PRE-RAPHAELITISM 385

his greatness, all his infinite luxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everything that he sees,-on his grasping all, and losing hold of nothing,-on his forgetting himself, and forgetting nothing else. I wish it to be understood how every great man paints what he sees or did see, his greatness being indeed little else than his intense sense of fact. And thus Pre-Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one and the same, so far as education can influence them. They are different in their choice, different in their faculties, but all the same in this, that Raphael himself, so far as he was great, and all who preceded or followed him who ever were great, became so by painting the truths around them as they appeared to each man’s own mind, not as he had been taught to see them, except by the God who made both him and them.

55. There is, however, one more characteristic of Turner’s second period, on which I have still to dwell, especially with reference to what has been above advanced respecting the fallacy of overtoil; namely, the magnificent ease with which all is done when it is successfully done. For there are one or two drawings of this time which are not done easily.¹ Turner had in these set himself to do a fine thing to exhibit his powers; in the common phrase, to excel himself; so sure as he does this, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever come from his hands are some of this second period, on which he has spent much time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident from one side to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and warm lights set against them in violent contrast; one of Bamborough Castle, a large water-colour, may be named as an example.² But the truly noble works are those in which, without effort, he has expressed his thoughts as they came, and forgotten himself; and in these the

¹ [See above, p. 344. With the following passage, compare Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 3.]

² [The same criticism is made on this drawing of Bamborough in Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 248).]

XII. 2B

[Version 0.04: March 2008]