IN a society which is as indifferent to works of art as our modern industrialism it seems paradoxical that artists of all kinds should loom so large in the general consciousness of mankind—that they should be remembered with reverence and boasted of as national assets when statesmen, lawyers, and soldiers are forgotten. The great mass of modern men could rub along happily enough without works of art or at least without new ones, but society would be sensibly more bored if the artist died out altogether. The fact is that every honest bourgeois, however sedate and correct his life, keeps a hidden and scarce-admitted yearning for that other life of complete individualism which hard necessity or the desire for success has denied him. In contemplating the artist he tastes vicariously these forbidden joys. He regards the artist as a strange species, half idiot, half divine, but above all irresponsibly and irredeemably himself. He seems equally strange in his outrageous egoism and his superb devotion to an idea.

Also in a world where the individual is squeezed and moulded and polished by the pressure of his fellow-men the artist remains irreclaimably individual—in a world where every one else is being perpetually educated the artist remains ineducable—where others are shaped he grows. CÉzanne realised the type of the artist in its purest most unmitigated form, and M. Vollard has had the wit to write a book about CÉzanne and not about CÉzanne’s pictures. The time may come when we shall require a complete study of CÉzanne’s work, a measured judgment of his achievement and position—it would probably be rash to attempt it as yet. Meanwhile we have M. Vollard’s portrait, at once documented and captivating. Should the book ever become as well known as it deserves there would be, one guesses,

ten people fascinated by CÉzanne for one who would walk down the street to see his pictures.

The art historian may sometimes regret that Vasari did not give us more of the Æsthetics of his time; but Vasari knew his business, knew, perhaps, that the Æsthetics of an age are quickly superseded but that the human document remains of perennial interest to mankind. M. Vollard has played Vasari to CÉzanne and done so with the same directness and simplicity, the same narrative ease, the same insatiable delight in the oddities and idiosyncrasies of his subject. And what a model he had to paint! Every word and every gesture he records stick out with the rugged relief of a character in which everything is due to the compulsion of inner forces, in which nothing has been planed down or smoothed away by external pressure—not that external pressure was absent but that the inner compulsion—the inevitable bent of CÉzanne’s temperament, was irresistible. In one very important detail CÉzanne was spared by life—he always had enough to live on. The thought of a CÉzanne having to earn his living is altogether too tragic. But if life spared him in this respect his temperament spared him nothing—for this rough ProvenÇal countryman had so exasperated a sensibility that the smallest detail of daily life, the barking of a dog, the noise of a lift in a neighbouring house, the dread of being touched even by his own son might produce at any moment a nervous explosion. At such times his first relief was in cursing and swearing, but if this failed the chances were that his anger vented itself on his pictures—he would cut one to pieces with his palette knife, or failing that roll it up and throw it into the stove. M. Vollard describes with delightful humour the tortures he endured in the innumerable sittings which he gave CÉzanne for his portrait—with what care he avoided any subject of conversation which might lead to misunderstanding. But with all his adroitness there were one or two crises in which the portrait was threatened with the dreaded knife—fortunately CÉzanne always found some other work on which to vent his indignation, and the portrait survived, though after a hundred and fifteen sittings, in which CÉzanne exacted the immobility of an apple, the portrait was left incomplete. “I am not displeased with the shirt front,” was CÉzanne’s characteristic appreciation.

Two phrases continually recur in CÉzanne’s conversation which show his curious idiosyncrasies. One the often-quoted one of his dread that any one might “lui jeter le grappin dessus” and the other “moi qui suis faible dans la vie.” They express his constant attitude of distrust of his kind—for him all women were “des veaux et des calculatrices”—his dread of any possible invasion of his personality, and his sense of impotence in face of the forces of life.

None the less, though he pathetically exaggerated his weakness he never seems to have had the least doubt about his supreme greatness as an artist; what troubled and irritated him was his incapacity to express his “sensation” in such terms as would make its meaning evident to the world. It was for this reason that he struggled so obstinately and hopelessly to get into the “Salon de M. Bougereau.” His attitude to conventional art was a strange mixture of admiration at its skill and of an overwhelming horror of its emptiness—of its so “horrible resemblance.”

The fact is that CÉzanne had accepted uncritically all the conventions in the pathetic belief that it was the only way of safety for one “so feeble in life.” So he continued to believe in the Catholic Church not from any religious conviction but because “Rome was so strong”—so, too, he believed in the power and importance of the “Salon de Bougereau” which he hated as much as he feared. So, too, with what seems a paradoxical humility he let it be known, when his fame had already been established among the intelligent, that he would be glad to have the Legion of Honour. But here, too, he was destined to fail. The weighty influence and distinguished position of his friends could avail nothing against the undisguised horror with which any official heard the dreaded name of CÉzanne. And it appeared that CÉzanne was the only artist in France for whom this distinction was inaccessible, even through “influence.” Nothing is stranger in his life than the contrast between the idea the public formed of CÉzanne and the reality. He was one of those men destined to give rise to a legend which completely obscured the reality. He was spoken of as the most violent of revolutionaries—Communard and Anarchist were the favourite epithets—and all the time he was a timid little country gentleman of immaculate respectability who subscribed whole-heartedly to any reactionary opinion which could establish his “soundness.” He was a timid man who really believed

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.

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.

In the “Bathers resting,” painted in 1877, there is already a great change. It is rather by the exact placing of plastic units than by continuous flowing silhouettes that the design holds. Giorgione, perhaps, is behind this, but no longer Tintoretto, and, above all, Poussin has intervened.

In later works, such as the portrait of “Mme. CÉzanne in a greenhouse,” the plasticity has become all-important, there is no longer any suggestion of a romantic decor; all is reduced to the purest terms of structural design.

These notes on CÉzanne’s development are prompted by the illustrations in M. Vollard’s book. These are numerous and excellent, and afford a better opportunity for a general study of CÉzanne’s oeuvre than any other book. In fact, when the time comes for the complete appreciation of CÉzanne M. Vollard’s book will be the most important document existing. It should, however, have a far wider appeal than that. I hope that after the war M. Vollard will bring out a small cheap edition[53]—it should become a classic biography. To say, as I would, that M. Vollard’s book is a monument worthy of CÉzanne himself is to give it the highest praise.