of Cezanne 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 Cezanne. M. Vollard never
tires of telling us about those who hid their Cezannes 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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne, 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 Cezanne, 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