THE BOY WONDERS AT TURNER THE DUMB POET
In thinking over Turner the Man, whom Thornbury called the Dumb Poet, again 'Orvieto' rose before the boy. The twin parts of that picture, the earthly foreground and the heavenly distances, continued to symbolise the dual parts of Turner's nature, as indeed the natures of all of us.
The first book that the boy read about Turner was perhaps the wisest and the most sympathetic of all his biographies, that by the late Cosmo Monkhouse. On page 3 he found two quotations; one astonished, the other shocked him. They neither astonish nor shock him now because he is much older, and he knows that if one passage is exaggerated so is the other. He knows that Turner was neither saint nor sinner, but a queer-tempered man, with bursts of humour and geniality, and a thirst for knowledge; a man of genius with a dwarfed nature, uneducated, who in art moved easily among great things, and who, try as he would, and he did try, could hardly touch the hem of the garment of great things outside his art; who loved his work before anything in the world, who was not cultured, and whose manners were neither pretty nor engaging, who cared nothing for social conventions, but who went his own rough way, preferring Wapping and the sailors and the river, and rum and brown sherry, to the conventional delights and the fine feeding of Belgravia. Here are the two passages. The first is from Ruskin's Modern Painters, published in 1843, magnificent rhetoric, magical, and meaning very little:—
'Glorious in conception—unfathomable in knowledge—solitary in power—with the elements waiting upon his will, and the night and morning obedient to his call, sent as a prophet of God to reveal to men the mysteries of the universe, standing, like the great angel of the Apocalypse, clothed with a cloud, and with a rainbow upon his head, and with the sun and stars given into his hand.'
The second is from Thornbury's Life of Turner, published in 1862. There is no confirmation of Thornbury's suggestion that Turner ever 'wallowed' at Wapping:—
'Towards the end of his career he would often, I am assured on the best authority, paint hard all the week till Saturday night; and he would then put by his work, slip a five-pound note into his pocket, button it securely up there, and set off to some low sailor's house in Wapping or Rotherhithe, to wallow till Monday morning summoned him to mope through another week.'
The boy who was shocked at that extract from Thornbury's Life, following so closely upon Ruskin's eulogy, found consolation in an understanding passage written by Cosmo Monkhouse. It seemed to explain Turner.
'He lived in two worlds—one the pictorial sight-world, in which he was a profound scholar and a poet, the other the articulate, moral, social word-world, in which he was a dunce and underbred. In the one he was great and happy, in the other he was small and miserable; for what philosophy he had was fatalist. The riddle of life was too hard for his uncultivated intellect and starved heart to contemplate with any hope; he was only at rest in his dreamland.'
His dreamland served him to the end, to that day in 1851, when the old war-man, warring always for the beautiful, having lost the cunning of his hand, but not the vision of his eyes, died gazing on the river, his old companion, whom he had loved always.