Kitabı oxu: «Fromentin», səhifə 3

Thus, through two masterpieces, a new writer, of strong and pure French stock, suddenly revealed himself. The most distinguished novelists and critics of the day, George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, sent him their heartiest congratulations and sought his friendship. In both of these books, Fromentin showed himself to be not only a curious and close observer, but a subtle and trained psychologist. He studied not only the outward forms of people and of things, he probed the depths as well, the underlying spirit; and having found it, he revealed it to others with keen and original discernment. What he saw in those tribes and peoples, as new to him as they are to us, was not merely the picturesqueness of their attitudes and the exuberant brilliance of their land, but the whole predestined history of the race from its origins, as revealed in the practice of their strange customs and the passionate intensity of their instincts. For Fromentin was not one of those who find satisfaction solely in the contemplation of beauty. He was above all one of the kind that wants to understand the meaning and the cause of beauty, in order to enjoy more keenly its possession.

It is interesting to compare with Fromentin the painter, who paints best of all with his pen, a poet of the highest rank, who came later than he in this same region of Saintonge: Pierre Loti. Roving, restless, concerned solely with the misery of his own soul and the beauty of the world, Loti carries his dreams with him to the remotest shores, and in order to distract his thoughts from life which bores him, he has gathered together extraordinary colours, the brilliant dust of picturesque ruins, and has created for himself a capricious and sensual world, in which nothing, perhaps, is real excepting his own melancholy, yet which amuses and enchants him with its prodigious fund of poetry. Like Loti, Fromentin also had an eye for rich and dazzling hues and knew how to render them with his pen. But being less feverish, more self-controlled in heart and mind, he did not write merely for the sake of depicting faces and backgrounds; he developed his robust and harmonious phrases for the purpose of interpreting, and preferably in their most vivid aspects, the dominant impulse of a race, the art with which a picture is composed, the design of a landscape, the emotion of an hour, or the spirit of an epoch.

“To Fromentin,” writes Gabriel Trarieux, “the function of an adjective is to appeal, not to the eye or ear, but to the moral sense. Nature, to this psychologist, is not an inert colour, but an inner voice. He shows us Africa, and more especially his own heart. Is such conscientiousness, such self-revelation, a distinctive mark of the native of Charente? For my part, I think it is.”

His offerings to the Salon continued uninterruptedly, year after year. Only the more famous need be mentioned: The Moorish Burial (1850); The Negro Boatmen (1859); Horsemen returning from a Fantasia, Couriers from the Land of the Ouled Naïls (1861); The Arab Bivouac at Daybreak, The Arab Falconer, Hunting with the Falcon in Algeria, The Quarry (1863); Windstorm in the Plains of Algiers (1864); Heron Hunting, Thieves of the Night (1865); A Tribe on the March through the Pasture Lands of Tell, A Pool in an Oasis (1866); Arabs attacked by a Lioness (1868); Halt of the Muleteers (1869); and his last five pictures, The Grand Canal and The Breakwater (1872); The Ravine (1874); The Nile and View of Esneh (1876).

With the second picture that he exhibited, The Place of the Breach in Constantine, the talent of the painter was officially recognized by the bestowal of a Second Class Medal. Fromentin, nevertheless, knew his weaknesses. What distressed him the most was that he still saw what was pretty, rather than what was great; a defect of instinct which is particularly conspicuous in The Moorish Burial (1850) and The Gazelle Hunt (1859). He strove, by consulting nature ceaselessly, to rid himself of this almost-but-not quite tendency, of which he could never have been cured by mere studio work. He soon began, as a matter of fact, to acquire a truer and broader vision. He grasped this singular fact, peculiar to tropical lands: namely, that, howsoever discordant the details of a landscape may be, they form a sum total that is always simple and easy to transcribe upon a canvas. Since he never played false, either with himself or with nature, he mirrored back accurately, through the crystal clearness of his mind, the form and colour of the objects before him. Looking to-day at such pictures as An Audience before the Caliph, The Negro Boatmen, and a host of others, we breathe in, just as we do in reading his books, that indefinable odour of the Orient which comes from the smoke of the camp fires and the tobacco, from the orange trees and from the persons of the natives themselves; we delight our eyes with the venerable olive trees of the sacred grove at Blidah, with the plain bounded on the north by the long chain of the hills of Sahel, low-lying, gray in the morning, ruddy at noon, with just one white spot toward the northeast, at Coléah, where there is a vast gap, formed by the course of the Mazapan River, through which we get a glimpse of the sea.

The entire series of sketches and notes which, from Constantine to Biskra, by way of Lambessa, Fromentin collected during his journey into the heart of Algeria, he was destined to make use of later on, to guard himself from ever falsifying. And if the colours of his paintings are often timid, it is precisely for the reason that in the seclusion of his studio, remote from Africa, he lacked that pulsation of generous light, with which he needed to be enveloped, in order to kindle his palette to the required glow.

III. – AN EVOLUTION

Eugène Fromentin will be remembered as the painter of Algeria, or at least as one of the first who revealed it in such a way as to make it beloved. Not the Algeria of the South, lost amid a furnace of sunshine and of sand, but the Algeria which is accessible to all, that of the Arabs, with peaceful cities set in the midst of ruins, and grateful palm groves forgotten, like baskets after a festival, on the border of the desert; the Algeria of ceremonious and brilliant fantasias, of mosques, of battle-fields still smoking, and of vagabond tribes. It may be regretted that he contented himself with seeing the Arab exclusively outside his tent, in the open light of sand and sky, and that, instead of confining his studies to external phases of life, he never ventured to penetrate to his hearthstone, in the intimacy of his family life. Yet who would reproach the artist for his scrupulous delicacy and discretion?

Jules Claretie was quite right in declaring that Marilhat brought back from the Orient landscapes imbued with profound melancholy, Decamps scenes distinguished for their dazzling brilliance, Delacroix spectacles of majestic grandeur, and that Fromentin in his turn discovered in that land of light a personal note which his predecessors would have sought in vain, since he carried it within himself. The colour scale of Fromentin is a subdued one; his favourite shades are the half-tones.

In the presence of that brilliant land, ennobled by centuries of history, Fromentin remained, nevertheless, a Parisian of the purest stock. His Arabs are all keenly alert, down to the very folds of their burnooses. He could not bear to behold ugliness; he transformed it through the golden warp of his imagination. Although his pictures lack the harsh vibration of the desert and a sense of its far-reaching monotony, the desert nevertheless loses nothing of its grandeur; because his poet’s understanding, more infinite than the expanses of the dunes, passed of its own accord beyond the bounds of a horizon which, unlike that of the sea, is not void save for the passerby who is incapable of emotion and comprehension. Beneath his sober brush, the Arabs retain all their strange attractions, which he amply indicates by a single dash of light, just as in his books he evokes a landscape or an individual by a single word. His eyes took in the outward form of things as completely as his mind penetrated the minds of others. His unwearied power of observation neglected nothing that pertained to light; consequently the accuracy of his paintings, comparable to that of historic documents, is attested by every traveller.

The Fantasia, for example, gives an admirable presentment of the open country around Algiers and of one aspect of Arab manners and customs. It shows us a numerous cavalcade galloping at headlong speed, with clamorous shouts and discharge of guns, across a broad plain toward a knoll on which the mounted emir sits in judgment. This mingling of motley garments and of horses galloping in all directions produces a scene of extraordinary animation and a liveliness of tone that contrasts sharply with the bare immensity of the plain and the uniformity of the sky.

Suddenly, in 1861, Fromentin’s manner was marked by a complete evolution. Not that he abandoned the fine and delicate methods habitual with him, the methods of a poet seeking to interpret his visions and his sentiments through his skill in animated composition. Nothing of his originality was sacrificed. His power, on the contrary, was increased, because he had learned, in regard to the inspiration of his works, how to see reality more truly, and in regard to the resources of his art, how to understand better the superior methods of his compeers and his masters. But he had seen Corot, and his admiration of him increased day by day; it was the influence of the painter of The Farm Wagon that induced him to render the value of colour tones in accordance with their harmonies rather than their contrasts.