The Project Gutenberg EBook of Turner, by C. Lewis Hind

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Turner
       Five letters and a postscript.

Author: C. Lewis Hind

Release Date: December 23, 2012 [EBook #41694]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TURNER ***




Produced by sp1nd, Paul Clark and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)

[Pg i]

MASTERPIECES
IN COLOUR
EDITED BY - -
T. LEMAN HARE

TURNER

1775-1851

[Pg ii]

"Masterpieces in Colour" Series

Others in Preparation.

[Pg iii]
[Pg iv]

[Pg v]

TURNER

FIVE LETTERS AND A POSTSCRIPT

BY C. LEWIS HIND

ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT
REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

[Pg vi]
[Pg vii]

CONTENTS

[Pg viii]
[Pg ix]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[Pg x]
[Pg 11]

LETTER I
EXPLANATORY

Yes: I remember that morning at Exeter when I surprised you making a drawing of the west porch of the cathedral. Timidly were the unrestored figures of angels, apostles, prophets, kings and warriors—very old, very battered—taking form in your sketch-book:[Pg 12] timidly, for even then you were beginning to be troubled by the blur that rose, after an hour's work, between your eyes and the carven kings and saints.

Your sister passed into the cathedral to her devotions carrying white flowers for the altar: we stayed in the sunlight. I cannot remember how Turner became the subject of our talk; but I think it was my mention of his drawing of the west front of Salisbury Cathedral done when he was twenty-three—one of the set exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1799, which hastened his election to an Associateship of the Royal Academy. Those were the days of the tinted architectural drawings, but in that magnificent Salisbury, the details indicated, yet not insistent, the old stones yellow in the sunshine, grey-blue in the shadow, Turner was already on the track of Light, the goal of his art life. He had not yet formulated any principle, that was not Turner's way; but those small, bright eyes of his had already perceived that there is light in shade as in shine. Girtin, that marvellous boy, his friend and fellow-student, was still alive; but art was in a poor[Pg 15] state in England, in 1799, and we can well believe that this drawing of Salisbury made Turner a marked man. I could dispense with the lamp-post boys playing with hoops, as indeed with every figure in every picture by Turner. But he needed such strong foreground notes, and he, like the older landscape painters, troubled little about figures. Claude used to say, with a laugh, that he made no charge for them. Their use was to throw back the middle distance.

[Pg 13]
[Pg 14]

Then we talked of Turner's water-colours. Had he never composed the "Liber Studiorum"; never produced gorgeous dreams of glowing colour in his oil pictures; never with veils of luminous paint flashed sunrise upon white canvases; never done a moonlight, or white sails billowing over a wet sea, he would, in his water-colours, have earned the title of father of modern landscape and of Impressionism.

You, who had seen nothing of Turner's work except the plates, good in their way, but far from being the real thing, in Mr. Stopford Brooke's edition of the "Liber Studiorum," hinted that you found the master old-fashioned. Corot, Monet, and Harpignies were your idols in land[Pg 16]scape. That was not strange when I consider that your childhood was spent in Jersey, and your youth at Moret and in Paris, and that on your twentieth birthday, a few months ago, you were articled to an architect of Exeter, your France-loving father's native place. So the Master seemed old-fashioned, did he? And you were a little sceptical of my enthusiasm.

"Ah," I said, "if you could see a range of Turner's water-colours from the first boyish drawing of Lambeth Palace exhibited at the Royal Academy when he was fifteen, through the plodding period of his development, cumbered with ungainly figures, but set in the Turnerian air and against infinite distances, as in the winding Thames from Richmond Hill, ever moving towards the light, on to his later visions when buildings, hills, and clouds shimmer in iridescent vapour! Then the figures of men and women disappear, and after fifty years of observation of Nature those old eyes see only the chromatic glories of the reflections and refractions of imponderable sun-rays. The lovely colours linger so delicately on odds and ends of paper that it seems as if a breath must blow[Pg 17] them away. If you could see the sapphire, opal and amethyst tenderness of his 'Study on the Rhine,' the misty hills rainbow-tinted, the sun flushing the steep castle rock and making a golden pathway over the sea, you would feel that this barber's son, morose, mean, in whose muddled brain moved until his last day magnificent ideas, has given to the world the whole history of water-colour, from the tinted drawing, to the flame of an effect seen and caught in a moment of ecstasy."

You were still sceptical! I acknowledge that there were others in Turner's day who also broke new paths—Cozens, and of course Girtin, of whom Turner is reported to have said, "Had Tom Girtin lived I should have starved." As an old man he would mumble of "Poor Tom's golden drawings." I acknowledge that since Turner's day the channel that he flooded has broadened and gushed forth into many tributaries; but he was the first, modelling himself on Claude, to start in pursuit of the sun, to break the rays, and flush the land.

I quoted a Frenchman, M. le Sizeranne: "All the torches which have shed a flood of new light upon Art—that of Delacroix in 1825, those[Pg 18] of the Impressionists in 1870—have in turn been lit at his flame."

I quoted Constable—generous Constable—"I believe it would be difficult to say that there is a bit of landscape now done that does not emanate from that source."

I quoted Pisarro, telling how during the war of 1870 he and Monet came to London, studied Turner at the National Gallery, and found in Turner and Constable "practical certitude in matters of technique which they had but vaguely suspected and discussed at the Café Guerbois." What would they have said had they known that Ruskin, the champion of Turner, the foe of Impressionism, when, in 1856, he sifted the nineteen thousand Turner water-colours, drawings, studies, and the "unfinished" paintings, had condemned the sunshine and atmosphere canvases now in the Tate Gallery to half a century of obscurity, because in his opinion they were "unfinished." Turner purposely left them unfinished and elusive as sunrise itself, momentary impressions of the glory of the world. The sun is new each day, ever uncompleted: so are these records of the flame of Turner.

[Pg 19]

"They are golden visions," said Constable, speaking of the Venice pictures, "only visions, but still one would like to live and die with such pictures."

Turner, to whom the world of men and women was a place to escape from, brooded on scenes that open a pathway to tired eyes leading away somewhere west of the sun and east of the moon; he loved distances, lakes that feel their way round hills to infinity, and sunsets that are a world in themselves. Even in his dark "Calais Pier" he must open the inky clouds to a blue sky swaying above the bituminous sea. In the "unfinished" "Chichester Canal" you may sail over that happy waterway, beyond the spire, on and on whithersoever your fancy leads; in the "unfinished" "Petworth Park" you may tramp away with the hunter and the hounds past the sentinel trees to that vast sky flaming and beckoning; in the "unfinished" "Norham Castle Sunrise" the poet-artist dreamed the mystery of dawn, and as he saw the miracle unfolding, he told his dream to you and to me; he saw the blue mists parting before the sun-rays rising behind the castle;[Pg 20] saw the opalescent sky reflected in the water; saw, perhaps, in the mind's eye, the strong red note that the picture needed, and quickly set that cow standing knee-deep in the shallows. Turner gave all of himself to the making of this lovely impression, for Norham Castle, which he drew and painted so often, was his mascot. Sketching on the Tweed with Cadell, the Edinburgh bookseller, as they passed Norham Castle, Turner suddenly swept off his hat to the ruins. "I made a drawing of Norham several years ago," he explained. "It took; and from that day to this I have had as much to do as my hands could execute."

There, I remember, I paused, noting that you were again passing your hands about your eyes. Troubled, you said that the blur had returned, and that you must work no more that day. So we walked towards the river.

On the way we saw Italian workmen in blue trousers paving a road from cauldrons of molten asphalt. We watched the little flames leaping from the bubbling mass, and I drew from the sight an image of the art life of Turner: how he stoked his furnace with Poussin, Vandevelde,[Pg 21] and de Loutherbourg, and so brought to life his dark early works such as "The Shipwreck" and "Calais Pier"; how as he fed his fire with Claude, Crome, and Wilson the furnace glowed, and the world saw the ardour of "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus," and the splendour of "Dido Building Carthage"; then when the flames leapt towards the sky there was pure Turner, the Turner of the "Téméraire" and the Venice dreams, a "Hastings" that has lost all earthly form; a dream boat passing between Headlands at Sunrise, and the later water-colours—the red Rigi, the blue Rigi, the blue and gold "Arth from the Lake of Zug," the moonlight Venice, and the atmospheric magic of the Lake of Uri.

When we regained the Cathedral close we met your sister returning from her devotions. She said: "What have you been discussing this summer morning?"

"I have been discoursing on The Flame of Turner," said I.

"Ah!" said she, "there's a Turner in the Museum here."

We went to the Museum and stood before "Buttermere Lake, with a part of Cromach[Pg 22] Water, Cumberland—a Shower." You were silent. What a catastrophe—after my dithyrambs about the flame of Turner and his slow soar to light, that I should show you, as your first Turner, that work of his early stoking period, painted at twenty-two, before he learned the method of oil painting and the ways of the sun. The lake has almost gone, the trees have blackened, only the rainbow dimly lingers. The flame of Turner? The chrysalis husk of Turner!

That poor "Buttermere Lake" is still the only picture by Turner that you have ever seen. And now that you are far from here, walking and digging in Sparta, and sailing in insecure little crafts to the Islands, I hold it a duty to write you in detachments this interminable letter explaining as well as I can what I mean by the Flame of Turner. Your sister will read the letters to you, ill-starred student, who, at the beginning of your art career, must not use your eyes for twelve months on penalty of blindness.

When, after the last visit to the oculist, you hurried from the lawyer's office in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where I witnessed your Will, I did not tell you that a few yards away rests a glorious[Pg 25] Turner, "Van Tromp's Barge entering the Texel" and sailing in golden pomp eternally through the Soane Museum. I saw it on my way to your lawyer's office. The picture is alone and I was alone with what Turner loved—a sportive sea, an arching sky, gold overhead, gold on the water, and a ship sailing home golden-hulled beneath golden sails, with flags flying at the mast, and a cunning wraith of indigo cloud sweeping down the sky to give the glamour value. You did not see the golden Van Tromp. I had not the heart to show it to you.

[Pg 23]
[Pg 24]

Now you are far from Turner. I can follow your track to Olympia, and along the path by the wood, above the excavations, to a rough sign-post, where I stood two years ago and read the words "To Arcadia!" Somewhere beyond Arcadia you are, and some day these letters will fall, one by one, into your hands.

[Pg 26]

LETTER II
HIS LIFE: AN IMPRESSION

Once in our walk from Exeter Cathedral to the river you paused and asked what kind of a man was this amalgam of poet-artist and suspicious tradesman. And I, who had been so long studying his works, and dipping into the lives of him by Thornbury, Hamerton, Cosmo Monkhouse, Sir Walter Armstrong, Mr. W. L. Wyllie, and others, tried to give an impression of the man Turner—a blur of his sayings, letters, habits, and the comments of his biographers. Some of them have bewailed that his was not a pattern life, such as would edify a Y.M.C.A. audience. Nature produces such useful lives by the hundred thousand: she makes but one Turner. The Church had blessed neither his union with Mrs. Danby, nor with Mrs. Booth, and, in his later days, he preferred rum and water with sea-faring men in Wapping or[Pg 27] Rotherhithe to dreary dinner-parties in dreary houses in the West End of London, which does not seem to me strange. We must take him as he was and be grateful. It was Nature's whim to link this great artist-soul to the starved soul of a petty tradesman. As an artist he is with the immortals: as a man he was true son of the covetous, kindly barber of Maiden Lane, Strand, keen on halfpennies, a driver of hard bargains. The father haggled with his customers, the son with engravers and picture buyers. Secretive, suspicious, ambitious, sometimes mean, yet capable of great kindnesses and sacrifices, was this little hook-nosed man in an ill-cut brown coat, and enormous frilled shirt, with feet and hands notably small. Kind? Yes. Did he not in the Academy of 1826 cover his glowing picture of "Cologne—The Arrival of a Packet Boat—Evening" with a wash of lamp-black, because it "killed" two portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence hanging alongside. "Poor Lawrence was so unhappy," said Turner. "The lamp-black will all wash off after the Exhibition." But Turner's moods were capricious. Like all blessed or cursed with the artistic temperament,[Pg 28] the mood of the moment usually governed his actions. Six years after the lamp-black incident he had a grey picture hanging beside Constable's "Opening of Waterloo Bridge," and Turner (you may imagine the fury in his bright eyes) watched his brother artist heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of his City barges. Presently, when Constable had gone away, Turner put a round daub of red lead upon his grey picture, which he afterwards shaped into a buoy. Constable said when he returned, "Turner has been here and fired a gun." Turner liked a joke, and if it was sometimes at the expense of another, that was but the way of his class.

From first to last he loved but one thing with heart and soul—his art. His affection for his father, and for Mr. Fawkes of Farnley Hall, were but interludes in his passion to interpret Nature, to make her conform to his visions, and to excel his predecessors and contemporaries. Certainly, in his way, he loved his "old dad," who lived with him until his death, looking after the picture gallery of unsold works in Queen Anne Street, and helping in the preparation of[Pg 29] his canvases. Of his father he was wont to chuckle, "Dad taught me nothing except to save halfpence." The death of the old man was a great blow.

The love affair which Thornbury relates amounts to nothing—no human thing ever really interfered with his art. His schooling at Brentford and Margate was infinitesimal—but for a landscape and sea painter, what education could have been better than the river and the boats at Brentford and the sea and ships at Margate. He remained illiterate to the end. When he wrote a description of St. Michael's Mount for the publication called "Coast Scenery," Coombes complained that "Mr. T——'s account is the most extraordinary composition I have ever read; in parts it is absolutely unintelligible." As Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy he was unable to express his ideas, but, says Thornbury, "he took great pains to prepare the most learned diagrams."

Throughout his life he extended and amended that amazing poem called "Fallacies of Hope," portions of which he tagged to his pictures in the Royal Academy Catalogue. It is doggerel[Pg 30] with occasional glints of the beauty, pomp, and wonder of the world that showered when he used his rightful methods of self-expression—eye and hand. The romance of the ancient world of myth and architecture tingled in this secretive, slovenly, Jewy man; but when he essayed to learn Greek, in the happy days at Sandycombe, the attempt had to be abandoned. The slow brain could not master the verbs.

Ambition was strong within him. No toil was too long or too severe. He travelled England and Europe, sketched everything, stored the forms of buildings and effects of light and colour; and could recall what he had garnered at an instant's notice. In painting he pitted himself against the dead, against his contemporaries, against twenty miles of country, against the very glory of the sun, wrestling with each in turn, and chuckling as they succumbed.

He saved his money and in later years hoarded his pictures. He refused to pass potential purchasers to his studio, but Gillott, the pen-maker, bearded the lion in Queen Anne Street, pushed past Mrs. Danby, joked with the old man when he growled, "Don't want to sell!"[Pg 31] and carried off in his cab some five thousand pounds worth of pictures.

Turner re-bought his canvases when they came up for sale at Christie's, worked without cessation, practised all manner of petty economies, and finally left his pictures to the nation and his fortune of one hundred and forty thousand pounds to found a home for "decayed male artists of English parents and of lawful issue, with an instruction for a Turner medal at the Royal Academy, and a monument to himself in St. Paul's Cathedral."

The will with its four codicils was a bewildering document. For years it was wrangled over in the courts, and in the end a compromise was effected. The fortune went to the next of kin, the pictures and drawings to the nation, and twenty thousand pounds to the Royal Academy. Ruskin summed up the compromise thus: "The nation buried, with threefold honour, Turner's body in St. Paul's, his pictures at Charing Cross, and his purposes in Chancery."

If Turner, as he eyes the landscape of the Elysian Fields, retains aught of earth-life frailty, he must look angrily down upon the Turner[Pg 32] section of the National Gallery, upon the rooms beneath, reached by a winding staircase, where some of his water-colours are crowded, upon the sunlight canvases at the Tate Gallery; and at certain provincial exhibitions whither some of his works have overflowed from the National Gallery. For he stated explicitly in his will that the pictures should be kept together in a room or rooms to be added to the National Gallery, to be called Turner's Gallery, and to be built within ten years of his demise.

I still hope that the Turner Gallery may be built. Perhaps the hope will become a reality. What a sight Turner's pictures chronologically arranged would be, from the dim experimental pieces and the "Moonlight: A Study at Millbank," to those four works, splendid failures, now at the Tate Gallery, that he painted the year before he died, when the mind of the old man, having flamed from the embers to express the opalescent loveliness of Venice, the grey tumult of the sea in the Whaling series, the glory of the sun flashed in stains of luminous colour upon white canvases, harked back, in the shadow of death, to the old legends he had always loved,[Pg 35] and painted them as of yore, but now blurred and tumbling, mighty ruins rising from blue lakes by great rivers and arching pines, with an impossible Æneas relating his story to an unrealised Dido, or being admonished by a Noah's-Ark Mercury. The imagination remains gorgeous if chaotic; at seventy-five he still reaches towards the unattainable, still seeks in visions a way of escape from the materialism and stupidity of the world.

[Pg 33]
[Pg 34]

What a triumph to see the range of oil pictures with the water-colours stepping daintily through the stages of his development to those latter dreams of the Rhine and Swiss lakes, fairy scenes that live, as by a miracle, on pieces of mere paper; also the proofs of the "Liber," with Mr. Frank Short's interpretations of the drawings that were never engraved, bringing the number up to a round hundred; also the tall books, one cold, beautiful steel engraving on a page, such as "Château Gaillard" in the volume called "Turner's Annual Tour, 1834," a view which charms the eyes dulled by grey London and makes the feet impatient to be off to Richard Coeur-de-Lion's castle on the bend of the Seine.[Pg 36] The portraits, sketches and caricatures, too, of Turner of Maiden Lane, Hand's Court, Hammersmith, Twickenham, Queen Anne and Harley Streets, Chelsea, and of all the world—they should hang near his life-work.

You will see him, when the good time of the Turner Gallery comes, as a pretty youth, painted by himself, no doubt a flattering likeness, which hangs in the National Gallery. It is a bust portrait, full-face, with large estimating eyes, somewhat amazed, a heavy nose, and a dropping under-lip. An attractive boy; but you must remember that Turner the idealist painted it, and that he had worked for a time in the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Nearer to the Turner that one visualises is the sturdy middle-aged man seated under a tree, cross-legged, pencil in hand, in the painting by Charles Turner. The brickdust face is clean-shaven, the nose unmistakably Semitic; the hair is long, and the whiskers straggle to the collar. A drawing rests upon his knee; he looks forth with an eye like a sword, considering how he shall change the landscape. The sketch by Maclise is a delight. Turner sits on a stool[Pg 37] up in the clouds, painting; the tail of his coat flaps over towards the earth, his boot is crooked into the support of the easel, and beneath him rises the sun with the word "Turner" blazoned amid the rays. But the best of the series, because it has that touch of caricature which often approaches nearer to life than a reasoned drawing, is the portrait by William Parrott made on Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy in 1846, when he was seventy-one. Turner is painting furiously upon his picture. The frame stands on the floor. The top is but an inch shorter than the battered beaver hat crushed over upon his big head. His Mrs. Gamp umbrella leans against a chair. His fellow-Academicians stare at his picture and at his colour-box, puzzled. "How does he do it?" they whisper.

In those days the members of the Academy were allowed four varnishing days. In his latter years Turner would send his pictures merely laid in with white and grey and complete them on the varnishing days. There was brown sherry at luncheon, and Wilkie Collins describes the old man as "sitting on the top of a flight of steps, or a box, like a shabby Bacchus nodding[Pg 38] at his picture." But he could paint a "Rain, Steam, and Speed" and "The Sun of Venice going to Sea" in spite of the brown sherry, and his lonely bachelor life.

But brown sherry or no brown sherry, to his dying day he never lost interest in the love of his life, light. At seventy years of age, when he is described as stooping, looking down and muttering to himself, he would pump Brewster as to all he knew on the subject of light. Those were the days of the infancy of photography, and Mr. Mayall, who was experimenting with daguerreotypes, tells how the old man, whose eyes were then weak and bloodshot, would sit in his studio day after day asking questions. He pretended that he was a Master in Chancery.

[Pg 39]
[Pg 40]

[Pg 41]

LETTER III
HIS ART: THE FURNACE DOORS OPEN

There is a small, neglected room in the National Gallery where certain beginnings and failures in art are entombed. If you were to stroll into that sepulchre on a dark day, I fear you would exclaim that "Buttermere Lake" is bright compared with those other early Turners "Morning on Coniston Fells" and "Moonlight: a Study at Millbank." Even on early March afternoons, when the sun strikes through the tall windows and falls upon "Moonlight at Millbank," little is visible on the small, sooty canvas except the full moon, looking like a discoloured white wafer stuck upon the dim sky. Turner developed slowly. This veritable nocturne, and the pictures that followed it shows how slow and difficult was his mastery of oil as a medium.

In the early nineteenth century Claude, the Poussins, Salvator Rosa, and Cuyp were the[Pg 42] idols of landscape art, which was still regarded as a sort of interloper in the realm swayed by religious and mythological pictures, portraits, genre works, and "Dutch drolleries." The academic pioneers in landscape had imposed themselves upon Nature and upon the English gentry who were the patrons of art. Landscape might be classically beautiful according to Claude, classically sublime according to Salvator, homely and mildly sunny according to Cuyp, conventionally maritime according to Vandevelde. Turner as a youth was not the man to break tradition. The cunning tradesman in him preferred the well-beaten path. It was his destiny to compete against the popular idols in turn, to sweep past them to Nature herself, and so onwards and upwards to the sun, the source of all light and colour. "Looked on the sun with hope" is one of the few simple and suggestive lines in his "Fallacies of Hope."

Averse in his beginnings, like Velazquez, to experimentalising, he was content to bide his time, to plough the furrows of other men, with the indwelling determination to plough them better. He admired with generosity; he never[Pg 43] depreciated. "Vandevelde made me a painter," he said, years later, and of a golden-brown Cuyp he exclaimed, "I would give a thousand pounds to have painted that."

If ever, exiled student, we visit the National Gallery together on the Turner quest, I shall take you first to that room where, from the grave, he challenges Claude of Lorraine. Turner bequeathed "The Sun Rising in a Mist," painted when he was thirty-two, and "Dido Building Carthage," painted when he was forty, to the nation, on condition that they should hang for ever "between the two pictures painted by Claude, the 'Seaport' and the 'Mill.'" There you have a glimpse into the mind of Turner, his fine envy of others, his confidence in his own power. A Frenchman, M. Viardot, incensed at the idea that any one should approach the throne of the Lorrainer, suggests that such o'ervaulting pride was a proof of Turner's insanity. I will not answer such foolishness, but British candour compels me to say that I do not think Claude suffers by the comparison. Turner became great when he became himself, not when he was trying to outvie others—Titian, Morland, Gainsborough,[Pg 44] Crome—to name but four. In the year that he painted "The Sun Rising in a Mist" he was trying in his "Country Blacksmith" to trip Wilkie, and in "The Sun Rising in a Mist," as Mr. Wyllie shows, the figures are taken almost exactly from Teniers, and the snub-nosed, high-pooped ships from Vandevelde. His time was not yet. He was learning furiously, brooding upon and correlating his impressions of Nature, storing them for future use, shredding the permanent from the trivial. I think of him on that tossing trip to Bur Island in a half-decked boat with Cyrus Redding, silently watching the sea, absorbed in contemplation, climbing to the summit of the island in a hurricane of wind, where he "seemed writing rather than drawing." Not yet could he say to a companion, looking at a black cow against the sun, "It's purple, not black as it is painted"; not yet had the sun begun to flood his drawings; not yet were the "brown tree school" angry because forms lost their details in the blinding light of his pictures. But in "Dido building Carthage," painted in 1815, the same year as the popular "Crossing the Brook," of which he thought so highly that[Pg 45] he talked in his ironic, humorous way of being wrapped up in it as a winding-sheet, there are signs that he was feeling the fascination of colour.

Some day you will stand at the entrance of the great Turner Room in the National Gallery and rest your eyes on the six huge dark pictures on the left wall. The dull and uninspiring "Waterloo" is later than the others; but to me it is just as unattractive as its companions—as I think it will be, light lover, to you. "The Tenth Plague" and "The Deluge" I never look at except when I wish to be reminded that from the chrysalis rises the butterfly, from the black furnace the loveliness of the flame. The "Death of Nelson" is dark and decorative, "Calais Pier" and "The Shipwreck" are dark and tremendous. "Nobody is wet," said Ruskin, and nobody feels that he is looking on the real Calais, or on a real shipwreck, yet what power they have. These funereal wild waves were made in Harley Street; light, to the slow-developing Turner, was still a studio convention. But nobody else could have made those seas. They are by Turner, but not by the true Turner, who[Pg 46] strove through the veiled sun to the source of light itself.

In "Crossing the Brook," which faces the entrance doorway, painted when he was forty, Turner has marched onward. The gates have opened to the far horizon, and he now gives us the Turnerian fifty miles or so of country outstretching to infinity on a few feet of canvas. If you were with me, I would whisper in your ear my division of "Crossing the Brook" into pleasing and unpleasing passages—the pleasing being the fleecy clouds in the blue sky, the faint miles of Devonshire, the wooded hills rising from the river, and the bridge that spans the water: the unpleasing passages are the worried foreground, the ugly rocks, the figures, and the black mouth of the tunnel. Yet it is a picture of which one becomes fond. Who can but be entranced by the distance, Turner's sign mark, the open gate that lures us away from the troubled foreground of the world.

I turn from the sanity of "Crossing the Brook" to the right wall, and straightway I am elated, it is always so, at the sight of one of the magnificent dreams that the old Wizard forced oil[Pg 47] paint and brushes to portray. In the centre of the wall hangs "Ulysses and Polyphemus."

The furnace doors are open, from them stream a fury of glow, and in the fire are the dazzling shapes of Turnerian romance.

[Pg 48]

LETTER IV
THE FLAME ASCENDS

When we visit the National Gallery I will place you with your back to the dark "Calais Pier" and "Shipwreck" wall, and waving my hand across to that glorious trio, the "Ulysses," the "Bay of Baiæ," and the "Carthage," I will say but one word—"Turner!"

Here indeed is the magician weaving his spells, breaking the laws of light and shade, toying with history, caring nothing so long as he can picture the dreams of the pomp and beauty of the world of imagination that dazzled a sullen man, pottering about in a dingy London studio. "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus" has been called operatic and melodramatic; it has been remarked that the galley of Ulysses, far from the influence of the sun, is in full light, and that the dark shadows thrown by the stone-pines in the "Bay of Baiæ" are unnatural. Turner needed those[Pg 51] deep blacks in the foreground; he wanted the galley of Ulysses to be in the light: so the old rascal forced truth to suit his vision. His success is his expiation. He never copied Nature or followed history. His way was to use Nature and history to suit his conception, the right way for a genius; but not for Brown, Smith, and Jones. Anachronisms abound in his works; he elongated steeples, rebuilt towers and towns, changed the courses of rivers (he in paint, as Leonardo with the pencil); but he caught the spirit of place. To me the "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus" is the very heart of romance. Unlike life, yes; all the best things are unlike life. I withdraw my remark that there is not a figure in a picture by Turner which I would not rather have erased, withdraw it in favour of the vast, impotent Polyphemus writhing on the cliff. When Turner painted the figures of gods and goddesses in the likeness of men and women he was bored; when he painted a giant monster like this Polyphemus his imagination inspired him. Asked where he found his subject, he invented two silly lines of doggerel and said they came from Tom Dibdin. His lonely visions were not for the[Pg 52] chatter of a dinner party. They may be tracked in that little red book found by Thornbury in his studio, where, amid notes about chemistry, memoranda as to colours, and prophylactics against the Maltese plague, are certain scraps of verse, something about, "Anna's kiss," "a look back," "a toilsome dream," "human joy, ecstasy, and hope."

[Pg 49]
[Pg 50]

Here I pause to ask myself how I can possibly give you, who have never seen it, an idea of the Turner room at the National Gallery. I close my eyes and visualise the route. I ascend the stairs, and am detained by two Turners that have, against his will, overflowed into an outer room—the beautiful heat-hazy Abingdon, and distant London, seen from Greenwich. Almost reluctantly I walk into the large gallery, and pass from the glorious sunrise in Ulysses to the glorious sunset in "The Fighting Téméraire," painted just ten years later. Claude and the others have been left far behind. Here is Turner the visionary, alone with the sun and the sea, untroubled by the necessity of painting the puny figure of man, but glorying in the symbols of man's power, the new tug dragging the stately[Pg 53] old battleship to her last berth, a theme near to his heart—the end of a period in man's history flickering out in the ageless glory of Nature.

Pages, chapters, have been written about the untruth of this picture. "His light and shade," says Mr. Wyllie, "is very seldom correct. His tones are almost always wrong. The place where the sun is setting in the 'Téméraire' is the darkest part of the picture." But what does it matter? This is his vision, of the absolute end of man's work in this daily death of Nature. Who would have one inch changed? About this, as about almost all the pictures, there is a story. The Téméraire "killed" a portrait by Geddes hanging above it, whereupon Geddes began to lay in a vivid Turkey carpet on his canvas. "Ho! ho!" cried Turner, who loved a fight; and the unfortunate Geddes watched him loading on orange, scarlet, and yellow with his palette knife.

I close my eyes to the splendour of the "Téméraire" and see "The Burial of Wilkie," a silvery blue sky and sea shimmering with delicate reflections, the mourning, black-sailed vessel severed by the flare of the torches, their brilliancy and the black of the sails forming vast[Pg 54] tracks of light and gloom on the water. On Varnishing Day Stanfield urged that the sails were untrue. Turner grunted—"Wish I had any colour to make 'em blacker."

Then I see the "Snowstorm—Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water and going by the lead," which Punch called "A Typhoon bursting in a Simoon over the Whirlpool of Maelstrom, Norway, with a ship on fire, an eclipse, and the effect of a lunar rainbow." Turner is now sixty-seven. He is prepared to push paint to its ultimate limit so that he can achieve the impossible. To study the effect of this hubbub of snowstorm and gale he put to sea in the tempest, and made the sailors lash him to the mast for four hours. It was the hostile reception of this picture following the attacks on others in previous years, the jeers of Punch, the shafts of Blackwood, that inspired Ruskin to compose "Modern Painters." The first volume was published the following year, 1843, but that colossal work had its beginnings in a letter Ruskin wrote in 1836 defending Turner's picture of Venice called "Juliet and her Nurse."

[Pg 55]

Turner was famous long before "Modern Painters" was published, and although that pæan of appreciation has carried his fame to the ends of the English-speaking world, the riot of its praise has tipped the pens of some critics with gall. The "Slave Ship" exalted so eloquently by Ruskin, and now in Boston, was described by George Inness, the American artist, as "the most infernal piece of clap-trap ever painted."

The aged Turner suffered from the criticisms of the "Snowstorm." Ruskin tells how he heard the old man one evening muttering to himself "Soapsuds and Whitewash." On the "Graduate of Oxford" attempting to soothe him, he burst out—"What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea's like? I wish they'd been in it!"

Beneath the "Snowstorm" at the National Gallery hang two pictures, shining with a radiance not of the earth, "The Sun of Venice going to Sea," and "The Approach to Venice," wrecks perhaps of what they were, but still lovely, in one all the pomp of Venice, in the other all her haunting and elusive beauty. A little further along the[Pg 56] wall in the direction of the "Ulysses" is the parent picture of Impressionism, that incomparable presentment of movement, mist, and moisture, aptly named "Rain, Steam, and Speed." The fools called this a phantom picture, complained that the locomotive has not the appearance of metal. Turner was not painting the fact of an engine; but the effect of an engine rushing through rain and mist. "My business," he once said to Cyrus Redding, "is to draw what I see: not what I know is there."

In the years 1845 and 1846, when his sense of form began to fail, but not his sense of colour, he re-saw the sea and the sun, to the exclusion of other aspects of Nature. Of the thirteen pictures painted in those two years, all but three were of Venice or of Whalers.

I wish, after our visit to the National Gallery, I could have taken you to the Old Masters Exhibition, and there bid you look at his "Mercury and Hersé," painted in 1811, when he saw with the eyes of Claude. Pleasant are the blue lakes, the distances and the veiled horizon, the faint hills and the arching sky; but they are derivative as the drawing-master trees and the wooden[Pg 57] foreground with its score of dummy figures, its posed Mercury, its unrealised Hersé, and its architectural litter. When you had absorbed this "Mercury and Hersé" of 1811, I would have turned your gaze to the "Burning of the Houses of Parliament" of 1835, the real Turner, seeing with his own eyes the fury of burning buildings, an orgy of flames roaring up to the star-sown sky. The far end of the stone bridge, a nocturne in the palest blues and yellows, drops into the fire, half the sky is aglow, half is a night blue, and the gold and sapphire are reflected in the water, where dim boats push out from the shade into the dazzle, and thousands of figures, mere suggestions of forms, watch the two towers, molten silver, standing solitary and self-contained like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego in the flames.

It was such spade-work as the "Liber Studiorum" that enabled him to triumph in such an impossible subject as "The Burning of the Houses of Parliament." Imagine what this series of drawings meant! Claude's "Liber Veritatis," to rival which the "Liber Studiorum" was designed, was a mere record of his pictures.[Pg 58] Turner's "Liber Studiorum" was a survey of Nature, classified under six heads,—architectural, pastoral, elegant or epic-pastoral, marine, mountainous, and historical or heroic. These divisions were suggested by "Dad." "Well, Gaffer," said Turner, "I see there will be no peace till I comply; so give me a piece of paper." He made each drawing in sepia; he etched the essential lines, and he trained a school of engravers (not without quarrelling) to engrave them.

Men have loved the "Liber." Connoisseurs, like Mr. Rawlinson, have specialised in it. I know an enthusiast who spends hours in the course of the year, smoking his pipe, gazing at (a poor impression, but his own) No. VII., "The Straw Yard," that hangs on his study-wall against a reproduction of Girtin's "White House at Chelsea," and he wonders which he would save first if the house caught fire. I have been a quarter of an hour late for an appointment through returning twice to a certain house to enjoy again Mr. Frank Short's engravings of two of the unpublished drawings—the "Crowhurst" and the "Stonehenge." But I never knew what the[Pg 61] "Liber" really was until I saw Mr. Rawlinson's collection, the depth and velvety richness of a very early state of the "Raglan Castle," and the large and still simplicity of the "Junction of Severn and Wye." Some day it may be your privilege to see them; but first we will descend to the ground floor of the National Gallery and please ourselves by making a choice among the seventy and more sepia drawings for the "Liber" that hang on the wall of the first room.

But I doubt if you will have patience to go through all, for around, and in little rooms beyond, are the water-colours.

[Pg 59]
[Pg 60]

[Pg 62]

LETTER V
THE FLAME LEAPS, EXPANDS, AND EXPIRES

When I think of Turner it is the later water-colours that flash before me. The oils are magnificent, tremendous, wrought in rivalry and for fame: the water-colours, lyrical impressions, moods of elation inspired by beauty, are himself. We will go straight to the six studies that hung on the wall by the fireplace, essential effects selected with unerring instinct from the unessential, called "Running Wave in a Cross-tide: Evening;" "Twilight on the Sea;" "Sunshine on the Sea on a Stormy Evening;" "Breaking Wave on Beach;" "Sunset on the Sea;" and "Coasting Vessels." The very titles are lyrics. Yet they are not more beautiful than other interpretations, pushed into the region where feeling and vision merge into ecstasy—those I have already mentioned, and some, my particular favourites, hanging on the wall to the[Pg 63] left of Ruskin's bust—the "Pilatus," the careful alchemy of "Carnarvon," and the atmospheric veils that part above the "Lake of Uri." Year by year other of his water-colours shine out momentarily at exhibitions, such as at the last Old Masters, when we saw the blue and gold "Lake of Thun," and the visionary "Lake of Zug" about which Ruskin wrote so enthusiastically in "Modern Painters"; and the "apocalyptic splendour" of the "Zurich" at Messrs. Agnew's.

But one never reaches the end of his achievement in the National Gallery collection. A selection of the four hundred is permanently on view, but a greater number are stored in cabinets in an inner room, whence once in three months an assortment is withdrawn for exhibition. Apart from these there are the thousands of drawings and studies disinterred from the tin boxes which have been arranged chronologically by Mr. A. J. Finberg, in a hundred vast drawers, preparatory to his long labour on the Catalogue Raisonné.

Mark their range and you will realise that the whole world was his province. Think of the books he illustrated—the Rivers, Harbours, and Southern Coast Scenery of England, the Rivers[Pg 64] of France, to name but four—travelling often on foot, with his luggage in a handkerchief tied to the end of a stick, flushing in the inn at night transparent washes of colour on paper, flowing tint into tint, knowing exactly what to do, sponging, scraping, using knife and finger, anything to force the material to express his vision. Once after a Rhine tour he appeared at Farnley Hall with a roll of fifty-three water-colours, painted at the rate of three a day.

I must show you the map of England and Scotland compiled by Mr. Huish, showing Turner's tours. It is covered with the lines of his tracks; you may see where he trudged or coached, and note the fourteen cathedrals, twenty-seven abbeys, and sixty-six castles which he drew. Similar maps might be made of France, Italy, and Switzerland.

Thinking of his wanderings, I look from the window of one of the Turner water-colour rooms near to the bust of Ruskin, who arranged and catalogued them; I look from the window and see a line of the new, dandy, taximeter cabs, and plan a little journey through London we two would take, if you were here. We would visit[Pg 65] Van Tromp at the Soane, and then drive straight to the South Kensington Museum, where there are golden dreams by Turner such as the "Royal Yacht Squadron, Cowes"; but we would not tarry with the oils, for I should be impatient to show you the wall of water-colours, some behind protecting blinds,—the early "Wrexham," ageing houses and grey-blue tower; the perfect suggestion of the spirit of place called "Sketch of an Italian Town," and the fairy-like blue, gold, and purple "Lake of Brienz," pure flame of Turner.

Then we would speed to Millbank, enter the Tate Gallery, and stand in Room VII. where the recovered sunshine Turners hang in radiant array. Ruskin, you will remember, after Turner's death, separated the "finished from the unfinished." The "finished" are in the National Gallery; the "unfinished" are among the forty-four at Millbank. Fifty years ago they were deposited, hidden from public gaze, in the National Gallery; early in 1905 they were examined by order of the trustees, cleaned, restored, and found to be brilliant and fresh, as on the day when the greatest landscape painter the world has known, painted them.

[Pg 66]

These forty-four pictures should be sorted. Some show but the tumbling splendour of his decline when he fumbled with his visions, and produced such chaotic failures as the two Deluges, the "Burning Fiery Furnace," "The Angel standing in the Sun," "Undine," and "The Exile and the Rock Limpet." The holiday crowd, when I was last at the Tate Gallery, laughed as their forerunners laughed when the pictures were first exhibited. Their laughter enabled me to understand why Turner was secretive and boorish in old age, when his imagination outsoared his dwindling power to express his dreams in paint. Many visitors giggled and made flippant comments, just as Punch did when the old lion's eyes began to fail and his hand to tremble. Had Turner ceased painting when he was nearing seventy he might have been spared much, but he could not stop. His inward eye still saw gorgeous scenes, and amid the grime of his dingy house in Queen Anne Street he struggled with such unearthly themes as this Deluge in the evening and the morning, and Napoleon in the sunset of his exile. These are the pictures of his magnificent decline[Pg 67] at which the crowd laughed, and at that riot of forms, so glorious in colour, called "Interior at Petworth." But they did not laugh at the "Norham Castle, Sunrise," a flush of the prismatic varieties of light against the blue mists of dawn, or at "The Evening Star," a nocturne thrown off long before Whistler popularised the word, done at the period when, the crepuscular hour of bats and owls obsessing Turner, he produced those small moonlight mezzotints, wonderful, dim, silver things, that were found in his house after he was dead. They did not laugh at the "Hastings," delicate blues and golden greys, with splendour in the upper sky, and the whole canvas aflame with the orange sail of the boat drawn up on the beach; or at the Yacht racing, an impression of sails against a tumbling sea, or at "A Ship Aground," the ground-swell rolling by the helpless vessel, and the sun setting angrily behind a bank of cloud; or at the Tivoli, an imaginative classical landscape probably painted as a pendant to the "Arch of Constantine." The setting suggests the scenery of Tivoli; but when Turner's imagination was fired, he cared little about topographical accuracy.

[Pg 68]

That day I waited until closing time, loth to leave these visions, noting with what art he had piled the chrome on the white ground in "Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands," the delicacy of the faint hues, the gold in the sky, the gold on the cliff, splashed yonder with blue, and the golden boat sailing ever on.

The hour drew near five. The attendant appeared, drew the curtains one by one over the sunshine pictures, hiding them with red hangings, all but the four large valedictory scenes from classical mythology, and the other splendid failures which have no curtains.

When I left the Gallery and stood upon the terrace overlooking the Thames and thence towards Chelsea, I saw, in the mind's eye, the print published after Turner's death that I had picked years ago from a twopenny portfolio in the Brompton Road, showing the little house by Cremorne Pier where he died, under the assumed name of Booth. The sun shines upon the building. The Thames flows in front of it. It is said that as long as strength held he would rise at daybreak, and wrapped in a blanket, stand upon the roof watching the colour flush the eastern sky.

[Pg 69]
[Pg 70]

[Pg 71]The Chelsea hiding-place was discovered, but he was sinking when a friend found him. He died on December 18, 1851, at the window, looking upon the river, propped upon his couch. A full, and, I think, with occasional lapses—the lot of all—a happy life, for his work never ceased to be less than absorbing. He died in the light, having run his race to the goal.

The account of that dinner at David Roberts' house, not long before his death, when he tried to propose his host's health, "ran short of words and breath, and dropped down in his chair, with a hearty laugh, starting again, and finishing with a 'hip, hip, hurrah!'" shows that the power to enjoy, and the sense of fun, had not withdrawn from the solitary genius, the "very moral of a master carpenter, with lobster red face, large fluffy hat and enormous umbrella," who wrestled with the sun, read Ovid, and Young's "Night Thoughts," tramped Europe in pursuit of beauty, and who was seen on the old Margate steamer studying the movement of the water, and the boiling foam in the wake of the "Magnet," and making his luncheon off shrimps strewn over an immense red handkerchief spread across his knee—Turner.

[Pg 72]

POSTSCRIPT
TURNER AND TWO OTHERS

Climbing the stairs to the flat, I passed a girl who was toiling upwards.

Pressing the button of the electric bell I watched her ascend the last flight. She paused. I inferred that our destination was the same, noted that she carried a satchel, a thick notebook, and a paper-covered sixpenny reprint. Mildly curious as to the title of the novel, I dissembled, and read "Endeavours after the Christian Life," by James Martineau. Therewith the stone staircase faded away, the stone walls opened to the past, and I saw my youth, and the figure of my father returning one night to the old home, his face illumined, his eyes shining; heard again the earnest words between him and my mother; how he had been at Martineau's valedictory address, how with the teacher's communication telling of deep things of the spirit[Pg 73] moving within him he had avoided friends, unable to return suddenly to earth, and how he had walked home as if with wings. Those were the days when the "Endeavours" was a costly, exclusive, and somewhat revolutionary book. A few quick years, and lo! it becomes one of Allenson's sixpenny series, bought by the hundred thousand.

The door of the flat opened, Martineau slept again with his forefathers, the saints of all time, and the girl and I passed into the modest room dedicated to one who was no saint. Yet I do not know. If a saint be he who by his life makes this world for others more wonderful, more beautiful and better worth living in, then Joseph Mallord William Turner was a saint. Which is strange.

I did not speak of saints to our hostess, for Turner is her god, and a god is greater than a half-god. There is one severe note in her room—the bust of Cæsar on a pedestal; all the rest is beauty—sheer beauty. I wonder what a far-horizon Colonial, who had never seen Turner's later water-colours, would feel in this room; walls covered with sensitive copies of those[Pg 74] flushes of radiant colour, waning blue dawns, purple mysteries of eve, sunlighted Swiss lakes, dream buildings, rainbow reaches of the Rhine, opalescent distances stretching past headlands into infinity.

The head of Cæsar, from his tall pedestal, surveyed these lyrics in colour, as strange to him as would have been the "Endeavours after the Christian Life," that paper book, tightly clutched, hidden from view, in a girl's hand. Then twilight came, the lamp was lighted, and I went away to carry out an idea that had just shaped itself.

I had never seen the house in Queen Anne Street where Turner lived with Mrs. Danby and the cats. Should I find the house changed—houses rather, for he owned three, two in Harley Street, and one in Queen Anne Street, communicating mysteriously at the back, and leaving the corner building in other hands.

As I walked through the Bloomsbury Squares I thought not of Turner, but of another, a man, very old, very frail, bent almost double, with the face of a spirit and the eye of a seer, whom years ago I had met on this very spot, creeping round the railings which encircle the grass and trees—[Pg 75]James Martineau, still lingering in the world which his spirit had long outsoared. I saw, in the mind's eye, that shrivelled octogenarian figure, and I asked at three shops for the "Endeavours after the Christian Life," found it in the fourth, and under lamp-post and by lighted windows, turned the familiar pages and read fragments.

The chapter headings stirred old thoughts, and there was one passage in the discourse on "Immortality" that seemed the voice of the dead murmuring as I went westward through the dark squares, saying that we see here only the partial operation of a higher law, that we witness no extinction, but simply migrations of the mind, which survives to fulfil its high offices elsewhere, and find perhaps in seeming death its true nativity.

As I walked that voice stilled the tumult of the traffic, companioned me through unfamiliar streets, until I knew by the brass plates on the doors, and the lighted rooms shining through holland blinds in upper stories, that I was in Harley Street, and near to Turner's house. Which was it?

[Pg 76]

A frock-coated, shining-hatted, prosperous personage, carrying a small black bag, was inserting a latch-key in one of the brass plate doors. As I advanced, his black bag swung up to cover his watch-chain.

"Which was Turner's house?" said I.

"Turner! What Turner? Was he a medical man?"

"No! the great Turner, I mean the Painter."

He collected himself, reflected, and said: "Ah! I do remember something! Yes, there is a tablet on the house yonder."

I peered up at the dwelling and saw, half way to the roof, a medallion, and the lamplight shining upon the first letters of the name Turner. This was the house of him who interpreted the feel of Nature, the movement of sea and wind, the glory of the sun, the mystery of its veiled face, the pomp of the world, the magic influence of light so transcendently that we say: "Yes! this magician was initiate! This queer Englishman was near to the eternal dream of his Maker."

As I stood in the dark street and looked up at Turner's house, the Shades gathered about me. A wizard in words joined this son of a[Pg 77] London barber, and that saint whose works have gone into a sixpenny edition.

This was the house that Ruskin knew. Behind these walls, were stored the pictures and water-colours in praise of which the most eloquent, the most inspiring, the most wilful and bewildering book that has ever been written upon art, was composed. Book? A library! The index alone of "Modern Painters" fills one volume. On the doorstep of this house Turner once stood and said to his disciple, who was about to start forth on a foreign tour—"Don't make your parents anxious. They'll be in such a fidge about you." He did not understand literary enthusiasm, and I doubt if he ever read a page of the copy of "The Stones of Venice" that Ruskin presented to him.

Three ghosts in a walk through London! Three great figures that trailed through the nineteenth century—a wizard in paint, a wizard in words, a wizard in holiness. Which is the greatest? Ruskin and Martineau explained, taught, chided, interpreted, and uplifted. Turner just acted, was content merely to express himself, to state his wonder at the wonder of the world.[Pg 78] Is not his influence the most enduring? A man of few words and those mostly incoherent, who taught nothing, believed nothing, gazed on the sun with hope, and did superhuman things. His prayers were his pictures.

The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Turner, by C. Lewis Hind

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TURNER ***

***** This file should be named 41694-h.htm or 41694-h.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/1/6/9/41694/

Produced by sp1nd, Paul Clark and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)


Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.



*** START: FULL LICENSE ***

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
  www.gutenberg.org/license.


Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works

1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.  See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.

1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.

1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that

- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
     License.  You must require such a user to return or
     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
     Project Gutenberg-tm works.

- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
     of receipt of the work.

- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.

1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.


Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org


Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

For additional contact information:
     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
     Chief Executive and Director
     gbnewby@pglaf.org

Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate


Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:

     www.gutenberg.org

This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.