him. That shows how overwhelming his influence
was. The fact that at last his admirers and disciples, no longer under
any spell or distorting sense of loyalty, recognize that there are in
painting plenty of things worth doing which he never did is all to the
good. It is now possible to criticize him seriously; and when all his
insufficiencies have been fairly shown he remains one of the very
greatest painters that ever lived. The serious criticism of Cezanne is
a landmark in the history of the movement, and still something of a
novelty; for, naturally, I reckon the vulgar vituperation with which his
work was greeted, and the faint praise with which it was subsequently
damned, as no criticism at all. The hacks and pedagogues and
middle-class metaphysicians who abused him, and only when it dawned on
them that they were making themselves silly, in the eyes of their
own flock even, took to patronizing, are forgot. They babble in the
Burlington Fine Arts Club--where nobody marks them--and have their
reward in professorships and the direction of public galleries. The
criticism that matters, of which we are beginning to hear something,
comes mostly from painters, his ardent admirers, who realize that
Cezanne attempted things which he failed to achieve and deliberately
shunned others worth achieving. Also, they realize that there is always
a danger of one good custom corrupting the world.

Cezanne is the full-stop between impressionism and the contemporary
movement. Of course there is really no such thing as a full-stop in art
any more than there is in nature. Movement grows out of movement, and
every artist is attached to the past by a thousand binders springing
from a thousand places in the great stem of tradition. But it is true
that there is hardly one modern artist of importance to whom Cezanne is
not father or grandfather, and that no other influence is comparable
with his. To be sure there is Seurat, of whom we shall hear more in the
next ten years. Although he died as long ago as 1891 his importance
has not yet been fully realized, his discoveries have not been fully
exploited, not yet has his extraordinary genius received adequate
recognition. Seurat may be the Giorgione of the movement. Working in
isolation and dying young, he is known to us only by a few pictures
which reveal unmistakeable and mysterious genius; but I should not be
surprised if from the next generation he were to receive honours equal
almost to those