Part 3 (1/2)
CHAPTER V.
THE LIBER STUDIORUM--HIS POETRY AND DRAGONS.
In 1807 Turner commenced his most serious rivalry, ”The Liber Studiorum,” a rivalry which not only exceeded in force but differed in quality from his others. Previously he had pitted his skill only against that of the artist rivalled, adopting the style of his rival, but in these engravings he pitted not only his skill, but also his style and range of art against Claude's. There are indeed only a few of the ”Liber” prints which are in Claude's style, and most of the best are in his own. Lovely as are _Woman Playing Tambourine_, and _Hindoo Devotions_, they seem to us far lower in value than _Mount St. Gothard_ and _Hind Head Hill_. There is the usual mixture of feeling in the motives with which Turner undertook this work, the same dependence on others for the starting impulse which we see throughout his art-life, the same originality, industry, and confusion of thought in carrying out his design. The idea of the ”Liber” did not originate with him, but with his friend Mr. W. F. Wells. The idea was n.o.ble in so far as it attempted to extend the bounds of landscape art beyond previous limits, to break down the Claude wors.h.i.+p which blinded the eyes of the public to the merit that existed in contemporary work, and prevented them, and artists also, from looking to nature as the source of landscape art. It is scarcely too much to say that in those days Claude stood between nature and the artist, and that he was as much the standard of landscape art as Pheidias of sculpture. To try to clear away this barrier of progress, as Hogarth had striven years before to abolish the ”black masters,” was no ign.o.ble effort, and it was done in a n.o.bler spirit than that of Hogarth, for he did not attempt to depreciate his rival. Yet the n.o.bility of the attempt was not unmixed, for if he did not disparage Claude, he attempted to make himself famous at Claude's expense. He did not indeed say, as Hogarth would have done, ”Claude is bad, I am good;” but he said, ”Claude is good, but I am better.” His own experience even from very early days should have told him that, despite the cant of connoisseurs and the strength of old traditions, no purely original work of his had pa.s.sed unnoticed, and that the truest and n.o.blest way of educating the public taste was by following the bent of his original genius, and leaving the public to draw their own comparisons.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEVIL'S BRIDGE.
_From the ”Liber Studiorum.”_]
Mr. Wells's daughter states that not only did the ”Liber Studiorum”
entirely owe its existence to her father's persuasion, but the divisions into ”Pastoral,” ”Elegant Pastoral,” ”Marine,” &c., were also suggested by him. Turner determined to print and publish and sell the ”Liber”
himself, but to employ an engraver. His first choice fell on ”Mr. F. C.
Lewis, the best aquatint engraver of the day, who at the very time was at work on facsimiles of Claude's drawings.”[23] With him he soon quarrelled. The terms were, that Turner was to etch and Lewis to aquatint at five guineas a plate. The first plate, _Bridge and Goats_, was finished and accepted by Turner, though not published till April, 1812; but the second plate Turner gave Lewis the option of etching as well as aquatinting, and he etched it accordingly, and sent a proof to Turner, raising his charge from five guineas to eight, in consideration of the extra work. Turner praised it, but declined to have the plate engraved, on the ground that Lewis had raised his charges. This ended Mr. Lewis's connection with the ”Liber,” and Turner next employed Mr.
Charles Turner, the mezzotint engraver, but he had to pay him eight guineas a plate. Charles Turner agreed to engrave fifty plates at this price, but after he had finished twenty, he wished to raise his charge to ten guineas, which led to a quarrel. With reference to these quarrels of Turner with his engravers, Mr. Thornbury says, ”The painter who had never had quarter given to him when he was struggling, now in his turn, I grieve to say, gave no quarter,” and ”inflexibly exacting as he was, Turner could not understand how an engraver who had contracted to do fifty engravings should try to get off his bargain at the twenty-first.”
This, like most of Thornbury's statements, is utterly untrustworthy.
There is no evidence to show that a hard bargain was ever driven with him when he was struggling, there is no word of any dispute with engravers till he began to employ them himself, and as to his ”not being able to understand” how any man should endeavour to obtain more than the price contracted for, it was exactly what he tried to do himself, when afterwards employed by Cooke.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ALPS AT DAYBREAK.
_From Rogers's ”Poems.”_]
The fact is that in all business arrangements Turner's worse nature, the mean, grasping spirit of the little tradesman, was brought into prominence. In the case of Lewis he was evidently in the wrong, in the case of Charles Turner he was only hard; but in all business transactions he was as a rule ungenerous, and sometimes dishonest. His action towards the public with regard to the ”Liber” can be called by no other name. His prices at first were fifteen s.h.i.+llings for prints, and twenty-five s.h.i.+llings for proofs. When the plates got worn (and mezzotint plates are subject to rapid deterioration in the light parts), Turner used to alter them, sometimes changing the effect greatly, as in the _Mer de Glace_, where he transformed the smooth, snow-covered glacier into spiky ridges of ice, or in the _aesacus_ and _Hesperie_, where the effect of sunbeams through the wood was effaced, and the direction in which the head of Hesperie was looking was changed, and the face afterwards concealed. The changes were not always for the worse; the very wear of the plate in some cases, as in that of the _Calm_, improved the effect, and what we have called his confusion of thought, and what Thornbury has called his ”distorted logic,” may have led him to believe that he was not wrong in selling as he did these worn and altered plates as proofs. A kind casuistry may lend us a word less disagreeable than dishonest to such transactions, but when we know that he habitually from the first made no distinction between proofs and prints--that he sold the same things under different names at different prices--every plea breaks down, and we are forced to the conclusion that when he thought he could cheat safely ”the pack of geese,”[24] as he thought the public, he did so.
Nor can we acquit Turner of unfairness in issuing the ”Liber Studiorum”
in compet.i.tion with the French painter's ”Liber Veritatis,” a book well-known to the public and to him, as the third edition of its plates, engraved by Earlom, was just issued, when the ”Liber Studiorum” was begun. He must have known what the public did not probably know--that Claude's rough sketches were mere memoranda of the effects of his pictures taken by him to identify them, and never meant for publication; whereas his were carefully-finished compositions, into which he threw his whole power. Not only was the publication unfair as regards Claude, but it was misleading to the public as regards himself. The t.i.tle, ”Liber Studiorum,” applies only to some of the prints. A few of the poorer plates, especially the architectural ones, and such simple designs as the _Hedging and Ditching_, might properly perhaps have been called studies, but even upon these he bestowed a care and a finish that would ent.i.tle them to be called pictures, monochrome as they are.
The want of a well-considered plan, and the capricious way in which they were published, contributed to the ill-success of the work; and though we are accustomed to look upon its failure as a severe judgment on the taste of the time, we are not at all sure that it would have succeeded if published in the present day, unless Mr. Ruskin had written the advertis.e.m.e.nt.
”The meaning of the entire book,” according to that eloquent writer, ”was symbolized in the frontispiece,[25] which he engraved with his own hand:[26] Tyre at Sunset, with the Rape of Europa, indicating the symbolism of the decay of Europe by that of Tyre, its beauty pa.s.sing away into terror and judgment (Europa being the Mother of Minos and Rhadamanthus).”
Turner's advertis.e.m.e.nt thus describes the intention of the work:--
”Intended as an ill.u.s.tration of Landscape Composition, cla.s.sed as follows: Historical, Mountainous, Pastoral, Marine, and Architectural.”
We think Turner's description the more correct, and that the intention of his frontispiece was to give all the ”cla.s.ses” in one composition, and we are extremely doubtful whether Turner knew or cared anything about either Minos or Rhadamanthus.
The most obvious intention of the work was to show his own power, and there never was, and perhaps never will be again, such an exhibition of genius in the same direction. No rhetoric can say for it as much as it says for itself in those ninety plates, twenty of which were never published. If he did not exhaust art or nature, he may be fairly said to have exhausted all that was then known of landscape art, and to have gone further than any one else in the interpretation of nature.
Notwithstanding, the merit of the plates is very unequal, some, as _Solway Moss_ and the _Little Devil's Bridge_, being more valuable as works of art than many of his large pictures; others, especially the architectural subjects, the _Interior of a Church_, and _Pembury Mill_, being almost devoid of interest. As to any one thought running through the series, we can see none, except desire to show the whole range of his power; and as to sentiment, it seems to us to be thoroughly impersonal, impartial, and artistic. He turns on the pastoral or historical stop as easily as if he were playing the organ, and his only concern with his figures is that they shall perform their parts adequately, which is as much as some of them do.
We have spoken of the book as an attack on Claude, and of the ”intention” of the work, but we are not sure that we are not using too definite ideas to express the variety of impulses in Turner's mind that tended to the commencement of the ”Liber.” We have seen that the first notion of it, and its divisions, were suggested by Mr. Wells, and the plates are nothing more nor less than a selection from his sketches and pictures, arranged under these heads. His early topographical drawings and studies in England provided him with the architectural and pastoral subjects, his studies of Claude and the Poussins and Wilson, with the elegant pastoral, Vandevelde and nature with the marine, and his one or two visits to the Continent with the mountainous. The frontispiece, the first attempt to give a coherent signification to the whole, was not published till 1812, and it was not till 1816 that the advertis.e.m.e.nt to which we have called attention appeared when, after four years'
intermission, the issue of the ”Liber” was recommenced; even then it is only described as ”an ill.u.s.tration of Landscape Composition;” and it is quite probable that the desire to make money, to display his art, to rival Claude, and to educate the public, contributed to the production of the work, without any very vivid consciousness on his part as to his motives of action. It has, like all Turner's work, the characteristics of a gradual growth rather than of the carrying out of a well-defined conception.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FALLS IN VALOMBRe.
_From Rogers's ”Jacqueline.”_]
There is one way in which the t.i.tle of the book may be considered as appropriate, and that is to take ”studia” to mean ”studies,” in the usual general sense of the word, for it is an index to his whole course of study (including books and excepting colour), down to the time of its publication. With the exception of his Venetian pictures and his later extravagances, it may be said to be an epitome of his art without colour. Poets and painters may change their style, and may develop their powers in after-life in an unexpected manner; but after the age at which Turner had arrived when he commenced to publish the ”Liber,” viz., thirty-two, there are few, if any, mental germs which have not at least sprouted. Turner, though he never left off acquiring knowledge, or developing his style, is no exception to this rule, and this makes the ”Liber” valuable, not only as a collection of works of art, but as a nearly complete summary of the great artist's work and mind. Amongst his more obvious claims to the first place among landscape artists, are his power of rendering atmospherical effects, and the structure and growth of things. He not only knew how a tree looked, but he showed how it grew. Others may have drawn foliage with more habitual fidelity, but none ever drew trunks and branches with such knowledge of their inner life; if you look at the trunks in the drawing of _Hornby Castle_ for instance (which we mention because it is easily seen at the South Kensington Museum), and compare them with any others in the same room, the superior indication of texture of bark, of truly varied swelling, of consistency, and all essential differences between living wood and other things, cannot fail to be apparent to the least observant. Although the trees of the ”Liber” are not of equal merit (Mr. Ruskin says the firs are not good), this quality may be observed in many of the plates.
Others have drawn the appearance of clouds, but Turner knew how they formed. Others have drawn rocks, but he could give their structure, consistency, and quality of surface, with a few deft lines and a wash; others could hide things in a mist, but he could reveal things through mist. Others could make something like a rainbow, but he, almost alone, and without colour, could show it standing out, a bow of light arrested by vapour in mid-air, not flat upon a mountain, or printed on a cloud.