“Perception, reasoning, action’s slow ally,
Thoughts that in the mind awakened lie—
Kindly expand the monumental stone
And as the ... continue power.”
This is Mr. Thornbury’s reading of part of the longest piece of poetry by Turner yet published, which he has printed without any care, making greater nonsense than even Turner ever wrote, which is saying a great deal. “Awakened” for instance is probably “unwakened,” and “monumental stone” is probably “mental store” with another word at the commencement, the word “power” is possibly “pours,” as the next line goes on, “a steady current, nor with headlong force,” &c. We quite agree with Mr. W. M. Rossetti, that these extracts are not made the best of, though it is doubtful whether the result of more careful editing would be worth the trouble.
There is no picture which better shows the greatness of Turner’s power of pictorial imagination than the Apollo and Python. We have said that nature was almost Turner’s only book. The only written book which there is evidence that he really studied—read through, probably, again and again—is Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” That he was fond of poetry there is no doubt, but the sparks that lit his imagination for nearly all his best classical compositions came from this book. This is the only poem which he really illustrated, and an edition of Ovid, with engravings from all the scenes which he drew from this source, would make one of the best illustrated books in the world. It would contain Jason, Narcissus and Echo, Mercury and Herse, Apollo and Python, Apuleia in search of Apuleius (which is really the story of Appulus, who was turned into a wild olive-tree, Apuleia being a characteristic mistake of Turner’s for Apulia. He is sometimes called “a shepherd of Apulia,” in notes and translations, and Turner evidently took the name of the country for the name of a woman), Apollo and the Sibyl, The Vision of Medea, The Golden Bough, Mercury and Argus, Pluto and Proserpine, Glaucus and Scylla, Pan and Syrinx, Ulysses and Polyphemus. Of all these pictures and designs we have no doubt that, though he referred to other poets in the catalogues and got the idea of some part of the composition from other poets, the original germs are to be found in no other book than Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” We have not exhausted the list of his debts to this poet, for it is probable that the first ideas of his Carthage pictures, and all that deal with the history of Æneas, came from the same source, assisted by references to Vergil.
Of all these, excepting the Ulysses and Polyphemus, there is none greater than the Apollo and Python. Although the figure of Apollo is not satisfactory, it gives an adequate impression of the small size of the boy-god, the radiating glory of his presence, the keen enjoyment of his struggle with the monster, and the triumph of “mind over matter.” Of the landscape and the dragon it is difficult to exaggerate the grandeur of the conception; the rocks and trees convulsed with the dying struggles of the gigantic worm, the agony of the brute himself, expressed in the distorted jaws and the twisted tail, the awful dark pool of blood below, the seams in its terrible riven side, studded with a thousand little shafts from Apollo’s bow, and the fragments of rock flying in the air above the griffin-like head and noisome steam of breath, make a picture without any rival of its kind in ancient or modern art. It is, as we have said, taken from two dragons of Ovid. Turner seems to have been of the same opinion about books as about nature, and if he wanted anything to complete his picture, went on a few pages and found it. The idea of the god and his bow and arrows is taken from the account of the combat in the first book of the “Metamorphoses,” and the idea of the huge dragon with his “poyson-paunch,” comes from the same place; but the ruin of the woodland, the flying stones, and the earth blackened with the dragon’s gore, come from the description of the combat of Cadmus and his dragon in the third. The larger stone is too huge indeed to be that which Cadmus flung, it has been either, as Mr. Ruskin thinks, lashed into the air by his tail, or, as we think, torn off the rock and vomited into the air; but there is the tree, which the “serpent’s weight” did make to bend, and which was “grieved his body of the serpent’s tail thus scourged for to be,” there is “the stinking breath that goth out from his black and hellish mouth,” there is the blood which “did die the green grass black,” an idea not in Callimachus nor in Ovid’s description of the Python, but which occurs both in the lines appended to the picture and in Ovid’s description of Cadmus’s serpent. If there were any doubt left as to the influence of this dragon on the picture, there is still another piece of evidence, viz., something very like a javelin, Cadmus’s weapon, which is sticking in the dragon, and has reappeared after being painted out, so that it is possible that Turner meant the hero of the picture, in the first instance, to be Cadmus and not Apollo.
The two great dragons of Turner, that which guards the Garden of the Hesperides, and the Python, are specially interesting as the greatest efforts made by Turner’s imagination in the creation of living forms, excepting, perhaps, the cloud figure of Polyphemus. They are perhaps the only monsters of the kind created by an artist’s fancy, which are credible even for a moment. They will not stand analysis any more than any other painters’ monsters, but you can enjoy the pictures without being disturbed by palpable impossibilities. The distance at which we see Ladon helps the illusion; with his fiery eyes and smoking jaws, his spiny back and terrible tail, no one could wish for a more probable reptile. The only objection that has been made to him is that his jaws are too thin and brittle, while Mr. Buskin is extravagant in his praise. It is wonderful to him—
“This anticipation, by Turner, of the grandest reaches of recent inquiry into the form of the dragons of the old earth ... this saurian of Turner’s is very nearly an exact counterpart of the model of the iguanodon, now the guardian of the Hesperian Garden of the Crystal Palace, wings only excepted, which are, here, almost accurately, those of the pterodactyle. The instinctive grasp which a healthy imagination takes of possible truth, even in its wildest flights, was never more marvellously demonstrated.”
Mr. Ruskin then goes on to call attention to—
“The mighty articulations of his body, rolling in great iron waves, a cataract of coiling strength and crashing armour, down amongst the mountain rents. Fancy him moving, and the roaring of the ground under his rings; the grinding down of the rocks by his toothed whorls; the skeleton glacier of him in thunderous march, and the ashes of the hills rising round him like smoke, and encompassing him like a curtain.”
The description, fine as it is, seems to us to destroy all belief in Turner’s dragon. The wings of a pterodactyle would never lift the body of an iguanodon, and Turner’s dragon could not even walk, his comparatively puny body could never even move his miles of tail, let alone lift them. It is far better to leave him where he is; the fact that he is at the top of that rock is sufficient evidence that he got there somehow; how he got there, and how he will get down again, are questions which we had better not ask if we wish to keep our faith in him. Nor can anything be more confused than the notion of a “saurian” with “coiling strength and crashing armour,” making the ground “roar under his rings.” This might be well enough of a fabulous monster made of iron, but quite inappropriate when applied to a saurian, like the alligator, for instance, with its soft, slow movements, and its bony, skin-padded, noiseless armour.