mission in painting makes it
easier for the artist, in that his mind is perforce engrossed with the
idea of simplification, directness, and an easy relationship of the
elements selected for presentation to each other.

It is the quality of "living-ness" in Cezanne that sends his art to
the heights of universality, which is another way of naming the
classical vision, or the masterly conception, and brings him together
with Whitman as much of the same piece. You get all this in all the
great masters of painting and literature, Goethe, Shakespeare, Rubens,
and the Greeks. It is the reaching out and the very mastering of life
which makes all art great, and all artists into geniuses. It is the
specializing on ideas which shuts the stream of its flow. I have felt
the same gift for life in a still-life or a landscape of Cezanne's
that I have felt in any of Whitman's best pieces. The element in
common with these two exceptional creators is liberation. They have
done more, these modern pioneers, for the liberation of the artist,
and for the "freeing" of painting and poetry than any other men of
modern time. Through them, painting and poetry have become literally
free, and through them it is that the young painters and poets have
sought new fields for self deliverance. Discipleship does not hold out
long with the truly understanding. Those who really know what
originality is are not long the slave of the power of imitation: it is
the gifted assimilator that suffers most under the spell of mastery.
Legitimate influence is a quality which all earnest creators learn to
handle at once. Both poetry and painting are, or so it seems to me,
revealing well the gift of understanding, and as a result we have a
better variety of painting and of poetry than at the first outbreak of
this so called modern esthetic epidemic.

The real younger creators are learning the difference between surface
and depth, between exterior semblances, and the underlying substances.
Both Whitman and Cezanne stand together in the name of one common
purpose, freedom from characteristics not one's own. They have taught
the creators of this time to know what classicism really is, that it
is the outline of all things that endure. They have both shown that it
is not idiosyncrasy alone which creates originality, that idiosyncrasy
is but the husk of personal penetration, that it is in no way the
constituent essential for genius. For genius is nothing but the name
for hi