FROMENTIN AS A CRITIC
whether his oscillation between literature and art was not perhaps
the result of self-doubt, an attempt to evade the most difficult chal–
lenge of
his
nature which demanded a single solution that he could
not accept. From early youth he was tormented by the necessity of
compromise and a feeling of spiritual weakness. In struggling against
his
conservative parents who respected art- his father was a physician
and amateur painter-but preferred for their brilliant son the career
of a lawyer, Fromentin never cut loose; he remained prudently at–
tached because of his economic dependence. A passionate admirer of
Delacroix, he was already as a young man a chastened romantic who
recommended caution and measure to himself. At twenty-four he
wrote that the secret of life is
to
know one's own limits. For his
painting he sailed to North Mrica as a remote world where he might
be
freer than in France. In time he became enslaved to this exotic
African subject-matter which he continued to reproduce from memory,
long after it had ceased to inspire him. When excited by the landscape
of Provence in which he discovered a new possibility for his art, he
reasoned that it would be imprudent to change his themes and
his
style when they were so well established in the public's mind. He
wrote then to his father that he would paint in two manners: one
for the public, the other for himself. The outcome, as might be
expected, was that he painted only for the Salon.
The character of the man is visible in the self-constraint of his
delicate pictures; he is one of those who live below their means out
of anxiety and unwillingness to take risks. He justified this attitude by
underestimating his abilities, as if these were finally and fatally lim–
ited, instead of striving to surmount his admitted weaknesses. The
same underestimation appears in the hero of
his
novel who is an
image of the author: Dominique speaks of himself as a mediocrity, a
failure, although his story and entire spirit mark him as a superior
man. He is a defeated personality whose suffering arises from a hope–
less romantic passion. To dominate himself after this unhappy love
(which represents the great crisis of Fromentin's youth), he gives up
poetry and intellectual ambition and retires to the province as a
simple farmer in daily contact with the realities of nature and physical
work.
It
is the common sense alternative to the romantic solutions:
religion or travel-Fromentin's teacher, Cabat, after a crisis lived
for a while in a Dominican monastery. Sainte-Beuve said of Dom-
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