*
Turner’s inarticulate nature was complicated by his infatuation with words. His art was an insufficient means of release for what boiled inside him. A if it were beyond his control, he poured forth floods of verse. The art world first became fully aware of his serious intentions concerning this other art form in 1812. The Academy had revived in 1798 an earlier dispensation allowing painters to quote lines of poetry after the listings of their picture titles in the exhibition catalogue – and Turner had taken immediate advantage of this to append snatches of Milton and Thomson. In the ensuing years some of his pictures were so honoured with verse, sometimes credited, sometimes not. The thirty-two lines that accompanied his picture Thomson’s Aeolian Harp, a Thames-at-Richmond classical landscape exhibited at his gallery in 1809, were unattributed but were written by him – the result of several sketchbook drafts.
Three years later at the Academy exhibition he showed along with three other landscapes a large (nearly five feet by eight feet) oil entitled Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps. In this a dark swirl of cloud sweeps over the cowering figures of Hannibal’s force; puny men humbled by nature, as Napoleon’s Grande Armée had been by the Russian winter just past. And in the 1812 Academy catalogue readers were treated to a passage from an ‘M.S.P.’ – in other words, a manuscript poem, all his own work – called ‘Fallacies of Hope’:
Craft, treachery, and fraud – Salassian force,
Hung on the fainting rear! then Plunder seiz’d
The victor and the captive, – Saguntum’s spoil,
Alike became their prey; still the chief advanc’d,
Look’d on the sun with hope; – low, broad, and wan;
While the fierce archer of the downward year
Stains Italy’s blanch’d barrier with storms.
In vain each pass, ensanguin’d deep with dead,
Or rocky fragments, wide destruction roll’d.
Still on Campania’s fertile plains – he thought,
But the loud breeze sob’d, ‘Capua’s joys beware!’32
It is a good example of Turner’s poetic talent or mimetic skills: echoes and borrowing from other poets, in this case Thomson, and words lacking necessary antecedents or without evident meaning, used as they are – in this instance, ‘alike’ in line 4, ‘in vain’ in line 8, ‘Or’ in line 9, and ‘he thought’ in line 10. It is verse that tries too hard and falls embarrassingly, tumbling from an intended sublime to a ridiculous end – bathos the effect. But this didn’t bother him.
Many young people are ‘poets’ in their late teens and early twenties and wisely give up thereafter. Turner, having dabbled in verses before, took to poetry in a big way in his thirties. Verses gushed from him indoors and out; he scribbled it mostly by pencil in his nearly illegible handwriting, in sketchbooks and guidebooks, sometimes using pen and ink for a passage that he particularly fancied, and copying out a favoured draft in a special notebook – strange in having no sketches in it – that he reserved for his verse. Staying at inns on his own, riding in coaches with other passengers, sitting on hillsides: nowhere was he immune to the fever. Even on a riverbank, with a fishing rod in one hand, he wrote poems with the other – if only, along with the fish, he had thrown some of the words back in! His determination was admirable, even when the results were dire (one thinks of Yeats’s definition of rhetoric, ‘Will doing the work of the imagination’.) He slapped the words down like blobs of paint, but they refused to meld, to contrast, to work together. He knew something else was needed and numbered the syllables in his ‘Ode to Discord’ as he apparently tried to improve the metre. He did several drafts of this, and of other favourites of the moment, such as ‘On Thomson’s Tomb’ and the ‘Dear Molly’ love poem of 1809:
By thy bosom so throbbing with truth
Its short heavings to me, speaks reproof
By the half blushing mark on each hill
O Molly dear Molly be still.33
The 400 lines of mostly rhymed travel notes written in 1811 on blank pages interleaved amid the gazetteer information of his copy of The British Itinerary (a tiny pocket companion for travellers) represent the most determined adhesion to banality and cliché, indeed to doggerel:
Then the famed Icknield Street appears a line
Roman the work and Roman the design.
Needy labourers, peaceful streams, sportive sea nymphs, dreadful monsters and parching heat also make an appearance in this work. The patriotic artist–poet, heading westward on his own itinerary, considers in passing the merits of lobster fishermen, captive British prisoners, bold British seamen and the gallant Nelson.
The word ‘fallacious’ cropped up first in his ‘Tabley Hall’ sketchbook in 1808, as he prepared for his lectures; it never goes away. ‘Hope’ is also ever-present: ‘What hope appeared ever to deny’ in The British Itinerary; ‘in hope of less inclement skies’ in a sketchbook34 – but the skies usually let loose a downpour and hope is not only denied but blasted and blighted. Much of this was convention, but it was one that Turner adopted willingly. He didn’t have that much to complain about as far as fame and fortune were concerned; but clearly his emotional life – his life as a son or lover – had let him down. Hope was not to be trusted; neither were women. If you look on the sun with hope, look out! The fierce archer will smite you.
Turner’s ‘M.S. Fallacies of Hope’ was never a consecutive, finished work, though he may have wanted to give that impression. Rather it was a scrapbag of bits and pieces he added to over the years, and made use of in the Academy catalogues at exhibition time. ‘Hope’s delusive smile’. ‘Hope’s harbinger, ephemeral …’35 His colleagues staunchly tried to throttle their expressions of amusement. Now and then they couldn’t take it any longer and tried to stifle the poem. In 1834 the Council seems to have allowed his verses – meant to have been appended to his picture The Golden Bough – to vanish from the catalogue, leaving only the reference to the ‘M.S. Fallacies of Hope’. When he refused to sell his picture of Carthage and declared he would be buried in it, a friend told him, ‘But they will dig you up, and get your picture for nothing. If you really want to rest in one of your works, be buried in the Fallacies of Hope. No one will dig you up then.’36
Thackeray, in 1845 in Fraser’s Magazine, made gentle fun of what he called ‘that sybilline book of mystic rhymes’, and said of its author, ‘I don’t like to contemplate him too much, lest I should actually begin to believe in his poetry as well as his paintings, and fancy the “Fallacies of Hope” to be one of the finest poems in the world.’37 In 1840, Punch took note of the lines from ‘Fallacies’ that Turner had attached to his RA exhibit Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon coming on:
Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;
Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds
Declare the typhon’s coming.
Before it sweep your decks, throw overboard
The dead and dying – ne’er heed their chains.
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?
Punch retaliated with:
A Typhoon bursting in a Simoon over the Whirlpool of Maelstrom,
Norway: with a ship on fire, an eclipse, and the effect of a lunar rainbow.
O Art, how vast thy mighty wonders are
To those who roam upon the extraordinary deep!
Maelstrom, thy hand is here.
From an unpublished Poem38
A lesser man would have taken heed of the public mood and kept his poetic output to himself. But Turner was not to be silenced by criticism or parody. His last four exhibits at the Academy in 1850 were accompanied by four poetic fragments, one of which – to go with Aeneas relating his Story to Dido – was:
Fallacious Hope beneath the moon’s pale crescent shone
Dido listened to Troy being lost and won.
*
It was part of the stock in trade of the eighteenth-century artist to consider pa
inting and poetry hand in hand; they were sister arts; they were twins. ‘Painting is poetry,’ wrote Jonathan Richardson, Britain’s first art theorist; elsewhere he opined, ‘Methinks it would not be amiss if a painter, before he made the least drawing of his intended picture, would take the pains to write the story’ – though he does not mention writing it in verse.39 Sir Joshua, in his third Discourse, said that an art of animating figures with ‘intellectual grandeur … can only be acquired by him that enlarges the sphere of his understanding by a variety of knowledge, and warms his imagination with the best productions of ancient and modem poetry’.40 In his ‘Perspective’ sketchbook of 1809, in several dense and foggy pages of prose writing, Turner tried to grapple with the differences between what painters and poets do. Near the end of one draft of his first lecture, he got it a bit clearer; he wrote (reworking Akenside): ‘Thus Painting and Poetry, flowing from the same fount mutually by vision, constantly comparing Poetic allusions by natural forms in one and applying forms found in nature to the other, meandering into streams by application, which reciprocally improved, reflect, and heighten each others beauties like … mirrors.’41
Some of his fellow artists were demonstrating that reading and quoting poetry were not enough; one should write it too. Fuseli wrote verse, in German. William Blake was a double threat, though Turner may not have known his poetry. He certainly knew the written work of Martin Archer Shee, portrait painter and Academician, whose Rhymes on Art appeared in two parts in 1805 and 1809 (the second under the title Elements of Art), satirizing philistinism, attacking critics of modern art and promoting the idea of a great public collection of painting. Shee’s Rhymes attracted much attention.
Of course, there was more to Turner’s poetic impulse than a desire simply to compete with Shee or even a desire for public attention, of which he was already getting a fair quota. His ambition – his intention to be a self-made poet as well as a painter – can be seen in the fact that he copied out in the ‘Frittlewell’ sketchbook (1809) a passage from Lord Holland’s 1806 Life of the Spanish poet and playwright Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (1562–1635): ‘The chief object of Poetry is to delineate strongly the characters and passions of Mankind, to paint the appearances of Nature and to describe their effects to our imagination. To accomplish these ends the versification must be smooth, the language pure and impressive, the images just, natural and appropriate.’ If Turner thought that, by writing this down, he would accomplish such an end, it was a vain hope. But he ploughed on regardless. Writing poetry was a way of working off some of his misanthropy and pessimism, of burning up his moody displeasure with the world:
Misanthrope stalks the soul in silent shade
On the bold promontory thrown at length he lies
And sea mews shrieking are her obsequies.42
Although bad poetry was the first and obvious product, the act of writing helped his painting. He came to sketchbook, watercolour paper and canvas with a less burdened spirit.
In one respect, Turner’s verse seems to indicate his desire to seem better educated than he was. But it also has another quality characteristic of the man: it respected the past. His literary heroes were of the eighteenth century. He admired the Augustan, pastoral style of Thomson and Akenside; he liked their classical allusions, allegorical personifications and vague, abstract concepts. He didn’t seem to notice the new writers, his young contemporaries, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, though he took to Byron later on.
In his thousands of words of tin-eared verse, Turner rarely put together any that had the intensity and rhythm and surprise of a real poem. His ‘Hastings’ sketchbook43 of 1809–11 contains a well-organized chunk of blank verse:
World I have known thee long & now the hour
When I must part from thee is near at hand
I bore thee much goodwill & many a time
In thy fair promises repos’d more trust
Than wiser heads & colder hearts w’d risk
Some tokens of a life, not wholely passed
In Selfish strivings or ignoble sloth
Haply there shall be found when I am gone
What may dispose thy candour to discover
Some merit in my zeal & let my words
Out live the Maker who bequeaths them to thee
For well I know where our possessions End
Thy praise begins & few there be who weave
Wreaths for the Poet brow, till he is laid
Low in his narrow dwelling with the worm.
This hangs together too successfully to be Turner; whom is he echoing? (Herbert? Cowper?) The essential Turner, heard when not trying hard to be Thomson or Akenside, gives voice in ‘Dear Molly’, with its orgasmic climax:
By the touch of lip or rove of my hand
By the critical moment no Maid can withstand
Then a bird in a bush is worth two in the hand
O Molly dear Molly I will
The muddle of much of Turner’s poetry prompts questions about how his brain worked. How ‘normal’ was his thinking? His contrariness may have had physiological as well as psychological roots. He painted with his right hand, but was he naturally a left-hander who had been forced to use his right? It has been remarked that two of his Perspective illustrations that demonstrate a triangle fitted inside a circle have headings that reverse the situation: ‘Circle (or circles) within a triangle’.44 His friend George Jones said, ‘Turner’s thoughts were deeper than ordinary men can penetrate and much deeper than he could at any time describe’, though he put a generous gloss on this by noting that ‘the indistinctness of his thoughts, like the indistinctness of his pictures, always indicated either greatness or beauty’.45 On numerous occasions in his company, people did not know what Turner was talking about. David Roberts said, ‘The same mystery that pervades his works, seemed to pervade his conversation.’46
In many of the notes that he wrote in the margins of books – conversations as it were with himself or with the authors – the same mystery is present, though presumably he was privy to it. Sometimes his reading was thorough. As noted, he had subscribed to the Lectures on Painting of John Opie, which Opie as Professor of Painting had given at the Royal Academy. Turner wrote to the Plymouth artist Ambrose Johns that he was ‘troubled with a fit of scribbling’ as he read them, and the margins of the first third of the book are crammed with what he called his ‘marks of gall’.47 The marks were in fact unusually cogent. When Opie wrote that for artists, ‘nothing is denied to persevering and well-directed industry’, Turner says, ‘It is right to hold out such a hope to light the weary artist on the way,’ but suggests that perseverance and industry are not enough. And when Opie later hedges his first claims in this matter, Turner notes the qualification: ‘the acknowledgement of an innate power that enforces, that inspires, and without which labour would be fruitless and a vain drudgery’. When Opie declares that students should not just study nature but attentively study ‘the peculiar manner of each master’, Turner responds with a cri de coeur, a bit rambling now, but clearly something he had to say, even for his own benefit:
He that has that ruling enthusiasm which accompanies abilities cannot look superficially. Every glance is a glance for study: contemplating and defining qualities and causes, effects and incidents, and develops by practice the possibility of attaining what appears mysterious upon principle. Every look at nature is a refinement upon art. Each tree and blade of grass or flower is not to him the individual tree grass or flower, but what [it] is in relation to the whole, its tone, its contrast and its use, and how far practicable: admiring Nature by the power and practicability of his Art, and judging of his Art by the perceptions drawn from Nature.48
His disparate character was drawn to hopes of synthesis and fusion. Just as, in the 1809 ‘Cockermouth’ sketchbook,49 he had quoted Tom Paine to the effect that the sublime and the ridiculous were ‘so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately’, so he now feels that nature and art can be br
ought close, at least by the able artist who has ‘that ruling enthusiasm’.
He was also thinking about the interrelations of painting and poetry, and when Opie mentions the ‘contrariety of means’ of the two arts, Turner adds, ‘though drawn from the same source and both feeling the beauties of nature’. But not all his annotations to Opie are either as sensible or as sensitive as that passage where he declares that ‘Every glance is a glance for study.’ When Opie calls beauty ‘a word to the full as indefinite, if not as complex, as the word nature’, Turner pens in the margin, ‘Beauty is compleatly a term of intimacy for no two agree when what is beautiful even in as to letch [lechery?] if possible even exceed the above end function in nature for what is pleasing to one optic is disgusting to others …’ And he proceeds into further obscurity and illegibility. But let us agree with him that beauty is in the optic of the beholder.
His swings between cogency and nonsense were as dramatic as those between generosity and niggardliness, furtiveness and ostentation. If he had been truly dyslexic,50 he would have been so continuously – and his letters demonstrate similar bouts of indistinctness and precision. Frequent Jekyll and Hyde tussles went on in Turner’s brain. Much of his art paid homage to the past; much of it increasingly did so in a revolutionary way. He loved his pictures, and let many moulder with damp and dust. His visions were one moment foggy, the next radiantly clear. He lacked ‘higher’ education but had a strong desire for learning. His mother’s mental collapse may have caused reverberations in the son, and who knows what genetic predisposition he had to similar psychic storms? He was driven into himself at an early age and spent the rest of his life making fitful attempts to unroll, to say ‘Here I am, this is me.’ His inchoate strivings to express complicated thoughts were in contrast to his father’s simple shrewd loquacity. Turner wanted to be up to date with contemporary thought on aesthetics – with the sublime, the picturesque and the interleavings of painting and poetry – and often waded in way out of his depth.
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