The Dark Clue (11 page)

I think most people, confronted by such splendid profusion, would find it hard to believe that it could all have sprung from one hand. Certainly, as I embarked on my tour, that was the uppermost thought in my mind. It was only after I had examined three or four of the pictures more closely that I recognized – with that sudden dawning that comes when you at last become conscious of some insistent sound, like a dog barking in the distance – that there was, indeed, a family relationship, suggested not by obvious similarities of style, but by certain recurrent quirks and oddities. What they mean, or whether they mean anything at all, I still do not know; but they have left me with the nagging idea that they are a kind of message in code, and that I need but the right key in order to decipher it.

The first painting I looked at (for no other reason than that it was the closest) was a luminous, gold-tinged historical scene which, at a casual glance, I should have taken to be by Claude. I failed, in my eagerness, to note the exact title, but the subject was the decline of Carthage. You are standing, as it were, in the bottom left-hand corner of the picture – in the entrance, perhaps, of a great palace, for the foreground is in shadow. Immediately before you, like flotsam on the shore, lies a clutter of objects: a pile of fruit; a standard bearing a shield and a wreath of withered flowers; discarded cloaks and weapons; and a strange, bulbous brown blob with a protuberance at the top, which might be a buoy with a chain but which also – you realize after a few seconds – has a fleshly quality about it, like a giant squid, or the internal organ of a beast. Beyond that is a narrow quay, and then
a dazzling strip of water, fringed in the distance by lines of hazy masts, which stretches to the horizon. Above it – almost in the centre of the canvas, but a little to the left – hangs a burning sun, filling the sky with an incandescence so bright that it stings your eyes to look at it.

On either side of the harbour, like the jaws of a vice, are clusters of classical buildings, their steps crowded with little doll-like figures. Those on the left are floridly baroque, and covered with ornate carvings, but those on the right – to which, because of the diagonal perspective, your gaze is naturally drawn – are more restrained: passing an odd little tower that looks like a dwarf lighthouse, you enter them by a narrow flight of steps (so narrow, indeed, you feel the walls will squeeze the breath from your body), and then ascend gradually until, at length, you reach a temple of Parthenon-like simplicity on the summit of a distant hill.

I could remember little about the fall of Carthage, save that she had been reduced to surrendering her arms and children to Rome, but the import of the picture seemed clear enough. It was, in effect, a moral tale, told (unlike a written narrative) from top right to bottom left: once, the Carthaginians had had the vigour and discipline to climb the straight and narrow path; but, as their wealth and power grew, they had abandoned the austere and lofty heights of greatness, neglecting their industry and defences, and descending into the flyblown city on the left, where they had dissipated their strength in idleness and luxury.

The picture was dated ‘1817', a mere two years after the defeat of Napoleon, and it suddenly occurred to me that Turner must have intended it as a warning to England – which, with her great trading empire, must surely be the Carthage of the modern age – against lowering her guard and sinking into complacency. Convinced (but how foolishly, I think now, looking back) that I had correctly divined his meaning, I turned to a second Claudian scene,
The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl
, to see if my great perspicacity could unlock
its
secrets, too.

A simpler and more tranquil piece, this, with soft light and sweet curves in place of the other's fierce sun and harsh architectural planes. You are standing (again, a little to the left of centre) on a wide sandy path that draws you enticingly to a golden
beach. A stone pier lined with boats reaches diagonally into the sea – which is no more than a long finger of blue, really, laid across the middle of the canvas, and yet enough to give you a pang of longing, and make you think you feel the warm breeze on your face, and smell its cargo of salt and the scent of wild flowers. The bay is ringed by gentle hills of a pale yellowy-green, which fades into grey on the horizon and differentiates itself into darker shrubs and bushes and leaves as it reaches the near-distance. It is only when you look closely that you see that among the rocks and foliage there are also ruined buildings: broken stone walls crumbling back into the sand, or a pair of subterranean archways – two great eyes separated by a brick nose, like the top of a buried skull – half hidden under a tangle of scrub. As if to heighten the air of menace, a barely visible serpent, almost the same colour as the earth, lurks in the bottom right-hand corner, waiting for its prey.

The picture is dominated by a V-shaped pair of trees on the right, which start close to the bottom of the canvas and reach almost to the top, spreading a band of shadow nearly to the left-hand edge. It is here that the only creatures – apart from the snake – appear: first, immediately under the trees themselves, a tiny white rabbit (soon to be the reptile's victim?); and then, on the other side of the path, the figures of Apollo and the Sibyl. He, dressed in a wreath and a red robe, is holding his hand towards her; while she, naked from the waist up, kneels on a rock, arms outstretched, inclined slightly towards
him
. Both of them seem somehow flat, and too small, giving the odd impression that they have been cut from another picture and pasted on. And the Sibyl, in particular, has the same doll-like appearance as the figures in
The Decline of Carthage
, as if she were the work of a gifted child rather than of the genius who painted the rest of the picture. There is something strange, too, in her hands and feet, which have the blunt shape of flippers rather than the complex geometry of human limbs. You might almost think that Turner had conceived her as a mermaid rather than a woman – an impression accentuated by her dress, which has a sort of scaly brightness, and clings to her legs like a skin.

Walter has several times reproached me for being too practical, and preferring dry facts to the sweeter but less substantial world
of myth and fancy; and now, for once, I felt the justice of his criticism; for if I had ever known the story of Apollo and the Sibyl, I had quite forgotten it, and was forced to seek him out, and ask him to explain it to me. I found him gravitating – as if drawn by magnetic attraction – towards another of those bolts of colour that had so struck us upon entering: a square canvas, cut in half by a horizontal blood-red bar so vivid that you could have seen it from half a mile away. Falling into step beside him, I said:

‘What did Apollo do to the Sibyl? Or can you not tell me in such august company?'

‘Sad,' he said, ‘but perfectly respectable. He granted that she should have as many years of life as she held grains of sand.'

That at least explained what she was doing with those fin-like hands. ‘And what happened?'

‘He was as good as his word; but she failed to ask for perpetual youth, and gradually wasted away until only her voice was left.'

I felt I now understood the subject; but I was still left with the faint consciousness – which remains with me still – of an unanswered question. It was put out of my mind at the time, however, by the square picture, which, as we approached it, imperiously claimed our attention with mysteries of its own. The red strip, I now saw, was a flaming sunset, spreading, it seemed (the painting was so indistinct it was difficult to be sure) across some desolate seashore. Before it stood Napoleon, his arms folded, his eyes cast pensively down, entirely alone save for a lone British sentry standing behind him, and his own elongated reflection in the wet sand. He was staring at a tiny triangular object on the ground, which I could only identify by looking at the title:
The Exile and the Rock Limpet, 184.2.
To the right was a pile of debris that might have been a wrecked ship, and above that the smoking ruins of a war-torn city.

We stood looking at it in silence for a few seconds, and then Walter sighed and said:

‘“And the light shineth in darkness.”'

He paused, and seemed to be waiting for me to go on; so I said:

‘“And the darkness comprehended it not.”?'

He nodded, but said nothing more. I am not sure what he meant – unless, as a painter himself, he was merely admiring the ability to create colour so radiant that it seems to burn from
within – but his words nonetheless helped to galvanize something in
my
mind; for they startled me almost as if he had uttered a profanity. After a moment's reflection I realized why: Turner had, without question, captured the beauty of the sun more gloriously than any artist I knew; but in the paintings I had seen there was always something terrible about it, too – a cruelty, a heedless power to destroy, that made it seem a fitter symbol for the bloodthirsty deity of the Aztecs than for the pure love of our Lord, expressed in that lovely passage from St. John.

I said nothing of this to Walter, for I did not wish to disturb him, at least until I had had a chance to see more, and discover if my impression was justified. I did not, however, scruple to point out another idiosyncrasy I had come to recognize; for, although the technique was entirely different from Turner's earlier works – the paint so coarse and mixed that it looked as if it had been applied by a madman in a frenzy – yet Napoleon and his guard had the familiar toylike quality, making them look more like tin soldiers than men, and I felt I could safely generalize about his figures.

‘At least your people are better than his,' I said, laughing.

I thought this compliment would please Walter, but he barely even acknowledged it; and after a moment I left him again to his reverie, to continue my researches on my own. Rather than examining another picture in detail, I decided to test my theory by merely glancing at them all; and flitting rapidly from one to the next I soon persuaded myself that I was right. I cannot remember every painting now, but enough to prove the point: a gory sunset lights the last journey of an heroic old warship,
The Fighting Téméraire,
towards its destiny in a breaker's yard; terrified people flee the wrathful
Angel Standing in the Sun,
the flesh burned from their bones by his all-engulfing fire; even a sun-soaked picture of Venice, which at first sight seems like a cheerful Canaletto seen through a heat-haze, at length reveals its own tragic secret – for its subject, you realize on closer inspection, is the Bridge of Sighs, which carried condemned criminals to their death

My exploration also yielded another discovery. As I was hurrying past a dark picture – which I had already dismissed in advance as unsuitable for my purpose, since there seemed no sunlight in it at all – my eye was caught by a glint of gold, and the
hint of a familiar form, in the middle of the canvas. Stopping to examine it, I saw that it was the coil of a giant serpent, emerging from a low, dark cave half hidden by brush, which immediately put me in mind of the snake and the ruins in the
Bay of Baiae.
There was more to come; for confronting the beast, in the foreground, is a man – presumably Jason, for the piece is called
Jason in Search of the Golden Fleece
– kneeling on a split and twisted fallen tree – which, when you look at it, seems to turn into a writhing monster, or two monsters, like the buoy in
The Decline of Carthage.
Less than two minutes later I happened upon
The Goddess of Discord in the Garden of the Hesperides
, where the effect is inverted: beyond a gently wooded valley, peopled with nymphs and goddesses, stand two mountainous walls of stone, leaning ominously towards each other (like the sides of a half-formed arch) across a narrow pass. In one place, the top of the rock has an odd serrated shape; which – when you examine it closely – turns out not to be rock at all, but the back of a terrifying monster guarding the entrance, with stone-coloured wings and crocodile jaws that might almost have been hollowed from the granite by wind and rain.

I had, and still have, no idea what to make of these connections, but I must confess that finding them excited me, and made me think, for a moment, that I should turn critic, and go into competition with Mr. Ruskin. At the same time, they troubled me (for they are undeniably disturbing), and put me in a quandary which I have still not resolved as I write this: should I point them out to Walter? To do so would have been to risk casting him back into gloom just at the moment when his delight in Turner's work seemed to have lifted his spirits; but to keep silent would have been to leave him in ignorance of something that might be important – and also (I must be honest!) to deny myself the chance of demonstrating my own insight.

Fate, however, spared me from having to make an immediate decision, for when I looked about for Walter I could not at first see him; and no sooner had I eventually found him again – standing in front of another lustrous canvas, in a corner I had missed – than I heard a voice behind me calling ‘Marian!'

I turned, and saw Elizabeth Eastlake – her head towering above all the other women, and most of the men – making her
way towards me. She was not, it seemed, alone; for as the crowd parted before her I noticed a little cavalcade in her wake: a middle-aged couple (as I supposed) and their daughter, and an old woman in a bath chair pushed by a manservant.

‘Marian!' she repeated, as she drew near; and then, seeing Walter: ‘Oh! And Mr. Hartright too! What a pleasant surprise!' After shaking our hands she turned towards the old woman in the bath chair, and, raising her voice, said:

‘Lady Meesden, may I introduce Miss Halcombe?'

I bowed, and for a moment had the extraordinary idea that I was meeting one of Turner's doll-people; for the woman's face was chalk-white with powder, save for a dab of rouge on each cheek, and the skin seemed to have folded in about her eyes, reducing them to no more than a pair of black shining buttons. She stared at me, unsmiling, for a moment, and then bobbed her head, like a bird pecking water from a pool.