‘the array Of act and circumstance, and visible form, Is mainly to the pleasure of the mind What passion makes them,’--
when we have agreed that Turner has used the sights of nature as a means to express the emotions or the mood which they aroused in him,--when all this is granted we are still merely at the threshold of the works themselves. A mood, an emotion, a state of feeling, these are all vague and general terms. There is nothing necessarily admirable or beautiful in a mood or a state of feeling, Feeling and emotion may be pleasant or unpleasant, harmonious or jarring, depressing or invigorating. And if the main value and beauty of these pictures resides in the particular and definite mood or state of feeling which they induce, this mood must have distinguishable contents, and it is the business of art criticism to do what it can to define these contents.
In Wordsworth’s ‘Lines, composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,’ he contrasts his present state of feeling towards nature with that of his youthful days. In the days of his thoughtless youth, he says, the forms and colours of the landscape had haunted him like a passion. He had loved them for themselves. But now, he says, Nature is no longer ‘all in all’ to him. It has now gained a remoter charm supplied by thought, an interest ‘unborrowed from the eye.’ He now hears
‘the still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue.’
Before the sights of nature he now feels the presence of elevated thoughts, a sense of something ‘more deeply interfused,’ a sense of something discernible only with the inner eye; a sense of the Divine that animates both nature and humanity, both what the eye sees and what the heart and mind create,--the spirit ‘whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,’ the spirit
‘that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.’
It is in this mood, it seems to me, that Turner contemplates the scenes and incidents of rural life which he represents in these pictures, and it is this mood which these pictures embody. The ‘Frosty Morning’ is therefore very much more than a representation of a country road, with a little hedging and ditching going on