Consider, too, that a great emotional renaissance must be preceded by an intellectual, destructive movement.  To that how shall we assign a starting-point?  It could be argued, I suppose, that it began with Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists.  Having gone so far back, the historian would find cause for going further still.  How could he justify any frontier?  Every living organism is said to carry in itself the germ of its own decay, and perhaps a civilisation is no sooner alive than it begins to contrive its end.  Gradually the symptoms of disease become apparent to acute physicians who state the effect without perceiving the cause.  Be it so; circular fatalism is as cheerful as it is sad.  If ill must follow good, good must follow ill.  In any case, I have said enough to show that if Europe be again at the head of a pass, if we are about to take the first step along a new slope, the historians of the new age will have plenty to quarrel about.

It may be because the nineteenth century was preparing Europe for a new epoch, that it understood better its destructive critics than its constructive artists.  At any rate before that century ended it had produced one of the great constructive artists of the world, and overlooked him.  Whether or no he marks the beginning of a slope, Cezanne certainly marks the beginning of a movement the main characteristics of which it will be my business to describe.  For, though there is some absurdity in distinguishing one artistic movement from another, since all works of art, to whatever age they belong, are essentially the same; yet these superficial differences which are the characteristics of a movement have an importance beyond that dubious one of assisting historians.  The particular methods of creating form, and the particular kinds of form affected by the artists of one generation, have an important bearing on the art of the next.  For whereas the methods and forms of one may admit of almost infinite development, the methods and forms of another may admit of nothing but imitation.  For instance, the fifteenth century movement that began with Masaccio, Uccello, and Castagno opened up a rich vein of rather inferior ore; whereas the school of Raffael was a blind alley.  Cezanne discovered methods and forms which have revealed a vista of possibilities to the end of which no man can see; on the instrument that he invented thousands of artists yet unborn may play their own tunes.

What the future will owe to Cezanne we cannot guess:  what contemporary art owes to him it would be hard to compute.  Without him the artists of genius and talent who to-day delight us with the significance and originality of their work might have remained port-bound for ever, ill-discerning their objective, wanting chart, rudder, and compass.  Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.  In 1839 he was born at Aix-en-Provence, and for forty years he painted patiently in the manner of his master