PARTISAN REVIEW
criterion of perfection, also imposes a system of restricted elements
with a common character of forms. Nature was already an order
with a secret law and rich correspondences in which the painter of
genius could make original discoveries. A general conformity to
nature was therefore taken for granted in the nineteenth century by
the most convinced devotees of pure art, although they might differ
about what aspects of nature were primary and what means the most
beautiful. The fluidity of the concept of the natural and the fluctua–
tions within the secular content of Western art--on which this basic
naturalism was founded-admitted an enormous range of styles. One
distinguished a noble correctness from a pedantic accuracy, and the
best artists of the last century recognized the charm and expressiveness
of naivete in drawing, not as a denial of nature, but as a personal
naturalness and spontaneity within the accepted framework of ex–
ternal natur.al relationships. Fromentin could regard the visible reality
as the living source of the pictorial in Dutch art and the close study
of nature as the primary discipline of the artist, and yet reject the
new realistic landscape painting of his day as an unfortunate devia–
tion. At one point, he hopes paradoxically that the example of Dutch
art will bring the moderns back from nature to pure painting; but
then he also says that the ideal, the corrective, is to create a modern
Metsu, without showing that one has him in mind.
What disturbed Fromentin in Rembrandt was not only the in–
correctness of drawing and color, but a more far-reaching arbitrari–
ness, an unwillingness to be reasonable and consistent. This fantastic
Dutchman introduced bizarre elements into a painting of real life.
He accepted the theme or convention of reality and then refused to
abide by its conditions. Rembrandt, we have seen, is for him an anar–
chic master who undertakes the impossible, confounding the world of
dreams and the world of reality. Fromentin feels in Rembrandt some–
thing profoundly unsocial that alarms him like the proposals of subver–
sive revolutionary minds. Indeed the term
uchimere"
that he applies to
Rembrandt was a common dispar.agement of socialist and utopian
ideas in Fromentin's time; it had a repugnant sense for him in par–
ticular, because as a youth he had been attracted to the left just
before the revolution of 1848
iC -.
He opposed to it the concept of
*
Fromentin's contemporary and admirer, Jacob Burckhardt, who quoted with
approval Fromentin's phrase about
Rubens-"sans orages et sans chimeres,"
criticized Rembrandt rather harshly as a painter of the
"canaille."
But unlike
the Frenchman, he found Rembrandt lacking in spirituality_
44
