The Harbours of England Part 2

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+p-painting the life of the s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p drawn yet which gave me the slightest idea of the entanglement of real rigging.

Respecting this lower kind of s.h.i.+p-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, a.s.sented 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 s.h.i.+pping, richly hung with s.h.i.+elds, and gorgeous with banners, is, however, thus incidently represented in 15th-century ma.n.u.scripts, 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 s.h.i.+pping in the Grand Ca.n.a.l 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, t.i.tian, Veronese, Bellini, Giorgione, Bonifazio, ever introduce a s.h.i.+p if they can help it. They delight in ponderous architecture, in gra.s.s, flowers, blue mountains, skies, clouds, and gay dresses; nothing comes amiss to them but s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+pping 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, s.h.i.+pping begins to a.s.sume 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 a.r.s.enals upon the sh.o.r.es 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 coa.r.s.e, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+nes 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 ma.s.sive fathom's height and rood's breadth of brine, pa.s.sing 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, clas.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.s. 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 s.h.i.+ps, in their contention with it; and the fluttering, tottering, high-p.o.o.ped, 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-p.o.o.ped and flag-beset nature which was in that age visible, while the Claude and Salvator s.h.i.+ps 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. s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+pping, 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 circ.u.mstantially, described as the misrepresentation of undeveloped s.h.i.+pping 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 ill.u.s.tration.

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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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, s.h.i.+pping subjects took not merely a prominent, but I think even a princ.i.p.al, 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 n.o.ble 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 fis.h.i.+ng-boats, barges, and other minor marine still life; and his better acquaintance with this kind of s.h.i.+pping than with the larger kind is very marked in the Liber Studiorum, in which there are five careful studies of fis.h.i.+ng-boats under various circ.u.mstances; namely, Calais Harbor, Sir John Mildmay's Picture, Flint Castle, Marine Dabblers, and the Calm; while of other s.h.i.+pping, 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 s.h.i.+pping. 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 quant.i.ty 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 s.h.i.+pping.

In executing the series of drawings for the work known as the Southern Coast, Turner appears to have gained many ideas about s.h.i.+pping, 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 Dorsets.h.i.+re coast, which the making of those drawings involved, that he received all his n.o.blest ideas about sea and s.h.i.+ps.

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 s.h.i.+pping (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 s.h.i.+pwreck, I am perfectly certain that, before the year 1818, he had _seen_ a s.h.i.+pwreck, and, moreover, one of that horrible kind--a s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ps and sea were things that broke to pieces. _He never afterwards painted a s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+p'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 s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+pwreck I shall speak presently.

I said that at this period he first was a.s.sured 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 s.h.i.+ps; in which s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps;--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 vanis.h.i.+ng, 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 cla.s.s 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 ca.n.a.l 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 s.h.i.+pping is divided into two cla.s.ses; 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 ca.n.a.l 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, s.h.i.+ps 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 princ.i.p.al. He would indeed draw a ruined tower, or a distant town, incomparably better than any one else, and a staircase or a bit of bal.u.s.trade 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_ s.h.i.+pping as its princ.i.p.al 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 s.h.i.+pwreck.

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 s.h.i.+pping is thoroughly princ.i.p.al, and studied from existing s.h.i.+ps. A large number of inferior works were, however, also produced by him in imitation of Vandevelde, representing old Dutch s.h.i.+pping; in these the s.h.i.+pping 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 s.h.i.+pwreck, the two may be considered as the princ.i.p.al symbols, in Turner's early oil paintings, of his two strengths in Terror and Repose. Among his drawings, s.h.i.+pping, as the princ.i.p.al subject, does not always const.i.tute a work of the first cla.s.s; 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 s.h.i.+p form into oil, and made his n.o.blest 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 s.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ps, and had most perfectly fulfilled the old and n.o.ble prophecy--

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

_Thomas of Ercildoune._

I.--DOVER.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DOVER.]

This port has some right to take precedence of others, as being that a.s.suredly which first exercises the hospitality of England to the majority of strangers who set foot on her sh.o.r.es. 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 repet.i.tion, 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 fis.h.i.+ng-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 fis.h.i.+ng-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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RAMSGATE.]