in only one thing, “his little sensation”; who laboured incessantly to express this peculiar quality and who had not the faintest notion of doing anything that could shock the feelings of any mortal man or woman. No wonder then that when he looked up from his work and surveyed the world with his troubled and imperfect intellectual vision he was amazed and perturbed at the violent antagonism which he had all unconsciously provoked. No wonder that he became a shy, distrustful misanthrope, almost incapable of any association with his kind.
I have suggested that Cézanne was the perfect realisation of the type of the artist—I doubt whether in the whole of Vasari’s great picture gallery there is a more complete type of “original.” But in order to accept this we must banish from our mind the conventional idea of the artist as a man of flamboyant habits and calculated pose. Nothing is less possible to the real artist than pose—he is less capable of it than the ordinary man of business because more than any one else his external activities are determined from within by needs and instincts which he himself barely recognises.
On the other hand the imitation artist is a past master of pose, he poses as the sport of natural inclinations whilst he is really deliberately exploiting his caprices; and as he has a natural instinct for the limelight this variety of the “Cabotin” generally manages to sit for the portrait of the artist. Cézanne, then, though his external life was that of the most irreproachable of country gentlemen, though he went to mass every Sunday and never willingly left the intimacy of family life, was none the less the purest and most unadulterated of artists, the most narrowly confined to his single activity, the most purely disinterested and the most frankly egoistic of men.
Cézanne had no intellectual independence. I doubt if he had the faintest conception of intellectual truth, but this is not to deny that he had a powerful mind. On the contrary he had a profound intelligence of whatever came within his narrow outlook on life, and above all he had the gift of expression, so that however fantastic, absurd, or naïve his opinions may have been, they were always expressed in such racy and picturesque language that they become interesting as revelations of a very human and genuine personality.
One of the tragi-comedies of Cézanne’s life was the story of his early friendship with Zola, followed in middle life by a gradual estrangement, and at last a total separation. It is perhaps the only blot in M. Vollard’s book that he has taken too absolutely Cézanne’s point of view, and has hardly done justice to Zola’s goodness of heart. The cause of friction, apart from Cézanne’s habitual testiness and ill-humour, was that Zola’s feeling for art, which had led him in his youth to a heroic championship of the younger men, faded away in middle life. His own practice of literature led him further and further away from any concern with pure art, and he failed to recognise that his own early prophecy of Cézanne’s greatness had come true, simply because he himself had become a popular author, and Cézanne had failed of any kind of success. Unfortunately Zola, who had evidently lost all real æsthetic feeling, continued to talk about art, and worse than that he had made the hero of “L’Œuvre” a more or less recognisable portrait of his old friend. Cézanne could not tolerate Zola’s gradual acquiescence in worldly ideals and ways of life, and when the Dreyfusard question came up not only did his natural reactionary bias make him a vehement anti-Dreyfusard but he had no comprehension whatever of the heroism of Zola’s actions; he found him merely ridiculous, and believed him to be engaged in an ill-conceived scheme of self-advertisement. But for all his contempt of Zola his affection remained deeper than he knew, and when he heard the news of Zola’s death Cézanne shut himself alone up in his studio, and was heard sobbing and groaning throughout the day.
Cézanne’s is not the only portrait in M. Vollard’s entertaining book—there are sketches of many characters, among them the few strange and sympathetic men who appreciated and encouraged Cézanne in his early days. Of Cabaner the musician M. Vollard has collected some charming notes. Cabaner was a “philosopher,” and singularly indifferent to the chances of life. During the siege of Paris he met Coppée, and noticing the shells which were falling he became curious. “Where do all these bullets come from?” Coppée: “It would seem that it is the besiegers who send them.” Cabaner, after a silence: “Is it always the Prussians?” Coppée, impatiently: “Who on earth could it be?” Cabaner: “I don’t know ... other nations!” But the book is so full of good stories that I must resist the temptation to quote.
| Cézanne. | The Artist’s Wife | |
| Plate XXV. |
Fortunately M. Vollard has collected also a large number of Cézanne’s obiter dicta on art. These have all Cézanne’s pregnant wisdom and racy style. They often contain a whole system of æsthetics in a single phrase, as, for instance: “What’s wanted is to do Poussin over again from Nature.”
They show, moreover, the natural bias of Cézanne’s feelings and their gradual modification as his understanding became more profound. What comes out clearly, and it must never be forgotten in considering his art, is that his point of departure was from Romanticism. Delacroix was his god and Ingres, in his early days, his devil—a devil he learned increasingly to respect, but never one imagines really to love, “ce Dominique est très fort mais il m’emm——.” That Cézanne became a supreme master of formal design every one would nowadays admit, but there is some excuse for those contemporaries who complained of his want of drawing. He was not a master of line in the sense in which Ingres was. “The contour escapes me,” as he said. That is to say he arrived at the contour by a study of the interior planes; he was always plastic before he was linear. In his early works, such, for instance, as the “Scène de plein air” (see Plate), he is evidently inspired by Delacroix; he is almost a romanticist himself in such work, and his design is built upon the contrasts of large and rather loosely drawn silhouettes of dark and light. In fact it is the method of Tintoretto, Rubens, and Delacroix.