The Crown of Wild Olive
having got no further on in the thirteen years, but one of the women is
tired, and has fainted on the bank; another is supporting her against
her bundle, and giving her drink; a third sympathetic woman is added,
and the two soldiers have stopped, and one is drinking from his canteen.
Nor is it merely of entire scenes, or of particular incidents, that
Turner's memory is thus tenacious. The slightest passages of color or
arrangement that have pleased him--the fork of a bough, the casting of a
shadow, the fracture of a stone--will be taken up again and again, and
strangely worked into new relations with other thoughts. There is a
single sketch from nature in one of the portfolios at Farnley, of a
common wood-walk on the estate, which has furnished passages to no fewer
than three of the most elaborate compositions in the Liber Studiorum.
I am thus tedious in dwelling on Turner's powers of memory, because I
wish it to be thoroughly seen how all his greatness, all his infinite
luxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everything
that he sees,--on his grasping all, and losing hold of nothing,--on his
forgetting himself, and forgetting nothing else. I wish it to be
understood how every great man paints what he sees or did see, his
greatness being indeed little else than his intense sense of fact. And
thus Pre-Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one and
the same, so far as education can influence them. They are different in
their choice, different in their faculties, but all the same in this,
that Raphael himself, so far as he was great, and all who preceded or
followed him who ever were great, became so by painting the truths
around them as they appeared to each man's own mind, not as he had been
taught to see them, except by the God who made both him and them.
There is, however, one more characteristic of Turner's second period, on
which I have still to dwell, especially with reference to what has been
above advanced respecting the fallacy of overtoil; namely, the
magnificent ease with which all is done when it is _successfully_ done.
For there are one or two drawings of this time which are _not_ done
easily. Turner had in these set himself to do a fine thing to exhibit
his powers; in the common phrase, to excel himself; so sure as he does
this, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever come from
his hands are some of this second period, on which he has spent much
time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident from one side
to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and warm lights set
against them in violent contrast; one of Bamborough Castle, a large
water-color, may be named as an example. But the truly noble works are
those in which, without effort, he has expressed his thoughts as they
came, and forgotten himself; and in these the outpouring of invention is
not less miraculous than the swiftness and obedience of the mighty hand
that expresses it. Any one who examines the drawings may see the
evidence of this facility, in the strange freshness and sharpness of
every touch of color; but when the multitude of delicate touches, with
which all the aerial tones are worked, is taken into consideration, it
would still appear impossible that the drawing could have been completed
with _ease_, unless we had direct evidence in the matter: fortunately,
it is not wanting. There is a drawing in Mr. Fawkes's collection of a
man-of-war taking in stores: it is of the usual size of those of the
England series, about sixteen inches by eleven: it does not appear one
of the most highly finished, but is still farther removed from
slightness. The hull of a first-rate occupies nearly one-half of the
picture on the right, her bows towards the spectator, seen in sharp
perspective from stem to stern, with all her portholes, guns, anchors,
and lower rigging elaborately detailed; there are two other ships of the
line in the middle distance, drawn with equal precision; a noble breezy
sea dancing against their broad bows, full of delicate drawing in its
waves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the larger vessel, and several
other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky. It might appear no small
exertion of mind to draw the detail of all this shipping down to the
smallest ropes, from memory, in the drawing-room of a mansion in the
middle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been given for the
effort. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter from the first stroke to
the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning after
breakfast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three hours, and
went out to shoot.
Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordinary painters,
and they will see the truth of what was above asserted,--that if a great
thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; and let them not
torment themselves with twisting of compositions this way and that, and
repeating, and experimenting, and scene-shifting. If a man can compose
at all, he can compose at once, or rather he must compose in spite of
himself. And this is the reason of that silence which I have kept in
most of my works, on the subject of Composition. Many critics,
especially the architects, have found fault with me for not "teaching
people how to arrange masses;" for not "attributing sufficient
importance to composition." Alas! I attribute far more importance to it
than they do;--so much importance, that I should just as soon think of
sitting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or King
Lear, as how to "compose," in the true sense, a single building or
picture. The marvellous stupidity of this age of lecturers is, that
they do not see that what they call "principles of composition," are
mere principles of common sense in everything, as well as in pictures
and buildings;--A picture is to have a principal light? Yes; and so a
dinner is to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point,
and an air of music a principal note, and every man a principal object.
A picture is to have harmony of relation among its parts? Yes; and so is
a speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company well
chosen, and a ragout well mixed. Composition! As if a man were not
composing every moment of his life, well or ill, and would not do it
instinctively in his picture as well as elsewhere, if he could.
Composition of this lower or common kind is of exactly the same
importance in a picture that it is in any thing else,--no more. It is
well that a man should say what he has to say in good order and
sequence, but the main thing is to say it truly. And yet we go on
preaching to our pupils as if to have a principal light was every thing,
and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein the courses
are indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty.
It is not, however, only in invention that men over-work themselves, but
in execution also; and here I have a word to say to the Pre-Raphaelites
specially. They are working too hard. There is evidence in failing
portions of their pictures, showing that they have wrought so long upon
them that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that the hand
refused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there are certain
qualities of drawing which they miss from over-carefulness. For, let
them be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common desire of
men to see things done in what they call a "masterly," or "bold," or
"broad," manner: a truth oppressed and abused, like almost every other
in this world, but an eternal one nevertheless; and whatever mischief
may have followed from men's looking for nothing else but this facility
of execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all right if
only it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the truth
remains the same:--that because it is not intended that men shall
torment or weary themselves with any earthly labor, it is appointed
that the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease and
decision of manipulation. I only wish people understood this much of
sculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finely
finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more
vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to
the workman's hammer: but at all events, in painting it is felt by all
men, and justly felt. The freedom of the lines of nature can only be
represented by a similar freedom in the hand that follows them; there
are curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, and
in the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught but
by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care what
example is taken, be it the most subtle and careful work of Leonardo
himself, there will be found a play and power and ease in the outlines,
which no _slow_ effort could ever imitate. And if the Pre-Raphaelites do
not understand how this kind of power, in its highest perfection, may be
united with the most severe rendering of all other orders of truth, and
especially of those with which they themselves have most sympathy, let
them look at the drawings of John Lewis.
These then are the principal lessons which we have to learn from Turner,
in his second or central period of labor. There is one more, however, to
be received; and that is a warning; for towards the close of it, what
with doing small conventional vignettes for publishers, making showy
drawings from sketches taken by other people of places he had never
seen, and touching up the bad engravings from his works submitted to him
almost every day,--engravings utterly destitute of animation, and which
had to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them over with
white, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many conventionalities,
and even falsities; and, having trusted for ten or twelve years almost
entirely to his memory and invention, living I believe mostly in London,
and receiving a new sensation only from the burning of the Houses of
Parliament, he painted many pictures between 1830 and 1840 altogether
unworthy of him. But he was not thus to close his career.
In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook another journey into
Switzerland. It was then at least forty years since he had first seen
the Alps; (the source of the Arveron, in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which
could not have been painted till he had seen the thing itself, bears
date 1800,) and the direction of his journey in 1840 marks his fond
memory of that earliest one; for, if we look over the Swiss studies and
drawings executed in his first period, we shall be struck with his
fondness for the pass of the St. Gothard; the most elaborate drawing in
the Farnley collection is one of the Lake of Lucerne from Fluelen; and,
counting the Liber Studiorum subjects, there are, to my knowledge, six
compositions taken at the same period from the pass of St. Gothard, and,
probably, several others are in existence. The valleys of Sallenche, and
Chamouni, and Lake of Geneva, are the only other Swiss scenes which seem
to have made very profound impressions on him.
He returned in 1841 to Lucerne; walked up Mont Pilate on foot, crossed
the St. Gothard, and returned by Lausanne and Geneva. He made a large
number of colored sketches on this journey, and realised several of them
on his return. The drawings thus produced are different from all that
had preceded them, and are the first which belong definitely to what I
shall henceforth call his Third period.
The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while the
faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all
conventionality being done away with by the force of the impression