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Turner, despite his taciturn and obstinate gruffness, could be pricked to tears by a stupid notice. "Soapsuds and whitewash!" he complained to Ruskin. "I wonder what they think the sea's like? I wish they'd been in it!" Turner's most Leonardesque aspect was the deep pessimism that went with his long investigation of nature. In the works of his maturity, human life is merely an eddy in elemental time. His love of full-bore catastrophe is indicated by the most Turneresque of all his titles, an Alpine scene: Snowstorm, Avalanche and Inundation (1837). But the painted results of his pessimism were of an indescribable grandeur and poignancy. He was rooted in his own time and society. Moreover, he was sure that that society—optimistic, promethean England with its empire and its burgeoning industrial revolution, now rising from its triumph over Bonaparte—was in fact on the edge of collapse. This is implicit in Turner's Venetian paintings, where the fretted and tottering profiles of the once omnipotent city melt (so ravishingly, and with such implied finality) into their last erosion by light and water.
Paintings of contemporary events were also dense with allegorical meaning. Among these was Turner's Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 1835 (see color page). This apocalyptic moment, for so it seemed to Londoners already made nervous by Chartist labor agitation, happened one October night in 1834, and Turner, rushing from dinner with sketchbook in hand, was there to see it. When the House of Lords collapsed, "Bright coruscations, as of electric fire, played in the great volume of flames," and the throng of watchers on the Thames' embankments broke into applause, "as though they had been present at the closing scene of some dramatic spectacle," as indeed, in Turner's view, they had: What more vivid image of the punishment of English hubris could he have asked for? All Turner is in his view of the conflagration: it is the essence of his delight in elemental conflict—fire raging in the clear mirror of water, its ruddy glow drifting west across a night sky cool as china.
Historical Fumes. Martin Butlin, keeper of the British Collection at the Tate Gallery, points out in the catalogue that Turner's cataclysms were meant to replace the older European tradition of personified myth—wrathful Zeus and so forth—and thus they moralize nature itself. Turner, a self-taught man, was no classical scholar, and he made blunders of erudition about myth and history. Yet as Butlin puts it, "Turner's moral philosophy was a matter of passion and visual expression, not of strict archaeology and attention to sources . . . The fumes of history filled his brain, not its dry facts." When the fumes wove in harmony with the demands of visual truth, Turner became an epic dramatist—as Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus shows, with that sublime apparition of a galleon, canvas flapping and looping, escorted by Nereids through a lake of fire and vapor, under the dimly discernible, looming profile of the giant.