not be allowed to ignore those whom we met, or 
 passed, or who passed us along the road : the carrier's 
 waggon and the stage-coach, travellers on foot and 
 on horseback, cattle and sheep being driven to the 
 great cities ; merry-makings in the villages ; crowds 
 of people if the journey ended in the town. In 
 Turner's day whole counties were not overhung with 
 smoke ; those places, which, as Matthew Arnold 
 said, * Mr. Bright calls centres of industry and 
 Mr. Cobbett, hell-holes,' had not yet the unmanage- 
 able size and unexampled hideousness to which we 
 have become accustomed ; but to the worse than 
 folly of which we seem already to be awakening. 
 Turner's England was not our England ; though 
 the Dudley drawing, with its sullen furnace- glare, was 
 a forecast of what was to become so widely spread. 
 
 But, as already said, the industry of which Turner, 
 painting almost exclusively what could be seen in the 
 open air, inevitably chiefly took cognisance was that of 
 the farmer. It is instructive to contrast the way in 
 which Turner would represent a scene of village life 
 from Wilkie's treatment of the same kind of subject. 
 Turner on one occasion seems actually to have entered 
 into rivalry with Wilkie, somewhat to the annoyance
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 179 
 
 of the younger painter, who might well have expected 
 Turner, with such great resources to leave to him 
 the subjects he had made peculiarly his own. In 
 1806 Wilkie had exhibited Village Politicians ; and 
 in the following year Turner produced a picture which 
 he called A Country Blacksmith disputing upon the Price 
 of Iron and the Price charged to the 'Butcher for shoeing 
 his Pony. Another oil painting, A Harvest Home, is 
 also reminiscent of Wilkie, of such pictures as Blind 
 Man's Buff and The Penny Wedding but with what a 
 difference ! In Wilkie's picture there are people in 
 a room, people whom we easily see individually in 
 fact, we are close to them, amongst them ; and if we 
 turn our eyes away for a moment from them to their 
 surroundings, it is to see the contents of the room, 
 chairs, tables, cupboards, dishes, represented with 
 minute fidelity. In Turner's picture also we can 
 interest ourselves in what the people who have 
 gathered for the Harvest Home are doing, and we 
 can see also the preparations that have been made for 
 feasting ; but although we are in the barn where the 
 rejoicing country folk are assembled, we are looking 
 down upon them and see them collectively rather 
 than individually, while what really dominates the 
 scene is the great entrance to the barn, with its double 
 doors thrown back, and looking vast as the western
 
 i8o TURNER 
 
 entrance to St. Paul's Cathedral when its doors are 
 opened wide to admit some solemn procession. Each 
 side of the huge doorway and the upper part of the 
 barn are in deep shade, so that wherever we look we 
 are still conscious of this opening into the world out- 
 side. Many of us probably have indelibly fixed in 
 our memories from childhood the impressiveness of 
 the great space of light seen from the dark interior of 
 a barn. I am writing now with full consciousness 
 that this picture is intensifying such a recollection. 
 Surely this means that Turner has seized upon what is 
 of deepest significance in his subject. The picture is 
 not mere genre painting. It is epical. The building 
 we are in seems vast the ordinary room of a house 
 being our unit of measurement. Here is space for an 
 abundant harvest to be garnered. Such as this must 
 have been, one thinks, the storehouses that Joseph 
 caused to be built for the harvests of the years of 
 plenty. But outside there, and vaster far, are the 
 fields and the hillsides on which the harvest grows, 
 and above them the sky from which come the life- 
 giving rain and sunshine. Some of those within the 
 barn wave to the children mounted high on the pre- 
 cious freight of the harvest waggon out in the open. 
 The intimate life of man and the great life of nature, 
 of which man's life is part, are vividly linked together.
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 181 
 
 It is thus with all the incidents of rural industry in 
 Turner's pictures. They do not lose, but gain, sig- 
 nificance by being so small in relation to their sur- 
 roundings. They gain in epical significance, that is. 
 Pictorially, they may be quite insignificant, or mere 
 useful points of colour we may even wish them away. 
 They may at times help to lessen Turner's reputation 
 as an artist, in the most narrow acceptation of the 
 word ; but they are of the essence of his outlook 
 upon life, and of the thoughts and feelings under the 
 impulse of which he painted his pictures. The thread 
 of smoke through the trees, the sheep on the broad 
 uplands, the cattle or horses returning to the farm, the 
 woodman felling trees, the quarryman working with 
 his pick, or rather this is in the Crook of Lune draw- 
 ing not working, but resting or idling, and watching 
 the farmer on horseback, on the road below, driving 
 his sheep to Lancaster market take all these things 
 out of Turner's pictures, and well he would be 
 another and a less -humanly interesting Turner. 
 
 Turner's fondness for incident is to be seen in the 
 animals in his pictures ; nay, it is surely more than 
 this : a sympathetic interest, a fellow-feeling for all life 
 that knows labour and suffering. It has already been 
 observed that almost as if they were sentient, and 
 called for our sympathy, he records the graceful
 
 1 8z TURNER 
 
 youth, the proud maturity, the pathetic decline and 
 death of the trees. His biographers have not failed 
 to note his kindliness to children. We may therefore 
 say a word here about his sympathy with the creatures 
 'whose pains are hardly less than our's, though he 
 was, like many who have such sympathy, a sports- 
 man. 
 
 The dog and the cow are the animals most fre- 
 quently introduced ; though horses returning to the 
 farm, with heads hanging low after a hard day's toil, 
 figure in many an evening scene. The delight a dog 
 takes in barking at cows, and the preparations for 
 defence made by the great clumsy animals by facing 
 the tormentor head down, are noted in several pictures. 
 In the Colchester drawing a hare has been started, and 
 man, woman and child are scurrying the poor thing out 
 of its wits. A little short-limbed dog takes up the 
 chase, and makes a brave show, though left hopelessly 
 in the rear. Evidently conscious of its inferior powers 
 of speed, it runs with reserve, keeping something in 
 hand, as who should say, * we could an' if we would.' 
 In one of the Richmond drawings two dogs 
 are scampering along side by side, and may be 
 expected at any moment to snap at each other, roll 
 over and over, and dash off again. 
 
 The varied intelligence of animals is well shown in
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 183 
 
 a Stonehenge drawing, where the shepherd and several 
 of the sheep lie killed by the lightning. The other 
 sheep continue browsing ; but the dog stands by his 
 dead master, and barks at the storm. Anyone who 
 has been at a sheepwashing or sheepshearing must 
 have noticed how exceptionally sheepish the victims of 
 these proceedings look. Turner has exactly hit this 
 off in the Sheepwashing; just as, in another instance, he 
 has given to the life the struggles of a crowd of sheep 
 to get down to the river to drink. One of the latest 
 and most finely imaginative of Turner's drawings is 
 Dawn after the Wreck. The darkness lingers under 
 the clouds out at sea, while in the east the growing 
 light of day is rising up towards the waning moon. 
 The clouds are drawn out along their edges into 
 forms as of ghostly, grasping or beckoning hands. 
 The tide is going down, leaving long reaches of 
 gleaming sand, but a ground-swell still troubles the 
 sea. On the wet sand, half-sinking into it, and well- 
 nigh exhausted, is a dog, the only survivor from the 
 wreck. He faces the waves and the darkness into 
 which his master has vanished from his sight, and 
 barks, all for which he has strength, in vain hope that 
 this may bring his master back to him. 
 
 It is no exaggeration to say that Turner painted over 
 and over again the full count of the seven ages of man.
 
 1 84 TURNER 
 
 He begins our life-story as early as is usually possible in 
 the open air, for in the Rochester, Strood, and Chatham 
 drawing, a woman who has come out from London 
 with the hop-pickers is feeding her child at the breast, 
 and is taking the usual precaution to prevent the 
 youngster from flattening its nose against the rounded 
 surface ! Only literature, as in Tennyson's ' De 
 Profundis,' can begin our history much earlier than this. 
 In the Mildmay Sea-piece, the little child almost leaps 
 from its mother's arms to welcome its father home 
 from his day's fishing ; while, in the youngsters sailing 
 toy boats in the T)ido building Carthage and the Marine 
 Dabblers, we have the innocent children of but few 
 years' growth playing with what to their parents are 
 symbols of a hardly won livelihood in the night and the 
 
 storm. 
 
 
 
 Leaving the days of childhood for those of youth, 
 we find that Turner did ample justice to that remark- 
 able creature the boy. His chef d'azuvre as a limner 
 of one of nature's most irresponsible productions is in 
 the beautiful drawing Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard. 
 Here the painter has found time to manifest his 
 appreciation of the utterly philistine nature of the boy 
 by showing a number of lads who, just released from 
 school, have piled their books on a tombstone, made 
 a dome for the edifice with a hat, steadying and
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 185 
 
 crowning the whole with a stone, and have then retired 
 a few yards to bombard the structure ! What the 
 apostle said of the race is true also of the individual : 
 not that which is spiritual comes first, but that which 
 is natural. Perhaps the youth who is leaning against 
 a tree and watching but taking no part in the pro- 
 ceedings may be taken as a prophecy that the spiritual 
 will manifest itself in these urchins in the due course 
 of evolution. 
 
 Another picture that runs the Kirkby Lonsdale one 
 very close as a study of boy-life is the Juvenile Trices 
 plate in the Liber; and, in another some boys 
 have been sailing a toy boat in a stream ; wind and 
 current have carried the little bark to the opposite 
 bank, where other boys are proceeding to capture and 
 appropriate it, with great manifestations of delight, 
 while hatred, malice and uncharitableness are having it 
 entirely to themselves among the despoiled youngsters, 
 apparently hardly to be prevented, by the energetic 
 actions of a man and a woman, from flinging themselves 
 into the stream and pursuing the thieves. 
 
 In one of the illustrations to Rogers' poems, a party 
 of gipsies have lighted their fire behind a copse-covered 
 hillock. In the foreground clothes are drying. In 
 the distance is a windmill, suggesting a neighbouring 
 village or hamlet. Two boys have ventured over the
 
 1 86 TURNER 
 
 intervening lengths of field to see the gipsies' camp. 
 They have just arrived at a point whence they can see 
 the gipsies, and know sufficient of the facts, if not of 
 the laws, of the transmission of light, to be aware that 
 the gipsies, should they look up from their fire, can see 
 them. One of the boys timorously advances a step 
 for a still better view, and stands with legs outstretched 
 and hand on the arm of his companion, who is evidently 
 ready to bolt for any reason or none. In the Brignall 
 Church, a boy has adventurously climbed a dangerous 
 tree to recover his kite ; and, in the Old Oak, in which 
 we see the villagers dancing at May-time, the village 
 boys are risking their necks among the branches of the 
 ancient tree. 
 
 So much for the boys. Now for some of Turner's 
 girls. He had evidently noticed that girls of a certain 
 age, and dogs, made very good playmates. In the 
 Richmond from tke Moors, a girl is relieving the tedium 
 of tending the sheep by making her dog sit up on its 
 hind legs while she puts her hat on its head ; and a girl 
 with a dog appears in another Richmond drawing. In 
 the Chateau d* Arc drawing, a girl and a boy have made 
 a dog sit up, and have put a sheaf of corn on his 
 head. 
 
 The large oil painting, Crossing the Brook, one of the 
 finest of Turner's earlier landscapes, owes its title to
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 187 
 
 two girls, one of whom is wading through the stream 
 in the foreground, while a dog carries her hat across, 
 and the other, on the farther bank, is making prepara- 
 tions to cross. My favourite among Turner's girls, 
 however, is one in a Seine-side drawing in the ' Rivers 
 of France' series. A carriage is coming up a hill, 
 steep enough to induce the occupants to get out and 
 walk. A gentleman and his little girl are ahead of the 
 other passengers ; she holds his hand, and he bends 
 down towards her to listen to her prattle, the hill, 
 perhaps by reason of his help, not interfering with her 
 girlish capacity for talk. They are just passing a table, 
 laid out in the open air under the shade of the trees ; 
 and she is evidently saying how delightful it would 
 be to stay and have refreshment there, while the sun 
 sank lower in the west, and is half inclined to stop 
 her father so that the suggestion may be carried into 
 effect ; but he will not consent ; they must measure 
 so many miles by nightfall, and have no time to 
 spare. 
 
 It may be that the boy who stands with his back to 
 the tree in Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard will meet the 
 girl with the dog when he goes over the moor some 
 day to fetch cattle from Richmond. Who knows ? 
 Anyhow, boys and girls do attract each other, as also 
 do older people ; and this, also, Turner saw under the
 
 1 88 TURNER 
 
 sun, and appears to have found it mightily amusing ; also 
 ubiquitous, and often unblushingly manifested in the 
 open air, affecting with particular force soldiers and 
 sailors, whether at Plymouth, Schaffhausen, or the 
 Lanterne at St. Cloud. In the Bay of Bai<e love- 
 making is going on between a boy and a girl who 
 apparently are not too old to bowl a hoop ! Sometimes 
 there is a desire for secrecy, and then what delight 
 for chance observers who see John the labourer with 
 his arm round Mary the milkmaid, and her head slowly 
 declining to his shoulder, or coyly turned away from 
 him, as in the Malmesbury Abbey, where a woman and 
 a boy, motionless and breathless, are watching such a 
 scene from the other side of a hedge ! 
 
 The proper sequel to this kind of thing is marriage, 
 which may or may not be a success, according to the 
 behaviour of the contracting parties. A sine qua non 
 of success is observance of the principle of give and 
 take not, however, of give as little and take as much 
 as you can, of which we see an example in the Calais 
 Pier. Just as a fishing-boat is putting of! to sea, one 
 of the men discovers that his wife has not given him 
 his fair share of brandy, and shows her the bottle with 
 threatening gestures. She, safe on the pier, holds her 
 bottle firmly and gazes calmly on her spouse, beside 
 himself with rage made impotent by the gradually
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 189 
 
 widening interval of troubled waters. What will 
 happen when he returns home ? Let us hope that he 
 has a short memory ! 
 
 Of the latest years of life also Turner was not un- 
 mindful, as in the Chateau de Nantes, where an old 
 man, careless himself of such things, holds a little boy 
 on a wall so that he may better see some passing 
 pageant, while a decrepit beggarman does not so much 
 as try to see the show, but bends down to the ground, 
 leaning heavily upon his crutches. In the Crowhunt 
 plate of the Liber Studierum, the mood of the land- 
 scape a snow-shower has quickly whitened all the 
 country-side is emphasised by the tree-felling that is 
 in progress, and even more by the old woman who is 
 picking up for firewood the twigs that have no value 
 for the woodmen. At Caudebec Turner saw a funeral, 
 and must needs tell us so, and show us the long 
 procession of mourners climbing the hillside and 
 passing with ranks broken by the long and toilful ascent, 
 and heads reverently bowed, through the cemetery door- 
 way. The river is dotted with boats, and the steamer 
 sends its long grey thread of smoke into the sky ; the 
 vintagers are busy among the vines. But there are 
 harvests reaped by other reapers ; there is a last voyage 
 that all must take ; and here, on the hillside, away from 
 the busy world, there are many headstones within the
 
 1 90 TURNER 
 
 cemetery walls. The sun is setting. Our life, like 
 our every day, is rounded with a sleep. 
 
 By discussing apart from each other the landscape 
 element and the figures and incidents in Turner's work, 
 one might be said to have taken his pictures to pieces. 
 But those who are familiar with them will always think 
 of each of them as a whole ; and there is an advantage 
 in taking separately the human interest, especially for 
 those who are not familiar with more than a few of his 
 works, in that it can readily be seen how constant was 
 Turner's interest, not only in a past that he imagined, 
 but in the life of his fellow-men in his own time. 
 
 The complexity of interest in Turner's work, 
 art and nature and human life, is at once its 
 strength and its weakness. We may say, if we like, 
 that he attempted too much. It remains almost 
 incredible that what we are certain he did is the work 
 of one man's lifetime. We have seen him entering 
 upon schemes that he could not possibly bring to com- 
 pletion. From first to last he was ever experimenting. 
 He would have had a great name had he ceased to 
 develop after painting Crossing the Brook, but he went 
 on to Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, and then to ' The 
 Sun of Venice ' going to Sea. Did ever Design seek to 
 bring into subjection such a complex of Fact as we 
 see in his pictures ? His life-work is an evolution.
 
 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 191 
 
 He establishes one order, and then another, and yet 
 another. The critics praised, then blamed, then 
 praised again. What phrase would have replaced 
 ' soapsuds and whitewash ' could he have lived on to 
 become an Impressionist ? 
 
 I have tried in this little volume to set before the 
 reader a tramping artist ; to tell the story of his life, 
 and, in telling it, to dwell upon his virtues, and, for their 
 sake, to say little of his faults ; to give some hint of 
 his genius, of his sensitiveness to the power and beauty 
 of nature, of the imaginative power, and the sense of 
 colour and design by which what he saw was trans- 
 formed as he conveyed it to paper or canvas ; to show 
 his sympathy with his fellow-men, and his wonder at 
 the passing of the generations of men and the mystery 
 that surrounds our being, which make his life-work as 
 well a solemn epic of humanity, as a revelation of the 
 beauty and splendour of the visible universe.
 
 INDEX 
 
 The titles of pictures are printed in italics. In several instances 
 they are abbreviated 
 
 Abingdon, 122 
 
 ALsacus und Hespe rie, 1 60 
 
 Agrippina landing ivith the 
 
 Ashes of Cfermanicus, 100, 
 
 122, 164 
 
 Alps at Daybreak, 141 
 Angel standing in the Sun, 161 
 Apollo and Daphne, 99, 158 
 Apollo filling the Python, 71, 
 
 87, 151 et seq. 
 Apuleia in search of Apuleius, 
 
 88 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 178 
 Arundel Castle, 128, 143 
 Arveiron, Source of the, 139 
 A-vernus, Lake, 13, 99 
 
 B 
 
 Bacchus and Ariadne, 100 
 Bay of Bai/e, Apollo and the 
 
 Sibyl, 5, 89, 158, 1 88 
 Ben Arthur, 145 
 Berenson, Bernhard, 23 
 
 O 193 
 
 Brightling Observatory, 143 
 Brignall Church, 1 86 
 Brooke, Stopford, 174 
 Browning, Robert, I, 69 
 Burne- Jones, Sir Edward, 25 
 
 Calais Pier, 71, 72, 122. 188 
 
 Caligula's Palace and Bridge, 
 162 
 
 Carthage, Decline of, 88 
 
 Carthage, Dido building, 88, 1 84 
 
 Carthage, Dido and JEneas leav- 
 ing, 88 
 
 Caudebec, 189 
 
 Chateau fArc, 1 86 
 
 Chateau de Nantes, 189 
 
 Chesneau, M., 153 
 
 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 
 161 
 
 Claude, Liber Veritatis, 76 
 
 Colchester, 182 
 
 Constable, John, 29, 112, 
 146
 
 INDEX 
 
 Cottage destroyed by an Ava- 
 lanche, 87 
 
 Country Blacksmith, etc., 1 79 
 Crook, of Lune, 143, 181 
 Crossing the Brook, 54, 83, 88, 
 143, 186, 190 
 
 D 
 
 Datur Hora Quieti, 7, 101 
 Dawn after the Wreck^ 183 
 Deluge, the Evening of the, 1 60 
 Deluge, the Morning of the, 1 60 
 Dolbadern Castle, 68 
 
 Evening Star, 92 
 
 Fawkes, Mr. Walter, 83 
 Frazer, Dr., 'The Golden 
 
 Bough,' 14 
 Frosty Morning, 88, 122 
 
 G 
 
 Girtin, Thomas, 48 ct seq. 
 
 Qlaucus and Scylla, 160 
 
 Qoddess of Discord, 71, 156 
 
 Q or dale Scar, 145 
 
 Gray's ' Elegy,' 1 1 
 
 Qreat End and Scawfell Pikes, 
 
 '45 
 
 Qrenoble, The Alps from, 131 
 
 H 
 
 Hamerton, Philip G., 13, 20, 
 
 6 5> 94, HS 
 Hannibal crossing the tAlps, 
 
 87, 164 
 
 ' Harbours of England,' 94 
 Hardraw Fall, 145 
 Harvest Home, 180 
 Hero and Leander, 99 
 Hey sham, 132 
 Holroyd, Sir Charles, 122 
 
 Impressionism, 30 
 I-vy Bridge, 83, 87 
 
 Jason, 71, 158-9 
 Jupiter, Temple of, 163 
 Juvenile Tricks, 170 
 
 K 
 
 Kinsgley, Charles, 170 
 Kingsley, W., 176 
 Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard, 
 143, 184 
 
 Lancaster Sends, 131 
 Langdale Pikes, 145 
 'Liber Studiorum,' 75 et seq., 
 125
 
 INDEX 
 
 195 
 
 Line Fishing off Hasting!, i oo 
 London from Greenwich, 122 
 Loretto Necklace, 99 
 
 M 
 
 Mac on, 73 
 
 Malmesbury Abbey, 188 
 Marine Dabblers, 184 
 Mer de Glace, 137 
 Mercury and lArgus, 99, 158 
 Mercury and Herse, 87 
 Meredith, George, 120 
 MichaeFs Mount, Saint, loo 
 Mildmay Sea-piece, 1 84 
 Monkhouse, Cosmo, n, 16, 
 
 60 et seq., no, 151 
 Monro, Dr., 46 
 Moonlight, a Study at Mill- 
 bank, 70 
 
 N 
 
 Narcissus and Echo, 1 60 
 
 Nelson, Death of, 71 
 
 Nemi, Lake of, 137 
 
 Afore, Off the, 100 
 
 Nor ham Castle, 68 
 
 Nor ham Castle, Sunrise, 91 
 
 Or-vieto, Vieiu of, 99 
 
 Pftice, 7"^ 5r/7 o/ 
 
 106, 177 
 Percy, Lord, under Attainder, 
 
 106 
 
 Phrynt going to the Baths, I oo 
 'Picturesque Views in England 
 
 and Wales," 93 
 Pilate -washing his Hands, 161 
 Procris and Cephalus, 1 60 
 Proserpine: The Plains of Enna, 
 
 100, 158 
 
 Rain, Steam, and Speed, 31, 105 
 Redding, Cyrus, 53-4 
 Redgrave, ' Century of Pain- 
 ters,' 21, 90, no, 114, 121 
 Richmond from the Moors, 143, 
 
 186 
 
 'Rivers of England,' 93 
 ' Rivers of France,' 102 
 Rochester, Strood, and Chatham, 
 
 184 
 Rogers* 'Italy* and 'Poems,' 
 
 100 
 
 Rome, The tArch of Titus, 89 
 Rome from the Vatican, 89 
 Rome, Vignette in Rogers' 
 'Italy,' 165
 
 196 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ruskin, John, i, 12, 18, 20, 
 26 et seq., 44, 60, 63, 80, 
 88, 169, 174, 175 
 
 Scarborough, 148 
 
 Ship in Distress, 100 
 
 Shipwreck, 71, 122 
 
 Short, Frank, 79 
 
 Sizeranne, M. de la, 132, 147 
 
 Slave Ship, 177 
 
 Snowstorm, 105, 175 
 
 Stonehengc, 183 
 
 ' Sun of Venice,' 105, 122, 190 
 
 Sun rising in a Mist, 5, 71 
 
 Sunrise, -with a Boat between 
 
 Headlands, 91 
 Syrinx fating from Pan, 160 
 
 Temeraire, Fighting, loo, 122, 
 148 
 
 Tempe, The Vale of, 99, 158 
 
 Totnes, 143 
 
 Trafalgar, The Battle of, 171 
 
 Turin from the Superga, 132 
 et seq. 
 
 Turner, J. M. W., birth, 36 ; 
 parentage, 38 ; early years, 
 39 et seq. , early art train- 
 ing, 43-5 ; early art work, 
 
 45 et seq. ; and Dr. Monro, 
 
 46 ; and Girtin, 48 et seq. , 
 as a tramp, 53 ; first sketch- 
 ing tour, 57 ; the Yorkshire 
 Dales, 60 ; elected A.R.A., 
 67 ; rivalry with earlier 
 masters, 68-9 ; early oil 
 paintings, 70-2 ; first visit 
 to Scotland, 72 ; elected 
 R.A., 72 ; first visit to the 
 Continent, 73 ; appointed 
 Professor of Perspective, 
 75 ; in Devon, Yorkshire, 
 etc., 83 ; Farnley Hall, 
 83-5 ; early patrons, 85 ; 
 home-life, 87 ; visit to 
 Italy, 89 ; later oil paint- 
 ings, 90 ; Italy again, 95 ; 
 letters to Jones and Chan- 
 trey, 95-9 ; Scotland again, 
 101 ; later journeys, 104; 
 last years and death, 106 
 et seq. ; his will, 1 08 ; 
 character, personal appear- 
 ance, etc., 1 10 et seq. 
 
 U 
 
 Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, 99, 
 122, 151 et seq., 169 
 
 Venice, ^Approach to, 105
 
 INDEX 
 
 197 
 
 Venice, the Dogana, 99 
 Venice from Fusina, 104 
 Venice, the Giudecca, 104 
 Venice, Morning, 105 
 Venice, Suburb, 105 
 Venice, Suburb towards Murano, 
 
 104 
 
 W 
 
 War, the Exile, etc., 106 
 Waterloo, the Field of, 89, 
 
 171 
 
 Watteau Painting, 106 
 Watts, G. F., 5 
 Whistler,). McNeill, 19 
 Whitaker, Dr., 65 
 Whit by, 149 
 Wilkie, Sir David, 1 79 
 Wreck off Hastings, 149 
 
 Tories hi re Coast, 149, 174
 
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