WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1839
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
PLATE LXXXI