When we compare such pictures as these with a subject like ‘The Death of Nelson,’ in the National Gallery,—a subject dealing directly with a particular historical incident—we cannot but feel that they owe something of their loftiness and grandeur to their exaltation above all merely limited feelings of patriotism. I suppose a Frenchman could hardly be expected to look at the ‘Nelson’ with quite the same feelings as an Englishman; or a Dane to regard the ‘Spithead; Boat’s crew recovering an anchor’—which actually represents the return of the English fleet with the Danish ships captured at Copenhagen—in the way this event was hailed in England. The feeling of patriotism is no doubt an admirable and useful one in real life; but in so far as art is tied down to the service of a particular kind of patriotism, it is limited to this definite end, and is not entirely free in and for itself. And art which is not entirely free from all finite ends cannot rise to the full height of its own destiny.
Yet in the very greatest art there is no opposition to all that is essentially noble and heroic in patriotism. A masterpiece like Lady Wantage’s ‘Sheerness,’ for example, is as full of all the essential virtues of patriotism as a picture like the ‘Death of Nelson.’ The difference is only in the degrees of emphasis placed on certain aspects of the whole conception. In the ‘Sheerness’ the interest is concentrated on the guardship at the Nore, and all that is implied in this aspect of a nation’s discipline, hardihood, watchfulness, and self-sacrifice. And on this idea of military (or naval) service for the Fatherland the possibility of actual struggle and, if need be, death at the hands of any national enemy is clearly involved. The ‘Death of Nelson,’ therefore, only makes explicit a single moment held in solution in the other picture. 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. The question, I repeat, is only one of degree, and these remarks will be entirely misunderstood if they are taken to imply that I should have wished that either the ‘Nelson’ or the ‘Spithead’ had not been painted. In the ‘Spithead,’ as a matter of fact, the connection with the particular historical incident which called it into existence has long dropped out of sight, whilst the ‘Nelson’ has always caused a certain feeling of dissatisfaction even among the most ardent and exclusive of patriots. This vague feeling is possibly at the root of the adverse technical criticisms to which it has been subjected by sailors and naval experts. These criticisms are generally in themselves entirely wrongheaded and sometimes fatuous, for the picture is certainly a grand and impressive one, and by far the most adequate representation in pictorial art of an event of the greatest national importance. But the intuitive sense of the nation has always thought more highly of such a picture as ‘The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth,’ than of the ‘Death of Nelson.’ In ‘The Fighting Téméraire,’ as in the earlier masterpieces to which I have referred, there is no touch of chauvinism or vainglory, yet it is generously and passionately patriotic: but it is magnanimous patriotism, which honours its foe and looks beyond and above the present momentary noise and strife.
CHAPTER V
‘SIMPLE NATURE’—1808-1813
The works of this period an important yet generally neglected aspect of Turner’s art—Turner’s classification of ‘Pastoral’ as opposed to ‘Elegant Pastoral’—The Arcadian idyll of the mid-eighteenth century—The first ‘Pastoral’ subjects in ‘Liber’—‘Windmill and Lock’—The capture of the Danish Fleet in 1807—Turner’s visit to Portsmouth—His return journey—‘Hedging and Ditching’—An attempt to define the mood of pictures like ‘The Frosty Morning,’ ‘Windsor,’ etc.—Distinction between mood and character.
THE phase of Turner’s work which we are now to consider seems to me one to which the critics have hardly done justice. The supreme beauty of two of the pictures of this group has certainly been recognised—I allude to the ‘Trout Stream’ and Lady Wantage’s ‘Walton Bridges,’ but these works have been treated mainly on their individual merits, instead of in their connection with a clearly-marked and most significant aspect of the artist’s genius. Chronologically, this period ranges from about the year 1808 to 1813, and it includes, in addition to the two works just mentioned, the ‘Windsor,’ ‘Abingdon,’ ‘Kingston Bank,’ ‘Frosty Morning,’ ‘Union of the Thames and Isis’ and ‘Sandbank with Gipsies,’ all in the National Gallery, as well as Sir Frederick Cook’s ‘Windmill and Lock’ and Mr. Orrock’s ‘Walton Bridges.’ These works all strike me as characterised by a certain mood or standpoint which possesses the profoundest significance for modern art,—a mood, moreover, which has not yet, to my knowledge, been satisfactorily analysed, and which Turner could never afterwards recall in all its essential beauty, though he frequently made the attempt.
I must confess that in spite of all my efforts I am quite unable to find a term that will adequately characterise this phase of Turner’s art. Turner’s own classification of such subjects as those mentioned above is ‘Pastoral,’ as distinguished from the ‘Elegant Pastoral.’ But this description is inadequate, because it seems to refer simply to the objects contained in the works, while it is exactly the mood or emotional standpoint from which the subject-matter is treated that seems to me all-important. The contemporary term for this kind of work, and one which Turner sometimes used himself, was ‘Simple Nature,’ and this description, though inadequate enough, is perhaps as good as any other we might hit upon. It indicated, at least, an antagonism to any artificial way of treating natural scenes, and suggested a certain unsophisticated plainness and directness of approach, and these qualities are certainly contained in the complex and subtle conception we are in search of. It is, then, as a painter of ‘Simple Nature’ that we have now to consider our subject.
In externals, this phase of Turner’s art is occupied with scenes of ordinary rural life; it deals with the country as the home and working-place of the peasantry. This gives us the distinction between the ‘Pastoral’ and the ‘Elegant Pastoral’ subjects in the ‘Liber,’ the elegant pastorals dealing with the country as the imaginative home and background of the stock figures of conventionally imaginative art. The elegant pastoral subjects are generally peopled with nymphs, classical shepherds and shepherdesses, goddesses and peacocks, while the pastoral subjects which are not elegant are peopled with real labouring men and women and unideal-looking children.
But the external subject-matter of a work of art tells us very little by itself. The important point is the universal which binds these objects together or organises them into an individual conception. We must think of our group of pictures as falling within the larger class of strictly pastoral subjects, but characterised by a special method of treatment and conception. One way of approaching this special conception will be to mark off a few of the pastoral subjects in the ‘Liber’ which do not fall within it. And this is all the easier because Turner’s first pastoral subject in the ‘Liber’ is conventional and empty, and he only gradually worked himself into a conception of the full possibilities of the category. That is to say, he first took up this form of art in a
