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
PLATE XI
CONWAY CASTLE
PENCIL. ABOUT 1798