Matisse
(Photo: E. Druet)]
CézanneI
It was the opinion of Degas that “le peintre en général est bête,” and most people seem to think that Cézanne was no exception to the rule. Before agreeing, I should want to know what precisely they understood by the word “bête.” Cézanne was silly certainly, but he was not stupid: he was limited and absurd, but not dull; his opinions for the most part were conventional, but his intelligence was not common; and his character was as obviously that of a man of genius as the most ardent hero-worshipper could desire.
Cézanne was a great character. It is a mistake to suppose that great characters are always agreeable ones. Few people, I imagine, found Cézanne agreeable; yet painters, one would suppose, were eager to meet him that they might hear what he had to say about painting. Cézanne’s ideas on painting are not like ideas at all: they are like sensations; they have the force of sensations. They seem to give the sense of what was in his mind by a method more direct than the ordinary intellectual one. His meaning reaches us, not in a series of pellets, but in a block. These sayings of his remind one oddly of his art; and some of his comments on life are hardly less forcible and to the point. This, for instance, provoked by Zola’s “L’Oeuvre,” is something more than a professional opinion:
On ne peut pas exiger d’un homme qui ne sait pas, qu’il dise des choses raisonnables sur l’art de peindre; mais, N. de D—— et Cézanne se mit à taper comme un sourd sur sa table—comment peut-il oser dire qu’un peintre se tue parce qu’il a fait un mauvais tableau? Quand un tableau n’est pas réalisé, on le f... au feu, et on en recommence un autre!
Réalisé—Cézanne’s incessant complaint that “he was unable to realize” has been taken by many stupid people to imply that Cézanne was conscious in himself of some peculiar and slightly humiliating inhibition from which his fellows were free; and even M. Vollard has thought it necessary to be continually apologizing for and explaining away the phrase, which, moreover, he never does explain. Yet the explanation is as simple as can be. Genius of the very highest order never, probably, succeeds in completely realizing its conceptions, because its conceptions are unrealizable. When Cézanne envied M. Bouguereau his power of realization he was perfectly sincere and perfectly sensible. A Bouguereau can realize completely the little nasty things that are in his mind: if a Cézanne, a Shakespeare, or an Æschylus could realize as completely all that was in his the human race would think more of itself than it does. Cézanne’s consciousness of the impossibility of realizing completely his conceptions—his consciousness, rather, that he had not completely realized them—made him regard all his pictures as unfinished. Some day, he thought—or liked to believe—he would push them a little further. His habit of destroying his own works, however, had nothing to do with any sense of failure or incapacity. It was simply a manifestation of rage and a means of appeasement. Some people like cups and saucers: Cézanne preferred oil-paintings, and his own were always to hand. A word of commendation for “les professeurs” (“qui n’ont rien dans le ven_._._n_._._tr_._._re—les salauds—les châtrés—les j_._f_._._._s”) or the least denigration of Chardin or Delacroix was sure to cost a still-life or a water-colour at any rate.
It is surprising that M. Vollard should not have made this more clear, for he certainly understood the genius and character of Cézanne. His book is an amazingly vivid presentment of both; and to have made such a book out of the life of a man whose whole life went into the art of painting is a remarkable feat. For Cézanne poured all his prodigious energy and genius into a funnel that ended in the point of his brush. He was a painter if ever there was one, and he was nothing else; he had no notion of being anything else. There is enough in Paris, one would have supposed, to attract from himself for a moment the attention of the most preoccupied and self-absorbed of men. When Cézanne lived in Paris he rose early, painted as long as there was light to paint by, and went to bed immediately after dinner. The time during which he was not painting he seems to have spent in wondering whether the light would be satisfactory (“gris clair”) next day. Cézanne in Paris, like the peasant in the country, spent most of his spare time thinking about the weather.
Comme il se couchait de très bonne heure, il lui arrivait de s’éveiller au milieu de la nuit. Hanté par son idée fixe, il ouvrait la fenêtre. Une fois rassuré, avant de regagner son lit il allait, une bougie à la main, revoir l’étude qui était en train. Si l’impression était bonne, il réveillait sa femme pour lui faire partager sa satisfaction. Et pour la dédommager de ce dérangement, il l’invitait à faire une partie de dames.
All of Cézanne went into his painting; only now and then a drop escaped that voracious funnel and splashed on to life. It is by collecting and arranging these odd drops and splashes that M. Vollard has managed to construct his lively picture of this extraordinary character. It is because his task must have been so abominably exacting—the task of catching the artist outside his work—that we easily forgive him a few lapses from good sense when he is not talking about his hero. It is annoying, nevertheless, to hear quite so much of the stupid and insensitive people who attacked and insulted Cézanne. M. Vollard never tires of telling us about those who hid their Cézannes or threw them out of window, or sold them for next to nothing and would now give their eyes to get them back; of those who jeered at Cézanne and would not hang his pictures at exhibitions, refusing him that public recognition he was human enough to covet—in a word, of the now discomfited and penitent majority. I had thoughts once of printing a selection from the press-cuttings that reached us at the Grafton Galleries during the first Post-Impressionist exhibition. It would have revealed our leading critics and experts, our professors and directors, our connoisseurs, our more cultivated dealers and our most popular painters vying with each other in heaping abuse and ridicule on the heads of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. The project is abandoned. That sort of thing I perceive becomes a bore. And I only wish M. Vollard had perceived it when he was writing about Zola. Zola failed to appreciate Cézanne, of course. Zola was an ordinary middle-class man: he was vain, vulgar, petty; he longed for the consideration of people like himself, and was therefore ostentatious; he had a passion for money and notoriety; he wanted to be thought not only clever but good; he preached, he deprecated, he took a moral standpoint and judged by results; and his taste was execrable. We meet people of Zola’s sort every day in third-class railway carriages and first, on the tops of omnibuses and in Chelsea drawing-rooms, at the music-hall, at the opera, at classical concerts, and in Bond Street galleries. We take them for granted and are perfectly civil to them. So why, because he happened to have an astonishing gift of statement and rapid generalization, should Zola be treated as though he were a monster? Though Diggle, the billiards champion, care little or nothing for poetry, he may have an excellent heart, as well as a hand far surpassing in dexterity that of our most accomplished portrait-painters. No one dreams of reviling him.
Let us be equally just to Zola; let us notice, too, how amusingly he sets off Cézanne. Both were greatly gifted men: neither was the man of intelligence and talent, the brilliant man with the discursive intellect, who carries his gift about with him, takes it out when and where he pleases, and applies it where and how he likes. Zola, when he was not using his gift, posed as an artist, a saint, or simply “a great man”; but he never contrived to be anything but a bourgeois—a “sale bourgeois,” according to Cézanne. Cézanne was all gift: seen as anything but a painter he looked like a fool. At Aix he tried to pass for a respectable rentier; he found no difficulty in being silly, but he could not achieve the necessary commonplaceness. He could not be vulgar. He was always an artist.
Instead of telling us so much about Zola and tutti quanti M. Vollard might have told us more about Cézanne’s artistic development. What, for instance, is the history of his relations with Impressionism? The matter is to me far from clear. Cézanne began his artistic life amongst the Impressionists, he was reckoned a disciple of Pissarro; yet it is plain from his early work that he never swallowed much of the doctrine. Gradually he came to think that the Impressionists were on the wrong tack, that their work was flimsy and their theory misleading, that they failed to “realize.” He dreamed of combining their delicate vision, their exquisite sensation, with a more positive and elaborate statement. He wanted to make of Impressionism “quelque chose de solide et de durable comme l’art des Musées.” He succeeded. But at what moment did his dissent become acute, and to what extent was he aware from the first of its existence? Towards the end of his life he took to scolding the Impressionists, but one fancies that he was never very willing that anyone else should abuse them. “Regardez,” said he to a young painter who had caught him coming out of church one stormy Sunday morning, as he pointed to a puddle touched by a sudden ray of sunlight, “comment voulez-vous rendre cela? Il faut se méfier, je vous le dis, des Impressionnistes_..._Tout de même, ils voient juste!”
The critical moment in Cézanne’s life—if in such a life one moment may without impertinence be thought more critical than another—must have come somewhere about 1870. M. Vollard once asked him what he did during the war. “Ecoutez un peu, monsieur Vollard! Pendant la guerre j’ai beaucoup travaillé sur le motif à l’Estaque.” M. Vollard is too good a patriot to add that during the war he also went into hiding, having been called up for military service. Cézanne, I am sorry to say, was an insoumis—a deserter. He seems to have supposed that he had something more important to do than to get himself killed for his country. It was not only in art that Cézanne gave proof of a surprisingly sure sense of values. Some fulsome journalist, wishing to flatter the old man after he had become famous, represented him hugging a tree and, with tears in his eyes, crying: “Comme je voudrais, celui-là, le transporter sur ma toile!” For a moment Cézanne contemplated the picture in terrified amazement, then exclaimed: “Dites, monsieur Vollard, c’est effrayant, la vie!” Useless to blame the particular imbecile: it was the world in which such things were possible that filled him with dismay. I stretch my hand towards a copy of the Burlington Magazine and come plumb on the following by the present Director of the Tate Gallery:
The truth is that the ecstasy of art and good actions are closely interrelated, the one leading to the other in endless succession or possibly even progression.
“Dites, monsieur Vollard, c’est effrayant, la vie!”J
Notes
I Paul Cézanne. Par Ambroise Vollard. (Paris: Crès. 4fr. 75.)
J Since writing these words I learn that the director of the Tate Gallery has been unable to find, in his series of vast rooms, space for two small and fine works by Cézanne. It is some consolation to know that he has found space for more than twenty by Professor Tonks.