The object of these remarks is far from that of suggesting that the presence of ‘errors’ and ‘inaccuracies’ of this kind interferes in any way with the purely artistic value of these drawings. It is rather to emphasise the fact that it is only when we judge them from a totally irrelevant point of view, that we can begin to talk of errors and inaccuracies. Rightly understood these so-called errors and inaccuracies are not only the justifiable licences of the artist, but the absolutely inevitable and proper and solely right means of expression which the artist had at his disposal. His aim is to produce a state of consciousness in which feeling looms large, and thought-determination is reduced almost to the vanishing point. One might say, without exaggeration or unfairness, that mental confusion formed an important part of his artistic aim. He had then to represent the objects he depicted not as they appear to a cool, level-headed, and accurate observer, but as they appear to a highly sensitive subject in a state of morbid excitement. If we look at Turner’s French drawings from this point of view, we cannot but admit that they are almost all highly successful. They are stamped with the impress of the genuinely romantic fervour, the lyrical movement of unbridled feeling. In them the joy of artistic creation has become triumphant, almost insolent. They are deep draughts of artistic intoxication, exultant with the rush of man’s undying passion for pleasure, and of the resistless energy that moulds the world of matter into forms more harmonious with our own distinctly human cravings and aspirations; Chateaux Gaillards or ‘Saucy Castles’ of the imagination one might almost call them. It was characteristic of Turner--I might almost say it was a necessity of his position as a landscape painter--that he felt compelled to search far and wide for material out of which to spin his web of visible phantasy. The need of novel shapes, glowing colours, striking and elaborate combinations was constantly felt. The rivers Meuse, Moselle and Rhine were diligently and repeatedly explored. The East--for his Bible illustrations--he was content to take at second-hand, through the medium of other men’s sketches, but he sailed down the Danube, as far as Vienna (or Buda-Pesth perhaps?), ransacked Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, Holland and Belgium and part of Austria. But as the years moved on, his mental grip of the real world became always looser. His mind played only with the fugitive shades on the surface of appearances; but not with the elasticity, the free disinterestedness of youth and of the young-hearted. The professional bias became ever more pronounced, the point of view ever more abstract and one-sided.