That Turner was always a great lover and reader of poetry is already well known. After he broke away from strictly topographical work, he seldom exhibited a picture without the accompaniment of some poetical quotation. To judge from these quotations Thomson’s Seasons was a favourite book with him, and we also find Milton, Ossian, Akenside, Dr. Langhorne, and Mallet laid under contribution. But the clearest evidence of the place poetry occupied in his mind at this time is afforded by his sketch-books, which contain on the whole even more poetry than drawings. On almost every sheet we find transcriptions or reminiscences of verses that had caught his fancy, or attempts of his own to express himself in metre. These attempts, it must be confessed, are seldom far from failure, for the artist’s command of words was not instinctive, like his power over pictorial signs. Yet the quantity of these attempts and the patient persistence with which he ground out indifferent verse, prove that the art of poetry was one that held at least as high a place in his affections as his own art.

As Turner’s verses were on the whole so unsuccessful, I will only offer the reader one example, and that a short one. It was written in one of his sketch-books about the year 1809. He had gone to Purley on the Thames, near Pangbourne, to indulge himself with a few days’ fishing—his sole form of recreation. But the rain had kept him in all day, and to while away the time he betook himself to poetry. He begins by apostrophising the fair leaves of his sketch-book which ‘Delusion’ tempts him to violate with his pen. The rain seems to have continued, for on the next page he begins again:—

‘Alas, another day is gone
As useless as it was begun.
The crimson’d streak of early morn
Checks the sweet lark that o’er the corn
Fluttered her wings at twilight grey;
Expectant eyed the moving ray,
Twitter’d her song in saddening mood
To {calm} her clamorous callow brood
{hush}
In hope of less inclement skies.

The hapless fisher——
No fly can tempt the finny brood
When the wash’d bank gives up its mud.
Beneath some tree he takes his stand
—— in doubtful shelter
. . . . . .
Anxious to fancy every streak a ray.
Not so the cotter’s children at the door,
Rich in content, tho’ Nature made them poor,
Standing on threshold emulous to catch
The pendant drop from off the dripping latch.
The daring boy—thus Briton’s early race
{To feel the heaviest drop upon his face}
{Foremost, must feel the drops upon his face,}
Or heedless of the storm or his abode
Launches his paper boat across the road—
Where the deep gullies which his father’s cart
Made in their progress to the mart
Full to the brim, deluged by the rain,
They prove to him a channel to the main.
Guiding his vessel down the stream
Even the pangs of hunger vanish like a dream.’

As poetry these lines have little to recommend them, but they give us a glimpse of the man himself, and they prove that he had something of the poet’s comprehensive sympathies; that he was ‘a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.’

CHAPTER VI
THE ‘LIBER STUDIORUM’

The object of this chapter—The first ‘Liber’ drawings were made at W. F. Wells’s cottage at Knockholt, Kent—‘Bridge and Cows’—Development of the so-called ‘Flint Castle’—Mrs. Wells—View of ‘Basle’—‘Little Devil’s Bridge’ and ‘London from Greenwich’—‘Martello Towers, Bexhill,’ and ‘Kirkstall Crypt’—Scene at Isleworth—The etching of the ‘Raglan Castle’ and ‘Source of the Arveron’ plates—Suggestion for the better exhibition of the ‘Liber’ drawings.

THE Liber Studiorum is an important aspect of Turner’s genius—so important that it seems to deserve a chapter to itself, even in so summary an investigation as the present. Yet from the point of view of its subject-matter, it is evident that the ‘Liber’ does not throw into relief any side of Turner’s art not amply illustrated in his paintings. What light the sequence of ‘Pastoral’ subjects throws upon the gradual development of his conception of realistic art, has already been touched upon in the previous chapter. But there remains one point of view from which it seems to me the ‘Liber’ possesses a special interest for our present study. In these designs we can study the formal elements of Turner’s art freed from the disturbing influence of colour. Each plate is primarily an arrangement in line and light and shade, and the requirements of what I may call melodic invention are considered before those of mere representation; that is to say, the emphasis is always on the subjective and constructive side of art, as opposed to its power of reproduction of the elements immediately given in ordinary perception.

Especially important from this point of view are those subjects, generally amongst the earlier plates, in which considerable alterations were made during the course of execution. An examination of a few of the cases in which there are important differences between the first preliminary drawing and the completed engraving is certainly well within the limits of our present inquiry; and such comparisons are worth making for their own sake, as they bring out very clearly certain characteristics of all pictorial art, and especially of Turner’s, which are not easily grasped when our observations are complicated by the presence of colour.

The first drawings executed for the work were made in October 1806, when Turner was on a visit to Mr. Wells, at Knockholt, in Kent. One of Mr. Wells’s daughters has told us that it was mainly on her father’s advice that Turner decided to undertake the work. But he required ‘much and long continued spurring’ before he could be induced to make a beginning. ‘At last,’ we are told, ‘after he had been well goaded, one morning, half in a pet he said, “Zounds, Gaffer, there will be no peace with you till I begin—well, give me a sheet of paper there, rule the size for me, tell me what I shall take.” The lady adds, ‘I sat by Turner laughing and playing whilst he made the drawings,’ ‘and before he left us the first five subjects which form the first number were completed and arranged for publication greatly to my dear Father’s delight.’ (The letter is given in extenso in Mr. Rawlinson’s Liber Studiorum, 2nd edition, pp. xii and xiii.)