Jim departed on his mission, but turned more than once to wring the prodigal by the hand again. By this time the song in the hall had degenerated into the low comic. Old Kit was in the middle of a facetious and mystic ballad known as "Bung-y'r-eye." The sentiment of it was, that an exciseman having seized on a keg which he supposed contained bung-y'r-eye-the slang term for hollands-on opening it, found a fine young baby inside. Determined to make the best of it, he carried the young foundling to be christened, and gave Bung-y'r-eye as the name of the future Christian, and the gist of the ballad was the surprise and perplexity of the parson at receiving such a baptismal denomination. After a while the mirth began evidently to slackenthe yeoman ceased to fill his cupthe dame gave little winks and starts at intervals-and the nieces were caught in most unmistakable yawns. "Come, then," said old Guy, "pass round the tankard once more before we part, and as 'tis well on in the Christmas morn we'll have a curl (carol, Anglicè). Let Lily begin: but where's Lily?" Lily had disappeared. The alarm caused by her absence was soon absorbed in a greater one-a shrill female voice was heard shrieking out, Fire! fire! and in a few minutes James came in, pale and ghastly, shouting out, "Maister, maister, the thatch be a fire!" J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. A GENERATION or two ago it was an article of popular belief that the possession of genius was not only compatible with folly, meanness, and pettiness, but that a man could scarcely be "a great genius" without either an amount of imbecility which exposed him to the contempt of his neighbours, or of selfindulgence and vice, which made him justly their horror. Perhaps the idea has not yet entirely faded from the obstinate popular mind, which is slow to change its opinions; but in the upper levels of intelligence it has been for some time replaced by a counter idea, not less sweeping, and scarcely less untrue. It is to Mr Carlyle that we owe the principle which he is at present laboriously attempting to set forth by the difficult process of turning Prussian Frederick into a lofty hero, that Genius necessarily implies all the wisdom, goodness, and perfection, both moral and intellectual, which can belong to man. A man who has this one divine gift, instead of contenting himself with the VOL. XCL-NO. DLV. double portion which has actually fallen to his share, must have every other excellence claimed for him by birthright. It is not enough that he is the poet of a nation; he must be acknowledged the individual most worthy, were not his contemporaries blind-to be that nation's ruler too. Strength and goodness, and all the more exquisite qualities of the soul, must belong to him whose possession of the incommunicable gift has been made manifest, even in modes which have little to do with the moral qualities. This modern philosophy, which saw in Burns not the inspired minstrel only, but, had it not been for blind fate and adverse circumstances, the hero and demigod of his country, has exercised a subtle influence in contemporary literature; and perhaps has nowhere more fully shown its perfect contradictoriness at once to fact and nature than in the eloquent and repeated defences, the webs of cunning argument and specious pleading, in which his admirers have enfolded the pitiful and scanty B history of the painter Turner, whose cuitous route of Hero-worship and Life, so called, has just been given deification, we * are brought back to the world. again to the old vulgar dogma, that of all the inspirations of human life Genius is the one least like to carry its possessor through the world with honour and dignity, or to preserve his garments unspotted. The great modern example of this extraordinary process is the great painter whose shabby figure has not been long enough off the stage to permit the possibility of its reproduction amid fabulous lights. It has fallen to the lot of this unhappy man to attract the adoring admiration of one of the most brilliant writers of the day, and, half deified, to have at the same time his notable imperfections accounted for according to the only plausible hypothesis by which the rights of genius can be kept intact while its faults are excused. If Turner could have chosen for himself, it is probable that he would have rather resigned the applause than borne the consequent examination and defence. But Turner was not consulted; and here, accordingly, stands forth, under the strongest light, a figure only adapted for twilight and the shadows; an unhappy soul, whom common charity is content to accept as a great painter, without special inquiry into his character, but whom the cruelty of friends forces forth into public ignominy, by way of proving his right, had not circumstances forbidden, to take his place among the greatest of men. If the greatest gifts of intellect are but synonymous with a great soul-if moral excellence, purity of heart, nobility of mind, are all as necessary parts of creative genius as the special faculty of utterance or of creation, that is peculiar to it -the dread dilemma which arises when a sudden phenomenon appears, splendid with indisputable genius, but deficient in everything which ennobles a mere human creature, may easily be divined. How such a thing can be, is puzzling enough without any theory to perplex the matter; but when there is no possibility of denying the fact, common observers, who do not feel their own discrimination disparaged by the paradox, may admit and deplore the sad contradiction, or even adopt the timid wisdom of silence, and conclude it best to turn the light away from the unsatisfactory figure, and direct it upon the undeniable productions which are not inconsistent with themselves. This prudent mode of procedure is, however, impossible to those who hold that genius cannot exist by itself, but must carry every human excellence along with it. Under such circumstances the only thing to be done is, with the strangest inconsequence, to prove how vulgar material restrictions and obstacles have tarnished and limited the divine soul-have driven it into painful corners, where its aspect looks poor and cowardly only because of the wicked bonds surrounding it; and have gained such mastery over its loftier nature as circumstances seldom gain over commonplace men. Treated according to this plan, the Immortals appear to us weakly succumbing to temptations and overborne by influences which ordinary individuals struggle through without any surrender of honour; and at length, by the cir We presume there can be little doubt that circumstances have an effect upon the lives and characters of men; to say anything else would be to contradict flatly the ordinary opinion of the world. Notwithstanding, if one will but look at one's private experience among the most ordinary and obscure actors in the life drama, how wonderfully, one must allow, character, temper, heart, and spirit, assert themselves beyond the reach of all external powers. The Life of J. M. W. Turner, R.A. By WALTER THORNBURY. Hurst & Blackett. 1862. How triumphantly the poor prodigal, to whom Providence has given the fairest prospects, and whose steps are guarded by love and kindness, can vindicate his own instincts against all the virtuous force of circumstance surrounding him, and go to destruction in its very face! Who needs to be taught that everrecurring lesson? Who can be ignorant that scarcely a great career has ever been made in this world otherwise than in the face of circumstances in strenuous defiance of all that external elements could do to overcome the unconquerable soul? In the face of such examples, what are we to say to the theory that adverse circumstances can excuse a man born with all the compensations of genius for an unlovely and ignoble life, a bitter and discontented heart, a course of vulgar vice and sordid meanness? Never was genius more wickedly disparaged. That celestial gift to which God has given capacities of enjoyment beyond the reach of the crowd, is of itself an armour against circumstance more proof than steel, and continually holds open to its possessor a refuge against the affronts of the world, a shelter from its contumelies, which is denied to other men. He who reckons of this endowment as of something which gives only a more exquisite egotism, a finer touch of selfishness, a sublimation of envy and self-assertion, and dependence upon the applause of the crowd, forms a mean estimate against which it is the duty of every man who knows better to protest. Outside circumstances, disappointment, neglect, dark want and misery, have plagued the souls and disturbed the temper of great men before now, but have never, so far as we are aware, polluted a pure heart, or made a noble mind despicable. The bitter soreness of unappreciated genius belongs proverbially to those whose gift is of the smallest; and the man who excuses a bad life by the pretence that this divine lymph contained within it has been soured by popular neglect, and turned to gall, speaks sacrilege and profanity. Such is the plea set up for Turner by his worshippers. Who that ever knew the generous craft but knows some poor painter toiling through real neglect and slights, bearing sharp anguishes yearly from a hanging committee, meeting with mortifications and disappointments all the harder to bear because other lives are dependent on his own, who yet bears a sweet heart through all his troubles, and, taking comfort in his art itself, finds the joy of that restore him always to fellowship with all men? Noble, humble, disappointed soul! unconscious of any nobility in your humbleness and brave rebound out of failure. What was neglect to this man would be fortune to you, who bear no grudge against the world. Yet, turning from such a spectacle, we are called upon to reverence Turner, and be remorsefully compassionate of his miserable life and niggard heart, because the public, once in the days of his youth, was doubtful of his pre-eminence, and soured the lymph of genius in his soul. Vain pretence and unworthy plea! If Mr Ruskin, standing sadly, as well might any true man, before those treasures which he has had so great a share in expounding to the world, had turned our eyes to the pictures, and hushed with ineffable pity and tears any undue reference to the painter, he would have but done a friend's part to the unhappy man of genius, whose wretchedness his over-adoration has brought forth naked and pitiful before the world. For what Mr Ruskin could gloss over in a maze of harmonious words, Mr Thornbury sets forth bare and unsoftened in the blaze of day. We will not ask whether the public demanded a life of Turner with so much clamour that the present author could not forbear; but it is only just to say that he has collected a mass of information larger in quantity, and fuller in detail, than Turner's uncommunicative and secretive character could have war ranted any one in expecting; and that henceforward nobody can have any excuse for reopening the subject, or gathering again out of merciful oblivion the few facts of the great painter's life. Little more can be said for the performance; it is a chaos of material without arrangement or form, full of repetitions, affectations, and Cockneyisms of every conceivable degree of bad taste. Yet through the muddle, by chance or happy fortune-" more by luck than good guiding," as the Scotch proverb has it-the man may be seen, shabbily visible as in the days of his flesh, an unattractive, sordid figure, giving the lie sturdily, with obstinate vulgar perseverance, to every attempt which may be made to make him a poet and a gentleman. Under no circumstances could the picture be a pleasant one but now that it has been made, and that no amount of silence can save the unlucky hero from the cruel kindness of his friends, our readers may not be displeased to hear, in a form less diffuse than Mr Thornbury's, the story of a man who has enriched the world with so many sunsets and sunrises, so many various splendours of storm and calm, without leaving one gracious human reminiscence behind him to make his fame dear to any heart of man. If impartiality ever could be attained in any human narrative, here is the unhappy soul who should have achieved the sad distinction of an impartial history. The love of his admirers for their own opinion has, however, saved Turner from this pre-eminence, and indeed originated in his favour a hotter partisanship than could ever have arisen from love of him. Though Mr Thornbury's high-pitched enthusiasm rings false beside the superlative certainty of Mr Ruskin, yet all that could be gleaned in his favour is undoubtedly collected in these volumes. The idea here presented of him is meant to be a lofty one; how far it justifies either the panegyric or the apology, every reader can judge for himself. now Joseph Mallord William Turner (an unlucky multiplicity of names, which he seems in earlier life to have eluded by using only the last) was born to the great comfort and delight of his biographer, who recurs to the fact on every possible occasion, as if it contained something specially characteristic-the son of a barber in Hand Court, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, in the year 1775. This humble origin was dignified by no personal superiority in his immediate progenitors. The barber was a barber of mind conformed to his fortunes; the mother a person of ungovernable temper, who ended her life in a lunatic asylum: not a gleam even of domestic love and comfort shines round the house which Mr Thornbury is at much unnecessary pains to describe, and which he declares to be "now so sacred a place in the eyes of many Englishmen." Nor does the boy himself awake any interest in the breast of the unenlightened observer. Nobody seems to predict any special glories of him: somehow the faculty within him gets kindled into expression by sight of a piece of heraldry, or a drawing of Paul Sandby's, or a print from Vandervelde-which we please; Mr Thornbury jauntily permits the reader to choose. Then he begins to draw cocks and hens, and then poplars and waving willows by the Thames, when good fortune carries him out to Brentford to do a little schooling there. By the time he is fourteen his drawings are for sale in the window of his father's shop; a year or two later he is a student of the Royal Academy, doing for himself at the same time in a variety of notable ways: washing-in backgrounds for architects, colouring prints for printsellers-maintaining, evidently, a very comfortable boyish traffic in those productions of industry, and by no means kept back or kept down by adverse fate. Neither is there anything very dark in the surroundings of his boyhood. A kind dilettante, Dr Munro, opens his house and his portfolios to the boy and his companion Girtin-and, permitting them to study and copy as they pleased amid apparently a very good collection of pictures, gave the lads half-a-crown for their nightly drawings, and entertained them at supper in a most genial and encouraging way. Nor was this the only pleasant circumstance in Turner's youthful life: he went boating on the Thames in many a prolonged excursion-he went to Margate he made drawings for illustrated books-he fell in love. These amusements show little evidence of any lack of youthful indulgences in his early life. The falling in love, however, of which Mr Thornbury tells the tale most tragically, came to final disappoint ment and failure; and in this, which seems to have happened when he was about twenty, lies the only substantial reason his candid biographer can find, for the dark shades of his character. "It helped to sour that great generous nature, and burn out of him hope and youth with the terrible corrosive of disappointment," says our author, with grandiloquence; but there is no corresponding pause of despair to be recorded in the thrifty and busy existence of the young artist. When he was little more than sixteen he seems to have not only exhibited, but sold his pictures. At twenty he added to his many occupations a little teaching, in which he does not show in the most conscientious or satisfactory light. "He would be silent and rough, and leave the puzzled pupils pretty well alone while he thought over some sketch of his own. He was not going to let out guinea secrets for five shillings; so he let his pupils paint on as they liked," said Mr Thornbury, with naïve frankness, probably forgetting that he has just attributed a great and generous nature to his hero. Ever busier and busier went on the increasing life. Between twenty and twentyfive years old he had made expeditions over all the midland counties, through Wales, and the south coast, making drawings for the illustrated A books which were then in fashion, wandering over the country in all the freedom of a young artist, making notes and sketches invaluable for himself, while doing the drawings which paid his expenses and kept him afloat-a perfect probation for an English landscapepainter. His biographer interrupts his account of this industrious life to remind us that "Turner was a bitterly disappointed man," and to tell us that some of his engravings entailed a heavy loss upon the publishers. Notwithstanding, work never seems to have failed him; and a good supply of work is a vulgar but sure sign of a certain amount of appreciation, which Turner was the last man in the world to undervalue. While steadily supporting himself by these drawings, he began to exhibit pictures; and here again we find no such marks of neglect as were to be expected. picture of Sheffield, exhibited at one-and-twenty "obtained loud praise from all the critics;" at twenty-eight he appears with "Coniston Fells," "evidently a great painter," says Mr Thornbury; at twenty-nine he was an Associate of the Academy. To most other men this would have been marked success; how it can possibly be supposed to lay the foundation of bitter disappointment-disappointment almost justifying and certainly excusing the unhappy peculiarities of his after life-perhaps Mr Ruskin and Mr Thornbury know; we do not pretend to understand. There are painters who could swallow greater disappointments than any which up to this time seem to have occurred to Turner for the certainty of admission into the privileges of the Academy, even at a less early age; and compassion for a man who has attained the first rank in his profession at nine-and-twenty seems to us a most unnecessary waste of sympathy. Few men do so much; and favoured beyond the lot of common humanity are those who succeed in doing more. During these probationary years |