In "Crossing the Brook," which faces the entrance doorway, painted when he was forty, Turner has marched onward. The gates have opened to the far horizon, and he now gives us the Turnerian fifty miles or so of country outstretching to infinity on a few feet of canvas. If you were with me, I would whisper in your ear my division of "Crossing the Brook" into pleasing and unpleasing passages—the pleasing being the fleecy clouds in the blue sky, the faint miles of Devonshire, the wooded hills rising from the river, and the bridge that spans the water: the unpleasing passages are the worried foreground, the ugly rocks, the figures, and the black mouth of the tunnel. Yet it is a picture of which one becomes fond. Who can but be entranced by the distance, Turner's sign mark, the open gate that lures us away from the troubled foreground of the world.
I turn from the sanity of "Crossing the Brook" to the right wall, and straightway I am elated, it is always so, at the sight of one of the magnificent dreams that the old Wizard forced oil paint and brushes to portray. In the centre of the wall hangs "Ulysses and Polyphemus."
The furnace doors are open, from them stream a fury of glow, and in the fire are the dazzling shapes of Turnerian romance.
[LETTER IV]
THE FLAME ASCENDS
When we visit the National Gallery I will place you with your back to the dark "Calais Pier" and "Shipwreck" wall, and waving my hand across to that glorious trio, the "Ulysses," the "Bay of Baiæ," and the "Carthage," I will say but one word—"Turner!"
Here indeed is the magician weaving his spells, breaking the laws of light and shade, toying with history, caring nothing so long as he can picture the dreams of the pomp and beauty of the world of imagination that dazzled a sullen man, pottering about in a dingy London studio. "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus" has been called operatic and melodramatic; it has been remarked that the galley of Ulysses, far from the influence of the sun, is in full light, and that the dark shadows thrown by the stone-pines in the "Bay of Baiæ" are unnatural. Turner needed those deep blacks in the foreground; he wanted the galley of Ulysses to be in the light: so the old rascal forced truth to suit his vision. His success is his expiation. He never copied Nature or followed history. His way was to use Nature and history to suit his conception, the right way for a genius; but not for Brown, Smith, and Jones. Anachronisms abound in his works; he elongated steeples, rebuilt towers and towns, changed the courses of rivers (he in paint, as Leonardo with the pencil); but he caught the spirit of place. To me the "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus" is the very heart of romance. Unlike life, yes; all the best things are unlike life. I withdraw my remark that there is not a figure in a picture by Turner which I would not rather have erased, withdraw it in favour of the vast, impotent Polyphemus writhing on the cliff. When Turner painted the figures of gods and goddesses in the likeness of men and women he was bored; when he painted a giant monster like this Polyphemus his imagination inspired him. Asked where he found his subject, he invented two silly lines of doggerel and said they came from Tom Dibdin. His lonely visions were not for the chatter of a dinner party. They may be tracked in that little red book found by Thornbury in his studio, where, amid notes about chemistry, memoranda as to colours, and prophylactics against the Maltese plague, are certain scraps of verse, something about, "Anna's kiss," "a look back," "a toilsome dream," "human joy, ecstasy, and hope."
PLATE VI.—ARTH FROM THE LAKE OF ZUG.
(From the water-colour by Turner in the National Gallery)