And it is this impress of his deep love for the beauty and the grandeur of Nature--a love as strong as Wordsworth’s, as intense as Shelley’s--which is perhaps the greatest cause of the enduring attractiveness of Turner’s work. Without it, he would never have toiled as he did all his life, from dawn to dark, year in and year out, observing and recording in those nineteen thousand studies every kind of natural scenery, every changing contour of mist and cloud, every differing form and structure of tree, every movement or reflection in water, every transient effect of light, storm, wind or weather.
Then he often had a deep meaning in his pictures, beyond what was to be seen on the surface, beyond, perhaps, what he himself could have always explained. Sometimes, no doubt, it was far-fetched, sometimes fantastic, yet it gives a character to his art which mere technical skill or perfect design do not by themselves attain. By the modern school of landscapists this would probably be regarded as a defect or even a heresy. Pictorial art, they say, should not be ‘literary,’ should not be intellectual. But to me it seems that the work of the highest artists--of Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Holbein, Rembrandt, for example--almost invariably appeals to the intellect as well as to the senses. Mind, sensibly or insensibly, intentionally or unintentionally, speaks to mind. As has been well said _apropos_ of Ruskin’s writings on Turner: “What if Ruskin’s torch lights up some beauty that the painter himself was never aware of? As a great man’s inventions will carry more readings than his own, so the meaning of a great painter is not to be limited to his expressed or palpable intentions. There is a harmony between the imaginings of both and Nature, which opens out an infinite range of significance and supports an infinite variety of interpretations.”
After Turner had attained manhood--say from 1807 onwards--his _creative_ power constantly and increasingly made itself felt. It is more evident in his oil pictures than in his water-colours, because in the latter, more or less throughout his life, he was employed on illustrative, topographical, work. But at an early period it is visible in his drawings, notably in his _Liber Studiorum_ (1807-1819). Leaving aside actual landscapes such as _Solway Moss_, _Ben Arthur_, etc., his creative, imaginative power is seen in such subjects as _Æsacus and Hesperie_, _Peat Bog_, _Procris and Cephalus_, _The Lost Sailor_ and other plates of the _Liber_. It also appears from time to time in later drawings. Yet a recent biographer has advanced the astonishing theory that, whatever were Turner’s merits, up to almost the end of his life he was not a “creative” artist, merely an _illustrator_, and this idea has been characteristically caught up and repeated by the latest German writer on Modern Art. But is there any truth in it? I think not. The painter of _The Frosty Morning_, and _Crossing the Brook_ (National Gallery); of _The Guardship at the Nore_ (Lady Wantage); of _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_ and _Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus_ (National Gallery); of _The Shipwreck_ (National Gallery), and a dozen other great Sea Pictures, not a “creative” artist? The draughtsman of _Chryses_ (Mrs. T. Ashton), _The Land’s End_ (“Southern Coast”), _The Longships Lighthouse_ (“England and Wales”), _The Alps at Daybreak_ and _The Vision of Columbus_ (“Rogers’s Poems”), _The Plains of Troy_ (“Byron’s Poems”), _The Mustering of the Warrior Angels_ (“Milton’s Poems”)? If these, and scores of others which might be added, are not examples of “creative” art, where are “creative” landscapes to be found? Is Martin’s _Plains of Heaven_ to be regarded as the type? Or is there no such thing as “creative” landscape art? But, after all, does the question need arguing? May one not just as well ask whether Botticelli, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, were “creative” artists?