PARTISAN REVIEW
Imque that he was not fully a poet nor fully a lover; as a lover,
"he mistakes his fear for virtue ,and his natural timidity for a stoic
effort."-l(· Even as a young man, more ardent and hopeful, Dominique
is a timid dual being : his poems are published anonymously, but
under his own name he writes a political treatise that gives him
considerable prestige. Fromentin is haunted by his own duality and
projects it constantly into his writing.
His attitude to Rembrandt may be seen then as a justification
of himself. Scrupulous as he was in looking at the painting of the
past, Fromentin could not escape his desires and least of all, his hidden
regrets. They turn up often in this book which seems at first reading
a triumph of disciplined observa tion and judgment. Even the account
of Rubens is shaped by the inner needs of the deeply troubled artist.
When he defines the Flemish master in a memorable phrase as a
temperament
«sans orages et sans chimeres" -without
storms and
without vain dreams- he states the antithesis to his own youthful self
which he had described fifteen years before in the person of Dominique
as
«un coeur orageux
....
et certainement martyrise de chimeres"–
a stormy heart and a martyr to chimerical dreams. Rembrandt too
is acceptable to him only when he is free from those
«
chimeres";
the
same word comes insistently to Fromentin's mind before the great
portrait of the Burgomaster Six:
«personnage peu chimerique, une
peinture sans
chimer~'-a
rather unfanciful personality, a painting
without fancy. But Delacroix who adored Rubens no less than did
Fromentin and placed Rembrandt above Raphael, on the contrary
welcomed these chimerical fancies as the true source of art: "In
taking his brushes in hand," he said "the artist abandons the easy
.and trivial course of everyday life to enter the world of noble fantasy
(chimeres),
necessary for the creative fire ."
We shall not conclude that the critic remains imprisoned in
himself and that his opinions are only a personal avowal; Fromentin's
book contains too much that we can verify with our eyes to justify
this shallow judgment. His formulation about Rubens' equable nature
is indeed right, but it owes its warmth to the writer's desire; he saw
more clearly than others this side of Rubens which he himself had
*
It is curious that many years before, Fromentin had noted in a draft of an
unpublished essay on Sainte-Beuve that the great critic was a double nature,
weak and contrite, a man of memories, regrets and tempered impressions.
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