In the first place then, when we consider Turner as a fellow-worker with Byron, Shelley, and Lamartine, we see that like them he appeals constantly and unerringly to that illusion of the romantic temperament which lends a mysterious charm to all that is indefinite and indefinable. In a singularly acute analysis of this temperament Mr. George Santayana has traced one of the chief causes of the delight which this kind of art and poetry awakens to what he calls ‘the illusion of infinite perfection.’ There is, he says, a loose and helpless state of mind to which we all of us approximate when in a state of fatigue. In this state of mind we are not capable of concentrated and serious attention to one thing at a time, so we are apt to ‘flounder in the vague, but at the same time we are full of yearnings, of half-thoughts and semi-visions, and the upward tendency and exaltation of our mood is emphatic and overpowering in proportion to our incapacity to think, speak, or imagine. The sum of our incoherencies has, however, an imposing volume and even, perhaps, a vague, general direction. We feel ourselves laden with an infinite burden; and what delights us most and seems to us to come nearest to the ideal, is not what embodies any one possible form, but that which, by embodying none, suggests many, and stirs the mass of our inarticulate imagination with a pervasive thrill.... That infinite perfection which cannot be realised, because it is self-contradictory, may be thus suggested, and on account of this suggestion an indeterminate effect may be regarded as higher, more significant, and more beautiful than any determinate one.’[30] These remarks help us to understand the positive qualities of Turner’s indeterminate style; its power of evoking a fallacious sense of profundity and significance, just because of its indeterminateness, its power of suggesting and stimulating emotion, just because it is incoherent and variously interpretable.
Yet when we have pressed these considerations to their extreme limit, we have only drawn attention to certain qualities which Turner’s later work shares with that of many indifferent artists and poets, and, far from exhausting the real and permanent elements of value in that work, they may be justly regarded as a searching and pitiless exposure of its weaknesses and defects. But we are on firmer ground when we turn to the purely personal qualities in this work, to the artist’s delicacy of hand and fineness of sight. It matters not what instrument Turner is working with, whether with the pencil, the pen, or the brush, or whether he is working hurriedly or at leisure, the movement of his hand is always graceful and delightful. His powers of sight also seem to me to have been quite extraordinary; I do not mean that he had merely the power of seeing distant objects distinctly, not mere long-sightedness, though he seems to have had this faculty in an abundant measure, but a quite unusual power of discriminating between minute shades of light and colour. As the born musician is distinguished from other men by his capacity for detecting differences of sound which to others seem the same, so the evidence of Turner’s work--and all who have attempted to copy even the slightest of his sketches will, I am sure, bear me out in this--shows that he possessed an abnormal power of visual discrimination. No doubt his early training and especially the influence of Dayes had something to do with the development of this capacity, but the capacity itself was largely innate. In addition to these two natural gifts, an abnormal delicacy of hand and eye, Turner had the priceless advantage of being passionately and unfalteringly in love with his art. Some of the greatest artists give me the impression of loving their art less for its own sake than for the sake of the content which it enables them to express,--Rembrandt and Jean François Millet, for example, give me this impression, and I do not think that their greatness is imperilled in the least by it--but Turner seems to me to have loved his art, especially in his later years, entirely for its own sake. This strong and deep affection threw a glamour over every detail of his work. Nothing was too high or too low for him. He brought the same inexhaustible patience and alertness of attention to the working out of a complicated problem of perspective as to the finishing of his most ambitious pictures. Like Wordsworth’s ‘happy warrior’ in the midst of danger, he had only to take a pencil into his hand to become ‘attired with sudden brightness, like a Man inspired.’ This concentration, this master-bias, throws a fervour and an inimitable charm over what it seems almost ironical to speak of as the mechanical execution of his works.