1846: AGED SEVENTY-ONE
THE BEGINNING OF TURNER'S DECLINE, AND A 'GREY, DIM DRAWING'
The story of Turner's art life really ended in the last chapter: there
is little more to tell, yet 'Queen Mab's Grotto,' which he exhibited at
the British Institution in 1846, flickers with the old splendour. The
sultry arch of trees in the foreground, the golden castle rising to the
sky, have something of the old witchery, and the mundane fairies are
more attractive than many of his clothed foreground fishermen. In this
picture he rivalled nobody but himself, but the suggestion clearly came
from Shakespeare, and it was the old man's pleasure to couple the names
of Shakespeare and Turner in the catalogue, with this from _A Midsummer
Night's Dream_:--
'Frisk it, frisk it by the moonlight beam.'
And this from the _Fallacies of Hope_:--
'Thy orgies, Mab, are manifold.'
The other pictures of this year have the old extravagance of title,
little more. They were:--
'Hurrah for the Whaler Erebus! Another Fish!'
'Undine giving the Ring to Massaniello, Fisherman of Naples.'
'The Angel Standing in the Sun,' with quotations from Revelation and
the poet Rogers.
'Whalers (boiling blubber) entangled in flaw ice, endeavouring to
extricate themselves.'
'Returning from the Ball (St. Martha).'
'Going to the Ball (San Martino).'
His ambition was as buoyant as ever, and the look of his eyes as keen;
but his hand was beginning to lose its power. Ruskin has this curt
comment:--
'I shall take no notice of the three pictures painted in the period of
his decline ("Undine," "The Angel Standing in the Sun," and "The Hero
of a Hundred Fights"). It was ill-judged to exhibit them; they occupy
to Turner's other works precisely the relation which _Count Robert of
Paris_ and _Castle Dangerous_ hold to Scott's early novels.'
One could continue indefinitely quoting Ruskin on Turner, ranging,
as he does, through the whole gamut from eulogy to chastisement,
from adoration to grief. Here is a passage that arrests me as I
turn his pages: pathetic, but a wilful misunderstanding of Turner's
temperament:--
'There is something very strange and sorrowful in the way Turner used
to hint only at these under-meanings of his; leaving us to find them
out, helplessly; and if we did _not_ find them out, no word more ever
came from him. Down to the grave he went, silent. "You cannot read me;
you do not care for me; let it all pass; go your ways."'
And here is a wail that is probably quite within the sad truth. In
a note to the first volume of _Modern Painters_, after remarking
sadly that 'Turner is exceedingly unequal,' that he has failed most
frequently 'in elaborate compositions,' and that 'finding fault with
Turner is not either decorous in myself or likely to be beneficial to
the reader,' Ruskin continues:--
'The reader will have observed that I strictly limited the perfection
of Turner's works to the time of their first appearing on the walls
of the Royal Academy. It bitterly grieves me to have to do this, but
the fact is indeed so. No _picture_ of Turner's is seen in perfection
a month after it is painted. The 'Walhalla' cracked before it had
been eight days in the Academy rooms; the vermilions frequently lose
lustre long before the Exhibition is over; and when all the colours
begin to get hard a year or two after the picture is painted, a
painful deadness and opacity come over them, the whites especially
becoming lifeless, and many of the warmer passages settling into a
hard valueless brown, even if the paint remains perfectly firm, which
is far from being always the case. I believe that in some measure
these results are unavoidable, the colours being so peculiarly blended
and mingled in Turner's present manner, as almost to necessitate their
irregular drying; but that they are not necessary to the extent in
which they sometimes take place, is proved by the comparative safety
of some even of the more brilliant works. Thus the "Old Téméraire"
is nearly safe in colour, and quite firm; while the "Juliet and
Her Nurse" is now the ghost of what it was; the "Slaver" shows no
cracks, though it is chilled in some of the darker passages, while
the "Walhalla" and several of the recent Venices cracked in the Royal
Academy.'
How the attacks and parodies of Turner must have pained Ruskin! This,
for example, from _Punch_ on 'Venice, Morning, Returning from the
Ball':--
'We had almost forgotten Mr. J. M. W. Turner, R.A., and his celebrated
MS. poem, the _Fallacies of Hope_, to which he constantly refers us,
as "in former years"; but on this occasion, he has obliged us by
simply mentioning the title of the poem, without troubling us with an
extract. We will, however, supply a motto to his "Morning--Returning
from the Ball," which really seems to need a little explanation; and
as he is too modest to quote the _Fallacies of Hope_, we will quote
for him:--
'Oh, what a scene! Can this be Venice? No.
And yet methinks it is--because I see
Amid the lumps of yellow, red and blue,
Something which looks like a Venetian spire.
That dash of orange in the background there
Bespeaks 'tis morning. And that little boat
(Almost the colour of Tomato sauce)
Proclaims them now returning from the ball:
This is my picture I would fain convey,
I hope I do. Alas! what Fallacy!'
The following pen-picture is no parody. Wilkie Collins told Thornbury
that when a boy--
'He used to attend his father on varnishing days, and remembers seeing
Turner (not the more perfect in his balance for the brown sherry at
the Academy lunch), seated on the top of a flight of steps, astride a
box. There he sat, a shabby Bacchus, nodding like a Mandarin at his
picture, which he, with a pendulum motion, now touched with his brush,
and now receded from. Yet, in spite of sherry, precarious seat and old
age, he went on shaping in some wonderful dream of colour; every touch
meaning something, every pin's head of colour being a note in the
chromatic scale.'
There is nothing sad in that; but who can look at or recall that 'grey,
dim drawing, with one or two specks of light from craft on the river,'
called 'Twilight in the Lorreli,' without emotion? This was one of the
fifty-three drawings that Turner had brought years before straight to
Farnley on his return from the Rhine. Long afterwards, possibly in
this year, Hawkesworth Fawkes conveyed the set to the dreary house in
Queen Anne Street to show to their creator. The old man turned over the
drawings until he came to 'Twilight in the Lorreli.' His eyes filled
with tears, and he muttered, 'But, Hawkey! but, Hawkey!'