The critical moment in Cezanne’s life—­if in such a life one moment may without impertinence be thought more critical than another—­must have come somewhere about 1870.  M. Vollard once asked him what he did during the war.  “Ecoutez un peu, monsieur Vollard!  Pendant la guerre j’ai beaucoup travaille sur le motif a l’Estaque.”  M. Vollard is too good a patriot to add that during the war he also went into hiding, having been called up for military service.  Cezanne, I am sorry to say, was an insoumis—­a deserter.  He seems to have supposed that he had something more important to do than to get himself killed for his country.  It was not only in art that Cezanne gave proof of a surprisingly sure sense of values.  Some fulsome journalist, wishing to flatter the old man after he had become famous, represented him hugging a tree and, with tears in his eyes, crying:  “Comme je voudrais, celui-la, le transporter sur ma toile!” For a moment Cezanne contemplated the picture in terrified amazement, then exclaimed:  “Dites, monsieur Vollard, c’est effrayant, la vie!” Useless to blame the particular imbecile:  it was the world in which such things were possible that filled him with dismay.  I stretch my hand towards a copy of the Burlington Magazine and come plumb on the following by the present Director of the Tate Gallery: 

    The truth is that the ecstasy of art and good actions are closely
    interrelated, the one leading to the other in endless succession or
    possibly even progression.

“Dites, monsieur Vollard, c’est effrayant, la vie!” [J]

[Footnote J:  Since writing these words I learn that the director of the Tate Gallery has been unable to find, in his series of vast rooms, space for two small and fine works by Cezanne.  It is some consolation to know that he has found space for more than twenty by Professor Tonks.]

RENOIR [K]

[Footnote K:  Renoir.  Par Albert Andre.  Cres et Cie.]

Renoir is the greatest painter alive. [L] There are admirers of Matisse and admirers of Picasso who will contradict that, though the artists themselves would probably agree.  Also, there are admirers of M. Bouguereau and of Sir Marcus Stone, there are Italian Futurists and members of the New English Art Club, with whom one bandies no words.  Renoir is the greatest painter alive.

[Footnote L:  This essay was written in 1919.  He died in 1920.]

He is over forty:  to be exact, he is seventy-seven years old.  Yet, in the teeth of modern theories that have at least the air of physiological certainties, one must admit that he is still alive.  A comparison between the five-and-thirty photographs reproduced by M. Besson and those at the end of Herr Meier-Graefe’s monograph suggests that even since 1910 his art has developed.  But what is certain is that, during his last period, since 1900 that is to say, though so crippled by rheumatism that it is with agonizing difficulty he handles a brush, he has produced works that surpass even the masterpieces of his middle age.