blues, with variations.  “Don’t make Chinese images like Gauguin,” he said another time.  “All nature must be modelled after the sphere, cone, and cylinder; as for colour, the more the colours harmonise the more the design becomes precise.”  Never a devotee of form—­he did not draw from the model—­his philosophy can be summed up thus:  Look out for the contrasts and correspondence of tones, and the design will take care of itself.  He hated “literary” painting and art criticism.  He strongly advised Bernard to stick to his paint and let the pen alone.  The moment an artist begins to explain his work he is done for; painting is concrete, literature deals with the abstract.  He loved music, especially Wagner’s, which he did not understand, but the sound of Wagner’s name was sympathetic, and that had at first attracted him!  Pissarro he admired for his indefatigable labours.  Suffering from diabetes, which killed him, his nervous tension is excusable.  He was in reality an amiable, kind-hearted, religious man.  Above all, simple.  He sought for the simple motive in nature.  He would not paint a Christ head because he did not believe himself a worthy enough Christian.  Chardin he studied and had a theory that the big spectacles and visor which the Little Master (the Velasquez of vegetables) wore had helped his vision.  Certainly the still-life of Cezanne’s is the only modern still-life that may be compared to Chardin’s; not Manet, Vollon, Chase has excelled this humble painter of Aix.  He called the Ecoles des Beaux-Arts the “Bozards,” and reviled as farceurs the German secessionists who imitated him.  He considered Ingres, notwithstanding his science, a small painter in comparison with the Venetians and Spaniards.

A painter by compulsion, a contemplative rather than a creative temperament, a fumbler and seeker, nevertheless Paul Cezanne has formed a school, has left a considerable body of work.  His optic nerve was abnormal, he saw his planes leap or sink on his canvas; he often complained, but his patience and sincerity were undoubted.  Like his friend Zola his genius—­if genius there is in either man—­was largely a matter of protracted labour, and has it not been said that genius is a long labour?

From the sympathetic pen of Emile Bernard we learn of a character living in the real bohemia of Paris painters who might have figured in any of the novels referred to, or, better still, might have been interpreted by Victor Hugo or Ivan Turgenieff.  But the Frenchman would have made of Pere Tanguy a species of poor Myriel; the Russian would have painted him as he was, a saint in humility, springing from the soil, the friend of poor painters, a socialist in theory, but a Christian in practice.  After following the humble itinerary of his life you realise the uselessness of “literary” invention.  Here was character for a novelist to be had for the asking.  The Crainquebille of Anatole France occurs to the lover of that writer after reading Emile Bernard’s little study of Father Tanguy.