France—1820 to 1840

T U R N E R.

CHAPTER I.

I N T R O D U C T O R Y.

THE task of writing a satisfactory life of Turner is one of more than usual difficulty. He hid himself, partly intentionally, partly because he could not express himself except by means of his brush. His secretiveness was so consistent, and commenced so early, that it seems to have been an instinct, or what used to be called by that name. Akin to the most divinely gifted poets by his supreme pictorial imagination, he also seems on the other side to have been related to beings whose reasoning faculty is less than human. When we look at such pictures as Crossing the Brook, The Fighting Téméraire, and Ulysses and Polyphemus, we feel that we are in the presence of a mind as sensitive as Keats’s, as tender as Goldsmith’s, and as penetrative as Shelley’s; when we read of the dirty discomfort of his home and of the difficulty with which his patrons, and even his relations, obtained access to his presence—how even his most intimate friends were not admitted to his confidence—we can only think of a hedgehog, whose offensive powers being limited, is warned by nature to live in a hole and roll itself up into a ball of spikes at the approach of strangers.

We are used to having our idols broken; but we still fashion them with a persistency which seems to argue it a necessity of our nature, that we should think of the life and character of gifted men as being the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace we perceive in their works. It is this habit which makes any attempt to write a life of Turner pre-eminently unsatisfactory, for his refined sense of the most ethereal of natural phenomena is not relieved by any refinement in his manners, his supreme feeling for the splendour of the sun is unmatched by any light or brilliance in his social life; his extreme sensibility, a sensibility not only artistic but human, to all the emotional influences of nature, stands for ever as a contrast to his self-absorbed, suspicious individuality. There is of course no reason why a landscape painter should be refined in manner or choice in his habits. There is no necessary connection between the subjects of such an artist and himself, except his hand and eye. He lives a life of visions that may come and go without affecting his life or even his thought, as we generally use that word. The most tremendous phenomena of nature may be seen and studied, and reproduced with such power as to strike terror into those who see the picture, and yet leave the artist unaltered in demeanour and taste. Even those men of genius who, instead of employing their imagination upon nature’s inanimate works, devote themselves to the study of man himself, socially and morally, do not by any means show that relation between themselves and their finest work that we appear naturally to expect.

But all this, though it may explain much, still leaves unsatisfactory the task of writing the life of a man of whom such passages as the following could be sincerely written:—

The contrast is too great to make the picture pleasant, the facts are too few to make it perfect; to make it one or the other, it would be necessary to do as Turner did, and rightly did, with his perfect drawings—suppress facts that jarred with his scheme of form and colour, and insert figures or mountains or clouds that were necessary to complete it; but a biography is nothing if not real—it belongs to the other side of art. The task would be rendered lighter, if not more agreeable, if we were frankly to accept the principle of a dual nature, and cutting up our subject into halves, treat Turner the artist and Turner the man as two separate beings; and there would, at first sight, seem to be no more convincing proof of this duality than is afforded by Turner. He had an exquisitely sensitive apprehension of all physical phenomena, and was able to hoard away his impressions by the thousand in that wonderful brain-store of his, until they were wanted for pictures. He stored them with his eye, he reproduced them with his hand and memory. These three were all of the finest, and seemed to act without that process which is necessary to most of us before we can make use of our impressions, viz., the translation of them into words. This process is as necessary for the nourishment of most minds as digestion for the nourishment of the body, but to him it appears to have been almost entirely denied. He had grasp enough of his impressions without it, to enable him to analyze them and compose them pictorially; but he could not give any account of them or of his method of composition, and they had no sensible effect on his conversation.

He thus lived in two worlds—one the pictorial sight-world, in which he was a profound scholar and a poet, the other the articulate, moral, social word-world in which he was a dunce and underbred. In the one he was great and happy, in the other he was small and miserable; for what philosophy he had was fatalist. The riddle of life was too hard for his uncultivated intellect and starved heart to contemplate with any hope; he was only at rest in his dreamland. When he came down into this world of ours from his own clouds, he brought some of his glory with him, but without any cheerful effect; for it came but as a foil to ruined castles, the vice of mortals and the decay of