Turner has even gone farther,
and given us pictures of pure color, as in the illustration of Goethe's
theory of colors,--a _fantasie_ of the palette. And why shall Turner
not orchestrate color as well as Verdi sound? why not give us his
synchromies as well as Beethoven his symphonies? You prefer common
sense,--Harding and Fripp, Stanfield and Creswick? Well, suppose you
like better to hear some familiar voice talking of past times than to
hear "Robert le Diable" ever so well sung, or Hawthorne's prose better
than Browning's verse,--it proves nothing, save that you do not care for
music and poetry so well as some others do.
But after all, Turner was one of the old school of artists. Claude was
the first landscape painter of the line, Turner the last; subjective
poets both,--the one a child, the other a mighty man. But the poets
no longer govern the world as in times past; they give place to the
philosophers. The race is no longer content with its inspirations and
emotions, but must see and understand. The old school of Art was one of
sentiment, the new is one of fact; and out of that English mind from
whose seeming common-place level of untrained, unschooled intellect have
burst so many of the loftiest souls the world has known,--from that mind
more inspired in its want of academic greatness, more self-educated in
its wild liberty, than the best-trained nations of Europe, this new
school has fittingly had its origin.
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