It is surprising that M. Vollard should not have made this more clear, for he certainly understood the genius and character of Cezanne.  His book is an amazingly vivid presentment of both; and to have made such a book out of the life of a man whose whole life went into the art of painting is a remarkable feat.  For Cezanne poured all his prodigious energy and genius into a funnel that ended in the point of his brush.  He was a painter if ever there was one, and he was nothing else; he had no notion of being anything else.  There is enough in Paris, one would have supposed, to attract from himself for a moment the attention of the most preoccupied and self-absorbed of men.  When Cezanne lived in Paris he rose early, painted as long as there was light to paint by, and went to bed immediately after dinner.  The time during which he was not painting he seems to have spent in wondering whether the light would be satisfactory ("gris clair”) next day.  Cezanne in Paris, like the peasant in the country, spent most of his spare time thinking about the weather.

Comme il se couchait de tres bonne heure, il lui arrivait de s’eveiller au milieu de la nuit.  Hante par son idee fixe, il ouvrait la fenetre.  Une fois rassure, avant de regagner son lit il allait, une bougie a la main, revoir l’etude qui etait en train.  Si l’impression etait bonne, il reveillait sa femme pour lui faire partager sa satisfaction.  Et pour la dedommager de ce derangement, il l’invitait a faire une partie de dames.

All of Cezanne went into his painting; only now and then a drop escaped that voracious funnel and splashed on to life.  It is by collecting and arranging these odd drops and splashes that M. Vollard has managed to construct his lively picture of this extraordinary character.  It is because his task must have been so abominably exacting—­the task of catching the artist outside his work—­that we easily forgive him a few lapses from good sense when he is not talking about his hero.  It is annoying, nevertheless, to hear quite so much of the stupid and insensitive people who attacked and insulted Cezanne.  M. Vollard never tires of telling us about those who hid their Cezannes or threw them out of window, or sold them for next to nothing and would now give their eyes to get them back; of those who jeered at Cezanne and would not hang his pictures at exhibitions, refusing him that public recognition he was human enough to covet—­in a word, of the now discomfited and penitent majority.  I had thoughts once of printing a selection from the press-cuttings that reached us at the Grafton Galleries during the first Post-Impressionist exhibition.  It would have revealed our leading critics and experts, our professors and directors, our connoisseurs, our more cultivated dealers and our most popular painters vying with each other in heaping abuse and ridicule on the heads of Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh.  The project is abandoned.  That sort of thing I perceive becomes a bore.