which her brother founded upon these events. ‘The array of act and circumstance, and visible form’ becomes exactly what the poet’s or artist’s ‘passion makes them.’[17] In other words, the matter of sense intuition is taken up into the world of intelligence. This matter, which in the first place was something immediate or given, now loses its natural and positive attributes, loses its authority as fact, but gains a wider scope and ampler authority by being taken up into the world of mind and used as a sign. And here again an opportunity presents itself for shallow and wrongheaded criticism. Those who are under the dominion of the theory that art should only represent sensuous facts in their immediacy resent the transformation which the data of sense must undergo before they can take their place in the organised world of meaning. To them, therefore, such pictures as these are defective; the colouring is not sufficiently natural, not bright enough, nor are the contrasts sufficiently strong. These pictures are not painted in ‘the key of nature.’ In a word, they are old-fashioned, because the artist has done something more in them than the theories of impressionism can consecrate.
We have then to avoid two mistaken ways of regarding these works. We must not look upon them (1) as attempts to reproduce the actual brilliancy and colour of natural lighting, nor must we treat them (2) as prosaic and literal imitations of actuality devoid of all the higher poetry of art. That these works are open to—nay, have almost invariably fallen victims to—these two opposite forms of depreciation, is a striking proof of the success with which they have avoided those fatal extremes in which so much of the art of the present lies engulfed.
But it is not enough simply to avoid the dangers which modern theorising throws in the way of the interpreter. A really concrete and fruitful criticism will not stop short till it has made the attempt to grasp, however imperfectly, by thought the full and special significance of each work. And again, when we have made it clear to ourselves that
‘the array
Of act and circumstance, and visible form,
Is mainly to the pleasure of the mind
What passion makes them,’—
when we have agreed that Turner has used the sights of nature as a means to express the emotions or the mood which they aroused in him,—when all this is granted we are still merely at the threshold of the works themselves. A mood, an emotion, a state of feeling, these are all vague and general terms. There is nothing necessarily admirable or beautiful in a mood or a state of feeling, Feeling and emotion may be pleasant or unpleasant, harmonious or jarring, depressing or invigorating. And if the main value and beauty of these pictures resides in the particular and definite mood or state of feeling which they induce, this mood must have distinguishable contents, and it is the business of art criticism to do what it can to define these contents.
In Wordsworth’s ‘Lines, composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,’ he contrasts his present state of feeling towards nature with that of his youthful days. In the days of his thoughtless youth, he says, the forms and colours of the landscape had haunted him like a passion. He had loved them for themselves. But now, he says, Nature is no longer ‘all in all’ to him. It has now gained a remoter charm supplied by thought, an interest ‘unborrowed from the eye.’ He now hears
‘the still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.’
Before the sights of nature he now feels the presence of elevated thoughts, a sense of something ‘more deeply interfused,’ a sense of something discernible only with the inner eye; a sense of the Divine that animates both nature and humanity, both what the eye sees and what the heart and mind create,—the spirit ‘whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,’ the spirit
‘that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’
It is in this mood, it seems to me, that Turner contemplates the scenes and incidents of rural life which he represents in these pictures, and it is this mood which these pictures embody. The ‘Frosty Morning’ is therefore very much more than a representation of a country road, with a little hedging and ditching going on