FROMENTIN AS A CRITIC
climactic movement, as in the beautiful concluding page on Rubens'
Elevation on the Cross)
where he compares the painting to an ode,
then to a sublime ode, and finally fixes upon one part, the head of
Christ, as its culminating and supreme strophe.
Fromentin's conviction about the personal, moral nature of
painting
is
imposed upon us and becomes almost self-evident through
his astounding suppleness in describing and judging the works. And
here we must recognize too that his calling as a writer counted for
something in the substance as well as style of his criticism. That unity
of sensation and feeling, which
is
basic for his critical method,
is
also
in his time a principle of imaginative writing, which represents the
exterior world through a reacting sensibility. In the novel and poetry
of the nineteenth century, and most of all in France, the inner life
of the individual, whether a character in a story or the writer him–
self, became the central object and was revealed through the same
refined imaging of experience that Fromentin employs in order to
characterize the old paintings. He was, in fact, among the first to intro–
duce into art criticism the standards of observation and of expression
of sentiment developed by the French novelists and poets-the re–
quirement of a direct encounter with the object, nuanced statement
of feeling, and a rapid, flexible prose with a syntax and rich sensory
language that could evoke the observed and the observer together,
without dissolving the object in the sensation or mood. To write
with strokes or touches was the ideal of a personal style. Painters also
shared this aim; Impressionism was for a time the most advanced
model of its accomplishment. We touch here on a point where the
mutual action of writing and painting is so complex that it becomes
impossible to disengage the effects of the two arts upon each other.
Since the visual was the highest example of direct experience of the
outer world and in this directness was affirmed the free activity of
the self, modern painting took on a new charm for the poet as an
art in which the subjective and the external were fused. As a young
man, while still a student, Fromentin wrote: "I have a rather active
interior life, I absorb enormously through the eyes."
As
a piece of writing,
The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland
is
original in form, recalling at the same time the Salon review, the
travel book, the critical essay and the private journal. Like the Salons
of Diderot and Baudelaire, it deals with what is immediately visible,
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