There is a chapter in the second volume of Thornbury's Life headed 'Turner's Poetry,' that seemed to the boy who loved 'Orvieto' to express absolutely, strangely, sadly, how illiterate and inarticulate outside his art was Turner, and how eager to express the emotions that moved dimly in his starved brain. Twelve pages of his halting, imperfect verse are printed, scraps from the longest fragments found among his papers after death, perhaps a portion of that interminable, chaotic poem, The Fallacies of Hope, extracts from which he used to append to his Academy pictures. There is hardly a clause that is coherent, there is no continuous thought, and some words are used in any sense. The impulse to sing is there, but the dumb poet has not begun to understand even the elements of the technique of composition. But the boy dug out and remembered two broken lines, and they became almost as much a part of his life as golden 'Orvieto.'
'... still the chief advanced,
Looked on the sun with hope...'
'Looked on the sun with hope' might have served for Turner's epitaph.
'Still the chief advanced' might have served as a motto for that amazing book published in 1909, called A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest.[1]
When that book in two volumes was issued, the boy who loved 'Orvieto' as a middle-aged man. Having read the Inventory—no, read is not the word;—when he had spent many hours over it, his wonder of Turner, if that were possible, increased. And dreaming of the drawings of the Turner Bequest, set forth so fully and patiently in this book, he echoed the words of the Director of the National Gallery, who wrote in the preface, 'There is nothing like it anywhere in the world.'
[1] A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, arranged chronologically by A. J. Finberg. His Majesty's Stationery Office. 2 vols. 15s.