PARTISAN REVIEW
is his view of the common qualities of the Dutch
school
as a true
social accomplishment, an education of the individuals determining
a high level of performance in the ordinary practitioners. To under–
stand this view, one must contrast it with the current idea that the
characteristics of a school are a mere taste or convention, without
artistic value in themselves, serving only as a substratum for the
achievements of the great masters. Bourgeois life at its best-and
Holland was an example-had for Fromentin certain positive moral
values: probity, patience, devotion to a task, reasonableness and
regard for reality, which determine the character of lesser artists and
give to their painting a seriousness and honesty that we must respect.
In aristocratic Belgium, there are no interesting minor personalities
around Rubens, only imitators or assistants; in Holland, Fromentin
discovers a host of attractive individual minor painters, many of
them artists who have also another profession or trade.
I have said that Fromentin wished to retain in the book some–
thing of his experience as a traveler and that the chapters follow
roughly his route in the Low Countries. But just as an Impressionist
picture, attached to a site and a moment, has a composition within
its seeming randomness, so in this apparently unplanned, unsystematic
work with its varied impressions, encounters and free range of
ideas, there is a structure, a large antithesis that underlies even the
evaluations, shaping the latter into a drama of judgment.
It
is not
a beautiful or great structure, but it is a form and that is important.
On one side is the Flemish Catholic Rubens, the master closest to
Fromentin's ideal-the exterior man, the synthesizer of the Italian
and the Northern, the unproblematic genius who produces with an
easy power like a force of nature; the more he is seen, the more he
grows in mastery and grandeur; in his portraits alone he fails, but
this task requires a sense for the inner world of personalities which
is naturally denied him, being incompatible with his highest qualities.
On the other side is the genius of Holland, the Protestant Rembrandt,
an artist
hors concours,
rising above all the other Dutch painters
whom Fromentin admires. His greatness emerges most clearly in por–
traiture, for Fromentin the most spiritual art of
all.
Yet Fromentin
cannot take Rembrandt. Before some of his works-and these include
the most famous, like
Dr. Tulp's Anatomy Lesson
and
The Night
Watch-he
is repelled or uncertain. More than half his account of
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