CHAPTER LII

1846: AGED SEVENTY-ONE

THE BEGINNING OF TURNER'S DECLINE, AND A 'GREY, DIM DRAWING'

The story of Turner's art life really ended in the last chapter: there is little more to tell, yet 'Queen Mab's Grotto,' which he exhibited at the British Institution in 1846, flickers with the old splendour. The sultry arch of trees in the foreground, the golden castle rising to the sky, have something of the old witchery, and the mundane fairies are more attractive than many of his clothed foreground fishermen. In this picture he rivalled nobody but himself, but the suggestion clearly came from Shakespeare, and it was the old man's pleasure to couple the names of Shakespeare and Turner in the catalogue, with this from _A Midsummer Night's Dream_:--

'Frisk it, frisk it by the moonlight beam.'

And this from the _Fallacies of Hope_:--

'Thy orgies, Mab, are manifold.'

The other pictures of this year have the old extravagance of title, little more. They were:--

'Hurrah for the Whaler Erebus! Another Fish!'

'Undine giving the Ring to Massaniello, Fisherman of Naples.'

'The Angel Standing in the Sun,' with quotations from Revelation and the poet Rogers.

'Whalers (boiling blubber) entangled in flaw ice, endeavouring to extricate themselves.'

'Returning from the Ball (St. Martha).'

'Going to the Ball (San Martino).'

His ambition was as buoyant as ever, and the look of his eyes as keen; but his hand was beginning to lose its power. Ruskin has this curt comment:--

'I shall take no notice of the three pictures painted in the period of his decline ("Undine," "The Angel Standing in the Sun," and "The Hero of a Hundred Fights"). It was ill-judged to exhibit them; they occupy to Turner's other works precisely the relation which _Count Robert of Paris_ and _Castle Dangerous_ hold to Scott's early novels.'

One could continue indefinitely quoting Ruskin on Turner, ranging, as he does, through the whole gamut from eulogy to chastisement, from adoration to grief. Here is a passage that arrests me as I turn his pages: pathetic, but a wilful misunderstanding of Turner's temperament:--

'There is something very strange and sorrowful in the way Turner used to hint only at these under-meanings of his; leaving us to find them out, helplessly; and if we did _not_ find them out, no word more ever came from him. Down to the grave he went, silent. "You cannot read me; you do not care for me; let it all pass; go your ways."'

And here is a wail that is probably quite within the sad truth. In a note to the first volume of _Modern Painters_, after remarking sadly that 'Turner is exceedingly unequal,' that he has failed most frequently 'in elaborate compositions,' and that 'finding fault with Turner is not either decorous in myself or likely to be beneficial to the reader,' Ruskin continues:--

'The reader will have observed that I strictly limited the perfection of Turner's works to the time of their first appearing on the walls of the Royal Academy. It bitterly grieves me to have to do this, but the fact is indeed so. No _picture_ of Turner's is seen in perfection a month after it is painted. The 'Walhalla' cracked before it had been eight days in the Academy rooms; the vermilions frequently lose lustre long before the Exhibition is over; and when all the colours begin to get hard a year or two after the picture is painted, a painful deadness and opacity come over them, the whites especially becoming lifeless, and many of the warmer passages settling into a hard valueless brown, even if the paint remains perfectly firm, which is far from being always the case. I believe that in some measure these results are unavoidable, the colours being so peculiarly blended and mingled in Turner's present manner, as almost to necessitate their irregular drying; but that they are not necessary to the extent in which they sometimes take place, is proved by the comparative safety of some even of the more brilliant works. Thus the "Old Téméraire" is nearly safe in colour, and quite firm; while the "Juliet and Her Nurse" is now the ghost of what it was; the "Slaver" shows no cracks, though it is chilled in some of the darker passages, while the "Walhalla" and several of the recent Venices cracked in the Royal Academy.'

How the attacks and parodies of Turner must have pained Ruskin! This, for example, from _Punch_ on 'Venice, Morning, Returning from the Ball':--

'We had almost forgotten Mr. J. M. W. Turner, R.A., and his celebrated MS. poem, the _Fallacies of Hope_, to which he constantly refers us, as "in former years"; but on this occasion, he has obliged us by simply mentioning the title of the poem, without troubling us with an extract. We will, however, supply a motto to his "Morning--Returning from the Ball," which really seems to need a little explanation; and as he is too modest to quote the _Fallacies of Hope_, we will quote for him:--

'Oh, what a scene! Can this be Venice? No. And yet methinks it is--because I see Amid the lumps of yellow, red and blue, Something which looks like a Venetian spire. That dash of orange in the background there Bespeaks 'tis morning. And that little boat (Almost the colour of Tomato sauce) Proclaims them now returning from the ball: This is my picture I would fain convey, I hope I do. Alas! what Fallacy!'

The following pen-picture is no parody. Wilkie Collins told Thornbury that when a boy--

'He used to attend his father on varnishing days, and remembers seeing Turner (not the more perfect in his balance for the brown sherry at the Academy lunch), seated on the top of a flight of steps, astride a box. There he sat, a shabby Bacchus, nodding like a Mandarin at his picture, which he, with a pendulum motion, now touched with his brush, and now receded from. Yet, in spite of sherry, precarious seat and old age, he went on shaping in some wonderful dream of colour; every touch meaning something, every pin's head of colour being a note in the chromatic scale.'

There is nothing sad in that; but who can look at or recall that 'grey, dim drawing, with one or two specks of light from craft on the river,' called 'Twilight in the Lorreli,' without emotion? This was one of the fifty-three drawings that Turner had brought years before straight to Farnley on his return from the Rhine. Long afterwards, possibly in this year, Hawkesworth Fawkes conveyed the set to the dreary house in Queen Anne Street to show to their creator. The old man turned over the drawings until he came to 'Twilight in the Lorreli.' His eyes filled with tears, and he muttered, 'But, Hawkey! but, Hawkey!'