[Illustration: _PLATE XLIV_ KIRKBY LONSDALE BRIDGE PENCIL. ABOUT 1816] [Illustration: _PLATE XLV_ RABY CASTLE AND CO. DURHAM PENCIL. ABOUT 1817] His amazingly rapid growth seems to be merely an effortless assimilation of the moral atmosphere of his time. All that was fairest and of good repute in the common spiritual heritage of the people seems to have passed insensibly into his thoughts and feelings. His art is a social or national phenomenon, so impersonal (or superpersonal) that it is difficult to point to traces of the mere individual in his work. The individual is lost in his universal function. The man himself is nothing but the voice or thought of what Hume has called ‘a man in general.’ Yet his work is as far removed as any work can be from the vagueness and coldness of the abstract universal. Behind every touch of his hand and every thought or idea in his mind beats the pulse of a full-blooded and passionate personality. Only, by some miracle, this man happens to be free from the local prejudices and limitations that deflect the judgment and sympathies of most men from the one true standard. This education of Turner’s sympathies and feelings was the work, we have seen reasons for concluding, of the poets and artists whom he loved and admired. In the light and warmth of their ideal creations his own high instincts were quickened into life and activity. Under their influence he had entered into the common spiritual world, and they had given the direction to his impulses and ideas regarding things human and divine. But education must be a lifelong process, and there comes a time in the growth of each individual when the need of something more clear-cut and permanent than his own impulses and desires, however wholesome they may be, declares itself. As Plato pointed out long ago, to secure the happiest results of the best ‘musical’ education, something more than a merely ‘musical’ education is needed. We have now reached that period in Turner’s life when the lover of beautiful sights and thoughts and feelings must make a determined effort to unify these manifold beauties by an explicit principle, to exchange opinion for knowledge, if he is to preserve the advantages he has already won. In life there is no standing still, no resting upon our gains. We must go forward to higher victories, or find our arms tarnish and our gains dissipate themselves. But it may well be doubted whether art is capable of reaching a higher point of beauty than that which Turner had already reached. Forced to its extreme limits beauty insensibly passes into something which is at once more and less than beauty. Such pictures as the ‘Frosty Morning,’ ‘Windsor,’ and ‘The Trout Stream’ are, perhaps, the most beautiful that art is capable of producing. And the example of Wordsworth, who did strive upward to ‘an intelligence which has greatness and the vision of all time and of all being,’ is not on all points reassuring. His poetry,