PARTISAN REVIEW
of sympathy into the artist's personality or moral nature, to use
Fromentin's old-fashioned term. His exact notation of qualities, tones,
rapports of colors and forms, is never just descriptive or analytic; it
flows out of an instantaneous savoring of the whole which is pro–
longed and tested by further scrutiny of the work and aims also at
a truer vision of the artist's physiognomy. There is nothing com–
parable for intensity of perception in the entire literature of
art
criticism.
Add to this a particular eloquence and devotion, a tone of
vibrant enthusiasm, which art criticism had scarcely known before
the modern period and which corresponds to an almost religious
sentiment of the dignity of art.
Long before Fromentin, writers had seen that a painting is a
personal object, but this insight had remained an unexplored gen–
erality. In
The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland
it becomes
concrete, evidential, intimate, a field of problems and profound
searching, as in the beautiful pages on Rubens and Ruisdael. Here,
through repeated observations, we are made to see beyond doubt
that the touch and the sensory stuff of a picture are spiritual things
of the greatest consequence. The
facture
is a product of feeling, a
result of the whole psychic disposition of the artist. What he does
beyond his instinct, through acquired skill and calculation, depends
on instinct too; even the artist's reason is marked with his character
and appears in this book as a personal trait. Everything in the work
of art-the attitude to the subject, the execution, palette, and forms
-belongs then to the individual and is an expressive end as well as
a means. This total conviction, with all that is vague and prob–
lematic in it, gives life to Fromentin's analyses and judgments.
The close vision of a work becomes an effort to relive its crea–
tion; the artist, with his temperament and process, emerges in almost
physical intimacy. What a delight for Fromentin to find at Mechlin
a freshly cleaned, unframed Rubensl "Thanks to circumstances," as
he says, "I w.as enabled to examine it closely and to follow the work–
manship just as if Rubens were painting before my eyes." Studying
the works of the past he strives to make himself contemporary with
them as actions of a spiritual moment and a mood. This tie with
the individual occasion (distinct from the personality which is
something more constant), very difficult if not impossible to re-
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