CHAPTER III

THE SUBLIME--1797-1802

Change from pure form to light and shade--‘Millbank’ and ‘Ewenny Priory’--Contrast between ‘Ewenny’ and ‘Llandaff’--The transition from objectivity to subjectivity--The growth of taste for the Sublime--There are no sublime objects, but only objects of sublime feeling--No guidance but from art--The Wilson tradition--The two elements in the sketches and studies of this period, (1) The study of Nature, and (2) The assimilation of the Wilson tradition--In the 1797 sketches these two operations are kept distinct--The North of England tour and its record--‘Studies for Pictures: Copies of Wilson’--The two operations begin to coalesce in the 1798 and 1799 sketches--The origin of ‘Jason’--The Scotch (1801) and Swiss (1802) tours.

There is an evident connection between such a study of light and shade as the ‘Interior of a Cottage’ (406 National Gallery) and at least two of the exhibits in the exhibition of 1797. One of these, the ‘Moonlight, a study at Millbank,’ was probably Turner’s first exhibited oil painting; the other, ‘Transept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire,’ I am inclined to regard as the first drawing in which the budding genius of the young artist was authoritatively announced. It is impossible to be sure whether the direction of Turner’s attention to the subtler problems of light and shade led him to turn to oil painting as a more suitable medium for the expression of such effects, or whether his resolution to explore the resources of the more complex medium had the effect of directing his attention to the expressional qualities of light and shade. The ‘Millbank’ bears on its face the evidence of Dutch influence (Van der Neer, Van Goyen, etc.) as well as of inexperience of the technical requirements of the new medium. This inexperience renders the work

insignificant with regard to the development of the artist’s personality, but the bent of his mind towards the mystery and expressiveness of darkness is notable.

In the water-colour of ‘Ewenny Priory’--now one of the chief treasures of the Cardiff Art Gallery (Pyke-Thompson Bequest)--Turner’s genius is less hampered by technical difficulties. If this be indeed the drawing that was exhibited in 1797[7] it shows an amazingly rapid development in the artist’s powers, especially when we compare it with the ‘Llandaff Cathedral’ (790, National Gallery), which was exhibited only twelve months earlier. The ‘Llandaff’ is merely the work of a clever and skilful topographical draughtsman, the ‘Ewenny’ is the work of a powerful imaginative artist. The gloomy interior of the Norman ruin is no longer an object to be measured, dated, classified and labelled. It is no longer an ‘interesting specimen’ that we have set before us. The artist has now broken with the ordinary, every-day world of sense-experience, and we plunge with him into the world of the imagination, where objects are no longer separated from and held over against the self; they now throb and tingle with our own emotional life.

This change of aim--we may speak of it for the sake of brevity as the change from objectivity to subjectivity--is accompanied by a change of method in the workmanship of the two drawings. In the ‘Llandaff’ (as in the ‘Lincoln’) the forms of all the objects are made out with the greatest possible clearness. 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; the objects represented have an unreal air of permanence and immutability, with something of the intellectual coldness and aloofness of a diagram or mathematical symbol.

In the ‘Ewenny’ drawing we are brought into contact with objects which have not yet been severed from the emotional colouring of immediate experience. Instead of a series of abstract spatial determinations, appealing only to the abstract understanding, we now have a presentation fraught with the infinite suggestiveness of living, sensible experience. Each object represented is now no longer held over against the self as something alien, something indifferent to and independent of humanity, like the laws of the physical sciences; each object has now become merely a moment in the affective life of an individual. It therefore touches our own feelings, challenges our hopes and fears, appeals intimately to our sympathies with the contagion of the emotions of an actual companion. We cannot remain indifferent to such an appeal if we would. Unless our nerves tingle as the eye plunges from the familiar objects of the foreground into the gloom beyond, the picture has not begun to exist for us. But immediately it touches our inner life into responsive activity the picture becomes transformed from so much indifferent paper and pigment into an aspect of our own affective life. We have caught the contagion of the artist’s emotional experience, in which the objects of his representation were submerged.

I am far from wishing to suggest that the distinction between the two kinds of art which I have endeavoured to indicate is either very obvious or easy to grasp. But it is, I am convinced, a very real and a very weighty distinction, and as such is worthy of the most careful study. 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. What is immediately important

for us is to see that Turner’s art has passed from one stage of growth to another, and to realise for ourselves as best we can the nature of this progression. To me it seems clear that the line of Turner’s personal development is following roughly the line upon which the artistic faculty of mankind has developed; that the transition from topography to the stage we have now entered upon coincides in part with the movement from Classic to Romantic art, from the art which is in bondage to the world of external reality, to the art which moves and has its being in the inner world of our ideas and feelings. The ‘Llandaff’ and ‘Lincoln’ belong to the classic (or the pseudo-classic, if you will) art of the eighteenth century, while the ‘Ewenny’ inaugurates the Romantic art of the nineteenth century. On its technical side the change is from form to tone, from a system of predominantly unemotional space-determinations to a medium which is more immediately in contact with the inward feeling of all self-conscious beings.

In moving from the Augustan point of view towards the Romantic, Turner was but walking in an already well-beaten track. During the last half-century the influence of Milton had been growing, the taste for the gloomy, the mysterious and the picturesque had found expression in Young’s _Night Thoughts_, in Gray’s _Elegy_, in Walpole’s _Castle of Otranto_, and had found critical exponents in Warton’s _History of English Poetry_, and in Burke’s Essay _On the Sublime and Beautiful_, (1756). Dr. Percy’s _Reliques_ had found many readers and admirers, and Macpherson’s _Ossian_ had stirred the enthusiasm of Europe. 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. It is therefore a purely subjective feeling that the artist has to represent, though this feeling is directed towards or centred round a certain definite series of objects. But these objects as coloured with the strength and resolution of the heroic mood--the mood of Kant’s _animi strenui_[9]--cannot properly be said to exist as natural objects. The real subject of the artist’s work is therefore, strictly speaking, the invisible and the intangible, a mere mood of the soul, an attitude of our own mind towards certain objects of thought.

Of course we should all have been justified before the feat had been accomplished, in declaring that it was impossible for pictorial art to paint the invisible, but now that it has been accomplished we have no alternative but to recognise the fact. Common-sense says the thing is impossible, and experience proves to us that common-sense is wrong. 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. He might search out the most fearful sights in nature, watch the loftiest waterfall of the mightiest river, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes, lightning flashes and storms, but these objects alone, though they might stimulate his feeling of moral freedom, could not show him how to express this faculty of moral resistance which ‘gives us,’ as Kant says, ‘the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.’[10] There was no help for Turner in this task but in the works of those artists who had succeeded in expressing such emotions, and it was to Wilson and De Loutherbourg that Turner went, not to learn how to represent natural objects as such, but to learn how to use such objects as the media of inward perceptions and ideas. De Loutherbourg’s influence was mainly in the direction of rhodomontade and melodrama, but Wilson’s, though not

devoid of danger, led Turner safely into the enchanted regions of romance.

The three chief expressive--as distinguished from representative--factors in Wilson’s work are darkness of tone, the scheme of colour, and the quality of the paint. I am inclined to think that the general darkness of Wilson’s pictures is the necessary result of the kind of subjects he treated. The darkness is necessary to tune the mind of the spectator to gloomy and tragic thoughts,--to spread over his mind what Johnson calls ‘a general obscurity of sacred horror, that oppresses distinction, and disdains expression.’ In his worst pictures this darkness of key readily passes into emptiness and blackness; but in his best pictures this darkness ranges through a gamut of subdued and glowing colour, which relieves the gloom and comforts us as it were in our distress. The tone and colour are thus to some extent determined by the character of the objects represented; the tone by their general emotional effect, and the colour scheme as conditioned by the tone, though controlled within rather wide limits by the natural colours of the objects represented. But the third element, the quality of the paint, seems altogether independent of the objects represented. It seems to reveal only the artist’s attitude towards these objects. It is as thoroughly subjective as the emotional vibration in the voice of an excited speaker. Under this term, the quality of the paint, I include all the immediate presentative elements of painting, the thickness or thinness of the impasto, the way the paint is put on, the signs of the brushwork, everything, in short, that tells us how the artist felt towards the objects he was representing.

The main object of Turner’s study during the period we are dealing with was the assimilation of the Wilson tradition, his study of the facts of Nature, simply as facts, falling into the second place. For a time the two lines of study are kept distinct. On the one hand, the work of neat and systematic note-taking face to face with nature is continued, and on the other hand, a number of studies aiming at the embodiment of the artist’s subjective attitude make their appearance. The final synthesis of the two factors, the without and the within, is of course only arrived at in the finished work of art, but the contents of the sketch-books of this period fall easily apart, according as they lean either in the direction of the particular facts or in the direction of the emotional synthesis.

The drawings made during the tour in the north of England, which Turner made in the summer of 1797, belong almost entirely to the first kind. In one sketch-book we find most of the more important ruined abbeys and castles of Yorkshire, Durham, and Northumberland drawn with the most delightful ease, accuracy, and charm. Here we have Kirkstall Abbey drawn from every available point of view, Ripon Cathedral, studied both without and within, Barnard and Richmond Castles, Dunstanborough, Bamborough, Durham Castle and Cathedral, Warkworth, Lindisfarne and Norham. The drawing of the interior of Ripon Cathedral, reproduced as Plate IX., is merely an average example of the kind of work that Turner now seemed to produce without the slightest effort. The most complicated structure and detail now presented no difficulties to his well-trained eye and hand. The ease with which he mastered all the material forms that met his eye may have left his mind at leisure to enjoy the moral atmosphere of the buildings, may have left his imagination free to range backward over its past history; but there is no trace of emotion or imagination in the graceful play of these clear-cut, accurate, and methodical outlines.

Melrose Abbey formed the highest point north in this journey. Leaving Melrose, Turner struck across to Cumberland, no doubt passing through Carlisle to Keswick. After the bustle and noise of much of the northward half of his journey, the peace and quiet of the English lakes must have been noticeable. In looking through the hundred or more pencil sketches made at Keswick, Buttermere, Ullswater, Patterdale, Windermere, Coniston, etc., one is struck by the absence of the conventional note of Romantic horror. There is no trace of what used to be called the bold and appalling singularities of nature.[11] There is indeed a marked absence of human activity in these drawings. We are alone with

nature, but nature’s aspect is generally peaceful and friendly. The mountains are high, but we enjoy climbing them and the fine views we get there. Their shapes above all interest us immensely. They do not strike us at all as appalling singularities, but as replete with an infinite grace and variety, under which we feel a fundamental reasonableness, an intuitive sense of intelligible design. And then there are not only the bare shapes, but their wonderful clothing of light and shade; the play of the gleams of sunlight and the long shadows across the deep bosoms of the hills, and the games the wreaths of mist and cloud play with the distant mountain-tops, and the wild races of the mountain-torrents over their favourite tracks. Occasionally there is time for more than the regulation pencil outline. Then the brush and a few colours come out, and a stretch of the distance wakes from its cold abstraction into life. Such sketches as ‘The Head of Derwentwater, with Lodore Falls and the entrance to Borrowdale,’ the ‘Hills of Glaramara,’ and ‘Buttermere Lake’ (Exhibited Drawings, No. 696), were produced in this way. In these we see beautiful effects of mist, with the sun playing through them, noted with subtle sympathy and accuracy, but the general effect is not at all gloomy; it is rather one of peace, serenity, and gladness.

This is the raw material out of which Turner set to work in the autumn and winter of 1797 to manufacture some important oil pictures full of gloom and wrath. The young artist reminds me of Johnson’s acquaintance who had resolved to be a philosopher, but found his native cheerfulness always breaking through. Turner’s unaffected delight in Nature certainly stood in the way of his aspiration towards the sublime. But he was not a man to be easily thwarted. We can trace in the pictures exhibited in 1798 the conflict between the elements given in perception and the subjective requirements of the artist, but by sheer diligence and strength of will he succeeded in moulding his cheerful perceptions into concepts full of gloom and horror. The picture of ‘Buttermere’ (N.G., at present on loan to the Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter) is based on a pale and delicately-charming water-colour drawing (696, N.G.), but little of the charm or delicacy of the original sketch survives in the oil painting, which is ruthlessly swamped in more than Wilsonian blackness. He succeeded best where the record of his perceptions was slightest. There are several sketches of Norham Castle, but they are all in pencil and very slight. For some reason or other the artist was evidently in a hurry. Perhaps partly because of this insufficient note-taking, here was a favourable subject round which his imagination was free to play, unhampered by any very clearly determined immediate perceptions. The picture of Norham Castle, exhibited at Somerset House in 1798, was Turner’s first distinct success in this kind of work, and he repeated the subject several times.

A small green-covered pocket-book, which still bears Turner’s label, ‘Studies for Pictures: Copies of Wilson,’ gives us a glimpse of the processes by which the sights of nature were converted into works of art. Here we see the subjective impulses of the artist struggling into expression; the artist’s love of gorgeous colour and dramatic effect nourishing itself and forging a material form for its own support. Among the designs in this interesting little book are several marine and coast subjects, a shipwreck, an interior of a forge with men busy casting an anchor, some river scenes, a rainbow standing over a dark city, several church interiors, and some studies of turbulent skies. It is difficult to distinguish Turner’s studies for his own pictures from his copies of Wilson, but one of the drawings is probably a copy of Wilson’s ‘Morning,’ and another, of his ‘Bridge of Augustus at Rimini.’ I have not been able to see either of these original pictures, so as to compare them with Turner’s copy, but a comparison of the copy with the engraving by Joseph Farington, published by Boydell, shows some important discrepancies in the arrangement of the light and shade. The character of these discrepancies leads one to suppose that they were not made intentionally by Turner, but were the result of his attempt to reproduce the general effect of the picture from memory. He may have made a slight pencil sketch of the picture in some gallery, and washed in the general effect afterwards from memory.

This is, of course, only a supposition, but it is somewhat strengthened by examination of a larger and more elaborate copy of Wilson’s ‘Landscape with Figures,’ a picture now in the National Gallery (No. 1290). That Turner’s water-colour is intended to be a copy is proved by the endorsement on its back--‘Study from Wilson,’

but when we compare it with the original we find that the various discrepancies in the copy can only be accounted for by supposing that Turner was working to a considerable extent from memory. I admit the evidence is not conclusive, but I do not think we shall be far wrong if we take it that Turner did not at this time make any elaborate copies of Wilson’s pictures, but that he studied them closely and enthusiastically, and relied more upon his memory than his notes.

In the sketches made during the following years we find that these two separate operations show a tendency to coalesce. Turner has evidently taken a dislike to his earlier map-making style, and tries hard to see nature like Wilson. His sketches from nature become slighter and more hurried. In his efforts towards breadth he comes very near emptiness, and in his attempts to get away from his neat bit-by-bit style of work he often comes near downright clumsiness and carelessness.

The summers of 1798 and 1799 were largely spent in North Wales. Here he found exactly the material that chimed in with the mood of sternness and gloom he wished to express: steep, convulsive mountains, wild valleys and broken passes, the bare skeletonlike ribs of broken ships aground on lonely estuaries, massive ruins of huge castles perched on inaccessible crags, gnawed to the bone as it were by the wind and rain and remorseless Time.

His mental grasp has clearly broadened. He no longer sees buildings as isolated objects, but they now fall into their places as incidents in the wide panorama of the country. Nothing is now drawn for itself; the trees are emanations from the ground, the dry land and the waters are kinsmen, the stones in the foreground are parts of the distant mountains, and the mountains huge elder brothers of the pebbles by the river-side. The bubbling waters are but clouds made captive, the clouds the freed souls of the brooks, the trees the organ of their transformation; and castles like Conway, standing with their roots plunged deep into their rocky foundations, seem but rocks raised to a higher power. The distinction between human art and physical nature is everywhere broken down. The spirit of life in nature is identified with the volitions and passions of the artist’s own soul: he has become sensible ‘to the moods of time and season, to the moral power, the affections and the spirit of the place.’[12]

This state of mind is closely akin to the mood in which the myths of the Old World had taken shape. Small wonder, then, if the broken and withered branches of a stricken tree writhing among vigorously shooting brushwood should suggest to Turner’s mobile fancy the idea of snakes and dragons. The sketch here reproduced (Plate XIII.) strikes me as probably the origin of the picture of ‘Jason’ which was exhibited in 1802.

In 1800 or 1801 Turner made a tour through the Highlands of Scotland. The immediate results were slightly disappointing, but the experience gained undoubtedly contributed to the effectiveness of the work done during the first visit to Switzerland, made in 1802. In the Scotch sketches Turner had hit upon a method of working that enabled him to cover a great deal of ground in a short space of time, and which had the additional advantage of exercising his memory, and of making his sketches from nature more like the first draughts of his finished pictures than like so many unfused notes or memoranda. All the more promising scenes he met with were sketched slightly in chalk upon large sheets of paper prepared with a wash of light brown. These sketches were seldom carried far before the actual scenes, but as soon after as was convenient--possibly at the inn in the evening--these skeletons were filled up from the artist’s retentive memory and ever-ready invention. In this way he was able to fortify himself against the multiplicity of nature’s irrelevant facts, and to find a ready form of expression for the reaction of his own mind upon the sights of nature.

Colour was very little used in the Scotch sketches, all the larger drawings--numbering, I think, between forty and fifty--being worked entirely in black and white. But a considerable number of the Swiss drawings are coloured, though, I believe, none of them directly from nature. Turner’s procedure in the case of these drawings appears to have been practically the same as with the Scotch series, but after the skeleton sketch from nature had been elaborated with pencil and white and black chalk, colour was sometimes resorted to, less as a record of facts

of local colour, than as an additional instrument of expression of the subjective mood. Among the drawings elaborated in this way are the sketches upon which several of the Farnley drawings (the large ‘Mer de Glace, Chamounix,’ ‘Falls of the Reichenbach,’ ‘Pass of St. Gothard,’ ‘Blair’s Hut, Mer de Glace,’[13] etc.), were based. In some cases the finished works are less impressive than the first sketches, which are almost overpowering in their concentrated vehemence and gloomy majesty. But we must beware of regarding these as simple sketches from nature. They are more strictly studies for pictures than sketches from nature, and it is hardly too much to say that they owe more of their energetic emotional appeal to the Wilson tradition, which Turner had by this time thoroughly assimilated, than to the immediate inspiration of nature.