artist. Hence all resemblances to sunshine must be obtained by sacrifice. "De Hooch, Cuyp, Claude, Both, Richard Wilson, and all other masters of sunshine, invariably reach their most telling effects by harmonies of gold with gray, giving up the blues, rubies, and freshest greens. Turner Idid the same in his earlier work. But in his later work he reached magnificent effects of sunshine colour." Indeed he alone has painted nature in her true colours, but his effects seem unnatural because he cannot contrast these colours duly with the sky: on the summit of the slope of light nature evades him. This limitation in the capacities of painting is the first reason for Turner's unnaturalness. The second is to be found in the very functions of painting. A picture cannot be as much as a window; but it ought not to be a mere window, even if it could. It is to be, not a transcript, but a work of art-the representation of a scene not as any one might see it, but as the artist himself saw it. A fellow-artist once complained to Turner that, after going to Domodossola, to find the site of a particular view which had struck him several years before, he had entirely failed in doing so: "it looked different when he went back again." "What," replied Turner, "do you not know yet, at your age, that you ought to paint your impressions ?" The faculty of receiving such impressions strongly and reproducing them vividly is precisely what distinguishes the poet-whether in language or painting. The function of an artist is to "receive a strong impression from a scene and then set himself as far as possible to reproduce that impression on the mind of the spectator of his picture." His aim is to "give the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts, and to reach a representation which, though it may be totally useless to engineers or geographers, and, when tried by rule and measure, totally unlike the place, shall yet be capable of producing on the far away beholder's and, unhindered by either flattery or criticism, slowly but surely continued in his course towards the attainment of his purpose. At the time when others said of his work, That is perfection!' he was saying of himself, 'I have just done with leading strings, and am beginning to walk alone.'

mind precisely the impression which the reality would have produced." 1 Turner is in this sense the greatest of all imaginative landscape painters. First because, as we have already seen, his insight into the truth and beauty of nature was greater than other men's. Secondly, because of his prodigious memory. "It was thought that he painted chiefly from imagination, when his peculiar character, as distinguished from all other artists, was in always drawing from memories of seen facts." Every one who came across him on his sketching tours was struck alike by his conscientiousness in observing phenomena, and by his power of recalling them. He would generally take only the roughest notes of scenes or effects, often mere pencil memoranda, many thousands of which, similar to those exhibited in the Water-colour Rooms, were found in his portfolios and sketch-books after his death. But "there is not one change in the casting of the jagged shadow along the hollows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind for ever; not a flake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud about their bases, but he has watched it as it melts away, and could recall it to its lost place in heaven by the slightest effort of his thoughts."

But there is a further element of greatness in Turner's pictures. He not only saw nature in its truth and beauty, but he saw it in relation and subjection to the human soul. This is what makes his works so picturesque, the essence of which is a sublimity not inherent in the thing depicted, but caused by something external to it, especially by the expression of suffering, pathos, or decay. It is the depth and breadth of his sympathy with the spirit of the things he depicted that make Turner's landscapes so great. though wide in range, this sympathy was uniform in

1 The distinction between the prosaic and poetic treatment of landscape in literature may be perceived in a moment by comparing Wordsworth's "The Thorn," in which he sinks to such land-surveying as

I've measured it from side to side,

"Tis three feet long and two feet wide

with the magnificently imaginative description of the yew trees, "The Fraternal Four " of Borrowdale, to which he rises in the "Excursion." In reading the former poem one may remember Turner's horror of being what he said Wilson called "too mappy."

tendency. "The distinctive effect of light he introduced. was that of sunset; and of sunset fading on ruin. None of the great early painters drew ruins except compulsorily. The shattered buildings introduced by them are shattered artificially, like models. There is no real sense of decay; whereas Turner only momentarily dwells on anything

else than ruin." This is characteristic of the tone of his mind. He paints the loveliness of nature, but with the worm at its root; for he ever connects that loveliness with the sorrow and labour of men. Look round this room and note the spirit of the pictures-The Destruction of Sodom, The Women of Egypt mourning for their First Born, The Ruin of Italy, The Decay of Carthage. Even in his view of daily labour there is the same feeling of solemnity and humiliation. Note the shipwrecks: pictures of the utmost anxiety and distress of which human life is capable; and the weariness of man and beast with those who plough the fields. His mythological subjects have the same spirit— The Goddess of Discord, Medea slaying her Children, and Apollo's gift of Immortality but not of perpetual Youth. And especially is "this dark clue discernible in the intensity with which his imagination dwelt always on the three great cities of Carthage, Rome, and Venice-Carthage in connection especially with the thoughts and study which led to the painting of the Hesperides' Garden, showing the death which attends the vain pursuit of wealth; Rome showing the death which attends the vain pursuit of power; Venice, the death which attends the vain pursuit of beauty. How strangely significative, thus understood, those last Venetian dreams of his become, themselves so beautiful and so frail; wrecks of all that they were once-twilight of twilight!" And, as if there should be no doubt of the essential unity of motive underlying all his work, there is the manuscript poem from which he produced mottoes for his principal pictures, and which he entitled the "Fallacies of Hope." There are critics who dispute, or deny, the moral motive in Turner's pictures; he painted the beauty of nature, they say, "for art's sake." So the critics said in his own day; and it was the knowledge that it was said, that made him anxious to reinforce his

meanings by some other medium than the art of painting. But he was a man of no literary education. He tried when he was in middle age to learn Latin, and when he was an old man to learn Greek; whilst all his life he struggled to become articulate in verse. But though very fond of poetry, he was entirely devoid of the literary gift. His letters are barely intelligible, his speeches and lectures were hopelessly involved, and it beat the best legal talent of the country to extract any definite meaning from his will. But he found an effective means of communication to those who have ears to hear, in his earnest desire to arrange his works in connected groups, and his evident intention with respect to each drawing, that it should be considered as expressing part of a continuous system of thought. He drew not separate views, but "River Scenery," "Rivers of France," "Harbours of England." "Silent always with a bitter silence, disdaining to tell his meaning, when he saw there was no ear to receive it, Turner only indicated this purpose by slight words of contemptuous anger, when he heard of any one's trying to obtain this or the other separate subject as more beautiful than the rest. What is the use of them,' he said, 'but together?"" Still more eloquent was his resolve, at whatever pecuniary sacrifice, to leave a connected series of his works to the nation. He refused two offers of £100,000 for the contents of his gallery at Queen Anne Street, and £5000 for the two "Carthages." A distinguished committee, including Sir Robert Peel, offered to buy these pictures for the nation; but he refused, because he had "already willed them." This will (or rather codicil), dated 1832, bequeathed all his finished pictures (except the two which were to be hung beside two Claudes) to the National Gallery, "provided that a room or rooms are added to the present National Gallery, to be, when erected, called Turner's Gallery." The public owes an additional debt of gratitude to Turner for his foresight in making this condition, for his water-colour drawings, which came to the

1 A later codicil made this bequest further conditional on the "Turner Gallery" being "provided or constructed" within ten years of his death.

nation without conditions, are not properly exhibited to this day. And it was only because the oil pictures would have otherwise been forfeited, that due provision was at the last legal moment made for them, and that the "Turner Gallery" became an accomplished fact instead of another "Fallacy of Hope."

It is often said that Turner's life was a contradiction to his art. But this is not so. That which cometh out of a man can only proceed from what the man himself is, and in the case of Turner, as in that of other great painters, some knowledge of his life and character is indispensable to the true appreciation of his art. We have seen how the secret of his art-on its expressional side—was his sympathy and large-mindedness; and we shall see presently how largely his technical mastery was founded on the patient study of other men's work. And this is precisely in accord with what we know of his character. "Having known Turner," says Mr. Ruskin, "for ten years, and that during the period of his life when the brightest qualities of his mind were, in many respects, diminished, and when he was suffering most from the evil-speaking of the world, I never heard him say one depreciating word of living man, or man's work; I never saw him look an unkind or blameful look; I never knew him let pass, without some sorrowful remonstrance, or endeavour at mitigation, a blameful word spoken by another. Of no man but Turner, whom I have ever known, could I say this." "The severest criticism he was ever known to make,' says Mr. Frith, "was on a landscape which every one was tearing to pieces. He was forced to confess that a very bad passage in the picture, to which the malcontents drew his attention, was a poor bit." Haydon, whose whole life was passed in war with the Royal Academy, drew back suddenly in the midst of one of his most violent expressions of exultation, and said, "But Turner behaved well and did me justice." And he did a great deal more than justice. Once, when he was on the Hanging Committee for the Academy exhibition, a picture by Bird had great merit, but no place for it could be found. Turner took down one of his own pictures, sent it out of the Academy, and hung Bird's in its He died in 1851. His will was proved in the following year, and was for four years in Chancery. In 1856 the Court of Chancery awarded the pictures and drawings to the National Gallery. The latter (19,000 in number) were sorted, and in part arranged for exhibition, by Mr. Ruskin, and are now in the Water-colour Room in the basement of the Gallery. The pictures, after a selection of them had been exhibited in Marlborough House, were placed in the South Kensington Museum, whence they were removed in 1861 to the National Gallery.

1 A nearer approach to severity perhaps, was the criticism he passed when he was taken to see the pictures of Thomson, a Scottish artist, at Edinburgh. You beat me in frames," was Turner's only remark.