Yet when we have pressed these considerations to their extreme limit, we have only drawn attention to certain qualities which Turner’s later work shares with that of many indifferent artists and poets, and, far from exhausting the real and permanent elements of value in that work, they may be justly regarded as a searching and pitiless exposure of its weaknesses and defects. But we are on firmer ground when we turn to the purely personal qualities in this work, to the artist’s delicacy of hand and fineness of sight. It matters not what instrument Turner is working with, whether with the pencil, the pen, or the brush, or whether he is working hurriedly or at leisure, the movement of his hand is always graceful and delightful. His powers of sight also seem to me to have been quite extraordinary; I do not mean that he had merely the power of seeing distant objects distinctly, not mere long-sightedness, though he seems to have had this faculty in an abundant measure, but a quite unusual power of discriminating between minute shades of light and colour. As the born musician is distinguished from other men by his capacity for detecting differences of sound which to others seem the same, so the evidence of Turner’s work--and all who have attempted to copy even the slightest of his sketches will, I am sure, bear me out in this--shows that he possessed an abnormal power of visual discrimination. No doubt his early training and especially the influence of Dayes had something to do with the development of this capacity, but the capacity itself was largely innate. In addition to these two natural gifts, an abnormal delicacy of hand and eye, Turner had the priceless advantage of being passionately and unfalteringly in love with his art. Some of the greatest artists give me the impression of loving their art less for its own sake than for the sake of the content which it enables them to express,--Rembrandt and Jean François Millet, for example, give me this impression, and I do not think that their greatness is imperilled in the least by it--but Turner seems to me to have loved his art, especially in his later years, entirely for its own sake. This strong and deep affection threw a glamour over every detail of his work. Nothing was too high or too low for him. He brought the same inexhaustible patience and alertness of attention to the working out of a complicated problem of perspective as to the finishing of his most ambitious pictures. Like Wordsworth’s ‘happy warrior’ in the midst of danger, he had only to take a pencil into his hand to become ‘attired with sudden brightness, like a Man inspired.’ This concentration, this master-bias, throws a fervour and an inimitable charm over what it seems almost ironical to speak of as the mechanical execution of his works.