Cezanne was a great character.  It is a mistake to suppose that great characters are always agreeable ones.  Few people, I imagine, found Cezanne agreeable; yet painters, one would suppose, were eager to meet him that they might hear what he had to say about painting.  Cezanne’s ideas on painting are not like ideas at all:  they are like sensations; they have the force of sensations.  They seem to give the sense of what was in his mind by a method more direct than the ordinary intellectual one.  His meaning reaches us, not in a series of pellets, but in a block.  These sayings of his remind one oddly of his art; and some of his comments on life are hardly less forcible and to the point.  This, for instance, provoked by Zola’s “L’Oeuvre,” is something more than a professional opinion: 

On ne peut pas exiger d’un homme qui ne sait pas, qu’il dise des choses raisonnables sur l’art de peindre; mais, N. de D——­ et Cezanne se mit a taper comme un sourd sur sa table—­comment peut-il oser dire qu’un peintre se tue parce qu’il a fait un mauvais tableau?  Quand un tableau n’est pas realise, on le f... au feu, et on en recommence un autre!

Realise—­Cezanne’s incessant complaint that “he was unable to realize” has been taken by many stupid people to imply that Cezanne was conscious in himself of some peculiar and slightly humiliating inhibition from which his fellows were free; and even M. Vollard has thought it necessary to be continually apologizing for and explaining away the phrase, which, moreover, he never does explain.  Yet the explanation is as simple as can be.  Genius of the very highest order never, probably, succeeds in completely realizing its conceptions, because its conceptions are unrealizable.  When Cezanne envied M. Bouguereau his power of realization he was perfectly sincere and perfectly sensible.  A Bouguereau can realize completely the little nasty things that are in his mind:  if a Cezanne, a Shakespeare, or an AEschylus could realize as completely all that was in his the human race would think more of itself than it does.  Cezanne’s consciousness of the impossibility of realizing completely his conceptions—­his consciousness, rather, that he had not completely realized them—­made him regard all his pictures as unfinished.  Some day, he thought—­or liked to believe—­he would push them a little further.  His habit of destroying his own works, however, had nothing to do with any sense of failure or incapacity.  It was simply a manifestation of rage and a means of appeasement.  Some people like cups and saucers:  Cezanne preferred oil-paintings, and his own were always to hand.  A word of commendation for “les professeurs” ("qui n’ont rien dans le ven_._._n_._._tr_._._re—­les salauds—­les chatres—­les j_._f_._._._s”) or the least denigration of Chardin or Delacroix was sure to cost a still-life or a water-colour at any rate.