BOOKS
Turner and Sea-Myth
By NEVILE WALLIS
(NE all subjects none should be more en-
trancing to English painters, one would think, than the infinite phases of the sea. As to the Japanese, the snowy height of Fujisan is the dominating motive, the reverence of that people for its purity of colour and curve evincing itself in repetitions which are almost a liturgy; so here it would not be surprising if the marine heritage had surpassed the pastoral and portrait achievements in British art. Ruskin, in Modern Painters, gave especial praise, after Turner, to the sea pieces of Clarkson Stanfield and Copley Fielding. Yet only Turner and Constable can be pitted triumphantly against the masters of the Low Countries and of France in any maritime anthology down to modern times.
The authors of a most comprehensive volume, finely illustrated, on the work of I. M. W. Turner* speak of 'his profound understanding of an immense range of natural phenomena.' His was a poetic apprehension, however, much rather than an accumulated knowledge of the working of tide and swell and breaking waves. Turner's seas usually exhibit impossible combinations on one canvas, his waves curling unprovoked and breaking not from fulness but from caprice. The other (forgotten) Henry Moore far exceeds his predecessor in acquired knowledge of the details of sea phenomena, so that one has the impression of a window opening suddenly upon the ocean. Turner's Wreck of a Transport Ship, on the other hand, possesses a dramatic truth akin to the imaginary world conjured up by Coleridge. Like that poet, the greatest of romantic painters ensures that his fantastic subject is real both for the eye and for the emotions. In each situation the details are selected for their appeal to common experience and raised, in the creative crucible, to the highest reach of imaginative realism. When Turner exults in the wild effects of sky and foam as the transport ship founders, his imagery is as compelling as Coleridge's : The upper air burst into life! And a hundred fire-flags sheen, To and fro they were hurried about! And to and fro, and in and out, The wan stars danced between.
Each detail comes from the known world and gives a firm background to the supernatural events which accompany it.
No words are truer in Modern Painters than the avowal that Turner could see no security that after death he would be understood more than he had been in life. 'My own enthusiasm,' Ruskin adds candidly, 'was wild in admiration, but it gave him no ray of pleasure; he could not make me understand his main meanings.' And indeed, how could he? Once acquired, discipline was assuredly never consciously applied by Turner, but wholly instinctive; so that in the fever of creation his hand would seem to be working independently of his brain, only im- *.FURNE.R. By John Rothenstein and Martin Butlin. (Heinemann, £66s.) pelled by some divinatory power. Experience had become pure intuition, as it became in Claude Monet's last magical phase. Even quite early in Turner's career a friend, watching him at work, observed him 'working like a madman' and 'tearing up the sea with the eagle-claw of a thumb-nail.' Little wonder that Ruskin's mental processes should have been unable to grasp the nature of Turner's romantic impulse to subli- mate the elemental forces of the natural world with a freedom of expression which could admit of no rational or moral interpretation in Vic- torian terms. The lofty rhetoric of Modern Painters, while it swayed public opinion in Turner's favour, ascribes to the artist not a single emotion he could have admitted his own.
Every artistic genius who knows his worth can be surer, at least, that his secrets will be shared in future studios than rightly appraised by art history. In recent times at home, romantic painters such as 'von Hitchens and John Piper have drawn inspiration from Turner's unique fluency of in- vention and colour. The radiant evocations of light and atmosphere of the master's later years have extensively affected the visions of abstract artists in Europe, and of many informal or summary painters in America and the Far East. For the moment, with the return to more literary and anecdotal modes of expression, Turner's ab- stract harmony of lights and shadows may appear less prevalent. But recalling that in places as unlikely as a studio of the dour 'kitchen sink' school a dozen years ago a photo of an apocalyp- tic Turner would be pinned to the easel, who can imagine that his dream-images will not always proxide a stimulus of varying nature?
It seems as certain that this painter will con- tinue to be re-interpreted by critics responsive to the Zeitgeist. To Roger Fry, expounding his gospel of C6zanne, Turner's structure of objects dissolved in mist, light and dazzle was profoundly suspect. Turner, decided Fry, knew all the tricks of the trade; was an arch-composer who could 'make a picture' out of anything, his memory stored with a vast repertory of images which were his stock-in-trade. (And, indeed, why not?) But with his veneration for an artist's candid attention in front of nature, Fry perversely in- sisted on applying the criterion of observation, or empiricism, to Turner's world without being able to concede the visionary's special subjec- tivity. It was left to Mr. Patrick Heron to correct Fry's parti pris approach in a perceptive essay, observing: .Nothing is clearer to us than that Turner, like every important living painter today, was a sub- jective artist, weaving fantasies not only out of the stuff of luminous air but around the chosen symbols of his art: a pale disc glittering at the bottom of a tunnel of cobalt dots---the moon: a ladder of yellow bars--the sun's light on the sea. And it was Fry's own Cdzanne who, in recent times, decisively rejected an empiricism of the visual sense and sent modern art burrow- ing into subjectivity. If he had understood that passage, Turner would surely have grunted approval; as one may believe he would also recognise himself in Sir John Rothenstein's eloquently descriptive and balanced survey, accompanying a great range of oil paint- ings and selection of watercolours. It is remark- able how much of Turner's power to excite the eye afresh with his conflagration of Westminster in 1835, or the medley of amber and wine-red swimming in a golden Petworth interior, is pre- served in these colour plates faithful to every nuance. Besides his earliest excursions in the topographical Picturesque, we are given enchant- ing examples of the small landscapes Turner made after 1805 on the quiet reaches of the Thames between Walton and Windsor, painted under chancy skies with an immediacy bringing him closely into relation then with the aims of Constable. So one follows the evolution for which there is no parallel, the revelation of Venice and recurring dramatic themes, culminat- ing in the visionary evocations of the cosmic forces of nature, as exhilarating as the flight of an eagle watched through a staircase window. In the mind's eye is conjured up that bare and miserly room and its extraordinary occupant with his hook nose and aspect of an eccentric little character actor. Moody, secretive, barely articu- late, `Ah,' he would mutter, 'Ruskin knows a great deal more about my pictures than / do . .
In his new compendium of English painting, Mr. Gauntt rightly segregates Turner—and, be- fore him, Blake and Hogarth—in separate chapters dwelling on their original independence and impact on their age. Hogarth's genius pre- pared the way for Reynolds and Gainsborough, very different as were their aims; and for all his mystical loneliness, Blake inspired the 'ideal community' presided over by Samuel Palmer at Shoreham in Kent. But Turner can only be con- sidered in isolation, with no close followers at his zenith and exerting practically no influence on English painting throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. It was left to France to re-apply the discoveries both of Turner and of Constable, whose native independence had been as marked.
It is Mr. Ciaunt's particular virtue that he has been a pioneer in exploring the foothills of later Victorian painting with something like the dis- interested relish and insight he has devoted to such a remote summit as William Blake. For this *titer no artistic expression of a period, however insular or bourgeois, has been without its special fascination, and it is true that dis- tance now lends enchantment as it has also brought surer judgment to the variety of Vic- torian realist painting. W. P. Frith of the com- prehensive panorama is as inseparable from the Dickens era as Turner from the heart of his Romantic movement. What Mr. Gaunt's later Victorian pages and pictures clearly bring out is that whenever conventional sentiment gives place to an almost devotional intensity, so that mood and manner find a single-hearted unity of expression as in medieval illumination, the in- spiration of Pre-Raphaelitism and its persistent current will be found. As for the run of Vic- torian pictorial journalism, it is the airlessness of the scene even when it represents a skirt or ribbon ruffled by a sea breeze which more than anything else insulates it from contemporary achievement in France. Until well into the twentieth century, Turner's tempests were to he felt in scarcely an English studio.
t A CONCISE HISIORY OF ENGLISH- PAINTING. BY William Gaunt. (Thames and Hudson, 35s.)
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