96
PARTISAN REVIEW
that its presence was completely irrelevant to the painting considered
as a certain arrangement of horizontal tonal areas; and, indeed, had
the painting been a Rothko, it would have been irrelevant. But the
star, though minuscule and therefore ignored by eyes nurtured on the
School of Paris, was the crucial issue of the painting, the integral pro–
tagonist in Turner's hushed commentary on the cyclic passage of day
to night. Like the vast expanses of sea and sky, it added still another
dimension to nature"s infinity, and to miss this was virtually to miss
the painting. The "Interior at Petworth" could likewise have been
mistaken for an abstract triumph of glittering, burnished hues, set into
motion by a bilious green. This it was, but it was also, and quite as
fundamentally, a spectacle of nature's and time's omnipotence, a scene
of ruin and decay in which crumbling furniture, rummaging dogs, sunlit
mirrors coalesced into a smoldering drama of light, heat, dust, and
moisture. And the even later "Snowstorm" was not just a stunning
whirlpool of whites and grays; it was a romantic artist's staggering trans–
lation into paint of the fusion of nature's most intangible and elemental
forces.
If
this was an abstract painting, it was abstract only insofar as
wind, sea, snow, and smoke are abstract.
While Constable is generally considered literal-minded by com–
parison with Turner, he is in many ways no more or no less factual
than his contemporary; it may simply be that a country storm is more
familiar to us than an ocean blizzard. Indeed, the Suffolk master would
have claimed, with Turner, that he painted what he saw; and if he
did so very much more than that, it was because he experienced the
same pantheistic impulses which motivated Turner's more extravagant
performances.
It
was well and good to admire the liberated, proto–
impressionist palette and brushstroke which resulted from Constable's
search for fidelity to visual facts; but to understand his greatness was
to realize, too, that the shimmering fabric of his paint surfaces was
also a projection of a romantic striving to embrace the totality of nature's
power. In the breathtaking "Stoke-by-Nayland," all of God's world–
church, leaf, cloud, earth, man, and beast- is transformed into a soggy,
glistening whole which quivers with anticipation of an approaching
storm; and we, like Constable, should have stood in awe before this
cosmic drama, as well as before the speckled animacy of pigment. In–
deed, the empathic intensity of such a canvas, as of "Fording the River,"
belonged as fully to the realm of emotion as to the realm of vision ano
recalled Constable's avowal (one which again could have been voiced
by Turner) : "Painting for me is but another word for feeling." Even
such a modest, diminutive work as the cloud study involved this merger
of fact and feeling, presenting not only a precise observation of mete-
