t of his landscapes and still-lifes, and in some of the
figure studies also. The endeavor to eliminate all aspects of
extraneous conception by dismissing the quality of literature, of
poetry and romance from painting, was the exact characteristic which
made him what he is for us today, the pioneer in the field of modern
art. It was significant enough when he once said to Renoir, that it
took him twenty years to find out that painting was not sculpture.
Those earlier and heavy impasto studies of his are the evidence of
this worthy deduction. It was significant, too, when he said that
Gaugin was but "a flea on his back," and that "he does nothing but
paint Chinese images."

The phrase that brings these two strikingly original personages in art
together is the one of Cezanne: "I remain the primitive of the way I
have discovered"; and that of Whitman, which comes if I am not
mistaken from Democratic Vistas, though it may be from elsewhere in
Whitman's prose, running chiefly: "I only wish to indicate the way for
the innumerable poets that are to come after me," etc., and "I warn
you this is not a book, this is a man." These two geniuses are both of
one piece as to their esthetic intention, despite the great gulf that
lies between their concepts of, and their attitudes toward life. For
the one, life was a something to stay close to always, for the other,
it was something to be afraid of to an almost abnormal degree; Whitman
and his door never closed, Cezanne and his door seldom or never
opened, indeed, were heavily padlocked against the intrusion of the
imaginary outsider. These are the geniuses who have done most for
these two arts of the present time, it is Whitman and Cezanne who have
clarified the sleeping eye and withheld it from being totally blinded,
from the onslaughts of jaded tradition.

There were in Cezanne the requisite gifts for selection, and for
discarding all useless encumbrances, there was in him the great desire
for purification, or of seeing the superb fact in terms of itself,
majestically; and if not always serenely, serenity was nevertheless
his passionate longing. He saw what there was for him in those old and
accepted masters who meant most to him, and he saw also what there was
for him in that newest of old masters, which was also in its way the
assumed discovery of our time, he saw the relativity of Greco's
beautiful art to the art of his own making. He saw that here was a
possible and applicable a