In the sketch we have an item of brute fact waiting, as it were, pathetically to be taken up into the world of thought and feeling, asking, so to speak, to be made significant and human. The artist has granted the request in his finished design by making the physical facts the mere passive spectators of man’s sorrow and suffering. In the sketch, the tall cliffs and ruined walls of the priory tower above the small fishing-boat struggling into port; in the picture, the tall masts of the wrecked schooner dwarf the priory and the cliffs and drive them into subordination. The real centre of interest is the active, restless power of the sea for ill. The baneful little leaps of the waves that fill nearly all the lower part of the design tell their story of storm and wreck plainly enough. The wrecked barques under the cliffs are in a sad plight, but the pieces of floating mast and broken plank in the foreground tell of worse things. On the shore we have the thrifty gatherers of flotsam and jetsam, and a crowd of willing helpers. On all this moving scene the wreck of the priory looks down not without sympathy; it too, it seems to say, is a part of man’s activity and ambition, it suffers also from the taint of mortality and from the merciless power of the wind and rain. CHAPTER VIII MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY, AND THE ORIGIN OF IMPRESSIONISM--1830-1845 Mental characteristics of 1815-1830 period--Their influence on form--and colour--Colour enrichment a general characteristic of Romantic Art--What further development is required to give us the transition to Impressionism?--The first of Turner’s so-called Impressionistic works--Vagueness or indistinctness as a means of expression--Two ways of painting one’s impressions--Turner’s earlier way--contrasted with the modern Impressionistic way--The change, after 1830, is it a change in terms of sight or of thought--visual or mental?--The content of Turner’s later work--The relation of Turner’s later work to Impressionism defined--The gradual development of Turner’s later manner--The Petworth sketches (1830)--The discovery of the artistic value of the indeterminate--The Vignettes-‘Rivers of France’--Venetian sketches (1834-1840)--Swiss and Rhine sketches (1841-1844)--The end.