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
PLATE X
CONWAY FALLS, NEAR BETTWYS-Y-COED
WATER COLOUR, ABOUT 1798
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.