CHAPTER VII

THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS, OR ‘WHAT YOU WILL’--1813-1830

A survey of the ground we have covered--The training of Turner’s sympathies by the poets--The limits of artistic beauty--and of a merely ‘musical’ education--Turner unlike Wordsworth--the predominantly sensuous bent of his genius--The parting of the ways--The dependence of art upon society--Turner ‘the fashion’--The influence of the Academy--The Italian visit in 1819--Turner’s Italian sketches--Their beauty and uselessness--The Naturalistic fallacy--Turner’s work for the engravers--The _Southern Coast_ series--‘Watchet’ and ‘Boscastle’--Whitaker’s _History of Richmondshire_--‘Hornby Castle’ and ‘Heysham’--Scott’s _Provincial Antiquities_--‘Edinburgh, from the Calton Hill’--‘Rochester,’ in the _Rivers of England_ series--_England and Wales_--‘Bolton Abbey’ and ‘Colchester’--‘Stamford’--‘Tynemouth.’

We have now followed the development of Turner’s mind from boyhood to youth and well into manhood. We have watched the architectural and topographical draughtsman develop into an artist under the guidance of his admiration for Wilson. Then the mind of the painter of the sublime, of the picturesque in general, struck its unseen roots deeper into the interests and sympathies of the people amongst whom he lived. In the hour of national danger his heart beat high with courage and determination. His pictures of the sea are like war songs; they strike the Dorian note, they represent the tone of mind of a brave man who faces wounds and death and all contingencies with unflinching endurance. Then the mind of the laureate of a nation in arms takes a still wider sweep. It embraces humanity and animate and inanimate nature in one glance, and finds the soul of good in all things. The Dorian harmonies give place to the Phrygian.

In all this Turner’s attitude seems entirely passive or receptive.

His amazingly rapid growth seems to be merely an effortless assimilation of the moral atmosphere of his time. All that was fairest and of good repute in the common spiritual heritage of the people seems to have passed insensibly into his thoughts and feelings. His art is a social or national phenomenon, so impersonal (or superpersonal) that it is difficult to point to traces of the mere individual in his work. The individual is lost in his universal function. The man himself is nothing but the voice or thought of what Hume has called ‘a man in general.’ Yet his work is as far removed as any work can be from the vagueness and coldness of the abstract universal. Behind every touch of his hand and every thought or idea in his mind beats the pulse of a full-blooded and passionate personality. Only, by some miracle, this man happens to be free from the local prejudices and limitations that deflect the judgment and sympathies of most men from the one true standard.

This education of Turner’s sympathies and feelings was the work, we have seen reasons for concluding, of the poets and artists whom he loved and admired. In the light and warmth of their ideal creations his own high instincts were quickened into life and activity. Under their influence he had entered into the common spiritual world, and they had given the direction to his impulses and ideas regarding things human and divine. But education must be a lifelong process, and there comes a time in the growth of each individual when the need of something more clear-cut and permanent than his own impulses and desires, however wholesome they may be, declares itself. As Plato pointed out long ago, to secure the happiest results of the best ‘musical’ education, something more than a merely ‘musical’ education is needed. We have now reached that period in Turner’s life when the lover of beautiful sights and thoughts and feelings must make a determined effort to unify these manifold beauties by an explicit principle, to exchange opinion for knowledge, if he is to preserve the advantages he has already won. In life there is no standing still, no resting upon our gains. We must go forward to higher victories, or find our arms tarnish and our gains dissipate themselves. But it may well be doubted whether art is capable of reaching a higher point of beauty than that which Turner had already reached. Forced to its extreme limits beauty insensibly passes into something which is at once more and less than beauty. Such pictures as the ‘Frosty Morning,’ ‘Windsor,’ and ‘The Trout Stream’ are, perhaps, the most beautiful that art is capable of producing. And the example of Wordsworth, who did strive upward to ‘an intelligence which has greatness and the vision of all time and of all being,’ is not on all points reassuring. His poetry, simply as poetry, did suffer from his philosophic studies. There may be something in the very nature of the human soul which sets bounds to the creation or expression of beauty.

But Turner was not like Wordsworth. He was for good and ill essentially and solely an artist. The play of shapes and colours was probably dearer to him than food or raiment. Having by sheer good fortune carried his art to its highest attainable pitch of beauty before he had reached his fortieth year, he was placed in an embarrassing position. The dialectical movement of beauty would now carry him outside his art, into regions where the individual man might reap rich gains, but where the artist could reap only sorrow and disappointment. The artist in Turner was stronger than the man. He loved the sensuous medium of art more than the spiritual beauty into which the current of traditional wisdom had carried him. The remainder of his life is therefore dedicated to the passionate and audacious development of the material beauties of his art.

We have now to trace in his works the gradual encroachments of the purely sensuous side of his art. For a time all seems well, perhaps more than well, for the gain in all the lower elements of his art is very striking. During the next twenty years his works gain constantly in the sensuous attractiveness of colour and in the formal beauties of rhythm and design. The loss of beauty is compensated by deep draughts of pleasantness. Yet amid the feverish intoxication of sensuous beauty a wild unrest and despair make themselves increasingly felt. The man has sacrificed himself to his art, and the starved human soul turns in bitterness from the ardently desired rewards of the most brilliantly triumphant artistic career that modern times have witnessed.

It is usual in treating mainly of Turner’s oil paintings to fix upon the year 1815 as the great turning-point in his career. After

1815 there is a marked change in the aims and character of Turner’s art, and it is convenient to date this change from the year that saw the end of the Napoleonic wars, and inaugurated a new era in the social and political condition of this country. From this date, too, the conditions of artistic production changed. The rapid development of industrial concerns brought a new class of patrons upon the scene. Before 1815, Turner’s patrons had been mainly the landed aristocracy; after 1815, his chief patrons were the successful merchants of the great towns. From that time the men of commerce and the manufacturers ousted the aristocracy from the leading position which they had held in the councils of the country. With the change of men a change took place in the ideals, manners and taste of the country; and Turner, with his extraordinary sensibility, his ready powers of intuition and rapid assimilation, seemed bound to reflect the change in his work.

Yet if we look closer into Turner’s career, we find that 1815 was rather the year that saw the brilliant public inauguration of the new era, than the actual beginning of the change. The ‘Crossing the Brook,’ exhibited in 1815, is often regarded as the impressive close of Turner’s early manner, yet this beautiful picture already bears the impress of that _folie des grandeurs_ to which we owe most of the excesses of the new manner. The ‘Frosty Morning’ of 1813 is really the last work in which the inspiration rings true throughout, in which the form and content are absolutely indissoluble. ‘Dido and Æneas,’ the only picture exhibited in 1814, is a frigid pseudo-classical pomposity, the due development of the strain of baser metal in Turner’s genius, which had already betrayed itself in the ‘Macon’ of 1803, the ‘Narcissus and Echo’ of 1804, and the ‘Schaffhausen’ of 1806. In glancing rapidly over Turner’s career we have been able to ignore these works; in the rush and splendour of his general development such pictures fall into insignificance, as casual indications that a busy professional man’s industry may outrun his inspiration.

After 1813 it is impossible to ignore this side of Turner’s production. It was just this regrettable side of his work that appealed most strongly to the middle-class public for whom he had now to cater. ‘Dido Building Carthage’ (1815) is a picture exactly to the taste of the admirers of the first instalment of _Childe Harold_, _The Bride of Abydos_, _The Corsair_, and _Lara_. It has the historical remoteness, the vague and empty grandeur, the mysterious dreaminess, the warm, voluptuous atmosphere and intoxicating lyrical movement of the contemporary phase of Romantic poetry. In ‘The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire’ (1817), ‘The Field of Waterloo’ (1818), ‘Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday’ (1819) and ‘Rome from the Vatican’ (1820), we recognise the contemporary and fellow-worker of Byron, Moore, Southey, Chateaubriand and Lamartine. In 1822 Turner’s only picture at the Royal Academy was entitled ‘What you Will’!--an ominous but significant title. It seems to put into words the ruling motive of this new phase of his art; to show that Turner is fully conscious that he is trimming his barque to catch the breath of popular applause. ‘The Bay of Baiae’ (1823), the two ‘Mortlakes’ (1826-27), ‘Dido directing the Equipment of the Fleet’ (1828) and ‘Ulysses’ (1829) indicate clearly the predominant bent of the artist’s mind towards the grosser pleasures of his art.

These works brought and kept Turner prominently before the public eye. They made him the pride and glory of the Royal Academy, and put him on a level of celebrity with Sir Thomas Lawrence. They made him, in short, in Sir Walter Scott’s words, ‘the fashion,’ yet it is these works that Turner’s admirers of the present day regard with only moderate enthusiasm.

Compared with the work of the previous decade, such pictures cannot but strike us as unworthy of the artist’s genius. Yet we have a tendency nowadays, I think, to overrate the independence of the artist. The modern artist, in so far as he is dependent upon the support of the society in which he works, is not an entirely free agent. The society that applauded them and for whose pleasure they were produced must therefore accept perhaps the main responsibility for the middle-class ideals stamped upon these pictures. In tracing the reaction of society upon art and art upon society, it is an extremely difficult matter to decide which factor is the more powerful, but I am inclined to think it is not art. But however this may be, it is certainly the duty of the individual to fortify himself as best he can against the contagion to which he is exposed. And it must be confessed that Turner was but ill-provided within himself with the means to resist the deadening influences of the atmosphere of bad taste into which he was now launched. It is true that Turner was not exactly what is called a ‘society-man,’ and he might therefore have more easily escaped the contagion of those drawing-room ideals to which men like Tom Moore succumbed. But Turner was a member of the Royal Academy. It was the recognised organisation of his profession, and he valued highly the honours it had to confer. His lack of general education made him an easy victim to the pretensions of officialism; like all uneducated people, he had a ridiculous reverence for the trappings and mummery of the learned world, for degrees, diplomas, titles. He was inordinately proud of the right to write ‘R.A.,’ ‘P.P.,’ after his name, and to alter these letters to _P._R.A. was the height of his ambition. Under these circumstances he could not but identify himself with the immediate practical aims of the Royal Academy. Now this ill-starred institution is so unwisely and so unfortunately constituted, that its very existence, and all its powers of activity as a professional benevolent society, are made to depend almost entirely upon its popularity as an exhibition society. The Academy throve then as it thrives now, in proportion as it succeeds in catering for the taste of the fashionable and moneyed public; it could only lose ground if it made the slightest attempts to guide or educate the public sense of beauty. In this way it had become in Turner’s time nothing more nor less than an organisation for stamping the ideals of the drawing-room upon English art.

In 1819 Turner made his first visit to Italy, the material for the pseudo-classical pictures painted before this having been derived from other artists’ pictures and engravings. It is curious that he should have waited till his forty-fifth year before making this journey. The Continent, it is true, had to a great extent been closed to English travellers since the outbreak of the French Revolution; but in spite of political and other difficulties Turner had managed to see a good deal of France, Belgium, Savoy and Switzerland, and he had been down the Rhine. If he had been equally keen to see Italy he could certainly have gone there also, especially as Italy was more generally accessible to an Englishman than any of the other countries he had visited. This curious shrinking from Italy may very likely have been due to the promptings of his own nature. When we examine his art as a whole we clearly see that he found more delight in the wildness, irregularity and caprice of Switzerland and the Rhine valleys than in the more regular scenery of Italy. Even Mr. Ruskin admits that Turner got no good from Italian scenery; Naples, Rome and Florence only put him out and bewildered him; Venice is the only Italian city that lent itself at all gracefully to his genius, and Venice is the most northern in character of all the Italian cities.

But the requirements of his patrons and the peculiar Academic misunderstanding of the principles of landscape art conspired to send Turner to Italy. There the scenery is more beautiful in itself and richer in historical associations than elsewhere in Europe, therefore it is the duty of the ambitious landscape painter who happens to have had the misfortune to be born somewhere out of Italy to stop painting the mere scenes of his own country as soon as possible, and to set out at once for such spots as Tivoli, Narni and Lago Maggiore, the spots approved, stamped and consecrated by generations of the prosperous travellers of all the chief countries of Europe. The theoretical error at the root of this dangerous prejudice is the confusion of the materially pretty, agreeable, and pleasant, with artistic beauty, which is something essentially different from any of these things. But this confusion of the pleasant and the beautiful was a doctrine which the Academy of Turner’s time was bent on inculcating by its teaching and exemplifying in its practice.

It happened that Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of the most brilliant exponents of the gospel of the pretty and pleasant, was spending the summer of 1819 in Rome. In the intervals of his labours and relaxations with the great and beautiful of society, he found time to notice the grandeur and beauties of the scenery around him. During this time ‘his letters to England were full of entreaties addressed to their common friends to urge upon Turner the importance of visiting Rome while “his genius was in the flower.” “It is injustice to his fame and his country,” he writes on another occasion, “to let the finest period of his genius pass away ... without visiting these scenes.”’[21] Whether these

appeals had any special weight with Turner we do not know, but he set out for Italy within a month or two of the writing of these letters.

He went from Calais to Paris, followed the usual coach-route to Turin, explored the Lakes of Como, Lugano and Maggiore, and reached Venice by way of Milan, Brescia and Desenzano. He must have spent some time at Venice to judge from the number of drawings made there, then went to Bologna, Cesena and Rimini, and continued along the coast of the Adriatic to Ancona. At Ancona he turned inland to Loreto and, following the high post road through Recanati and Macerata, entered the Via Flaminia at Foligno, and passing through Narni and Orticoli entered Rome by the Porta del Popolo, probably sometime in October. From Rome he explored Frascati, Tivoli and Albano, and made a tour to Naples, Baiae, Pozzuoli, Pompeii, Amalfi, Sorrento and Herculaneum. He was back in Rome by the 2nd December, then visited Florence, and, recrossing the Alps on the 24th January 1820, returned through Piedmont and France. On the 12th February we find him dining at Grosvenor Place, London, with his friends the Fawkeses.

To judge from the number of sketch-books filled on this journey Turner must have had the pencil in his hands practically the whole time he was away. Before starting he had ‘got up’ the subject carefully from books and engravings, and he knew exactly what buildings, antiquities and views he ought to look for at each place he went to. In this way he lost no time mooning about, like a modern artist, looking for unexpected beauties. He just went straight from one guide-book point of interest to another, sketched each methodically from every possible point of view and hurried on to the next. The sketch-books he used were generally about 7½ by 4½ inches in size, composed of ordinary white paper. His favourite medium was a hard-pointed pencil. His sketches are always made with a view to information, never for effect. In this way about a dozen books were filled, each of about a hundred pages, and most are drawn on on both sides of the pages. Our reproductions of the sketches of the Grand Canal, the Piazzetta at Venice, and Trajan’s Column (Plates XLVIII., L., and LIII.) may stand as examples of the main body of work done by Turner during this visit.

In addition to these small sketch-books he also used some of larger size, with the paper prepared with a wash of grey. He used one of these books at Tivoli, and another at Rome and Naples. The grey tint was of such a nature that it lifted quite easily when rubbed with bread or india-rubber. In this way he was able to indicate the chiaroscuro of his sketches with ease and celerity. The more elaborate drawings of Rome were made in this way, among them those exquisite views from Monte Mario, which have long been among the most admired of the drawings exhibited in the Turner Water-Colour Rooms at the National Gallery. Where the subject was an interesting one he occasionally worked over it, or over parts of it, with water-colour, as in the ‘View of Rome from Monte Mario’ (No. 592) here reproduced (Plate LI.), and ‘The Colosseum’ (No. 596) among the exhibited drawings. But the number of drawings in which Turner had recourse to colour is extremely limited, quite nineteen-twentieths of them being simply in pencil.

The drawings made during this visit are, in Mr. Ruskin’s opinion, the best Turner ever made from nature. ‘All the artist’s powers,’ he wrote, ‘were at this period in perfection; none of his faults had developed themselves; and his energies were taxed to the utmost to seize, both in immediate admiration, and for future service, the loveliest features of some of the most historically interesting scenery in the world.’[22] And again, ‘They are, in all respects, the most true and the most beautiful ever made by the painter.’[23] And assuredly it would be difficult to praise these superb drawings too highly or too enthusiastically; for sheer grace of pencilling, for skilful composition, for loving, unwearied rendering of architecture and natural scenery they are absolutely unrivalled.

But it is only as drawings, as works that contain their end within themselves, that they can be praised so highly. They are probably the most beautiful topographical drawings that have ever been made, but Turner did not regard himself as a topographical draughtsman, and from his point of view the results of this journey cannot have been completely satisfactory. If he had valued himself at all on his capacity for making beautiful topographical

drawings, he would surely have taken some steps to bring these achievements to the notice of the public.[24] He did nothing of the kind. We have seen that it was his settled habit to regard his sketches and drawings from nature as merely the preliminary stages of his pictures. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, Turner, after his few years of apprenticeship, never drew from nature without altering and arranging what he saw. He never accepted the given momentary facts in a passive spirit. It is on record that once he said to the companion of one of his sketching tours who had got into a muddle with the drawing he was making, ‘What are you in search of?’ And this active spirit had been one of the chief characteristics of all the drawing from nature he had done before his visit to Italy: he had always been in search of something, he had always had a very clear and exact idea of what he wanted, and he had almost invariably managed to grasp just what he wanted, while encumbering himself with very little else.

This clearness of intention is absent from the Italian drawings. The scenery, the buildings, the people, the shipping and the effects of light are all new to him, and delightfully interesting. The novelty of his surroundings carries him out of himself. He becomes for a time a mere common tourist with a kind of accidental knack of making rapid and wonderfully beautiful pictorial memoranda. It is as though the creative artist had said to his familiar daemon, ‘We are now in fair Italy. Sleep thou, and take a well-earned rest. The business of note-taking will go on automatically without thee; and when we are once more back in dreary London thou shalt awake as a giant refreshed with slumber, and shalt knead with renewed vigour the material that has been accumulated.’ But the results achieved were not as satisfactory as Turner might have expected. The best that could be made of these wonderful sketches was two or three charming water-colours for Mr. Fawkes, a weak and empty ‘Forum Romanum’ for Mr. Soane’s Museum, and a large ‘Bay of Baiae,’ which, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, ‘is encumbered with material; it contains ten times as much as is necessary to a good picture, and yet is so crude in colour as to look unfinished.’[25]

It therefore depends very much upon what _we_ are in search of, what conclusions we shall come to about these Italian drawings. If we are evangelists with a mission to preach the Gospel of Naturalism, we may accept them as the finest works of art Turner ever produced, in spite of the fact that he found them useless and worse than useless for his artistic purposes. From such a point of view it would be Turner’s fault if these beautiful things threw him out and led him astray; or, as Mr. Ruskin puts it, ‘the effect of Italy upon his [Turner’s] mind is very puzzling ... he seems never to have entered thoroughly into the spirit of Italy, and the materials he obtained there were afterwards but awkwardly introduced into his large compositions.’[26]

But if the processes of artistic creation are worth studying, we shall go on to ask ourselves how it is that the most elaborate, painstaking and thoroughly delightful drawings Turner ever made from nature were actually the least useful to him as a maker of pictures; and how it is that exquisitely deliberate and dainty drawings like those in the Roman and Neapolitan sketch-books lead actually to the production of frigid, hybrid, pseudo-classical pictures, while hurried and scarcely intelligible scribbles like those reproduced in Plates XXVII. and XXV. had been the means of bringing into existence such noble and impressive pictures as the ‘Windmill and Lock,’ and designs like the ‘Hedging and Ditching’?

The answer to these questions is not far to seek. The state of mind necessary for the production of the two kinds of drawings is essentially different, and the one, which produces the exhaustive and accurate drawing, is antagonistic to the state of mind in which a strongly imaginative work of art is conceived, while the other, which produces a less immediately satisfying record, is actually the state of mind in which a passionately felt work of art comes to birth. In the drawing which we admire so much the emotional element is in abeyance, the cognitive or sense-perceptive is predominant; in the other the emotional element is predominant. But in the first case, while the immediate result, considered simply in itself, is more delightful, there has been

no real quickening of the artist’s spirit; in the second case, while the immediate result is deplorable for us, it is eloquent and glorious for the artist himself as the first stirring of his newborn spiritual progeny.

The object of these remarks is not to attempt to convince us that these charming Italian drawings are at all less charming than they seem; it is rather to combat the false deductions which Naturalism has succeeded in drawing from the fact that they are so genuinely delightful and so self-satisfying. It is inevitable that an artist shall constantly be making studies from nature, sharpening and exercising his powers of observation, and storing his note-books and memory with facts of natural appearances. But it does not follow that this business of observing and recording visual facts is the essential or even most important part of the artist’s function. Naturalism assumes that it is. It therefore treats the power to copy natural objects faithfully and without alteration as the exact equivalent of the power of pictorial expression.[27] And so far as the system of art education pursued in this country has any rational foundation, it is based upon this doctrine of Naturalism. Hence the only kind of training that is provided for English art students is training in this capacity of reproducing objects of sight accurately. This has come to be the beginning and the end of modern art education, with what results we have only to walk into any summer exhibition of the Royal Academy to see. Under these circumstances, I think it is important that we should give its due weight to any evidence that tends to invalidate these generally received opinions. Of course the evidence of the practice and line of development of one artist, even an artist as great as Turner, is not by itself sufficient to settle such a question; but still, I submit, this evidence has a distinct bearing on the subject and should receive its due attention.

If the doctrine of Naturalism possessed the universal validity it is assumed to possess, the pictures based upon the truest and most elaborate drawings Turner ever made from nature--and that too of the most beautiful and the most historically interesting scenery in the world--should have been the best he had so far produced. They are admittedly among the worst. If the training acquired by making such drawings is essential to the development of the artist’s powers of pictorial expression, how comes it that in Turner’s case this training came after the production of his most perfect pictures,--these Italian drawings being made in 1819, the ‘Sheerness,’ ‘Windsor,’ ‘Abingdon,’ and ‘Frosty Morning’ having been painted between 1809 and 1813, and he had never worked from nature like this before? This is the evidence. I can only beg the candid reader to give it the earnest consideration it seems to me to deserve.

Turner’s oil paintings produced between 1815 and 1830 cannot but strike us as disappointing, especially when we compare them with the output of the years immediately preceding this period. It is only as a sea-painter that Turner reminds us of his former mastery, and with the exception of the ‘Dort’ (1818) ‘Entrance of the Meuse’ (1819), the Greenwich ‘Battle of Trafalgar’ (1823) and ‘Now for the Painter’ (1827), it would do Turner’s reputation little harm if all his oil pictures produced during these years were destroyed. His real greatness is only shown in this period by the water-colours produced mainly for the engravers. In the work done for the _Southern Coast_, Scott’s _Provincial Antiquities_, the _Rivers_ and _Ports of England_, and the _England and Wales_ series, Turner displayed all the genuine nobleness and sweetness of his nature. I propose therefore to occupy the remainder of this chapter with a rapid survey of these undertakings, singling out from each one or two representative designs for closer examination.

We have now seen what was the character of Turner’s pictures which gained him most applause and favour in Academic circles and with the public of the Academy. It is no doubt regrettable that a man of his talents should have to waste his time--as it seems to us--in the manufacture of puerile and pretentious specimens of Academic ‘high art,’ but we can easily make too much of the matter. There is something altogether incommensurable about such a man; he is like some great natural force, copious, abundant and unwearying. He must have drawn and painted with as little effort as ordinary mortals exert when they play cards or write letters to their friends. I have no doubt that

the ‘high art’ concoctions bothered him much more than his better works, for it was all ratiocinative, conscious, all spun out of the understanding without any deep-struck roots in the unconscious life of his affections. But no doubt he felt prouder of the results, simply because he was more conscious of the efforts. We have no grounds for supposing that he did not enjoy the work, and in return it certainly gave him comparative independence, and encouraged him to produce. Printsellers and publishers were anxious to get the celebrated Academician to work for them, and the big middle-class public were eager to possess themselves of engravings from the great man’s designs. It was certainly a clear gain that the designer of the _Southern Coast_, the _Richmondshire_ drawings, Scott’s _Provincial Antiquities_, the _Rivers_ and _Ports of England_, and the _England and Wales_ series could afford to keep publishers and editors at arm’s length, that he was so strong in public favour that his work was influenced by none but artistic considerations.

It hardly comes within the scope of the present essay to study the drawings in detail which form the originals of Turner’s engraved work, important as these drawings are as examples of the artist’s genius. Each drawing is a perfect work of art in itself, the fact that an engraving was to be made from it counting practically as nothing with the artist. If the subject did not lend itself quite satisfactorily to the engraver’s requirements, Turner introduced various modifications into the engraver’s proofs, but he did not alter the drawings. In this way the original drawings were kept as independent creations. Into them the artist was free to pour all that spontaneous native side of his talent which could find no outlet in his ambitious ‘high art’ productions. As water-colours the originals of the engravings that were issued between 1814 and 1830 are among the most remarkable and consummate achievements of the medium. With hardly an exception they are worked entirely in transparent colour, and for sheer range of invention, variety of effect, and loveliness of colour they have no equals. But their place is among the artist’s completed works, and as our immediate business is with the sketches and studies, we can only touch upon these exquisitely beautiful water-colours incidentally; _i.e._ only in so far as they help us to grasp the significance of the sketches and preliminary drawings which went to their production.

It is a curious sign how little conscious Turner was of the nature and limitations of his own capacities, that the plan of the _Southern Coast_ series of engravings, as it first took form in his mind, included a long narrative poem from his own hand describing the history and local peculiarities of the places he proposed to illustrate. It is hardly probable that an individual with less capacity for verbal expression ever sat down to write a long poem. Yet it is easy to see how it was that Turner came to think himself competent to undertake such a task. The stamp of his mind was genuinely poetic. He had, and knew that he had, in a high measure ‘the vision and the faculty divine.’ The inspiration of his best works had been drawn from the poets, from Thomson, Akenside, and Milton. His pictures, so far as it is possible to distinguish content from form, are real poems. And the technical accomplishment of pictorial art had come to him so easily and naturally that it may well have seemed to flow inevitably from the innate strength of his emotions and the vivid hue of his imagination. He probably thought that he had only to take a pen in his hand to find the accomplishment of verse following with the same ease and inevitability.

The verses Turner did succeed in writing are pathetic failures; the mind so intimately versed in the subtleties of visible melody and harmony was dead to the witchery of verbal sound. It is true that his failure is not quite so abject as the extracts Thornbury has printed from the attempted _Southern Coast_ epic would lead one to expect, but, when all due allowance is made for Thornbury’s blunders of transcription, the result is still quite hopeless. But it is otherwise when we turn to the designs made from the same subject-matter, and, in spite of Lessing and a host of modern theorists, I must insist that in their heart and essence they are indeed poems.

The first number of the _Southern Coast_ was published in January 1814, and the last number was not issued till May 1826, but with only one or two exceptions the whole of the Dorsetshire, Devon, Cornwall and Somersetshire subjects (and these form about three-quarters of the whole work) were made from sketches taken during a single journey in the summer of 1811. These sketches are the kind of notes that a poet would take; from the point of view of the historian or topographer they are singularly incomplete. Occasionally we come across a tolerably elaborate drawing of a ruined castle or stretch of rocky coast, but even these are summary and hurried in comparison with the Italian drawings, and Turner seldom chose such sketches as the bases of his finished pictures. He certainly found them useful as the means of making a methodical analysis of the pictorial constituents of what he saw, and as storing his memory and giving matter and fulness to his own conceptions of natural phenomena. But there their usefulness ended. The actual embryo of the pictures he painted is generally a hurried scrawl about two square inches in size, made with a blunt pencil.

Among the _Southern Coast_ sketch-books is a fat little volume bound in brown calf, having a brass clasp and lettered on the back, _British Itenary (sic)_. The title page runs as follows:--_The British Itinerary_ | or | Travellers Pocket Companion | throughout | Great Britain | Exhibiting | the Direct Route to Every | Borough and Commercial Town | in the Kingdom | with the principal Cross Roads | Compiled from Actual Measurement | and the best Surveys and Authorities | By | Nathanl. Coltman; | Surveyor. | Employed by the Post Office in Measuring the Roads of | Great Britain | London. | Printed and Published, by Wm. Dickie, No. 120 Strand; and N. Coltman, Green Walk; Black Friars Road. | Price 3s. Sewed.’ It contains two hundred and fifty leaves, the printed matter only occupying about a third of the total number, the remainder having been left blank for notes. These are now filled with Turner’s notes of expenses incurred, the draft of the poem he attempted to write, and a number of minute sketches. Among these it is possible to recognise the originals of several of the _Southern Coast_ designs, including those of Combe Martin, Watchet, Boscastle and Clovelly, the ‘Dartmouth’ and ‘Dartmouth Castle’ of the _Rivers of England_ series, and the sketch upon which the superb ‘Stonehenge at Daybreak’ (R. 81), in the unpublished ‘Liber,’ was probably founded. Two of these sketches have been reproduced on Plates LV. and LVI., together with the engravings of the completed designs. That the finished drawings could have been made from such slender material can hardly appear less than astonishing to those familiar with the methods of artists of the present day; but to the best of my belief, Turner had no other sketches or drawings of these places to assist him in his work, and it can only add to our amazement when we notice that in all probability the finished drawings were made, one nearly eight years, and the other nearly fourteen years, after the sketches were taken; the ‘Watchet’ plate having been published in April 1820, and the ‘Boscastle’ in March 1825.

When we examine carefully the sketch of Watchet we find that it gives us very little more than the general idea of a small fishing village, with a curved breakwater and a stretch of rocky coast running off into the distance. This general idea must have been all that the artist retained of his experiences of the place, _i.e._, he cannot possibly have retained any bare unattached visual sensations of any of the particular objects comprised in the scene. The details of the construction of the breakwater in the engraving may, for all I know (I have never visited the place), be exactly like those of the actual one which Turner saw there, but what little I know of his ordinary methods of work inclines me to doubt it. It is probably true enough to the general facts of the case, but all those little local accidents of form which the conscientious realist of to-day would linger over so lovingly are certainly ignored. No doubt when Turner was on the spot he looked at the breakwater, as at everything, with keen and vigilant eyes, and his impression of the structure would have contributed to the building up in his mind of a definite and concrete idea of the laws and customs of breakwaters in general. And when he set to work to elaborate his sketch it was doubtless this general idea which came into play, and which turned those half-dozen rudely scratched lines in the sketch into a sharply defined mental picture, as vivid to Turner’s imagination as a real scene, and infinitely more useful for his immediate purpose, for the task of selection and rejection was already done. In this way the whole subject came to life; the sketch, a fixed point in present perception, beckoning forth the stored essential riches of the artist’s mind. Those three upright lines inside the breakwater turn into

an array of fishing boats, the sea ripples into the harbour and creeps up the shore, the village straightens itself out and grows into a collection of habitable houses, with gardens and parting walls, the women come out of the houses to spread their washing on the grass to dry, others gossip in the roadway, the men have a little business loading or unloading one of the boats, or else see to the nets, or stroll idly along the jetty, and a couple set off on important business along the road that leads over the hill and far away. The whole process, of course, is absurdly easy and familiar. Even the least imaginative of us is capable of some kind of success in this line of imaginative interpretation. The only point of difference between the least of us and the greatest in this kind of exercise is in the quality of the subjective filling-out with which we clothe our meagre data, in the wealth of experience stored and refined by thought, its coherence, and above all, its clear-cut precision and definition. The power to force all the floating imagery thus called up to what I think Blake called ‘the seeing point’--to make the mental imagery as clear-cut and vivid as an actual object of sight, and then to use it as the material for the construction of a picture, these are exceptional capacities; but we can hardly doubt that the psychological processes which connect sketch and imaginative amplification, even in the mind of the most gifted artist, are the same as those which connect sign and interpretation in the minds of all normally constituted individuals.

To an artist trained in modern methods of literal transcription, it is curious to notice the liberties Turner allows himself to take with his own sketch. In it the main shapes of the mass of rock in the middle distance are pretty clearly marked, but instead of carefully retaining these and amplifying them, his busy mind sets to work and builds the whole structure up afresh. In the end it comes out very different from the sketch, but it is so well and truly put together, it is so thoroughly steeped in the profound knowledge garnered in years of the sharpest observation and study, that we accept it more gladly than an unintelligent transcript of any particular rock formation. Nay more, even if we had forced Turner himself to stay there on the spot, and elaborate his representation with the scene in front of his eyes, there would have been no gain to the drawing, for the result could not possibly have been more thoroughly penetrated with the laws of human thought and observation.

We notice the same freedom in dealing with the ‘Boscastle’ sketch. The general character only of the rocks on the right is there indicated, but in the engraving the whole mass is recreated from the stores of the artist’s knowledge. In the sketch, too, there is no authority for the solid masonry on the rock to the left, immediately below the gang of men assisting the vessel into harbour. Note also the alteration in the profile of this rock, which slopes less abruptly in the sketch than in the engraving.

It is true that these two plates can hardly be ranked as among the finest of the _Southern Coast_ subjects; the ‘Watchet’ is, I think, rather a poor design, and though the ‘Boscastle’ is finer, it can hardly be classed with such consummate achievements as the ‘Plymouth Dock, from Mount Edgecumbe,’ ‘Poole,’ or ‘The Land’s End.’ In these designs the subjective synthesis has a more distinctly emotional setting, but there can be no doubt that the processes of imaginative construction are on exactly the same lines as those we have just indicated. In every case the active motive force is something within the artist’s own soul; it is not given from without.

The next important publication with which Turner was connected after the commencement of the _Southern Coast_, was Whitaker’s _History of Richmondshire_, to which he furnished a series of twenty illustrations. This set of drawings, often spoken of as ‘the Yorkshire series,’ has always been regarded with peculiar affection by all lovers of Turner’s water-colour work. The originals are nearly all in private collections (where I hope they will be carefully guarded from the light, as the blues in them are of a fugitive nature), but there are two permanently accessible to the public in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge--thanks to Mr. Ruskin’s generosity--and a third is in London, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Cambridge drawings, the ‘Richmond, Yorks,’ and the ‘Mossdale Fall,’ are already somewhat faded, especially the latter one, but the London drawing, of ‘Hornby Castle,’ thanks to Mr. Vaughan’s wise

stipulation that it shall always be protected by a curtain when not being looked at, is still in fairly good condition. The engravings from the whole series were published between the years 1819 and 1823, but the sketches on which the drawings were based were all made during a tour in the summer of 1816.

So far as I know, Turner did not make a single colour sketch from nature during the whole of this tour. All the sketches are in pencil and the water-colours were all painted in the studio entirely from these pencil memoranda. The sketches are very similar to those made for the _Southern Coast_ subjects, but they contain evidence that the artist was in a softer and gentler frame of mind. The conquering Napoleonic insolence has passed into an attitude of human and affectionate solicitude. The touch of the pencil point is everywhere light and graceful, yet it is as swift as ever, never lingering for a moment over details or particular facts. This is especially noticeable in the treatment of foliage; the pencil seeming always to caress the general idea of foliage, while holding the particular shapes and even positions of trees and bushes as of only slight importance. The work, one cannot but feel, is that of a happy and contented man, at peace with himself and pleased with his surroundings. When we remember the close proximity of Farnley Hall to these scenes, and that Mr. and Mrs. Fawkes and their family actually accompanied the artist over part of the ground, we can hardly be surprised at the sunniness of temper evinced by these sketches.

In nearly all the designs human figures and cattle play a prominent part. This is noticeably the case with the two subjects I have chosen for illustration. In the ‘Hornby Castle’ the incident of the broken jug, the weeping maiden, the sympathetic bystanders, the picturesque passer-by on his donkey, the busy milk-maid, and above all the cat, triumphantly lapping up the spilt milk, all this is at least as important an element in the picture as the Castle and view itself. In the ‘Heysham’ the reapers, cattle, milkmaid, and passing waggon seem to form the keynote of the whole design. Yet there are no sketches or even the slightest indications of any of these things in the sketch-books. They were evolved, I firmly believe, entirely by the artists’ creative imagination as each scene came to life under his hands in the studio. To some extent, no doubt, the decorative or mechanical requirements of the subject solicited their existence. In the ‘Heysham,’ for example, lines are wanted in the foreground to repeat with variations the horizontal undulations of the mountains in the distance and middle-distance; the cast shadows do this, and hence we have the presence of the cows and figures as pretexts for these shadows. And then we may as well make these objects useful in themselves; hence the turn of the foreground cow’s neck placed just where it seems to complete the curve of the descending hills, and the sharp silhouette of the head catches the eye while the cast shadow swings it away in a new and happy direction. Exactly why the eye should find such exquisite enjoyment in the plunge down from the hill’s profile to the head of the calf, rubbing her nose against the back of the seated white cow, and then on to the foreground beast, and then in springing off again at a sharp angle to the bottom of the large foreground stone in the corner just above the signature,--exactly why we take pleasure in this kind of visual melody, I do not know, but I know that the tracks laid for visible flights of this kind, crossing each other and interweaving in all directions, form a very large part of the enjoyment which Turner’s drawings provide.

The pencil sketch of Heysham (Plate LIX. (_a_)) thus formed, as it were, the leading motive of the water-colour drawing, or rather it provided a series of shapes which could not be varied beyond certain limits, and these shapes formed the starting-point of the elaborate visual movement which Turner proceeded to invent and weave round it. I called just now this side of the work ‘decorative or mechanical,’ because I wished to distinguish it from a different but related aspect. This unmeaning and abstract play of lines is like the rhyme, assonance and rhythm of a poem; a part, but an unconscious, and as it were dependent, part, of the whole effect. No sane person would read a poem expressly for the jingle of the sounds, unless for the purposes of analysis, and in the same way, no sane lover of pictures would look at this drawing of Heysham merely for the visible play of the lines and masses. Neither can the artist or poet abandon themselves to the

mere unmeaning play of sounds or lines in the process of composition. These external requirements must be subordinated to the requirements of the meaning. And so, though I said just now that these mechanical requirements may have had some share in calling the figures and incidents represented into being, we must be careful not to forget that that share is only of slight and subordinate importance. What is important is the essential congruity of the figures and incidents with the landscape itself; they must appear not as something arbitrarily added, but as a mere development or further determination of the meaning already implicit in the landscape. In the present case so intimate is what I may call the logical identity between the bare view, as represented by the initial sketch, and as a topographical fact, and the whole living and moving scene as represented by the finished design, that the development of the one from the other seems as inevitable as the march of the seasons or the processes of growth and decay to which we ourselves are subject.

From this point of view I think it is easy to see that such a result is attainable in no other way than that which Turner has followed. No actual scene could ever possess quite the same close-knit logical coherence, the same absolute absence of irrelevance, as we find in Turner’s finished drawing; so that the most faithful and loving and skilful reproduction of the most carefully selected aspect of actuality would never give us the same kind of outer and inner unity that Turner has achieved by his method of amplifying, modifying, and interpreting his slight pencil sketches. Only in this way can the active forces of interpretation or assimilation, by which the artist as well as the meanest of us fills out the incoming suggestions of the given, achieve adequate expression. A psychologist might perhaps describe the difference between a faithful transcription of an actual scene and such an effort of the creative imagination as we have just been studying, by saying that the one is a representation of the incoming or given ideas or sensations, while Turner’s picture represents these same ideas or sensations after they have been thoroughly ‘apperceived’ by the masses of ideas stored in the artist’s mind. If we adopt such a description, we must not forget to add that Turner has used his knowledge of the mechanism of the pictorial language to set out his total idea for us in the clearest and pleasantest way.

As with the Heysham sketch, so with the Hornby.[28] I need perhaps hardly call attention to the deliberate heightening of Hornby Castle, and to the way the back of the nearer hill in front of it has been humped in the finished design. This deliberate falsification (as it must seem to the literalist) is paralleled by the treatment of the foreground tree, whose individuality is destroyed, and whose place is taken by a mere alien grown in the fertile climate of the artist’s imagination. I have no doubt that if Turner could have got the same effect without making these alterations he would not have made them. But it is obvious that he could not. From his point of view such alterations are merely grammatical devices by which he throws the required emphasis on qualities which hills and trees do undeniably possess, but which were somewhat slurred over in nature’s momentary presentment of the case. And if we think about the matter calmly, we see that we cannot expect any object to enter into new relations without undergoing some kind of modification; I mean that we cannot expect physical facts to be taken up into the intelligible world and used as factors in the expression of ideas and emotions without requiring some kind of modification.

While Turner was producing these exquisite drawings for Whitaker’s _History of Richmondshire_, he also executed a series of ten or eleven slightly smaller drawings to illustrate Sir Walter Scott’s _Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland_. Eight of these drawings were presented by the publishers to Scott, who had them framed from an oak felled on the Abbotsford estate during Turner’s visit there in 1818. The effect of this frame on the drawings, it must be confessed, is atrocious. It might be guaranteed to kill the effect of any water-colour drawings but the radiantly immortal ones for which it was made. No doubt even these would look better out of it, but such as it is it hung in the breakfast-room at Abbotsford till after Scott’s death, and as it then hung, so it hangs now in Mr. Thomas Brocklebank’s hospitable mansion at Heswall, Chester.

When we draw the curtain, which has kept Turner’s beautiful

work as fresh as when it was first executed, and look at these drawings, it is difficult to single out any one of them for special attention. But after looking through the engravings made from them in Scott’s book, the marvellous view of ‘Edinburgh from the Calton Hill’ leaves perhaps the most powerful impression on the imagination. I have, therefore, selected the drawing made from nature upon which this design was based as the subject of one of our illustrations (Plate LX.).

In this case we find that Turner has followed his sketch with great care, yet the whole material has been hammered this way and that by his powerful hand. We can see that the artist felt impatient with nature’s calm and unhurried chronicle of facts, and was determined at all costs to make a more immediate and concentrated attack on the spectator’s powers of perception. Instead of stretching out calmly and indifferently on both hands, as in the sketch, the city in the finished design seems to soar upwards from the depths beneath our feet. The jail on our left has been squeezed together, making the line from the porch to the central turret much more oblique than it was. The perspective of nearly all the buildings has been modified, yet the artist has taken great care to preserve the character of the silhouettes of the leading planes. But it is in the invention of the play of light which animates the whole, and throws into such strong relief all the telling points of the design, that we find the clearest evidence of the artist’s active intervention.

A curious instance of Turner’s habit of using his notes rather as hints to his imagination than as providing ready-made material waiting for immediate incorporation, is afforded by the sketches of some figures made while he was standing on the Calton Hill. On the back of one of the pages on which our view of Edinburgh is drawn, there is a rough sketch of the brow of the hill with groups of figures on it. Among these figures are three girls attending to the drying of the clothes they have washed. One of these is standing shaking out a cloth in the wind. But though Turner has introduced this incident into the foreground of his picture, the figure there is not a repetition of the graceful figure in the sketch. In the picture the action has been changed, and the figure presented in a different point of view. It is designed altogether afresh. In the same way none of the other figures is repeated in the finished drawing. The figures in the drawing are indeed the same sort of people as in the sketch, but each is designed specially for its place, and with reference to the movement of the whole picture. All this is eminently characteristic of the cast of Turner’s mind, which seems to store scenes and incidents in complete independence of their momentary and particular appearance; he is thus able to set these invisible essences in motion before his mind’s eye, and to wait till they arrange themselves to his complete satisfaction, and he has then no difficulty in clothing them with the attributes of time and space.

We will turn now to a sketch of a different kind. In the ‘Edinburgh,’ ‘Heysham’ and ‘Hornby’ sketches, as in most of those we have examined, we have seen Turner making a note of what we may call the chief items of the topographical data, leaving the problem of their arrangement, modification and amplification for future solution. In the two sketches of Rochester (Plates LXII. (_a_) and (_b_)) which I have had reproduced, we see the artist’s mind moving on a different track. A few pages earlier in the sketch-book from which these two leaves are taken, he has indeed made his usual record of the facts about the church, bridge, etc., at Rochester, but apparently, as time did not press, he remained in his boat watching the scene and criticising, as one who understood such things, nature’s own methods of design. His sketches now become not topographical records but swift and eloquent designs for pictures. The concrete particularity of the castle, church, bridge, etc., becomes abrogated or submerged. These objects are now taken up into a new kind of systematic unity, in which their relationship to the whole and to each other is of much more importance than their discrete individuality. Now, the important point is just how the Castle and the other topographical items drop into place with regard to the shipping on the river,--the kind of groups they all make, the way the one item affects the other, half hiding it or setting it off to advantage. In the sketch on page 18 of the sketch-book (Plate LXII. (_a_)) the exact position of the mast of the foreground vessel is the dominant factor,--the way it unites the lines described by the silhouette of the castle and the trees sloping down to the bridge, bringing the

curves to a focus, as it were, and providing a rigid base for them to spring from again. In the other sketch (Plate LXII. (_b_)) Turner is trying a different arrangement of the material, or, to put it more accurately, nature is trying another effect, and Turner is watching and making notes of the experiment.

In this way, before Turner shut up his book he had made over a dozen skeleton designs, which he had only to clothe in colour and light and shade to develop into beautiful pictures. But when he got home and actually set to work to make the drawing of Rochester for the _Rivers of England_ series, he deliberately ignored every one of nature’s pregnant suggestions, and began to build up his own design in his own way. Perhaps he thought nature’s designs wanted more space than he had at his command in a plate that was to be only a few inches square; perhaps it was the sheer delight in the exercise of his creative powers that was the main motive force, for though his sketch-books teem with designs caught in this way on the wing, yet he never once, so far as I can discover, adopted one of them in his own pictures, without so modifying and recasting it as to make it into a quite new and independent construction.

I am not at all sure of the exact date when the sketch of Bolton Abbey (Plate LXIV.) was made. It is the sketch upon which the water-colour engraved in the _England and Wales_ series was based. The engraving was published in 1827, so the water-colour must have been made a year or two earlier, but as the sketch occurs in a book which contains a number of the _Devonshire Rivers_ subjects, it probably belongs to about the time of Turner’s second visit to Devonshire. This visit took place in either 1812 or 1813, and the Wharfedale sketches, of which the ‘Bolton’ is one, cannot have been later than 1815. So it is probable that at least ten years elapsed between the making of the sketch and the water-colour drawing in which the sketch was elaborated.

The drawing itself is one of the most universally admired of all the _England and Wales_ subjects. Mr. Ruskin alludes to it again and again in the various volumes of _Modern Painters_. In the fourth volume (chapter xvi.) he gives an admirable analysis of the imaginative conception, and in volume three (chapter ix.) he dwells with his usual eloquence on the knowledge displayed in the treatment of the foreground trees. With the general tenor of these remarks I am in entire agreement, and if the passages were not so long I should like to introduce them here, but unless the reader is very careful, I am inclined to think that Mr. Ruskin’s constant appeal to ‘the facts’ is likely to mislead him into the belief that all the details of the design, and especially those of the foreground trees, are elaborately studied and accurately reproduced from the actual scene. Turner’s sketch proves that this was not the case. Each individual tree, every curve in its trunk, the texture of its bark, the stains and hollows and flickering lights and shadows upon it, and the intricate play of the trees’ upper branches, all these have been, not painstakingly studied from nature, but invented by the artist in his studio, and each detail has been invented not entirely for its own sake, but as a note, a chord, in the whole complex of visible harmony.

I do not think any more wonderful example could be given of the intense activity of creative genius than that which is furnished by a careful comparison of this drawing with the sketch upon which it was based. We look at the sketch, and all the subject seems there; as a synopsis of the finished picture it seems tolerably complete. Yet in the drawing we find almost every detail has been altered. Notice the way the foreground trees have been pushed nearer to each other. In the sketch one has to search for the abbey, and then one’s eyes begin to wander about aimlessly. But in the drawing everything is brought into connection with everything else; it is all welded together. The abbey is the first thing one sees, then the eye goes easily and inevitably to the second couple of foreground trees, the seated angler and the distant river-bank. In passing from one object to the other the eye feels something of the same kind of pleasure that the ear takes in the rhythm of verse, so that one’s gaze travels over the drawing not vagrantly and with effort, but gladly, and to the spectator all this visible melody and delight seem like the unconscious expression of the secret joy with which the artist’s mind played round the scene, an echo of the mysterious music of his happy memories.

The effect of the ‘Bolton’ drawing is that of a bright summer’s

afternoon, an effect that does not change very rapidly; the slightness of Turner’s sketch was not, therefore, a necessary outcome of the transitory nature of his subject-matter. Had he been so minded he could easily have painted the whole subject out-of-doors. But with the ‘Colchester’ drawing, another of the _England and Wales_ subjects, published about the same time as the ‘Bolton,’ the case was different. There the effect is a momentary one. It is evening, the shades of twilight have gathered, and the sun is on the point of disappearing. There was only time for a few hasty memoranda; but while the modern artist would almost invariably make his memoranda in colour, Turner is quite satisfied with his usual hurried pencil notes. In the sketches here reproduced (Plate LXVI.) we have a kind of abstract of the whole scene. There is the miller’s house beside the river at the foot of the hill, while the hill is crowned by a row of trees through which the abbey building and the roofs of the distant town can be seen. The position of the sun and of its reflection in the river are marked.

The general idea of the whole is certainly there in the sketches, but in a rudimentary or indeterminate condition. Note how deliberately vague and undefined the idea of the trees on the brow of the hill has been kept. A distant abbey-building set in the delicate tracery of gracefully branching trees, the whole framed in masses of feathery foliage, that was the general idea of this part of the design, and Turner knew that he was familiar enough with the nature and ways of trees to be able to carry out this idea with all the requisite wealth of detail whenever he should set himself seriously to the task. The exact shapes of the trees actually growing there on the hillside on the day and at the moment when he made this sketch were, apart from their general idea, a matter of indifference to him. If he had cared very much about them he could easily have gone there the next morning and drawn them carefully; they would hardly have altered much in the night. But these shapes would have surely wanted revision, alteration and suppression, before they could have taken their places as a perfectly articulated limb in Turner’s living, organic design. The result could not have been more satisfactory than the one reached without this labour.

As with the row of trees, so with the miller’s house, the cottages creeping up the hillside and the distant town. The pencil hieroglyphs are enough to suggest the general idea of these objects, their appropriate particularities will unroll themselves from the stored treasures of Turner’s mind so soon as he takes his pencil in hand again to carry forward his work; not the actual details of the cottages, etc., existing down there in Essex, but the details appropriate to the picture as an expression of an emotional experience.

The drawings in the _England and Wales_ series produced in this way, in which a definite particular experience of the artist is enshrined as it were in a wealth of appropriate and beautifully arranged shapes and colours, are among the best of the series. But the pressure of professional engagements did not always permit the artist to wait for this kind of inspiration. On such occasions he appears to have fallen back on the material stored in his early sketch-books, and his rhetorical mastery of the elements of design was taxed to the uttermost to provide it with suitable clothing and ornament. An excellent example of this kind of work is provided by the drawing of Stamford, published in 1830. This was founded on one of the sketches made during Turner’s first tour in the North of England, in 1797. This sketch (Plate LXVIII.) is no doubt a fairly accurate record of the place, its humdrum streets and houses, with its three triumphant bursts of idealism in the shape of its three unimaginative church towers.

In taking up this sketch thirty years after it was made, Turner seems to have asked himself, ‘What am I to do to make this dull affair into something universally interesting?’ that is to say, into something interesting and even amusing to those who care nothing for Stamford merely for its own sake. Of course the first thing for him to do was obviously to seize upon the three towers and make the most of them, setting them up against a gorgeous sky filled with rain and thunder and the darting rays of the thwarted sun, which, however, must so far triumph in its contest as to flood the towers with its light and transfigure them with its splendour. The street below remains dull and untractable, but yet something may be made of it. We can gain one point by insisting on the smallness and homeliness of the houses, intensifying their

unimaginative character into something approaching the grotesque. Better the actively ugly, for that at least makes our dullest and largest church tower look almost beautiful by contrast, than the passively commonplace. And then, lest our modest efforts remain of small avail, we invent a couple of quaint old travellers hurrying across the road to their inn, accompanied by the barks and gambols of a lively little white dog; by good luck and our own skilful management they come just in front of our dull row of houses, so that what with one thing and another we find our eyes and thoughts very pleasantly diverted. As for the houses on the left we can shut off a great part of them by simply drawing up a lumbering stage-coach on that side of the road and heaping it with ample females in swelling draperies, with burgeoning umbrellas and bounteous baggage. And having got so far, we can now see exactly what it is we want to make our foreground and distance more immediately effective. In the sketch there is a hint that the road dips just a trifle down from the foreground to the church; we increase this slight inequality till we get a dip of something like forty or fifty feet between us and the church, a drop that gives uncommon height and dignity to our humble towers. And now, having got our street laid out to our liking, we want to make the most of its possibilities, so we set another stage-coach down at the foot of our little hill, load it with passengers impatient to be out of their wet clothes, and give it a couple of rearing, prancing, steaming horses to gallop it in hot haste up the declivity, so that now, as we look at the engraving, we can almost hear the ring of the horses’ hooves on the stones and feel the rush of wind made by the coach as it dashes past us; all this merely by way of amplifying the artist’s statement about his imaginary hill, and to drive the idea of his well-invented fiction home into the consciousness of even the dullest of his audience.

The ‘Tynemouth’ design, published in 1831, is on a higher plane of imaginative creation than the ‘Stamford’ subject, yet it was built up in just the same way from a sketch made at the same time on another leaf of the same sketch-book. The ‘Stamford’ design shows Turner struggling valiantly against the absence of any very pressing inspiration, and emerging with credit from the ordeal; the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing, on the other hand, shows that his youthful and thirty-year old topographical sketch had served to set his imagination aflame with all the urgency of a recent personal experience. The vision conjured up by what I can only call the potential or possible associations of a rocky coast had so much completeness, so much innate driving force, that Turner had no need to resort to the purely external and arbitrary tricks of composition which had proved such valuable auxiliaries in the ‘Stamford’ drawing. In the case of the ‘Stamford’ subject, we might almost say that the pictorial equivalent of the rhyme and metre had suggested the sense; in the case of the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing the idea itself is so vivid that it creates its own lilt and harmony.

In looking through a number of Turner’s drawings the hasty observer--especially should he be a professional student eager to pick up useful knowledge--is inclined to jump to the conclusion that the important thing about rocks and mountains is to be high, and that when the height of the most prominent buildings, especially if they happen to be in ruins, has been increased three or fourfold, all the duties of the imaginative designer have been attended to. In the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing we see how free Turner is from the constraint of any such ready-made and purely external rules of design. He has here deliberately lowered the apparent height of his buildings and cliffs, and, if we examine the matter carefully, we see that he has done this not at the dictates of a passing whim or fancy, but because the heart of the matter--the so-called ‘subject,’ that vague, intangible, elusive something which seems to sit in the centre of the dynamical idea and pump blood and life into every outlying portion of the organism, and tyrannises so beneficently over the structure and function of each part of the design--because this heart of the matter would clearly have it so.

In the sketch we have an item of brute fact waiting, as it were, pathetically to be taken up into the world of thought and feeling, asking, so to speak, to be made significant and human. The artist has granted the request in his finished design by making the physical facts the mere passive spectators of man’s sorrow and suffering. In the sketch, the tall cliffs and ruined walls of the priory tower above the small fishing-boat struggling into port; in the picture, the tall masts of the wrecked schooner dwarf the priory and the cliffs and drive them into subordination. The real centre of interest is the active, restless power of the sea for ill. The baneful little leaps of the waves that fill nearly all the lower part of the design tell their story of storm and wreck plainly enough. The wrecked barques under the cliffs are in a sad plight, but the pieces of floating mast and broken plank in the foreground tell of worse things. On the shore we have the thrifty gatherers of flotsam and jetsam, and a crowd of willing helpers. On all this moving scene the wreck of the priory looks down not without sympathy; it too, it seems to say, is a part of man’s activity and ambition, it suffers also from the taint of mortality and from the merciless power of the wind and rain.