We have then to think of Turner as a solitary dreamer of dreams, with a professional interest in the capacity of these dreams to startle a rather stupid public. If we want to enter intimately into the spiritual and emotional content of his dreams we have only to turn to the contemporary works of the poets. In pictures like ‘The Fountain of Indolence,’ the ‘Agrippina’ and those I have mentioned above, we see how deeply impressed his mind had become with the ideals of current Romantic poetry; the true Byronic disgust with himself and vague emotions of the infinite, the desire to
‘steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the universe, and feel What I can ne’er express.’
There is no doubt that these obscure emotions and vague reveries can only be adequately expressed in one particular way. They defy embodiment in clear-cut determinate forms. They demand a style as indeterminate, as vaguely suggestive, as inarticulate as the loose-knit dreams which are calling for embodiment.
This, then, I take to be the proper explanation of the vagueness of Turner’s later manner: It is not that he saw the world indistinctly, but that his ideas were incapable of definition; it is not that his eyes were newly opened to the vapours and mists of the physical world, but that his own thoughts were confused and his emotions, in spite of their strength, were incoherent and inarticulate.
We are now in a position to define the relation in which Turner’s later works stand to modern Impressionism. The exact connotation of this term is not by any means easy to grasp, but so far as Impressionism has distinctive aims I think we are justified in describing them as the attempt to eliminate all those elements in art which are due to the reaction of the intelligent self upon the immediate data of sense-perception. The aim of Impressionism is to get rid of what one eminent psychologist has called the noëtic fringe in a state of consciousness, to abstract from memory and see objects as simple visual elements. The Impressionist wishes to see objects as though he was looking at them for the first time, as though they had no meaning for him. The theoretic justification of this procedure is that, in stripping off the formative and organising action of intelligence we isolate the pure element of objective reality; that pictures painted upon this principle give the real truth of nature and are free from all those errors and distortions which the action of thought is supposed to introduce into the irrefragably trustworthy elements of the given. These assumptions are, I need hardly add, untenable, but this is not the place to criticise them.