THE HOPE OF SUNRISE.

315

his return, and their oars, too, are thrusting forth, ready to join in the flight.

That driving smoulder of fire low to the left indicates the mouth of the fatal cave that still lies glowing; in shadow above, high on the cliff the giant a creature of mists, yet vast and terrible, even though a phantom of air, claws at his wound, and raises his supplicating hand to Neptune. Above him, through half-illuminated gloom and cloud, I catch faint glimpses of sunny heights, and with daybreak lightening athwart them.

First the fact of sunrise, then the exulting vessel, blossoming with boastful flags, and Ulysses flying like a deer before the hounds; lastly the cursing and defeated giant; such is the sequence of the picture.

We know it is the vessel of Ulysses, because one flag bears his name, and another depicts the siege of Troy.

So lavish is this man's genius, that he must introduce at once and into the same picture day and night, joy and grief. Through the slant rays of the sun I see Phoebus and his chariot-horses (or rather I see the horses; for, thanks to sugar of lead, Phœbus has vanished). Turner wishes now to express the gods' approval and aid of Ulysses, for Pallas aided him in the cave, and Jove hates the old scalers of heaven's walls. He does it by giving us a shoal of sea-nymphs urging on the vessel, and in a phosphorescent twilight driving before them the scaly flocks of Proteus. He embodies what he may have thought of as he leant dreaming over the bulwarks of vessels

316

THE FEAST OF COLOUR.

cleaving by night Italian seas. The gleams of their track blend with the frothy ripples of the oars, and lead us on to the columns of light with which the sun bisects the foreground. There is hardly a touch of pure, unbroken, or raw colour in all this picture, yet there is not a touch but serves as a note in the great chromatic diapason.

The great puffing cream-coloured sails, the red prows, the striped masts, the violet haze on the distant sea-rocks, the yellow glow of expanding sunlight, the horizon's bar of denser blinder blue, the great ripple of red and golden cloudlets, the gleams on the upper cliff of the Cyclopean land, are all deliciously woven together to form this imperial picture.

For colour, for life and shade, for composition, this seems to me the most wonderful and admirable of Turner's idealisms. This is a creation and a poem. The "Téméraire," though equally exquisite in its way, is only a natural incident poetically heightened -it is truth and poetry. This is imagination and poetry. Yet, perhaps, Turner valued the "Téméraire " most, for he peculiarly reserved it in his will.

There can be, of course, no doubt that Turner selected this subject from the ninth book of the "Odyssey." Yet, with his usual secretive sort of fun, he loved to mystify busybodies and dilettantes about it.

His friend, the Rev. Mr. Judkins, who is neither a busybody nor a dilettante, but a friend of Constable's, and a very clever landscape artist, was one day dining with Turner at a large party. A lady

sitting next to the clerical artist, with the curiosity traditionally supposed to be peculiar to her sex, was full of the glories of the "Polyphemus,” the wonder of the last Exhibition. It was one perpetual whisper.

"Wine? No, thank you; but oh, Mr. Judkins, do you-What do you think of Mr. Turner's great picture? And a very little, if you please. Don't you now think it is a sweet picture ?" &c., &c.

Turner, glum and shy, opposite, is watching all this. He sees where the lady's eyes fall after she addresses her whispers to Mr. Judkins. His little beads of eyes roll and twinkle with fun and slyness. Across the table he growls:

"I know what you two are talking about, Judkins -about my picture."

Mr. Judkins suavely waves his glass and acknowledges that it was. The lady smiled on the great man. "And I bet you don't know where I took the subject from; come now-bet you don't."

Judkins blandly replied,

"Oh! from the old poet, of course, Turner; from the 'Odyssey,' of course."

"No," grunted Turner, bursting into a chuckle; "Odyssey!' not a bit of it. I took it from Tom Dibdin. Don't you know the lines:

'He ate his mutton, drank his wine,

And then he poked his eye out."

The lines may be in Dibdin-I never could find them; but such is the mystifying fun Turner was so fond of.

As Turner tried all kinds of verse, from epic poems

to after-dinner songs, he may have written these lines to embody his mystification. If he did, all I can say is that they are the best I have ever read of his, for no poet was ever yet gifted with such a desire to sing, and had at the same time so small a windpipe.

It has sometimes struck me that Turner, who did occasionally steal, derived his idea of "Polyphemus" from Michael Angelo's grand Titanic sketch of แ "Morning."

CHAPTER XIX.

TURNER'S ART LIFE- -CONTINUED.

IN 1831 Turner exhibited his "Caligula's Palace and Bridge; Bay of Baiæ." Baiæ seems to have impressed Turner as the chief site of the ruins of some of old Rome's most stupendous works of luxury and power. As usual, Turner has mistaken his text-he has turned the bridge of boats that the mad Caligula built to frustrate a prophecy of Thrasyllus, a mathematician, into a substantial structure of stone, such as the thirteen arches of the Mole of Puteoli, which Antoninus Pius restored. On the left of the picture are the ruins of the palace, and on the extreme right, in the distance, is Baiæ. The sun rises behind the ruin, and children are playing with goats in the foreground; the latter were, I believe, introduced (by consent of Turner) by Mr. E. Goodall, the engraver. Turner had a great sympathy with the ruins of Roman greatness, and was never tired of trying to express that sympathy more thoroughly.

More and more classic, this same year Turner exhibited "The Vision of Medea:" not a great success. Medea is performing an incantation attended by the Fates. Above her is the dragon chariot, with her twins. Behind her is Medea again, throwing her