A. J. Finberg

“ Turner’s sketch proves that this was not the case. Each individual tree, every curve in its trunk, the texture of its bark, the stains and hollows and flickering lights and shadows upon it, and the intricate play of the trees’ upper branches, all these have been, not painstakingly studied from nature, but invented by the artist in his studio, and each detail has been invented not entirely for its own sake, but as a note, a chord, in the whole complex of visible harmony. ”

“ In such pictures as these—and I do not hesitate to rank them among the truest and highest that Christianity has yet produced—in pictures like these the ordinary scenes of rural life and labour are impressed with the quietness and beauty of the best part of the artist’s own nature, and fed with the lofty thoughts that only poets dare utter in words. Such pictures are indeed in the old monkish sense an act of worship. The mood they call up and sustain is a blessed mood in which the mystery and the weight of this unintelligible world are lightened. ”

“ If we look at Turner’s French drawings from this point of view, we cannot but admit that they are almost all highly successful. They are stamped with the impress of the genuinely romantic fervour, the lyrical movement of unbridled feeling. In them the joy of artistic creation has become triumphant, almost insolent. They are deep draughts of artistic intoxication, exultant with the rush of man’s undying passion for pleasure, and of the resistless energy that moulds the world of matter into forms more harmonious with our own distinctly human cravings and aspirations ”

“ The sober and restrained colouring of pictures like the ‘Windsor,’ the ‘Frosty Morning’ and ‘The Nore,’ is in perfect harmony with the patient strength and sternness of the emotional colouring of their inspiration. The same mood could not be expressed in any other scheme of lighting and colour. But to treat what, for want of a better word, I may call a pictorial metre, as though it were equally admirable as a means of expression for all kinds and shades of emotion, would argue an extraordinary dulness or sheer absence of artistic capacity ”

“ During the next twenty years his works gain constantly in the sensuous attractiveness of colour and in the formal beauties of rhythm and design. The loss of beauty is compensated by deep draughts of pleasantness. Yet amid the feverish intoxication of sensuous beauty a wild unrest and despair make themselves increasingly felt. The man has sacrificed himself to his art, and the starved human soul turns in bitterness from the ardently desired rewards of the most brilliantly triumphant artistic career that modern times have witnessed. ”

“ The horizontal line of the sea, the heaving waves, the masses of light and dark in the sky, the stolid forms of the big ships, the instability of the smaller boats,—these are notes which Turner never seems wearied of evoking, and weaving into ever fresh combinations. The demands of mere representation count for almost nothing in these entrancing drawings. The artist draws simply because he loves his artistic symbols, loves weaving them into designs, and because his gift of melodic invention is inexhaustible. ”

“ A study is simply a pictorial name, and a name has meaning only in a sentence or by suggesting a sentence. [35] If we look at a study from the same point of view from which we regard a work of art, we should go on to ask ourselves, ‘Well, what of it, what is the artist’s purpose in painting or drawing this?’ It would start us upon an objectless and endless intellectual exercise, in which we should miss the purpose which every work of art implies.
This indeterminateness and incompleteness of meaning forms, I believe, the essential characteristic of a study, as distinguished from a work of art. ”

“ Hence the question is not between the value of patriotic feeling and a shallow, empty form of cosmopolitanism as artistic motives, but merely under which aspect the virtues of patriotism are to be contemplated. Which aspect does fullest justice to the whole conception of personal devotion and sacrifice to the commonweal? My own feeling is that the point of view which raises itself above the particular interests of one nation, and treats the hardships and dangers of national defence as an inevitable condition of human life, is more in accord with the freedom and universality of the highest art. ”

“ In all these drawings Turner seems to be playing with his material medium, fondling and caressing his colours and the intrinsic beauties of water-colour. Yet it is not mere colour as colour that he gives us, not the cheap and arbitrary and mechanical splendour of merely decorative art. The colour is delicate and subtle, full of surprises, and as varied as nature herself; it is controlled and marshalled by the authority of the tone scheme; it is nature grasped by human intelligence, and made obedient to its organising power. ”

“ This objection I admit has force, but I think it is fully met by pointing to the distinction between a mood, a passing state of feeling, and a permanent habit of mind or settled character. It may not have been Turner’s happiness to mature this mood of reconciliation into the master light of his whole life, yet the mood itself is one that few, if any, human hearts are entirely unfamiliar with. It is a mood that sits about us all in our earlier days. The feelings of love and reverence may well be one of the primary facts of human nature. ”

“ One of his richest mines of pictorial imagery was Venice; not so much the actual city of the Adriatic, as the fragmentary ideas of an ideal Venice as they floated in the imagination of the ordinary Englishman,—the unconscious crystallisation of the desires of the average middle-class tourist for Southern warmth, freedom, colour, variety, and bodily pleasure. With all the uncanny certainty of genius he gathered up the threads of these incoherent and fugitive desires and fixed them in the forms of immortality. ”

“ The careful student of modern criticism will know how splendidly Mr. Ruskin fought against experience in this matter and how he was worsted. I am really sorry for common-sense. To paint the invisible and intangible—it is a hard nut to crack. But I protest we have no choice in the matter. The thing is there before us. It is a pity it is not quite so simple and easy as we should like it to be, but it is best, I think, to face the difficulties honestly.
Turner’s problem, then, as a painter of the sublime, was one in which the mere study of natural objects could not help him. ”

“ In reducing nature in this way to an element within the consciousness of the artist and spectator, I may seem to have destroyed at a blow all the pure unsullied beauty of the external world as it exists in apparent independence of human experience. I have done nothing of the kind. I have insisted that nature, as an existent independent of individual experience, is an unreal abstraction ”

“ Those who are under the dominion of the theory that art should only represent sensuous facts in their immediacy resent the transformation which the data of sense must undergo before they can take their place in the organised world of meaning. To them, therefore, such pictures as these are defective; the colouring is not sufficiently natural, not bright enough, nor are the contrasts sufficiently strong. These pictures are not painted in ‘the key of nature.’ In a word, they are old-fashioned, because the artist has done something more in them than the theories of impressionism can consecrate. ”

“ Such pictures as the ‘Frosty Morning,’ ‘Windsor,’ and ‘The Trout Stream’ are, perhaps, the most beautiful that art is capable of producing. And the example of Wordsworth, who did strive upward to ‘an intelligence which has greatness and the vision of all time and of all being,’ is not on all points reassuring. His poetry, simply as poetry, did suffer from his philosophic studies. There may be something in the very nature of the human soul which sets bounds to the creation or expression of beauty.
But Turner was not like Wordsworth. He was for good and ill essentially and solely an artist. ”

“ In painting Richard Wilson and De Loutherbourg had struck the same note of gloomy grandeur.
Now the essence of this kind of art—the Sublime—is not merely to strike the spectator dumb with amazement or terror, but also to make him feel that man’s moral freedom is superior to the most terrible forces of Nature. [8] The mere representation of the fearful and terrible sights of inorganic nature is therefore not by itself enough to evoke a feeling of the sublime; before he can do this the artist must also excite in the spectator the consciousness of his power to overcome or resist such objects. ”

“ But, however carefully we study the matter, and however profoundly convinced we may be that the distinction is firmly grounded in the essential nature of art itself, yet we can never hope to describe it in the precise terms of the exact sciences. We can never hope to understand the exact nature of the ties which bind the expressive symbols of Romantic art to the echoes they awaken with mathematical certainty in the breast of each individual. The problem of the relation between thought and feeling still agitates the rival schools of philosophy, and this is not the place to discuss such matters. ”

“ WE have studied in the preceding chapter the first phase of Turner’s genuinely creative work. We have seen the artist tear himself free from the trammels of the prosaic understanding, with its clear-cut distinctions between external nature and subjective thought and feeling, and plunge whole-heartedly into the concrete world of the poetic imagination. The accomplished draughtsman of the visible has developed into the perfervid poet of the invisible. Objective reality, as such, is shattered and trampled ruthlessly underfoot. ”

“ We have not read these pictures aright, we have not really brought them into contact with our own life, until we contemplate the bare external facts in the light of the mood which the artist has prescribed for them. It is, I know, commonly taken for granted that pictorial art is impotent to achieve this kind of determination; that the artist is at the mercy of any chance mood which the spectator may bring to his work; that the artist can only represent objects and spatial relations, and that he can lay no constraint on the spectator to think and feel about these objects in any particular way. ”

“ When the artist has told us as clearly and precisely as possible the exact shape of every object from his chosen point of view, we feel that he has done all that he set out to do, and all that we can reasonably demand from him. Then these objects are left standing side by side in relative independence of each other and of us; they have no necessary connection one with the other, like the parts of a piece of music, or the points of an argument. Their only bond of union is the abstract one of space. The whole effect is of something severed from direct experience ”

“ They are always subordinated to a genuinely imaginative conception. His pictures, therefore, are not the work of a man with a professional speciality. They are real epics of the sea. From their own imaginative point of view their workmanship is almost perfect. Their style is sonorous and weighty. They are as solemn and majestic in conception as they are manly in feeling. They have something of that ‘beauty which, as Milton sings, hath terror in it.’ Together ‘they move in perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood’—the noblest sequence of poems ever dedicated to the majesty of the sea. ”