Connection between marine painting and the sublime--Turner’s first marine subjects--The ‘Bridgewater sea-piece’--‘Meeting of the Thames and Medway’--‘Our landing at Calais’ and ‘Calais Pier’--‘Fishermen upon a Lee Shore’--‘Guisborough Shore’ and ‘Dunbar’ sketch-books--‘The Shipwreck’--‘At the Mouth of the Thames’--‘The Nore,’ ‘Sheerness,’ etc.--‘Death of Nelson.’ We have studied in the preceding chapter the first phase of Turner’s genuinely creative work. We have seen the artist tear himself free from the trammels of the prosaic understanding, with its clear-cut distinctions between external nature and subjective thought and feeling, and plunge whole-heartedly into the concrete world of the poetic imagination. The accomplished draughtsman of the visible has developed into the perfervid poet of the invisible. Objective reality, as such, is shattered and trampled ruthlessly underfoot. ‘Woe! woe! Thou hast destroy’d The beautiful world With violent blow ’Tis shiver’d! ’tis shatter’d! The fragments abroad by a demigod scatter’d! Now we sweep The wrecks into nothingness! Fondly we weep The beauty that’s gone! Thou, ’mongst the sons of earth, Lofty and mighty one, Build it once more! In thine own bosom the lost world restore!’ The distinction between percipient and object is brushed aside, and the external world becomes the medium and the means of manifestation of inward perceptions and ideas. How far the external world can be built up again in the bosom of the self-conscious subject depends largely upon the opportunities and genius of the individual. In pictures like the ‘Kilgarran Castle,’ ‘Norham Castle,’ and ‘The Trossachs’--to take perhaps the three most successful works of the kind of art we have been studying--the mind only partially coalesces with its objects. Such art only deals with a limited range of subject-matter, and it treats its objects rather as foils to the contemplative mind than as having significance and worth in themselves. The terrors of inorganic nature are not represented for their own sake, but are paraded to mark the triumph of the moral freedom that rises superior to them. The artist is therefore forced to do violence to external nature, to subdue it and degrade it into a symbol of what is antagonistic in his own conscious experience. Yet by sheer force of artistic treatment all this hostile and negative matter is brought within the realm of art, and made into an object in which the self-scrutinising spirit of man finds itself mirrored. But the sublime lies only on the threshold of beauty. It succeeds, in so far as it does attain its effect, only by making extreme demands upon the acquired culture and reasoning powers of the spectator. The sublime cannot be adequately represented by any sensuous object, but the very inadequacy of these objects can stir up and evoke this feeling in the properly prepared spectator.