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<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2> <h2>THE CASE OF PAUL CÉZANNE</h2> The case of painter Paul Cézanne. Is he a stupendous nobody or a surpassing genius? The critical doctors disagree, an excellent omen for the reputation of the man from Provence. We do not discuss a corpse, and though Cézanne died in 1906 he is still a living issue among artists and writers. Every exhibition calls forth comment: fair, unfair, ignorant, and seldom just. Yet the Cézanne question, is it so difficult to resolve? Like Brahms, the Frenchman is often misrepresented; Brahms, known now as a Romantic writing within the walls of accepted forms, neither a pedant nor a revolutionist; Cézanne, not a revolutionist, not an innovator, vastly interested in certain problems, has been made "chef d'école" and fathered with a lot of theories which would send him into one of his famous rages if he could hear them. Either a revolutionist or a plagiarist! cried Paul Gauguin—whose work was heartily detested by Cézanne; but truth is ever mediocre, whether it resides at the bottom of a well or swings on the cusps of the new moon. What is the truth about Cézanne? The question bobs up every season. His so-called followers [Pg 97] raise a clamour over the banality of "representation" in art, and their master is the one man in the history of art who squandered on canvas startling evocations of actuality, whose nose was closest to the soil. Huysmans was called an "eye" by Remy de Gourmont. Paul Cézanne is also an eye. In 1901 I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon a picture by Maurice Denis entitled Hommage à Cézanne, the idea of which was manifestly inspired by Manet's Hommage à Fantin-Latour. The canvas depicted a still life by Cézanne on a chevalet and surrounded by Bonnard, Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, Mellerio, and Vollard. Himself (as they say in Irish) is shown standing and apparently unhappy, embarrassed. Then came the brusque apotheosis of 1904 at the Autumn Salon, the most revelatory of his unique gift thus far made. Puvis de Chavannes had a special Salle, so had Eugène Carrière; Cézanne held the place of honour. The critical press was hostile or half-hearted. Poor Cézanne, with his naïve vanity, seemed dazzled by the uproarious championship of "les jeunes," and, to give him credit for a peasant-like astuteness, he was rather suspicious and always on his guard. He stolidly accepted the frantic homage of the youngsters, looking all the while like a bourgeois Buddha. In The Sun of 1901, 1904, and 1906 (the latter the year of his death) appeared my articles on Cézanne, among the [Pg 98] first, if not the first, that were printed in this country. Since then he has been hoisted to the stars by his admirers, and with him have mounted his prices. Why not? When juxtaposed with most painters his pictures make the others look like linoleum or papier-mâché. He did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the manners, ideas, and aspects of his generation. In the classic retort of Manet he could have replied to those who taunted him with not "finishing" his pictures: "Sir, I am not a historical painter." Nor need we be disconcerted, in any estimate of him, by the depressing snobbery of collectors who don't know B from a bull's foot, but who go off at half-trigger when a hint is dropped about the possibilities of a painter appreciating in a pecuniary sense. Cézanne is the painting idol of the hour, as were Manet and Monet a decade ago. These fluctuations must not distract us, because Cabanel, Bouguereau and Henner, too, were idolised once upon a time, and served to make a millionaire's holiday by hanging in his marble bathroom. It is the undeniable truth that Cézanne has become a tower of strength in the eyes of the younger generation of artists which intrigues critical fancy. Sincerity is strength; Cézanne is sincere to the core; but even stark sincerity does not necessarily imply the putting forth of masterpieces. Before he attained his original, synthetic power he patiently studied Delacroix, Courbet, and [Pg 99] several others. He achieved at times the foundational structure of Courbet, but his pictures, so say his enemies, are sans composition, sans linear pattern, sans personal charm. But "Popularity is for dolls," cried Emerson. Cézanne's was a twilight soul. And a humourless one. His early modelling in paint was quasi-structural. Always the architectural sense, though his rhythms are elliptical at times and he betrays a predilection for the asymmetrical. Nevertheless, a man who has given to an art in two dimensions the illusion of a third; tactile values are here raised to the nth degree. His colour is personal and rhythmic. Huysmans was clairvoyant when, nearly a half-century ago, he spoke of Cézanne's work as containing the prodromes of a new art. He was absorbed in the handling of his material, not in the lyric, dramatic, anecdotic, or rhetorical elements. His portraits are vital and charged with character. And he often thinks profoundly on unimportant matters. When you are young your foreground is huddled: it is the desire for more space that begets revolutionists; not unlike a big man elbowing his way in a crowd. Laudable then are all these sporadic outbursts; and while a creative talent may remain provincial, even parochial, as was the case with Cézanne, a critic must be cosmopolitan or nothing. An artist may stay rooted in his own bailiwick his life long, yet paint like an angel; but a provincial critic is [Pg 100] a contradiction in terms. He reminds one of a razor so dull that it can't cut butter. Let us therefore be hospitable to new ideas; even Cabanel has his good points. The tang of the town is not in Cézanne's portraits of places. His leaden landscapes do not arouse to spontaneous activity a jaded retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. As for the groups of bathing women, how they must wound the sensibility of George Moore, Professor of Energy at the University of Erotica. There is no sex appeal. Merely women in their natural pelt. It is related of the Empress Eugénie that in front of Courbet's Les Baigneuses (Salon, 1853) she asked: "Est-ce aussi une percheronne?" Of the heavy-flanked Percheron breed of horse are the ladies on the canvases of Cézanne. The remark of the Empress appealed to the truculent vanity of Courbet. It might not have pleased Cézanne. With beauty, academic or operatic, he had no traffic. If you don't care for his graceless nudes you may console yourself that there is no disputing tastes—with the tasteless. They are uglier than the females of Degas, and twice as truthful. We have seen some of his still-life pieces so acid in tonal quality as to suggest that divine dissonance produced on the palate by a slightly stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a score by Stravinski. But what thrice-subtle sonorities, what colour chords are in his [Pg 101] best work. I once wrote in the Promenades of an Impressionist that his fruits and vegetables savour of the earth. Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; when he painted an onion it revealed a certain grace. Vollon would have dramatised it. When Cézanne painted one you smelt it. A feeble witticism, to be sure, but it registered the reaction on the sounding-board of my sensibility. The supreme technical qualities in Cézanne are volume, ponderability, and an entrancing colour scheme. What's the use of asking whether he is a "sound" draughtsman? He is a master of edges and a magician of tonalities. Huysmans spoke of his defective eyesight; but disease boasts its discoveries, as well as health. The abnormal vision of Cézanne gave him glimpses of a "reality" denied to other painters. He advised Emile Bernard to look for the contrasts and correspondences of tones. He practised what he preached. No painter was so little affected by personal moods, by those variations of temperament dear to the artist. Had Cézanne the "temperament" that he was always talking about? If so it was not decorative in the accepted sense. An unwearying experimenter, he seldom "finished" a picture. His morose landscapes were usually painted from one scene near his home at Aix. I visited the spot. The pictures do not resemble it; which simply means that Cézanne had the vision and I had not. A few themes with polyphonic [Pg 102] variations filled his simple life. Art submerged by the apparatus. And he had the centripetal, not the centrifugal temperament. In his rigid, intense ignorance there was no room for climate, personal charm, not even for sunshine. Think of the blazing blue sky and sun of Provence; the romantic, semitropical riot of its vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and search for this mellow richness and misty golden air in the pictures of our master. You won't find them, though a mystic light permeates the entire series. The sallow-sublime. He did not paint portraits of Provence, as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan, or Bizet in L'Arlésienne. He sought for profounder meanings. The superficial, the facile, the staccato, and the brilliant repelled him. Not that he was an "abstract" painter—as the jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a legitimate trompe-l'œil on the optic nerve. His is not a pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow, patient delineation by a geologist of art of a certain hill on old Mother Earth, shamelessly exposing her bare torso, bald rocky pate, and gravelled feet. The illusion is not to be escaped. As drab as the orchestration of Brahms, and as austere in linear economy; and as analytical as Stendhal or Ibsen, Cézanne never becomes truly lyrical except in his still-life. Upon an apple he lavishes his palette of smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion for him is as beautiful as a naked woman. [Pg 103] And he possesses a positive genius for the tasteless. The chiefest misconception of Cézanne is that of the theoretical fanatics who not only proclaim him their chief of school, which may be true, but also declare him to be the greatest painter that ever wielded a brush since the Byzantines. The nervous, shrinking man I saw at Paris would have been astounded at some of the things printed since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of the official Salon (as did Zola for a seat in the Academy) he disliked notoriety. He loved work; above all, solitude. He took with him a fresh batch of canvases every morning and trudged to his pet landscapes, the Motive he called it, and it was there that he slaved away with technical heroism, though he didn't kill himself with his labours as some of his fervent disciples have asserted. He died of unromantic diabetes. When I first saw him he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial notary, A rare impersonality, I should say. There is a lot of inutile talk about "significant form" by propagandists of the New Æsthetic. As if form had not always been significant. No one can deny Cézanne's preoccupation with form; nor Courbet's either. Consider the Ornans landscapes, with their sombre flux of forest, by the crassest realist among French painters (he seems hopelessly [Pg 104] romantic to our sharper and more petulant modern mode of envisaging the world); there is "significant form," and a solid structural sense. But Cézanne quite o'ercrows Courbet in his feeling for the massive. Sometimes you can't see the ribs because of the skeleton. Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognise a master. The limitations of Paul Cézanne are patent to all. He is a profound investigator, and if he did not deem it wise to stray far from the territory he called his own then we should not complain, for therein he was monarch of all he surveyed. His non-conformism defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding Johann Sebastian Bach following Richard Strauss! The idea seems monstrous. Yet this, figuratively speaking, constitutes the case of Cézanne. He arrived after the classic, romantic, impressionistic, symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made, like Puvis, but one born to a crabbed simplicity. His veiled, cool harmonies sometimes recall the throb of a deep-bass organ-pipe. Oppositional splendour is there, and the stained radiance of a Bachian chorale. The music flows as if from a secret spring. What poet asked: "When we drive out from the cloud of steam majestical white horses, are we greater than the first men, who led black ones by the mane?" Why can't we be truly catholic in our taste? The heaven of art contains many mansions, and the rainbow more [Pg 105] colours than one. Paul Cézanne will be remembered as a painter who respected his material, and as a painter, pure and complex. No man who wields a brush need wish a more enduring epitaph. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 106] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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