370 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

in Greenwich Hospital; another of the death of Nelson, in his own gallery;¹ then all kinds of mountain scenery, some idealized into compositions, others of definite localities; together with classical compositions, Romes, and Carthages, and such others, by the myriad, with mythological, historical, or allegorical figures-nymphs, monsters, and spectres; heroes and divinities.*

35. What general feeling, it may be asked incredulously, can possibly pervade all this? This, the greatest of all feelings-an utter forgetfulness of self. Throughout the whole period with which we are at present concerned, Turner appears as a man of sympathy absolutely infinite-a sympathy so all-embracing, that I know nothing but that of Shakspeare comparable with it.² A soldier’s wife resting by the roadside is not beneath it; Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, watching the dead bodies of her sons, not above it.³ Nothing can possibly be so mean as that it will not interest his whole mind, and carry away his whole heart; nothing so great or solemn but that he can raise himself into harmony with it; and it is impossible to prophesy of him at any moment, whether, the next, he will be in laughter or in tears.

36. This is the root of the man’s greatness; and it follows as a matter of course that this sympathy must give him a subtle power of expression, even of the characters of mere material things, such as no other painter ever

* I shall give a catalogue raisonnée of all this in the third volume of Modern Painters.⁴

¹ [For the picture in Greenwich Hospital, see Notes on the Turner Gallery, 1856 (No. 524), and Harbours of England, § 24. The “Death of Nelson” is now No. 480 in the National Gallery: see Notes on the Turner Gallery, ibid.]

² [For the comparison with Shakspeare, see Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 101, above, p. 128.]

³ [The “soldier’s wife” is in “Winchelsea” (Liber Studiorum): see § 52, below. For “Rizpah” (Liber Studiorum), see Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. xi. § 29.]

⁴ [At the time of writing this Ruskin still thought to finish Modern Painters in one more volume, the third. The book grew, however, and when he wrote the preface to the third volume, the catalogue here promised had not been given; he there repeated (§ 5 n.) his intention of “forming a systematic catalogue of all his works.” This he never completed; but in the fifth volume of Modern Painters (pt. ix. ch. xi.) he analysed the order of subjects in Liber Studiorum.]

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