CHAPTER III

THE BOY WONDERS AT TURNER THE DUMB POET

In thinking over Turner the Man, whom Thornbury called the Dumb Poet, again 'Orvieto' rose before the boy. The twin parts of that picture, the earthly foreground and the heavenly distances, continued to symbolise the dual parts of Turner's nature, as indeed the natures of all of us.

The first book that the boy read about Turner was perhaps the wisest and the most sympathetic of all his biographies, that by the late Cosmo Monkhouse. On page 3 he found two quotations; one astonished, the other shocked him. They neither astonish nor shock him now because he is much older, and he knows that if one passage is exaggerated so is the other. He knows that Turner was neither saint nor sinner, but a queer-tempered man, with bursts of humour and geniality, and a thirst for knowledge; a man of genius with a dwarfed nature, uneducated, who in art moved easily among great things, and who, try as he would, and he did try, could hardly touch the hem of the garment of great things outside his art; who loved his work before anything in the world, who was not cultured, and whose manners were neither pretty nor engaging, who cared nothing for social conventions, but who went his own rough way, preferring Wapping and the sailors and the river, and rum and brown sherry, to the conventional delights and the fine feeding of Belgravia. Here are the two passages. The first is from Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, published in 1843, magnificent rhetoric, magical, and meaning very little:--

'Glorious in conception--unfathomable in knowledge--solitary in power--with the elements waiting upon his will, and the night and morning obedient to his call, sent as a prophet of God to reveal to men the mysteries of the universe, standing, like the great angel of the Apocalypse, clothed with a cloud, and with a rainbow upon his head, and with the sun and stars given into his hand.'

The second is from Thornbury's _Life of Turner_, published in 1862. There is no confirmation of Thornbury's suggestion that Turner ever 'wallowed' at Wapping:--

'Towards the end of his career he would often, I am assured on the best authority, paint hard all the week till Saturday night; and he would then put by his work, slip a five-pound note into his pocket, button it securely up there, and set off to some low sailor's house in Wapping or Rotherhithe, to wallow till Monday morning summoned him to mope through another week.'

The boy who was shocked at that extract from Thornbury's _Life_, following so closely upon Ruskin's eulogy, found consolation in an understanding passage written by Cosmo Monkhouse. It seemed to explain Turner.

'He 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.'

His dreamland served him to the end, to that day in 1851, when the old war-man, warring always for the beautiful, having lost the cunning of his hand, but not the vision of his eyes, died gazing on the river, his old companion, whom he had loved always.

Gradually, the boy who grew up in the seventies, and who knew golden 'Orvieto' by heart, began to form a mental picture of the man Turner, gathered from the pictures and caricatures of him, and the innumerable stories, some untrue, many exaggerated, that have collected about the hairdresser's son who became the world's greatest landscape painter.

His friend and patron, Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, made a caricature of Turner which shows him as a little man, 'in an ill-cut brown tail coat, striped waistcoat and enormous frilled shirt, the feet and hands notably small, sketching on a small piece of paper, held down almost level with his waist.' Yes, Turner was an odd man, odd in looks, rough in manner. When he had passed middle age the world meant very little to him. He cared for nobody: he was hardly interested in Ruskin's magical extravagance of eulogy. 'My own admiration,' said Ruskin, 'was wild enthusiasm, but it gave him no ray of pleasure. He loved me, but cared nothing for what I said.' About the time that Ruskin was lecturing the world for not admiring Turner, and lashing himself into ecstasy over his idol, the idol was seen on board the old Margate steamer, studying sky and water, and eating his lunch of shrimps out of a huge red handkerchief laid across his knees.

Turner lived outside the world--in his dreamland. When the buoyancy of youth had passed; when 'dad' was dead, he grew more morose, more untidy and more exclusive, but his dream did not change. No! it became more mystical, more subtle, more unrealisable to his ageing eyes. Was he not in dreamland on that Varnishing Day of the Royal Academy of 1846 when George Parrott made a humorous sketch of him. There were four varnishing days in those halcyon times, and it was Turner's habit to send in his pictures merely laid in with white and grey, and to finish them on the walls. We see him in Parrott's Varnishing Day sketch at the age of seventy-one, a short, thick-set, clumsy figure, with ruffled silk hat upon his head and gingham propped against a chair--painting on a large picture, engrossed, oblivious of everything happening around. 'I am told,' says Scarlett Davies, 'it was good fun to see the great man whacking away with about fifty stupid apes standing round him, peeping into his colour-box and examining all his brushes and colours.'

He was in dreamland while the 'stupid apes' watched him.

Did they hope to discover the dreamer's secret? Ah, gentlemen, you did not find the secret in the colour-box. And the dumb poet could never have told in words how he produced his pictures, although when he sold one he was wont to say, 'I've lost one of my children.'

The dumb poet!

There is a chapter in the second volume of Thornbury's _Life_ headed 'Turner's Poetry,' that seemed to the boy who loved 'Orvieto' to express absolutely, strangely, sadly, how illiterate and inarticulate outside his art was Turner, and how eager to express the emotions that moved dimly in his starved brain. Twelve pages of his halting, imperfect verse are printed, scraps from the longest fragments found among his papers after death, perhaps a portion of that interminable, chaotic poem, _The Fallacies of Hope_, extracts from which he used to append to his Academy pictures. There is hardly a clause that is coherent, there is no continuous thought, and some words are used in any sense. The impulse to sing is there, but the dumb poet has not begun to understand even the elements of the technique of composition. But the boy dug out and remembered two broken lines, and they became almost as much a part of his life as golden 'Orvieto.'

'... still the chief advanced, Looked on the sun with hope...'

'Looked on the sun with hope' might have served for Turner's epitaph.

'Still the chief advanced' might have served as a motto for that amazing book published in 1909, called _A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest._

When that book in two volumes was issued, the boy who loved 'Orvieto' as a middle-aged man. Having read the _Inventory_--no, read is not the word;--when he had spent many hours over it, his wonder of Turner, if that were possible, increased. And dreaming of the drawings of the Turner Bequest, set forth so fully and patiently in this book, he echoed the words of the Director of the National Gallery, who wrote in the preface, 'There is nothing like it anywhere in the world.'

[1] _A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest_, arranged chronologically by A. J. Finberg. His Majesty's Stationery Office. 2 vols. 15s.