Kindreds of the earth, or tribes of it![4]—the “earth-begotten,” the Chaos children—children of this present world, with its desolate seas and its Medusa clouds: the Dragon children, merciless: they who dealt as clouds without water: serpent clouds, by whose sight men were turned into stone;—the time must surely come for their wailing.
20. “Thy kingdom come,” we are bid to ask then! But how shall it come? With power and great glory, it is written; and yet not with observation, it is also written. Strange kingdom! Yet its strangeness is renewed to us with every dawn.
When the time comes for us to wake out of the world’s sleep, why should it be otherwise than out of the dreams of the night? Singing of birds, first, broken and low, as, not to dying eyes, but eyes that wake to life, “the casement slowly grows a glimmering square;” and then the gray, and then the rose of dawn; and last the light, whose going forth is to the ends of heaven.
This kingdom it is not in our power to bring; but it is, to receive. Nay, it has come already, in part; but not received, because men love chaos best; and the Night, with her daughters. That is still the only question for us, as in the old Elias days, “If ye will receive it.” With pains it may be shut out still from many a dark place of cruelty; by sloth it may be still unseen for many a glorious hour. But the pain of shutting it out must grow greater and greater:—harder, every day, that struggle of man with man in the abyss, and shorter wages for the fiend’s work. But it is still at our choice; the simoom-dragon may still be served if we will, in the fiery desert, or else God walking in the garden, at cool of day. Coolness now, not of Hesperus over Atlas, stooped endurer of toil; but of Heosphorus over Sion, the joy of the earth.[5] The choice is no vague or doubtful one. High on the desert mountain, full descried, sits throned the tempter, with his old promise—the kingdoms of this world, and the glory of them. He still calls you to your labor, as Christ to your rest;—labor and sorrow, base desire, and cruel hope. So far as you desire to possess, rather than to give; so far as you look for power to command, instead of to bless; so far as your own prosperity seems to you to issue out of contest or rivalry, of any kind, with other men, or other nations; so long as the hope before you is for supremacy instead of love; and your desire is to be greatest, instead of least;—first, instead of last;—so long you are serving the Lord of all that is last, and least;—the last enemy that shall be destroyed—Death; and you shall have death’s crown, with the worm coiled in it; and death’s wages with the worm feeding on them; kindred of the earth shall you yourself become; saying to the grave, “Thou art my father;” and to the worm, “Thou art my mother, and my sister.”
I leave you to judge, and to choose, between this labor, and the bequeathed peace; this wages, and the gift of the Morning Star; this obedience, and the doing of the will which shall enable you to claim another kindred than of the earth, and to hear another voice than that of the grave, saying, “My brother, and sister, and mother.”
[1] It is proper, however, for the reader to know, that the title which I myself originally intended for this book was “Turner and the Ancients;” nor did I purpose to refer in it to any other modern painters than Turner. The title was changed; and the 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. But, as far as I am concerned, I regretted the change then, and regret it still.
[2] It may perhaps be necessary to explain one or two singular points of Turner’s character, not in defence of this statement, but to show its meaning. In speaking of his truth, I use the word in a double sense;—truth to himself, and to others.
Truth to himself; that is to say, the resolution to do his duty by his art, and carry all work out as well as it could be done. Other painters, for the most part, modify their work by some reference to public taste, or measure out a certain quantity of it for a certain price, or alter facts to show their power. Turner never did any of these things. The thing the public asked of him he would do, but whatever it was, only as he thought it ought to be done. People did not buy his large pictures; he, with avowed discontent, painted small ones; but instead of taking advantage of the smaller size to give, proportionally, less labor, he instantly changed his execution so as to be able to put nearly as much work into his small drawings as into his large ones, though he gave them for half the price. But his aim was always to make the drawing as good as he could, or as the subject deserved, irrespective of price. If he disliked his theme, he painted it slightly, utterly disdainful of the purchaser’s complaint. “The purchaser must take his chance.” If he liked his theme, he would give three hundred guineas’ worth of work for a hundred, and ask no thanks. It is true, exceptionally, that he altered the engravings from his designs, so as to meet the popular taste, but this was because he knew the public could not be got otherwise to look at his art at all. His own drawings the entire body of the nation repudiated and despised: “the engravers could make something of them,” they said. Turner scornfully took them at their word. If that is what you like, take it. I will not alter my own noble work one jot for you, but these things you shall have to your minds;—try to use them, and get beyond them. Sometimes, when an engraver came with a plate to be touched, he would take a piece of white chalk in his right hand and of black in his left: “Which will you have it done with?” The engraver chose black or white, as he thought his plate weak or heavy. Turner threw the other piece of chalk away, and would reconstruct the plate, with the added lights or darks, in ten minutes. Nevertheless, even this concession to false principles, so far as it had influence, was injurious to him: he had better not have scorned the engravings, but either done nothing with them, or done his best. His best, in a certain way, he did, never sparing pains, if he thought the plate worth it: some of his touched proofs are elaborate drawings.
Of his earnestness in his main work, enough, I should think, has been already related in this book; but the following anecdote, which I repeat here from my notes on the Turner Gallery, that there may be less chance of its being lost, gives, in a few words, and those his own, the spirit of his labor, as it possessed him throughout his life. The anecdote was communicated to me in a letter by Mr. Kingsley, late of Sidney College, Cambridge; whose words I give:—“I had taken my mother and a cousin to see Turner’s pictures; and, as my mother knows nothing about art, I was taking her down the gallery to look at the large Richmond Park, but as we were passing the Sea-storm, she stopped before it, and I could hardly get her to look at any other picture: and she told me a great deal more about it than I had any notion of, though I had seen many sea-storms. She had been in such a scene on the coast of Holland during the war. When, some time afterwards, I thanked Turner for his permission for her to see the pictures, I told him that he would not guess which had caught my mother’s fancy, and then named the picture; and he then said, ‘I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like: I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did. But no one had any business to like the picture.’ ‘But,’ said I, ‘my mother once went through just such a scene, and it brought it all back to her.’ ‘Is your mother a painter?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then she ought to have been thinking of something else.’ These were nearly his words; I observed at the time, he used ‘record’ and ‘painting,’ as the title ‘author’ had struck me before.”