378 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

and their best hope was that he might not be able to colour. They had begun to express this hope loudly enough for it to reach his ears. The engraver of one of his most important marine pictures told me, not long ago, that one day about the period in question, Turner came into his room to examine the progress of the Plate, not having seen his own picture for several years.¹ It was one of his dark early pictures, but in the foreground was a little piece of luxury, a pearly fish wrought into hues like those of an opal. He stood before the picture for some moments; then laughed, and pointed joyously to the fish:-“They say that Turner can’t colour!” and turned away.

44. Under the force of these various impulses the change was total. Every subject thenceforward was primarily conceived in colour; and no engraving ever gave the slightest idea of any drawing of this period.

The artists who had any perception of the truth were in despair; the Beaumontites, classicalists, and “owl species” in general, in as much indignation as their dulness was capable of. They had deliberately closed their eyes to all nature, and had gone on inquiring, “Where do you put your brown ‘tree’ ?”² A vast revelation was made to them at once, enough to have dazzled any one; but to them, light unendurable as incomprehensible. They did “to the moon complain,”³ in one vociferous, unanimous, continuous “Tu whoo.” Shrieking rose from all dark places at the same instant, just the same kind of shrieking that is now raised against the Pre-Raphaelites. Those glorious old Arabian Nights, how true they are! Mocking and whispering, and abuse loud and low by turns, from all the black

¹ [The picture is “Calais Pier,” No. 472 in the National Gallery; the engraver, T. Lupton (see below, § 47). Ruskin described the picture in his Notes on the Turner Gallery, 1856, and in a footnote referred to this anecdote, adding that for “several months” he should have written “several years”; the correction is accordingly here made. The picture was exhibited in 1803, and Lupton’s engraving of it, which was in hand for many years, never satisfied the painter; an interesting statement on the subject by Lupton is given by Thornbury (p. 196, ed. 1877).]

² [See preface to the second edition of Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 45 n.).]

³ [Gray’s Elegy, iii.]

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