FROMENTIN AS A CRITIC
lacked as a youth and which had become for him a personal end.
It was reassuring to discover that this man of overflowing vitality was
also sensible and restrained. But in Fromentin's image of Rubens we
miss .an important, familiar part of the painter. His critic admires
Rubens' masculine force, yet shies away from just that aspect of his
art in which it is most heartily displayed, the sensuality of his pagan
pictures with their great nudes. In mentioning the portrait of Rubens'
wife, he apologizes for the painter's indiscretion in representing her
partly naked.
With Rembrandt the relationship is more complicated and dis–
turbing. We may put it rudely by saying that Fromentin in doubting
Rembrandt was defending himself, as in elevating Rubens to the
heights he was pointing to his own absolute goal. Ruben') was an
infinitely more vigorous, masculine Fromentin, the kind of artist Fro–
mentin would have liked to be, a Delacroix without nerves and more
robust, equally at home in the religious and secular spheres, "who
could gaily paint a torso in an afternoon and, pleased with himself,
put down his palette and go off for a ride on his horse, without a
thought about painting on his mind." But Rembrandt was the dream
of his unhappy conscience, his earliest self, the bohemian and ro–
mantic chimera of Fromentin's youth, a stubborn, sincere, fanatical,
uncompromising poet-painter, at odds with authority, whom the
modem artist dared not follow and very early sacrificed to his need
of success. The sad Dutchman grapples with the oldest secret wishes
of Fromentin, and in doing so denies the rightness of Fromentin's
public ideals.
It is mainly in criticizing Rembrandt that Fromentin commits
himself to laws and absolute stringencies in art. In Rubens he dis–
covers an admirable
((mesure,"
but the Flemish master is no occa–
sion for expounding rules. His art is a triumph of sheer genius, which
by some miracle is in perfect harmony with good sense. Rembrandt
is another story. With him Fromentin has to be unrelentingly censori–
ous. The failures he reproaches in Rembrandt are due to no lack of
genius or to unfavorable circumstance, but to the artist's willfulness,
his disregard of plain logic as well as of the rules of art. Rembrandt
attempts the impossible, he wishes to transcend the principle of
identity and of contradiction, and when he loses his head, his color
becomes murky, the execution spoils, everything goes wrong.
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