But it is only as drawings, as works that contain their end within themselves, that they can be praised so highly. They are probably the most beautiful topographical drawings that have ever been made, but Turner did not regard himself as a topographical draughtsman, and from his point of view the results of this journey cannot have been completely satisfactory. If he had valued himself at all on his capacity for making beautiful topographical [Illustration: _PLATE L_ THE PIAZZETTA, VENICE, LOOKING TOWARDS ISOLA DI S. GIORGIO MAGGIORE PENCIL. 1819] [Illustration: _PLATE LI_ ROME, FROM MONTE MARIO PENCIL AND WATER COLOUR. 1819] drawings, he would surely have taken some steps to bring these achievements to the notice of the public.[24] He did nothing of the kind. We have seen that it was his settled habit to regard his sketches and drawings from nature as merely the preliminary stages of his pictures. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, Turner, after his few years of apprenticeship, never drew from nature without altering and arranging what he saw. He never accepted the given momentary facts in a passive spirit. It is on record that once he said to the companion of one of his sketching tours who had got into a muddle with the drawing he was making, ‘What are you in search of?’ And this active spirit had been one of the chief characteristics of all the drawing from nature he had done before his visit to Italy: he had always been in search of something, he had always had a very clear and exact idea of what he wanted, and he had almost invariably managed to grasp just what he wanted, while encumbering himself with very little else. This clearness of intention is absent from the Italian drawings. The scenery, the buildings, the people, the shipping and the effects of light are all new to him, and delightfully interesting. The novelty of his surroundings carries him out of himself. He becomes for a time a mere common tourist with a kind of accidental knack of making rapid and wonderfully beautiful pictorial memoranda. It is as though the creative artist had said to his familiar daemon, ‘We are now in fair Italy. Sleep thou, and take a well-earned rest. The business of note-taking will go on automatically without thee; and when we are once more back in dreary London thou shalt awake as a giant refreshed with slumber, and shalt knead with renewed vigour the material that has been accumulated.’ But the results achieved were not as satisfactory as Turner might have expected. The best that could be made of these wonderful sketches was two or three charming water-colours for Mr. Fawkes, a weak and empty ‘Forum Romanum’ for Mr. Soane’s Museum, and a large ‘Bay of Baiae,’ which, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, ‘is encumbered with material; it contains ten times as much as is necessary to a good picture, and yet is so crude in colour as to look unfinished.’[25]