FROMENTIN AS A CRITIC
and does not try to bring his ideas about the artist's personality, work
and social experience into harmony.
If
he believes, for example, that
"it is impossible to talk about
men
(his emphasis) and really to
understand them, without knowing their milieu" (he
says
this, without
qualification, in a letter written during his trip in the Low Coun–
tries), he applies this principle in treating the Dutch school and
the great Flemish primitives, but not in his account
of
Rubens and
Rembrandt, as if the milieu- a vague concept in his mind, it must
be admitted-were irrelevant to the study of artists of supreme genius.
And yet it is a sign of his breadth that Fromentin, whose persistent
critical concentration on the aesthetic offered what many had thought
was lacking in Taine, should even concern himself with the milieu.
He does not fear at all the charge that he might be reducing unique
or ineffable facts of individual creativeness to social generalities,
foreign to the nature of art. He regrets rather his insufficient knowl–
edge of history, which is already considerable for a layman-as a
student he had frequented Michelet- and which guides him in his
interpretations.
If
in that quoted letter he limits the significance of
the milieu to the understanding of the men, he goes beyond this
in the book. Here the social basis of Dutch art, formulated with
remarkable acumen by Hegel many years before and then elaborated
by Taine in a less searching way, is presented as something not only
fully evident, but also as necessary for the production and intimate
character of the art. Read the curious, whimsical statement in the
chapter on the "origin ,and character of the Dutch School," where
Fromentin remarks that Dutch art was so closely tied to the state
of Dutch affairs that it issued promptly from the newly won Dutch
independence as if "the right to have a national school of painting"
were one of the stipulations of the treaty of 1609. Dutch painting
has been a classic example for the thesis of the social and environ–
mental dependence of a style of art; in the Holland of the seventeenth
century the relations between geography, economy, social life, religion
and art are exceptionally clear. Yet this insight has not been carried
much further since Hegel's time, and the concept of "milieu" has
blurred the perception of the society itself. Fromentin's imagination
is
stirred by this transparent example of a historic unity of
art
and
nature and social life, which he does not undertake, however, to
explore. What interests us most in his vision of this Dutch complex
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