Fromentin, Poet and Painter

The Observer, 27 January 1918, page 4, 1,709 words

Eugène Fromentin: Lettres de Jeunesse. Par Pierre Blanchon. (Paris: Garnier.)

(Reviewed by George Moore.)

All ears are attentive when the question is asked, what is the secret force that compels man to imitate nature? We remember that the cave-man lived under the compulsion to draw, and that he drew very well, though himself was not far removed from the animals he depicted so sympathetically.

It would seem, therefore, that the intelligence alone is not sufficient to create works of art. It is true, however, that all great artists are intelligent, but many great names rise up in our minds of men as intelligent as Michel Angelo or Richard Wagner, who did not create works of art, who did not even wish to create them and were, moreover, unable to understand them when they were created.

A partial explanation may be discovered in the fact that painting and sculpture are subject to the hand, and that in the writing of books and music the hand plays a part. We may go further and say that art is in the touch. Yet it cannot be denied that men have been born with skillful hands who were unable to create a work of art in any of the arts. They may have had hands, but they had not minds, is the immediate answer. Again, this is but a partial truth; nobody, for instance, had a more skilful hand than Fromentin, and few minds were more comprehensive and subtle than his. Yet despite his hand and mind he failed in painting; and though we derive much more pleasure from his books than his pictures, they seem in the last analysis of our sensations to lack something. We say “seem,” for what they lack has so far eluded criticism, and we are afraid that none will be able to explain the failure of a man so marvellously well equipped at all points as Fromentin. A strange failure, truly; but it is about such strange failures that the critic likes to prowl with a lantern, casting a gleam peradventure into a dark corner.

***

Fromentin was born as La Rochelle in 1820, and his intellect seems to have developed early, for we find him writing verses as the age of sixteen; and to his father’s great grief, for the elder Fromentin was a lawyer — a determined man who forced his son to study for the Bar and to pass all his examinations before he gave his consent that Eugène should follow the bent of his inclinations and adopt art as his business in life. We were speaking of the boy’s verses, and of these it is only needful to say that they seem to us singularly unboyish, singularly dry and arid, and singularly well done if the boy’s age be taken into account. He composed some ten or twelve thousand verses between the ages of sixteen and twenty, and he drew a good deal and seems, by his letters, to have regretted deeply that his father could not be persuaded to consider his drawings; but if his talent for drawing at the age of twenty-three may be measured by the portrait that the excellent editor of the letters publishes, we confess that we experience small wonder that the elder Fromentin viewed his son’s predilection for the arts with disfavour. We sympathise with him, and many fathers with sons will, too, for there are small Fromentins in every family, and all these can draw and write verses as well as our Fromentin. But what happened to our Fromentin never happened to another: at twenty-four he developed an extraordinary skilfulness of hand, and apparently without teaching, or almost none. So far as we can discover from his letters he worked only a year or a year and few months in Cabat’s studio — Cabat was a celebrated painter in the fifties, but his name and works are unknown to us — and on leaving Cabat’s studio Fromentin went to Algeria in the hope of discovering inspiration and models.

***

Here the critical lantern may cast a beam. If a man cannot find art in his own heart he is not likely to find it among strangers for it is oneself that is essential in art, and hence it follows that however faithfully we draw Arabs we leave something out. If Arabs could draw they might draw themselves; Persians can draw themselves so well that we read living human beings in their pictures, a thing that we should not be able to do in Ingres’ pictures if Ingres had gone to Persia in search of art. But there was no need for him to go to Persia or Algeria. He was possessed of that inner vision which we are afraid that Fromentin lacked.

In looking at his pictures we acknowledge the skilfulness with which he swishes in the tail of an Arab horse, especially in watercolour; and if we remember his picture of “Hawking” in the Louvre mayhap it is because we have read his books, and himself has taught us to look with suspicion on local colour and to believe that if we cannot find a style within the idiom of our own time it avails us little to go to Fisele in search of one or to Algeria for subjects. He was too great a man, however, to be duped by local colour — he accepted it, for he lacks the inward vision, and because local colour was the craze of the forties. In 1840, all France was going to Algeria in search of local colour, and among the painters was one David, a musician. He heard the Arabs chanting round their fires and introduced some of their rhythms into his symphony, “The Desert.” Berlioz cried, “A new Beethoven has been born, and for many months David was discussed whenever musicians met. At one of these discussions it was noticed that Auber had not ventured a remark. “And what do you think, master, of David?” “I’m waiting for David to get off his camel,” was the reply; and it seems to us to enlighten the question we are examining.

***

Fromentin was the fashion of the sixties, and it is to his credit that he should have doubted his painting, even when all the world was buying it. He seems to have been always in doubt about it, and while purchasers were bidding against each other for his Arab horses, his sand storms, his mosques and minarets, Fromentin laid the palette aside to write three books that are being read and will probably continue to be read as long as there are readers in Europe. The most valuable is his study of Dutch painters (“The Masters of Old Time”), amd Fromentin was especially qualified for the task he set himself, for he was a poet and a philosopher, and, although an inferior painter, undoubtedly a skilful craftsman and a great aesthetician, despite the fact that his appreciations of the Dutch masters are not always ours, we must remember that every generation admires bad pictures, to do so is the common lot; but while we are drawn to Fromentin by his admirable descriptions of pictures and the various inspirations that called them into form and colour, we cannot, if we would understand Fromentin, close our eyes to his occasional strange preferences. None will ever convey the genius of Rubens in words as well as Fromentin, yet the Rubens he seems to admire above all others is one that was painted in a mood more characteristic of himself than Rubens — a dying saint receiving the Sacrament. I remember well going to Antwerp, anxious to see Fromentin’s Rubens, and my disappointment. A dry pedantic Rubens it seemed to me — a tiresome Rubens that recalled to mind a phrase of Fromentin’s, “The church bore Rubens, mythology mystified him, life enchanted him.” Quite so, but if Fromentin understood Rubens so well, why did he admire “The Dying Saint”? There is but one answer to this question. He liked the dry and pedantic, and the title of his article might be “Fromentin, Poet, Painter, and Usher.” The word “usher” is unavoidable, for it is through this word that we may understand Fromentin’s failure. He was a little too much of an usher to be a great painter, and the usher is discernible very often in his phraseology, beautiful though it is. He is an usher in his style and in his preferences. An usher of genius, if you will, but an usher. He prefers Hals’ pictures of burgomasters, faces in long array, side faces, full faces, three-quarter faces, reminding one of the insides of omnibuses, to the old women in the almshouses of Harlem. This picture, to us Hals’ greatest picture, he would have us believe, represents Hals’ decadence. He waxes indignant over it, telling us that Hals had begun to see dimly and that his hand had lost its sureness of touch. He laments the fact that the new generation admires it; he foresees the end of art and tries to disguise his hatred of Manet and Monet, who were painting in the ‘sixties.

***

In his letters he is at his best when “standing by a rickety table, writing under the light of a stinking lamp.” The phrase is taken from one of his letters, and it seems significant, for the letter written in these difficult conditions is admirable without a trace of the pedantry we have noticed when reading “Summer in the Sahara.” Besides “Summer in the Sahara.”and “A Year in the Sebel” he wrote a novel, “Dominique,” a book that has often been compared to George Sand. We would prefer to speak of it as George Sand’s best book if Sand’s name must be dragged in. “Dominique” is without story or characters; it is charged with sentimentality; but it contains pages that seemed to us very beautiful when we read the book; but descriptions of the changes in the seasons do not exhibit the talent of him who asks for recognition as a tale-teller. Man’s struggle for life on this earth and the relations of men and women give the tale-teller a better scope for his abilities and more enduring fame.