The Crown of Wild Olive
harmony with it; and it is impossible to prophesy of him at any moment,
whether, the next, he will be in laughter or in tears.
This is the root of the man's greatness; and it follows as a matter of
course that this sympathy must give him a subtle power of expression,
even of the characters of mere material things, such as no other painter
ever possessed. The man who can best feel the difference between
rudeness and tenderness in humanity, perceives also more difference
between the branches of an oak and a willow than any one else would; and
therefore, necessarily the most striking character of the drawings
themselves is the speciality of whatever they represent--the thorough
stiffness of what is stiff, and grace of what is graceful, and vastness
of what is vast; but through and beyond all this, the condition of the
mind of the painter himself is easily enough discoverable by comparison
of a large number of the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful:
in itself quite passionless, though entering with ease into the external
passion which it contemplates. By the effort of its will it sympathises
with tumult or distress, even in their extremes, but there is no tumult,
no sorrow in itself, only a chastened and exquisitely peaceful
cheerfulness, deeply meditative; touched without loss of its own perfect
balance, by sadness on the one side, and stooping to playfulness upon
the other. I shall never cease to regret the destruction, by fire, now
several years ago, of a drawing which always seemed to me to be the
perfect image of the painter's mind at this period,--the drawing of
Brignal Church near Rokeby, of which a feeble idea may still be gathered
from the engraving (in the Yorkshire series). The spectator stands on
the "Brignal banks," looking down into the glen at twilight; the sky is
still full of soft rays, though the sun is gone; and the Greta glances
brightly in the valley, singing its evening-song; two white clouds,
following each other, move without wind through the hollows of the
ravine, and others lie couched on the far away moorlands; every leaf of
the woods is still in the delicate air; a boy's kite, incapable of
rising, has become entangled in their branches, he is climbing to
recover it; and just behind it in the picture, almost indicated by it,
the lowly church is seen in its secluded field between the rocks and the
stream; and around it the low churchyard wall, and the few white stones
which mark the resting places of those who can climb the rocks no more,
nor hear the river sing as it passes.
There are many other existing drawings which indicate the same character
of mind, though I think none so touching or so beautiful; yet they are
not, as I said above, more numerous than those which express his
sympathy with sublimer or more active scenes; but they are almost always
marked by a tenderness of execution, and have a look of being beloved in
every part of them, which shows them to be the truest expression of his
own feelings.
One other characteristic of his mind at this period remains to be
noticed--its reverence for talent in others. Not the reverence which
acts upon the practices of men as if they were the laws of nature, but
that which is ready to appreciate the power, and receive the assistance,
of every mind which has been previously employed in the same direction,
so far as its teaching seems to be consistent with the great text-book
of nature itself. Turner thus studied almost every preceding landscape
painter, chiefly Claude, Poussin, Vandevelde, Loutherbourg, and Wilson.
It was probably by the Sir George Beaumonts and other feeble
conventionalists of the period, that he was persuaded to devote his
attention to the works of these men; and his having done so will be
thought, a few scores of years hence, evidence of perhaps the greatest
modesty ever shown by a man of original power. Modesty at once admirable
and unfortunate, for the study of the works of Vandevelde and Claude was
productive of unmixed mischief to him; he spoiled many of his marine
pictures, as for instance Lord Ellesmere's, by imitation of the former;
and from the latter learned a false ideal, which confirmed by the
notions of Greek art prevalent in London in the beginning of this
century, has manifested itself in many vulgarities in his composition
pictures, vulgarities which may perhaps be best expressed by the general
term "Twickenham Classicism," as consisting principally in conceptions
of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of most
of our suburban villas. From Nicolo Poussin and Loutherbourg he seems to
have derived advantage; perhaps also from Wilson; and much in his
subsequent travels from far higher men, especially Tintoret and Paul
Veronese. I have myself heard him speaking with singular delight of the
putting in of the beech leaves in the upper right-hand corner of
Titian's Peter Martyr. I cannot in any of his works trace the slightest
influence of Salvator; and I am not surprised at it, for though Salvator
was a man of far higher powers than either Vandevelde or Claude, he was
a wilful and gross caricaturist. Turner would condescend to be helped by
feeble men, but could not be corrupted by false men. Besides, he had
never himself seen classical life, and Claude was represented to him as
competent authority for it. But he _had_ seen mountains and torrents,
and knew therefore that Salvator could not paint them.
One of the most characteristic drawings of this period fortunately bears
a date, 1818, and brings us within two years of another dated drawing,
no less characteristic of what I shall henceforward call Turner's Second
period. It is in the possession of Mr. Hawkesworth Fawkes of Farnley,
one of Turner's earliest and truest friends; and bears the inscription,
unusually conspicuous, heaving itself up and down over the eminences of
the foreground--"PASSAGE OF MONT CENIS. J. M. W. TURNER, January 15th,
1820."
The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or what
seems to have been a hospice at that time,--I do not remember such at
present,--a small square-built house, built as if partly for a fortress,
with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a kind of
drawbridge to the door. This building, about 400 or 500 yards off, is
seen in a dim, ashy grey against the light, which by help of a violent
blast of mountain wind has broken through the depth of clouds which
hangs upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing but
this roof of drifting cloud; but neither is there any weight of
darkness--the high air is too thin for it,--all savage, howling, and
luminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting out
here and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is a
desolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it in
long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof and
through its window in a frantic whirl; the near ground is all wan with
half-thawed, half-trampled snow; a diligence in front, whose horses,
unable to face the wind, have turned right round with fright, its
passengers struggling to escape, jammed in the window; a little farther
on is another carriage off the road, some figures pushing at its wheels,
and its driver at the horses' heads, pulling and lashing with all his
strength, his lifted arm stretched out against the light of the
distance, though too far off for the whip to be seen.
Now I am perfectly certain that any one thoroughly accustomed to the
earlier works of the painter, and shown this picture for the first time,
would be struck by two altogether new characters in it.
The first, a seeming enjoyment of the excitement of the scene, totally
different from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerly
have been regarded. Every incident of motion and of energy is seized
upon with indescribable delight, and every line of the composition
animated with a force and fury which are now no longer the mere
expression of a contemplated external truth, but have origin in some
inherent feeling in the painter's mind.
The second, that although the subject is one in itself almost incapable
of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the
impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it
might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low
minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of color have been
elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading,
instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warm
hues of the granite promontories, the dull stone color of the walls of
the buildings, clearly opposed, even in shade, to the grey of the snow
wreaths heaped against them, and the faint greens and ghastly blues of
the glacier ice, being all expressed with delicacies of transition
utterly unexampled in any previous drawings.
These, accordingly, are the chief characteristics of the works of
Turner's second period, as distinguished from the first,--a new energy
inherent in the mind of the painter, diminishing the repose and exalting
the force and fire of his conceptions, and the presence of Color, as at
least an essential, and often a principal, element of design.
Not that it is impossible, or even unusual, to find drawings of serene
subject, and perfectly quiet feeling, among the compositions of this
period; but the repose is in them, just as the energy and tumult were in
the earlier period, an external quality, which the painter images by an
effort of the will: it is no longer a character inherent in himself. The
"Ulleswater," in the England series, is one of those which are in most
perfect peace: in the "Cowes," the silence is only broken by the dash
of the boat's oars, and in the "Alnwick" by a stag drinking; but in at
least nine drawings out of ten, either sky, water, or figures are in
rapid motion, and the grandest drawings are almost always those which
have even violent action in one or other, or in all: e. g. high force of
Tees, Coventry, Llanthony, Salisbury, Llanberis, and such others.
The color is, however, a more absolute distinction; and we must return
to Mr. Fawkes's collection in order to see how the change in it was
effected. That such a change would take place at one time or other was
of course to be securely anticipated, the conventional system of the
first period being, as above stated, merely a means of Study. But the
immediate cause was the journey of the year 1820. As might be guessed
from the legend on the drawing above described, "Passage of Mont Cenis,
January 15th, 1820," that drawing represents what happened on the day in
question to the painter himself. He passed the Alps then in the winter
of 1820; and either in the previous or subsequent summer, but on the
same journey, he made a series of sketches on the Rhine, in body color,
now in Mr. Fawkes's collection. Every one of those sketches is the
almost instantaneous record of an _effect_ of color or atmosphere, taken
strictly from nature, the drawing and the details of every subject being
comparatively subordinate, and the color nearly as principal as the
light and shade had been before,--certainly the leading feature, though
the light and shade are always exquisitely harmonized with it. And
naturally, as the color becomes the leading object, those times of day
are chosen in which it is most lovely; and whereas before, at least five
out of six of Turner's drawings represented ordinary daylight, we now
find his attention directed constantly to the evening: and, for the
first time, we have those rosy lights upon the hills, those gorgeous
falls of sun through flaming heavens, those solemn twilights, with the
blue moon rising as the western sky grows dim, which have ever since