One wild day Turner called loudly from the doorway:—
'Hawkey! Hawkey! come here! Look at this thunderstorm—isn't it wonderful? Isn't it sublime?'
And while he talked he was making notes of its form and colour on the back of a letter. Young Mr. Hawkes proposed a drawing block but Turner said the letter did very well. He was absorbed, entranced, while the storm rolled and swept, and the lightning flashed over the Yorkshire hills. When the storm had passed Turner returned to the room and said:—
'There, Hawkey. In two years you will see this again, and call it "Hannibal Crossing the Alps."'
We look at this tumultuous picture to-day and think of that thunderstorm at Farnley as we watch the lurid sun through the storm of snow that threatens to overwhelm the muddled, huddled, Carthaginian army. Yes: it is wonderful as was the thunderstorm to Turner. This picture, in a category between his classical works and his sunlight visions, was accompanied by nine halting, unpoetical lines from the Fallacies of Hope, this being the first time that a quotation from that poem was attached to the R. A. catalogues. The title was modified, probably, from Campbell's Pleasures of Hope.
'Craft, treachery, and fraud—Salassian force—
Hung on the fainting rear; then plunder seized
The victor and the captive,—Saguntum's spoil
Alike became their prey; still the chief advanc'd,
Looked on the sun with hope; low, broad, and wan
While the fierce archer of the downward year
Stains Italy's blanched barrier with storms.
In vain each pass, ensanguined deep with dead
Or rocky fragments, wide destruction roll'd.'
And the eyes fall upon two lines that mean something, that aptly express the thought of the dumb poet, the lines which I quoted in Chapter III.,—'Still the chief advanced, Looked on the sun with hope'—Turner's fitting epitaph, and life-long aspiration. He added to the Fallacies of Hope off and on for forty years, and it dealt with almost every conceivable subject from the Deluge to Napoleon.
This year his town address is given as Queen Anne Street West, but, as I have already explained, this did not mean a change of domicile, as the three houses, two in Harley Street and one in Queen Anne Street, were the same dwelling with a communication at the back.
Turner, Thornbury tells us, almost entirely rebuilt his house in Queen Anne Street, and while all the houses round it from time to time smartened themselves up, this alone remained unchanged. The Gallery in later years, as we know, became most dilapidated:—