Turner's Sketches and Drawings

by A. J. Finberg

It is not the special business of art criticism to show that the conception of nature as what is ‘given’ in sense-perception, and as ‘God’s work’ as distinguished from the action of human intelligence, is contradictory and untenable. The work is already done. The theory of the perceptive judgment, upon which all modern philosophies, realist as well as idealist, are based, is too firmly established to render necessary any further discussion of Locke’s and Hume’s imperfect analysis of perception. All that art criticism has to do is to realise that its own point of view is essentially identical with the point of view of logic and metaphysic, and to adopt and use any of the established truths of these sciences which are relevant to its purposes.

In insisting that the philosophical point of view is the only possible platform from which the facts which art criticism deals with can be adequately correlated, I am aware that I am advancing a somewhat novel proposition. It is also one which I do not think it advisable to defend in detail on the present occasion. The present volume is the outcome of an attempt to apply this point of view. So far as all that has gone before is in harmony with my intentions, it is an exemplification of the practical usefulness of such a working hypothesis, but the subject seems to me to call for full and free discussion, and I hope on a suitable occasion to revert to it. At present I hope it will be sufficient if I say that art criticism, if it is to be regarded as a form of knowledge, can have only one consistent aim, and that is intellectual satisfaction. And the subject-matter of art criticism is essentially a form of communication, and therefore is concerned only with certain aspects of the formed world of human experience. And in dealing with any aspects of the ‘world of discourse’ with a view to the satisfaction of our intellectual requirements of coherency and consistency of thought, the terms and ideas used in our non-systematised everyday thought and language are certainly inadequate, and those in use in all the special sciences, though valid enough when confined within the limits prescribed by their initial assumptions, are no less unsatisfactory for our purpose.

For the artist to regard nature as anything but an existing reality independent of individual experience and given ready-made in immediate perception must, no doubt, be exceedingly difficult. Both the original bent of his mind and the whole course of his professional training and practice have tended to consolidate his spatial intuitions into something apparently primary and instinctive. But an artist, as an artist, is not called upon to undertake the business of art criticism. The difficulty, however, remains nearly as great for the art critic, for he also is necessarily one whose visual faculties have received early and special development. When even an art critic looks at the familiar objects with which he is surrounded and notices their sharply defined forms and colours, he finds it hard to believe that the very distinctness of these perceptions is the result of a long process of education which his own faculties have undergone. The clearness seems so unmistakably to belong to the objects. Yet however difficult the step, it must be taken. We are bound to admit that animals and infants cannot have the same ordered visual image of space definitely stretching away all round them which we are apt to regard as one of the primary and fixed constituents of the external world. But if the spatial system into which objects of perception fall so easily has to be constructed in some way by each human being for himself, it follows that pictorial art, which as a means of expression and communication is based entirely upon that system, cannot by any possibility present us with bare physical fact, with a nucleus of solid, ready-made reality—of ‘God’s work,’ in Mr. Ruskin’s sense of these terms. So that when we talk of art as representing nature, it is evident that we must be careful to distinguish exactly what we mean by such an expression. If we take it to mean that art does or can or ought to give us a copy of the given actual world as it exists apart from what Mr. Ruskin calls the meddling action of man’s intelligence, then it is obvious that we have fallen into a very serious error. Apart from the action of his intellect, an artist could not possibly make the external world an object of his thought; he could not, therefore, represent it on paper or canvas; and even if we suppose these difficulties overcome, and the copy of bare unadulterated reality fixed on the canvas, nobody could possibly recognise it or know that it was there.

If this is so, I think it is clear that art cannot portray or represent or imitate or copy nature, at least in the sense in which nature is taken at the unreflective level of thought. What art portrays must be some part of the ideal construction present to the mind of the artist. Perhaps the simplest way of putting this is to say that the artist can operate only with ideas, and not with any directly given elements of reality; with idea, in short, in the sense of ‘meaning,’ ‘significance,’ or ‘logical content,’ and not with idea as physical fact or immediate experience. But as ideas in this sense—which we must be careful to remember includes emotion—are not gifted with the property of visibility, it seems on the whole better not to say that a work of art imitates or portrays them. Strictly speaking, a work of art is a symbol, and a symbol is not a copy or imitation of the meaning it stands for. The meaning of pictorial art is then always some connected circle of psychical states with their presentative and emotional contents. These contents may refer to the common physical world of ordinary experience, or they may refer to a dream-world that has no existence except as an element of human consciousness; and this reference is determined in each case by the nature of the contents themselves.

In reducing nature in this way to an element within the consciousness of the artist and spectator, I may seem to have destroyed at a blow all the pure unsullied beauty of the external world as it exists in apparent independence of human experience. I have done nothing of the kind. I have insisted that nature, as an existent independent of individual experience, is an unreal abstraction; that the very fulness and reality and splendour of nature exist for each of us nowhere but in the world of our own consciousness, and that within that world of consciousness nature does exist as a system of objects acting and reacting on one another, and is therefore independent of the presence or absence of the consciousness which presents them.

Such a conception of nature seems to me an inevitable corollary from the general conception of the purpose and mode of action of art forced upon us by our previous investigations. From this point of view I will define a work of pictorial art as an arrangement of spatial symbols embodying an individualised psychical content present to the mind of the artist, and intended to call up always the same ideas and emotions in the minds of others. I will make no attempt to conceal my opinion that such a theory is valid of all pictorial art, and I will add that I am also disposed to think that such a point of view is a peculiarly fruitful one from which the whole field of art criticism could be reconstituted. And as criticism, as at present understood and practised, is declared on all hands—even by its most accomplished exponents—to be bankrupt,[33] I might urge that the revolutionary character of any general theory was a strong argument in its favour. But the present occasion is not a suitable one for dwelling upon the general and far-reaching character of this theory. Here I am only justified in insisting upon its validity as a working hypothesis for the proper understanding of our immediate subject-matter. Only on such an hypothesis, it seems to me, can we give an intelligible explanation of the essential character of Turner’s studies and sketches and drawings from nature, and of their connection with his completed works.

Whether this assertion is justified at all, and if so how far, depends, of course, upon the whole of the foregoing study of Turner’s works, but I will add a few cursory remarks, partly of a recapitulatory nature, but treating our subject-matter from the point of view of its logical content or meaning. In these remarks I will try to deal with some of the difficulties that stand in the way of such a treatment.

We will deal first with Turner’s studies of separate objects, such as those of an arm-chair (No. 563, N. G.), of fishes (373, 374, N. G.) and birds (375, 415, N. G.) among the exhibited drawings.[34] Here the artist works directly from an external object, and seems to be aiming not at the expression or representation of his own ideas, but at the reproduction of the attributes or qualities given in sense perception and belonging to an independent reality. The object was there before the artist began to draw it, and the artist’s drawing only reproduces the visible qualities (form and colour) of the object itself. But the object is much more than its visible qualities, and even its visible qualities are far from exhausted by the one aspect of them which is all that the artist can represent. He therefore takes one aspect of an object and uses that as a sign or symbol of all the other possible aspects and sense qualities which we may suppose the object to possess. So that even if we insist on regarding the image on the paper as a particular image, it is clear that it must be used as a universal sign, if it is to be understood. The profile view of a face, for instance, means or implies not only the whole head, but also the whole concrete individuality of the person to whom the profile belongs.

So far, then, as a particular visual image is used as a rallying point for calling up the whole range of ideas which constitute the thing as an object of thought, so far have we to do with a logical idea, with an element in our world of knowledge, with what is strictly an universal or an identity. A sharply defined sensuous image of a thing forms, no doubt, a more easily and generally recognisable vehicle of reference than a name, but its function as a means of communication is the same. And as in speaking and writing it is not a matter of indifference what words we use to designate the objects about which we are thinking, so in pictorial communication, the particular sensuous image employed has considerable importance in directing attention to certain constituents of the total idea called up. In this way pictorial signs certainly have a general tendency to focus attention upon the corporeity of objects, but it is, I believe, a grave error of principle not to acknowledge that all the properly associated elements of the subject referred to are more or less involved. Some elements are kept more in the background of consciousness than others, but they are very far from being non-existent.

It is important, certainly, to think of pictorial signs as endlessly supple and fluid. Even the rigidity of the meanings of words has been absurdly overstated. Poetry is only possible because the powers of evocation possessed by words are much less limited and defined than certain theorists would have us believe. But pictorial signs are more delicate agents than words. They vary in ways that words cannot. They are made de novo on every occasion of their use, and therefore they can adapt themselves more adroitly to each new context. And every shade of variation in the constitution of the sign has its influence in determining the constitution of the mental presentation which it calls up.