CHAPTER ONE

He was so very pleased to be sitting in such close proximity to the paintings he had specifically brought Gwendolyn Evans along to the Tate Gallery to view; to have them all round him in a dazzling profusion of light and colour.

Yes, it was fundamentally here, with these largely abstract-looking canvases, that modern art began. Here, with Peace, Burial at Sea, Norham Castle, Sunrise, Mountain Scene with Lake and Hut, Mountain in Landscape, and Sunrise with a boat between headlands, all painted between 1835-40 in a manner which, to Turner's contemporaries, could hardly have been expected to win widespread understanding, let alone critical adulation! Yet here they were, exhibited on the wall in front of Matthew Pearce, painter and sculptor, together with his latest girlfriend, who had never seen them before. Here for the eye to behold was the revolutionary break with tradition which, not altogether surprisingly, had caused such a scandal in Turner's day, obliging the great painter to keep so much of his later work largely to and for himself. In these and similar paintings, matter had been broken down, virtually erased from the canvas in order that light and colour could come shining out of it with a brilliance and importance scarcely dreamed of by earlier painters. Here form, if and where it still existed, had been subordinated to content, the material displaced by the spiritual, and the resulting impression was so nebulous ... that one might have taken it for pure abstraction - devoid of the even slightest reference to external reality. No artist before Turner had dared to be so biased on the side of the spirit. More exactly, no artist before Turner could have conceived of the possibility or legitimacy of being so spiritually biased, especially prior to the nineteenth century. It wouldn't have been relevant to the age, an age, at least from approximately the 14-18th centuries, of what Spengler would have called 'great art', or art that reflected Western man in his egocentric prime - balanced, in varying degrees, between his subconscious and superconscious minds in the ego at its dualistic height. Torn between the sensual and the spiritual, the mundane and the transcendent.

Around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in particular, when Western man was in full-flower, there could not have been the slightest possibility of an art arising which betrayed a distinct predilection for the spirit - for light and colour over form and substance. Had, by any quirk of evolutionary fate, something approximating to a late Turner been produced then, it would have struck people as a mess, not art but rather something akin to an artist's palette - one that had taken a number of diverse paints and suffered them to be experimentally blended. With the nineteenth century, however, a great change came over the Western mind, a change initiated by the Industrial Revolution, itself a product in part of the Napoleonic Wars, and the subsequent growth of towns and cities to a size quite unprecedented in the entire history of mankind. No longer was civilized man finely balanced between the sensual and the spiritual, the subconscious and the superconscious minds, but in the process of becoming increasingly biased on the side of the transcendent - in short, to whatever reflected his growing isolation from nature in the artificial urban and industrial environments he had created for himself in response to evolutionary necessity. From the nineteenth century, it was becoming increasingly evident that Western man had passed his prime as an egocentric being, a recipient of dualistic tension, and accordingly entered a post-egocentric epoch of transcendental lopsidedness, in which the influence of the superconscious came to play an ever-more decisive role in shaping his destiny. Hence Turner's late canvases, which reflected the imbalance that was characterizing modern man. And hence, too, their great importance and significance to such eyes as could be expected, at this more evolved juncture in post-egocentric time, to appreciate them - a greater number of minds, it should be evident, than would have done so shortly after they were first painted.

Yet, despite the eulogistic comments which Matthew Pearce was making on behalf of the half-dozen or so brightly painted canvases in front of him, Gwen's eyes weren't all that appreciative, her mind remaining rather unmoved by them, even though, thanks in large measure to the esoteric information being imparted to her by Matthew with regard to the general direction of human evolution, she was now in a better position than ever before to understand them. Had she been honest with her boyfriend, instead of trying to please him by feigning enthusiasm for the works, she would have confessed, there and then, to the sad fact that a majority of the paintings on display in this particular section of the Turner bequest left her stone cold, absolutely failed, for one reason or another, to interest her. But from feminine tact, which embraced a certain fear of what Matthew would think of her if she disappointed him in this way, she did her best to appear sympathetic, to share his unquestionable admiration for those exhibits upon which he specifically chose to comment.

However, it was far from easy! For even with the best will in the world, she couldn't bring herself to view paintings like Mountain in Landscape and Sunrise with a boat between headlands through the same pair of eyes as him. To her, they seemed a mess. Too indistinct to be worth taking seriously. There was the suggestion of a certain scrappiness about them which violently conflicted with her own classical predilection for neat, clear, well-defined works, such as she had seen in some of the other rooms. One might have thought the artist had gone mad, lost contact with reality to the extent of being incapable of reproducing coherent forms, so vague was the resultant impression! Such, at any rate, was how she secretly felt at the sight of the more abstract-looking paintings, not least those which she had seen in the previous room - like, for example, Scene in Venice and Venice from the Salute, which had been painted between 1840-45. And partly because of this subjective doubt concerning Turner's sanity, she found herself incapable of entering into the spirit of the paintings, unwilling to commit herself to an enthusiastic acceptance of them from fear that she might compromise her aesthetic integrity and become reduced, in her own estimation, to the unenviable level of a bigoted crank. With one part of her mind she remained defiantly aloof, self-consciously superior to what she saw all around her, while with the other part she played along with Matthew, responding to various of his pronouncements with an appropriately complaisant nod, smile, or gentle grunt - a policy she was subsequently obliged to adopt as much for exhibits like Shade and Darkness - the Evening of the Deluge, Yacht approaching the coast, Light and Colour (Goethe's theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses writing the Book of Genesis, which were hung on the large picture support at right-angles to the wall they had been sitting in front of, as for exhibits like Sun Setting over a Lake, Stormy sea with dolphins, and Snow Storm - Steam Boat off a harbour's mouth and making signals in shallow water, and going by the lead on the opposite wall, the extended title of which both baffled and privately amused her.

Not that Matthew Pearce was unduly garrulous or imposing, and therefore necessitated one's constant attention on his conversation. Yet he was certainly not a man to allow himself to be led from painting to painting at a rate corresponding to the disinterestedness of his partner! On the contrary, standing or sitting in front of a Turner from 3-5 minutes, as he devotedly did in a number of instances, it was obligatory for her to fix her attention on the relevant painting for a corresponding period of time, even when it wasn't of any particular interest to her. A sign of impatience would almost certainly have offended him, a cursory inspection of the other occupants of the room no less than a tendency to flit from one painting to another independently of his guidance and running commentary. Feminine tact was enough to tell her this - now no less than previously!

Yet it wasn't enough to tell her that, after a couple of minutes' silent inspection of Stormy sea with dolphins, Matthew would suddenly change mental tack and, for the first time since setting eyes on the Turners, launch out on a swift stream of criticism concerning the manifest turbulence of the scene portrayed, which he considered the worst aspect of Romanticism and the one he could least abide. For, to his way of thinking, the turbulent was by nature Satanic, opposed to evolutionary progress towards blissful passivity, and, for that reason, something to be condemned. "God knows," he continued, speaking in a fairly quiet though firm tone-of-voice, "Delacroix and Gericault were worse offenders against 'the peace that surpasses all understanding' than ever Turner was! Yet that doesn't mean to say that he wasn't guilty, from time to time, of following suit and producing works which, in their Romantic turbulence, correspond to the demonic. That and the one next to it, the Snow Storm, are typically Romantic in this respect. They seethe with negativity, with horribly tortuous activity. Not my favourite Turner, by any means!"

He broke away from the canvas in question, as though from an evil spell, and briskly led Gwen towards the next room, which contained works by other English painters. He looked quite stylish in his tight black denims and puffy zipper-jacket, stylish enough, at any rate, to attract the passing attention of two young women, who caused Gwen to look at him from a broadly personal viewpoint herself and reflect upon his tidy, if informal, appearance. His dark-brown hair, gathered into a short pigtail that gently curved down from the back of his head to his neck, had been washed only the night before and looked perfectly docile. With his aquiline profile and large blue eyes, he was certainly more handsome than the previous men in her life, which was of some consolation. He was also more intelligent, though not perhaps more highly-sexed. As yet, it was still too soon for her to get him into proper sexual perspective, since she hadn't known him long enough. But time would doubtless tell, and thus enable her to extend her assessment of him to such matters as were of specific importance to her as a woman, not simply as an intellectual.

Before entering the next room, however, Matthew halted near the exist in front of one last Turner, a relatively small work entitled The Angel Standing in the Sun, for which he confessed a special fondness, deeming it one of the master's most spiritually noble productions - a shedder of dazzling light. "Admittedly, not one of his most abstract-tending works," he softly remarked. "Yet the whole concept of angelic transcendence and light is really too beautiful. Not altogether surprisingly, it was one of his last works, dated 1846. I can't help but admire its mystical symbolism. It is virtually an epitome of the coming post-human millennium, of man become superman, or angelic being, surrounded by spiritual light in blissful self-realization. For, of course, the essential light of the post-human millennium won't be the sun, though that will doubtless continue to exist in heathen selflessness for some time thereafter, but the light of spirit in the superconscious - the clear, as opposed to unclear or chemical, light. Yet before his death, Turner left us this magnificently paradoxical symbol of mankind's future destiny, one which will continue to shine in the hearts of men throughout the coming decades."

He looked sideways at Gwen to gauge her response, which, as before, appeared to be fairly sympathetic. She smiled back at him but remained silent. She didn't have much to say, since it was all rather bewildering to her, and he sensed as much from her reticence. He sensed, too, that she was probably too shy or reserved to talk in art galleries and was slightly embarrassed by his speech. Nevertheless he felt that he had to say something, if only to justify being in her company. It would have seemed stranger to him had they gone through the rooms without exchanging a word, as some couples evidently did. Hitherto he had always gone along to the Tate Gallery alone and had remained wrapped-up in himself, enshrouded in silence and thoughtful contemplation of the paintings. Now that he was accompanied by a woman, however, he considered it his duty to speak, to offer comments on several of the exhibits which particularly impressed or even depressed him. And, besides, he had a burning desire to instruct, to enlighten, to expatiate. He hoped he wouldn't be wasting his breath on Gwen who, after all, was an intelligent young woman - intelligent enough to have gone to college, at any rate, and got herself a teaching diploma in French, which she was currently justifying in her capacity as French teacher in a south London comprehensive. So, if that was anything to judge by, she ought to be appreciative of the merits of a great painter when she saw one, and accessible, moreover, to such evolutionary theories as he was only too keen to impress upon her for her own good.

Leaving the last room of the Turner bequest, they stepped across the threshold of the next room, which was divided into two sections, one small and the other large, and were immediately confronted by the turbulence of a huge canvas by Francis Danby entitled The Deluge, at which Matthew quickly took umbrage for its Romantic ferocity - the sight of so many twisted, struggling nude or semi-nude bodies endeavouring to climb to safety from the rushing flood-waters onto the rocks and trees that lay to-hand, offering the victims of the deluge a temporary shelter from the waters of death. Not a particularly agreeable spectacle, by any means; though a work of undoubted ingenuity, reminiscent of the turbulent waterscapes favoured by Gericault, Delacroix, and, on occasion, the great Turner himself. Compared with John Martin's The Plains of Heaven, which was exhibited, curiously, in the same section of the room, it was indeed a hellish context, its violence in complete contrast to the blissful serenity of one of Martin's greatest works, the only work on view of which the latter-day artist would allow himself to think highly. In fact, the three canvases by this artist on display here could be assessed, according to him, on the basis of a descending order of merit, The Plains of Heaven, being wholly transcendent, signifying the apex of tranquil spirituality, The Last Judgement, with the Saved blissfully to one side of the canvas and the Damned agonizingly to the other, presided over by Christ and His angels, signifying a compromise between Heaven and Hell, and, finally, The Great Day of His Wrath, focusing on a cataclysmic upheaval in which numerous naked bodies were hurled with the falling, lightening-cleft rocks into a dark abyss of raging hell, signifying virtually the furthest possible remove from blissful tranquillity. One shuddered at the sight of it, of so many panic-stricken people plunging helplessly to their doom in the ugly black abyss between the sundered rocks! Romantic pessimism could go no further. The great evil at the root of life was indubitably manifest.

"So far as I'm concerned," said Matthew, suddenly breaking the horrified silence into which he had fallen in the presence of this gruesome work, "the scene before us is positively primeval in its cataclysmic turbulence, a record, one might argue, of pagan man, or man tyrannized over by the moral darkness of his subconscious and living in fear of a wrathful and largely materialistic deity. It seethes with negativity, it knows no compromise. Unlike the scene depicted in The Last Judgement, which could be said to signify the mentality of Christian man, or man torn between the hell of materialistic damnation and the heaven of idealistic salvation, half-way up the ladder of human evolution in some egocentric compromise. And there, at the apex of evolution, one finds not a trace of Hell. For the compromise has been superseded, and instead of seething negativity one has blissful positivity, instead of death - life!"

He was of course referring Gwen's attention to The Plains of Heaven, which he considered significant of the culmination of transcendental man's spiritual aspirations. As yet, we were still too close to the dualistic compromise for comfort; we still had a long way to go before attaining to a life of transcendent bliss. Yet we were certainly heading in the right direction, our spiritual bias on the side of the superconscious was becoming more evident all the time and would doubtless continue to develop over the coming decades ... until such time as not a trace of egocentric dualism remained, and we entered the post-human millennium - the heaven that John Martin had ingeniously symbolized through a tranquil, otherworldly landscape peopled by the Blessed.

Oh yes, there could be little doubt that we were now closer to that heavenly culmination than Western society had ever been in the past! We were no longer as dualistic, thank goodness, as our egocentric forebears in the heyday of Christianity. We didn't give much credence to Hell. We didn't like the concept of compromise. Still less what had preceded it. The Great Day of His Wrath could hardly be expected to attract all that many enthusiastic admirers these days, least of all for its cataclysmic subject-matter! No, it was to The Plains of Heaven that the enlightened modern man instinctively turned, eager to see there the goal of human evolution. This painting had relevance to him. The others didn't. This was John Martin's highest conceptual achievement, a fact which Matthew was keen to impress upon his girlfriend as they stood in front of the large canvas for about three minutes, admiring and studying. And he was no less keen to impress upon her the fact that, taken together, the three canvases in the vicinity of where they were standing signified a summary of human evolution, beginning with the pre-Christian, progressing to the Christian, and culminating in the post-Christian - the wholly transcendent. A journey, as it were, from agony to bliss via a dualistic compromise.

"Yes, I see your point," Gwen admitted, smiling coyly. "Psychologically, one could argue that The Deluge is on a similar plane to The Great Day of His Wrath," she added, turning back towards the Danby, plunging from the heights of Heaven to the depths of Hell in a split second.

"Indeed!" concurred Matthew, following her across the room. "Although Danby does at least provide one with an angel weeping over the death, it would appear, of a flood victim. Yet that's psychologically inept, in my opinion, since angels shouldn't weep. As symbolic representatives of transcendent spirituality, they should be incapable of indulging in negative emotions. They should pertain to the blissful tranquillity of Heaven, not weep like poor wretches from a more mundane realm. They should be spiritually consistent - bringers of love and joy. A weeping or angry angel would seem to be a contradiction in terms."

"Well, Francis Danby evidently considered it symbolically apt to have a representative from the divine realm saddened by all the evil afoot," Gwen declared pithily.

"So it would seem," Matthew conceded, smiling wryly. "Yet is still strikes me as rather surreal, if you see what I mean. An angel in Hell? Very unlikely! Unless, of course, it was a fallen angel. But, then, fallen angels aren't really angels in the true sense, are they?"

Gwen couldn't very well argue with that! She simply moved on a few paces to a canvas by Samuel Colman entitled The Destruction of the Temple (c. 1830) which, with its lightening-stricken crumbling stone and panic-stricken inhabitants, appeared unequivocally hellish, unequivocally on a psychological level with the pre-Christian. Undoubtedly a very imaginative work, but hardly one guaranteed to inspire one with any great confidence in the coming post-human millennium! Nevertheless, as they were about to take their leave of it for the larger section of Room 16, Matthew elected to say a few words in praise of the transparency of a majority of the figures therein portrayed which, so he maintained, were agreeably transcendent.

No such comment, however, could he allot to the Pre-Raphaelite and associated paintings which now confronted his weary gaze as, reluctantly, he shuffled after Gwen and stepped into a world of late Victorianism. Ugh, how he had come to loathe the Pre-Raphaelites! How reactionary they seemed to him these days, in light of what the Impressionists had been doing in France at approximately the same time! How awful that, instead of reflecting and justifying Western man's advance towards the superconscious, they should have turned their back on the age to the extent they appeared to have done, and consequently indulged in such fanciful illusions as were ordinarily to be encountered in their works! Pre-Raphael indeed! As if salvation were to come through reverting to some largely medieval context of rural simplicity! No, the medievalism of the Brotherhood was indeed a chimera, a sham solution even by their standards, a skimming off the cream of medieval mythology, romance, and sentimentality, a nostalgia for things past without the knowledge or experience of true medievalism, with its innumerable horrors and limitations.

Not that the Middle Ages were as black or bleak as was sometimes thought by contemporary liberals. Yet they were by no means as agreeable as a spell in the fanciful illusions of Pre-Raphaelitism might have led one to suppose! Nor would they have offered one much consolation for the upheavals of modern life. There was nothing particularly heavenly about an age of mounting dualism. Nothing charitable about the great castles which had been erected to protect the nobility from fellow noblemen, popular unrest, and foreign invasion. Compared with the present, it was undoubtedly closer to Hell, even given all the horrors and limitations which beset the modern world. Yet the Pre-Raphaelites didn't want to see that. They preferred to turn their back on industrial progress and large-scale urbanization for the sake of a comforting illusion which medievalism seemed to offer them. They preferred to think in terms of an illusory Golden Age of the English past in which chivalrous knights came to the timely rescue of beautiful damsels in distress, and people lived in harmony with nature. They had no desire to learn from Constable or Turner and follow in their progressive footsteps by adopting a transcendental approach to painting. That was left, on the contrary, to the Impressionists, those glorifiers of spirituality in light and colour, those disintegrators of matter. The Pre-Raphaelites, by contrast, appear to have had scant taste for spiritual leadership - assuming they would have known how to recognize it in the first place. Instead, they preferred to thematically regress not merely to the previous century but some five or six centuries, and to paradoxically pretend that such a regression was effectively a kind of progress. To them, an aristocratic society would have made more sense than a proletarian one. It would have corresponded to a Golden Age, whereas what was going on around them in the industrial world signified a tarnishing of the mean, a societal 'fall' from natural grace, which no right-thinking person could possibly condone. Therefore back to the days of old when knights were bold and England not yet ruined by industrialism. Yet not as far back, it has to be admitted, as the ages favoured by Poynter, Alma-Tadema, and Lord Leighton, to name but three historical painters. No, let us give them some credit. They weren't that reactionary. Five or six hundred years merely - not a couple of millennia!

It was with some psychological displeasure that Matthew Pearce observed the titles and subject-matter of the paintings on display here, in the larger section of Room 16. He was not at all resigned to what seemed like an enthusiasm for them on the part of Gwen, who peered eagerly into the canvases, let fall a whispered "too beautiful!" or a respectful "so choice!" every now and then, as though to assure him that she had a fairly developed aesthetic sense and was confident he would agree with her as a matter of course - a thing which, to some extent, he was superficially prepared to do, since the paintings here, as elsewhere, of the leading Pre-Raphaelites were of course generally quite beautiful and obviously the work of highly skilled artists. Yes, naturally! No-one with an ounce of culture could possibly deny that such exhibits had beauty and were accordingly deserving of some respect. Yet all that was somehow beside-the-point, painfully irrelevant to the evolution of modern art, and he was disappointed with Gwen, after all he had said to her, that she couldn't see it. To her, they were skilfully painted representational works with noble subject-matter. To him, by contrast, they were traitors to the age, down-dragging influences in an age of mounting transcendentalism.

Yes, of course King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, The Lady of Shalott, and The Knight Errant, painted by Bourne-Jones, Waterhouse, and Millais respectively, were accomplished works, done with loving care and an eye for detail. One couldn't doubt that! Yet how frightfully anachronistic they seemed, how devoid of contemporary significance when compared with Turner's most revolutionary works - works, for example, like Scene in Venice, Venice from the Salute, or even Interior at Petworth, the abstract impression of which was to set the tone for the next century and influence all or most of the leading painters of the age! Could one say the same of the Pre-Raphaelites? Not if one knew anything about modern art! Theirs was a lost cause, as lost as that of the French Symbolists, with their fin-de-siècle decadence. From Turner, the torch of modernism had passed to the Impressionists, especially to Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro, and from them it was handed down more diversified to the twentieth century via the Post-Impressionists, Nabis, and Divisionists who, in their various ways, were to keep the belief in progress alive and weather the storms of decadence and reaction which swept all about them. But The Lady of Shalott, in front of which Gwen was now standing, rapt, it appeared, in wholehearted admiration, had very little faith in progress and nothing to say to modernity. The stream which bore its heroine away from Camelot was only a variant on the current of reactionary sentimentality which enabled Waterhouse, its Tennysonian creator, to be borne away from the nineteenth century towards an imaginary realm of medieval romance. There was little about the work to suggest that a new era of human evolution had recently got under way, superior to anything in the past. Strictly speaking, it wasn't an integral part of late-nineteenth-century art. It had no real relevance to the age. It had simply been imposed upon it out of a longing for mythical escape. To Matthew Pearce, however, it was something to be escaped from! He had no desire to tally there any longer in the world of the reactionaries. He couldn't share Gwen's respect for Pre-Raphaelitis.

"But don't you like it?" she protested, as he tugged her away from the Waterhouse, as though from a bedbug, and made for the room's nearest exit.

"No, I bloody well don't!" he firmly and almost categorically asseverated, not bothering to look at her. "I've no respect for down-draggers!"

She didn't quite understand him, but said no more. She was disappointed that he didn't share her tastes in art, yet in no way anxious to quarrel with him. She knew that he had his reasons and wouldn't be diverted from them by anything she said on behalf of her own. She had to accept him. Yet she was conscious, as they walked back through the earlier rooms again and on towards the main exit, that an apocalyptic-like rift had opened-up between them - one doubtless born of their dissimilar wavelengths - into which they were now tumbling, as into a hell of their own contrivance. No matter how hard she tried to learn from him and accept his views as her own, she couldn't surmount her previous conditioning overnight, so to speak, and thereby climb straight onto his level of awareness. The words she heard him speak made no real impression on her soul. She wasn't ready for them. Her pretence of complicity in awareness had been exposed in Room 16, and she knew he resented it. Now she was secretly angry with herself for having allowed her natural response to the genius of the Pre-Raphaelites to be aired in such obviously eulogistic terms, completely overlooking the fact that Matthew might not think so highly of it. Instead of continuing to play second-fiddle to him, she had suddenly taken the lead, and it was not one that he had any intentions of following. It had been a foolish miscalculation on her part!