he is a very great impressionist—­a neo-impressionist, or expressionist if you like—­but I should say an impressionist much influenced and much to the good, as was Gauguin, by acquaintance with Cezanne in his last and most instructive phase.  Indeed, it is clear that Gauguin and Van Gogh would not have come near achieving what they did achieve—­achieved, mind you, as genuine painters—­had they not been amongst the first to realize and make use of that bewildering revelation which is the art of Cezanne.

Of that art I am not here to speak; I am concerned only with its influence.  Taking the thing at its roughest and simplest, one may say that the influence of Cezanne during the last seventeen years has manifested itself most obviously in two characteristics—­Directness and what is called Distortion.  Cezanne was direct because he set himself a task which admitted of no adscititious flourishes—­the creation of form which should be entirely self-supporting and intrinsically significant, la possession de la forme as his descendants call it now.  To this great end all means were good:  all that was not a means to this end was superfluous.  To achieve it he was prepared to play the oddest tricks with natural forms—­to distort.  All great artists have distorted; Cezanne was peculiar only in doing so more consciously and thoroughly than most.  What is important in his art is, of course, the beauty of his conceptions and his power in pursuit:  indifference to verisimilitude is but the outward and visible sign of this inward and spiritual grace.  For some, however, though not for most of his followers his distortion had an importance of its own.

To the young painters of 1904, or thereabouts, Cezanne came as the liberator:  he it was who had freed painting from a mass of conventions which, useful once, had grown old and stiff and were now no more than so many impediments to expression.  To most of them his chief importance—­as an influence, of course—­was that he had removed all unnecessary barriers between what they felt and its realization in form.  It was his directness that was thrilling.  But to an important minority the distortions and simplifications—­the reduction of natural forms to spheres, cylinders, cones, etc.—­which Cezanne had used as means were held to be in themselves of consequence because capable of fruitful development.  From them it was found possible to deduce a theory of art—­a complete aesthetic even.  Put on a fresh track by Cezanne’s practice, a group of gifted and thoughtful painters began to speculate on the nature of form and its appeal to the aesthetic sense, and not to speculate only, but to materialize their speculations.  The greatest of them, Picasso, invented Cubism.  If I call these artists who forged themselves a theory of form and used it as a means of expression Doctrinaires it is because to me that name bears no disparaging implication and seems to indicate well enough what I take to be their one common characteristic: