FROMENTIN AS A CRITIC
Umesure"
as a social and not only artistic virtue, and came to regard
this restraint as a positive, almost creative quality. Few words appear
so often in Fromentin's criticism and his novel as
uchimere"
and
«mesure."
"Nothing chimerical .... a perfect equilibrium," he writes
in
D01r}inique,
and in the same book, "a rare good sense, a perfect
rectitude .... produces miracles." These are characterizations of
Dominique's teacher, Augustin, who is like a little Dutchman in
quality-sober, disciplined, honest, persevering, without great talent
but effective through these domestic virtues; "the reasonable," he says,
"is the inseparable friend of justice and truth."
In this artistic morality of reason and measure Fromentin is
conscious of his ties with French tradition; in admiring Ruisdael
and the lesser Dutch artists of the seventeenth century, he thinks of
their affinity with French literature and thought of the same time:
they are the
uhonnetes hommes"
of painting. Rembrandt, on the
other hand, in his career, his personality and art, is the most un–
French figure in the book. He is without
umesure,')
an imprudent
man who risks everything after having established himself as an artist.
The more Fromentin criticizes Rembrandt, the more we are
drawn to the Dutch painter and the more we feel sorry for Fromen–
tin. What a turmoil in the Frenchman's heart as he pursues the old
man so relentlessly in the name of reason, nature, law and the in–
herent necessities of art! With all his admiration for Rembrandt's
portraits, he cannot wholeheartedly accept this crazy Hollander who
dared to transfigure the real world. Grant his success and you have
to grant also that Fromentin's art was possibly on a wrong path.
Rembrandt's great inner liberty challenged and disturbed him as did
nothing else. Fromentin wrote to his wife: "Rembrandt doesn't let
me sleep."
Fromentin, like others of his generation-he was born in 1820,
within a year of Flaubert and Baudelaire, ,a year after Courbet- was
a belated child of romanticism who could no longer be content with
an imagined world and yet could not accept the familiar reality as a
matter for art. In his early twenties already, the young painter, who
had been nourished by the romantic poets, wrote that long observa–
tion of things is better than imagination; the latter is a principle of
weakness and misfortune and spoils the freshness of vision. But he
admitted that he lacked true imagination, for which he substituted
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