Of all things, living or lifeless, upon this strange earth, there is but
one which, having reached the mid-term of appointed human endurance on
it, I still regard with unmitigated amazement. I know, indeed, that all
around me is wonderful--but I cannot answer it with wonder:--a dark
veil, with the foolish words, NATURE OF THINGS, upon it, casts its
deadening folds between me and their dazzling strangeness. Flowers open,
and stars rise, and it seems to me they could have done no less. The
mystery of distant mountain-blue only makes me reflect that the earth is
of necessity mountainous;--the sea-wave breaks at my feet, and I do not
see how it should have remained unbroken. But one object there is still,
which I never pass without the renewed wonder of childhood, and that is
the bow of a Boat. Not of a racing-wherry, or revenue cutter, or clipper
yacht; but the blunt head of a common, bluff, undecked sea-boat, lying
aside in its furrow of beach sand. The sum of Navigation is in that. You
may magnify it or decorate as you will: you do not add to the wonder of
it. Lengthen it into hatchet-like edge of iron,--strengthen it with
complex tracery of ribs of oak,--carve it and gild it till a column of
light moves beneath it on the sea,--you have made no more of it than it
was at first. That rude simplicity of bent plank, that can breast its
way through the death that is in the deep sea, has in it the soul of
shipping. Beyond this, we may have more work, more men, more money; we
cannot have more miracle.
For there is, first, an infinite strangeness in the perfection of the
thing, as work of human hands. I know nothing else that man does, which
is perfect, but that. All his other doings have some sign of weakness,
affectation, or ignorance in them. They are overfinished or
underfinished; they do not quite answer their end, or they show a mean
vanity in answering it too well.
But the boat's bow is naïvely perfect: complete without an effort. The
man who made it knew not he was making anything beautiful, as he bent
its planks into those mysterious, ever-changing curves. It grows under
his hand into the image of a sea-shell; the seal, as it were, of the
flowing of the great tides and streams of ocean stamped on its delicate
rounding. He leaves it when all is done, without a boast. It is simple
work, but it will keep out water. And every plank thence-forward is a
Fate, and has men's lives wreathed in the knots of it, as the cloth-yard
shaft had their deaths in its plumes.
Then, also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the thing
accomplished. No other work of human hands ever gained so much.
Steam-engines and telegraphs indeed help us to fetch, and carry, and
talk; they lift weights for us, and bring messages, with less trouble
than would have been needed otherwise; this saving of trouble, however,
does not constitute a new faculty, it only enhances the powers we
already possess. But in that bow of the boat is the gift of another
world. Without it, what prison wall would be so strong as that "white
and wailing fringe" of sea. What maimed creatures were we all, chained
to our rocks, Andromeda-like, or wandering by the endless shores;
wasting our incommunicable strength, and pining in hopeless watch of
unconquerable waves? The nails that fasten together the planks of the
boat's bow are the rivets of the fellowship of the world. Their iron
does more than draw lightning out of heaven, it leads love round the
earth.
Then also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the enemy that
it does battle with. To lift dead weight; to overcome length of languid
space; to multiply or systematize a given force; this we may see done by
the bar, or beam, or wheel, without wonder. But to war with that living
fury of waters, to bare its breast, moment after moment, against the
unwearied enmity of ocean,--the subtle, fitful, implacable smiting of
the black waves, provoking each other on, endlessly, all the infinite
march of the Atlantic rolling on behind them to their help,--and still
to strike them back into a wreath of smoke and futile foam, and win its
way against them, and keep its charge of life from them;--does any other
soulless thing do as much as this?
I should not have talked of this feeling of mine about a boat, if I had
thought it was mine only; but I believe it to be common to all of us who
are not seamen. With the seaman, wonder changes into fellowship and
close affection; but to all landsmen, from youth upwards, the boat
remains a piece of enchantment; at least unless we entangle our vanity
in it, and refine it away into mere lath, giving up all its protective
nobleness for pace. With those in whose eyes the perfection of a boat is
swift fragility, I have no sympathy. The glory of a boat is, first its
steadiness of poise--its assured standing on the clear softness of the
abyss; and, after that, so much capacity of progress by oar or sail as
shall be consistent with this defiance of the treachery of the sea. And,
this being understood, it is very notable how commonly the poets,
creating for themselves an ideal of motion, fasten upon the charm of a
boat. They do not usually express any desire for wings, or, if they do,
it is only in some vague and half-unintended phrase, such as "flit or
soar," involving wingedness. Seriously, they are evidently content to
let the wings belong to Horse, or Muse, or Angel, rather than to
themselves; but they all, somehow or other, express an honest wish for a
Spiritual Boat. I will not dwell on poor Shelley's paper navies, and
seas of quicksilver, lest we should begin to think evil of boats in
general because of that traitorous one in Spezzia Bay; but it is a
triumph to find the pastorally minded Wordsworth imagine no other way of
visiting the stars than in a boat "no bigger than the crescent moon";[I]
and to find Tennyson--although his boating, in an ordinary way, has a
very marshy and punt-like character--at last, in his highest
inspiration, enter in where the wind began "to sweep a music out of
sheet and shroud."[J] But the chief triumph of all is in Dante. He had
known all manner of traveling; had been borne through vacancy on the
shoulders of chimeras, and lifted through upper heaven in the grasp of
its spirits; but yet I do not remember that he ever expresses any
positive _wish_ on such matters, except for a boat.
[I] Prologue to _Peter Bell_.
[J] _In Memoriam_, ci.
"Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou, and I,
Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend
A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly
With winds at will where'er our thoughts might wend,
So that no change nor any evil chance
Should mar our joyous voyage; but it might be
That even satiety should still enhance
Between our souls their strict community:
And that the bounteous wizard then would place
Vanna and Bice, and our Lapo's love,
Companions of our wandering, and would grace
With passionate talk, wherever we might rove,
Our time, and each were as content and free
As I believe that thou and I should be."
And of all the descriptions of motion in the _Divina Commedia_, I do not
think there is another quite so fine as that in which Dante has
glorified the old fable of Charon by giving a boat also to the bright
sea which surrounds the mountain of Purgatory, bearing the redeemed
souls to their place of trial; only an angel is now the pilot, and there
is no stroke of laboring oar, for his wings are the sails.
"My preceptor silent yet
Stood, while the brightness that we first discerned
Opened the form of wings: then, when he knew
The pilot, cried aloud, 'Down, down; bend low
Thy knees; behold God's angel: fold thy hands:
Now shalt thou see true ministers indeed.
Lo! how all human means he sets at nought;
So that nor oar he needs, nor other sail
Except his wings, between such distant shores.
Lo! how straight up to heaven he holds them reared,
Winnowing the air with those eternal plumes,
That not like mortal hairs fall off or change.'
"As more and more toward us came, more bright
Appeared the bird of God, nor could the eye
Endure his splendor near: I mine bent down.
He drove ashore in a small bark so swift
And light, that in its course no wave it drank.
The heavenly steersman at the prow was seen,
Visibly written blessed in his looks.
Within, a hundred spirits and more there sat."
I have given this passage at length, because it seems to me that Dante's
most inventive adaptation of the fable of Charon to Heaven has not been
regarded with the interest that it really deserves; and because, also,
it is a description that should be remembered by every traveler when
first he sees the white fork of the felucca sail shining on the Southern
Sea. Not that Dante had ever seen such sails;[K] his thought was utterly
irrespective of the form of canvas in any ship of the period; but it is
well to be able to attach this happy image to those felucca sails, as
they now float white and soft above the blue glowing of the bays of
Adria. Nor are other images wanting in them. Seen far away on the
horizon, the Neapolitan felucca has all the aspect of some strange bird
stooping out of the air and just striking the water with its claws;
while the Venetian, when its painted sails are at full swell in
sunshine, is as beautiful as a butterfly with its wings half-closed.[L]
There is something also in them that might remind us of the variegated
and spotted angel wings of Orcagna, only the Venetian sail never looks
majestic; it is too quaint and strange, yet with no peacock's pride or
vulgar gayety,--nothing of Milton's Dalilah:
"So bedecked, ornate and gay
Like a stately ship
Of Tarsus, bound for the Isles
Of Javan or Gadire
With all her bravery on and tackle trim,
Sails filled and streamers waving."
That description could only have been written in a time of vulgar women
and vulgar vessels. The utmost vanity of dress in a woman of the
fourteenth century would have given no image of "sails filled or
streamers waving"; nor does the look or action of a really "stately"
ship ever suggest any image of the motion of a weak or vain woman. The
beauties of the Court of Charles II., and the gilded galleys of the
Thames, might fitly be compared; but the pomp of the Venetian
fisher-boat is like neither. The sail seems dyed in its fullness by the
sunshine, as the rainbow dyes a cloud; the rich stains upon it fade and
reappear, as its folds swell or fall; worn with the Adrian storms, its
rough woof has a kind of noble dimness upon it, and its colors seem as
grave, inherent, and free from vanity as the spots of the leopard, or
veins of the seashell.
[K] I am not quite sure of this, not having studied with any care
the forms of mediæval shipping; but in all the MSS. I have examined
the sails of the shipping represented are square.
[L] It is not a little strange that in all the innumerable paintings
of Venice, old and modern, no notice whatever had been taken of
these sails, though they are _exactly_ the most striking features of
the marine scenery around the city, until Turner fastened upon them,
painting one important picture, "The Sun of Venice," entirely in
their illustration.
Yet, in speaking of poets' love of boats, I ought to have limited the
love to _modern_ poets; Dante, in this respect, as in nearly every
other, being far in advance of his age. It is not often that I
congratulate myself upon the days in which I happen to live; but I do so
in this respect, that, compared with every other period of the world,
this nineteenth century (or rather, the period between 1750 and 1850)
may not improperly be called the Age of Boats; while the classic and
chivalric times, in which boats were partly dreaded, partly despised,
may respectively be characterized, with regard to their means of
locomotion, as the Age of Chariots, and the Age of Horses.
For, whatever perfection and costliness there may be in the present
decorations, harnessing, and horsing of any English or Parisian wheel
equipage, I apprehend that we can from none of them form any high ideal
of wheel conveyance; and that unless we had seen an Egyptian king
bending his bow with his horses at the gallop, or a Greek knight leaning
with his poised lance over the shoulder of his charioteer, we have no
right to consider ourselves as thoroughly knowing what the word
"chariot," in its noblest acceptation, means.
So, also, though much chivalry is yet left in us, and we English still
know several things about horses, I believe that if we had seen
Charlemagne and Roland ride out hunting from Aix, or Coeur de Lion trot
into camp on a sunny evening at Ascalon, or a Florentine lady canter
down the Val d'Arno in Dante's time, with her hawk on her wrist, we
should have had some other ideas even about horses than the best we can
have now. But most assuredly, nothing that ever swung at the quay sides
of Carthage, or glowed with crusaders' shields above the bays of Syria,
could give to any contemporary human creature such an idea of the
meaning of the word Boat, as may be now gained by any mortal happy
enough to behold as much as a Newcastle collier beating against the
wind. In the classical period, indeed, there was some importance given
to shipping as the means of locking a battle-field together on the
waves; but in the chivalric period, the whole mind of man is withdrawn
from the sea, regarding it merely as a treacherous impediment, over
which it was necessary sometimes to find conveyance, but from which the
thoughts were always turned impatiently, fixing themselves in green
fields, and pleasures that may be enjoyed by land--the very supremacy of
the horse necessitating the scorn of the sea, which would not be trodden
by hoofs.
It is very interesting to note how repugnant every oceanic idea appears
to be to the whole nature of our principal English mediæval poet,
Chaucer. Read first the Man of Lawe's Tale, in which the Lady Constance
is continually floated up and down the Mediterranean, and the German
Ocean, in a ship by herself; carried from Syria all the way to
Northumberland, and there wrecked upon the coast; thence yet again
driven up and down among the waves for five years, she and her child;
and yet, all this while, Chaucer does not let fall a single word
descriptive of the sea, or express any emotion whatever about it, or
about the ship. He simply tells us the lady sailed here and was wrecked
there; but neither he nor his audience appear to be capable of receiving
any sensation, but one of simple aversion, from waves, ships, or sands.
Compare with his absolutely apathetic recital, the description by a
modern poet of the sailing of a vessel, charged with the fate of another
Constance:
"It curled not Tweed alone, that breeze--
For far upon Northumbrian seas
It freshly blew, and strong;
Where from high Whitby's cloistered pile,
Bound to St. Cuthbert's holy isle,
It bore a bark along.
Upon the gale she stooped her side,
And bounded o'er the swelling tide
As she were dancing home.
The merry seamen laughed to see
Their gallant ship so lustily
Furrow the green sea foam."
Now just as Scott enjoys this sea breeze, so does Chaucer the soft air
of the woods; the moment the older poet lands, he is himself again, his
poverty of language in speaking of the ship is not because he despises
description, but because he has nothing to describe. Hear him upon the
ground in Spring:
"These woodes else recoveren greene,
That drie in winter ben to sene,
And the erth waxeth proud withall,
For sweet dewes that on it fall,
And the poore estate forget,
In which that winter had it set:
And then becomes the ground so proude,
That it wol have a newe shroude,
And maketh so queint his robe and faire,
That it had hewes an hundred paire,
Of grasse and floures, of Inde and Pers,
And many hewes full divers:
That is the robe I mean ywis
Through which the ground to praisen is."
In like manner, wherever throughout his poems we find Chaucer
enthusiastic, it is on a sunny day in the "good green-wood," but the
slightest approach to the sea-shore makes him shiver; and his antipathy
finds at last positive expression, and becomes the principal foundation
of the Frankeleine's Tale, in which a lady, waiting for her husband's
return in a castle by the sea, behaves and expresses herself as
follows:--
"Another time wold she sit and thinke,
And cast her eyen dounward fro the brinke;
But whan she saw the grisly rockes blake,
For veray fere so wold hire herte quake
That on hire feet she might hire not sustene
Than wold she sit adoun upon the grene,
And pitously into the see behold,
And say right thus, with careful sighes cold.
'Eterne God, that thurgh thy purveance
Ledest this world by certain governance,
In idel, as men sain, ye nothing make.
_But, lord, thise grisly fendly rockes blake,
That semen rather a foule confusion
Of werk, than any faire creation_
Of swiche a parfit wise God and stable,
Why han ye wrought this werk unresonable?'"
The desire to have the rocks out of her way is indeed severely punished
in the sequel of the tale; but it is not the less characteristic of the
age, and well worth meditating upon, in comparison with the feelings of
an unsophisticated modern French or English girl among the black rocks
of Dieppe or Ramsgate.
On the other hand, much might be said about that peculiar love of _green
fields and birds_ in the Middle Ages; and of all with which it is
connected, purity and health in manners and heart, as opposed to the
too frequent condition of the modern mind--
"As for the birds in the thicket,
Thrush or ousel in leafy niche,
Linnet or finch--she was far too rich
To care for a morning concert to which
She was welcome, without a ticket."[M]
[M] Thomas Hood.
But this would lead us far afield, and the main fact I have to point out
to the reader is the transition of human grace and strength from the
exercises of the land to those of the sea in the course of the last
three centuries.
Down to Elizabeth's time chivalry lasted; and grace of dress and mien,
and all else that was connected with chivalry. Then came the ages which,
when they have taken their due place in the depths of the past, will be,
by a wise and clear-sighted futurity, perhaps well comprehended under a
common name, as the ages of Starch; periods of general stiffening and
bluish-whitening, with a prevailing washerwoman's taste in everything;
involving a change of steel armor into cambric; of natural hair into
peruke; of natural walking into that which will disarrange no
wristbands; of plain language into quips and embroideries; and of human
life in general, from a green race-course, where to be defeated was at
worst only to fall behind and recover breath, into a slippery pole, to
be climbed with toil and contortion, and in clinging to which, each
man's foot is on his neighbor's head.
But, meanwhile, the marine deities were incorruptible. It was not
possible to starch the sea; and precisely as the stiffness fastened upon
men, it vanished from ships. What had once been a mere raft, with rows
of formal benches, pushed along by laborious flap of oars, and with
infinite fluttering of flags and swelling of poops above, gradually
began to lean more heavily into the deep water, to sustain a gloomy
weight of guns, to draw back its spider-like feebleness of limb, and
open its bosom to the wind, and finally darkened down from all its
painted vanities into the long, low hull, familiar with the overflying
foam; that has no other pride but in its daily duty and victory; while,
through all these changes, it gained continually in grace, strength,
audacity, and beauty, until at last it has reached such a pitch of all
these, that there is not, except the very loveliest creatures of the
living world, anything in nature so absolutely notable, bewitching, and,
according to its means and measure, heart-occupying, as a well-handled
ship under sail in a stormy day. Any ship, from lowest to proudest, has
due place in that architecture of the sea; beautiful, not so much in
this or that piece of it, as in the unity of all, from cottage to
cathedral, into their great buoyant dynasty. Yet, among them, the
fisher-boat, corresponding to the cottage on the land (only far more
sublime than a cottage ever can be), is on the whole the thing most
venerable. I doubt if ever academic grove were half so fit for
profitable meditation as the little strip of shingle between two black,
steep, overhanging sides of stranded fishing-boats. The clear, heavy
water-edge of ocean rising and falling close to their bows, in that
unaccountable way which the sea has always in calm weather, turning the
pebbles over and over as if with a rake, to look for something, and then
stopping a moment down at the bottom of the bank, and coming up again
with a little run and clash, throwing a foot's depth of salt crystal in
an instant between you and the round stone you were going to take in
your hand; sighing, all the while, as if it would infinitely rather be
doing something else. And the dark flanks of the fishing-boats all
aslope above, in their shining quietness, hot in the morning sun, rusty
and seamed with square patches of plank nailed over their rents; just
rough enough to let the little flat-footed fisher-children haul or twist
themselves up to the gunwales, and drop back again along some stray
rope; just round enough to remind us, in their broad and gradual curves,
of the sweep of the green surges they know so well, and of the hours
when those old sides of seared timber, all ashine with the sea, plunge
and dip into the deep green purity of the mounded waves more joyfully
than a deer lies down among the grass of spring, the soft white cloud of
foam opening momentarily at the bows, and fading or flying high into the
breeze where the sea-gulls toss and shriek,--the joy and beauty of it,
all the while, so mingled with the sense of unfathomable danger, and the
human effort and sorrow going on perpetually from age to age, waves
rolling forever, and winds moaning forever, and faithful hearts trusting
and sickening forever, and brave lives dashed away about the rattling
beach like weeds forever; and still at the helm of every lonely boat,
through starless night and hopeless dawn, His hand, who spread the
fisher's net over the dust of the Sidonian palaces, and gave into the
fisher's hand the keys of the kingdom of heaven.
Next after the fishing-boat--which, as I said, in the architecture of
the sea represents the cottage, more especially the pastoral or
agricultural cottage, watchful over some pathless domain of moorland or
arable, as the fishing-boat swims, humbly in the midst of the broad
green fields and hills of ocean, out of which it has to win such fruit
as they can give, and to compass with net or drag such flocks as it may
find,--next to this ocean-cottage ranks in interest, it seems to me, the
small, over-wrought, under-crewed, ill-caulked merchant brig or
schooner; the kind of ship which first shows its couple of thin masts
over the low fields or marshes as we near any third-rate sea-port; and
which is sure somewhere to stud the great space of glittering water,
seen from any sea-cliff, with its four or five square-set sails. Of the
larger and more polite tribes of merchant vessels, three-masted, and
passenger-carrying, I have nothing to say, feeling in general little
sympathy with people who want to _go_ anywhere; nor caring much about
anything, which in the essence of it expresses a desire to get to other
sides of the world; but only for homely and stay-at-home ships, that
live their life and die their death about English rocks. Neither have I
any interest in the higher branches of commerce, such as traffic with
spice islands, and porterage of painted tea-chests or carved ivory; for
all this seems to me to fall under the head of commerce of the
drawing-room; costly, but not venerable. I respect in the merchant
service only those ships that carry coals, herrings, salt, timber, iron,
and such other commodities, and that have disagreeable odor, and
unwashed decks. But there are few things more impressive to me than one
of these ships lying up against some lonely quay in a black sea-fog,
with the furrow traced under its tawny keel far in the harbor slime. The
noble misery that there is in it, the might of its rent and strained
unseemliness, its wave-worn melancholy, resting there for a little while
in the comfortless ebb, unpitied, and claiming no pity; still less
honored, least of all conscious of any claim to honor; casting and
craning by due balance whatever is in its hold up to the pier, in quiet
truth of time; spinning of wheel, and slackening of rope, and swinging
of spade, in as accurate cadence as a waltz music; one or two of its
crew, perhaps, away forward, and a hungry boy and yelping dog eagerly
interested in something from which a blue dull smoke rises out of pot or
pan; but dark-browed and silent, their limbs slack, like the ropes above
them, entangled as they are in those inextricable meshes about the
patched knots and heaps of ill-reefed sable sail. What a majestic sense
of service in all that languor! the rest of human limbs and hearts, at
utter need, not in sweet meadows or soft air, but in harbor slime and
biting fog; so drawing their breath once more, to go out again, without
lament, from between the two skeletons of pier-heads, vocal with wash of
under wave, into the gray troughs of tumbling brine; there, as they can,
with slacked rope, and patched sail, and leaky hull, again to roll and
stagger far away amidst the wind and salt sleet, from dawn to dusk and
dusk to dawn, winning day by day their daily bread; and for last reward,
when their old hands, on some winter night, lose feeling along the
frozen ropes, and their old eyes miss mark of the lighthouse quenched in
foam, the so-long impossible Rest, that shall hunger no more, neither
thirst any more,--their eyes and mouths filled with the brown sea-sand.
After these most venerable, to my mind, of all ships, properly so
styled, I find nothing of comparable interest in any floating fabric
until we come to the great achievement of the 19th century. For one
thing this century will in after ages be considered to have done in a
superb manner, and one thing, I think, only. It has not distinguished
itself in political spheres; still less in artistical. It has produced
no golden age by its Reason; neither does it appear eminent for the
constancy of its Faith. Its telescopes and telegraphs would be
creditable to it, if it had not in their pursuit forgotten in great part
how to see clearly with its eyes, and to talk honestly with its tongue.
Its natural history might have been creditable to it also, if it could
have conquered its habit of considering natural history to be mainly the
art of writing Latin names on white tickets. But, as it is, none of
these things will be hereafter considered to have been got on with by us
as well as might be; whereas it will always be said of us, with unabated
reverence,
"THEY BUILT SHIPS OF THE LINE."
Take it all in all, a Ship of the Line is the most honorable thing that
man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced. By himself, unhelped, he
can do better things than ships of the line; he can make poems and
pictures, and other such concentrations of what is best in him. But as a
being living in flocks, and hammering out, with alternate strokes and
mutual agreement, what is necessary for him in those flocks, to get or
produce, the ship of the line is his first work. Into that he has put as
much of his human patience, common sense, forethought, experimental
philosophy, self-control, habits of order and obedience, thoroughly
wrought handwork, defiance of brute elements, careless courage, careful
patriotism, and calm expectation of the judgment of God, as can well be
put into a space of 300 feet long by 80 broad. And I am thankful to have
lived in an age when I could see this thing so done.
Considering, then, our shipping, under the three principal types of
fishing-boat, collier, and ship of the line, as the great glory of this
age; and the "New Forest" of mast and yard that follows the windings of
the Thames, to be, take it all in all, a more majestic scene, I don't
say merely than any of our streets or palaces as they now are, but even
than the best that streets and palaces can generally be; it has often
been a matter of serious thought to me how far this chiefly substantial
thing done by the nation ought to be represented by the art of the
nation; how far our great artists ought seriously to devote themselves
to such perfect painting of our ships as should reveal to later
generations--lost perhaps in clouds of steam and floating troughs of
ashes--the aspect of an ancient ship of battle under sail.
To which, I fear, the answer must be sternly this: That no great art
ever was, or can be, employed in the careful imitation of the work of
man as its principal subject. That is to say, art will not bear to be
reduplicated. A ship is a noble thing, and a cathedral a noble thing,
but a painted ship or a painted cathedral is not a noble thing. Art
which reduplicates art is necessarily second-rate art. I know no
principle more irrefragably authoritative than that which I had long ago
occasion to express: "All noble art is the expression of man's delight
in God's work; not in his own."
"How!" it will be asked, "Are Stanfield, Isabey, and Prout necessarily
artists of the second order because they paint ships and buildings
instead of trees and clouds?" Yes, necessarily of the second order; so
far as they paint ships rather than sea, and so far as they paint
buildings rather than the natural light, and color, and work of years
upon those buildings. For, in this respect, a ruined building is a noble
subject, just as far as man's work has therein been subdued by nature's;
and Stanfield's chief dignity is his being a painter less of shipping
than of the seal of time or decay upon shipping.[N] For a wrecked ship,
or shattered boat, is a noble subject, while a ship in full sail, or a
perfect boat, is an ignoble one; not merely because the one is by
reason of its ruin more picturesque than the other, but because it is a
nobler act in man to meditate upon Fate as it conquers his work, than
upon that work itself.
[N] As in the very beautiful picture of this year's Academy, "The
Abandoned."
Shipping, therefore, in its perfection, never can become the subject of
noble art; and that just because to represent it in its perfection would
tax the powers of art to the utmost. If a great painter could rest in
drawing a ship, as he can rest in drawing a piece of drapery, we might
sometimes see vessels introduced by the noblest workmen, and treated by
them with as much delight as they would show in scattering luster over
an embroidered dress, or knitting the links of a coat of mail. But ships
cannot be drawn at times of rest. More complicated in their anatomy than
the human frame itself, so far as that frame is outwardly discernible;
liable to all kinds of strange accidental variety in position and
movement, yet in each position subject to imperative laws which can only
be followed by unerring knowledge; and involving, in the roundings and
foldings of sail and hull, delicacies of drawing greater than exist in
any other inorganic object, except perhaps a snow wreath,[O]--they
present, irrespective of sea or sky, or anything else around them,
difficulties which could only be vanquished by draughtsmanship quite
accomplished enough to render even the subtlest lines of the human face
and form. But the artist who has once attained such skill as this will
not devote it to the drawing of ships. He who can paint the face of St.
Paul will not elaborate the parting timbers of the vessel in which he is
wrecked; and he who can represent the astonishment of the apostles at
the miraculous draught will not be solicitous about accurately showing
that their boat is overloaded.
[O] The catenary and other curves of tension which a sail assumes
under the united influence of the wind, its own weight, and the
particular tensions of the various ropes by which it is attached, or
against which it presses, show at any moment complexities of
arrangement to which fidelity, except after the study of a lifetime,
is impossible.
"What!" it will perhaps be replied, "have, then, ships never been
painted perfectly yet, even by the men who have devoted most attention
to them?" Assuredly not. A ship never yet has been painted at all, in
any other sense than men have been painted in "Landscapes with figures."
Things have been painted which have a general effect of ships, just as
things have been painted which have a general effect of shepherds or
banditti; but the best average ship-painting no more reaches the truth
of ships than the equestrian troops in one of Van der Meulen's
battle-pieces express the higher truths of humanity.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
Take a single instance. I do not know any work in which, on the whole,
there is a more unaffected love of ships for their own sake, and a
fresher feeling of sea breeze always blowing, than Stanfield's "Coast
Scenery." Now, let the reader take up that book, and look through all
the plates of it at the way in which the most important parts of a
ship's skeleton are drawn, those most wonderful junctions of mast with
mast, corresponding to the knee or hip in the human frame, technically
known as "Tops." Under its very simplest form, in one of those poor
collier brigs, which I have above endeavored to recommend to the readers
affection, the junction of the top-gallant-mast with the topmast, when
the sail is reefed, will present itself under no less complex and
mysterious form than this in Fig. 1, a horned knot of seven separate
pieces of timber, irrespective of the two masts and the yard; the whole
balanced and involved in an apparently inextricable web of chain and
rope, consisting of at least sixteen ropes about the top-gallant-mast,
and some twenty-five crossing each other in every imaginable degree of
slackness and slope about the topmast. Two-thirds of these ropes are
omitted in the cut, because I could not draw them without taking more
time and pains than the point to be illustrated was worth; the thing, as
it is, being drawn quite well enough to give some idea of the facts of
it. Well, take up Stanfield's "Coast Scenery," and look through it in
search of tops, and you will invariably find them represented as in Fig.
2, or even with fewer lines; the example Fig. 2 being one of the tops of
the frigate running into Portsmouth harbor, magnified to about twice its
size in the plate.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
"Well, but it was impossible to do more on so small a scale." By no
means: but take what scale you choose, of Stanfield's or any other
marine painter's most elaborate painting, and let me magnify the study
of the real top in proportion, and the deficiency of detail will always
be found equally great: I mean in the work of the higher artists, for
there are of course many efforts at greater accuracy of delineation by
those painters of ships who are to the higher marine painter what
botanical draughtsmen are to the landscapists; but just as in the
botanical engraving the spirit and life of the plant are always lost, so
in the technical ship-painting the life of the ship is always lost,
without, as far as I can see, attaining, even by this sacrifice,
anything like completeness of mechanical delineation. At least, I never
saw the ship drawn yet which gave me the slightest idea of the
entanglement of real rigging.
Respecting this lower kind of ship-painting, it is always matter of
wonder to me that it satisfies sailors. Some years ago I happened
to stand longer than pleased my pensioner guide before Turner's
"Battle of Trafalgar," at Greenwich Hospital; a picture which, at
a moderate estimate, is simply worth all the rest of the
hospital--ground--walls--pictures and models put together. My guide,
supposing me to be detained by indignant wonder at seeing it in so good
a place, assented to my supposed, sentiments by muttering in a low
voice: "Well, sir, it _is_ a shame that that thing should be there. We
ought to 'a 'ad a Uggins; that's sartain." I was not surprised that my
sailor friend should be disgusted at seeing the _Victory_ lifted nearly
right out of the water, and all the sails of the fleet blowing about to
that extent that the crews might as well have tried to reef as many
thunder-clouds. But I was surprised at his perfect repose of respectful
faith in "Uggins," who appeared to me--unfortunate landsman as I was--to
give no more idea of the look of a ship of the line going through the
sea, than might be obtained from seeing one of the correct models at the
top of the hall floated in a fishpond.
Leaving, however, the sailor to his enjoyment, on such grounds as it may
be, of this model drawing, and being prepared to find only a vague and
hasty shadowing forth of shipping in the works of artists proper, we
will glance briefly at the different stages of excellence which such
shadowing forth has reached, and note in their consecutive changes the
feelings with which shipping has been regarded at different periods of
art.
1. _Mediæval Period._ The vessel is regarded merely as a sort of
sea-carriage, and painted only so far as it is necessary for complete
display of the groups of soldiers or saints on the deck: a great deal of
quaint shipping, richly hung with shields, and gorgeous with banners,
is, however, thus incidently represented in 15th-century manuscripts,
embedded in curly green waves of sea full of long fish; and although
there is never the slightest expression of real sea character, of
motion, gloom, or spray, there is more real interest of marine detail
and incident than in many later compositions.
2. _Early Venetian Period._ A great deal of tolerably careful
boat-drawing occurs in the pictures of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini,
deserving separate mention among the marine schools, in confirmation of
what has been stated above, that the drawing of boats is more difficult
than that of the human form. For, long after all the perspectives and
fore-shortenings of the human body were completely understood, as well
as those of architecture, it remained utterly beyond the power of the
artists of the time to draw a boat with even tolerable truth. Boats are
always tilted up on end, or too long, or too short, or too high in the
water. Generally they appear to be regarded with no interest whatever,
and are painted merely where they are matters of necessity. This is
perfectly natural: we pronounce that there is romance in the Venetian
conveyance by oars, merely because we ourselves are in the habit of
being dragged by horses. A Venetian, on the other hand, sees vulgarity
in a gondola, and thinks the only true romance is in a hackney coach.
And thus, it was no more likely that a painter in the days of Venetian
power should pay much attention to the shipping in the Grand Canal than
that an English artist should at present concentrate the brightest rays
of his genius on a cab-stand.
3. _Late Venetian Period._ Deserving mention only for its notably
negative character. None of the great Venetian painters, Tintoret,
Titian, Veronese, Bellini, Giorgione, Bonifazio, ever introduce a ship
if they can help it. They delight in ponderous architecture, in grass,
flowers, blue mountains, skies, clouds, and gay dresses; nothing comes
amiss to them but ships and the sea. When they are forced to introduce
these, they represent merely a dark-green plain, with reddish galleys
spotted about it here and there, looking much like small models of
shipping pinned on a green board. In their marine battles, there is
seldom anything discernible except long rows of scarlet oars, and men in
armor falling helplessly through them.
4. _Late Roman Period._ That is to say, the time of the beginning of the
Renaissance landscape by the Caracci, Claude, and Salvator. First, in
their landscapes, shipping begins to assume something like independent
character, and to be introduced for the sake of its picturesque
interest; although what interest could be taken by any healthy human
creature in such vessels as were then painted has always remained a
mystery to me. The ships of Claude, having hulls of a shape something
between a cocoa-nut and a high-heeled shoe, balanced on their keels on
the top of the water, with some scaffolding and cross-sticks above, and
a flag at the top of every stick, form perhaps the _purest_ exhibition
of human inanity and fatuity which the arts have yet produced. The
harbors also, in which these model navies ride, are worthy of all
observation for the intensity of the false taste which, endeavoring to
unite in them the characters of pleasure-ground and port, destroys the
veracity of both. There are many inlets of the Italian seas where sweet
gardens and regular terraces descend to the water's edge; but these are
not the spots where merchant vessels anchor, or where bales are
disembarked. On the other hand, there are many busy quays and noisy
arsenals upon the shores of Italy; but Queen's palaces are not built
upon the quays, nor are the docks in any wise adorned with
conservatories or ruins. It was reserved for the genius of Claude to
combine the luxurious with the lucrative, and rise to a commercial
ideal, in which cables are fastened to temple pillars, and lighthouses
adorned with rows of beaupots. It seems strange also that any power
which Salvator showed in the treatment of other subjects utterly deserts
him when he approaches the sea. Though always coarse, false, and vulgar,
he has at least energy, and some degree of invention, as long as he
remains on land; his terrestrial atrocities are animated, and his
rock-born fancies formidable. But the sea air seems to dim his sight and
paralyze his hand. His love of darkness and destruction, far from
seeking sympathy in the rage of ocean, disappears as he approaches the
beach; after having tortured the innocence of trees into demoniac
convulsions, and shattered the loveliness of purple hills into colorless
dislocation, he approaches the real wrath and restlessness of ocean
without either admiration or dismay, and appears to feel nothing at its
shore except a meager interest in bathers, fishermen, and gentlemen in
court dress bargaining for state cabins. Of all the pictures by men who
bear the reputation of great masters which I have ever seen in my life
(except only some by Domenichino), the two large "Marines" in the Pitti
Palace, attributed to Salvator, are, on the whole, the most vapid and
vile examples of human want of understanding. In the folly of Claude
there is still a gleam of grace and innocence; there is refreshment in
his childishness, and tenderness in his inability. But the folly of
Salvator is disgusting in its very nothingness: it is like the vacuity
of a plague-room in an hospital, shut up in uncleansed silence, emptied
of pain and motion, but not of infection.
5. _Dutch Period._ Although in artistical qualities lower than is easily
by language expressible, the Italian marine painting usually conveys an
idea of three facts about the sea,--that it is green, that it is deep,
and that the sun shines on it. The dark plain which stands for far away
Adriatic with the Venetians, and the glinting swells of tamed wave
which lap about the quays of Claude, agree in giving the general
impression that the ocean consists of pure water, and is open to the
pure sky. But the Dutch painters, while they attain considerably greater
dexterity than the Italian in mere delineation of nautical incident,
were by nature precluded from ever becoming aware of these common facts;
and having, in reality, never in all their lives seen the sea, but only
a shallow mixture of sea-water and sand; and also never in all their
lives seen the sky, but only a lower element between them and it,
composed of marsh exhalation and fog-bank; they are not to be with too
great severity reproached for the dullness of their records of the
nautical enterprise of Holland. _We_ only are to be reproached, who,
familiar with the Atlantic, are yet ready to accept with faith, as types
of sea, the small waves _en papillote_, and peruke-like puffs of
farinaceous foam, which were the delight of Backhuysen and his compeers.
If one could but arrest the connoisseurs in the fact of looking at them
with belief, and, magically introducing the image of a true sea-wave,
let it roll up to them through the room,--one massive fathom's height
and rood's breadth of brine, passing them by but once,--dividing, Red
Sea-like, on right hand and left,--but at least setting close before
their eyes, for once in inevitable truth, what a sea-wave really is; its
green mountainous giddiness of wrath, its overwhelming crest--heavy as
iron, fitful as flame, clashing against the sky in long cloven
edge,--its furrowed flanks, all ghastly clear, deep in transparent
death, but all laced across with lurid nets of spume, and tearing open
into meshed interstices their churned veil of silver fury, showing still
the calm gray abyss below; that has no fury and no voice, but is as a
grave always open, which the green sighing mounds do but hide for an
instant as they pass. Would they, shuddering back from this wave of the
true, implacable sea, turn forthwith to the papillotes? It might be so.
It is what we are all doing, more or less, continually.
Well, let the waves go their way; it is not of them that we have here
to reason; but be it remembered, that men who cannot enter into the Mind
of the Sea, cannot for the same reason enter into the Mind of Ships, in
their contention with it; and the fluttering, tottering, high-pooped,
flag-beset fleets of these Dutch painters have only this much
superiority over the caricatures of the Italians, that they indeed
appear in some degree to have been studied from the high-pooped and
flag-beset nature which was in that age visible, while the Claude and
Salvator ships are ideals of the studio. But the effort is wholly
unsuccessful. Any one who has ever attempted to sketch a vessel in
motion knows that he might as easily attempt to sketch a bird on the
wing, or a trout on the dart. Ships can only be drawn, as animals must
be, by the high instinct of momentary perception, which rarely developed
itself in any Dutch painter, and least of all in their painters of
marine. And thus the awkward forms of shipping, the shallow impurity of
the sea, and the cold incapacity of the painter, joining in
disadvantageous influence over them, the Dutch marine paintings may be
simply, but circumstantially, described as the misrepresentation of
undeveloped shipping in a discolored sea by distempered painters. An
exception ought to be made in favor of the boats of Cuyp, which are
generally well floated in calm and sunny water; and, though rather punts
or tubs than boats, have in them some elements of a slow, warm,
square-sailed, sleepy grandeur--respectable always, when compared either
with the flickering follies of Backhuysen, or the monstrous, unmanly,
and _à fortiori_, unsailorly absurdities of metaphysical vessels, puffed
on their way by corpulent genii, or pushed by protuberant dolphins,
which Rubens and the other so-called historical painters of his time
were accustomed to introduce in the mythology of their court-adulation;
that marvelous Faith of the 18th century, which will one day, and that
not far off, be known for a thing more truly disgraceful to human nature
than the Polynesian's dance round his feather idol, or Egyptian's
worship of the food he fattened on. From Salvator and Domenichino it is
possible to turn in a proud indignation, knowing that theirs are no
fair examples of the human mind; but it is with humbled and woful anger
that we must trace the degradation of the intellect of Rubens in his
pictures of the life of Mary of Medicis.[P]
[P] "The town of Lyons, seated upon a chariot drawn by two lions,
_lifts its eyes towards heaven_, and admires there--'les nouveaux
Epoux,'--represented in the character of Jupiter and Juno."--_Notice
des Tableaux du Musée Impérial_, 2nde partie, Paris, 1854, p. 235.
"The Queen upon her throne holds with one hand the scepter, in the
other the balance. Minerva and Cupid are at her sides. Abundance and
Prosperity distribute metals, laurels, 'et d'autres récompenses,' to
the Genii of the Fine Arts. Time, crowned with the productions of
the seasons, leads France to the--Age of Gold!"--p. 239.
So thought the Queen, and Rubens, and the Court. Time himself,
"crowned with the productions of the seasons," was, meanwhile, as
Thomas Carlyle would have told us, "quite of another opinion."
With view of arrival at Golden Age all the sooner, the Court
determine to go by water; "and Marie de Medicis gives to her son the
government of the state, under the emblem of a vessel, of which he
holds the rudder."
This piece of royal pilotage, being on the whole the most
characteristic example I remember of the Mythological marine above
alluded to, is accordingly recommended to the reader's serious
attention.
6. _Modern Period._ The gradual appreciation of the true character both
of shipping and the ocean, in the works of the painters of the last half
century, is part of that successful study of other elements of
landscape, of which I have long labored at a consistent investigation,
now partly laid before the public; I shall not, therefore, here enter
into any general inquiry respecting modern sea-painting, but limit
myself to a notice of the particular feelings which influenced Turner in
his marine studies, so far as they are shown in the series of plates
which have now been trusted to me for illustration.
Among the earliest sketches from nature which Turner appears to have
made, in pencil and Indian ink, when a boy of twelve or fourteen, it is
very singular how large a proportion consists of careful studies of
stranded boats. Now, after some fifteen years of conscientious labor,
with the single view of acquiring knowledge of the ends and powers of
art, I have come to one conclusion, which at the beginning of those
fifteen years would have been very astonishing to myself--that, of all
our modern school of landscape painters, next to Turner, and before the
rise of the Pre-Raphaelites, the man whose works are on the whole most
valuable, and show the highest intellect, is Samuel Prout. It is very
notable that also in Prout's early studies, shipping subjects took not
merely a prominent, but I think even a principal, place.
The reason of this is very evident: both Turner and Prout had in them an
untaught, inherent perception of what was great and pictorial. They
could not find it in the buildings or in the scenes immediately around
them. But they saw some element of real power in the boats. Prout
afterwards found material suited to his genius in other directions, and
left his first love; but Turner retained the early affection to the
close of his life, and the last oil picture which he painted, before his
noble hand forgot its cunning, was the Wreck-buoy. The last thoroughly
perfect picture he ever painted, was the Old Téméraire.
The studies which he was able to make from nature in his early years,
are chiefly of fishing-boats, barges, and other minor marine still life;
and his better acquaintance with this kind of shipping than with the
larger kind is very marked in the Liber Studiorum, in which there are
five careful studies of fishing-boats under various circumstances;
namely, Calais Harbor, Sir John Mildmay's Picture, Flint Castle, Marine
Dabblers, and the Calm; while of other shipping, there are only two
subjects, both exceedingly unsatisfactory.
Turner, however, deemed it necessary to his reputation at that period
that he should paint pictures in the style of Vandevelde; and, in order
to render the resemblance more complete, he appears to have made careful
drawings of the different parts of old Dutch shipping. I found a large
number of such drawings among the contents of his neglected portfolios
at his death; some were clearly not by his own hand, others appeared to
be transcripts by him from prints or earlier drawings; the quantity
altogether was very great, and the evidence of his prolonged attention
to the subject more distinct than with respect to any other element of
landscape. Of plants, rocks, or architecture, there were very few
careful pieces of anatomical study. But several drawers were entirely
filled with these memoranda of shipping.
In executing the series of drawings for the work known as the Southern
Coast, Turner appears to have gained many ideas about shipping, which,
once received, he laid up by him for use in after years. The evidence of
this laying by of thought in his mind, as it were in reserve, until he
had power to express it, is curious and complete throughout his life;
and although the Southern Coast drawings are for the most part quiet in
feeling, and remarkably simple in their mode of execution, I believe it
was in the watch over the Cornish and Dorsetshire coast, which the
making of those drawings involved, that he received all his noblest
ideas about sea and ships.
Of one thing I am certain; Turner never drew anything that could be
_seen_, without having seen it. That is to say, though he would draw
Jerusalem from some one else's sketch, it would be, nevertheless,
entirely from his own experience of ruined walls: and though he would
draw ancient shipping (for an imitation of Vandevelde, or a vignette to
the voyage of Columbus) from such data as he could get about things
which he could no more see with his own eyes, yet when, of his own free
will, in the subject of Ilfracombe, he, in the year 1818, introduces a
shipwreck, I am perfectly certain that, before the year 1818, he had
_seen_ a shipwreck, and, moreover, one of that horrible kind--a ship
dashed to pieces in deep water, at the foot of an inaccessible cliff.
Having once seen this, I perceive, also, that the image of it could not
be effaced from his mind. It taught him two great facts, which he never
afterwards forgot; namely, that both ships and sea were things that
broke to pieces. _He never afterwards painted a ship quite in fair
order._ There is invariably a feeling about his vessels of strange awe
and danger; the sails are in some way loosening, or flapping as if in
fear; the swing of the hull, majestic as it may be, seems more at the
mercy of the sea than in triumph over it; the ship never looks gay,
never proud, only warlike and enduring. The motto he chose, in the
Catalogue of the Academy, for the most cheerful marine he ever painted,
the Sun of Venice going to Sea, marked the uppermost feeling in his
mind:
"Nor heeds the Demon that in grim repose
Expects his evening prey."
I notice above the subject of his last marine picture, the Wreck-buoy,
and I am well persuaded that from that year 1818, when first he saw a
ship rent asunder, he never beheld one at sea, without, in his mind's
eye, at the same instant, seeing her skeleton.
But he had seen more than the death of the ship. He had seen the sea
feed her white flames on souls of men; and heard what a storm-gust
sounded like, that had taken up with it, in its swirl of a moment, the
last breaths of a ship's crew. He never forgot either the sight or the
sound. Among the last plates prepared by his own hand for the Liber
Studiorum, (all of them, as was likely from his advanced knowledge,
finer than any previous pieces of the series, and most of them
unfortunately never published, being retained beside him for some last
touch--forever delayed,) perhaps the most important is one of the body
of a drowned sailor, dashed against a vertical rock in the jaws of one
merciless, immeasurable wave. He repeated the same idea, though more
feebly expressed, later in life, in a small drawing of Grandville, on
the coast of France. The sailor clinging to the boat in the marvelous
drawing of Dunbar is another reminiscence of the same kind. He hardly
ever painted a steep rocky coast without some fragment of a devoured
ship, grinding in the blanched teeth of the surges,--just enough left to
be a token of utter destruction. Of his two most important paintings of
definite shipwreck I shall speak presently.
I said that at this period he first was assured of another fact,
namely, that the _Sea_ also was a thing that broke to pieces. The sea up
to that time had been generally regarded by painters as a liquidly
composed, level-seeking consistent thing, with a smooth surface, rising
to a water-mark on sides of ships; in which ships were scientifically to
be embedded, and wetted, up to said water-mark, and to remain dry above
the same. But Turner found during his Southern Coast tour that the sea
was _not_ this: that it was, on the contrary, a very incalculable and
unhorizontal thing, setting its "water mark" sometimes on the highest
heavens, as well as on sides of ships;--very breakable into pieces; half
of a wave separable from the other half, and on the instant carriageable
miles inland;--not in any wise limiting itself to a state of apparent
liquidity, but now striking like a steel gauntlet, and now becoming a
cloud, and vanishing, no eye could tell whither; one moment a flint
cave, the next a marble pillar, the next a mere white fleece thickening
the thundery rain. He never forgot those facts; never afterwards was
able to recover the idea of positive distinction between sea and sky, or
sea and land. Steel gauntlet, black rock, white cloud, and men and masts
gnashed to pieces and disappearing in a few breaths and splinters among
them;--a little blood on the rock angle, like red sea-weed, sponged away
by the next splash of the foam, and the glistering granite and green
water all pure again in vacant wrath. So stayed by him, forever, the
Image of the Sea.
One effect of this revelation of the nature of ocean to him was not a
little singular. It seemed that ever afterwards his appreciation of the
calmness of water was deepened by what he had witnessed of its frenzy,
and a certain class of entirely tame subjects were treated by him even
with increased affection after he had seen the full manifestation of
sublimity. He had always a great regard for canal boats, and instead of
sacrificing these old, and one would have thought unentertaining,
friends to the deities of Storm, he seems to have returned with a
lulling pleasure from the foam and danger of the beach to the sedgy bank
and stealthy barge of the lowland river. Thenceforward his work which
introduces shipping is divided into two classes; one embodying the
poetry of silence and calmness, the other of turbulence and wrath. Of
intermediate conditions he gives few examples; if he lets the wind down
upon the sea at all, it is nearly always violent, and though the waves
may not be running high, the foam is torn off them in a way which shows
they will soon run higher. On the other hand, nothing is so perfectly
calm as Turner's calmness. To the canal barges of England he soon added
other types of languid motion; the broad-ruddered barks of the Loire,
the drooping sails of Seine, the arcaded barks of the Italian lakes
slumbering on expanse of mountain-guarded wave, the dreamy prows of
pausing gondolas on lagoons at moon-rise; in each and all commanding an
intensity of calm, chiefly because he never admitted an instant's
rigidity. The surface of quiet water with other painters becomes FIXED.
With Turner it looks as if a fairy's breath would stir it, but the
fairy's breath is not there. So also his boats are intensely motionless,
because intensely capable of motion. No other painter ever floated a
boat quite rightly; all other boats stand on the water, or are fastened
in it; only his _float_ in it. It is very difficult to trace the reasons
of this, for the rightness of the placing on the water depends on such
subtle curves and shadows in the floating object and its reflection,
that in most cases the question of entirely right or entirely wrong
resolves itself into the "estimation of an hair": and what makes the
matter more difficult still, is, that sometimes we may see a boat drawn
with the most studied correctness in every part, which yet will not
swim; and sometimes we may find one drawn with many easily ascertainable
errors, which yet swims well enough; so that the drawing of boats is
something like the building of them, one may set off their lines by the
most authentic rules, and yet never be sure they will sail well. It is,
however, to be observed that Turner seemed, in those southern coast
storms, to have been somewhat too strongly impressed by the
disappearance of smaller crafts in surf, and was wont afterwards to give
an uncomfortable aspect even to his gentlest seas, by burying his boats
too deeply. When he erred, in this or other matters, it was not from
want of pains, for of all accessories to landscape, ships were
throughout his life those which he studied with the greatest care. His
figures, whatever their merit or demerit, are certainly never the
beloved part of his work; and though the architecture was in his early
drawings careful, and continued to be so down to the Hakewell's Italy
series, it soon became mannered and false whenever it was principal. He
would indeed draw a ruined tower, or a distant town, incomparably better
than any one else, and a staircase or a bit of balustrade very
carefully; but his temples and cathedrals showed great ignorance of
detail, and want of understanding of their character. But I am aware of
no painting from the beginning of his life to its close, containing
_modern_ shipping as its principal subject, in which he did not put
forth his full strength, and pour out his knowledge of detail with a joy
which renders those works, as a series, among the most valuable he ever
produced. Take for instance:
1. Lord Yarborough's Shipwreck.
2. The Trafalgar, at Greenwich Hospital.
3. The Trafalgar, in his own gallery.
4. The Pas de Calais.
5. The Large Cologne.
6. The Havre.
7. The Old Téméraire.
I know no fourteen pictures by Turner for which these seven might be
wisely changed; and in all of these the shipping is thoroughly
principal, and studied from existing ships. A large number of inferior
works were, however, also produced by him in imitation of Vandevelde,
representing old Dutch shipping; in these the shipping is scattered,
scudding and distant, the sea gray and lightly broken. Such pictures
are, generally speaking, among those of least value which he has
produced. Two very important ones, however, belong to the imitative
school: Lord Ellesmere's, founded on Vandevelde; and the Dort, at
Farnley, on Cuyp. The latter, as founded on the better master, is the
better picture, but still possesses few of the true Turner qualities,
except his peculiar calmness, in which respect it is unrivaled; and if
joined with Lord Yarborough's Shipwreck, the two may be considered as
the principal symbols, in Turner's early oil paintings, of his two
strengths in Terror and Repose. Among his drawings, shipping, as the
principal subject, does not always constitute a work of the first class;
nor does it so often occur. For the difficulty, in a drawing, of getting
good color is so much less, and that of getting good form so much
greater, than in oil, that Turner naturally threw his elaborate studies
of ship form into oil, and made his noblest work in drawing rich in hues
of landscape. Yet the Cowes, Devonport, and Gosport, from the England
and Wales (the Saltash is an inferior work), united with two drawings of
this series, Portsmouth and Sheerness, and two from Farnley, one of the
wreck of an Indiaman, and the other of a ship of the line taking stores,
would form a series, not indeed as attractive at first sight as many
others, but embracing perhaps more of Turner's peculiar, unexampled, and
unapproachable gifts than any other group of drawings which could be
selected, the choice being confined to one class of subject.
I have only to state, in conclusion, that these twelve drawings of the
Harbors of England are more representable by engraving than most of his
works. Few parts of them are brilliant in color; they were executed
chiefly in brown and blue, and with more direct reference to the future
engraving than was common with Turner. They are also small in size,
generally of the exact dimensions of the plate, and therefore the lines
of the compositions are not spoiled by contraction; while finally, the
touch of the painter's hand upon the wave-surface is far better imitated
by mezzotint engraving than by any of the ordinary expedients of line.
Take them all in all, they form the most valuable series of marine
studies which have as yet been published from his works; and I hope
that they may be of some use hereafter in recalling the ordinary aspect
of our English seas, at the exact period when the nation had done its
utmost in the wooden and woven strength of ships, and had most perfectly
fulfilled the old and noble prophecy--
"They shall ride
Over ocean wide,
With hempen bridle, and horse of tree."
_Thomas of Ercildoune._