Paul Cézanne (eBook)

CHAPTER 1
HIS YOUTH

He was born in Aix in 1839. At college there, he had had a good classical education. It was not that he had been an awfully diligent worker, but at that period the professors appealed oftener to the emotions of their students than to their reason. They neglected the sciences a little. They centred their attention on the dead languages, and neither Greek nor Latin was quite dead in this corner of the land of the ancients where the soil is but a thin crust over rock, where the lines of the hills cut sharply against the sky, where the cities are full of the ruins of temples, aqueducts and theatres, where the Mediterranean elements of the population have undergone but slight mingling, where the language of the common people still participates intimately in the genius and structure of the old mother-tongue—like the dwellings of the poor, which, up to the beginning of the last century had invaded the tiers of benches, the corridors and the great doorways of the arenas of Nîmes and Arles without changing their curve, their mass and their accent. Cézanne retained from his studies a special friendship for the old Latin artists who revealed to him the poetry of a world whose horizons and profiles he knew. He read them in the original. In the course of walks that he took about the countryside of Aix with his rare visitors and with friends far rarer still—those who, in Aix itself, had braved the bourgeois prejudice and the raillery of fools to have the protection and encouragement of his intellect—anything was a pretext for him to invoke Vergil or Lucretius; whether it was an encounter along the road, the sight of beasts yoked to the plough, an old wall, the crossing of a stream, a flight of pigeons or simply the intimate tone of his own heart, anything might have their participation and authority.

In his youth he was “guilty” of verse in Latin. In French, even, he composed a pagan poem, “Hercules” which Zola, if we are to believe the letters he wrote from Paris at this time, seems to have found but little to his taste. But Zola, though he had authored a book Zola, the less[1] on Cézanne that is often fine, understood him but poorly, even in the days when they loved each other like brothers. They had been in the same class at college. But more than that they had together explored the country to its horizons and likewise the world of dreams and aspiration—to the infinity of enthusiasm and desire. Nothing is more touching than this ardent friendship and communion of the two young men who were to have, indubitably, the most vivifying effect on the artists of today. There was something divine in their pagan childhood. We have all felt the passage— whether we have understood the action both have had on us—we have all felt the passage of that blast of brutal intoxication that swells in the first books of the poet: “La Fortune des Rougons,” (The Fortune of the Rougons) “La Conquete de Plassans”, (The Conquest of Plassans) “La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret,” (The Sin of Father Mouret) and in the painter’s strange canvases, blue and green, where the shudder of space and of water stirs the world and murmurs about the nude beings assembled under the boughs of trees.

Together the two would start out along the roads where the dust creaks as one treads in it. During the heat of the day, they splashed about in the river Arc, swimming, diving, rolling on the warm moss to dry themselves, diving in again, naked in the water and the sun until the air grew cool. Often, they stayed away from home for two or three days, sleeping under a shed or on the leaves in the motionless nights of summer that cool into morning. They returned with sunburnt skins, smarting feet, and red earth under their nails. In their veins beat an acrid blood. The bark of scrub oak, the bitter juice of chewed leaves, the rocky paths where they ran after the lizards, the thorns of the hedges, the brambles, the flints—all drove through their skins the pervading spirit of the poets, dead or living, whose verses they had brought with them to read to each other —at the top of their voices. They were two little black fauns, tender and wild of heart —and with never one doubt.

Cézanne struggled three years with his father, a banker, who wanted to put him into his office, made an honest attempt at studying law in Aix and finally managed to get leave to join Zola in Paris where the latter called him. No sooner was he there than he talked of returning to Provence. The brutality of the city, its fever, the indifference of its crowds to what he regarded as the essential in life, all was a shock to him, stupefied him. The contrast between his live youthfulness and his first contact with men was too strong. His terrible sensibility drew back as before a blow. He ceased showing what went on within him and giving his full soul to the friend with whom he had begun the discovery of the world. As a child he had thought of every living being as close to himself. He had opened, had expanded to all, at least he believed so. He did not yet perceive that the friend he had chosen in the rush of instinct was himself an exception. They did not know, either of them, that almost all those who dwell in cities perceive nothing of what was intoxicating for them. They did not know that they were practically the only ones to find in the murmur of leaves, the sonority of water and the vibration of insects, the sonorities and the murmurs that run, like a breeze swollen with whispering voices and with odors, from one end to the other of the verses they spoke as they walked along. They were unaware of the sincere hearts they possessed, and of the fact that the hearts of other men are not the same.

The one quickest to find it out was he who was least fitted for external strife, who belonged least to the current of the century, he who came to Paris later, who first hurtled against the incomprehension of men because he expressed himself in that language they understand least—and to all this he could not resign himself.[2] Zola, the less susceptible, the more combative, did not understand. For him his friend—that being distraught with love, stifling with compressed life, torn with the magnificent chants that every look arrested on his lips—for him the friend was fantastic, full of contradictions and shadow: “He is all of one piece, stiff and hard to the hand; nothing can bend him, nothing can wrest from him a compromise....”

Yes, —and very surely yes. The time of lyric expansion was past, the time was no longer ripe for calling aloud the witnessing of nature, for according to all the confidence one has in oneself, for believing that all of us have the disinterestedness of spirit and the desire to commune in enthusiasm that the artist has within him. The time had come to brace himself against the despairing flight of childish illusions, to cuirass his breast against the wounds inflicted by the inexhaustible misunderstanding of men, and to bare it more and still more to the balm of inner searching and the amends that hope makes. Where was he to turn, how many years was he to wait before coming wholly to understand that the more we give our respect to man, the less does he respect us; —and that we never find outside of ourselves the consolation and the support we need to keep us from weakening before the end? The young provincial, with his accent of candor, his confiding look and his unlimited capacity for giving himself to friends, frequents the Atelier Suisse, and fails at the competition for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Cezanne is surrounded by a tribe of silly daubers, young bourgeois just out of college, who have had a first- prize in drawing and now talk of art like an administrative career, of women like merchandise one buys dirt cheap in the ill-smelling lanes of a seaport. And everywhere—hostility, the indifference, which is worse, the aggressive ugliness, the immutable beatitude of those who do not understand.

However, here and there—we hear rumors. People are mentioning the name of a painter whom Baudelaire loves and whose work is refused at the Salon. Now that the crowd tolerates Delacroix— seeing that he is an academician and decorated, now that the official exhibitions refuse only the most beautiful of Courbet’s works, it is around Manet that we find the young men who are not wanted in the schools. Other desires are born, and new visions, and happily uncompromising certitudes. Literary men meet at the lectures of...