Yes: I remember that morning at Exeter when I surprised you making a drawing of the west porch of the cathedral. Timidly were the unrestored figures of angels, apostles, prophets, kings and warriors—very old, very battered—taking form in your sketch-book: timidly, for even then you were beginning to be troubled by the blur that rose, after an hour's work, between your eyes and the carven kings and saints.

Your sister passed into the cathedral to her devotions carrying white flowers for the altar: we stayed in the sunlight. I cannot remember how Turner became the subject of our talk; but I think it was my mention of his drawing of the west front of Salisbury Cathedral done when he was twenty-three—one of the set exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1799, which hastened his election to an Associateship of the Royal Academy. Those were the days of the tinted architectural drawings, but in that magnificent Salisbury, the details indicated, yet not insistent, the old stones yellow in the sunshine, grey-blue in the shadow, Turner was already on the track of Light, the goal of his art life. He had not yet formulated any principle, that was not Turner's way; but those small, bright eyes of his had already perceived that there is light in shade as in shine. Girtin, that marvellous boy, his friend and fellow-student, was still alive; but art was in a poor state in England, in 1799, and we can well believe that this drawing of Salisbury made Turner a marked man. I could dispense with the lamp-post boys playing with hoops, as indeed with every figure in every picture by Turner. But he needed such strong foreground notes, and he, like the older landscape painters, troubled little about figures. Claude used to say, with a laugh, that he made no charge for them. Their use was to throw back the middle distance.

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You, who had seen nothing of Turner's work except the plates, good in their way, but far from being the real thing, in Mr. Stopford Brooke's edition of the "Liber Studiorum," hinted that you found the master old-fashioned. Corot, Monet, and Harpignies were your idols in landscape. That was not strange when I consider that your childhood was spent in Jersey, and your youth at Moret and in Paris, and that on your twentieth birthday, a few months ago, you were articled to an architect of Exeter, your France-loving father's native place. So the Master seemed old-fashioned, did he? And you were a little sceptical of my enthusiasm.

"Ah," I said, "if you could see a range of Turner's water-colours from the first boyish drawing of Lambeth Palace exhibited at the Royal Academy when he was fifteen, through the plodding period of his development, cumbered with ungainly figures, but set in the Turnerian air and against infinite distances, as in the winding Thames from Richmond Hill, ever moving towards the light, on to his later visions when buildings, hills, and clouds shimmer in iridescent vapour! Then the figures of men and women disappear, and after fifty years of observation of Nature those old eyes see only the chromatic glories of the reflections and refractions of imponderable sun-rays. The lovely colours linger so delicately on odds and ends of paper that it seems as if a breath must blow them away. If you could see the sapphire, opal and amethyst tenderness of his 'Study on the Rhine,' the misty hills rainbow-tinted, the sun flushing the steep castle rock and making a golden pathway over the sea, you would feel that this barber's son, morose, mean, in whose muddled brain moved until his last day magnificent ideas, has given to the world the whole history of water-colour, from the tinted drawing, to the flame of an effect seen and caught in a moment of ecstasy."

You were still sceptical! I acknowledge that there were others in Turner's day who also broke new paths—Cozens, and of course Girtin, of whom Turner is reported to have said, "Had Tom Girtin lived I should have starved." As an old man he would mumble of "Poor Tom's golden drawings." I acknowledge that since Turner's day the channel that he flooded has broadened and gushed forth into many tributaries; but he was the first, modelling himself on Claude, to start in pursuit of the sun, to break the rays, and flush the land.

I quoted a Frenchman, M. le Sizeranne: "All the torches which have shed a flood of new light upon Art—that of Delacroix in 1825, those of the Impressionists in 1870—have in turn been lit at his flame."

I quoted Constable—generous Constable—"I believe it would be difficult to say that there is a bit of landscape now done that does not emanate from that source."

I quoted Pisarro, telling how during the war of 1870 he and Monet came to London, studied Turner at the National Gallery, and found in Turner and Constable "practical certitude in matters of technique which they had but vaguely suspected and discussed at the CafÉ Guerbois." What would they have said had they known that Ruskin, the champion of Turner, the foe of Impressionism, when, in 1856, he sifted the nineteen thousand Turner water-colours, drawings, studies, and the "unfinished" paintings, had condemned the sunshine and atmosphere canvases now in the Tate Gallery to half a century of obscurity, because in his opinion they were "unfinished." Turner purposely left them unfinished and elusive as sunrise itself, momentary impressions of the glory of the world. The sun is new each day, ever uncompleted: so are these records of the flame of Turner.

"They are golden visions," said Constable, speaking of the Venice pictures, "only visions, but still one would like to live and die with such pictures."

Turner, to whom the world of men and women was a place to escape from, brooded on scenes that open a pathway to tired eyes leading away somewhere west of the sun and east of the moon; he loved distances, lakes that feel their way round hills to infinity, and sunsets that are a world in themselves. Even in his dark "Calais Pier" he must open the inky clouds to a blue sky swaying above the bituminous sea. In the "unfinished" "Chichester Canal" you may sail over that happy waterway, beyond the spire, on and on whithersoever your fancy leads; in the "unfinished" "Petworth Park" you may tramp away with the hunter and the hounds past the sentinel trees to that vast sky flaming and beckoning; in the "unfinished" "Norham Castle Sunrise" the poet-artist dreamed the mystery of dawn, and as he saw the miracle unfolding, he told his dream to you and to me; he saw the blue mists parting before the sun-rays rising behind the castle; saw the opalescent sky reflected in the water; saw, perhaps, in the mind's eye, the strong red note that the picture needed, and quickly set that cow standing knee-deep in the shallows. Turner gave all of himself to the making of this lovely impression, for Norham Castle, which he drew and painted so often, was his mascot. Sketching on the Tweed with Cadell, the Edinburgh bookseller, as they passed Norham Castle, Turner suddenly swept off his hat to the ruins. "I made a drawing of Norham several years ago," he explained. "It took; and from that day to this I have had as much to do as my hands could execute."

There, I remember, I paused, noting that you were again passing your hands about your eyes. Troubled, you said that the blur had returned, and that you must work no more that day. So we walked towards the river.

On the way we saw Italian workmen in blue trousers paving a road from cauldrons of molten asphalt. We watched the little flames leaping from the bubbling mass, and I drew from the sight an image of the art life of Turner: how he stoked his furnace with Poussin, Vandevelde, and de Loutherbourg, and so brought to life his dark early works such as "The Shipwreck" and "Calais Pier"; how as he fed his fire with Claude, Crome, and Wilson the furnace glowed, and the world saw the ardour of "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus," and the splendour of "Dido Building Carthage"; then when the flames leapt towards the sky there was pure Turner, the Turner of the "TÉmÉraire" and the Venice dreams, a "Hastings" that has lost all earthly form; a dream boat passing between Headlands at Sunrise, and the later water-colours—the red Rigi, the blue Rigi, the blue and gold "Arth from the Lake of Zug," the moonlight Venice, and the atmospheric magic of the Lake of Uri.

When we regained the Cathedral close we met your sister returning from her devotions. She said: "What have you been discussing this summer morning?"

"I have been discoursing on The Flame of Turner," said I.

"Ah!" said she, "there's a Turner in the Museum here."

We went to the Museum and stood before "Buttermere Lake, with a part of Cromach Water, Cumberland—a Shower." You were silent. What a catastrophe—after my dithyrambs about the flame of Turner and his slow soar to light, that I should show you, as your first Turner, that work of his early stoking period, painted at twenty-two, before he learned the method of oil painting and the ways of the sun. The lake has almost gone, the trees have blackened, only the rainbow dimly lingers. The flame of Turner? The chrysalis husk of Turner!

That poor "Buttermere Lake" is still the only picture by Turner that you have ever seen. And now that you are far from here, walking and digging in Sparta, and sailing in insecure little crafts to the Islands, I hold it a duty to write you in detachments this interminable letter explaining as well as I can what I mean by the Flame of Turner. Your sister will read the letters to you, ill-starred student, who, at the beginning of your art career, must not use your eyes for twelve months on penalty of blindness.

When, after the last visit to the oculist, you hurried from the lawyer's office in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where I witnessed your Will, I did not tell you that a few yards away rests a glorious Turner, "Van Tromp's Barge entering the Texel" and sailing in golden pomp eternally through the Soane Museum. I saw it on my way to your lawyer's office. The picture is alone and I was alone with what Turner loved—a sportive sea, an arching sky, gold overhead, gold on the water, and a ship sailing home golden-hulled beneath golden sails, with flags flying at the mast, and a cunning wraith of indigo cloud sweeping down the sky to give the glamour value. You did not see the golden Van Tromp. I had not the heart to show it to you.

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