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:—