CHAPTER XLIX

1843: AGED SIXTY-EIGHT

VISIONS OF VENICE AND THE FIRST VOLUME OF 'MODERN PAINTERS'

The two pictures of Venice exhibited in 1843, so changed, so faded, are in their way among the loveliest things Turner ever painted. 'San Benedetto, Looking Towards Fusina,' was formerly known as 'The Approach to Venice,' and I wish that title could have been retained, as one always thinks of it as 'The Approach to Venice,' and always in connection with the companion picture, 'The "Sun of Venice" Going to Sea,' with the name of this immortalised, fishing-boat 'Sol di Venezia' conspicuous on the sail. These two fading visions of Venice are indescribable, although everybody attempts to describe them. An eloquent passage may be found in the essay M. de la Sizeranne wrote for _The Studio_ on 'The Genius of Turner,' from which the following is an extract:--

'Nothing will be found more beautiful than the "Approach" itself. No robe from Tintoretto's brush will be found to possess the splendour of the gondolas conveying us. No Titian--that of the mountains of Cadore, the presence of which we divine, no nimbus about the head of a saint, will equal that sun, no purple these skies, no prayer the infinite sweetness of the dream experienced during those brief, delicious moments. Nothing will be found to compare with the distant vision of that city which, on the horizon, seems to be too beautiful ever to be reached, and appears to recede from the traveller's barque--

_Ainsi que Dèle sur le mer_

gilded like youth, silent as dreams, and like happiness unattainable.'

Earlier in the Essay this sensitive writer says:--

'Turner was the first of the Impressionists, and after a lapse of eighty years he remains the greatest, at least in the styles he has treated. That Impressionism came from England is proved by the letters of Delacroix, and demonstrated by M. Paul Signac in his pamphlet on "Neo-Impressionism."... Turner is the father of the Impressionists. Their discoveries are his. He first saw that Nature is composed in a like degree of colours and of lines, and, in his evolution, the rigid and settled lines of his early method gradually melt away and vanish in the colours. He sought to paint the atmosphere, the envelopment of coloured objects seen at a distance, rather than the things enveloped: and he quickly realised that the atmosphere could not be expressed, except through the infinite parcelling out of things which Claude Lorrain drew in a solid grouping and painting _en bloc._ He shredded the clouds. He took the massive and admirable masses, the _cumuli_ of Ruysdael, of Hobbema, of Van de Velde, picked the threads out of them, and converted them into a myriad-shaded charpie, which he entrusted to the winds of heaven.'

Time has been cruel to both these Venetian pictures, perhaps cruel only to be kind. Even in Ruskin's time much of the transparency had gone; but there they are, dreams of Venice; not the Venice we see, not the Venice that Canaletto saw, but the Venice that floated before the eyes of Turner, that blossomed in the imagination of an old man nearing his seventieth year. I suppose we must call the other pictures of 1843 failures, but only because he tried to express the inexpressible--such themes as 'The Evening of the Deluge' and 'The Morning After,' with Moses writing the book of Genesis, mixed up with Goethe's theory of Light and Colour, and accompanied by an extract from the _Fallacies of Hope_:--

'The ark stood firm on Ararat: the returning sun Exhaled earth's humid bubbles, and emulous of light, Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic guise.'

In this year, too, he exhibited 'The Opening of the Walhalla,' which has been banished to the honourable seclusion of the Dublin National Gallery. This Doric temple, erected on a hill overlooking the Danube, containing two hundred marble busts of eminent Germans, had been opened by King Ludwig of Bavaria in the previous year. The idea inspired Turner; he painted a characteristic picture of the ceremony and sent it to King Ludwig, who returned the gift with the comment that he did not understand it. Poor Turner! Munich would be well content to own the 'Walhalla' now.

In 1843 the first volume of _Modern Painters_ was published, which 'originated,' as Ruskin tells us, 'in indignation at the shallow and false criticisms of the periodicals of the day of the works of the great living artist to whom it principally refers.' The second volume was not published until 1846; the third and fourth in 1856, and the fifth and last volume of this 'enormous work of thought, inspiration, sincerity and devotion' in 1860.

We have it on the authority of Thornbury, that Turner was vexed at Ruskin's panegyrics, and said, 'The man put things into my head I never thought of.' I doubt if Turner was vexed at the panegyrics, but it is quite certain that Ruskin's imagination saw things in the pictures that Turner never 'thought of.' Turner was a man of deeds, not of thoughts. He worked with his eyes, hand, and spirit: he was Nature's lover. It is certain, too, that after the first irritation felt by his contemporaries at some of the wilder works of Turner's later years had cooled, his fame would have steadily increased, and would have been as high as it is to-day, had _Modern Painters_ never been written.

Neither that wonderful book, nor any other book, could serve Turner. Only he himself could have produced that fantasy, exquisite and intelligible, called 'The Seelisberg: Moonlight,' or the study, purple, gold and blue, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, of a lake, perhaps Brienz, enclosed by snowy peaks, with the wraith of a castle in the foreground, and the moon in the blue sky. He went his own way, and perhaps on the very day that he should have been reading the glowing periods of _Modern Painters_, hailing him as a sort of superman, he was the chief actor in that scene on board the old Margate steamer, watching the effect of the sun, and the boiling foam in the wake of the boat, and at luncheon-time eating shrimps out of an immense silk handkerchief laid across his knees. And while he was eating shrimps and watching the movement of the water, those who had reached the end of the first volume of _Modern Painters_ were perhaps reading with shining eyes and lifted hearts the concluding passage about 'the great artist whose works have formed the chief subject of this treatise':--

'In all that he says, we believe: in all that he does, we trust.... He stands upon an eminence, from which he looks back over the universe of God, and forward over the generations of men. Let every work of his hand be a history of the one, and a lesson to the other. Let each exertion of his mighty mind be both hymn and prophecy; adoration to the Deity, revelation to mankind.'

That is Ruskin at his finest: here is Turner at his--well, as Turner.

A Mr. Hammersley, who visited him about this time in Queen Anne Street, described how he heard the shambling, slippered footstep coming down the stairs, the cold, cheerless room, the gallery, even less tidy and more forlorn, all confusion, mouldiness and wretched litter; most of the pictures covered with uncleanly sheets, and the man! 'his loose dress, his ragged hair, his indifferent quiet--all indeed that went to make his physique and some of his mind, but above all I saw, felt (and feel still) his penetrating gray eye.'