Pissarro.  To the eyes of the world he appeared, so far as he appeared at all, a respectable, minor Impressionist, an admirer of Manet, a friend, if not a protege, of Zola, a loyal, negligible disciple.  He was on the right side, of course—­the Impressionist side, the side of the honest, disinterested artists, against the academic, literary pests.  He believed in painting.  He believed that it could be something better than an expensive substitute for photography or an accompaniment to poor poetry.  So in 1870 he was for science against sentimentality.

But science will neither make nor satisfy an artist:  and perhaps Cezanne saw what the great Impressionists could not see, that though they were still painting exquisite pictures their theories had led art into a cul de sac.  So while he was working away in his corner of Provence, shut off completely from the aestheticism of Paris, from Baudelairism and Whistlerism, Cezanne was always looking for something to replace the bad science of Claude Monet.  And somewhere about 1880 he found it.  At Aix-en-Provence came to him a revelation that has set a gulf between the nineteenth century and the twentieth:  for, gazing at the familiar landscape, Cezanne came to understand it, not as a mode of light, nor yet as a player in the game of human life, but as an end in itself and an object of intense emotion.  Every great artist has seen landscape as an end in itself—­as pure form, that is to say; Cezanne has made a generation of artists feel that compared with its significance as an end in itself all else about a landscape is negligible.  From that time forward Cezanne set himself to create forms that would express the emotion that he felt for what he had learnt to see.  Science became as irrelevant as subject.  Everything can be seen as pure form, and behind pure form lurks the mysterious significance that thrills to ecstasy.  The rest of Cezanne’s life is a continuous effort to capture and express the significance of form.

I have tried to say in another place that there are more roads than one by which a man may come at reality.  Some artists seem to have come at it by sheer force of imagination, unaided by anything without them; they have needed no material ladder to help them out of matter.  They have spoken with reality as mind to mind, and have passed on the message in forms which owe nothing but bare existence to the physical universe.  Of this race are the best musicians and architects; of this race is not Cezanne.  He travelled towards reality along the traditional road of European painting.  It was in what he saw that he discovered a sublime architecture haunted by that Universal which informs every Particular.  He pushed further and further towards a complete revelation of the significance of form, but he needed something concrete as a point of departure.  It was because Cezanne could come at reality only through what he saw that he never invented purely abstract forms.  Few great artists