We wish we had space here for Mr. Ruskin’s splendid description of Turner’s picture of _Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying_--a work which seems to us to illustrate what we have said of his manner of decline in a remarkable way. There is no doubt about its splendour of colour, the grandeur of its sea, and the force with which its sentiment of horror and wrong and death is conveyed; but it shows a childishness, a want of mental faculties of the simplest kind, which is all the more extraordinary when brought in contrast with such gigantic pictorial power. The sharks are quite unnecessary, the bodies in the water are too many, the absurdity of the chains appearing above it is too gross; the horror is overdone and melodramatic, or, in a word, one of his finest pictorial conceptions is spoilt for want of a little common sense, of a little power to place himself in relation to his fellows and see how it would appear to them. Again, we cannot help wishing that he had had a friend at his elbow like Stanfield, who would have saved him from the laughter of small critics. He was not fit to manage such a work on such a subject by himself.
In his picture of _War--the Exile and the Rock-limpet_, with its extract from the “Fallacies of Hope”--
“Ah! thy tent-formed shell is like A soldier’s nightly bivouac, alone Amidst a sea of blood ... ...But can you join your comrades?”
we see the same mental helplessness. It verges on the sublime, it verges on the ridiculous. We should be sorry to call it either; but it is childish--not with the grand simplicity of Blake, but with the confused complicity of Turner. Mr. Ruskin says that Turner tried in vain to make him understand the full meaning of this work, and we are not surprised.
Such pictures as these had occurred now and then all through his career--pictures in which the means employed were utterly inadequate to express the sentiment duly, such as the _Waterloo_,--pictures in which the accumulation of ideas was confused and excessive, as the _Phryne going to the Bath as Venus, Demosthenes taunted by Æschines_; and he had shown some hazy symbolism in connection with shell-fish in these verses:--
“Roused from his long contented cot he went Where oft he laboured, and the ... bent, To form the snares for lobsters armed in mail; But men, more cunning, over this prevail,