The Sun.
London, England, 1861-11-23 00:00:00

RUSKIN ON TURNER.

My dear Sir,—Fix at the beginning the following main
characteristic of Turner in your mind as the key to the
secret of all he said and did :

Uprightness,
Generosity,
enderness of heart,
Extreme
Sensuality,
Obstinacy,
Extreme
Irritability,
and be sure that he knew his own power, and felt himself
utterly alone in the world, from its not being understood.
Don't try to mask the dark side. J. RUSKIN.
Encouraged by the certainty that the field was
clear Mr. Thornbury set to work, " letting no day
pass without some search for materials, some noting
of traditions, and some visit to Turner's old friends,
until he had compiled the immense mass of material
upon which his work is founded. The industry
wLth which he has collected and arranged so much
is worthy of high praise, and the skill with which
fidelity to truth is combined with generous ap-
preciation of the man, no less than the
artist, is equally so. It would not be fair
to expect such an undertaking to be fault-
less ' • but there are some trivial errors which
would have been avoided by a more careful revision.
We have several small repetitions, and once we
meet with extraordinary inooneietenoy. In one
place the author says, after enumerating some of
Turner's deficiencies, " I do firmly believe that
though often utterly defective in a sense of form,
Turner was, taking altogether his quantity, imagina-
tion, variety, quality, and originality, the greatest
landscape painter, not only England but the world
ever has, and perhaps ever will, produce." The
italics are Mr. Thornbury's own, who would
seem to take his stand by this opinion. But in his
final summing up of Turner's character, he says,
"I would not encourage rising genius to copy
Turner, but to go and study nature with Turner's
truth, industry, and love. Nor am I at all per-
suaded, by all Mr. Ruskin's eloquence, that Eng-
land has yet seen the greatest of her landscape
painters." How comes Mr. Thornbury to pass
over such a self-contradiction as this ? We are
sorry, too, to observe occasionally an absence of that
magnanimity towards rivals which he is the first to
applaud in a kindred act. We remember having
noticed in a former work something approaching to
spitefulness in the way in which he spoke of living
authors who had displeased him, and in the
present preface we find him mentioning a
painstaking writer of the day with un-
called for acerbity. Mr. Thornbury should
be above such betrayals of temper, and can afford
to be generous to his rivals. The work before us
will probably be one of his greatest successes,
and has evidently been the result of much time,
thought, and labour. In fact his sense of the
greatness of his task has been, in some degree, a
drawback to him, for, at the outset, his style is
inflated and extravagant. As the work proceeds
it tones down, and passages of real eloquence
and pathos supersede strainings after effect, which
remind us of Gilfillan's " Conflagration of Genius."
Before the next edition, which will probably be
soon forthcoming, we should advise Mr. Thorn-
bury to read over carefully the earlier
pages, and reduce them to plainer Eric,-
lish. There is no occasion for him to mount
on stilts, as his style is always clear and
forcible when he allows it to be natural and
easy. The arrangement of the earlier chapters,
too, is not without fault. He goes back to describe
the state of the country at Turner's birth after he
has given us the narrative of his childhood. This
defect might be very easily remedied by a little
transposition. But, notwithstanding any slight
errors of this kind, the work is a success, which
biographies of great men are not always. Mr.
Thornbury has kept himself in the back-ground,
and centred the interest upon his principal figure.
He has shown us how the sordid temper of his

father and the insanity of his mother had evil
influence on Turner's life; how the sense of being
misunderstood and unfairly depreciated both as
man and artist, embittered the naturally hard and
somewhat narrow nature ; how quickly scandal
propagated tales to his disadvantage, and
how injustice was done him in many respects
by reports of his want of kindness and charity.
He cannot, however, deny that Turner was often
rough, uncouth, anduncivil—always close, reserved,
and unsocial. His heart was not warm enough to
remain unsoured by his early disappointment, his
nature not sufficiently expansive to receive un-
scathed the miserly instructions of his parent ; above
all, his mind was not sufficiently elevated " to look
through Nature up to Nature's God"—to reconcile
the inconsistencies of life by the one great solution
—to trace in the mazes of his chequered career the
hand of a guiding Father. We can give credit to
Mr. Thornbury's assertion that, apart fr.
dm his
artistic faculty, Turner's was not a great min , an
cthirecuwmasnttanoefesbeintteerreaesaerdly training
snainatuinragi
daenfd haectusn.
Stillppy
that much that was really great outlived all evil
influences the following anecdotes of Turner's
generosity
will TpUritoNvEe :lt'S KINDNESS.
"When Bird, the son of a Wolverhampton clothier,
about 1811, first sent a picture to the Royal Academy—it
might have been ' Good News,' or ' Choristers Rehears-
o r some other of those early anticipations of Wilkie
and Webster—Turner was one of the ' Hanging Commit-
tee,' as it was opprobriously called. Every one said the
picture of the. new man had great merit, but them was no
place fit for it left unoccupied. Hero was a desirable guest,
but the inn was full. The R. A's joke and talk. Tho
days of chivalry are past. Turner growls, and is disturbed
he says, that come what may, the young man's picture
must have a place. All the others cry impossible,' and
go on talking about other things. All this time he is exa-
mining the picture, right, left, surface, clear-obscure,
touch, colour, character, carefully; he sees' it is good, he
cries out again and hushes the buzz of voices—' We must
find a good place for this young man's picture.' Impos-
sible—impossible,' says the gold spectacles again, and more
oracularly this time than before. Turner said no more, but
quietly removed one of his pic4urPs and hung up Bird's.