CHAPTER VIII

MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY, AND THE ORIGIN OF IMPRESSIONISM--1830-1845

Mental characteristics of 1815-1830 period--Their influence on form--and colour--Colour enrichment a general characteristic of Romantic Art--What further development is required to give us the transition to Impressionism?--The first of Turner’s so-called Impressionistic works--Vagueness or indistinctness as a means of expression--Two ways of painting one’s impressions--Turner’s earlier way--contrasted with the modern Impressionistic way--The change, after 1830, is it a change in terms of sight or of thought--visual or mental?--The content of Turner’s later work--The relation of Turner’s later work to Impressionism defined--The gradual development of Turner’s later manner--The Petworth sketches (1830)--The discovery of the artistic value of the indeterminate--The Vignettes-‘Rivers of France’--Venetian sketches (1834-1840)--Swiss and Rhine sketches (1841-1844)--The end.

When we try to make clear to ourselves the inner characteristics of the period studied in the last chapter, we notice at once a change from the gloom, sternness and patient endurance of the earlier decade to a brighter and more cheerful frame of mind. Turner’s predominant frame of mind is proud and happy. He seems to rejoice in the splendour of the world and exult over the richness and variety of its material. His attitude towards humanity is not so easily defined. In the best of his oil paintings, as in the ‘Pas de Calais’ (‘Now for the Painter’), and in his water colours, there is an abundance of close and sympathetic observation of the labours and sorrow of mankind. But in spite of the graces of a naturally kind heart Turner’s attitude towards these labours and sufferings is not entirely free from traces of hardness and selfishness. His instinct for the picturesque side of this kind of subject-matter is so keen, and his insistence on this picturesqueness is so constant and so emphatic, that it is hard to resist the suspicion that his interest is rather professional than personal. He does not seem to feel himself an actor and a fellow-sufferer. He was on the other side of the fence; he was the artist, and labouring, suffering mankind his material. And so far as he himself was concerned he had every reason for exultation. The nature that could endow a humbly born youth with such gifts as he possessed, and the society that had rewarded these talents so generously, might be said to have fairly earned the young painter’s gratitude. He gave it effusively, with none of the ulterior reserves an educated Greek would have felt in the presence of a great happiness or pre-eminent success.

Let us now turn to the outward and visible results of this exultant and somewhat heartless and selfish enjoyment. The movement of the design, the quality of the tone and colour, and the spirit of the handling of the pictures in which such a frame of mind is expressed, could not possibly be the same as in Turner’s earlier pictures. 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; and Turner’s shortcomings, if he had any, were moral rather than artistic.

Given then the mood of exultant enjoyment of the physical amenities of the world, a lighter and brighter colour scheme than that of Turner’s earlier pictures was bound to be forthcoming, if that mood was to be fully expressed by pictorial art. And as a matter of history Turner was the first modern artist in the range of landscape art to give adequate expression to this sentiment of unrestrained enjoyment of the physical delights of nature, though we see the same swelling sense of the pride of life finding a similar form of expression in the works of contemporary figure-painters like Sir Thomas Lawrence, Shee and Hayter in England, and Delacroix, Isabey, and others in France.

In the present chapter I propose to deal with the closing phase of Turner’s art. In the works of this period Turner has been said to have initiated a new kind of art, or at least to have invented or introduced certain important innovations in the region of colour and tone, which have had the effect of developing new possibilities in the art of landscape-painting. It is from this point of view, and with reference to this aspect of Turner’s work, that he has been hailed as the father of Impressionism. Before discussing the value of the innovations Turner introduced and their influence on subsequent developments of the art, it is important to study the immediate causes which brought them into existence. In other words, we must study this new phase of Turner’s art in relation to its immediate antecedents; in the first place, to see how far it can be regarded as a necessary development of what had gone before, and in the second place, to discover exactly what is new in it.

The two most striking characteristics of Turner’s later work are the brightness and extended range of his colour schemes. But this formal characteristic is clearly taken over bodily from the previous period, and we have just seen that it was but the necessary outward expression of the spiritual content with which Turner was then preoccupied. In a picture like ‘Ulysses deriding Polyphemus’ (1829), for example, we have a colour scheme as bright and as extended as that of any of the later works, and yet it is emphatically a work of the Romantic period. It is all ablaze with the light and flame of human pride. Its gorgeous array of blues, its burnished gold and glowing crimson and scarlet and white are but the triumphant expression of the mood of unrestrained sensuous enjoyment which formed the key-note of the work we have just been examining.

But if the lightening of the colour scheme was simply an inheritance from the Romantic phase of art, what are we to regard as the special contribution of the later manner? A comparison of a few of Turner’s later works with the ‘Ulysses’ will show us at once. The earliest example of Turner’s later and so-called Impressionistic manner with which I am familiar is the ‘Calais Sands, low water--Poissards collecting bait,’ which was exhibited in 1830, and is now in the Bury Art Gallery. Its colour

scheme is actually more subdued than the ‘Ulysses,’ but the whole effect is more vaporous and the figures are less distinct. So far as I am able to judge, this is the chief _differentia_ of Turner’s later manner, and of all Impressionistic work on its formal side. As a second characteristic we may add the fact that it deals with a scene of contemporary life, something that Turner had actually seen with his eyes, not something that he had read about and imagined, as in the ‘Ulysses.’

If we examine ‘The Evening Star’ and ‘At Petworth’ (both at the Tate Gallery), the ‘Snowstorm’ of 1842, the late Venetian pictures, and the ‘Rain, Storm, Speed’ of 1844, we find these works are all similarly distinguished by their general vagueness of definition and by the fact that they all represent scenes which had come within the range of the artist’s own experience.

Yet it is evident that these two characteristics are not of equal importance. The vagueness of definition was a general characteristic of all Turner’s later work, but a considerable number of these works were purely imaginary compositions, as for example the ‘Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus’ (1839), ‘The Exile and the rock limpet’ (1842), ‘The Evening of the Deluge’ (1843), ‘Queen Mab’s Cave’ (1846), and the various ‘Whaler’ pictures (1845 and 1846). There is obviously, then, no necessary connection between Turner’s vagueness of execution (his distinctively Impressionist manner) and his choice of subject of which he had been actually an eye-witness.

Besides, we must remember that Turner did not wait till his later years before beginning to paint his own impressions. He had been busy painting them ever since he had come to artistic maturity. His ‘Calais Pier’ (1803), the ‘Spithead’ (1809), ‘Petworth--Dewy Morning’ (1810), ‘Teignmouth’ and ‘Hulks on the Tamar’ (1811 and 1812), and ‘Frosty Morning’ (1813),--to name only a few--were certainly works of this kind; as were the ‘Hedging and Ditching’ of the _Liber_ and the ‘Colchester’ of the _England and Wales_ series. But there is no lack of determination in the execution of these works. The difference between Turner’s later attempts to paint his impressions and his earlier must therefore be found in his attitude towards these impressions--the principle of selection, of suppression and adjustment upon which he dealt with the data of sense-perception; and this brings us to the consideration of the _rationale_ of that vagueness of execution which we have agreed to regard as the chief characteristic of Turner’s later work.

An ingenious and at first somewhat plausible attempt has been made to explain the peculiarities of Turner’s later style, on the ground that old age and failing health had brought about an actual organic change in the artist’s powers of sight. But it seems to me that Dr. Liebreich’s arguments[29] and conclusions are vitiated by his failure to discriminate between Turner’s manner of expression and the action of his eyesight. These are two clearly distinct operations. Between the act of seeing and an artist’s fully organised manner of expression, a whole host of considerations--among them the limitations and capacities of the material--interpose themselves. These considerations must all receive their due weight. I know several very short-sighted artists whose pictures are remarkable for their elaborate and sharply defined details, and there are others with strong and good eyesight, whose pictures are confused and indistinct. An artist puts into his pictures only what he chooses to put there. And when we work out in detail the reasons why Turner chose to make his drawings indistinct, we find that such considerations are quite sufficient by themselves to account for his change of style, without having recourse to any hypothetical alteration in his organs of sight.

The clue, then, to the nature of Turner’s later manner of expression is to be found in the character not of his optical sensations but of his thought, or in other words, upon the mode in which his intelligent self reacted upon the immediate data of sense-perception. By the time he had reached the period with which we are now concerned, he had lost much of his interest in the material world. He cared no longer for the strength and weight, the toughness and tang of material; that delight in the solidity of real objects which gives such a manly gusto to his early sea-pieces, is now altogether absent from his work. He cares no longer for the company of men, or for their avocations or joys and sorrows. He is now a lonely old man, with his thoughts mainly centred upon himself, upon his artistic genius, his artistic fame, and the visions of future pictures by which his genius was to continue to manifest itself, and by which his fame was to be increased or sustained.

We have then to think of Turner as a solitary dreamer of dreams, with a professional interest in the capacity of these dreams to startle a rather stupid public. If we want to enter intimately into the spiritual and emotional content of his dreams we have only to turn to the contemporary works of the poets. In pictures like ‘The Fountain of Indolence,’ the ‘Agrippina’ and those I have mentioned above, we see how deeply impressed his mind had become with the ideals of current Romantic poetry; the true Byronic disgust with himself and vague emotions of the infinite, the desire to

‘steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the universe, and feel What I can ne’er express.’

There is no doubt that these obscure emotions and vague reveries can only be adequately expressed in one particular way. They defy embodiment in clear-cut determinate forms. They demand a style as indeterminate, as vaguely suggestive, as inarticulate as the loose-knit dreams which are calling for embodiment.

This, then, I take to be the proper explanation of the vagueness of Turner’s later manner: It is not that he saw the world indistinctly, but that his ideas were incapable of definition; it is not that his eyes were newly opened to the vapours and mists of the physical world, but that his own thoughts were confused and his emotions, in spite of their strength, were incoherent and inarticulate.

* * * * *

We are now in a position to define the relation in which Turner’s later works stand to modern Impressionism. The exact connotation of this term is not by any means easy to grasp, but so far as Impressionism has distinctive aims I think we are justified in describing them as the attempt to eliminate all those elements in art which are due to the reaction of the intelligent self upon the immediate data of sense-perception. The aim of Impressionism is to get rid of what one eminent psychologist has called the noëtic fringe in a state of consciousness, to abstract from memory and see objects as simple visual elements. The Impressionist wishes to see objects as though he was looking at them for the first time, as though they had no meaning for him. The theoretic justification of this procedure is that, in stripping off the formative and organising action of intelligence we isolate the pure element of objective reality; that pictures painted upon this principle give the real truth of nature and are free from all those errors and distortions which the action of thought is supposed to introduce into the irrefragably trustworthy elements of the given. These assumptions are, I need hardly add, untenable, but this is not the place to criticise them.

Now if Impressionism aims at getting rid of all the cognitive elements in concrete perception (recognition, classing, naming, etc.) as well as the later processes of interpretation and associative reflection, and would express only the bare sensational element of impression, it is clear that Turner cannot be properly described as an Impressionist. Turner’s artistic aim was consistently lyrical, _i.e._ strongly subjective and emotional, while the chief aim of Impressionism is to eliminate all the merely subjective colouring from perception, with the single purpose of isolating and reproducing what is regarded as the objective element. So far, then, as Impressionism has adopted Turner’s results, it seems open to the charge of having done so without understanding their real nature or significance.

Yet this result, however helpful it may prove to the student of present-day art, cannot be wholly satisfactory from another point of view. From the point of view of Turner’s work our result is largely negative. We have endeavoured to make it clear that to regard his later work as a new and triumphant attempt to represent what is called the ‘truths of nature’ is pure misunderstanding; that Turner’s aim is not to represent either truths of atmosphere, of lighting or of natural colour, or any kind or class of physical fact; that he is busied mainly with his own emotions and fancies, and that he is concerned with the objective

world only indirectly and only in so far as it furnishes or suggests the stuff out of which his pictorial symbols are woven. But we have still to search for the secret power of attraction which these symbols do unquestionably possess. Why is it, we must ask, that these signs and symbols have such power to move men, to delight and intoxicate some, to soothe and cheer others?

The answers to these questions may be conveniently grouped under two heads. In the first place we may consider what are the attractions which Turner’s work shares with the Romantic poets whose works express the same kind of subject-matter, and in the second place we may attempt to indicate what are the qualities which are more intimately connected with his own individuality.

In the first place then, when we consider Turner as a fellow-worker with Byron, Shelley, and Lamartine, we see that like them he appeals constantly and unerringly to that illusion of the romantic temperament which lends a mysterious charm to all that is indefinite and indefinable. In a singularly acute analysis of this temperament Mr. George Santayana has traced one of the chief causes of the delight which this kind of art and poetry awakens to what he calls ‘the illusion of infinite perfection.’ There is, he says, a loose and helpless state of mind to which we all of us approximate when in a state of fatigue. In this state of mind we are not capable of concentrated and serious attention to one thing at a time, so we are apt to ‘flounder in the vague, but at the same time we are full of yearnings, of half-thoughts and semi-visions, and the upward tendency and exaltation of our mood is emphatic and overpowering in proportion to our incapacity to think, speak, or imagine. The sum of our incoherencies has, however, an imposing volume and even, perhaps, a vague, general direction. We feel ourselves laden with an infinite burden; and what delights us most and seems to us to come nearest to the ideal, is not what embodies any one possible form, but that which, by embodying none, suggests many, and stirs the mass of our inarticulate imagination with a pervasive thrill.... That infinite perfection which cannot be realised, because it is self-contradictory, may be thus suggested, and on account of this suggestion an indeterminate effect may be regarded as higher, more significant, and more beautiful than any determinate one.’[30] These remarks help us to understand the positive qualities of Turner’s indeterminate style; its power of evoking a fallacious sense of profundity and significance, just because of its indeterminateness, its power of suggesting and stimulating emotion, just because it is incoherent and variously interpretable.

Yet when we have pressed these considerations to their extreme limit, we have only drawn attention to certain qualities which Turner’s later work shares with that of many indifferent artists and poets, and, far from exhausting the real and permanent elements of value in that work, they may be justly regarded as a searching and pitiless exposure of its weaknesses and defects. But we are on firmer ground when we turn to the purely personal qualities in this work, to the artist’s delicacy of hand and fineness of sight. It matters not what instrument Turner is working with, whether with the pencil, the pen, or the brush, or whether he is working hurriedly or at leisure, the movement of his hand is always graceful and delightful. His powers of sight also seem to me to have been quite extraordinary; I do not mean that he had merely the power of seeing distant objects distinctly, not mere long-sightedness, though he seems to have had this faculty in an abundant measure, but a quite unusual power of discriminating between minute shades of light and colour. As the born musician is distinguished from other men by his capacity for detecting differences of sound which to others seem the same, so the evidence of Turner’s work--and all who have attempted to copy even the slightest of his sketches will, I am sure, bear me out in this--shows that he possessed an abnormal power of visual discrimination. No doubt his early training and especially the influence of Dayes had something to do with the development of this capacity, but the capacity itself was largely innate. In addition to these two natural gifts, an abnormal delicacy of hand and eye, Turner had the priceless advantage of being passionately and unfalteringly in love with his art. Some of the greatest artists give me the impression of loving their art less for its own sake than for the sake of the content which it enables them to express,--Rembrandt and Jean François Millet, for example, give me this impression, and I do not think that their greatness is imperilled in the least by it--but Turner seems to me to have loved his art, especially in his later years, entirely for its own sake. This strong and deep affection threw a glamour over every detail of his work. Nothing was too high or too low for him. He brought the same inexhaustible patience and alertness of attention to the working out of a complicated problem of perspective as to the finishing of his most ambitious pictures. Like Wordsworth’s ‘happy warrior’ in the midst of danger, he had only to take a pencil into his hand to become ‘attired with sudden brightness, like a Man inspired.’ This concentration, this master-bias, throws a fervour and an inimitable charm over what it seems almost ironical to speak of as the mechanical execution of his works.

It is difficult to define the exact relationship of Turner’s love for his art, with his passionate and unwearying study of natural phenomena. My own impression is that his love of nature was at best to some extent subordinate to his love of art; that he loved nature partly at least as a means to artistic expression, and not altogether for itself. But however this may be, the extent of his knowledge of, and intimate familiarity with, nature’s ways counts for much in the attractions of his pictures. The evidence of his keen though intermittent study of natural phenomena is writ large in the collection of his sketch-books. The very extent of his knowledge, no doubt, led at times to a certain overcrowding of his works, but it forms the secret of his supple and ample style, and the inexhaustible fecundity of his invention.

It is then to the magic of his style that Turner’s later works owe a great deal of their strange power of compelling attention and extorting a sometimes unwilling admiration. He had in a quite pre-eminent degree what Reynolds has called the genius of mechanical execution. And this power is as remarkable in his earlier works as in his later. But in his earlier works this power was used to give definite embodiment to a range of worthy and significant ideas and emotions, and the sheer beauty of their content is apt to divert our attention from the consummate skill implied in this rarest and highest artistic achievement. But in the later work the very weakness and poverty of the content has the effect of keeping our attention fixed upon the suggestiveness and visual beauty of the material elements of expression. In the poetry of the French Symbolists we see a somewhat similar effect consciously aimed at. The poverty of thought is used as a foil to throw the greatest possible emphasis on the beauty of sounds and the faint suggestions of individual words. In this way the attenuation of significance in Turner’s later works throws into startling prominence all the innate and intrinsic splendours of the painter’s palette.

We shall have occasion to amplify and illustrate these observations as we trace the gradual development of Turner’s later manner, the task to which we have now to address ourselves.

* * * * *

I have alluded above to what I regard as the first oil painting in which the change that took place in Turner’s artistic aims about the year 1830 was clearly indicated. This was the ‘Calais Sands, low water,’ exhibited at the Royal Academy in May, 1830. But before painting this picture Turner had been experimenting in his new manner in a series of water-colour sketches. These sketches were made at Petworth, where Turner went to stay for a few weeks with Lord Egremont, probably in 1829, after his return from his second journey to Italy.

The two oil paintings of Petworth Park, still in the Petworth collection, as well as the brilliant unfinished sketch of ‘Petworth Park’ in the National Gallery (No. 559), were probably painted in the house during this visit; at any rate, the sketches in water-colour upon which these canvases were based were made at this time. But when Turner was not busy at his easel or sketching in the park and neighbourhood, he seems to have felt the time hang heavily on his hands, so, to save himself from the ennui of small-talk and idleness, he began making colour sketches, first of the various rooms, then of the furniture and bric-à-brac, and finally of the people staying in the house. These sketches, which number about a hundred, indicate clearly a distinct change in Turner’s outlook upon nature. Up to this time he had invariably employed form as the basis of his work. In these studies we see him turning his attention directly to colour as the chief element

of representation. The difference is no doubt largely a matter of degree, for both elements are indispensable. Yet we have only to compare, say, a drawing like that of ‘Rochester,’ in the _Rivers of England_ series, with any one of the _Rivers of France_ subjects to see that the change of emphasis, upon colour instead of form, was fraught with important technical results. From a psychological point of view the change is also significant. It shows that Turner was dissatisfied with the language of form, which had served him so well all his life; the vague unrest and conflicting emotions which now surged in his bosom demanded a less static, a more fluent and elusive medium of expression.

Let us examine one of these Petworth subjects, a sketch of people ‘Waiting for Dinner.’ The scene takes place in a large drawing-room. The fireplace comes in the centre of the design, and before it a corpulent and dignified figure in evening dress stands facing us. On either side there are groups of figures, also in evening dress, the white of the ladies’ muslin frocks relieved with the yellow and black of an effulgent matron and the black suits and scarlet uniforms of the men. Examined in detail, the drawing of the figures is childish, but viewed at a proper distance, so that the eye can range freely over it all without bringing any one point into sharp focus, the effect is extraordinary. It is like catching a glimpse of the actual scene. The whole goes together, the room is filled with atmosphere, the sharp staccato touches sprinkled with such amazing cunning among the floating wreaths of colour give exactly that sense of relief which the eye experiences as it wanders over an actual scene,--the sense of angles and sharp points of resistance which artists speak of as the ‘lost and found’ of nature. The very slightness of the execution of the drawing and the reckless carelessness of the handling add to the feeling of immediate contact with reality, for the lack of definition is indissolubly associated in our minds with the experience of movement and change, and the figures whose precise forms elude us seem only to be moving before our eyes. Yet this effect would certainly not be produced were it not for the wonderful accuracy and subtlety with which the relative values of the masses of tone have been observed,--the relation, for instance, between the exact shade of grey of the shirt-front of the noble lord with his back to the fire and the exact tint of the firelight itself seen through his legs, or, in short, between every touch of colour and the whole which they constitute.

Yet when we compare this drawing with any of the more elaborately worked ones, we cannot but realise the enormous importance of slightness of definition as a means of expression. In the ‘Spinnet Player,’ for example, we find the same skill in the observation and rendering of tones as in ‘Waiting for Dinner,’ and the same extraordinary science of colour declension; yet the effect it produces is one of static unreality.

In this drawing a lady dressed in blue is seated in the foreground at a spinnet; on the left, there is another lady in white on a couch, and on the right, in the middle distance, a group of figures are seated round a table apparently playing cards, while a figure in a light-coloured dress stands behind the chair of one of the players. The objects on the wall of the room, the near furniture and figures are all considerably more defined than any of the objects in ‘Waiting for Dinner,’ but the definition of these parts sets up a standard which condemns the drawing as a whole. We feel disappointed, after getting so much definition, that we do not get more. The middle-distance figures are so well drawn, or rather are so vivaciously observed and full of individuality, that we cannot help complaining that the foreground lady’s neck and shoulders are impossible, and that the lady on the couch is so much like a wooden doll. These observations suggest that each drawing sets up its own standard of definition. The comparative failure of such a drawing could not but help to impress on Turner the immense value for his purposes of a wise and consistent vagueness of statement.

In the vignettes made to illustrate the works of Rogers, Scott, Byron and Campbell we see the lesson of the Petworth experiments driven home. Though these drawings were made expressly with the object of being engraved in black and white, they are conceived entirely upon a colour basis, while their lack of definition must have made quite unwarrantable demands upon the skill and resources of the engravers. But it is evident that Turner had now firmly grasped the fact that the glamour and

intoxication of colour had become the dominant and essential factor in his art, and that the vagueness of his ideas could only be adequately expressed by allusion and suggestion. These vignettes and the engravings made from them vary widely in value. One or two of them are worthy of the artist, for example the ‘Datur hora quieti,’ ‘The Alps at Daybreak’ and the ‘Melrose,’ but for the most part they owe the very great popular success they have enjoyed to the skill with which the artist has entered into the spirit of the second-and third-rate poetry he was called upon to illustrate, and to the admirable way in which his suggestions were engraved.

The designs for the _Rivers of France_ are conceived in a somewhat similar strain of lyrical abandonment to the sensuous charm of colour. Translated into mere black and white they leave us but half convinced. It is rather like a prose translation into a foreign language of the poetry of Victor Hugo, Swinburne or Shelley. To feel their full effect we must turn to the original water-colours, with all their ravishing intoxication of colour. It is as though our reason must needs be lulled asleep by the dominant flood of purely sensuous delight, before we can feel about these drawings as the artist would have us feel.

We have seen, in the case of the ‘Stamford’ design in the _England and Wales_ series, that Turner’s interest in a place was specifically different from that of a resident or an historian. He cares little or nothing for local facts, merely as facts; his main concern is to skim off from the surface of observation a few telling points, a few heads of discourse as we might call them, which serve as a point of departure to his own abundant pictorial improvisation. The result may be more or less like the locality which furnishes the title of the drawing, but it is never in any strict sense of the word an accurate representation of the place. Yet the gulf that yawns between local fact and Turner’s lyrical inspiration is never of quite the same character in the English drawings as in the French. In both the gulf is wide, but in the English subjects the artist’s intimate knowledge of the general characteristics of the scenery gives such an air of plausibility to his improvisations that one might be tempted to explain his poetical licences as the result of an ardent striving after general and specific truth.[31] With the French drawings it is impossible to make such a mistake. Turner was not at all intimate with French scenery. He got up the subject in a most perfunctory manner in a few short and hurried tours. He merely paid a flying visit to the chief places mentioned in his guide-book and, instead of studying what he saw with a moderate degree of attention, was quite satisfied to look for mere hints of Turnerian phantasies; he did not want facts, but suggestions for pictorial inventions. So that in spite of his voluminous note-taking we find scarcely an accurate detail in the whole of the sixty engravings. The twin towers of Tancarville Castle are certainly the result of a misunderstanding of the hurried sketch made on the spot, and I have no doubt that the ‘errors’ and ‘inaccuracies’ so relentlessly ferreted out by Mr. Hamerton, in the representations of the Castle of Amboise, the towers of Notre Dame and St. Jacques de la Boucherie, the old Hôtel de Ville and the Pump, were caused in the same way. From the point of view of the topographer there can be no doubt that Hamerton’s statement[32] that the engravings of this series contain only ‘a sort of muddled reminiscence’ of the objects and places Turner had seen is in the main correct.

The object of these remarks is far from that of suggesting that the presence of ‘errors’ and ‘inaccuracies’ of this kind interferes in any way with the purely artistic value of these drawings. It is rather to emphasise the fact that it is only when we judge them from a totally irrelevant point of view, that we can begin to talk of errors and inaccuracies. Rightly understood these so-called errors and inaccuracies are not only the justifiable licences of the artist, but the absolutely inevitable and proper and solely right means of expression which the artist had at his disposal. His aim is to produce a state of consciousness in which feeling looms large, and thought-determination is reduced almost to the vanishing point. One might say, without exaggeration or unfairness, that mental confusion formed an important part of his artistic aim. He had then to represent the objects he depicted not as they appear to a cool, level-headed, and accurate observer, but as they appear to a highly sensitive subject in a state of morbid excitement.

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; Chateaux Gaillards or ‘Saucy Castles’ of the imagination one might almost call them.

It was characteristic of Turner--I might almost say it was a necessity of his position as a landscape painter--that he felt compelled to search far and wide for material out of which to spin his web of visible phantasy. The need of novel shapes, glowing colours, striking and elaborate combinations was constantly felt. The rivers Meuse, Moselle and Rhine were diligently and repeatedly explored. The East--for his Bible illustrations--he was content to take at second-hand, through the medium of other men’s sketches, but he sailed down the Danube, as far as Vienna (or Buda-Pesth perhaps?), ransacked Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, Holland and Belgium and part of Austria. But as the years moved on, his mental grip of the real world became always looser. His mind played only with the fugitive shades on the surface of appearances; but not with the elasticity, the free disinterestedness of youth and of the young-hearted. The professional bias became ever more pronounced, the point of view ever more abstract and one-sided.

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.

Let us look carefully at the two Venetian sketches here reproduced. In ‘Shipping on the Riva degli Schiavone’ (No. 55, N.G.) we see the Campanile and Ducal Palace on the right, a blaze of warm, palpitating light. In the centre there is a stretch of limpid green water, with a tangle of boats on it leading the eye to the opalescent Madonna della Salute in the extreme distance. There is a secondary group of shipping on the left, among whose masts the tower of San Giorgio Maggiore can be seen. No words can describe the intense blaze of light, the brilliance of the colours and their perfect harmony. The execution is breathlessly hurried and seemingly reckless, yet always perfectly under control; the artist’s hand is so audaciously swift because the full value of his colours can only be got in this way. Human skill can go no further in this direction, and no reproduction can do anything like justice to the wonderful original.

We find the same qualities in ‘The Approach to Venice: Sunset’ (51, N.G.), and ‘Riva degli Schiavone, from near the Public Gardens’ (56, N.G.).

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. And a large part of the attractiveness of these drawings is due to the ease and grace with which the reign of purpose and intelligence is maintained.

After all it is the marvellous technical skill which they display which is the essence of the charm of these works. The subject-matter counts for less than the execution, the objects portrayed are less eloquent than the sense of freedom, mastery and real happiness evident in the artist’s work. He wanted nothing beyond this; the work to him was not a symbol of something higher,--it did not point beyond itself. It was at once means and end, process and fulfilment, work and reward, the toil of life and its consummated bliss.

The intrinsic poverty of the subject-matter no doubt serves to

intensify what I may call the material beauty of the workmanship. Yet we must beware of ranking this subject-matter too low. It is not mere sensuous feeling, it is not entirely devoid of the element of thought. The conscious action of thought is probably entirely absent. The scenes float before us in all the bareness of immediate sensation. They give us nothing more than a moment of immediate experience caught, as it were, on the wing, and pinned down all quivering with life. But the momentary experience is that of a man whose visual sensations have been organised by a life-time of strenuous intellectual control. The brain and the senses are but the organs of one function. There is not a single definite thought present, the artist has sunk himself in the flow of the merely animal life, yet his naked sentience is conditioned through and through and characterised by the pervasive activity of the mind.

To transfix a fleeting moment of immediate living experience is a very different thing from the deliberate analysis of the process of perception and the wilful abstraction of one of its elements. In other words, this work of Turner is essentially different in kind from the work of the modern Impressionists. The Impressionist adopts the methods of science. He operates on his perceptions, and cuts away this element and that, and in the end presents you with a dead and potted psychological abstraction, a diagram of the ‘pure’ visual sensation, which delights us with its ingenuity and neatness, but which no one would take for a fragment of the living flow of thought and emotion which all concrete experience is. Impressionism is cold and heartless; it is merely intellectual and ratiocinative, and therefore essentially inartistic. But the so-called impressionistic work of Turner, in spite of its other defects and shortcomings, remains ever in the flood of concrete living experience. It is never abstract; it never loses its emotional contagion, though its emotional suggestiveness is somewhat vague and indefinite. Its power of evoking emotion is very strongly pronounced, but the emotions it calls up are sadly lacking in definition, and seem to lie very much at the mercy of chance associations.

The cause of this vagueness and emptiness is no doubt closely connected with Turner’s triumphant grasp of the fleeting momentary experience. His work is almost, though not quite, as empty and indeterminate as an isolated fragment of immediate sensation. A single steady look by a cool observer would grasp more of the character of a given scene than we find in these sketches. But the time occupied in a steady look at a scene is too long for Turner; though the look should last but half a minute the mind has time to grasp and organise the sensuous data. Turner’s object is to catch these data of sense in their least organised condition. To do this, he must reduce the time of contact between the scene and his senses to its shortest possible extent. Some of the later Impressionists have found that merely to open and shut the eyes gives their senses and intelligence too long an exposure; they have therefore devised a mechanical instrument which they hold in front of their eyes, and which operates very much like a shutter used for taking instantaneous photographs. In this way they obtain a glimpse of a scene of shorter duration than the most rapid opening and shutting of the eyes can give. We have no reason for suspecting that Turner had recourse to any such mechanical aids, but he achieved similar results. He gives us the momentary bedazzlement of the sunlight, and, within this impression, a confused and fragmentary perception of objects. The objects seen are hardly recognisable, their attributes are reduced to a minimum, and the blur of living emotion which forms part of such rudimentary perception is reduced to its lowest terms. The control such sketches exercise over the thoughts and feelings of the spectator is therefore small and possesses very little individuality.

But even Venice soon palled upon Turner’s imagination. He seemed desirous of getting away as far as possible from the disturbing influences of human association. Only among the lonely valleys and mountain tops of Switzerland could his perturbed and wearied spirit find something like the peace he sought so feverishly. Even here he shrank from the common light of ordinary day. He loved the solemn stillness of night, and would wait to surprise the first rosy hues of dawn upon Mount Pilatus or the Rigi. His sympathies are all with the silent and primary things of nature.

It is as though he were seeking to strip himself of the attributes

of humanity, to sink into the unconscious vegetative life of nature. Even when roused to activity his mind seems curiously dehumanised. When he draws for us the towers and churches of a place like Freiburg we seem to be looking at the work of a disembodied spirit. The city is divested of all its human associations. His eye seems now to classify and arrange what it sees in terms of space and motion, much as we should imagine an eagle to look down upon the welter and turmoil of our lives. I get the same impression from the ‘Village and Castle on the Rhine’ (82, N.G.), and ‘The Via Mala’ (73, N.G.).

In all this, in this gradual impoverishment of mind and feeling, it is difficult to discover anything more than the silent and inevitable ravages of old age. But it is not their poverty of content that makes these later drawings of Turner so remarkable. It is the virile and glorious artistic skill which only flames the brighter amid the decay of all Turner’s other faculties. The man was dead before the incomparable master of tone and colour was exhausted. It is this curious combination of an unexhausted special aptitude with a moribund mentality that gives this later work of Turner its uniqueness, its lurid and uncanny fascination. In the whole history of pictorial art we have never had before quite the same display of senile apathy gilded and transfigured by the dying shafts of an incommensurable natural capacity.

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By the time Turner was seventy years of age his bodily infirmities prevented him from visiting Switzerland. For a year or two we find him haunting the coast of Normandy, about Dieppe, Eu and Ambleteuse. Then he is unable to cross the Channel. For a short season he flits about Sussex and Kent--at Folkestone, Margate, Deal, and Sandwich--and then there is silence.