The first quotation from the “Fallacies of Hope,” nevertheless, was published in the catalogue of 1812, as the motto of his picture of _Snowstorm--Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps_, and it is probable that the ill-success of the “Liber” contributed not a little to the gloomy habit of mind which breathes through the fragments of this unfinished composition. These were the lines appended to that grand picture:--
“Craft, treachery, and fraud--Salassian force Hung on the fainting rear! then Plunder seiz’d The victor and the captive--Saguntum’s spoil, Alike became their prey; still the chief advanc’d, Look’d on the sun with hope;--low, broad, and wan. While the fierce archer of the downward year Stains Italy’s blanch’d barrier with storms. In vain each pass, ensanguin’d deep with dead, Or rocky fragments, wide destruction roll’d. Still on Campania’s fertile plains--he thought But the loud breeze sob’d, Capua’s joys beware.”
This is nearer to poetry than Turner ever got again. The picture is well-known, and was suggested partly by a storm observed at Farnley, partly by a picture by J. Cozens,[27] of the same subject, from which Turner is reported to have said that he learnt more than from any other.
Turner’s love of poetry was shown from the first possible moment. The first pictures to which he appended poetical mottoes were those of 1798, but he could not have used them before, as quotations were never published in the Academy Catalogue prior to that year. When his first original verses were published we cannot tell, but there is little doubt that the lines to his _Apollo and the Python_, in the Catalogue of 1811, were of his own fabrication. They are not from Callimachus, as asserted in the catalogue, but a jumble of the descriptions of two of Ovid’s dragons, the Python, and Cadmus’s tremendous worm, and are just the peculiar mixture of Ovid, Milton, Thomson, Pope, and the quotations in Royal Academy Catalogues, out of which he formed his poetical style. The Turneresque style of poetry is in fact formed very much in the same way as the Turneresque style of landscape, but the result is not so satisfactory. It required a totally different kind of brain machinery from that which Turner possessed. He may have had a good ear for the music of tones, for he used to play the flute, but he had none for the music of words. Coleridge was an instance of how distinct these two faculties are, as he, whose verses exceed almost all other English verses in beauty of sound, could not tell one note of music from another. Turner lived in a world of light and colour, and beautiful changeful indefinite forms; his thought had visions in place of words; his mind communed with itself in sights and symbols; the procession of his ideas was a panorama. So, where a poet would jot down lines and thoughts, he would print off the impressions on his mental retina; his true poetry was drawn not written--the poetry of instant act, not of laboured thought. How sensible he himself was of the difference, is shown in his clumsy lines:--