by James Wilson
I felt I now understood the subject; but I was still left with the faint consciousness – which remains with me still – of an unanswered question. It was put out of my mind at the time, however, by the square picture, which, as we approached it, imperiously claimed our attention with mysteries of its own. The red strip, I now saw, was a flaming sunset, spreading, it seemed (the painting was so indistinct it was difficult to be sure) across some desolate seashore. Before it stood Napoleon, his arms folded, his eyes cast pensively down, entirely alone save for a lone British sentry standing behind him, and his own elongated reflection in the wet sand. He was staring at a tiny triangular object on the ground, which I could only identify by looking at the title: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, 184.2. To the right was a pile of debris that might have been a wrecked ship, and above that the smoking ruins of a war-torn city.
We stood looking at it in silence for a few seconds, and then Walter sighed and said:
‘“And the light shineth in darkness.”’
He paused, and seemed to be waiting for me to go on; so I said:
‘“And the darkness comprehended it not.”?’
He nodded, but said nothing more. I am not sure what he meant – unless, as a painter himself, he was merely admiring the ability to create colour so radiant that it seems to burn from within – but his words nonetheless helped to galvanize something in my mind; for they startled me almost as if he had uttered a profanity. After a moment’s reflection I realized why: Turner had, without question, captured the beauty of the sun more gloriously than any artist I knew; but in the paintings I had seen there was always something terrible about it, too – a cruelty, a heedless power to destroy, that made it seem a fitter symbol for the bloodthirsty deity of the Aztecs than for the pure love of our Lord, expressed in that lovely passage from St. John.
I said nothing of this to Walter, for I did not wish to disturb him, at least until I had had a chance to see more, and discover if my impression was justified. I did not, however, scruple to point out another idiosyncrasy I had come to recognize; for, although the technique was entirely different from Turner’s earlier works – the paint so coarse and mixed that it looked as if it had been applied by a madman in a frenzy – yet Napoleon and his guard had the familiar toylike quality, making them look more like tin soldiers than men, and I felt I could safely generalize about his figures.
‘At least your people are better than his,’ I said, laughing.
I thought this compliment would please Walter, but he barely even acknowledged it; and after a moment I left him again to his reverie, to continue my researches on my own. Rather than examining another picture in detail, I decided to test my theory by merely glancing at them all; and flitting rapidly from one to the next I soon persuaded myself that I was right. I cannot remember every painting now, but enough to prove the point: a gory sunset lights the last journey of an heroic old warship, The Fighting Téméraire, towards its destiny in a breaker’s yard; terrified people flee the wrathful Angel Standing in the Sun, the flesh burned from their bones by his all-engulfing fire; even a sun-soaked picture of Venice, which at first sight seems like a cheerful Canaletto seen through a heat-haze, at length reveals its own tragic secret – for its subject, you realize on closer inspection, is the Bridge of Sighs, which carried condemned criminals to their death
My exploration also yielded another discovery. As I was hurrying past a dark picture – which I had already dismissed in advance as unsuitable for my purpose, since there seemed no sunlight in it at all – my eye was caught by a glint of gold, and the hint of a familiar form, in the middle of the canvas. Stopping to examine it, I saw that it was the coil of a giant serpent, emerging from a low, dark cave half hidden by brush, which immediately put me in mind of the snake and the ruins in the Bay of Baiae. There was more to come; for confronting the beast, in the foreground, is a man – presumably Jason, for the piece is called Jason in Search of the Golden Fleece – kneeling on a split and twisted fallen tree – which, when you look at it, seems to turn into a writhing monster, or two monsters, like the buoy in The Decline of Carthage. Less than two minutes later I happened upon The Goddess of Discord in the Garden of the Hesperides, where the effect is inverted: beyond a gently wooded valley, peopled with nymphs and goddesses, stand two mountainous walls of stone, leaning ominously towards each other (like the sides of a half-formed arch) across a narrow pass. In one place, the top of the rock has an odd serrated shape; which – when you examine it closely – turns out not to be rock at all, but the back of a terrifying monster guarding the entrance, with stone-coloured wings and crocodile jaws that might almost have been hollowed from the granite by wind and rain.
I had, and still have, no idea what to make of these connections, but I must confess that finding them excited me, and made me think, for a moment, that I should turn critic, and go into competition with Mr. Ruskin. At the same time, they troubled me (for they are undeniably disturbing), and put me in a quandary which I have still not resolved as I write this: should I point them out to Walter? To do so would have been to risk casting him back into gloom just at the moment when his delight in Turner’s work seemed to have lifted his spirits; but to keep silent would have been to leave him in ignorance of something that might be important – and also (I must be honest!) to deny myself the chance of demonstrating my own insight.
Fate, however, spared me from having to make an immediate decision, for when I looked about for Walter I could not at first see him; and no sooner had I eventually found him again – standing in front of another lustrous canvas, in a corner I had missed – than I heard a voice behind me calling ‘Marian!’
I turned, and saw Elizabeth Eastlake – her head towering above all the other women, and most of the men – making her way towards me. She was not, it seemed, alone; for as the crowd parted before her I noticed a little cavalcade in her wake: a middle-aged couple (as I supposed) and their daughter, and an old woman in a bath chair pushed by a manservant.
‘Marian!’ she repeated, as she drew near; and then, seeing Walter: ‘Oh! And Mr. Hartright too! What a pleasant surprise!’ After shaking our hands she turned towards the old woman in the bath chair, and, raising her voice, said:
‘Lady Meesden, may I introduce Miss Halcombe?’
I bowed, and for a moment had the extraordinary idea that I was meeting one of Turner’s doll-people; for the woman’s face was chalk-white with powder, save for a dab of rouge on each cheek, and the skin seemed to have folded in about her eyes, reducing them to no more than a pair of black shining buttons. She stared at me, unsmiling, for a moment, and then bobbed her head, like a bird pecking water from a pool.
‘And her brother-in-law, Mr. Hartright,’ said Lady Eastlake. Walter can usually extort a smile from the stoniest misanthrope, but the old woman was as frosty with him as she had been with me; and it was, I thought, with some relief that Lady Eastlake turned away from her to present us to the other members of her party: Lady Meesden’s daughter, Mrs. Kingsett; her husband (who appeared, among his other misfortunes, to be called Mauritius); and their own daughter, Florence, an awkward, coltish seventeen-year-old who blushed when you looked at her.
‘Marian is a particular friend of mine, Lydia,’ said Lady East-lake.
‘Indeed?’ said Mrs. Kingsett. She was about fifty, with plaited greying hair coiled neatly behind her head, and wearing a loose-fitting walking dress in a fine red-and-white check that looked wonderfully free and comfortable. She was too square and craggy to be considered beautiful; but there was a certain vivacious charm to her voice when she smiled and said:
‘Well, there can’t be a better recommendation than that.’
‘Perhaps “By Appointment to the Queen”?’ said Lady East-lake.
Mrs. Kingsett laughed; and – as if trying to make up for her mother’s coldness – shook my hand in the most easy and affable manner imaginable.
‘Sir Charles and I are away on our autumn visit to Italy next week,’ Lady Eastlake w
ent on. ‘And I have come to remind myself what great English art can be.’
‘What do you think, Miss Halcombe?’ said Mrs. Kingsett, casting her eyes about her in a way that seemed to include the whole exhibition. ‘Are you quite overwhelmed?’
‘Quite,’ I said.
‘I, too.’
At this, her husband, who was standing at her elbow, gave a derisive ‘tk’ – which she studiedly ignored – and looked away with a long-suffering smile. Nature had not dealt kindly with him; for he had a turned-up nose like a pig, and a pulled-down mouth, with too many teeth, like a wolf; and whiskers so curled that you’d think they’d been singed by his hot and florid complexion; and in his little gesture of defiance, and his wife’s pointed refusal to acknowledge it, I suddenly fancied that (as sometimes happens) I could read the whole history of their connection. Here were a plain man and a plain woman, who had married – as they thought – for mutual advantage: he for the respectability that came with her station, and her mother’s title; she, poor thing, for fear that a shy and ungainly girl like herself might have no husband at all if she refused him. But over the years, both had come to realize that she was his intellectual, as well as his social, superior; and as she had grown in confidence, and blossomed into maturity, so he had dwindled into sourness and disappointment. Any true feelings they might have had for each other had been eaten away by the acid of his resentment and her contempt – leaving the marriage an empty shell, into which she had steadily expanded, by developing as independent a life as was consistent with respectability, and he had been reduced to sulking in a corner.
You could not help but feel sorry for both of them, but I must own that the balance of my sympathy lay with her – if only because her fate, or something like it, might all too easily have been my own. Perhaps Mr. Kingsett sensed this; for, though he shook my hand (he really could not do otherwise, when his wife had already done so), his grip was as slack and uninterested as a dead fish, and he immediately turned away with an inaudible mumble, and fixed his watery gaze on the fireplace. To my surprise, as I moved myself, I noticed that Lady Meesden was scowling at us, with a ferocity that suggested she had witnessed the whole episode.
Certainly, Mr. Kingsett’s hostility cannot have arisen from any consciousness of social distinction, for he received Walter as one greets an old friend – or, perhaps it would be truer to say, as a drowning man greets a log, for here was a promise of rescue from the ocean of females in which the poor man found himself, and he clung to it for dear life. Within less than a minute he had manoeuvred Walter away from me and established a small gentlemen’s club, with a membership of two, in the corner. A moment later I heard him opening the proceedings with: ‘I think a picture should be of something, and you should be able to see what it is.’
Not wanting to add to Walter’s embarrassment by eavesdropping on his reply, I turned back towards Mrs. Kingsett; but she – doggedly pursuing her policy of disregarding her husband altogether – was already deep in conversation with Lady Eastlake again, and I felt I could not intrude. Rather than brave the bellicose Lady Meesden or her tongue-tied granddaughter, therefore, I decided to study the picture before us.
It was another classical subject: Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus. Again, we are close to the bottom left-hand corner, looking diagonally across the canvas to a brilliant sunrise on the low horizon, which casts its rays into the sky, burnishing the underside of the clouds and veining them with bloodshot streaks. The foreground is dominated by Ulysses’ ship, its gilded hull trimmed with stripes of black and red, moving from left to right into the centre of the canvas as it makes for the open sea. The water is soporifically calm, with tiny lapping waves that seem barely to have the energy to reach the shore, but on board everything is bustle: the decks are crowded, the oars are out, and sailors swarm up the mast and yards, frantically setting the ornately decorated sails or raising their red flags. Behind them, almost in darkness, is the dark mass of Polyphemus’s island.
I knew, I think, even before I had consciously noted any of the details, that this picture was unlike the others – or, rather, that it somehow fulfilled the others; for, like a song, of which, up until now, you have only a few notes and half the chorus, it seemed to bring together all those peculiarities which I had glimpsed elsewhere, and miraculously fuse them into a glorious whole. Here was the beautiful but merciless sun; here the entrance to the underworld – the mouth of Polyphemus’s cave, its blackness broken this time not by the gleam of a serpent, but by a single smear of reddish gold, which could be the glow of a fire within, or of the sun without; here, above all, those weird hybrid objects that seemed to be two things at once, or one thing in the process of turning into another. The prow of Ulysses’ ship was a gaping fish-jaw, its shape echoed by two great arch-like rocks in the sea beyond, while about it, in the foam, played silvery figures – nymphs? spirits? – which gradually faded into transparency, until they were one with the water, and disappeared. Saluting it, on the right edge of the canvas, was the figurehead of another ship, which rose up like a clenched fist – or one of those odd flipper-limbs: fish, and flesh, and wood, all at once – before a cluster of clouds that turned out, on closer inspection, to be the horses of Apollo’s chariot, drawing the sun into the sky. And the wounded giant himself, rearing in agony above his island, was so vague that he, too, might be a cloud, or the mist-covered peak of a mountain.
Each of these effects taken on its own could have been merely disturbing, but in their totality they seemed to achieve a kind of dreamlike enchantment which made me think for a moment that I had at last glimpsed (though I could not put it into words) Turner’s purpose. The subject was sombre enough, and its treatment strange to the point of insanity: yet (in this picture, at least) the beauty seemed finally to outweigh the horror and the madness – and to be, indeed, all the greater for having absorbed the base elements of our experience, and transmuted them into gold. Exhilarated, I opened my notebook and wrote: ‘Magician. Alchemist.’
I had barely finished when I was startled (the ‘t’ of ‘Alchemist’ has a long squiggling tail to prove it) by someone speaking at my elbow:
‘I sing the cave of Polypheme,
Ulysses made him cry out…’
Astonished, I looked round. There was Lady Meesden – one hand raised, to signal to the manservant that he should stop – gliding into place at my side. Without pausing, she continued:
‘For he ate his mutton, drank his wine,
And then he poked his eye out.’
Her voice was rather faint, but there was something commanding about it – not the imperious tone you might imagine from a woman in her position, but rather a kind of operatic flourish that made you think you were listening to a performance rather than a conversation. I noticed several other people glancing at her as if they expected her to break into song; and, in truth, I half-expected it myself, for I had no idea what she was talking about, and it seemed as likely as anything else that she was mad, and merely reliving some entertainment from her youth – like Walter’s old woman in Hand Court.
‘Tom Dibdin,’ she said, as if by way of explanation.
The name was familiar – it somehow conjured in my mind a world of stage-coaches and sailing-ships and breezy spring mornings, before railways and factories turned England into a great machine, and swaddled it in smoke – but I could not for a moment place it.
‘Melodrame Mad. 1819.’
And then I remembered: Thomas Dibdin’s Reminiscences had been a great favourite of my father’s when I was a child – although, fearful that it might corrupt me, and make me run away, and become a travelling player like its author, he forbade me to read it. (This interdiction, of course, only increased its romance for me, prompting me to sneak into the library whenever I could, and stealthily devour two or three pages of an anecdote about a theatre manager or an actress, before approaching footsteps forced me to make my escape.) I still could not see the relevance to Turner’s work, however; and the perplexity
must have shown on my face, for, pointing a wavering finger at the picture, Lady Meesden said:
‘His inspiration for that. Or so he claimed.’
‘Turner, you mean?’ I said.
‘Of course Turner,’ she snapped; but then softened it by (for a marvel) smiling at me, and saying more gently: ‘But he might not have meant it.’
‘Why should he say it, then?’
‘Why, to shock,’ she said, as if nothing could be more natural, and I must be an idiot to ask. ‘It was some damned silly woman, as I recall, whispering to a clergyman. So misty, so spiritual, so ethereal, Mr. Whatever-his-name-was. Upon my word, I don’t know how Turner does it. He must be a magician. Or some such nonsense.’
I confess I felt myself blushing, but had the grace to smile.
‘And he told her he’d got the idea not from The Odyssey, as we’d all supposed, but from a ditty in a comic spectacle.’ She shook her head, and started to laugh, almost silently. ‘I bet she never dared offer another opinion in her life.’
‘Were you there yourself?’ I asked.
‘He told me of it afterwards.’
‘Oh, so you knew him personally?’
‘Oh, yes, I knew Turner,’ she replied, with a knowing emphasis on the T and the ‘Tur’ that immediately made me wonder if their acquaintance had been more than mere friendship. The same thought, I fancy, must have struck the little audience that had gathered around us; for a stout woman who had been listening (and pretending not to) from the beginning, shot Lady Meesden a stern glance, and turned her back; and a man behind us took his wife by the arm and hurried her away.
‘He was a great lover of the theatre,’ Lady Meesden went on, entirely heedless of the stir she had created. There was something proprietorial in her tone which suggested that the theatre was her world, and she would therefore naturally know anyone who frequented it; and for the first time it occurred to me that – improbable as it might seem – she might, from her appearance and the way she spoke, have once been an actress.