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
PLATE XLVIII