III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS 133

Imagine what it was for a man to live seventy years in this hard world, with the kindest heart, and the noblest intellect of his time, and never to meet with a single word or ray of sympathy, until he felt himself sinking into the grave. From the time he knew his true greatness all the world was turned against him: he held his own; but it could not be without roughness of bearing, and hardening of the temper, if not of the heart. No one understood him, no one trusted him, and every one cried out against him. Imagine, any of you, the effect upon your own minds, if every voice, that you heard from the human beings around you were raised, year after year, through all your lives, only in condemnation of your efforts, and denial of your success. This may be borne, and borne easily, by men who have fixed religious principles, or supporting domestic ties. But Turner had no one to teach him in his youth,¹ and no one to love him in his old age. Respect and affection, if they came at all, came unbelieved, or came too late. Naturally irritable, though kind-naturally suspicious, though generous-the gold gradually became dim, and the most fine gold changed, or, if not changed, overcast and clouded. The deep heart was still beating, but it was beneath a dark and melancholy mail, between whose joints, however, sometimes the slightest arrows found entrance, and power of giving pain. He received no consolation in his last years, nor in his death. Cut off in great part from all society-first, by labour, and at last by sickness-hunted to his grave by the malignities of small critics, and the jealousies of hopeless rivalry, he died in the house of a stranger-one companion of his life, and one only, staying with him to the last. The window of his death-chamber was turned towards the west, and the sun shone upon his face in its setting, and rested there, as he expired.²

¹ [Compare Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvii. § 3 n.]

² [When Turner died, Ruskin was at Venice. But his father sought out Turner’s old housekeeper, Mrs. Danby, and from her doubtless learnt the particulars of his last hours, which passed into all the biographies of the painter. The house in which he died still stands at the western end of Cheyne Walk, Chelsea (No. 119). A sketch of the bedroom, showing the window to which he had himself wheeled within an hour of his death, is given opposite p. 359 of Thornbury’s Life (ed. 1877).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]