it--the ruthless display the artists make of their special knowledge of the construction and rigging of their vessels. I believe Turner’s knowledge of this kind was almost as exhaustive as theirs, but whether as full or more limited, he made a better use of what he did know. His objects are never there simply for themselves. They are always subordinated to a genuinely imaginative conception. His pictures, therefore, are not the work of a man with a professional speciality. They are real epics of the sea. From their own imaginative point of view their workmanship is almost perfect. Their style is sonorous and weighty. They are as solemn and majestic in conception as they are manly in feeling. They have something of that ‘beauty which, as Milton sings, hath terror in it.’ Together ‘they move in perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood’--the noblest sequence of poems ever dedicated to the majesty of the sea.
When we compare such pictures as these with a subject like ‘The Death of Nelson,’ in the National Gallery,--a subject dealing directly with a particular historical incident--we cannot but feel that they owe something of their loftiness and grandeur to their exaltation above all merely limited feelings of patriotism. I suppose a Frenchman could hardly be expected to look at the ‘Nelson’ with quite the same feelings as an Englishman; or a Dane to regard the ‘Spithead; Boat’s crew recovering an anchor’--which actually represents the return of the English fleet with the Danish ships captured at Copenhagen--in the way this event was hailed in England. The feeling of patriotism is no doubt an admirable and useful one in real life; but in so far as art is tied down to the service of a particular kind of patriotism, it is limited to this definite end, and is not entirely free in and for itself. And art which is not entirely free from all finite ends cannot rise to the full height of its own destiny.
Yet in the very greatest art there is no opposition to all that is essentially noble and heroic in patriotism. A masterpiece like Lady Wantage’s ‘Sheerness,’ for example, is as full of all the essential virtues of patriotism as a picture like the ‘Death of Nelson.’ The difference is only in the degrees of emphasis placed on certain aspects of the whole conception. In the ‘Sheerness’ the interest is concentrated on the guardship at the Nore, and all that is implied in this aspect of a nation’s discipline, hardihood, watchfulness, and self-sacrifice. And on this idea of military (or naval) service for the Fatherland the possibility of actual struggle and, if need be, death at the hands of any national enemy is clearly involved. The ‘Death of Nelson,’ therefore, only makes explicit a single moment held in solution in the other picture. Hence the question is not between the value of patriotic feeling and a shallow, empty form of cosmopolitanism as artistic motives, but merely under which aspect the virtues of patriotism are to be contemplated. Which aspect does fullest justice to the whole conception of personal devotion and sacrifice to the commonweal? My own feeling is that the point of view which raises itself above the particular interests of one nation, and treats the hardships and dangers of national defence as an inevitable condition of human life, is more in accord with the freedom and universality of the highest art. The question, I repeat, is only one of degree, and these remarks will be entirely misunderstood if they are taken to imply that I should have wished that either the ‘Nelson’ or the ‘Spithead’ had not been painted. In the ‘Spithead,’ as a matter of fact, the connection with the particular historical incident which called it into existence has long dropped out of sight, whilst the ‘Nelson’ has always caused a certain feeling of dissatisfaction even among the most ardent and exclusive of patriots. This vague feeling is possibly at the root of the adverse technical criticisms to which it has been subjected by sailors and naval experts. These criticisms are generally in themselves entirely wrongheaded and sometimes fatuous, for the picture is certainly a grand and impressive one, and by far the most adequate representation in pictorial art of an event of the greatest national importance. But the intuitive sense of the nation has always thought more highly of such a picture as ‘The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth,’ than of the ‘Death of Nelson.’ In ‘The Fighting Téméraire,’ as in the earlier masterpieces to which I have referred, there is no touch of chauvinism or vainglory, yet it is generously and passionately patriotic: but it is magnanimous patriotism, which honours its foe and looks beyond and above the present momentary noise and strife.