CHAPTER XVIII

1811: AGED THIRTY-SIX

'APOLLO KILLING THE PYTHON' AND A PICNIC

'The Python was a dragon which lived at Crissa, in the vicinity of Delphi, and committed great havoc among cattle and the inhabitants. The Pythian games there celebrated were established in commemoration of the destruction of the Python by Apollo.' So runs the official description in the catalogue appended to 'Apollo Killing the Python.' When it was exhibited in 1811, Turner supplied six lines from the _Hymn of Callimachus._ beginning:--

'Envenora'd by thy darts, the monster coil'd, Portentous, horrible, and vast his snake-like form....'

'Mercury and Herse' was illumined by this couplet from Ovid's _Metamorphoses_:--

'Close by the sacred walls in wide Munichio's plain, The God well pleased beheld the virgin train!'

How tiresome these descriptions and tags of verse seem, and how old-fashioned 'Apollo Killing the Python' looks, yet I have only to gaze at it for five minutes to be hypnotised by its grandeur; but the mood passes, and Ruskin's panegyric does not restore it, that succinct panegyric--'This is one of the very noblest of all Turner's works, and therefore I do not scruple to say, one of the noblest pictures in the world.'

The pages of _Modern Painters_ roll on in magnificent and eloquent periods on 'Apollo Killing the Python.' Certain of the passages one knows by heart, few of them have anything to do with the art of Turner, and some are untrue, such as--'He was without hope'; 'Turner painted the labour of men, their sorrow and their death.' Often Ruskin's prose leaves us breathless, almost crushed:--

'Fancy him [the dragon] moving, and the roaring of the ground under his rings; the grinding down of the rocks by his toothed whorls; the skeleton glacier of him in thunderous march, and the ashes of the hills rising round him like smoke, and encompassing him like a curtain.'

The quotation from Ovid and the theme of 'Apollo Killing the Python' suggest that Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ was one of the few books that Turner really studied and read through, probably again and again, as he found most of his subjects for classical pictures in Ovid. Monkhouse considers that with the exception of 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus,' there is none greater than the 'Apollo Killing the Python.' That must remain a matter of opinion. To me it seems that Ovid only confused Turner's imagination. He needed no classical legend to paint such masterpieces as 'Norham Castle at Sunrise,' 'The Evening Star,' 'The Burial of Wilkie,' 'Rain, Steam and Speed,' 'The Snowstorm,' or the later interpretations of Venice.

Let us turn from books, even from the classic _Metamorphoses_, to nature, to Devonshire, where in this year, or thereabouts, Cyrus Redding met him, to whom we owe delightful accounts of Turner in holiday mood.

On one of these excursions Turner once actually gave a picnic 'in excellent taste.' 'Our host,' says Redding, was 'agreeable but terse, blunt, and almost epigrammatic at times. Never given to waste his words, nor remarkably choice in their arrangement, they were always in their right place and admirably effective.' An account has also been preserved of a scene in an inn where they conversed until nearly midnight, when Turner laid his head upon the table and was soon sound asleep. They were up with the sun, and it was at that early hour that Turner made his sketch for 'Crossing the Brook' exhibited in 1815. Another excursion was by sea. The morning was squally, and the sea rolled boisterously into the sound. Then they landed and--

'Turner was all the while quiet, watching the troubled scene, and it was not unworthy his notice. The island, the solitary hut upon it, the bay in the bight of which it lay, and the long gloomy Bolt Head to seaward, against which the waves broke with fury, seemed to absorb the entire notice of the artist, who scarcely spoke a syllable. While the fish were getting ready, Turner mounted nearly to the highest point of the island rock, _and seemed writing rather than drawing._ The wind was almost too violent for either purpose; what he particularly noted he did not say.'

And here is a specimen of Turner's conversation, showing how true was his observation:--

'He was looking at a seventy-four gun ship, which lay in the shadow under Saltash. The ship seemed one dark mass.

'"I told you that would be the effect," said Turner, referring to some previous conversation. "Now, as you observe, it is all shade."

'"Yes, I perceive it; and yet the ports are there." '"We can only take what is visible--no matter what may be there. There are people in the ship; we don't see them through the planks."'

Turner's friends could have told Ruskin how untrue was such a statement as 'he was without hope.' Like ordinary mortals he had his good days and his bad days, his hours of fun and his hours of gloom, his moments of kindness and his moments of cruelty.

'His spirits,' says Thornbury, 'were high, deep as were occasionally his fits of melancholy.' Once he wrote a letter to Calcott, in which he drew a wild duck or mallard, a pun on his second name; and as to his kindness, there is the story, one of many, of his generosity at the 1811 Academy to a young artist called Bird, whose picture had been crowded out. Turner begged the Hanging Committee to restore the work, insisting that it was too good to be rejected. They agreed, but declined to alter the hanging. Turner had another long look at Bird's picture, and then, taking down one of his own of the same size, hung Bird's in its place. I wonder was that 'one of his own' the 'Scarborough,' exhibited this year, the large, beautiful, and simple sketch for which is in the National Collection, one of the 'unfinished' water-colours reproduced in these pages.

We begin to understand something of Turner the man as well as of Turner the artist. As an artist he seems the more wonderful, the more one studies him. To-day I looked again at his 'Innsbruck,' his 'Sketch of an Italian Town,' and his 'Lake of Brienz' at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Those three water-colours, stages in his development, are sufficient to make an ordinary painter's reputation.