perfect artist; he is the perfect antithesis
of the professional picture-maker, or poem-maker, or music-maker. He
created forms because only by so doing could he accomplish the end of
his existence--the expression of his sense of the significance of form.
When we are talking about aesthetics, very properly we brush all this
aside, and consider only the object and its emotional effect on us; but
when we are trying to explain the emotional effectiveness of pictures we
turn naturally to the minds of the men who made them, and find in the
story of Cezanne an inexhaustible spring of suggestion. His life was a
constant effort to create forms that would express what he felt in the
moment of inspiration. The notion of uninspired art, of a formula for
making pictures, would have appeared to him preposterous. The real
business of his life was not to make pictures, but to work out his own
salvation. Fortunately for us he could only do this by painting. Any two
pictures by Cezanne are bound to differ profoundly. He never dreamed of
repeating himself. He could not stand still. That is why a whole
generation of otherwise dissimilar artists have drawn inspiration from
his work. That is why it implies no disparagement of any living artist
when I say that the prime characteristic of the new movement is its
derivation from Cezanne.

The world into which Cezanne tumbled was a world still agitated by the
quarrels of Romantics and Realists. The quarrel between Romance and
Realism is the quarrel of people who cannot agree as to whether the
history of Spain or the number of pips is the more important thing about
an orange. The Romantics and Realists were deaf men coming to blows
about the squeak of a bat. The instinct of a Romantic invited to say
what he felt about anything was to recall its associations. A rose, for
instance, made him think of old gardens and young ladies and Edmund
Waller and sundials, and a thousand quaint and gracious things that, at
one time or another, had befallen him or someone else. A rose touched
life at a hundred pretty points. A rose was interesting because it had a
past. "Bosh," said the Realist, "I will tell you what a rose is; that is
to say, I will give you a detailed account of the properties of _Rosa
setigera_, not forgetting to mention the urn-shaped calyx-tube, the five
imbricated lobes, or the open corolla of five obovate petals." To a
Cezanne one account would appear as irrelevant as the other, since both