If riotous energy is, as I have said, the chief note of many of these hot, hasty, and often clever pictures, it must be sadly stated that of genuine originality there are few traces.  To the very masters they pretend to revile they owe everything.  In vain one looks for a tradition older than Courbet; a few have attempted to stammer in the suave speech of Corot and the men of Fontainebleau; but 1863, the year of the Salon des Refuses, is really the year of their artistic ancestor’s birth.  The classicism of Lebrun, David, Ingres, Prudhon; the romanticism of Gericault, Delacroix, Decamps; the tender poetry of those true Waldmenschen, Millet, Dupre, Diaz, Daubigny, or of that wild heir of Giorgione and Tiepolo, the marvellous colour virtuoso who “painted music,” Monticelli—­all these men might never have been born except for their possible impact upon the so-called “Batignolles” school.  Alas! such ingratitude must rankle.  To see the major portion of this band of young painters, with talent in plenty, occupying itself in a frantic burlesque of second-hand Cezannes, with here and there a shallow Monet, a faded Renoir, an affected Degas, or an impertinent Gauguin, must be mortifying to the older men.

And now we reach the holy precincts.  If ardent youths sneered at the lyric ecstasy of Renoir, at the severe restraint of Chavannes, at the poetic mystery of Carriere, their lips were hushed as they tiptoed into the Salle Cezanne.  Sacred ground, indeed, we trod as we gazed and wondered before these crude, violent, sincere, ugly, and bizarre canvases.  Here was the very hub of the Independents’ universe.  Here the results of a hard-labouring painter, without taste, without the faculty of selection, without vision, culture—­one is tempted to add, intellect—­who with dogged persistency has painted in the face of mockery, painted portraits, landscapes, flowers, houses, figures, painted everything, painted himself.  And what paint!  Stubborn, with an instinctive hatred of academic poses, of the atmosphere of the studio, of the hired model, of “literary,” or of mere digital cleverness, Cezanne has dropped out of his scheme harmony, melody, beauty—­classic, romantic, symbolic, what you will!—­and doggedly represented the ugliness of things.  But there is a brutal strength, a tang of the soil that is bitter, and also strangely invigorating, after the false, perfumed boudoir art of so many of his contemporaries.

Think of Bouguereau and you have his antithesis in Cezanne—­Cezanne whose stark figures of bathers, male and female, evoke a shuddering sense of the bestial.  Not that there is offence intended in his badly huddled nudes; he only delineates in simple, naked fashion the horrors of some undressed humans.  His landscapes are primitive though suffused by perceptible atmosphere; while the rough architecture, shambling figures, harsh colouring do not quite destroy the impression of general vitality.  You could not say with Walt Whitman that his stunted trees were