ture, as by
_remembering_ something which will fit better in that place. For
instance, Turner felt the bank on the right ought to be made more solid
and rocky, in order to suggest firmer resistance to the stream, and he
turns it, as will be seen by comparing the etchings, into a kind of rock
buttress, to the wall, instead of a mere bank. Now, the buttress into
which he turns it is very nearly a facsimile of one which he had drawn
on that very St. Gothard road, far above, at the Devil's Bridge, at
least thirty years before, and which he had himself etched and engraved,
for the Liber Studiorum, although the plate was never published. Fig. 1
is a copy of the bit of the etching in question. Note how the wall winds
over it, and observe especially the peculiar depression in the middle of
its surface, and compare it in those parts generally with the features
introduced in the later composition. Of course, this might be set down
as a mere chance coincidence, but for the frequency of the cases in
which Turner can be shown to have done the same thing, and to have
introduced, after a lapse of many years, memories of something which,
however apparently small or unimportant, had struck him in his earlier
studies. These instances, when I can detect them, I shall point out as I
go on engraving his works; and I think they are numerous enough to
induce a doubt whether Turner's composition was not universally an
arrangement of remembrances, summoned just as they were wanted, and set
each in its fittest place. It is this very character which appears to
me to mark it as so distinctly an act of dream-vision; for in a dream
there is just this kind of confused remembrance of the forms of things
which we have seen long ago, associated by new and strange laws. That
common dreams are grotesque and disorderly, and Turner's dream natural
and orderly, does not, to my thinking, involve any necessary difference
in the real species of act of mind. I think I shall be able to show, in
the course of the following pages, or elsewhere, that whenever Turner
really tried to _compose_, and made modifications of his subjects on
principle, he did wrong, and spoiled them; and that he only did right in
a kind of passive obedience to his first vision, that vision being
composed primarily of the strong memory of the place itself which he had
to draw; and secondarily, of memories of other places (whether
recognized as such by himself or not I cannot tell), associated,