Called a communard in 1874, Cezanne was saluted with the title of anarchist in 1904, when his vogue had begun; these titles being a species of official nomenclature for all rebels.  Thiers, once President of the French Republic, made a bon mot when he exclaimed:  “A Romantic—­that is to say, Communist!” During his entire career this mild, reserved gentleman from Aix came under the ban of the critics and the authorities, for he had shouldered his musket in 1871, as did Manet, as did Bazille,—­who, like Henri Regnault, was killed in a skirmish.

His most virulent enemies were forced to admit that Edouard Manet had a certain facility with the brush; his quality and beauty of sheer paint could not be winked away even by Albert Wolff.  But to Cezanne there was no quarter shown.  He was called the “Ape of Manet”; he was hissed, cursed, abused; his canvases were spat upon, and as late as 1902, when M. Roujon, the Director of the Beaux-Arts, was asked by Octave Mirbeau to decorate Cezanne, he nearly fainted from astonishment.  Cezanne!  That barbarian!  The amiable director suggested instead the name of Claude Monet.  Time had enjoyed its little whirligig with that great painter of vibrating light and water, but Monet blandly refused the long-protracted honour.  Another anecdote is related by M. Duret.  William II of Germany in 1899 wished to examine with his own eyes, trained by the black, muddy painting of Germany, the canvases of Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Cezanne, and Manet, acquired by Director Tschudi for the Berlin National Gallery.  He saw them all except the Cezanne.  Herr Tschudi feared that the Parisian fat would be in the imperial fire if the Cezanne picture appeared.  So he hid it.  As it was his Majesty nodded in emphatic disapproval of the imported purchases.  If he had viewed the Cezanne!

At first blush, for those whose schooling has been academic, the Cezanne productions are shocking.  Yet his is a personal vision, though a heavy one.  He has not a facile brush; he is not a great painter; he lacks imagination, invention, fantasy; but his palette is his own.  He is a master of gray tones, and his scale is, as Duret justly observes, a very intense one.  He avoids the anecdote, historic or domestic.  He detests design, prearranged composition.  His studio is an open field, light the chief actor of his palette.  He is never conventionally decorative unless you can call his own particular scheme decorative.  He paints what he sees without flattery, without flinching from any ugliness.  Compared with him Courbet is as sensuous as Correggio.  He does not seek for the correspondences of light with surrounding objects or the atmosphere in which Eugene Carriere bathes his portraits, Rodin his marbles.  The Cezanne picture does not modulate, does not flow; is too often hard, though always veracious—­Cezannes veracity, be it understood.  But it is an inescapable veracity.  There is, too, great vitality and a peculiar reserved passion, like that of a Delacroix a ribbers, and in his still-life he is as great even as Manet.