Chapter VII: The Splendour of Success, or ‘what You Will’--1813-1830 (2)

As with the Heysham sketch, so with the Hornby.[28] I need perhaps hardly call attention to the deliberate heightening of Hornby Castle, and to the way the back of the nearer hill in front of it has been humped in the finished design. This deliberate falsification (as it must seem to the literalist) is paralleled by the treatment of the foreground tree, whose individuality is destroyed, and whose place is taken by a mere alien grown in the fertile climate of the artist’s imagination. I have no doubt that if Turner could have got the same effect without making these alterations he would not have made them. But it is obvious that he could not. From his point of view such alterations are merely grammatical devices by which he throws the required emphasis on qualities which hills and trees do undeniably possess, but which were somewhat slurred over in nature’s momentary presentment of the case. And if we think about the matter calmly, we see that we cannot expect any object to enter into new relations without undergoing some kind of modification; I mean that we cannot expect physical facts to be taken up into the intelligible world and used as factors in the expression of ideas and emotions without requiring some kind of modification.

While Turner was producing these exquisite drawings for Whitaker’s _History of Richmondshire_, he also executed a series of ten or eleven slightly smaller drawings to illustrate Sir Walter Scott’s _Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland_. Eight of these drawings were presented by the publishers to Scott, who had them framed from an oak felled on the Abbotsford estate during Turner’s visit there in 1818. The effect of this frame on the drawings, it must be confessed, is atrocious. It might be guaranteed to kill the effect of any water-colour drawings but the radiantly immortal ones for which it was made. No doubt even these would look better out of it, but such as it is it hung in the breakfast-room at Abbotsford till after Scott’s death, and as it then hung, so it hangs now in Mr. Thomas Brocklebank’s hospitable mansion at Heswall, Chester.

When we draw the curtain, which has kept Turner’s beautiful

DINBURGH, FROM CALTON HILL

PENCIL. 1818]

ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN SCOTT’S “PROVINCIAL ANTIQUITIES OF SCOTLAND,” 1 NOVEMBER, 1820]

EDINBURGH FROM CALTON HILL

PENCIL. 1818]

PENCIL. 1818]

BORTHWICK CASTLE

PENCIL. 1818]

ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN SCOTT’S “PROVINCIAL ANTIQUITIES OF SCOTLAND,” 2 APRIL, 1819]

work as fresh as when it was first executed, and look at these drawings, it is difficult to single out any one of them for special attention. But after looking through the engravings made from them in Scott’s book, the marvellous view of ‘Edinburgh from the Calton Hill’ leaves perhaps the most powerful impression on the imagination. I have, therefore, selected the drawing made from nature upon which this design was based as the subject of one of our illustrations (Plate LX.).

In this case we find that Turner has followed his sketch with great care, yet the whole material has been hammered this way and that by his powerful hand. We can see that the artist felt impatient with nature’s calm and unhurried chronicle of facts, and was determined at all costs to make a more immediate and concentrated attack on the spectator’s powers of perception. Instead of stretching out calmly and indifferently on both hands, as in the sketch, the city in the finished design seems to soar upwards from the depths beneath our feet. The jail on our left has been squeezed together, making the line from the porch to the central turret much more oblique than it was. The perspective of nearly all the buildings has been modified, yet the artist has taken great care to preserve the character of the silhouettes of the leading planes. But it is in the invention of the play of light which animates the whole, and throws into such strong relief all the telling points of the design, that we find the clearest evidence of the artist’s active intervention.

A curious instance of Turner’s habit of using his notes rather as hints to his imagination than as providing ready-made material waiting for immediate incorporation, is afforded by the sketches of some figures made while he was standing on the Calton Hill. On the back of one of the pages on which our view of Edinburgh is drawn, there is a rough sketch of the brow of the hill with groups of figures on it. Among these figures are three girls attending to the drying of the clothes they have washed. One of these is standing shaking out a cloth in the wind. But though Turner has introduced this incident into the foreground of his picture, the figure there is not a repetition of the graceful figure in the sketch. In the picture the action has been changed, and the figure presented in a different point of view. It is designed altogether afresh. In the same way none of the other figures is repeated in the finished drawing. The figures in the drawing are indeed the same sort of people as in the sketch, but each is designed specially for its place, and with reference to the movement of the whole picture. All this is eminently characteristic of the cast of Turner’s mind, which seems to store scenes and incidents in complete independence of their momentary and particular appearance; he is thus able to set these invisible essences in motion before his mind’s eye, and to wait till they arrange themselves to his complete satisfaction, and he has then no difficulty in clothing them with the attributes of time and space.

We will turn now to a sketch of a different kind. In the ‘Edinburgh,’ ‘Heysham’ and ‘Hornby’ sketches, as in most of those we have examined, we have seen Turner making a note of what we may call the chief items of the topographical data, leaving the problem of their arrangement, modification and amplification for future solution. In the two sketches of Rochester (Plates LXII. (_a_) and (_b_)) which I have had reproduced, we see the artist’s mind moving on a different track. A few pages earlier in the sketch-book from which these two leaves are taken, he has indeed made his usual record of the facts about the church, bridge, etc., at Rochester, but apparently, as time did not press, he remained in his boat watching the scene and criticising, as one who understood such things, nature’s own methods of design. His sketches now become not topographical records but swift and eloquent designs for pictures. The concrete particularity of the castle, church, bridge, etc., becomes abrogated or submerged. These objects are now taken up into a new kind of systematic unity, in which their relationship to the whole and to each other is of much more importance than their discrete individuality. Now, the important point is just how the Castle and the other topographical items drop into place with regard to the shipping on the river,--the kind of groups they all make, the way the one item affects the other, half hiding it or setting it off to advantage. In the sketch on page 18 of the sketch-book (Plate LXII. (_a_)) the exact position of the mast of the foreground vessel is the dominant factor,--the way it unites the lines described by the silhouette of the castle and the trees sloping down to the bridge, bringing the

ROCHESTER

PENCIL. ABOUT 1821]

PENCIL. ABOUT 1821]

ROCHESTER. ON THE RIVER MEDWAY

WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1822]

curves to a focus, as it were, and providing a rigid base for them to spring from again. In the other sketch (Plate LXII. (_b_)) Turner is trying a different arrangement of the material, or, to put it more accurately, nature is trying another effect, and Turner is watching and making notes of the experiment.

In this way, before Turner shut up his book he had made over a dozen skeleton designs, which he had only to clothe in colour and light and shade to develop into beautiful pictures. But when he got home and actually set to work to make the drawing of Rochester for the _Rivers of England_ series, he deliberately ignored every one of nature’s pregnant suggestions, and began to build up his own design in his own way. Perhaps he thought nature’s designs wanted more space than he had at his command in a plate that was to be only a few inches square; perhaps it was the sheer delight in the exercise of his creative powers that was the main motive force, for though his sketch-books teem with designs caught in this way on the wing, yet he never once, so far as I can discover, adopted one of them in his own pictures, without so modifying and recasting it as to make it into a quite new and independent construction.

I am not at all sure of the exact date when the sketch of Bolton Abbey (Plate LXIV.) was made. It is the sketch upon which the water-colour engraved in the _England and Wales_ series was based. The engraving was published in 1827, so the water-colour must have been made a year or two earlier, but as the sketch occurs in a book which contains a number of the _Devonshire Rivers_ subjects, it probably belongs to about the time of Turner’s second visit to Devonshire. This visit took place in either 1812 or 1813, and the Wharfedale sketches, of which the ‘Bolton’ is one, cannot have been later than 1815. So it is probable that at least ten years elapsed between the making of the sketch and the water-colour drawing in which the sketch was elaborated.

The drawing itself is one of the most universally admired of all the _England and Wales_ subjects. Mr. Ruskin alludes to it again and again in the various volumes of _Modern Painters_. In the fourth volume (chapter xvi.) he gives an admirable analysis of the imaginative conception, and in volume three (chapter ix.) he dwells with his usual eloquence on the knowledge displayed in the treatment of the foreground trees. With the general tenor of these remarks I am in entire agreement, and if the passages were not so long I should like to introduce them here, but unless the reader is very careful, I am inclined to think that Mr. Ruskin’s constant appeal to ‘the facts’ is likely to mislead him into the belief that all the details of the design, and especially those of the foreground trees, are elaborately studied and accurately reproduced from the actual scene. Turner’s sketch proves that this was not the case. Each individual tree, every curve in its trunk, the texture of its bark, the stains and hollows and flickering lights and shadows upon it, and the intricate play of the trees’ upper branches, all these have been, not painstakingly studied from nature, but invented by the artist in his studio, and each detail has been invented not entirely for its own sake, but as a note, a chord, in the whole complex of visible harmony.

I do not think any more wonderful example could be given of the intense activity of creative genius than that which is furnished by a careful comparison of this drawing with the sketch upon which it was based. We look at the sketch, and all the subject seems there; as a synopsis of the finished picture it seems tolerably complete. Yet in the drawing we find almost every detail has been altered. Notice the way the foreground trees have been pushed nearer to each other. In the sketch one has to search for the abbey, and then one’s eyes begin to wander about aimlessly. But in the drawing everything is brought into connection with everything else; it is all welded together. The abbey is the first thing one sees, then the eye goes easily and inevitably to the second couple of foreground trees, the seated angler and the distant river-bank. In passing from one object to the other the eye feels something of the same kind of pleasure that the ear takes in the rhythm of verse, so that one’s gaze travels over the drawing not vagrantly and with effort, but gladly, and to the spectator all this visible melody and delight seem like the unconscious expression of the secret joy with which the artist’s mind played round the scene, an echo of the mysterious music of his happy memories.

The effect of the ‘Bolton’ drawing is that of a bright summer’s

BOLTON ABBEY

PENCIL. ABOUT 1815]

BOLTON ABBEY

ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN “PICTURESQUE VIEWS IN ENGLAND AND WALES,” 1827]

COLCHESTER

PENCIL. ABOUT 1824]

PENCIL. ABOUT 1824]

COLCHESTER, ESSEX

ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN “PICTURESQUE VIEWS IN ENGLAND AND WALES,” 1827]

afternoon, an effect that does not change very rapidly; the slightness of Turner’s sketch was not, therefore, a necessary outcome of the transitory nature of his subject-matter. Had he been so minded he could easily have painted the whole subject out-of-doors. But with the ‘Colchester’ drawing, another of the _England and Wales_ subjects, published about the same time as the ‘Bolton,’ the case was different. There the effect is a momentary one. It is evening, the shades of twilight have gathered, and the sun is on the point of disappearing. There was only time for a few hasty memoranda; but while the modern artist would almost invariably make his memoranda in colour, Turner is quite satisfied with his usual hurried pencil notes. In the sketches here reproduced (Plate LXVI.) we have a kind of abstract of the whole scene. There is the miller’s house beside the river at the foot of the hill, while the hill is crowned by a row of trees through which the abbey building and the roofs of the distant town can be seen. The position of the sun and of its reflection in the river are marked.

The general idea of the whole is certainly there in the sketches, but in a rudimentary or indeterminate condition. Note how deliberately vague and undefined the idea of the trees on the brow of the hill has been kept. A distant abbey-building set in the delicate tracery of gracefully branching trees, the whole framed in masses of feathery foliage, that was the general idea of this part of the design, and Turner knew that he was familiar enough with the nature and ways of trees to be able to carry out this idea with all the requisite wealth of detail whenever he should set himself seriously to the task. The exact shapes of the trees actually growing there on the hillside on the day and at the moment when he made this sketch were, apart from their general idea, a matter of indifference to him. If he had cared very much about them he could easily have gone there the next morning and drawn them carefully; they would hardly have altered much in the night. But these shapes would have surely wanted revision, alteration and suppression, before they could have taken their places as a perfectly articulated limb in Turner’s living, organic design. The result could not have been more satisfactory than the one reached without this labour.

As with the row of trees, so with the miller’s house, the cottages creeping up the hillside and the distant town. The pencil hieroglyphs are enough to suggest the general idea of these objects, their appropriate particularities will unroll themselves from the stored treasures of Turner’s mind so soon as he takes his pencil in hand again to carry forward his work; not the actual details of the cottages, etc., existing down there in Essex, but the details appropriate to the picture as an expression of an emotional experience.

The drawings in the _England and Wales_ series produced in this way, in which a definite particular experience of the artist is enshrined as it were in a wealth of appropriate and beautifully arranged shapes and colours, are among the best of the series. But the pressure of professional engagements did not always permit the artist to wait for this kind of inspiration. On such occasions he appears to have fallen back on the material stored in his early sketch-books, and his rhetorical mastery of the elements of design was taxed to the uttermost to provide it with suitable clothing and ornament. An excellent example of this kind of work is provided by the drawing of Stamford, published in 1830. This was founded on one of the sketches made during Turner’s first tour in the North of England, in 1797. This sketch (Plate LXVIII.) is no doubt a fairly accurate record of the place, its humdrum streets and houses, with its three triumphant bursts of idealism in the shape of its three unimaginative church towers.

In taking up this sketch thirty years after it was made, Turner seems to have asked himself, ‘What am I to do to make this dull affair into something universally interesting?’ that is to say, into something interesting and even amusing to those who care nothing for Stamford merely for its own sake. Of course the first thing for him to do was obviously to seize upon the three towers and make the most of them, setting them up against a gorgeous sky filled with rain and thunder and the darting rays of the thwarted sun, which, however, must so far triumph in its contest as to flood the towers with its light and transfigure them with its splendour. The street below remains dull and untractable, but yet something may be made of it. We can gain one point by insisting on the smallness and homeliness of the houses, intensifying their

STAMFORD, LINCOLNSHIRE

PENCIL. 1797]

STAMFORD, LINCOLNSHIRE

ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN “PICTURESQUE VIEWS IN ENGLAND AND WALES,” 1830]

TYNEMOUTH PRIORY

PENCIL, WITH PART IN WATER COLOUR. 1797.]

ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN “PICTURESQUE VIEWS IN ENGLAND AND WALES,” 1831]

unimaginative character into something approaching the grotesque. Better the actively ugly, for that at least makes our dullest and largest church tower look almost beautiful by contrast, than the passively commonplace. And then, lest our modest efforts remain of small avail, we invent a couple of quaint old travellers hurrying across the road to their inn, accompanied by the barks and gambols of a lively little white dog; by good luck and our own skilful management they come just in front of our dull row of houses, so that what with one thing and another we find our eyes and thoughts very pleasantly diverted. As for the houses on the left we can shut off a great part of them by simply drawing up a lumbering stage-coach on that side of the road and heaping it with ample females in swelling draperies, with burgeoning umbrellas and bounteous baggage. And having got so far, we can now see exactly what it is we want to make our foreground and distance more immediately effective. In the sketch there is a hint that the road dips just a trifle down from the foreground to the church; we increase this slight inequality till we get a dip of something like forty or fifty feet between us and the church, a drop that gives uncommon height and dignity to our humble towers. And now, having got our street laid out to our liking, we want to make the most of its possibilities, so we set another stage-coach down at the foot of our little hill, load it with passengers impatient to be out of their wet clothes, and give it a couple of rearing, prancing, steaming horses to gallop it in hot haste up the declivity, so that now, as we look at the engraving, we can almost hear the ring of the horses’ hooves on the stones and feel the rush of wind made by the coach as it dashes past us; all this merely by way of amplifying the artist’s statement about his imaginary hill, and to drive the idea of his well-invented fiction home into the consciousness of even the dullest of his audience.

The ‘Tynemouth’ design, published in 1831, is on a higher plane of imaginative creation than the ‘Stamford’ subject, yet it was built up in just the same way from a sketch made at the same time on another leaf of the same sketch-book. The ‘Stamford’ design shows Turner struggling valiantly against the absence of any very pressing inspiration, and emerging with credit from the ordeal; the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing, on the other hand, shows that his youthful and thirty-year old topographical sketch had served to set his imagination aflame with all the urgency of a recent personal experience. The vision conjured up by what I can only call the potential or possible associations of a rocky coast had so much completeness, so much innate driving force, that Turner had no need to resort to the purely external and arbitrary tricks of composition which had proved such valuable auxiliaries in the ‘Stamford’ drawing. In the case of the ‘Stamford’ subject, we might almost say that the pictorial equivalent of the rhyme and metre had suggested the sense; in the case of the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing the idea itself is so vivid that it creates its own lilt and harmony.

In looking through a number of Turner’s drawings the hasty observer--especially should he be a professional student eager to pick up useful knowledge--is inclined to jump to the conclusion that the important thing about rocks and mountains is to be high, and that when the height of the most prominent buildings, especially if they happen to be in ruins, has been increased three or fourfold, all the duties of the imaginative designer have been attended to. In the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing we see how free Turner is from the constraint of any such ready-made and purely external rules of design. He has here deliberately lowered the apparent height of his buildings and cliffs, and, if we examine the matter carefully, we see that he has done this not at the dictates of a passing whim or fancy, but because the heart of the matter--the so-called ‘subject,’ that vague, intangible, elusive something which seems to sit in the centre of the dynamical idea and pump blood and life into every outlying portion of the organism, and tyrannises so beneficently over the structure and function of each part of the design--because this heart of the matter would clearly have it so.

In the sketch we have an item of brute fact waiting, as it were, pathetically to be taken up into the world of thought and feeling, asking, so to speak, to be made significant and human. The artist has granted the request in his finished design by making the physical facts the mere passive spectators of man’s sorrow and suffering. In the sketch, the tall cliffs and ruined walls of the priory tower above the small fishing-boat struggling into port; in the picture, the tall masts of the wrecked schooner dwarf the priory and the cliffs and drive them into subordination. The real centre of interest is the active, restless power of the sea for ill. The baneful little leaps of the waves that fill nearly all the lower part of the design tell their story of storm and wreck plainly enough. The wrecked barques under the cliffs are in a sad plight, but the pieces of floating mast and broken plank in the foreground tell of worse things. On the shore we have the thrifty gatherers of flotsam and jetsam, and a crowd of willing helpers. On all this moving scene the wreck of the priory looks down not without sympathy; it too, it seems to say, is a part of man’s activity and ambition, it suffers also from the taint of mortality and from the merciless power of the wind and rain.