'Cut off in great part,' says Mr. Ruskin, 'from all society, first by labour and last by sickness, hunted to his grave by the malignities of small critics and the jealousies of hopeless rivalry, he died in the house of a stranger.' As Mr. Leslie, his fellow-academician, remarks upon this passage truly enough, 'This was Turner's own fault. No death-bed could be more surrounded by attentive friends than his might have been, had he chosen to let his friends know where he lived.' But he seldom answered letters; his place of residence was a profound mystery to all; and he was living under an assumed name. To the Chelsea street-boys he was known as 'Puggy Booth,' and by his neighbours he was deemed to be an old admiral in reduced circumstances. His house in Queen Anne Street was closed, terribly out of repair—black with dirt. After much knocking at the door it was opened, if at all, by an old woman, her face half-concealed, owing to some cancerous disfigurement; she had kept the visitor waiting while she assumed a large apron—hung always behind the door on a peg, handy for the purpose,—which hid the grimy and tattered state of her dress. The drawing-room was tenanted by half-a-dozen Manx cats. In the other rooms, rats and mice made havoc with hoarded drawings and engravings. Many of the pictures in the gallery were warped and cracked, and mildewed by neglect and damp. At Sandycombe Lodge, a few of the academicians, including Mr. Mulready, had once been regaled with tea; and Mr. Pye, the engraver, had been treated to cheese and porter; but of the hospitalities of Queen Anne Street there are no records. Rogers, poet and satirist, expressed his wonder at a beautiful table adorning the painter's parlour. 'But how much more wonderful it would be,' he went on, 'to see any of his friends sitting round it!' And there is the story of the visitor who praised the wine of which he had had two glasses, a year intervening between them. 'It ought to be good,' said Turner; 'it's the same bottle you tasted before!' True or false, and their accuracy has been much questioned, that such stories could be repeated at all, says quite enough for the kind of life led by the painter at his gallery. And what claims upon society had the man who chose to conduct himself towards it after this manner?
Yet it is curious to note that Turner was in many ways fitted to be socially successful. He had very considerable humour, and highly appreciated the jests of others, even when they were directed against himself. He sat for a long time shaking with laughter, on a high seat at the Academy, one varnishing day, when Mulready had said 'that his cows were like the dough pigs, with currant eyes, in the bakers' shops.' He was gay and playful at times, and shone in careless conversation. Personally he was not less liked than as a painter he was respected by his fellow-academicians; and yet, from some mental warp, he closed his doors against the world, shunned his friends, preferred to live miserably and obscurely, hoarding his money, and treasuring his works. It is difficult to believe that he was not afflicted, late in life, with some morbid affection of mind that amounted almost to insanity, not alleviated by a manner of life that was far from regular, and habits that were anything but temperate. The more he avoided refined society, the more he found pleasure in dissipation of the lowest kind. 'Melancholy' Burton derived relief and amusement listening to the ribaldry of the bargemen. Turner found these and other solaces, it would seem, in his occasional mysterious absences from home, and indecorous sojournings at Wapping and elsewhere.
It is with a sense of relief we turn from the contemplation of the imperfect man to consider the nearly perfect artist. The meanness, the squalor, the degradation of his morale and life are not discernible in his works. The affluence of beauty of some of these is indeed marvellous. But this fallen man had extraordinary gifts as a painter, and these he heightened and intensified by labour and industry the most ceaseless. It would be difficult to conceive any one endowed with a keener sensibility to colour, or with a more devotional love for its glories; it would be equally hard to estimate the enhancement of the worth of English art effected by the colour of Turner. It should be remembered that he appeared at a time when coldness of tone was almost a fashion in painting. The chilliness of the shadows of Lawrence and his followers was remarkable. Turner raised the chord of colour a whole octave, if it is permissible to say so, illustrating one art by the terms of another. Mr. Ruskin ascribes to him the discovery of the scarlet shadow. It was in truth less a new discovery than the re-awakening of an old one. The early masters were well aware of the value of warmth in this respect. Wilkie comments in his journal on the great picture of Correggio: 'And here I observe hot shadows prevail, not cold, as some of us would have it. This he has to a fault, making parts of his figures look like red chalk drawings, but the sunny and dazzling effect of the whole may be attributed to this artifice.'[27] If we look for a prevalent tone in Turner's pictures—though a prevalent tone is always a vice in a painter, nature being without bias in the question of hue—we shall find it to be yellow, which he himself declared to be his favourite colour, and which occasioned those jokes about the 'mustard-pot' as a source of inspiration, to which art-students were at one time addicted. But, indeed, Turner's sense of all colour was very limitless. A Mrs. Austin once said to him, 'I find, Mr. Turner, that, in copying one of your works, touches of blue, red, and yellow appear all through the work.' He answered: 'Well, don't you see that yourself in nature, because, if you don't, Heaven help you!' Mr. Ruskin writes: 'Other painters had rendered the golden tones and blue tones of the sky; Titian especially the latter in perfection. But none had dared to paint—none seem to have seen—the scarlet and purple.' In representing the glare of sunlight, Turner surpassed even Claude. Cuyp hardly attempted this feat, his suns generally gleaming through a mist; though Turner standing before a splendid example of Cuyp, exclaimed: 'I would give a thousand pounds to have painted that' In atmospheric perspective he was perfect; but in linear faulty and ill grounded, although he had held the appointment of Professor of Perspective at the Academy for some years. The drawbacks to his pictures consist in their frequent sacrifice of truth to effect. From this cause he constantly failed to satisfy critics who were well acquainted with the scenes and subjects he attempted to represent. A tar said of his Battle of Trafalgar at Greenwich: 'What a Trafalgar! it's a d——d deal more like a brick-field!' while Sir Thomas Hardy used to call it a 'street scene,' as the ships had more the effect of houses than men-of-war. Of the wreck of the Minotaur, Admiral Bowles complained 'that no ship or boat could live in such a sea.'
To Turner's credit must be placed many acts of consideration for, and kindness towards, his brother artists. He has been known to displace one of his own pictures to make room for the work of a promising beginner. His love for art is the real redeeming point in his history. He was devoted to the Academy, which had recognised his genius at an early date, and was wholly conservative in his opinion upon all academic questions. Yet his zeal did not blind him. Haydon, whose life had been a gallant though almost fruitless struggle against the despotic exclusiveness of the Academy, drew back, we are told, in the midst of his exultation at a brief victory gained over his opponents, and said calmly: 'But Turner behaved well, and did me justice.'
Turner's biographer, with a scrupulousness that looks a little like timidity, has abstained steadily from all demur to the dicta of Mr. Ruskin. Mr. Thornbury's volumes represent rather elaborations than contradictions of the Ruskin opinions, just as what are known as 'variations' in music are rather amplifications of, than departures from, the original theme. But we are by no means sure that Mr. Thornbury has strengthened the case in the painter's favour. We believe that, at the bar, the junior counsel has been sometimes found to injure the effect of his chief's advocacy, by entering into and disclosing matters of detail which had been purposely left untouched by him. Something of the same sort has happened in the present instance. Mr. Ruskin bade us worship his hero, classically screened in a cloud. Mr. Thornbury unveils the idol, and the too apparent deformity disclosed renders adoration no longer possible. Mr. Ruskin's five volumes of Modern Painters will therefore probably still be considered to comprise the true 'Turneriad.' A more imposing monument to Turner's memory than is afforded by this book, with all its defects, can hardly be. For something like a quarter of a century Mr. Ruskin employed himself in examining and lauding the achievements of Turner. He did not complete his self-imposed task until the great painter had been dead some ten years.
It is really curious to go back to the beginning of this remarkable work.
In 1843 appeared the first volume of 'Modern Painters: their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters. By a Graduate of Oxford.' A further volume was issued three years afterwards, to accompany an extended and amended edition of the first. A ten years' pause, and third and fourth portions were given to the world. Then came 1860, and the final volume. Not, as the author avowed, that his subject was concluded, for 'he had been led by it into fields of infinite inquiry, where it was only possible to break off with such imperfect results as may at any given moment have been attained.' He stopped because he must stop at some time or other. The future art-writings of Mr. Ruskin will no longer bear the collective title of Modern Painters. Perhaps that is all that the 'finis' at the end of the fifth volume really amounts to.
In his fifth volume, Mr. Ruskin has narrated the history of the birth and growth of his book. He has ascribed to himself from his earliest years, 'the gift of taking pleasure in landscape.' This, he says, 'I assuredly possess in a greater degree than most men, it having been the ruling passion of my life, and the reason for the choice of its field of labour.' Certain articles in a review condemnatory of the pictures of Turner offended keenly so ardent an admirer of the king of landscape painters. Mr. Ruskin addressed a letter to the editor of the review, 'reprobating the matter and style of those critiques, and pointing out their dangerous tendency;' for 'he knew it to be demonstrable that Turner was right and true, and that his critics were wrong, false, and base.' The letter grew to be a book; the defence expanded into an attack. What began as a few comments upon a particular branch of painting ended in being the most elaborate English dissertation upon art, in its widest and weightiest significance. The title originally selected for the book was Turner and the Ancients; and it was not then proposed to refer in it to any other modern painter than Turner. But the design enlarged,—'The title was changed, and notes on other living painters inserted in the first volume, in deference to the advice of friends; probably wise, for unless the change had been made, the book might never have been read at all.' So writes the author in his last pages; and returning to his first love, it is hard to say whether from fickleness or from constancy he adds, 'So far as I am concerned, I regretted the change then, and regret it still.'
To this book, then, commenced almost without a plan, time subsequently gave form and pattern. At a certain period of his labour Mr. Ruskin paused to map out the future of his work, to define the limits of his undertaking. But in examining the concluding volume it will be seen that the waywardness of the beginning characterizes also the end. Time has taken away its gift; the scheme has fallen through; the book ends; but the design it had gathered to itself as it advanced, which had budded out from it unexpectedly as it were, remains in a large measure uncompleted. Over the boundaries he had himself imposed, his eloquent diffuseness long since surged: the book doubled its promised length; and now the author stays his hand, turns from his toil, and leaves unfinished and shapeless the long-expected 'section on the sea,' holding out but vague promise of his ever being able to accomplish, even in a separate work, his intentions in regard to that portion of his project.
It is almost of necessity that there should be deviation from the original planned economy of a work occupying more than a score of years; but Mr. Ruskin is more than ordinarily susceptible to vicissitude. It is part of his idiosyncrasy to start impulsively with an ill-digested project, and to run off the lines of his argument upon the slightest provocation and at the earliest opportunity. So that in his case time and his own temper have combined to exaggerate the vibration of his book. His manner of progression is very much what Mr. Assheton Smith's huntsman used to denominate 'zedding.' He cannot proceed straightforwardly. He must wander from the direct track; as a consequence, he is betrayed into all sorts of culs de sac, wrong turnings, and roundabout roads; and in the end, although much ground is gone over, very little advance is made. He is as the bee which does not make its final burglarious headlong plunge into the calyx until after a protracted course of circuitous buzzing and much prefatory waste of time: and this with all the insect's credit for industry. So over-perverse a traveller, so ultra-dilatory a bee as the author of Modern Painters, must shorten his journey, must leave much honey unfilched. He is as the army which commences in orderly retreat and ends in rabble-like riot and demoralization, gaining a place of safety at last, with the sacrifice of much baggage and treasure. So, as has been said, Mr. Ruskin flings away altogether a large division of his idea. In one place he writes,—