PARTISAN REVIEW
a gesture. The interest of Fromentin lies in his power to make us
see that the highest human values are involved in a patch of color,
the bend of a line.
Notice also that Fromentin is not satisfied to judge that a work
is good or bad. Few of the pictures he admires are perfect. He is too
much a painter who has struggled with his canvas and suffered from
the consciousness of its failings, even when it has been acclaimed a
masterpiece, to approach the works of others with ,an all-or-none
principle. Before Rubens he remains critical, attentive to the dif–
ferences between one part and another. He sees the painter as a
human genius of uneven powers, subject to the endlessly complex
conditions of work. In a great painting the conception may surpass
the execution, one figure may be masterly, another more relaxed
in drawing, and all this variability of an artist arises from his char–
acter. Comparing Rubens'
Elevation on the Cross
with the
Descent,
Fromentin is able to say convincingly that the first is more progres–
sive, more truly Rubens, but the other is more complete, more per–
fectly realized; or that his
Adoration of the Magi
in Antwerp is less
accomplished than the one in Brussels, yet is the final expression of
his knowledge of color and his dexterity. This is a profoundly ob–
jective kind of criticism which sees the modalities of an artist's
achievement and is able to discern the differences not only between
one work and another, but also between the aspects or parts of the
same creation. It is what we miss sometimes in Baudelaire, a critic
of more youthful spirit, who is more imaginative and intense in his
appreciations, but takes the whole production of an artist
en bloc:
Delacroix is for him a God whose least fragment is a masterpiece
and in whose great pictures every touch carries the same force and
necessity. We feel in
his
grandiose pages on Delacroix a will to adora–
tion, the fulfilment of a desire for the perfect. The attentiveness of
Fromentin is more searching and perhaps in the long run more
revealing; the imperfections he discovers are at times as instructive
as the perfect parts; they belong no less to the personality and help
us to understand it better and to see what an accomplishment are
its unquestionable successes. And when Fromentin comes to a work
which is for him an achievement of transcendent greatness in spite
of its defects, he rises gradually from a mood of grave inspection
and testing to an exalted lyrical praise, symphonic in its expansive,
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