er the work the easier it is to turn it
into ridicule. To appreciate the science of Turner's colour would
require the study of a life; but to laugh at it requires little more
than the knowledge that the yolk of egg is yellow and spinage green; a
fund of critical information on which the remarks of most of our
leading periodicals have been of late years exclusively based. We
shall, however, in spite of the sulphur and treacle criticisms of our
Scotch connoisseurs, and the eggs and spinage of our English ones,
endeavour to test the works of this great colourist by a knowledge of
nature somewhat more extensive than is to be gained by an acquaintance,
however formed, with the apothecary's shop or the dinner table."

So much for the critics. For the artist, if Ruskin said more than Turner
himself could understand, he has summed up his achievement in a few
passages which may possibly outlast the works themselves. "There has
been marked and constant progress in his mind; he has not, like some few
artists, been without childhood; his course of study has been as
evidently as it has been swiftly progressive; and in different stages of
the struggle, sometimes one order of truth, sometimes another, has been
aimed at or omitted. But from the beginning to the present height of his
career he has never sacrificed a greater truth to a less. As he
advanced, the previous knowledge or attainment was absorbed in what
succeeded, or abandoned only if incompatible, and never abandoned
without a gain: and his present works present the sum and perfection of
his accumulated knowledge, delivered with the impatience and passion of
one who feels too much, and has too little time to say it in, to pause
for expression or ponder over his syllables." And again of his latest
works--"There is in them the obscurity, but the truth, of prophecy; the
instinctive and burning language, which would express less if it uttered
more; which is indistinct only by its fulness, and dark with its
abundant meaning. He feels now, with long-trained vividness and keenness
of sense, too bitterly, the impotence of the hand and the vainness of
the colour to catch one shadow or one image of the glory which God has
revealed to him. He has dwelt and communed with Nature all the days of
his life: he knows her now too well, he cannot falter over the material
littlenesses of her outward form: he must give her soul, or he has done
nothing, and he cannot do this with the flax, the eart