“Intended as an illustration of Landscape Composition, classed as follows: Historical, Mountainous, Pastoral, Marine, and Architectural.”
We think Turner’s description the more correct, and that the intention of his frontispiece was to give all the “classes” in one composition, and we are extremely doubtful whether Turner knew or cared anything about either Minos or Rhadamanthus.
The most obvious intention of the work was to show his own power, and there never was, and perhaps never will be again, such an exhibition of genius in the same direction. No rhetoric can say for it as much as it says for itself in those ninety plates, twenty of which were never published. If he did not exhaust art or nature, he may be fairly said to have exhausted all that was then known of landscape art, and to have gone further than any one else in the interpretation of nature. Notwithstanding, the merit of the plates is very unequal, some, as Solway Moss and the Little Devil’s Bridge, being more valuable as works of art than many of his large pictures; others, especially the architectural subjects, the Interior of a Church, and Pembury Mill, being almost devoid of interest. As to any one thought running through the series, we can see none, except desire to show the whole range of his power; and as to sentiment, it seems to us to be thoroughly impersonal, impartial, and artistic. He turns on the pastoral or historical stop as easily as if he were playing the organ, and his only concern with his figures is that they shall perform their parts adequately, which is as much as some of them do.
We have spoken of the book as an attack on Claude, and of the “intention” of the work, but we are not sure that we are not using too definite ideas to express the variety of impulses in Turner’s mind that tended to the commencement of the “Liber.” We have seen that the first notion of it, and its divisions, were suggested by Mr. Wells, and the plates are nothing more nor less than a selection from his sketches and pictures, arranged under these heads. His early topographical drawings and studies in England provided him with the architectural and pastoral subjects, his studies of Claude and the Poussins and Wilson, with the elegant pastoral, Vandevelde and nature with the marine, and his one or two visits to the Continent with the mountainous. The frontispiece, the first attempt to give a coherent signification to the whole, was not published till 1812, and it was not till 1816 that the advertisement to which we have called attention appeared when, after four years’ intermission, the issue of the “Liber” was recommenced; even then it is only described as “an illustration of Landscape Composition;” and it is quite probable that the desire to make money, to display his art, to rival Claude, and to educate the public, contributed to the production of the work, without any very vivid consciousness on his part as to his motives of action. It has, like all Turner’s work, the characteristics of a gradual growth rather than of the carrying out of a well-defined conception.
There is one way in which the title of the book may be considered as appropriate, and that is to take “studia” to mean “studies,” in the usual general sense of the word, for it is an index to his whole course of study (including books and excepting colour), down to the time of its publication. With the exception of his Venetian pictures and his later extravagances, it may be said to be an epitome of his art without colour. Poets and painters may change their style, and may develop their powers in after-life in an unexpected manner; but after the age at which Turner had arrived when he commenced to publish the “Liber,” viz., thirty-two, there are few, if any, mental germs which have not at least sprouted. Turner, though he never left off acquiring knowledge, or developing his style, is no exception to this rule, and this makes the “Liber” valuable, not only as a collection of works of art, but as a nearly complete summary of the great artist’s work and mind. Amongst his more obvious claims to the first place among landscape artists, are his power of rendering atmospherical effects, and the structure and growth of things. He not only knew how a tree looked, but he showed how it grew. Others may have drawn foliage with more habitual fidelity, but none ever drew trunks and branches with such knowledge of their inner life; if you look at the trunks in the drawing of Hornby Castle for instance (which we mention because it is easily seen at the South Kensington Museum), and compare them with any others in the same room, the superior indication of texture of bark, of truly varied swelling, of consistency, and all essential differences between living wood and other things, cannot fail to be apparent to the least observant. Although the trees of the “Liber” are not of equal merit (Mr. Ruskin says the firs are not good), this quality may be observed in many of the plates. Others have drawn the appearance of clouds, but Turner knew how they formed. Others have drawn rocks, but he could give their structure, consistency, and quality of surface, with a few deft lines and a wash; others could hide things in a mist, but he could reveal things through mist. Others could make something like a rainbow, but he, almost alone, and without colour, could show it standing out, a bow of light arrested by vapour in mid-air, not flat upon a mountain, or printed on a cloud. If all his power over atmospheric effects and all his knowledge of structure are not contained in the “Liber,” there is sufficient proof of them scattered through its plates to do as much justice to them as black and white will allow. If we want to know the result of his studies of architecture we see it here also, little knowledge or care of buildings for their own sakes, but perfect sense of their value pictorially for breaking of lights and casting of shadows; for contrast with the undefined beauty of natural forms, and for masses in composition; for the sentiment that ruins lend, and for the names which they give to pictures. If we seek the books from which his imagination took fire, we have the Bible and Ovid, the first of small, the latter of great and almost solitary power. Jason daring the huge glittering serpent, Syrinx fleeing from Pan, Cephalus and Procris, Æsacus and Hesperie, Glaucus and Scylla, Narcissus and Echo; if we want to know the artists he most admired and imitated, or the places to which he had been, we shall find easily nearly all the former, and sufficient of the latter to show the wide range of his travel. In a word, one who has carefully studied the “Liber” had indeed little to learn of the range and power of Turner’s art and mind, except his colour and his fatalism.
The first quotation from the “Fallacies of Hope,” nevertheless, was published in the catalogue of 1812, as the motto of his picture of Snowstorm—Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, and it is probable that the ill-success of the “Liber” contributed not a little to the gloomy habit of mind which breathes through the fragments of this unfinished composition. These were the lines appended to that grand picture:—
“Craft, treachery, and fraud—Salassian force
Hung on the fainting rear! then Plunder seiz’d
The victor and the captive—Saguntum’s spoil,
Alike became their prey; still the chief advanc’d,
Look’d on the sun with hope;—low, broad, and wan.
While the fierce archer of the downward year
Stains Italy’s blanch’d barrier with storms.
In vain each pass, ensanguin’d deep with dead,
Or rocky fragments, wide destruction roll’d.
Still on Campania’s fertile plains—he thought
But the loud breeze sob’d, Capua’s joys beware.”
This is nearer to poetry than Turner ever got again. The picture is well-known, and was suggested partly by a storm observed at Farnley, partly by a picture by J. Cozens,[27] of the same subject, from which Turner is reported to have said that he learnt more than from any other.
Turner’s love of poetry was shown from the first possible moment. The first pictures to which he appended poetical mottoes were those of 1798, but he could not have used them before, as quotations were never published in the Academy Catalogue prior to that year. When his first original verses were published we cannot tell, but there is little doubt that the lines to his Apollo and the Python, in the Catalogue of 1811, were of his own fabrication. They are not from Callimachus, as asserted in the catalogue, but a jumble of the descriptions of two of Ovid’s dragons, the Python, and Cadmus’s tremendous worm, and are just the peculiar mixture of Ovid, Milton, Thomson, Pope, and the quotations in Royal Academy Catalogues, out of which he formed his poetical style. The Turneresque style of poetry is in fact formed very much in the same way as the Turneresque style of landscape, but the result is not so satisfactory. It required a totally different kind of brain machinery from that which Turner possessed. He may have had a good ear for the music of tones, for he used to play the flute, but he had none for the music of words. Coleridge was an instance of how distinct these two faculties are, as he, whose verses exceed almost all other English verses in beauty of sound, could not tell one note of music from another. Turner lived in a world of light and colour, and beautiful changeful indefinite forms; his thought had visions in place of words; his mind communed with itself in sights and symbols; the procession of his ideas was a panorama. So, where a poet would jot down lines and thoughts, he would print off the impressions on his mental retina; his true poetry was drawn not written—the poetry of instant act, not of laboured thought. How sensible he himself was of the difference, is shown in his clumsy lines:—