s seen landscape as
an end in itself--as pure form, that is to say; Cezanne has made a
generation of artists feel that compared with its significance as an end
in itself all else about a landscape is negligible. From that time
forward Cezanne set himself to create forms that would express the
emotion that he felt for what he had learnt to see. Science became as
irrelevant as subject. Everything can be seen as pure form, and behind
pure form lurks the mysterious significance that thrills to ecstasy. The
rest of Cezanne's life is a continuous effort to capture and express the
significance of form.

I have tried to say in another place that there are more roads than one
by which a man may come at reality. Some artists seem to have come at it
by sheer force of imagination, unaided by anything without them; they
have needed no material ladder to help them out of matter. They have
spoken with reality as mind to mind, and have passed on the message in
forms which owe nothing but bare existence to the physical universe. Of
this race are the best musicians and architects; of this race is not
Cezanne. He travelled towards reality along the traditional road of
European painting. It was in what he saw that he discovered a sublime
architecture haunted by that Universal which informs every Particular.
He pushed further and further towards a complete revelation of the
significance of form, but he needed something concrete as a point of
departure. It was because Cezanne could come at reality only through
what he saw that he never invented purely abstract forms. Few great
artists have depended more on the model. Every picture carried him a
little further towards his goal--complete expression; and because it was
not the making of pictures but the expression of his sense of the
significance of form that he cared about, he lost interest in his work
so soon as he had made it express as much as he had grasped. His own
pictures were for Cezanne nothing but rungs in a ladder at the top of
which would be complete expression. The whole of his later life was a
climbing towards an ideal. For him every picture was a means, a step, a
stick, a hold, a stepping-stone--something he was ready to discard as
soon as it had served his purpose. He had no use for his own pictures.
To him they were experiments. He tossed them into bushes, or left them
in the open fields to be stumbling-blocks for a future race of luckless
critics.

Cezanne is a type of the