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Title: The Harbours of England

Author: John Ruskin

Illustrator: J. M. W. Turner

Release Date: May 23, 2007 [EBook #21591]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Library Edition

THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
JOHN RUSKIN

STONES OF VENICE
VOLUME III

GIOTTO
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
HARBOURS OF ENGLAND
A JOY FOREVER

NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
NEW YORK CHICAGO




THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
JOHN RUSKIN

VOLUME X

GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
THE HARBORS OF ENGLAND
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART
(A JOY FOREVER)




THE HARBORS OF ENGLAND.




CONTENTS.

                           PAGE
   THE HARBORS OF ENGLAND    1
      I. DOVER              34
     II. RAMSGATE           36
    III. PLYMOUTH           38
     IV. CATWATER           40
      V. SHEERNESS          41
     VI. MARGATE            43
    VII. PORTSMOUTH         46
   VIII. FALMOUTH           49
     IX. SIDMOUTH           51
      X. WHITBY             52
     XI. DEAL               54
    XII. SCARBOROUGH        56




EDITOR'S PREFACE.


"Turner's _Harbors of England_," as it is generally called, is a book
which, for various reasons, has never received from readers of Mr.
Ruskin's writings the attention it deserves. True, it has always been
sought after by connoisseurs, and collectors never fail with their
eleven or twelve guineas whenever a set of Artist's Proofs of the First
Edition of 1856 comes into the market. But to the General Reader the
book with its twelve exquisitely delicate mezzotints--four of which Mr.
Ruskin has declared to be among the very finest executed by Turner from
his marine subjects--is practically unknown.

The primary reason for this neglect is not far to seek. Since 1877 no
new edition of the work has been published, and thus it has gradually
passed from public knowledge, though still regarded with lively interest
by those to whom Mr. Ruskin's words--particularly words written in
further unfolding of the subtleties of Turner's art--at all times appeal
so strongly.

In his own preface Mr. Ruskin has told us all that in 1856 it was
necessary to know of the genesis of the _Harbors_. That account may now
be supplemented with the following additional facts. In 1826 Turner (in
conjunction with Lupton, the engraver) projected and commenced a serial
publication entitled _The Ports of England_. But both artist and
engraver lacked the opportunity required to carry the undertaking to a
successful conclusion, and three numbers only were completed. Each of
these contained two engravings. Part I., introducing _Scarborough_ and
_Whitby_, duly appeared in 1826; Part II., with _Dover_ and _Ramsgate_,
in 1827; and in 1828 Part III., containing _Sheerness_ and
_Portsmouth_, closed the series.[A] Twenty-eight years afterwards (that
is, in 1856, five years after Turner's death) these six plates, together
with six new ones, were published by Messrs. E. Gambart & Co., at whose
invitation Mr. Ruskin consented to write the essay on Turner's marine
painting which accompanied them. The book, a handsome folio, appears to
have been immediately successful, for in the following year a second
edition was called for. This was a precise reprint of the 1856 edition;
but, unhappily, the delicate plates already began to exhibit signs of
wear. The copyright (which had not been retained by Mr. Ruskin, but
remained the property of Messrs. E. Gambart & Co.) then passed to
Messrs. Day & Son, who, after producing the third edition of 1859, in
turn disposed of it to Mr. T. J. Allman. Allman issued a fourth edition
in 1872, and then parted with his rights to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.,
who in 1877 brought out the fifth, and, until now, last edition. Since
that date the work has been out of print, and has remained practically
inaccessible to the ordinary reader.

    [A] To ornament the covers of these parts, Turner designed a
    vignette, which was printed upon the center of the front wrapper of
    each. As _The Ports of England_ is an exceptionally scarce book, and
    as the vignette can be obtained in no other form, a facsimile of it
    is here given. The original drawing was presented by Mr. Ruskin to
    the Fitz-William Museum, at Cambridge, where it may now be seen.

It is matter for congratulation that at length means have been found to
bring _The Harbors of England_ once more into currency, and to issue the
book through Mr. George Allen at a price which will place it within the
reach of the reading public at large.

The last edition of 1877, with its worn and "retouched" plates,[B] was
published at twenty-five shillings; less than a third of that sum will
suffice to procure a copy of this new issue in which the prints (save
for their reduced size) more nearly approach the clearness and beauty of
the originals of 1856 than any of the three editions which have
immediately preceded it.

    [B] By this time (1877) the plates had become considerably worn, and
    were accordingly "retouched" by Mr. Chas. A. Tomkins. But such
    retouching proved worse than useless. The delicacy of the finer work
    had entirely vanished, and the plates remained but a ghost of their
    former selves, such as no one would recognize as doing justice to
    Turner. The fifth is unquestionably the least satisfactory of the
    five original editions containing Lupton's engravings.

I have before me the following interesting letter addressed by Mr.
Ruskin's father to Mr. W. Smith Williams, for many years literary
adviser to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.:--

     "CHAMOUNI, _August 4th, 1856._

     "MY DEAR SIR,--I hear that in _The Athenaeum_ of 26th July there is
     a good article on my son's _Harbors of England_, and I should be
     greatly obliged by Mr. Gordon Smith sending me that number....

     "The history of this book, I believe, I told you. Gambart, the
     French publisher and picture dealer, said some 18 months ago that
     he was going to put out 12 Turner plates, never published, of
     English Harbors, and he would give my son two good Turner drawings
     for a few pages of text to illustrate them.[C] John agreed, and
     wrote the text, when poorly in the spring of 1855, at Tunbridge
     Wells; and it seems the work has just come out. It was in my
     opinion an extremely well done thing, and more likely, as far as it
     went, if not to be extremely popular, at least to be received
     without cavil than anything he had written. If there is a very
     favorable review in _The Athenaeum_ ... it may tend to disarm the
     critics, and partly influence opinion of his larger works....--With
     our united kind regards,

     "Yours very truly,
     "JOHN JAMES RUSKIN."

    [C] Mr. E. Gambart (who is still living) states that, to the best of
    his recollection, he paid Mr. Ruskin 150 guineas for his work.
    Probably this was the price originally agreed upon, the two Turner
    drawings being ultimately accepted as a more welcome and appropriate
    form of remuneration.

In all save one particular the Text here given follows precisely that of
the previous issues. It has been the good fortune of the present Editor
to be able to restore a characteristic passage suppressed from motives
of prudence when the work was originally planned.[D] The proof-sheets of
the first edition, worked upon by Mr. Ruskin, were given by him to his
old nurse Anne.[E] She, fortunately, carefully preserved them, and in
turn gave them to Mr. Allen, some ten years before he became Mr.
Ruskin's publisher. These proofs had been submitted as they came from
the press to Mr. W. H. Harrison (well known to readers of _On the Old
Road_, etc., as "My First Editor"), who marked them freely with notes
and suggestions. To one passage he appears to have taken so decided an
objection that its author was prevailed upon to delete it. But, whilst
deferring thus to the judgment of others, and consenting to remove a
sentence which he doubtless regarded with particular satisfaction as
expressing a decided opinion upon a favorite picture, Mr. Ruskin
indulged in one of those pleasantries which now and again we observe in
his informal letters, though seldom, if ever, in his serious writings.
In the margin, below the canceled passage, he wrote boldly: "_Sacrificed
to the Muse of Prudence. J. R._"[F]

    [D] See _post_, p. 19.

    [E] See _Praeterita_. She died March 30th, 1871.

    [F] The accompanying illustration is a facsimile of the portion of
    the proof-sheet described above--slightly reduced to fit the smaller
    page.

That Mr. Harrison was justified in raising objection to this "moderate
estimate" of Turner's picture will, I think, be readily allowed. In
those days Mr. Ruskin's influence was, comparatively speaking, small;
and the expression of an opinion which heaped praise upon the single
painting of a partially understood painter at the expense of a great and
popular institution would only have served to arouse opposition, and
possibly to attract ridicule. It is different to-day. We know the keen
enthusiasm of the author of _The Seven Lamps_, and have seen again and
again how he expresses himself in terms of somewhat exaggerated
admiration when writing of a painter whom he appreciates, or a picture
that he loves. To us this enthusiasm is an attractive characteristic. It
has never been permitted to distort the vision or cloud the critical
faculty; and we follow the teaching of the Master all the more closely
because we feel his fervor, and know how completely he becomes possessed
with a subject which appeals to his imagination or his heart. I have
therefore not scrupled to revive the words which he consented to
immolate at the shrine of Prudence.

It is not my province here to enter into any criticism of the pages
which follow; but, for the benefit of those who are not versed in the
minutiae of Shelleyan topics, a word may be said regarding Mr. Ruskin's
reference[G] to the poet who met his death in the Bay of Spezzia. The
_Don Juan_ was no "traitorous" craft. Fuller and more authentic
information is to hand now than the meager facts at the disposal of a
writer in 1856; and we know that the greed of man, and not the lack of
sea-worthiness in his tiny vessel, caused Percy Shelley to

         "... Suffer a sea change
    Into something rich and strange."

    [G] See _post_, p. 3.

There is, unhappily, no longer any room for doubt that the _Don Juan_
was willfully run down by a felucca whose crew coveted the considerable
sum of money they believed Byron to have placed on board, and cared
nothing for the sacrifice of human life in their eagerness to seize the
gold.

The twelve engravings, to which reference has already been made, have
been reproduced by the photogravure process from a selected set of early
examples; and, in addition, the plates so prepared have been carefully
worked upon by Mr. Allen himself. It will thus be apparent that
everything possible has been done to produce a worthy edition of a
worthy book, and to place in the hands of the public what to the present
generation of readers is tantamount to a new work from a pen
which--alas!--has now for so long a time been still.

THOMAS J. WISE.




AUTHOR'S ORIGINAL PREFACE.


Among the many peculiarities which distinguished the late J. M. W.
Turner from other landscape painters, not the least notable, in my
apprehension, were his earnest desire to arrange his works in connected
groups, and his evident intention, with respect to each drawing, that it
should be considered as expressing part of a continuous system of
thought. The practical result of this feeling was that he commenced many
series of drawings,--and, if any accident interfered with the
continuation of the work, hastily concluded them,--under titles
representing rather the relation which the executed designs bore to the
materials accumulated in his own mind, than the position which they
could justifiably claim when contemplated by others. The _River Scenery_
was closed without a single drawing of a rapidly running stream; and the
prints of his annual tours were assembled, under the title of the
_Rivers of France_, without including a single illustration either of
the Rhone or the Garonne.

The title under which the following plates are now presented to the
public, is retained merely out of respect to this habit of Turner's.
Under that title he commenced the publication, and executed the vignette
for its title-page, intending doubtless to make it worthy of taking rank
with, if not far above, the consistent and extensive series of the
_Southern Coast_, executed in his earlier years. But procrastination and
accident equally interfered with his purpose. The excellent engraver Mr.
Lupton, in co-operation with whom the work was undertaken, was
unfortunately also a man of genius, and seems to have been just as
capricious as Turner himself in the application of his powers to the
matter in hand. Had one of the parties in the arrangement been a mere
plodding man of business, the work would have proceeded; but between the
two men of talent it came very naturally to a stand. They petted each
other by reciprocal indulgence of delay; and at Turner's death, the
series, so magnificently announced under the title of the _Harbors of
England_, consisted only of twelve plates, all the less worthy of their
high-sounding title in that, while they included illustrations of some
of the least important of the watering-places, they did not include any
illustration whatever of such harbors of England as Liverpool, Shields,
Yarmouth, or Bristol. Such as they were, however, I was requested to
undertake their illustration. As the offer was made at a moment when
much nonsense, in various forms, was being written about Turner and his
works; and among the twelve plates there were four[H] which I considered
among the very finest that had been executed from his marine subjects, I
accepted the trust; partly to prevent the really valuable series of
engravings from being treated with injustice, and partly because there
were several features in them by which I could render more intelligible
some remarks I wished to make on Turner's marine painting in general.

    [H] Portsmouth, Sheerness, Scarborough, and Whitby.

These remarks, therefore, I have thrown together, in a connected form;
less with a view to the illustration of these particular plates, than of
the general system of ship-painting which was characteristic of the
great artist. I have afterwards separately noted the points which seemed
to me most deserving of attention in the plates themselves.

Of archaeological information the reader will find none. The designs
themselves are, in most instances, little more than spirited sea-pieces,
with such indistinct suggestion of local features in the distance as may
justify the name given to the subject; but even when, as in the case of
the Dover and Portsmouth, there is something approaching topographical
detail, I have not considered it necessary to lead the reader into
inquiries which certainly Turner himself never thought of; nor do I
suppose it would materially add to the interest of these cloud distances
or rolling seas, if I had the time--which I have not--to collect the
most complete information respecting the raising of Prospect Rows, and
the establishment of circulating libraries.

DENMARK HILL.
[1856.]




THE HARBORS OF ENGLAND.


Of all things, living or lifeless, upon this strange earth, there is but
one which, having reached the mid-term of appointed human endurance on
it, I still regard with unmitigated amazement. I know, indeed, that all
around me is wonderful--but I cannot answer it with wonder:--a dark
veil, with the foolish words, NATURE OF THINGS, upon it, casts its
deadening folds between me and their dazzling strangeness. Flowers open,
and stars rise, and it seems to me they could have done no less. The
mystery of distant mountain-blue only makes me reflect that the earth is
of necessity mountainous;--the sea-wave breaks at my feet, and I do not
see how it should have remained unbroken. But one object there is still,
which I never pass without the renewed wonder of childhood, and that is
the bow of a Boat. Not of a racing-wherry, or revenue cutter, or clipper
yacht; but the blunt head of a common, bluff, undecked sea-boat, lying
aside in its furrow of beach sand. The sum of Navigation is in that. You
may magnify it or decorate as you will: you do not add to the wonder of
it. Lengthen it into hatchet-like edge of iron,--strengthen it with
complex tracery of ribs of oak,--carve it and gild it till a column of
light moves beneath it on the sea,--you have made no more of it than it
was at first. That rude simplicity of bent plank, that can breast its
way through the death that is in the deep sea, has in it the soul of
shipping. Beyond this, we may have more work, more men, more money; we
cannot have more miracle.

For there is, first, an infinite strangeness in the perfection of the
thing, as work of human hands. I know nothing else that man does, which
is perfect, but that. All his other doings have some sign of weakness,
affectation, or ignorance in them. They are overfinished or
underfinished; they do not quite answer their end, or they show a mean
vanity in answering it too well.

But the boat's bow is naively perfect: complete without an effort. The
man who made it knew not he was making anything beautiful, as he bent
its planks into those mysterious, ever-changing curves. It grows under
his hand into the image of a sea-shell; the seal, as it were, of the
flowing of the great tides and streams of ocean stamped on its delicate
rounding. He leaves it when all is done, without a boast. It is simple
work, but it will keep out water. And every plank thence-forward is a
Fate, and has men's lives wreathed in the knots of it, as the cloth-yard
shaft had their deaths in its plumes.

Then, also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the thing
accomplished. No other work of human hands ever gained so much.
Steam-engines and telegraphs indeed help us to fetch, and carry, and
talk; they lift weights for us, and bring messages, with less trouble
than would have been needed otherwise; this saving of trouble, however,
does not constitute a new faculty, it only enhances the powers we
already possess. But in that bow of the boat is the gift of another
world. Without it, what prison wall would be so strong as that "white
and wailing fringe" of sea. What maimed creatures were we all, chained
to our rocks, Andromeda-like, or wandering by the endless shores;
wasting our incommunicable strength, and pining in hopeless watch of
unconquerable waves? The nails that fasten together the planks of the
boat's bow are the rivets of the fellowship of the world. Their iron
does more than draw lightning out of heaven, it leads love round the
earth.

Then also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the enemy that
it does battle with. To lift dead weight; to overcome length of languid
space; to multiply or systematize a given force; this we may see done by
the bar, or beam, or wheel, without wonder. But to war with that living
fury of waters, to bare its breast, moment after moment, against the
unwearied enmity of ocean,--the subtle, fitful, implacable smiting of
the black waves, provoking each other on, endlessly, all the infinite
march of the Atlantic rolling on behind them to their help,--and still
to strike them back into a wreath of smoke and futile foam, and win its
way against them, and keep its charge of life from them;--does any other
soulless thing do as much as this?

I should not have talked of this feeling of mine about a boat, if I had
thought it was mine only; but I believe it to be common to all of us who
are not seamen. With the seaman, wonder changes into fellowship and
close affection; but to all landsmen, from youth upwards, the boat
remains a piece of enchantment; at least unless we entangle our vanity
in it, and refine it away into mere lath, giving up all its protective
nobleness for pace. With those in whose eyes the perfection of a boat is
swift fragility, I have no sympathy. The glory of a boat is, first its
steadiness of poise--its assured standing on the clear softness of the
abyss; and, after that, so much capacity of progress by oar or sail as
shall be consistent with this defiance of the treachery of the sea. And,
this being understood, it is very notable how commonly the poets,
creating for themselves an ideal of motion, fasten upon the charm of a
boat. They do not usually express any desire for wings, or, if they do,
it is only in some vague and half-unintended phrase, such as "flit or
soar," involving wingedness. Seriously, they are evidently content to
let the wings belong to Horse, or Muse, or Angel, rather than to
themselves; but they all, somehow or other, express an honest wish for a
Spiritual Boat. I will not dwell on poor Shelley's paper navies, and
seas of quicksilver, lest we should begin to think evil of boats in
general because of that traitorous one in Spezzia Bay; but it is a
triumph to find the pastorally minded Wordsworth imagine no other way of
visiting the stars than in a boat "no bigger than the crescent moon";[I]
and to find Tennyson--although his boating, in an ordinary way, has a
very marshy and punt-like character--at last, in his highest
inspiration, enter in where the wind began "to sweep a music out of
sheet and shroud."[J] But the chief triumph of all is in Dante. He had
known all manner of traveling; had been borne through vacancy on the
shoulders of chimeras, and lifted through upper heaven in the grasp of
its spirits; but yet I do not remember that he ever expresses any
positive _wish_ on such matters, except for a boat.

    [I] Prologue to _Peter Bell_.

    [J] _In Memoriam_, ci.

    "Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou, and I,
      Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend
      A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly
      With winds at will where'er our thoughts might wend,
    So that no change nor any evil chance
      Should mar our joyous voyage; but it might be
      That even satiety should still enhance
      Between our souls their strict community:
    And that the bounteous wizard then would place
      Vanna and Bice, and our Lapo's love,
      Companions of our wandering, and would grace
    With passionate talk, wherever we might rove,
    Our time, and each were as content and free
    As I believe that thou and I should be."

And of all the descriptions of motion in the _Divina Commedia_, I do not
think there is another quite so fine as that in which Dante has
glorified the old fable of Charon by giving a boat also to the bright
sea which surrounds the mountain of Purgatory, bearing the redeemed
souls to their place of trial; only an angel is now the pilot, and there
is no stroke of laboring oar, for his wings are the sails.

                          "My preceptor silent yet
    Stood, while the brightness that we first discerned
    Opened the form of wings: then, when he knew
    The pilot, cried aloud, 'Down, down; bend low
    Thy knees; behold God's angel: fold thy hands:
    Now shalt thou see true ministers indeed.
    Lo! how all human means he sets at nought;
    So that nor oar he needs, nor other sail
    Except his wings, between such distant shores.
    Lo! how straight up to heaven he holds them reared,
    Winnowing the air with those eternal plumes,
    That not like mortal hairs fall off or change.'

      "As more and more toward us came, more bright
    Appeared the bird of God, nor could the eye
    Endure his splendor near: I mine bent down.
    He drove ashore in a small bark so swift
    And light, that in its course no wave it drank.
    The heavenly steersman at the prow was seen,
    Visibly written blessed in his looks.
    Within, a hundred spirits and more there sat."

I have given this passage at length, because it seems to me that Dante's
most inventive adaptation of the fable of Charon to Heaven has not been
regarded with the interest that it really deserves; and because, also,
it is a description that should be remembered by every traveler when
first he sees the white fork of the felucca sail shining on the Southern
Sea. Not that Dante had ever seen such sails;[K] his thought was utterly
irrespective of the form of canvas in any ship of the period; but it is
well to be able to attach this happy image to those felucca sails, as
they now float white and soft above the blue glowing of the bays of
Adria. Nor are other images wanting in them. Seen far away on the
horizon, the Neapolitan felucca has all the aspect of some strange bird
stooping out of the air and just striking the water with its claws;
while the Venetian, when its painted sails are at full swell in
sunshine, is as beautiful as a butterfly with its wings half-closed.[L]
There is something also in them that might remind us of the variegated
and spotted angel wings of Orcagna, only the Venetian sail never looks
majestic; it is too quaint and strange, yet with no peacock's pride or
vulgar gayety,--nothing of Milton's Dalilah:

    "So bedecked, ornate and gay
    Like a stately ship
    Of Tarsus, bound for the Isles
    Of Javan or Gadire
    With all her bravery on and tackle trim,
    Sails filled and streamers waving."

That description could only have been written in a time of vulgar women
and vulgar vessels. The utmost vanity of dress in a woman of the
fourteenth century would have given no image of "sails filled or
streamers waving"; nor does the look or action of a really "stately"
ship ever suggest any image of the motion of a weak or vain woman. The
beauties of the Court of Charles II., and the gilded galleys of the
Thames, might fitly be compared; but the pomp of the Venetian
fisher-boat is like neither. The sail seems dyed in its fullness by the
sunshine, as the rainbow dyes a cloud; the rich stains upon it fade and
reappear, as its folds swell or fall; worn with the Adrian storms, its
rough woof has a kind of noble dimness upon it, and its colors seem as
grave, inherent, and free from vanity as the spots of the leopard, or
veins of the seashell.

    [K] I am not quite sure of this, not having studied with any care
    the forms of mediaeval shipping; but in all the MSS. I have examined
    the sails of the shipping represented are square.

    [L] It is not a little strange that in all the innumerable paintings
    of Venice, old and modern, no notice whatever had been taken of
    these sails, though they are _exactly_ the most striking features of
    the marine scenery around the city, until Turner fastened upon them,
    painting one important picture, "The Sun of Venice," entirely in
    their illustration.

Yet, in speaking of poets' love of boats, I ought to have limited the
love to _modern_ poets; Dante, in this respect, as in nearly every
other, being far in advance of his age. It is not often that I
congratulate myself upon the days in which I happen to live; but I do so
in this respect, that, compared with every other period of the world,
this nineteenth century (or rather, the period between 1750 and 1850)
may not improperly be called the Age of Boats; while the classic and
chivalric times, in which boats were partly dreaded, partly despised,
may respectively be characterized, with regard to their means of
locomotion, as the Age of Chariots, and the Age of Horses.

For, whatever perfection and costliness there may be in the present
decorations, harnessing, and horsing of any English or Parisian wheel
equipage, I apprehend that we can from none of them form any high ideal
of wheel conveyance; and that unless we had seen an Egyptian king
bending his bow with his horses at the gallop, or a Greek knight leaning
with his poised lance over the shoulder of his charioteer, we have no
right to consider ourselves as thoroughly knowing what the word
"chariot," in its noblest acceptation, means.

So, also, though much chivalry is yet left in us, and we English still
know several things about horses, I believe that if we had seen
Charlemagne and Roland ride out hunting from Aix, or Coeur de Lion trot
into camp on a sunny evening at Ascalon, or a Florentine lady canter
down the Val d'Arno in Dante's time, with her hawk on her wrist, we
should have had some other ideas even about horses than the best we can
have now. But most assuredly, nothing that ever swung at the quay sides
of Carthage, or glowed with crusaders' shields above the bays of Syria,
could give to any contemporary human creature such an idea of the
meaning of the word Boat, as may be now gained by any mortal happy
enough to behold as much as a Newcastle collier beating against the
wind. In the classical period, indeed, there was some importance given
to shipping as the means of locking a battle-field together on the
waves; but in the chivalric period, the whole mind of man is withdrawn
from the sea, regarding it merely as a treacherous impediment, over
which it was necessary sometimes to find conveyance, but from which the
thoughts were always turned impatiently, fixing themselves in green
fields, and pleasures that may be enjoyed by land--the very supremacy of
the horse necessitating the scorn of the sea, which would not be trodden
by hoofs.

It is very interesting to note how repugnant every oceanic idea appears
to be to the whole nature of our principal English mediaeval poet,
Chaucer. Read first the Man of Lawe's Tale, in which the Lady Constance
is continually floated up and down the Mediterranean, and the German
Ocean, in a ship by herself; carried from Syria all the way to
Northumberland, and there wrecked upon the coast; thence yet again
driven up and down among the waves for five years, she and her child;
and yet, all this while, Chaucer does not let fall a single word
descriptive of the sea, or express any emotion whatever about it, or
about the ship. He simply tells us the lady sailed here and was wrecked
there; but neither he nor his audience appear to be capable of receiving
any sensation, but one of simple aversion, from waves, ships, or sands.
Compare with his absolutely apathetic recital, the description by a
modern poet of the sailing of a vessel, charged with the fate of another
Constance:

    "It curled not Tweed alone, that breeze--
    For far upon Northumbrian seas
      It freshly blew, and strong;
    Where from high Whitby's cloistered pile,
    Bound to St. Cuthbert's holy isle,
      It bore a bark along.
    Upon the gale she stooped her side,
    And bounded o'er the swelling tide
      As she were dancing home.
    The merry seamen laughed to see
    Their gallant ship so lustily
      Furrow the green sea foam."

Now just as Scott enjoys this sea breeze, so does Chaucer the soft air
of the woods; the moment the older poet lands, he is himself again, his
poverty of language in speaking of the ship is not because he despises
description, but because he has nothing to describe. Hear him upon the
ground in Spring:

    "These woodes else recoveren greene,
    That drie in winter ben to sene,
    And the erth waxeth proud withall,
    For sweet dewes that on it fall,
    And the poore estate forget,
    In which that winter had it set:
    And then becomes the ground so proude,
    That it wol have a newe shroude,
    And maketh so queint his robe and faire,
    That it had hewes an hundred paire,
    Of grasse and floures, of Inde and Pers,
    And many hewes full divers:
    That is the robe I mean ywis
    Through which the ground to praisen is."

In like manner, wherever throughout his poems we find Chaucer
enthusiastic, it is on a sunny day in the "good green-wood," but the
slightest approach to the sea-shore makes him shiver; and his antipathy
finds at last positive expression, and becomes the principal foundation
of the Frankeleine's Tale, in which a lady, waiting for her husband's
return in a castle by the sea, behaves and expresses herself as
follows:--

      "Another time wold she sit and thinke,
    And cast her eyen dounward fro the brinke;
    But whan she saw the grisly rockes blake,
    For veray fere so wold hire herte quake
    That on hire feet she might hire not sustene
    Than wold she sit adoun upon the grene,
    And pitously into the see behold,
    And say right thus, with careful sighes cold.
      'Eterne God, that thurgh thy purveance
    Ledest this world by certain governance,
    In idel, as men sain, ye nothing make.
    _But, lord, thise grisly fendly rockes blake,
    That semen rather a foule confusion
    Of werk, than any faire creation_
    Of swiche a parfit wise God and stable,
    Why han ye wrought this werk unresonable?'"

The desire to have the rocks out of her way is indeed severely punished
in the sequel of the tale; but it is not the less characteristic of the
age, and well worth meditating upon, in comparison with the feelings of
an unsophisticated modern French or English girl among the black rocks
of Dieppe or Ramsgate.

On the other hand, much might be said about that peculiar love of _green
fields and birds_ in the Middle Ages; and of all with which it is
connected, purity and health in manners and heart, as opposed to the
too frequent condition of the modern mind--

      "As for the birds in the thicket,
    Thrush or ousel in leafy niche,
    Linnet or finch--she was far too rich
    To care for a morning concert to which
      She was welcome, without a ticket."[M]

    [M] Thomas Hood.

But this would lead us far afield, and the main fact I have to point out
to the reader is the transition of human grace and strength from the
exercises of the land to those of the sea in the course of the last
three centuries.

Down to Elizabeth's time chivalry lasted; and grace of dress and mien,
and all else that was connected with chivalry. Then came the ages which,
when they have taken their due place in the depths of the past, will be,
by a wise and clear-sighted futurity, perhaps well comprehended under a
common name, as the ages of Starch; periods of general stiffening and
bluish-whitening, with a prevailing washerwoman's taste in everything;
involving a change of steel armor into cambric; of natural hair into
peruke; of natural walking into that which will disarrange no
wristbands; of plain language into quips and embroideries; and of human
life in general, from a green race-course, where to be defeated was at
worst only to fall behind and recover breath, into a slippery pole, to
be climbed with toil and contortion, and in clinging to which, each
man's foot is on his neighbor's head.

But, meanwhile, the marine deities were incorruptible. It was not
possible to starch the sea; and precisely as the stiffness fastened upon
men, it vanished from ships. What had once been a mere raft, with rows
of formal benches, pushed along by laborious flap of oars, and with
infinite fluttering of flags and swelling of poops above, gradually
began to lean more heavily into the deep water, to sustain a gloomy
weight of guns, to draw back its spider-like feebleness of limb, and
open its bosom to the wind, and finally darkened down from all its
painted vanities into the long, low hull, familiar with the overflying
foam; that has no other pride but in its daily duty and victory; while,
through all these changes, it gained continually in grace, strength,
audacity, and beauty, until at last it has reached such a pitch of all
these, that there is not, except the very loveliest creatures of the
living world, anything in nature so absolutely notable, bewitching, and,
according to its means and measure, heart-occupying, as a well-handled
ship under sail in a stormy day. Any ship, from lowest to proudest, has
due place in that architecture of the sea; beautiful, not so much in
this or that piece of it, as in the unity of all, from cottage to
cathedral, into their great buoyant dynasty. Yet, among them, the
fisher-boat, corresponding to the cottage on the land (only far more
sublime than a cottage ever can be), is on the whole the thing most
venerable. I doubt if ever academic grove were half so fit for
profitable meditation as the little strip of shingle between two black,
steep, overhanging sides of stranded fishing-boats. The clear, heavy
water-edge of ocean rising and falling close to their bows, in that
unaccountable way which the sea has always in calm weather, turning the
pebbles over and over as if with a rake, to look for something, and then
stopping a moment down at the bottom of the bank, and coming up again
with a little run and clash, throwing a foot's depth of salt crystal in
an instant between you and the round stone you were going to take in
your hand; sighing, all the while, as if it would infinitely rather be
doing something else. And the dark flanks of the fishing-boats all
aslope above, in their shining quietness, hot in the morning sun, rusty
and seamed with square patches of plank nailed over their rents; just
rough enough to let the little flat-footed fisher-children haul or twist
themselves up to the gunwales, and drop back again along some stray
rope; just round enough to remind us, in their broad and gradual curves,
of the sweep of the green surges they know so well, and of the hours
when those old sides of seared timber, all ashine with the sea, plunge
and dip into the deep green purity of the mounded waves more joyfully
than a deer lies down among the grass of spring, the soft white cloud of
foam opening momentarily at the bows, and fading or flying high into the
breeze where the sea-gulls toss and shriek,--the joy and beauty of it,
all the while, so mingled with the sense of unfathomable danger, and the
human effort and sorrow going on perpetually from age to age, waves
rolling forever, and winds moaning forever, and faithful hearts trusting
and sickening forever, and brave lives dashed away about the rattling
beach like weeds forever; and still at the helm of every lonely boat,
through starless night and hopeless dawn, His hand, who spread the
fisher's net over the dust of the Sidonian palaces, and gave into the
fisher's hand the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

Next after the fishing-boat--which, as I said, in the architecture of
the sea represents the cottage, more especially the pastoral or
agricultural cottage, watchful over some pathless domain of moorland or
arable, as the fishing-boat swims, humbly in the midst of the broad
green fields and hills of ocean, out of which it has to win such fruit
as they can give, and to compass with net or drag such flocks as it may
find,--next to this ocean-cottage ranks in interest, it seems to me, the
small, over-wrought, under-crewed, ill-caulked merchant brig or
schooner; the kind of ship which first shows its couple of thin masts
over the low fields or marshes as we near any third-rate sea-port; and
which is sure somewhere to stud the great space of glittering water,
seen from any sea-cliff, with its four or five square-set sails. Of the
larger and more polite tribes of merchant vessels, three-masted, and
passenger-carrying, I have nothing to say, feeling in general little
sympathy with people who want to _go_ anywhere; nor caring much about
anything, which in the essence of it expresses a desire to get to other
sides of the world; but only for homely and stay-at-home ships, that
live their life and die their death about English rocks. Neither have I
any interest in the higher branches of commerce, such as traffic with
spice islands, and porterage of painted tea-chests or carved ivory; for
all this seems to me to fall under the head of commerce of the
drawing-room; costly, but not venerable. I respect in the merchant
service only those ships that carry coals, herrings, salt, timber, iron,
and such other commodities, and that have disagreeable odor, and
unwashed decks. But there are few things more impressive to me than one
of these ships lying up against some lonely quay in a black sea-fog,
with the furrow traced under its tawny keel far in the harbor slime. The
noble misery that there is in it, the might of its rent and strained
unseemliness, its wave-worn melancholy, resting there for a little while
in the comfortless ebb, unpitied, and claiming no pity; still less
honored, least of all conscious of any claim to honor; casting and
craning by due balance whatever is in its hold up to the pier, in quiet
truth of time; spinning of wheel, and slackening of rope, and swinging
of spade, in as accurate cadence as a waltz music; one or two of its
crew, perhaps, away forward, and a hungry boy and yelping dog eagerly
interested in something from which a blue dull smoke rises out of pot or
pan; but dark-browed and silent, their limbs slack, like the ropes above
them, entangled as they are in those inextricable meshes about the
patched knots and heaps of ill-reefed sable sail. What a majestic sense
of service in all that languor! the rest of human limbs and hearts, at
utter need, not in sweet meadows or soft air, but in harbor slime and
biting fog; so drawing their breath once more, to go out again, without
lament, from between the two skeletons of pier-heads, vocal with wash of
under wave, into the gray troughs of tumbling brine; there, as they can,
with slacked rope, and patched sail, and leaky hull, again to roll and
stagger far away amidst the wind and salt sleet, from dawn to dusk and
dusk to dawn, winning day by day their daily bread; and for last reward,
when their old hands, on some winter night, lose feeling along the
frozen ropes, and their old eyes miss mark of the lighthouse quenched in
foam, the so-long impossible Rest, that shall hunger no more, neither
thirst any more,--their eyes and mouths filled with the brown sea-sand.

After these most venerable, to my mind, of all ships, properly so
styled, I find nothing of comparable interest in any floating fabric
until we come to the great achievement of the 19th century. For one
thing this century will in after ages be considered to have done in a
superb manner, and one thing, I think, only. It has not distinguished
itself in political spheres; still less in artistical. It has produced
no golden age by its Reason; neither does it appear eminent for the
constancy of its Faith. Its telescopes and telegraphs would be
creditable to it, if it had not in their pursuit forgotten in great part
how to see clearly with its eyes, and to talk honestly with its tongue.
Its natural history might have been creditable to it also, if it could
have conquered its habit of considering natural history to be mainly the
art of writing Latin names on white tickets. But, as it is, none of
these things will be hereafter considered to have been got on with by us
as well as might be; whereas it will always be said of us, with unabated
reverence,

"THEY BUILT SHIPS OF THE LINE."

Take it all in all, a Ship of the Line is the most honorable thing that
man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced. By himself, unhelped, he
can do better things than ships of the line; he can make poems and
pictures, and other such concentrations of what is best in him. But as a
being living in flocks, and hammering out, with alternate strokes and
mutual agreement, what is necessary for him in those flocks, to get or
produce, the ship of the line is his first work. Into that he has put as
much of his human patience, common sense, forethought, experimental
philosophy, self-control, habits of order and obedience, thoroughly
wrought handwork, defiance of brute elements, careless courage, careful
patriotism, and calm expectation of the judgment of God, as can well be
put into a space of 300 feet long by 80 broad. And I am thankful to have
lived in an age when I could see this thing so done.

Considering, then, our shipping, under the three principal types of
fishing-boat, collier, and ship of the line, as the great glory of this
age; and the "New Forest" of mast and yard that follows the windings of
the Thames, to be, take it all in all, a more majestic scene, I don't
say merely than any of our streets or palaces as they now are, but even
than the best that streets and palaces can generally be; it has often
been a matter of serious thought to me how far this chiefly substantial
thing done by the nation ought to be represented by the art of the
nation; how far our great artists ought seriously to devote themselves
to such perfect painting of our ships as should reveal to later
generations--lost perhaps in clouds of steam and floating troughs of
ashes--the aspect of an ancient ship of battle under sail.

To which, I fear, the answer must be sternly this: That no great art
ever was, or can be, employed in the careful imitation of the work of
man as its principal subject. That is to say, art will not bear to be
reduplicated. A ship is a noble thing, and a cathedral a noble thing,
but a painted ship or a painted cathedral is not a noble thing. Art
which reduplicates art is necessarily second-rate art. I know no
principle more irrefragably authoritative than that which I had long ago
occasion to express: "All noble art is the expression of man's delight
in God's work; not in his own."

"How!" it will be asked, "Are Stanfield, Isabey, and Prout necessarily
artists of the second order because they paint ships and buildings
instead of trees and clouds?" Yes, necessarily of the second order; so
far as they paint ships rather than sea, and so far as they paint
buildings rather than the natural light, and color, and work of years
upon those buildings. For, in this respect, a ruined building is a noble
subject, just as far as man's work has therein been subdued by nature's;
and Stanfield's chief dignity is his being a painter less of shipping
than of the seal of time or decay upon shipping.[N] For a wrecked ship,
or shattered boat, is a noble subject, while a ship in full sail, or a
perfect boat, is an ignoble one; not merely because the one is by
reason of its ruin more picturesque than the other, but because it is a
nobler act in man to meditate upon Fate as it conquers his work, than
upon that work itself.

    [N] As in the very beautiful picture of this year's Academy, "The
    Abandoned."

Shipping, therefore, in its perfection, never can become the subject of
noble art; and that just because to represent it in its perfection would
tax the powers of art to the utmost. If a great painter could rest in
drawing a ship, as he can rest in drawing a piece of drapery, we might
sometimes see vessels introduced by the noblest workmen, and treated by
them with as much delight as they would show in scattering luster over
an embroidered dress, or knitting the links of a coat of mail. But ships
cannot be drawn at times of rest. More complicated in their anatomy than
the human frame itself, so far as that frame is outwardly discernible;
liable to all kinds of strange accidental variety in position and
movement, yet in each position subject to imperative laws which can only
be followed by unerring knowledge; and involving, in the roundings and
foldings of sail and hull, delicacies of drawing greater than exist in
any other inorganic object, except perhaps a snow wreath,[O]--they
present, irrespective of sea or sky, or anything else around them,
difficulties which could only be vanquished by draughtsmanship quite
accomplished enough to render even the subtlest lines of the human face
and form. But the artist who has once attained such skill as this will
not devote it to the drawing of ships. He who can paint the face of St.
Paul will not elaborate the parting timbers of the vessel in which he is
wrecked; and he who can represent the astonishment of the apostles at
the miraculous draught will not be solicitous about accurately showing
that their boat is overloaded.

    [O] The catenary and other curves of tension which a sail assumes
    under the united influence of the wind, its own weight, and the
    particular tensions of the various ropes by which it is attached, or
    against which it presses, show at any moment complexities of
    arrangement to which fidelity, except after the study of a lifetime,
    is impossible.

"What!" it will perhaps be replied, "have, then, ships never been
painted perfectly yet, even by the men who have devoted most attention
to them?" Assuredly not. A ship never yet has been painted at all, in
any other sense than men have been painted in "Landscapes with figures."
Things have been painted which have a general effect of ships, just as
things have been painted which have a general effect of shepherds or
banditti; but the best average ship-painting no more reaches the truth
of ships than the equestrian troops in one of Van der Meulen's
battle-pieces express the higher truths of humanity.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.]

Take a single instance. I do not know any work in which, on the whole,
there is a more unaffected love of ships for their own sake, and a
fresher feeling of sea breeze always blowing, than Stanfield's "Coast
Scenery." Now, let the reader take up that book, and look through all
the plates of it at the way in which the most important parts of a
ship's skeleton are drawn, those most wonderful junctions of mast with
mast, corresponding to the knee or hip in the human frame, technically
known as "Tops." Under its very simplest form, in one of those poor
collier brigs, which I have above endeavored to recommend to the readers
affection, the junction of the top-gallant-mast with the topmast, when
the sail is reefed, will present itself under no less complex and
mysterious form than this in Fig. 1, a horned knot of seven separate
pieces of timber, irrespective of the two masts and the yard; the whole
balanced and involved in an apparently inextricable web of chain and
rope, consisting of at least sixteen ropes about the top-gallant-mast,
and some twenty-five crossing each other in every imaginable degree of
slackness and slope about the topmast. Two-thirds of these ropes are
omitted in the cut, because I could not draw them without taking more
time and pains than the point to be illustrated was worth; the thing, as
it is, being drawn quite well enough to give some idea of the facts of
it. Well, take up Stanfield's "Coast Scenery," and look through it in
search of tops, and you will invariably find them represented as in Fig.
2, or even with fewer lines; the example Fig. 2 being one of the tops of
the frigate running into Portsmouth harbor, magnified to about twice its
size in the plate.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.]

"Well, but it was impossible to do more on so small a scale." By no
means: but take what scale you choose, of Stanfield's or any other
marine painter's most elaborate painting, and let me magnify the study
of the real top in proportion, and the deficiency of detail will always
be found equally great: I mean in the work of the higher artists, for
there are of course many efforts at greater accuracy of delineation by
those painters of ships who are to the higher marine painter what
botanical draughtsmen are to the landscapists; but just as in the
botanical engraving the spirit and life of the plant are always lost, so
in the technical ship-painting the life of the ship is always lost,
without, as far as I can see, attaining, even by this sacrifice,
anything like completeness of mechanical delineation. At least, I never
saw the ship drawn yet which gave me the slightest idea of the
entanglement of real rigging.

Respecting this lower kind of ship-painting, it is always matter of
wonder to me that it satisfies sailors. Some years ago I happened
to stand longer than pleased my pensioner guide before Turner's
"Battle of Trafalgar," at Greenwich Hospital; a picture which, at
a moderate estimate, is simply worth all the rest of the
hospital--ground--walls--pictures and models put together. My guide,
supposing me to be detained by indignant wonder at seeing it in so good
a place, assented to my supposed, sentiments by muttering in a low
voice: "Well, sir, it _is_ a shame that that thing should be there. We
ought to 'a 'ad a Uggins; that's sartain." I was not surprised that my
sailor friend should be disgusted at seeing the _Victory_ lifted nearly
right out of the water, and all the sails of the fleet blowing about to
that extent that the crews might as well have tried to reef as many
thunder-clouds. But I was surprised at his perfect repose of respectful
faith in "Uggins," who appeared to me--unfortunate landsman as I was--to
give no more idea of the look of a ship of the line going through the
sea, than might be obtained from seeing one of the correct models at the
top of the hall floated in a fishpond.

Leaving, however, the sailor to his enjoyment, on such grounds as it may
be, of this model drawing, and being prepared to find only a vague and
hasty shadowing forth of shipping in the works of artists proper, we
will glance briefly at the different stages of excellence which such
shadowing forth has reached, and note in their consecutive changes the
feelings with which shipping has been regarded at different periods of
art.

1. _Mediaeval Period._ The vessel is regarded merely as a sort of
sea-carriage, and painted only so far as it is necessary for complete
display of the groups of soldiers or saints on the deck: a great deal of
quaint shipping, richly hung with shields, and gorgeous with banners,
is, however, thus incidently represented in 15th-century manuscripts,
embedded in curly green waves of sea full of long fish; and although
there is never the slightest expression of real sea character, of
motion, gloom, or spray, there is more real interest of marine detail
and incident than in many later compositions.

2. _Early Venetian Period._ A great deal of tolerably careful
boat-drawing occurs in the pictures of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini,
deserving separate mention among the marine schools, in confirmation of
what has been stated above, that the drawing of boats is more difficult
than that of the human form. For, long after all the perspectives and
fore-shortenings of the human body were completely understood, as well
as those of architecture, it remained utterly beyond the power of the
artists of the time to draw a boat with even tolerable truth. Boats are
always tilted up on end, or too long, or too short, or too high in the
water. Generally they appear to be regarded with no interest whatever,
and are painted merely where they are matters of necessity. This is
perfectly natural: we pronounce that there is romance in the Venetian
conveyance by oars, merely because we ourselves are in the habit of
being dragged by horses. A Venetian, on the other hand, sees vulgarity
in a gondola, and thinks the only true romance is in a hackney coach.
And thus, it was no more likely that a painter in the days of Venetian
power should pay much attention to the shipping in the Grand Canal than
that an English artist should at present concentrate the brightest rays
of his genius on a cab-stand.

3. _Late Venetian Period._ Deserving mention only for its notably
negative character. None of the great Venetian painters, Tintoret,
Titian, Veronese, Bellini, Giorgione, Bonifazio, ever introduce a ship
if they can help it. They delight in ponderous architecture, in grass,
flowers, blue mountains, skies, clouds, and gay dresses; nothing comes
amiss to them but ships and the sea. When they are forced to introduce
these, they represent merely a dark-green plain, with reddish galleys
spotted about it here and there, looking much like small models of
shipping pinned on a green board. In their marine battles, there is
seldom anything discernible except long rows of scarlet oars, and men in
armor falling helplessly through them.

4. _Late Roman Period._ That is to say, the time of the beginning of the
Renaissance landscape by the Caracci, Claude, and Salvator. First, in
their landscapes, shipping begins to assume something like independent
character, and to be introduced for the sake of its picturesque
interest; although what interest could be taken by any healthy human
creature in such vessels as were then painted has always remained a
mystery to me. The ships of Claude, having hulls of a shape something
between a cocoa-nut and a high-heeled shoe, balanced on their keels on
the top of the water, with some scaffolding and cross-sticks above, and
a flag at the top of every stick, form perhaps the _purest_ exhibition
of human inanity and fatuity which the arts have yet produced. The
harbors also, in which these model navies ride, are worthy of all
observation for the intensity of the false taste which, endeavoring to
unite in them the characters of pleasure-ground and port, destroys the
veracity of both. There are many inlets of the Italian seas where sweet
gardens and regular terraces descend to the water's edge; but these are
not the spots where merchant vessels anchor, or where bales are
disembarked. On the other hand, there are many busy quays and noisy
arsenals upon the shores of Italy; but Queen's palaces are not built
upon the quays, nor are the docks in any wise adorned with
conservatories or ruins. It was reserved for the genius of Claude to
combine the luxurious with the lucrative, and rise to a commercial
ideal, in which cables are fastened to temple pillars, and lighthouses
adorned with rows of beaupots. It seems strange also that any power
which Salvator showed in the treatment of other subjects utterly deserts
him when he approaches the sea. Though always coarse, false, and vulgar,
he has at least energy, and some degree of invention, as long as he
remains on land; his terrestrial atrocities are animated, and his
rock-born fancies formidable. But the sea air seems to dim his sight and
paralyze his hand. His love of darkness and destruction, far from
seeking sympathy in the rage of ocean, disappears as he approaches the
beach; after having tortured the innocence of trees into demoniac
convulsions, and shattered the loveliness of purple hills into colorless
dislocation, he approaches the real wrath and restlessness of ocean
without either admiration or dismay, and appears to feel nothing at its
shore except a meager interest in bathers, fishermen, and gentlemen in
court dress bargaining for state cabins. Of all the pictures by men who
bear the reputation of great masters which I have ever seen in my life
(except only some by Domenichino), the two large "Marines" in the Pitti
Palace, attributed to Salvator, are, on the whole, the most vapid and
vile examples of human want of understanding. In the folly of Claude
there is still a gleam of grace and innocence; there is refreshment in
his childishness, and tenderness in his inability. But the folly of
Salvator is disgusting in its very nothingness: it is like the vacuity
of a plague-room in an hospital, shut up in uncleansed silence, emptied
of pain and motion, but not of infection.

5. _Dutch Period._ Although in artistical qualities lower than is easily
by language expressible, the Italian marine painting usually conveys an
idea of three facts about the sea,--that it is green, that it is deep,
and that the sun shines on it. The dark plain which stands for far away
Adriatic with the Venetians, and the glinting swells of tamed wave
which lap about the quays of Claude, agree in giving the general
impression that the ocean consists of pure water, and is open to the
pure sky. But the Dutch painters, while they attain considerably greater
dexterity than the Italian in mere delineation of nautical incident,
were by nature precluded from ever becoming aware of these common facts;
and having, in reality, never in all their lives seen the sea, but only
a shallow mixture of sea-water and sand; and also never in all their
lives seen the sky, but only a lower element between them and it,
composed of marsh exhalation and fog-bank; they are not to be with too
great severity reproached for the dullness of their records of the
nautical enterprise of Holland. _We_ only are to be reproached, who,
familiar with the Atlantic, are yet ready to accept with faith, as types
of sea, the small waves _en papillote_, and peruke-like puffs of
farinaceous foam, which were the delight of Backhuysen and his compeers.
If one could but arrest the connoisseurs in the fact of looking at them
with belief, and, magically introducing the image of a true sea-wave,
let it roll up to them through the room,--one massive fathom's height
and rood's breadth of brine, passing them by but once,--dividing, Red
Sea-like, on right hand and left,--but at least setting close before
their eyes, for once in inevitable truth, what a sea-wave really is; its
green mountainous giddiness of wrath, its overwhelming crest--heavy as
iron, fitful as flame, clashing against the sky in long cloven
edge,--its furrowed flanks, all ghastly clear, deep in transparent
death, but all laced across with lurid nets of spume, and tearing open
into meshed interstices their churned veil of silver fury, showing still
the calm gray abyss below; that has no fury and no voice, but is as a
grave always open, which the green sighing mounds do but hide for an
instant as they pass. Would they, shuddering back from this wave of the
true, implacable sea, turn forthwith to the papillotes? It might be so.
It is what we are all doing, more or less, continually.

Well, let the waves go their way; it is not of them that we have here
to reason; but be it remembered, that men who cannot enter into the Mind
of the Sea, cannot for the same reason enter into the Mind of Ships, in
their contention with it; and the fluttering, tottering, high-pooped,
flag-beset fleets of these Dutch painters have only this much
superiority over the caricatures of the Italians, that they indeed
appear in some degree to have been studied from the high-pooped and
flag-beset nature which was in that age visible, while the Claude and
Salvator ships are ideals of the studio. But the effort is wholly
unsuccessful. Any one who has ever attempted to sketch a vessel in
motion knows that he might as easily attempt to sketch a bird on the
wing, or a trout on the dart. Ships can only be drawn, as animals must
be, by the high instinct of momentary perception, which rarely developed
itself in any Dutch painter, and least of all in their painters of
marine. And thus the awkward forms of shipping, the shallow impurity of
the sea, and the cold incapacity of the painter, joining in
disadvantageous influence over them, the Dutch marine paintings may be
simply, but circumstantially, described as the misrepresentation of
undeveloped shipping in a discolored sea by distempered painters. An
exception ought to be made in favor of the boats of Cuyp, which are
generally well floated in calm and sunny water; and, though rather punts
or tubs than boats, have in them some elements of a slow, warm,
square-sailed, sleepy grandeur--respectable always, when compared either
with the flickering follies of Backhuysen, or the monstrous, unmanly,
and _a fortiori_, unsailorly absurdities of metaphysical vessels, puffed
on their way by corpulent genii, or pushed by protuberant dolphins,
which Rubens and the other so-called historical painters of his time
were accustomed to introduce in the mythology of their court-adulation;
that marvelous Faith of the 18th century, which will one day, and that
not far off, be known for a thing more truly disgraceful to human nature
than the Polynesian's dance round his feather idol, or Egyptian's
worship of the food he fattened on. From Salvator and Domenichino it is
possible to turn in a proud indignation, knowing that theirs are no
fair examples of the human mind; but it is with humbled and woful anger
that we must trace the degradation of the intellect of Rubens in his
pictures of the life of Mary of Medicis.[P]

    [P] "The town of Lyons, seated upon a chariot drawn by two lions,
    _lifts its eyes towards heaven_, and admires there--'les nouveaux
    Epoux,'--represented in the character of Jupiter and Juno."--_Notice
    des Tableaux du Musee Imperial_, 2nde partie, Paris, 1854, p. 235.

    "The Queen upon her throne holds with one hand the scepter, in the
    other the balance. Minerva and Cupid are at her sides. Abundance and
    Prosperity distribute metals, laurels, 'et d'autres recompenses,' to
    the Genii of the Fine Arts. Time, crowned with the productions of
    the seasons, leads France to the--Age of Gold!"--p. 239.

    So thought the Queen, and Rubens, and the Court. Time himself,
    "crowned with the productions of the seasons," was, meanwhile, as
    Thomas Carlyle would have told us, "quite of another opinion."

    With view of arrival at Golden Age all the sooner, the Court
    determine to go by water; "and Marie de Medicis gives to her son the
    government of the state, under the emblem of a vessel, of which he
    holds the rudder."

    This piece of royal pilotage, being on the whole the most
    characteristic example I remember of the Mythological marine above
    alluded to, is accordingly recommended to the reader's serious
    attention.

6. _Modern Period._ The gradual appreciation of the true character both
of shipping and the ocean, in the works of the painters of the last half
century, is part of that successful study of other elements of
landscape, of which I have long labored at a consistent investigation,
now partly laid before the public; I shall not, therefore, here enter
into any general inquiry respecting modern sea-painting, but limit
myself to a notice of the particular feelings which influenced Turner in
his marine studies, so far as they are shown in the series of plates
which have now been trusted to me for illustration.

Among the earliest sketches from nature which Turner appears to have
made, in pencil and Indian ink, when a boy of twelve or fourteen, it is
very singular how large a proportion consists of careful studies of
stranded boats. Now, after some fifteen years of conscientious labor,
with the single view of acquiring knowledge of the ends and powers of
art, I have come to one conclusion, which at the beginning of those
fifteen years would have been very astonishing to myself--that, of all
our modern school of landscape painters, next to Turner, and before the
rise of the Pre-Raphaelites, the man whose works are on the whole most
valuable, and show the highest intellect, is Samuel Prout. It is very
notable that also in Prout's early studies, shipping subjects took not
merely a prominent, but I think even a principal, place.

The reason of this is very evident: both Turner and Prout had in them an
untaught, inherent perception of what was great and pictorial. They
could not find it in the buildings or in the scenes immediately around
them. But they saw some element of real power in the boats. Prout
afterwards found material suited to his genius in other directions, and
left his first love; but Turner retained the early affection to the
close of his life, and the last oil picture which he painted, before his
noble hand forgot its cunning, was the Wreck-buoy. The last thoroughly
perfect picture he ever painted, was the Old Temeraire.

The studies which he was able to make from nature in his early years,
are chiefly of fishing-boats, barges, and other minor marine still life;
and his better acquaintance with this kind of shipping than with the
larger kind is very marked in the Liber Studiorum, in which there are
five careful studies of fishing-boats under various circumstances;
namely, Calais Harbor, Sir John Mildmay's Picture, Flint Castle, Marine
Dabblers, and the Calm; while of other shipping, there are only two
subjects, both exceedingly unsatisfactory.

Turner, however, deemed it necessary to his reputation at that period
that he should paint pictures in the style of Vandevelde; and, in order
to render the resemblance more complete, he appears to have made careful
drawings of the different parts of old Dutch shipping. I found a large
number of such drawings among the contents of his neglected portfolios
at his death; some were clearly not by his own hand, others appeared to
be transcripts by him from prints or earlier drawings; the quantity
altogether was very great, and the evidence of his prolonged attention
to the subject more distinct than with respect to any other element of
landscape. Of plants, rocks, or architecture, there were very few
careful pieces of anatomical study. But several drawers were entirely
filled with these memoranda of shipping.

In executing the series of drawings for the work known as the Southern
Coast, Turner appears to have gained many ideas about shipping, which,
once received, he laid up by him for use in after years. The evidence of
this laying by of thought in his mind, as it were in reserve, until he
had power to express it, is curious and complete throughout his life;
and although the Southern Coast drawings are for the most part quiet in
feeling, and remarkably simple in their mode of execution, I believe it
was in the watch over the Cornish and Dorsetshire coast, which the
making of those drawings involved, that he received all his noblest
ideas about sea and ships.

Of one thing I am certain; Turner never drew anything that could be
_seen_, without having seen it. That is to say, though he would draw
Jerusalem from some one else's sketch, it would be, nevertheless,
entirely from his own experience of ruined walls: and though he would
draw ancient shipping (for an imitation of Vandevelde, or a vignette to
the voyage of Columbus) from such data as he could get about things
which he could no more see with his own eyes, yet when, of his own free
will, in the subject of Ilfracombe, he, in the year 1818, introduces a
shipwreck, I am perfectly certain that, before the year 1818, he had
_seen_ a shipwreck, and, moreover, one of that horrible kind--a ship
dashed to pieces in deep water, at the foot of an inaccessible cliff.
Having once seen this, I perceive, also, that the image of it could not
be effaced from his mind. It taught him two great facts, which he never
afterwards forgot; namely, that both ships and sea were things that
broke to pieces. _He never afterwards painted a ship quite in fair
order._ There is invariably a feeling about his vessels of strange awe
and danger; the sails are in some way loosening, or flapping as if in
fear; the swing of the hull, majestic as it may be, seems more at the
mercy of the sea than in triumph over it; the ship never looks gay,
never proud, only warlike and enduring. The motto he chose, in the
Catalogue of the Academy, for the most cheerful marine he ever painted,
the Sun of Venice going to Sea, marked the uppermost feeling in his
mind:

    "Nor heeds the Demon that in grim repose
    Expects his evening prey."

I notice above the subject of his last marine picture, the Wreck-buoy,
and I am well persuaded that from that year 1818, when first he saw a
ship rent asunder, he never beheld one at sea, without, in his mind's
eye, at the same instant, seeing her skeleton.

But he had seen more than the death of the ship. He had seen the sea
feed her white flames on souls of men; and heard what a storm-gust
sounded like, that had taken up with it, in its swirl of a moment, the
last breaths of a ship's crew. He never forgot either the sight or the
sound. Among the last plates prepared by his own hand for the Liber
Studiorum, (all of them, as was likely from his advanced knowledge,
finer than any previous pieces of the series, and most of them
unfortunately never published, being retained beside him for some last
touch--forever delayed,) perhaps the most important is one of the body
of a drowned sailor, dashed against a vertical rock in the jaws of one
merciless, immeasurable wave. He repeated the same idea, though more
feebly expressed, later in life, in a small drawing of Grandville, on
the coast of France. The sailor clinging to the boat in the marvelous
drawing of Dunbar is another reminiscence of the same kind. He hardly
ever painted a steep rocky coast without some fragment of a devoured
ship, grinding in the blanched teeth of the surges,--just enough left to
be a token of utter destruction. Of his two most important paintings of
definite shipwreck I shall speak presently.

I said that at this period he first was assured of another fact,
namely, that the _Sea_ also was a thing that broke to pieces. The sea up
to that time had been generally regarded by painters as a liquidly
composed, level-seeking consistent thing, with a smooth surface, rising
to a water-mark on sides of ships; in which ships were scientifically to
be embedded, and wetted, up to said water-mark, and to remain dry above
the same. But Turner found during his Southern Coast tour that the sea
was _not_ this: that it was, on the contrary, a very incalculable and
unhorizontal thing, setting its "water mark" sometimes on the highest
heavens, as well as on sides of ships;--very breakable into pieces; half
of a wave separable from the other half, and on the instant carriageable
miles inland;--not in any wise limiting itself to a state of apparent
liquidity, but now striking like a steel gauntlet, and now becoming a
cloud, and vanishing, no eye could tell whither; one moment a flint
cave, the next a marble pillar, the next a mere white fleece thickening
the thundery rain. He never forgot those facts; never afterwards was
able to recover the idea of positive distinction between sea and sky, or
sea and land. Steel gauntlet, black rock, white cloud, and men and masts
gnashed to pieces and disappearing in a few breaths and splinters among
them;--a little blood on the rock angle, like red sea-weed, sponged away
by the next splash of the foam, and the glistering granite and green
water all pure again in vacant wrath. So stayed by him, forever, the
Image of the Sea.

One effect of this revelation of the nature of ocean to him was not a
little singular. It seemed that ever afterwards his appreciation of the
calmness of water was deepened by what he had witnessed of its frenzy,
and a certain class of entirely tame subjects were treated by him even
with increased affection after he had seen the full manifestation of
sublimity. He had always a great regard for canal boats, and instead of
sacrificing these old, and one would have thought unentertaining,
friends to the deities of Storm, he seems to have returned with a
lulling pleasure from the foam and danger of the beach to the sedgy bank
and stealthy barge of the lowland river. Thenceforward his work which
introduces shipping is divided into two classes; one embodying the
poetry of silence and calmness, the other of turbulence and wrath. Of
intermediate conditions he gives few examples; if he lets the wind down
upon the sea at all, it is nearly always violent, and though the waves
may not be running high, the foam is torn off them in a way which shows
they will soon run higher. On the other hand, nothing is so perfectly
calm as Turner's calmness. To the canal barges of England he soon added
other types of languid motion; the broad-ruddered barks of the Loire,
the drooping sails of Seine, the arcaded barks of the Italian lakes
slumbering on expanse of mountain-guarded wave, the dreamy prows of
pausing gondolas on lagoons at moon-rise; in each and all commanding an
intensity of calm, chiefly because he never admitted an instant's
rigidity. The surface of quiet water with other painters becomes FIXED.
With Turner it looks as if a fairy's breath would stir it, but the
fairy's breath is not there. So also his boats are intensely motionless,
because intensely capable of motion. No other painter ever floated a
boat quite rightly; all other boats stand on the water, or are fastened
in it; only his _float_ in it. It is very difficult to trace the reasons
of this, for the rightness of the placing on the water depends on such
subtle curves and shadows in the floating object and its reflection,
that in most cases the question of entirely right or entirely wrong
resolves itself into the "estimation of an hair": and what makes the
matter more difficult still, is, that sometimes we may see a boat drawn
with the most studied correctness in every part, which yet will not
swim; and sometimes we may find one drawn with many easily ascertainable
errors, which yet swims well enough; so that the drawing of boats is
something like the building of them, one may set off their lines by the
most authentic rules, and yet never be sure they will sail well. It is,
however, to be observed that Turner seemed, in those southern coast
storms, to have been somewhat too strongly impressed by the
disappearance of smaller crafts in surf, and was wont afterwards to give
an uncomfortable aspect even to his gentlest seas, by burying his boats
too deeply. When he erred, in this or other matters, it was not from
want of pains, for of all accessories to landscape, ships were
throughout his life those which he studied with the greatest care. His
figures, whatever their merit or demerit, are certainly never the
beloved part of his work; and though the architecture was in his early
drawings careful, and continued to be so down to the Hakewell's Italy
series, it soon became mannered and false whenever it was principal. He
would indeed draw a ruined tower, or a distant town, incomparably better
than any one else, and a staircase or a bit of balustrade very
carefully; but his temples and cathedrals showed great ignorance of
detail, and want of understanding of their character. But I am aware of
no painting from the beginning of his life to its close, containing
_modern_ shipping as its principal subject, in which he did not put
forth his full strength, and pour out his knowledge of detail with a joy
which renders those works, as a series, among the most valuable he ever
produced. Take for instance:

  1. Lord Yarborough's Shipwreck.
  2. The Trafalgar, at Greenwich Hospital.
  3. The Trafalgar, in his own gallery.
  4. The Pas de Calais.
  5. The Large Cologne.
  6. The Havre.
  7. The Old Temeraire.

I know no fourteen pictures by Turner for which these seven might be
wisely changed; and in all of these the shipping is thoroughly
principal, and studied from existing ships. A large number of inferior
works were, however, also produced by him in imitation of Vandevelde,
representing old Dutch shipping; in these the shipping is scattered,
scudding and distant, the sea gray and lightly broken. Such pictures
are, generally speaking, among those of least value which he has
produced. Two very important ones, however, belong to the imitative
school: Lord Ellesmere's, founded on Vandevelde; and the Dort, at
Farnley, on Cuyp. The latter, as founded on the better master, is the
better picture, but still possesses few of the true Turner qualities,
except his peculiar calmness, in which respect it is unrivaled; and if
joined with Lord Yarborough's Shipwreck, the two may be considered as
the principal symbols, in Turner's early oil paintings, of his two
strengths in Terror and Repose. Among his drawings, shipping, as the
principal subject, does not always constitute a work of the first class;
nor does it so often occur. For the difficulty, in a drawing, of getting
good color is so much less, and that of getting good form so much
greater, than in oil, that Turner naturally threw his elaborate studies
of ship form into oil, and made his noblest work in drawing rich in hues
of landscape. Yet the Cowes, Devonport, and Gosport, from the England
and Wales (the Saltash is an inferior work), united with two drawings of
this series, Portsmouth and Sheerness, and two from Farnley, one of the
wreck of an Indiaman, and the other of a ship of the line taking stores,
would form a series, not indeed as attractive at first sight as many
others, but embracing perhaps more of Turner's peculiar, unexampled, and
unapproachable gifts than any other group of drawings which could be
selected, the choice being confined to one class of subject.

I have only to state, in conclusion, that these twelve drawings of the
Harbors of England are more representable by engraving than most of his
works. Few parts of them are brilliant in color; they were executed
chiefly in brown and blue, and with more direct reference to the future
engraving than was common with Turner. They are also small in size,
generally of the exact dimensions of the plate, and therefore the lines
of the compositions are not spoiled by contraction; while finally, the
touch of the painter's hand upon the wave-surface is far better imitated
by mezzotint engraving than by any of the ordinary expedients of line.
Take them all in all, they form the most valuable series of marine
studies which have as yet been published from his works; and I hope
that they may be of some use hereafter in recalling the ordinary aspect
of our English seas, at the exact period when the nation had done its
utmost in the wooden and woven strength of ships, and had most perfectly
fulfilled the old and noble prophecy--

                "They shall ride
                Over ocean wide,
    With hempen bridle, and horse of tree."
                        _Thomas of Ercildoune._




I.--DOVER.

[Illustration: DOVER.]


This port has some right to take precedence of others, as being that
assuredly which first exercises the hospitality of England to the
majority of strangers who set foot on her shores. I place it first
therefore among our present subjects; though the drawing itself, and
chiefly on account of its manifestation of Turner's faulty habit of
local exaggeration, deserves no such pre-eminence. He always painted,
not the place itself, but his impression of it, and this on steady
principle; leaving to inferior artists the task of topographical detail;
and he was right in this principle, as I have shown elsewhere, when the
impression was a genuine one; but in the present case it is not so. He
has lost the real character of Dover Cliffs by making the town at their
feet three times lower in proportionate height than it really is; nor is
he to be justified in giving the barracks, which appear on the left
hand, more the air of a hospice on the top of an Alpine precipice, than
of an establishment which, out of Snargate street, can be reached,
without drawing breath, by a winding stair of some 170 steps; making the
slope beside them more like the side of Skiddaw than what it really is,
the earthwork of an unimportant battery.

This design is also remarkable as an instance of that restlessness which
was above noticed even in Turner's least stormy seas. There is nothing
tremendous here in scale of wave, but the whole surface is fretted and
disquieted by torturing wind; an effect which was always increased
during the progress of the subjects, by Turner's habit of scratching out
small sparkling lights, in order to make the plate "bright," or
"lively."[Q] In a general way the engravers used to like this, and,
as far as they were able, would tempt Turner farther into the practice,
which was precisely equivalent to that of supplying the place of healthy
and heart-whole cheerfulness by dram-drinking.

    [Q] See the farther explanation of this practice in the notice of
    the subject of "Portsmouth."

The two sea-gulls in the front of the picture were additions of this
kind, and are very injurious, confusing the organization and concealing
the power of the sea. The merits of the drawing are, however, still
great as a piece of composition. The left-hand side is most interesting,
and characteristic of Turner: no other artist would have put the round
pier so exactly under the round cliff. It is under it so accurately,
that if the nearly vertical falling line of that cliff be continued, it
strikes the sea-base of the pier to a hair's breadth. But Turner knew
better than any man the value of echo, as well as of contrast,--of
repetition, as well as of opposition. The round pier repeats the line of
the main cliff, and then the sail repeats the diagonal shadow which
crosses it, and emerges above it just as the embankment does above the
cliff brow. Lower, come the opposing curves in the two boats, the whole
forming one group of sequent lines up the whole side of the picture. The
rest of the composition is more commonplace than is usual with the great
master; but there are beautiful transitions of light and shade between
the sails of the little fishing-boat, the brig behind her, and the
cliffs. Note how dexterously the two front sails[R] of the brig are
brought on the top of the white sail of the fishing-boat to help to
detach it from the white cliffs.

    [R] I think I shall be generally more intelligible by explaining
    what I mean in this way, and run less chance of making myself
    ridiculous in the eyes of sensible people, than by displaying the
    very small nautical knowledge I possess. My sailor friends will
    perhaps be gracious enough to believe that I _could_ call these
    sails by their right names if I liked.




II.--RAMSGATE.

[Illustration: RAMSGATE.]


This, though less attractive, at first sight, than the former plate, is
a better example of the master, and far truer and nobler as a piece of
thought. The lifting of the brig on the wave is very daring; just one of
the things which is seen in every gale, but which no other painter than
Turner ever represented; and the lurid transparency of the dark sky, and
wild expression of wind in the fluttering of the falling sails of the
vessel running into the harbor, are as fine as anything of the kind he
has done. There is great grace in the drawing of this latter vessel:
note the delicate switch forward of her upper mast.

There is a very singular point connected with the composition of this
drawing, proving it (as from internal evidence was most likely) to be a
record of a thing actually seen. Three years before the date of this
engraving Turner had made a drawing of Ramsgate for the Southern Coast
series. That drawing represents the _same day_, the _same moment_, and
the _same ships_, from a different point of view. It supposes the
spectator placed in a boat some distance out at sea, beyond the
fishing-boats on the left in the present plate, and looking towards the
town, or into the harbor. The brig, which is near us here, is then, of
course, in the distance on the right; the schooner entering the harbor,
and, in both plates, lowering her fore-topsail, is, of course, seen
foreshortened; the fishing-boats only are a little different in position
and set of sail. The sky is precisely the same, only a dark piece of it,
which is too far to the right to be included in _this_ view, enters into
the wider distance of the other, and the town, of course, becomes a more
important object.

The persistence in one conception furnishes evidence of the very
highest imaginative power. On a common mind, what it has seen is so
feebly impressed, that it mixes other ideas with it immediately; forgets
it--modifies it--adorns it,--does anything but keep _hold_ of it. But
when Turner had once seen that stormy hour at Ramsgate harbor-mouth, he
never quitted his grasp of it. He had _seen_ the two vessels; one go in,
the other out. He could have only seen them at that one moment--from one
point; but the impression on his imagination is so strong, that he is
able to handle it three years afterwards, as if it were a real thing,
and turn it round on the table of his brain, and look at it from the
other corner. He will see the brig near, instead of far off: set the
whole sea and sky so many points round to the south, and see how they
look, so. I never traced power of this kind in any other man.




III.--PLYMOUTH.

[Illustration: PLYMOUTH.]


The drawing for this plate is one of Turner's most remarkable, though
not most meritorious, works: it contains the brightest rainbow he ever
painted, to my knowledge; not the best, but the most dazzling. It has
been much modified in the plate. It is very like one of Turner's pieces
of caprice to introduce a rainbow at all as a principal feature in such
a scene; for it is not through the colors of the iris that we generally
expect to be shown eighteen-pounder batteries and ninety-gun ships.

Whether he meant the dark cloud (intensely dark blue in the original
drawing), with the sunshine pursuing it back into distance; and the
rainbow, with its base set on a ship of battle, to be together types of
war and peace, and of the one as the foundation of the other, I leave it
to the reader to decide. My own impression is, that although Turner
might have some askance symbolism in his mind, the present design is,
like the former one, in many points a simple reminiscence of a seen
fact.[S]

    [S] I have discovered, since this was written, that the design was
    made from a vigorous and interesting sketch by Mr. S. Cousins, in
    which the rainbow and most of the ships are already in their places.
    Turner was, therefore, in this case, as I have found him in several
    other instances, realizing, not a fact seen by himself, but a fact
    as he supposed it to have been seen by another.

However, whether reminiscent or symbolic, the design is, to my mind, an
exceedingly unsatisfactory one, owing to its total want of principal
subject. The fort ceases to be of importance because of the bank and
tower in front of it; the ships, necessarily for the effect, but fatally
for themselves, are confused, and incompletely drawn, except the little
sloop, which looks paltry and like a toy; and the foreground objects
are, for work of Turner, curiously ungraceful and uninteresting.

It is possible, however, that to some minds the fresh and dewy space of
darkness, so animated with latent human power, may give a sensation of
great pleasure, and at all events the design is worth study on account
of its very strangeness.




IV.--CATWATER.

[Illustration: CATWATER.]


I have placed in the middle of the series those pictures which I think
least interesting, though the want of interest is owing more to the
monotony of their character than to any real deficiency in their
subjects. If, after contemplating paintings of arid deserts or glowing
sunsets, we had come suddenly upon this breezy entrance to the crowded
cove of Plymouth, it would have gladdened our hearts to purpose; but
having already been at sea for some time, there is little in this
drawing to produce renewal of pleasurable impression: only one useful
thought may be gathered from the very feeling of monotony. At the time
when Turner executed these drawings, his portfolios were full of the
most magnificent subjects--coast and inland,--gathered from all the
noblest scenery of France and Italy. He was ready to realize these
sketches for any one who would have asked it of him, but no consistent
effort was ever made to call forth his powers; and the only means by
which it was thought that the public patronage could be secured for a
work of this kind, was by keeping familiar names before the eye, and
awakening the so-called "patriotic," but in reality narrow and selfish,
associations belonging to well-known towns or watering-places. It is to
be hoped, that when a great landscape painter appears among us again, we
may know better how to employ him, and set him to paint for us things
which are less easily seen, and which are somewhat better worth seeing,
than the mists of the Catwater, or terraces of Margate.




V.--SHEERNESS.

[Illustration: SHEERNESS.]


I look upon this as one of the noblest sea-pieces which Turner ever
produced. It has not his usual fault of over-crowding or over-glitter;
the objects in it are few and noble, and the space infinite. The sky is
quite one of his best: not violently black, but full of gloom and power;
the complicated roundings of its volumes behind the sloop's mast, and
downwards to the left, have been rendered by the engraver with notable
success; and the dim light entering along the horizon, full of rain,
behind the ship of war, is true and grand in the highest degree. By
comparing it with the extreme darkness of the skies in the Plymouth,
Dover, and Ramsgate, the reader will see how much more majesty there is
in moderation than in extravagance, and how much more darkness, as far
as sky is concerned, there is in gray than in black. It is not that the
Plymouth and Dover skies are false,--such impenetrable forms of
thunder-cloud are amongst the commonest phenomena of storm; but they
have more of spent flash and past shower in them than the less
passionate, but more truly stormy and threatening, volumes of the sky
here. The Plymouth storm will very thoroughly wet the sails, and wash
the decks, of the ships at anchor, but will send nothing to the bottom.
For these pale and lurid masses, there is no saying what evil they may
have in their thoughts, or what they may have to answer for before
night. The ship of war in the distance is one of many instances of
Turner's dislike to draw _complete_ rigging; and this not only because
he chose to give an idea of his ships having seen rough service, and
being crippled; but also because in men-of-war he liked the mass of the
hull to be increased in apparent weight and size by want of upper spars.
All artists of any rank share this last feeling. Stanfield never makes
a careful study of a hull without shaking some or all of its masts out
of it first, if possible. See, in the Coast Scenery, Portsmouth harbor,
Falmouth, Hamoaze, and Rye old harbors; and compare, among Turner's
works, the near hulls in the Devonport, Saltash, and Castle Upnor, and
distance of Gosport. The fact is, partly that the precision of line in
the complete spars of a man-of-war is too formal to come well into
pictorial arrangements, and partly that the chief glory of a ship of the
line is in its aspect of being "one that hath had losses."

The subtle varieties of curve in the drawing of the sails of the near
sloop are altogether exquisite; as well as the contrast of her black and
glistering side with those sails, and with the sea. Examine the wayward
and delicate play of the dancing waves along her flank, and between her
and the brig in ballast, plunging slowly before the wind; I have not
often seen anything so perfect in fancy, or in execution of engraving.

The heaving and black buoy in the near sea is one of Turner's "echoes,"
repeating, with slight change, the head of the sloop with its flash of
luster. The chief aim of this buoy is, however, to give comparative
lightness to the shadowed part of the sea, which is, indeed, somewhat
overcharged in darkness, and would have been felt to be so, but for this
contrasting mass. Hide it with the hand, and this will be immediately
felt. There is only one other of Turner's works which, in its way, can
be matched with this drawing, namely, the Mouth of the Humber in the
River Scenery. The latter is, on the whole, the finer picture; but this
by much the more interesting in the shipping.




VI.--MARGATE.

[Illustration: MARGATE.]


This plate is not, at first sight, one of the most striking of the
series; but it is very beautiful, and highly characteristic of
Turner.[T] First, in its choice of subjects: for it seems very notably
capricious in a painter eminently capable of rendering scenes of
sublimity and mystery, to devote himself to the delineation of one of
the most prosaic of English watering-places--not once or twice, but in a
series of elaborate drawings, of which this is the fourth. The first
appeared in the Southern Coast series, and was followed by an elaborate
drawing on a large scale, with a beautiful sunrise; then came another
careful and very beautiful drawing in the England and Wales series; and
finally this, which is a sort of poetical abstract of the first. Now, if
we enumerate the English ports one by one, from Berwick to Whitehaven,
round the island, there will hardly be found another so utterly devoid
of all picturesque or romantic interest as Margate. Nearly all have some
steep eminence of down or cliff, some pretty retiring dingle, some
roughness of old harbor or straggling fisher-hamlet, some fragment of
castle or abbey on the heights above, capable of becoming a leading
point in a picture; but Margate is simply a mass of modern parades and
streets, with a little bit of chalk cliff, an orderly pier, and some
bathing-machines. Turner never conceives it as anything else; and yet
for the sake of this simple vision, again and again he quits all higher
thoughts. The beautiful bays of Northern Devon and Cornwall he never
painted but once, and that very imperfectly. The finest subjects of the
Southern Coast series--the Minehead, Clovelly, Ilfracombe, Watchet,
East and West Looe, Tintagel, Boscastle--he never touched again; but he
repeated Ramsgate, Deal, Dover, and Margate, I know not how often.

    [T] It was left unfinished at his death, and I would not allow it to
    be touched afterwards, desiring that the series should remain as far
    as possible in an authentic state.

Whether his desire for popularity, which, in spite of his occasional
rough defiances of public opinion, was always great, led him to the
selection of those subjects which he thought might meet with most
acceptance from a large class of the London public, or whether he had
himself more pleasurable associations connected with these places than
with others, I know not; but the fact of the choice itself is a very
mournful one, considered with respect to the future interests of art.
There is only this one point to be remembered, as tending to lessen our
regret, that it is possible Turner might have felt the necessity of
compelling himself sometimes to dwell on the most familiar and prosaic
scenery, in order to prevent his becoming so much accustomed to that of
a higher class as to diminish his enthusiasm in its presence. Into this
probability I shall have occasion to examine at greater length
hereafter.

The plate of Margate now before us is nearly as complete a duplicate of
the Southern Coast view as the previous plate is of that of Ramsgate;
with this difference, that the position of the spectator is here the
same, but the class of ship is altered, though the ship remains
precisely in the same spot. A piece of old wreck, which was rather an
important object to the left of the other drawing, is here removed. The
figures are employed in the same manner in both designs.

The details of the houses of the town are executed in the original
drawing with a precision which adds almost painfully to their natural
formality. It is certainly provoking to find the great painter, who
often only deigns to bestow on some Rhenish fortress or French city,
crested with Gothic towers, a few misty and indistinguishable touches of
his brush, setting himself to indicate, with unerring toil, every
separate square window in the parades, hotels, and circulating libraries
of an English bathing-place.

The whole of the drawing is well executed, and free from fault or
affectation, except perhaps in the somewhat confused curlings of the
near sea. I had much rather have seen it breaking in the usual
straightforward way. The brilliant white of the piece of chalk cliff is
evidently one of the principal aims of the composition. In the drawing
the sea is throughout of a dark fresh blue, the sky grayish blue, and
the grass on the top of the cliffs a little sunburnt, the cliffs
themselves being left in the almost untouched white of the paper.




VII.--PORTSMOUTH.

[Illustration: PORTSMOUTH.]


This beautiful drawing is a _third_ recurrence by Turner to his earliest
impression of Portsmouth, given in the Southern Coast series. The
buildings introduced differ only by a slight turn of the spectator
towards the right; the buoy is in the same spot; the man-of-war's boat
nearly so; the sloop exactly so, but on a different tack; and the
man-of-war, which is far off to the left at anchor in the Southern Coast
view, is here nearer, and getting up her anchor.

The idea had previously passed through one phase of greater change, in
his drawing of "Gosport" for the England, in which, while the sky of the
Southern Coast view was almost cloud for cloud retained, the interest of
the distant ships of the line had been divided with a collier brig and a
fast-sailing boat. In the present view he returns to his early thought,
dwelling, however, now with chief insistence on the ship of the line,
which is certainly the most majestic of all that he has introduced in
his drawings.

It is also a very curious instance of that habit of Turner's before
referred to (p. 27), of never painting a ship quite in good order. On
showing this plate the other day to a naval officer, he complained of
it, first that "the jib[U] would not be wanted with the wind blowing out
of harbor," and, secondly, that "a man-of-war would never have her
foretop-gallant sail set, and her main and mizzen top-gallants
furled:--all the men would be on the yards at once."

    [U] The sail seen, edge on, like a white sword, at the head of the
    ship.

I believe this criticism to be perfectly just, though it has happened to
me, very singularly, whenever I have had the opportunity of making
complete inquiry into any technical matter of this kind, respecting
which some professional person had blamed Turner, that I have always
found, in the end, Turner was right, and the professional critic wrong,
owing to some want of allowance for possible accidents, and for
necessary modes of pictorial representation. Still, this cannot be the
case in every instance; and supposing my sailor informant to be
perfectly right in the present one, the disorderliness of the way in
which this ship is represented as setting her sails, gives us farther
proof of the imperative instinct in the artist's mind, refusing to
contemplate a ship, even in her proudest moments, but as in some way
over-mastered by the strengths of chance and storm.

The wave on the left hand beneath the buoy, presents a most interesting
example of the way in which Turner used to spoil his work by retouching.
All his truly fine drawings are either done quickly, or at all events
straight forward, without alteration: he never, as far as I have
examined his works hitherto, altered but to destroy. When he saw a plate
look somewhat dead or heavy, as, compared with the drawing, it was
almost sure at first to do, he used to scratch out little lights all
over it, and make it "sparkling"; a process in which the engravers
almost unanimously delighted,[V] and over the impossibility of which
they now mourn, declaring it to be hopeless to engrave after Turner,
since he cannot now scratch their plates for them. It is quite true that
these small lights were always placed beautifully; and though the plate,
after its "touching," generally looked as if ingeniously salted out of
her dredging-box by an artistical cook, the salting was done with a
spirit which no one else can now imitate. But the original power of the
work was forever destroyed. If the reader will look carefully beneath
the white touches on the left in this sea, he will discern dimly the
form of a round nodding hollow breaker. This in the early state of the
plate is a gaunt, dark, angry wave, rising at the shoal indicated by the
buoy;--Mr. Lupton has fac-similed with so singular skill the scratches
of the penknife by which Turner afterwards disguised this breaker, and
spoiled his picture, that the plate in its present state is almost as
interesting as the touched proof itself; interesting, however, only as a
warning to all artists never to lose hold of their first conception.
They may tire even of what is exquisitely right, as they work it out,
and their only safety is in the self-denial of calm completion.

    [V] Not, let me say with all due honor to him, the careful and
    skillful engraver of these plates, who has been much more tormented
    than helped by Turner's alterations.




VIII.--FALMOUTH.

[Illustration: FALMOUTH.]


This is one of the most beautiful and best-finished plates of the
series, and Turner has taken great pains with the drawing; but it is
sadly open to the same charges which were brought against the Dover, of
an attempt to reach a false sublimity by magnifying things in themselves
insignificant. The fact is that Turner, when he prepared these drawings,
had been newly inspired by the scenery of the Continent; and with his
mind entirely occupied by the ruined towers of the Rhine, he found
himself called upon to return to the formal embrasures and unappalling
elevations of English forts and hills. But it was impossible for him to
recover the simplicity and narrowness of conception in which he had
executed the drawing of the Southern Coast, or to regain the innocence
of delight with which he had once assisted gravely at the drying of
clothes over the limekiln at Comb Martin, or penciled the woodland
outlines of the banks of Dartmouth Cove. In certain fits of prosaic
humorism, he would, as we have seen, condemn himself to delineation of
the parades of a watering-place; but the moment he permitted himself to
be enthusiastic, vaster imaginations crowded in upon him: to modify his
old conception in the least, was to exaggerate it; the mount of
Pendennis is lifted into rivalship with Ehrenbreitstein, and hardworked
Falmouth glitters along the distant bay, like the gay magnificence of
Resina or Sorrento.

This effort at sublimity is all the more to be regretted, because it
never succeeds completely. Shade, or magnify, or mystify as he may, even
Turner cannot make the minute neatness of the English fort appeal to us
as forcibly as the remnants of Gothic wall and tower that crown the
Continental crags; and invest them as he may with smoke or sunbeam, the
details of our little mounded hills will not take the rank of cliffs of
Alp, or promontories of Apennine; and we lose the English simplicity,
without gaining the Continental nobleness.

I have also a prejudice against this picture for being disagreeably
noisy. Wherever there is something serious to be done, as in a battle
piece, the noise becomes an element of the sublimity; but to have great
guns going off in every direction beneath one's feet on the right, and
all round the other side of the castle, and from the deck of the ship of
the line, and from the battery far down the cove, and from the fort on
the top of the hill, and all for nothing, is to my mind eminently
troublesome.

The drawing of the different wreaths and depths of smoke, and the
explosive look of the flash on the right, are, however, very wonderful
and peculiarly Turneresque; the sky is also beautiful in form, and the
foreground, in which we find his old regard for washerwomen has not
quite deserted him, singularly skillful. It is curious how formal the
whole picture becomes if this figure and the gray stones beside it are
hidden with the hand.




IX.--SIDMOUTH.

[Illustration: SIDMOUTH.]


This drawing has always been interesting to me among Turner's sea
pieces, on account of the noble gathering together of the great wave on
the left,--the back of a breaker, just heaving itself up, and provoking
itself into passion, before its leap and roar against the beach. But the
enjoyment of these designs is much interfered with by their monotony: it
is seriously to be regretted that in all but one the view is taken from
the sea; for the spectator is necessarily tired by the perpetual rush
and sparkle of water, and ceases to be impressed by it. It would be
felt, if this plate were seen alone, that there are few marine paintings
in which the weight and heaping of the sea are given so faithfully.

For the rest it is perhaps more to be regretted that we are kept to our
sea-level at Sidmouth than at any other of the localities illustrated.
What claim the pretty little village has to be considered as a port of
England, I know not; but if it was to be so ranked, a far more
interesting study of it might have been made from the heights above the
town, whence the ranges of dark-red sandstone cliffs stretching to the
southwest are singularly bold and varied. The detached fragment of
sandstone which forms the principal object in Turner's view has long ago
fallen, and even while it stood could hardly have been worth the honor
of so careful illustration.




X.--WHITBY.

[Illustration: WHITBY.]


As an expression of the general spirit of English coast scenery, this
plate must be considered the principal one of the series. Like all the
rest, it is a little too grand for its subject; but the exaggerations of
space and size are more allowable here than in the others, as partly
necessary to convey the feeling of danger conquered by activity and
commerce, which characterizes all our northerly Eastern coast. There are
cliffs more terrible, and winds more wild, on other shores; but nowhere
else do so many white sails lean against the bleak wind, and glide
across the cliff shadows. Nor do I know many other memorials of monastic
life so striking as the abbey on that dark headland. We are apt in our
journeys through lowland England, to watch with some secret contempt the
general pleasantness of the vales in which our abbeys were founded,
without taking any pains to inquire into the particular circumstances
which directed or compelled the choice of the monks, and without
reflecting that, if the choice were a selfish one, the selfishness is
that of the English lowlander turning monk, not that of monachism;
since, if we examine the sites of the Swiss monasteries and convents, we
shall always find the snow lying round them in July; and it must have
been cold meditating in these cloisters of St. Hilda's when the winter
wind set from the east. It is long since I was at Whitby, and I am not
sure whether Turner is right in giving so monotonous and severe
verticality to the cliff above which the abbey stands; but I believe it
must have some steep places about it, since the tradition which, in
nearly all parts of the island where fossil ammonites are found, is sure
to be current respecting them, takes quite an original form at Whitby,
owing to the steepness of this rock. In general, the saint of the
locality has simply turned all the serpents to stone; but at Whitby, St.
Hilda drove them over the cliff, and the serpents, before being
petrified, had all their heads broken off by the fall!




XI.--DEAL.

[Illustration: DEAL.]


I have had occasion,[W] elsewhere, to consider at some length, the
peculiar love of the English for neatness and minuteness: but I have
only considered, without accounting for, or coming to any conclusion
about it; and, the more I think of it, the more it puzzles me to
understand what there can be in our great national mind which delights
to such an extent in brass plates, red bricks, square curbstones, and
fresh green paint, all on the tiniest possible scale. The other day I
was dining in a respectable English "Inn and Posting-house," not ten
miles from London, and, measuring the room after dinner, I found it
exactly twice and a quarter the height of my umbrella. It was a highly
comfortable room, and associated, in the proper English manner, with
outdoor sports and pastimes, by a portrait of Jack Hall, fisherman of
Eton, and of Mr. C. Davis on his favorite mare; but why all this hunting
and fishing enthusiasm should like to reduce itself, at home, into twice
and a quarter the height of an umbrella, I could not in any wise then,
nor have I at any other time been able to ascertain.

    [W] _Modern Painters_, vol. iv. chap. 1.

Perhaps the town of Deal involves as much of this question in its aspect
and reputation, as any other place in Her Majesty's dominions: or at
least it seemed so to me, coming to it as I did, after having been
accustomed to the boat-life at Venice, where the heavy craft, massy in
build and massy in sail, and disorderly in aquatic economy, reach with
their mast-vanes only to the first stories of the huge marble palaces
they anchor among. It was very strange to me, after this, knowing that
whatever was brave and strong in the English sailor was concentrated in
our Deal boatmen, to walk along that trim strip of conventional
beach, which the sea itself seems to wash in a methodical manner, one
shingle-step at a time; and by its thin toy-like boats, each with its
head to sea, at regular intervals, looking like things that one would
give a clever boy to play with in a pond, when first he got past
petticoats; and the row of lath cots behind, all tidiness and telegraph,
looking as if the whole business of the human race on earth was to know
what o'clock it was, and when it would be high water,--only some slight
weakness in favor of grog being indicated here and there by a
hospitable-looking open door, a gay bow-window, and a sign intimating
that it is a sailor's duty to be not only accurate, but "jolly."

Turner was always fond of this neat, courageous, benevolent, merry,
methodical Deal. He painted it very early, in the Southern Coast series,
insisting on one of the tavern windows as the principal subject, with a
flash of forked lightning streaming beyond it out at sea like a narrow
flag. He has the same association in his mind in the present plate;
disorder and distress among the ships on the left, with the boat going
out to help them; and the precision of the little town stretching in
sunshine along the beach.




XII.--SCARBOROUGH.

[Illustration: SCARBOROUGH.]


I have put this plate last in the series, thinking that the reader will
be glad to rest in its morning quietness, after so much tossing among
the troubled foam. I said in the course of the introduction, that
nothing is so perfectly calm as Turner's calmness; and I know very few
better examples of this calmness than the plate before us, uniting, as
it does, the glittering of the morning clouds, and trembling of the sea,
with an infinitude of peace in both. There are one or two points of
interest in the artifices by which the intense effect of calm is
produced. Much is owing, in the first place, to the amount of absolute
gloom obtained by the local blackness of the boats on the beach; like a
piece of the midnight left unbroken by the dawn. But more is owing to
the treatment of the distant harbor mouth. In general, throughout
nature, Reflection and Repetition are _peaceful_ things; that is to say,
the image of any object, seen in calm water, gives us an impression of
quietness, not merely because we know the water must be quiet in order
to be reflective; but because the fact of the repetition of this form is
lulling to us in its monotony, and associated more or less with an idea
of quiet succession, or reproduction, in events or things throughout
nature:--that one day should be like another day, one town the image of
another town, or one history the repetition of another history, being
more or less results of quietness, while dissimilarity and
non-succession are also, more or less, results of interference and
disquietude. And thus, though an echo actually increases the quantity of
sound heard, its repetition of the notes or syllables of sound, gives an
idea of calmness attainable in no other way; hence the feeling of
calm given to a landscape by the notes of the cuckoo. Understanding
this, observe the anxious _doubling_ of every object by a visible echo
or shadow throughout this picture. The grandest feature of it is the
steep distant cliff; and therefore the dualism is more marked here than
elsewhere; the two promontories or cliffs, and two piers below them,
being arranged so that the one looks almost like the shadow of the
other, cast irregularly on mist. In all probability, the more distant
pier would in reality, unless it is very greatly higher than the near
one, have been lowered by perspective so as not to continue in the same
longitudinal line at the top,--but Turner will not have it so; he
reduces them to exactly the same level, so that the one looks like the
phantom of the other; and so of the cliffs above.

Then observe, each pier has, just below the head of it, in a vertical
line, another important object, one a buoy, and the other a stooping
figure. These carry on the double group in the calmest way, obeying the
general law of vertical reflection, and throw down two long shadows on
the near beach. The intenseness of the parallelism would catch the eye
in a moment, but for the lighthouse, which breaks the group and prevents
the artifice from being too open. Next come the two heads of boats, with
their two bowsprits, and the two masts of the one farthest off, all
monotonously double, but for the diagonal mast of the nearer one, which
again hides the artifice. Next, put your finger over the white central
figure, and follow the minor incidents round the beach; first, under the
lighthouse, a stick, with its echo below a little to the right; above, a
black stone, and its echo to the right; under the white figure, another
stick, with its echo to the left; then a starfish,[X] and a white spot
its echo to the left; then a dog, and a basket to double its light;
above, a fisherman, and his wife for an echo; above them, two lines of
curved shingle; above them, two small black figures; above them, two
unfinished ships, and two forked masts; above the forked masts, a house
with two gables, and its echo exactly over it in two gables more; next
to the right, two fishing-boats with sails down; farther on, two
fishing-boats with sails up, each with its little white reflection
below; then two larger ships, which, lest his trick should be found out,
Turner puts a dim third between; then below, two fat colliers, leaning
away from each other, and two thinner colliers, leaning towards each
other; and now at last, having doubled everything all round the beach,
he gives one strong single stroke to gather all together, places his
solitary central white figure, and the Calm is complete.

    [X] I have mentioned elsewhere that Turner was fond of this subject
    of Scarborough, and that there are four drawings of it by him, if
    not more, under different effects, having this much common to the
    four, that there is always a starfish on the beach.

It is also to be noticed, that not only the definite repetition has a
power of expressing serenity, but even the slight sense of _confusion_
induced by the continual doubling is useful; it makes us feel not well
awake, drowsy, and as if we were out too early, and had to rub our eyes
yet a little, before we could make out whether there were really two
boats or one.

I do not mean that every means which we may possibly take to enable
ourselves to see things double, will be always the most likely to insure
the ultimate tranquillity of the scene, neither that any such artifice
as this would be of avail, without the tender and loving drawing of the
things themselves, and of the light that bathes them; nevertheless the
highest art is full of these little cunnings, and it is only by the help
of them that it can succeed in at all equaling the force of the natural
impression.

One great monotony, that of the successive sigh and vanishing of the
slow waves upon the sand, no art can render to us. Perhaps the silence
of early light, even on the "field dew consecrate" of the grass itself,
is not so tender as the lisp of the sweet belled lips of the clear waves
in their following patience. We will leave the shore as their silver
fringes fade upon it, desiring thus, as far as may be, to remember the
sea. We have regarded it perhaps too often as an enemy to be subdued;
let us, at least this once, accept from it, and from the soft light
beyond the cliffs above, the image of the state of a perfect Human
Spirit,--

    "The memory, like a cloudless air,
    The conscience, like a sea at rest."

  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Transcriber's Note                                           |
  |                                                              |
  | There was one instance each of 'sea-shell' and 'seashell'.   |
  | These have not been changed.                                 |
  |                                                              |
  | One instance of the 'oe' ligature has been transcribed as    |
  | oe.                                                          |
  +--------------------------------------------------------------+





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