But man is not really a passive mirror in which a foreign nature is reflected, nor is he satisfied merely to submit himself to natural influences and vicissitudes. Man is never really satisfied to take the world as he finds it, but sets to work to transform it into what he feels it ought to be. The social and political world, with its realms of morality, art and religion, came into existence as a protest against the merely natural. In this world, created and sustained by human intelligence and will, the physical world is not abolished or destroyed, but it is transformed into a more or less willing accomplice of a strange and higher power. It is in this new form which nature assumes under the sway of intelligence and will that we find it in Turner’s works.[B] In his presence the external world loses its stubborn indifference to human aims and becomes saturated with purely human aspiration and emotion. Its colours and shapes cease to belong to the merely physical world. They become instead the garment in which the inward spiritual nature of the artist robes itself. Nature in this new aspect is no longer a merely hostile and mechanical system of laws; a soul has been breathed into it which we recognize as identical with our own.
Now it is evident that these two kinds of art, the passive and the active, with their totally dissimilar aims, cannot and ought not to represent nature in the same way. The art which uses nature as a medium for the expression of ideas and feelings cannot attain its object by representing physical objects in the simple and direct way appropriate to the art which aims merely at naturalness. The artist’s intention must make itself manifest even in the manner in which he represents physical objects,--indeed, he has no other way of expressing his ideas. The active or creative artist will therefore make it clear that he has broken entirely with the disconnected, accidental and prosaic look of everyday existence which it is the one aim of the passive artist to retain.
From this point of view the charges that are often brought against Turner, that his colour is forced and unnatural, will leave us cold and indifferent. To make such an objection is merely a proof of mental confusion. The creative artist _must_ break with the prosaic vision of nature, if only to make it evident that his objects are not there for their own sake and for their immediate effect, but to call forth a response and echo in the mind of the observer. Turner’s colour--“dyed in the ardours of the atmosphere”--is one of his most potent instruments of expression, and must be judged as we judge, let us say, the verbal magic of Shelley’s verse, as a work of free beauty, fashioned in response to the deepest and truest cravings of man’s nature.