The Dark Clue

by James Wilson

  He let out an involuntary gasp, as if he had been struck, from which I deduced that I had guessed rightly.

  ‘If that were Sir Charles’s intention,’ I went on, ‘and he were prepared to act so dishonourably – which I can assure you he would not – do you really suppose he would have no better recourse than to send me?’

  He could not answer, but merely stood staring at me.

  ‘If you will trust me with them, I promise I will take good care of them; but if that is not good enough for you, then I am sorry, but I must leave empty-handed.’

  He looked so desperate that I feared for a moment he would snatch the money anyway, or strike at me in a rage; but he neither moved nor spoke. Seeing the dumb misery in his eyes, I almost relented; but then I steeled myself, and – with no more than a cool ‘goodbye’ – turned and left the room.

  Disappointment and relief – those, in about equal measure – were my dominant emotions as I began to descend the staircase, and both seemed to deepen with every step I took. But then, when I reached the last flight, I suddenly became frightened again; for above me I heard the sound of the padlock closing, and then the clatter of his footsteps following mine. What if he had decided to try to stop me? I quickened my pace, clutching my skirt in one hand and the banister in the other. I had reached the door, and was fiddling frantically with the chains and bolts, when he reached the first-floor landing and shouted:

  ‘Wait!’

  But I did not wait. I let myself into the street, slamming the door after me, and then hurried to the corner and stopped in front of a house with brightly lit windows and a cheerful sound of laughter and voices within to catch my breath.

  And it was there he caught me. I had thought I was safe, and did not hear him approach. I felt his hand on my arm, and almost shrieked in terror.

  But when I turned I saw I had no reason to be frightened. His shoulders were sunk in defeat, and the heat and passion had left his face, making it suddenly deathly pale. He held the diaries towards me like a supplicant.

  ‘Here,’ he said.

  I gave him his sovereign, and hailed a cab.

  I have not opened them yet. What if, after such an adventure, they prove worthless?

  Sufficient unto the day. I shall look at them tomorrow.

  Sunday

  Bad news. A letter from Mrs. Kingsett: her mother is very ill. I may call when she is better, but that is not likely to be for some weeks – if, that is (I cannot help thinking, in view of her age), she gets better at all. I curse myself for being such a prig at Marlborough House, and so failing to learn more then.

  Prayed for Lady Meesden’s recovery in church. Of course there is an element of selfishness in my prayers. I hope I may be forgiven.

  Still could not bring myself to open the diaries. They are my only hope at the moment, and if they are disappointing I shall fret and be unable to sleep for worry, which will help no-one.

  Tomorrow morning. I swear it.

  Monday

  Missing days – missing weeks – an entire missing decade – and little enough (so far, at least) about Turner. But I am not entirely despondent. Sir Charles is right: if nothing else, I am learning something of the art world fifty and sixty and seventy years ago, which can only be helpful.

  And what a world it is! So different from our own! Here is the first mention of Turner’s name, on 18th April, 1793:

  Dined at the Old Slaughter Chop House with Perrin, then drew at the Academy from 7 till 8. Afterwards, Perrin, Hynd and Larkin came to tea, and we ended by talking half the night. Perrin was much excited by a ‘young genius’, William Turner, whose work he had seen yesterday. The boy is not yet eighteen – has won the Great Silver Palette for landscape drawing – is ‘the bright hope of the British school’, etc. etc. I said that in that case he must prepare himself for disappointment; for in a few years, when the novelty has gone off, he will find himself neglected, and another ‘young genius’ sought to fill his place.

  ‘No matter!’ cries Larkin (who I think was drunk, for he and Hynd had been drinking together; though it made him maudlin and reckless, not merry) – ‘in a few years we shall not want hope for a British school, or for a British anything; for history has set its seal upon us, and soon we shall have come to nothing, like Venice before us.’

  ‘Oh, what damned nonsense!’ roars Hynd, like a red-faced bull.

  ‘The world’s turned upside down, and you’re blind if you don’t see it!’ rejoins Larkin, growing heated. ‘Twenty years ago, who’d have supposed that in so short a space we should have lost America, and the French king his head!’

  ‘As to that,’ says Hynd with a grim laugh. ‘There’s heads nearer to home might get the same treatment, and we should be none the worse for it.’

  And if Perrin had not at that moment proposed a glee, and at once begun to sing, it might have come to blows.

  For my own part (God forgive me!) – only grant me success, and the world may turn, or tumble, or fall about my very ears, for all I care!

  This makes me think that perhaps I was right about Turner’s The Decline of Carthage being intended as a warning to England. He painted it much later, of course; but the impressions made on a youthful mind stamp it for life; and perhaps he never lost the fear which comes from being born into a time of desperate wars and revolutions, when the very survival of your country seems in doubt.

  Nothing more of note, then (save for the trials and disappointments of Haste’s career), till we come to 1799:

  1st December. An idle day. Did not work as I should.

  Met Perrin tonight at Lord Meesden’s. He tells me young William Turner is elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, and has removed from Covent Garden to Harley Street, having been assured by his fellow-Academicians that it is a more respectable situation.

  It is painful, as I close, to reflect on our respective ages, and on our different prospects; for Perrin says that Turner, though he is but four-and-twenty, claims he has more commissions in hand than he knows how to execute, while I, nine years his senior, and with a wife and children to support, have no commissions at all, and must make up the rent for this very wnrespectable lodging by painting my landlord’s cat.

  God grant me strength to strive harder, that I may succeed in my great task. And keep me from the sin of Envy. Amen.

  Poor Haste. As I read these words, I cannot help seeing the image of his son, and that mean little attic, and the strange overblown painting of Lear, and concluding that his petition went unanswered.

  But at least he mentions Lord Meesden! That is heartening – though only, of course, if Lady Meesden lives.

  Should I pray for her again? Or do we corrupt our prayers, when we want what we are asking for too much?

  I must ask Mr. Palmer next Sunday.

  Tomorrow I accompany Haste into the nineteenth century.

  Tuesday

  All morning with Haste. Sometimes I can scarcely bear to read him, so relentless is the torrent of failures and accidents and misunderstandings. And, to make it worse, as often as not they are not merely dreadful, but dreadfully comic, so that I find myself laughing even as I cry, and end by reproaching myself for lack of feeling.

  For some reason, there is nothing at all for 1801, save a short entry for 31st December:

  31st December. And what is left but once again to repent my vices, weaknesses and failings of the year past, and to pray for greater strength in the year to come?

  Tonight I re-read Reynolds on Poetry and Painting. Poetry, he says, ‘exerts its influence over almost all the passions’, including ‘one of our most prevalent dispositions, anxiety for the future’. It ‘operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe’. Painting, by contrast, ‘is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on till attention is totally engaged. What i
s done by painting must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have

  My pictures should rise to this sublime challenge – they should amaze – they should dumbfound – they should at a single unanswerable stroke attain all that a poem achieves in ten or twenty or a hundred pages.

  But do they? Alas! I fear they do not. God make me worthier of the sacred cause to which you have called me.

  Was not Turner, too, an admirer of Reynolds, and a lover of poetry? Might not those same thoughts have been in his mind?

  In 1802, Turner himself reappears:

  27th May. This afternoon, just when I had given up all thought of seeing him again, Sir George Beaumont called. To my astonishment, he acted as if there had been no uneasiness or estrangement between us, and our relations were as cordial as ever. On entering my painting-room he stood a long while before Lear; and my heart beat so wildly as I awaited his judgement that, had he asked me a question, I doubt if I could have answered it. At length, however, he made no comment at all, but merely asked whether I had seen the present exhibition at the Royal Academy.

  Scarce able to speak – for I was starting to wonder if he might have gone mad – I said I had not; and then, pointedly, asked if he would care to give me his opinion of that. He plainly did not understand me; for, in the politest manner possible, he said: ‘Indeed, Haste. There are some fine things there; but I don’t like what I see of young Turner and his imitators. They lack finish.’ (Was I to be denied a certain grim satisfaction at hearing this?)

  And then, without a word about my work, he left, leaving me too dumbfounded to call after him.

  And two years later, in 1804:

  19th April. Sir George called with Perrin, who is full of Turner and all his works, having but yesterday been to the opening of Turner’s private gallery. He was as excited as a child who has just seen the king. ‘It is seventy feet long, Haste – and twenty wide – and stands behind his house in Harley Street, and its neighbour in Queen Anne Street’ – and more in the same vein, as if a catalogue of architectural facts were the most interesting topic in the world. At length, to my relief, Sir George stopped him by saying: ‘That’s all very well, Perrin; but he should not shew so many pictures together. And his skies are too strong, and do not correspond with the other parts.’

  ‘What, then,’ says Perrin, aghast. ‘Do you not think he has merit?’

  ‘He has merit,’ said Sir George, ‘but it is of the wrong sort. There is a perversity about him – he is too rough and unnatural, and neglects the example of the immortal masters, merely for effect. The danger of it is that he may lead others into the same errors, for there’s no denying his seducing skill; and that’s why all men of taste and sense should oppose him.’

  There were red spots on Perrin’s cheeks, and I could see he wanted to take issue with him; but he held his tongue – fearful, no doubt, of losing his own commission. But I was emboldened by Sir George’s words to screw my courage to the sticking-place and ask him, at last, straight out about my Lear – for here was a work built solidly on those very everlasting principles he had just so warmly praised, and – though he had not yet offered an opinion – yet surely he would not have spoken so if he had not meant to approve it?

  He seemed surprised, at first, that I should even mention the matter; but then he stood and gazed at it for a minute or more. At length he said: ‘It is too big, Haste.’

  Too big! – I could scarce believe my ears! I should have been as politic as Perrin, and said nothing; but my indignation was roused, and the words fairly forced themselves from my lips: ‘If you will recall, Sir George, it was you who considered my original plan too small, and asked me to paint it the size of life!’ To which he made no direct response at all, but merely said: ‘I should not have the space for it.’ and left.

  A moment later Perrin put his head back in at the door and said laughing: ‘You must build a gallery to accommodate it.’ And then he was gone again before I could reply.

  Was ever an artist more abused? My rage and despair were so terrible I wanted to dash my own brains out, or take a knife to the picture and cut it to ribbons, but my poor Alice heard the commotion, and restrained me.

  She is an angel in my distress. God bless her, and reward my exertions in spite of all!

  Twenty-three months, and still he had not finished his Lear! However many years must it have taken him? Seldom can a man have laboured so long to so little effect. Or rather, not little – for if it is the picture I saw in the attic, no-one could complain it was too small – but rather unsatisfying. The style is too bombastic – the figures disproportioned – the whole somehow less than the sum of its parts. I do not agree with Sir George Beaumont about Turner, but I can fully understand his reluctance to applaud Lear.

  But why do I not agree with him about Turner? Is it merely our natural inclination to venerate the past? For Beaumont, the ideal was the style of the Old Masters (who doubtless, in their turn, were reviled for flouting the accepted conventions of their time), and anything that diverged from it was seen as ‘error’; while for me, Turner himself is already hallowed by age, and his works seem to glow with a natural beauty entirely lacking in the sickly confections of the present.

  It cannot be wholly that (for otherwise, of course, I should equally admire the Lear); and yet it is undeniably true that I find an enchantment in Haste’s world – a world of Regency bustle and elegance, in which Islington was still a village, and beaux still paraded at Vauxhall – which has not been entirely banished by the knowledge that it was vicious and depraved, and the evidence in Haste’s own journal that it was as full of suffering as our own. Why are we so perverse?

  Wednesday

  Almost ten barren years – barren both for me and for Haste, for there is no reference to Turner, and nothing (save the birth of his son) but debt and failure for him – but at last, in 1813, I find this:

  15th February. Turning into Queen Anne Street met Calcott, who had evidently just emerged from the first house. A plate by the door read: ‘Benjamin Young, dentist’, so I rallied him, saying: ‘What! Have you broken your tooth then on Sir George’s leg?’

  He gave a smile that barely deserved the name and said: ‘That is nearer the mark than you know. No, I am just come from Turner’s.’ And he pointed to a door next to the first, which I had supposed led to the dentist’s mews. ‘That is the entrance to his gallery.’

  ‘I thought it was by the house in Harley Street.’

  ‘He has moved round the corner here, and taken the next house along; and had this door made through the dentist’s, so that people may reach the gallery more easily. Which is a matter of material concern for him at present; for if he is to find purchasers for his work, it is here he must find them.’

  I asked him why; and he replied: ‘Why, because of Sir George Beaumont. He’s so implacably furious with us – with Turner, for leading us all astray, and with me, for being led – that he’s trying to stop people buying our work. Result: neither of us has sold anything at the Academy exhibition for some time now. Last year, he cut me dead at the private view, and deterred Lord Brownlow from taking one of my landscapes. And even Turner, for all his reputation, had difficulty securing a good position for his Hannibal Crossing the Alps.’

  ‘That’, I said, ‘is nothing to do with Sir George. It’s to do with the Hanging Committee’s being a spiteful little cabal, riven with petty jealousies and intrigues.’

  Calcott did not respond – they never do, but merely sulk, for the thought that anything might be the fault of the Academy itself, and not of the patrons and connoisseurs, wounds their pride. He shrugged, and said stiffly: ‘At all events, I am resolved to send nothing in this year, and Turner is minded to do the same.’ And off he went, in a pet.

  Perhaps I should not have spoken so; but I cannot, even now, see a great injustice and not cry out. For what is the proper object of an institution such as the Royal Academy, if not to seek out talent, whereve
r it is to be found, and to encourage it for the glory of art, and the renown of the country? And what does it do instead? It acts as a closed club, whose sole purpose is to promote its own members (when they are not too occupied with fighting each other) – by, for example, appointing one of their number to the position of Professor of Perspective, and then not requiring him to carry out his duties. So are men of genius excluded, and compelled to starve, while their inferiors occupy the places that should by right be theirs.

  Reading that last paragraph, I was struck by how different in tone it seemed from what had gone before, as if Haste had suddenly decided to stop writing his journal and embark on a tract instead. It was little surprise to find, therefore, when I reached the entry for nth November that year: Today began my satire on the Academy’; and, three months later, Today my satire is published. God help it to find its mark.’

  He wrote under an assumed name, a rare piece of discretion for Haste, announcing his aim as ‘the wholesale reform of this corrupt body’. I hope he did not suffer by it; but I know him well enough now to fear that he did.

  Thursday

  A letter from Mrs. Kingsett. Her mother died three days ago. A great blow for her, and – I confess it – a dreadful disappointment for me. My head is full of names that I found in Haste – Calcott, Beaumont, Perrin – and as I read I tantalized myself with the prospect of talking to someone who could speak of them from first-hand experience. And that is quite apart, of course, from what she might have told me of Turner himself.

  But I must not waste pity on myself, when there are others so much more deserving of it. Mrs. Kingsett herself sets me a fine example, for even in her grief (I am touched to find) she thinks of me, and my far smaller loss, saying that I may call next week, and look at Lady Meesden’s letters and papers before they are dispersed or destroyed. I shall go, and be grateful.

  All afternoon and evening with Haste. I have now reached 1827. Nothing more of Turner – nothing at all, in fact, save almost unremitting misery, made only worse by the occasional snippet of praise or promise of a commission, which raises him up just enough to ensure that the inevitable disappointment, when it comes, plunges him into yet deeper despair. He is, of course, discovered as the author of the attack on the Academy, and finds that he has contrived to alienate himself, at a stroke, from almost everybody who could help to further his career. More and more, as the years go by, and one grandiose scheme after another comes to nothing, he sees ‘the great Cabal’, and his own fearless honesty in denouncing it, as the cause of all his troubles.