RUSKIN AGAINST THE PHILISTINES

In England, meantime, great things were being accomplished amid peaceful surroundings. In portraiture Lawrence soon became supreme, and what excellence he possessed was accentuated on his death in 1830 by the appointment of Sir Martin Archer Shee as his successor in the Presidency of the Royal Academy. That was the end of portraiture in England until a new school arose. But it was in landscape that our country occupied the field in the first half of the nineteenth century, and tilled it with the astonishing results that are usually the effect of doing much and saying little. The work accomplished by Turner, Constable, and Cotman, in the first half of the century, to say nothing of Crome and one or two of the older men who were still alive, has never been equalled in any country, and yet less was heard about the execution of it than would keep a modern journalist in bread and cheese for a week. Turner, who wouldn't sell his pictures, and Constable, who couldn't, between them filled up the measure of English art without any other aid than that of the materials with which they recorded their gorgeous communion with nature. When Ruskin stepped in with the "Modern Painters," originally designed as a vindication of Turner against certain later-day critics, Turner's comment was, "He knows a great deal more about my pictures than I do. He puts things into my head and points out meanings in them that I never intended." That was in 1843, when Turner was well on in his third manner—within eight years of his death. But let us go back to the beginning.

Until he developed his latest manner, Turner was about the most popular artist that ever lived. His pictures were not above the comprehension of the public, educated or otherwise, and no effort was either needed or demanded to understand them. In the diary of a provincial amateur, Thomas Greene, are recorded an impression of Turner's work as early as 1797:—"Visited the Royal Exhibition. Particularly struck with a sea-view by Turner ...the whole composition bold in design and masterly in execution. I am entirely unacquainted with the artist, but if he proceeds as he has begun, he cannot fail to become the first in his department." And again in 1799:—"Was again struck and delighted with Turner's landscapes.... Turner's views are not mere ordinary transcripts of nature,—he always throws some peculiar and striking character into the scene he represents."

Brought up as a topographical draughtsman, he made no departure till quite late in life from the conventional method of depicting scenery; but being a supremely gifted artist, he was capable of utilising this method as no other before or since has ever succeeded in doing. The accepted method was good enough for him, and he laid his paint upon the canvas as anybody else had done before him, and as many of our present-day painters would do well to do after him—if only they had the genius in them to "make the instrument speak." The impressions created on our mind by Turner's earlier pictures are not conveyed by dots, cubes, streaks, or any device save that of pigment laid upon the canvas in such a manner as seemed to the artist to reproduce what he saw in nature. That he did this with surprising and altogether exceptional skill is the proof of his genius. Unflagging energy and devotion to his art enabled him to realise, not all, but a wonderful number of the beauties he saw in the world, with an experience that few beside him have ever taken the trouble to acquire. When barely thirty years old—in 1805—he was already considered as the first of living landscape painters, and was thus noticed by Edward Dayes (the teacher of Girtin):—"Turner may be considered as a striking instance of how much may be gained by industry, if accompanied with perseverance, even without the assistance of a master. The way he acquired his professional powers was by borrowing when he could a drawing or picture to copy; or by making a sketch of any one in the exhibition early in the morning and finishing it up at home. By such practice, and a patient perseverance, he has overcome all the difficulties of the art." Turner himself used to say that his best academy was "the fields and Dr Monro's parlour"—where Girtin and other young artists met and sketched and copied the drawings in the doctor's collection. Burnet, in his notice of "Turner and his Works," suggests that John Robert Cozens had paved the way for both Girtin and Turner in striking out a broad effect of light and shade. "The early pictures of Turner," he observes, "possess the breadth, but are destitute of the brilliant power of light and colour afterwards pervading his works, and ultimately carried to the greatest extreme in his last pictures. Breadth of light seems to have been latterly his chief aim, supported by the contrast of hot and cold colour; two of his unfinished pictures exemplified the principle; they were divided into large masses of blue where the water or sky was to come and the other portions laid out in broad orange yellow, falling into delicate brown where the trees and landscapes were to be placed. This preparation, while it secured the greatest breadth, would have shone through the other colours when finished, giving the luminous quality observable in his pictures. In many instances his works sent for exhibition to the British Institution had little more than this brilliant foundation, which was worked into detail and completed in the varnishing days, Turner being the first in the morning and the last to leave; his certainty in the command over his colour, and the dexterity in his handling, seemed to convert in a few hours 'an unsubstantial pageant' into a finished landscape. These ad captandum effects, however, are not what his fame will depend on for perpetuity; his finest pictures are the production of great study in their composition, careful and repeated painting in the detail, and a natural arrangement of the colour and breadth of the chiaroscuro."

PLATE XLVII.—J. M. W. TURNER
CROSSING THE BROOK
National Gallery of British Art, London

Whether or not we agree with all of Burnet's opinions, we shall be more likely to learn the truth about Turner from prosaic contemporaries of his earlier years than from all the rhapsodies of later days. How significant, when stripped of its amusing circumstances, is the simple fact related thus by Leslie:—"In 1839, when Constable exhibited his Opening of Waterloo Bridge, it was placed in one of the small rooms next to a sea-piece by Turner—a grey picture, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it. Constable's picture seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times while he was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind him looking from the Waterloo Bridge to his own picture, and at last brought his palette from the great room where he was touching another picture, and putting a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, went away without saying a word. The intensity of this red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. I came into the room just after Turner had left it. "He has been here," said Constable, "and fired a gun." On the opposite wall was a picture by Jones of Shadrach Meshach and Abednego in the Furnace. "A coal," said Cooper, "has bounced across the room from Jones's picture and set fire to Turner's sea." Turner did not come in again for a day and a half, and then in the last moment allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy."

It was in 1835, after an unbroken popular triumph lasting over thirty years, that the critics openly rounded on him. The occasion seized by Blackwood's Magazine was the exhibition of his first Venetian picture exhibited in that year—it is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. "What is Venice in this picture?" wrote Blackwood's critic. "A flimsy, whitewashed, meagre assemblage of architecture, starting off ghost-like into unnatural perspective, as if frightened at the affected blaze of some dogger vessels (the only attempt at richness in the picture). The greater part of the picture is white, disagreeable white, without light or transparency, and the boats with their red worsted masts are as gewgaw as a child's toy which he may have cracked to see what it is made of. As to Venice, nothing can be more unlike its character."

Ruskin was then only sixteen years old, but eight years later appeared in print the first volume of "Modern Painters," "by an undergraduate of Oxford," as the result of his growing indignation at this and subsequent attacks on Turner. Without following Ruskin into the dubious regions whither the pursuit of his romantic fancies ultimately led him, we may in fairness quote the opening sentence of his second chapter, "Of Truth of Colour," which will help us, moreover, in understanding the conditions under which painting was being conducted at this period. "There is nothing so high in art," he says, "but that a scurrile jest can reach at, and often the greater the work the easier it is to turn it into ridicule. To appreciate the science of Turner's colour would require the study of a life; but to laugh at it requires little more than the knowledge that the yolk of egg is yellow and spinage green; a fund of critical information on which the remarks of most of our leading periodicals have been of late years exclusively based. We shall, however, in spite of the sulphur and treacle criticisms of our Scotch connoisseurs, and the eggs and spinage of our English ones, endeavour to test the works of this great colourist by a knowledge of nature somewhat more extensive than is to be gained by an acquaintance, however formed, with the apothecary's shop or the dinner table."

So much for the critics. For the artist, if Ruskin said more than Turner himself could understand, he has summed up his achievement in a few passages which may possibly outlast the works themselves. "There has been marked and constant progress in his mind; he has not, like some few artists, been without childhood; his course of study has been as evidently as it has been swiftly progressive; and in different stages of the struggle, sometimes one order of truth, sometimes another, has been aimed at or omitted. But from the beginning to the present height of his career he has never sacrificed a greater truth to a less. As he advanced, the previous knowledge or attainment was absorbed in what succeeded, or abandoned only if incompatible, and never abandoned without a gain: and his present works present the sum and perfection of his accumulated knowledge, delivered with the impatience and passion of one who feels too much, and has too little time to say it in, to pause for expression or ponder over his syllables." And again of his latest works—"There is in them the obscurity, but the truth, of prophecy; the instinctive and burning language, which would express less if it uttered more; which is indistinct only by its fulness, and dark with its abundant meaning. He feels now, with long-trained vividness and keenness of sense, too bitterly, the impotence of the hand and the vainness of the colour to catch one shadow or one image of the glory which God has revealed to him. He has dwelt and communed with Nature all the days of his life: he knows her now too well, he cannot falter over the material littlenesses of her outward form: he must give her soul, or he has done nothing, and he cannot do this with the flax, the earth, and the oil. 'I cannot gather the beams out of the east, or I would make them tell you what I have seen; but read this, and interpret this, and let us remember together. I cannot gather the gloom out of the night sky, or I would make that teach you what I have seen; but read this, interpret this, and let us feel together. And if you have not that within you which I can summon to my aid, if you have not the sun in your spirit, and the passion in your heart, which my words may awaken, though they be indistinct and swift, leave me; for I will give you no patient mockery, no laborious insult of that glorious Nature, whose I am and whom I serve. Let other servants imitate the voice and the gesture of their master, while they forget his message. Hear that message from me; but remember that the teaching of Divine truth must still be a mystery.'"

Within a very few years Ruskin was performing a more useful service for the English School of painting than that of gilding the fine gold of its greatest genius. Whether or not he was aware of the fact, young Holman Hunt had borrowed a copy of "Modern Painters," which, he says, entirely changed his opinions as to the views held by society at large concerning art, and in 1849 there were exhibited Hunt's Rienzi, Rossetti's Girlhood of Mary Virgin, and Millais' Lorenzo and Isabella, each inscribed with the mystic letters "P.R.B.," meaning "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." It is interesting to note that this alliance was formed when the three young artists were looking over a book of engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa.

In the following year Hunt exhibited the British Family, Millais, The Carpenter's Shop, and Rossetti the Ecce Ancilla Domini, and in 1851 were Hunt's Two Gentlemen of Verona and three by Millais. The fury of the critics had now reached a point at which some notice had to be taken of it—as of a man in an apopleptic fit. That of the Times in particular:—"These young artists have unfortunately become notorious by addicting themselves to an antiquated style, false perspective, and crude colour of remote antiquity. We want not to see what Fuseli termed drapery "snapped instead of folded," faces bloated into apoplexy, or extenuated into skeletons; colour borrowed from the jars in a druggist's shop, and expression forced into caricature. That morbid infatuation which sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity deserves no quarter at the hands of the public." It was in disapproval of the tone of this outburst that the author of "Modern Painters" addressed his famous and useful letter to the Times, vindicating the artists, and following it up with another in which he wishes them all "heartily good speed, believing in sincerity that if they temper the courage and energy which they have shown in the adoption of their systems with patience and discretion in framing it, and if they do not suffer themselves to be driven by harsh and careless criticism into rejection of the ordinary means of obtaining influence over the minds of others, they may, as they gain experience, lay in our England the foundation of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for three hundred years."

If any one of this strenuous young band had been a painter of the first rank, this prediction might have been abundantly verified. But it must be owned that none of them was. Holman Hunt came nearest to being, and Millais probably thought he was, when he had abandoned his early principles and shaped for the Presidency of the Academy. Rossetti had more genius in him than the others, but it came out in poetry as well as in painting, and perhaps in more lasting form. As it was, the effects of the revolution were widespread and entirely beneficial; but those effects must not be looked for in the works of any one particular artist, but rather in the general aspect of English art in the succeeding half century, and perhaps to-day. It broke up the soil. The flowers that came up were neither rare nor great, but they were many, varied, and pleasing, and in every respect an improvement on the evergreens and hardy annuals with which the English garden had become more and more encumbered from want of intelligent cultivation. More than this, the freedom engendered of revolt had now encouraged the young artist to feel that he was no longer bound to paint in any particular fashion. People's eyes were opened to possibilities as well as to actualities; and though they were prone to close again under the soporific influence of what was regular and conventional, they were capable of opening again, perhaps with a start, but without the necessity for a surgical operation. In 1847, for example, George Frederick Watts had offered to adorn, free of charge, the booking-hall of Euston Station, and had been refused—Watts, by the by, was quite independent of the Pre-Raphaelites—whereas in 1860 the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn accepted his School of Legislature, and in 1867 he was elected an academician.

Two somewhat remarkable effects of the movement are attributed to it by Mr Edmund Gosse (in a note on the work of Alfred Hunt, written in 1884), which are probably typical of many more. The Liverpool Academy, founded in 1810, had an annual grant of £200 from the Corporation. In 1857 it gave a prize to Millais' Blind Girl in preference to the most popular picture of the year (Abraham Solomon's Waiting for the Verdict), and so great was the public indignation that pressure was brought to bear on the Corporation, the grant was withdrawn, and the Academy ruined.

In the other instance we may not go the whole way with Mr Gosse, when in speaking of the Pre-Raphaelite principle he says that "the school of Turnerian landscape was fatally affected by them," or that all the landscape painters, except Alfred Hunt, "accepted the veto which the Pre-Raphaelites had tacitly laid upon composition or a striving after an artificial harmony of forms in landscape." But to a certain extent their influence undoubtedly was prejudicial in that respect. In suggesting another reason for the cessation of Turner s influence he is quite as near the mark, namely, the action of the Royal Academy in admitting no landscape painters to membership. At Turner's death in 1851 there were only three, among whom was Creswick. "This popular artist," says Mr Gosse, "was the Upas tree under whose shadow the Academical patronage of landscape died in England. From his election as an associate in 1842 to that of Vicat Cole in 1869, no landscape painter entered the doors of the Royal Academy." Of this august body we shall have something to say later on.