CHAPTER II

THE BOY WONDERS AT TURNER'S ART LIFE

From 'Orvieto' as a starting-point, the boy, who is now a man, proceeded in time to explore the art life of Turner, dwelling oftenest on his golden visions, in which this persistent man, eloquent nowhere but in his art, truly found himself. They were the goals of his pilgrimage, but few appreciated them. Among the few was honest, plain-spoken John Constable, who said of Turner's contributions to the Royal Academy of 1828, which were so unlike his own practical art: 'Turner has some golden visions, glorious and beautiful. They are only visions, but still, they are art, and one could live and die with such pictures.' Yet in that year the tale of Turner's golden visions had hardly begun to be told. He was to go on simplifying and simplifying, until modelling became subordinated to colour, and the forms and shapes of things became lost in the effulgence of light.

Was there ever such a life of industrious and progressive work? It began when he was a mere boy, in the dark court off Maiden Lane near the Strand; the long, laborious, loving effort ended only with the end, that furtive, fugitive end when, tired of man and his ways, the old, self-sufficient painter disappeared from his haunts and his friends, and under the assumed name of Mr. Booth, the sun his master, the river his companion, met death in a little balconied house overlooking the Thames at Chelsea.

Work, work, work--absorbing, concentrated work--that was his life. This 'short, stout man with a red face and covetous eyes,' was hardly what the world calls a fine character, although there are on record many instances of his generosity and kindness, he was as secretive about his work as about his life. The door of his studio, whether in Queen Anne Street or on the hills was, metaphorically, always locked.

When the boy, who loved the view of 'Orvieto' more than any picture he had ever seen, began to study Turner's art life he amused and confused himself by dividing it, as all his biographers have done, into periods. These he simplified into two broad divisions, first when this ever-ambitious painter pitted himself against his predecessors and contemporaries, and later when, entirely disregarding the works of man, he faced Nature, and challenged nothing less than the source of all light and colour--the sun.

Turner's art life shows no sudden rush of genius. Step by step he climbed, and had he died in 1802, at the age of twenty-seven, when Girtin, his friend and fellow-student, died, we should have had the record of a youth of great promise, but whose performances were no more wonderful, if as wonderful, as Girtin's. From the period of Training he passed to the period of Rivalry. Of the many painters he strove to outsoar there was none so worthy his challenge as Claude Lorrain, and to this day, in accordance with a condition of Turner's will, two of his pictures hang in the National Gallery side by side with two of Claude's, challenging the Lorrainer from beyond the grave. The challenger has his desire, but Claude is not conquered. The great Englishman does not dethrone the great Frenchman on his own ground. Claude is unrivalled in the balance of his classical pictures, and in their cool and temperate colour. The real Turner, the Turner who challenged the sun, had not yet found himself. In his periods of Power and Splendour, between the ages, say, of forty-five and sixty-five, dominated by such masterpieces as the 'Ulysses' and the 'Fighting Téméraire,' Turner disregarded all other painters. And while he was producing epics this prodigal artist was also throwing off lyrics--the impulsive water-colours, and those 'unfinished oils,' destined, when reclaimed and shown in 1906, to raise the art of Turner to the empyrean of landscape art. They were works of pleasure, easy evocations of his genius, done quickly and gladly, thrown aside, never exhibited.

Of all the periods of his art life there is none to be compared with the period contained in the few glorious years when he was past sixty and drawing near to his seventieth year, the period when light in all its manifestations obsessed him, when he produced the 'Norham Castle, Sunrise,' the 'Hastings' with the red sail, the later 'Venice' pictures, and the later water-colours, so delicate, so flushed with sunshine that the world of sight seems to be swimming in iridescent vapour. Finally, there is the period of decline, but what a decline, that could evoke such a magnificent madness as 'Queen Mab's Grotto,' and such tumbling splendours as the four classical pictures he exhibited the year before he died!

The boy who loved 'Orvieto' despaired of ever being able to write adequately about Turner, so enormous, so diversified, was his achievement. Sometimes he thought he would like to consider nothing but the 'Orvieto,' the 'Rain, Steam and Speed,' the 'Sunrise' pictures and the 'Evening Star'; and among the water-colours a certain dream of blue loveliness called 'Lucerne' and the red 'Righi,' and perhaps the six small pictures, phantom ships and fairy skies, that he bequeathed to Mrs. Booth, and perhaps the four impressions in one frame, sensations they might be called, of Petworth at evening, mere sunset visions, but such visions.

What was the nature of the man who controlled these wonders? The boy read Thornbury's very interesting and very unreliable _Life_, he read Monkhouse and others, and as he read there rose before him a picture of the dual Turner, the great artist and the crafty tradesman. A little sadly he set himself to understand something of Turner the Man.