have depended more on the model.  Every picture carried him a little further towards his goal—­complete expression; and because it was not the making of pictures but the expression of his sense of the significance of form that he cared about, he lost interest in his work so soon as he had made it express as much as he had grasped.  His own pictures were for Cezanne nothing but rungs in a ladder at the top of which would be complete expression.  The whole of his later life was a climbing towards an ideal.  For him every picture was a means, a step, a stick, a hold, a stepping-stone—­something he was ready to discard as soon as it had served his purpose.  He had no use for his own pictures.  To him they were experiments.  He tossed them into bushes, or left them in the open fields to be stumbling-blocks for a future race of luckless critics.

Cezanne is a type of the perfect artist; he is the perfect antithesis of the professional picture-maker, or poem-maker, or music-maker.  He created forms because only by so doing could he accomplish the end of his existence—­the expression of his sense of the significance of form.  When we are talking about aesthetics, very properly we brush all this aside, and consider only the object and its emotional effect on us; but when we are trying to explain the emotional effectiveness of pictures we turn naturally to the minds of the men who made them, and find in the story of Cezanne an inexhaustible spring of suggestion.  His life was a constant effort to create forms that would express what he felt in the moment of inspiration.  The notion of uninspired art, of a formula for making pictures, would have appeared to him preposterous.  The real business of his life was not to make pictures, but to work out his own salvation.  Fortunately for us he could only do this by painting.  Any two pictures by Cezanne are bound to differ profoundly.  He never dreamed of repeating himself.  He could not stand still.  That is why a whole generation of otherwise dissimilar artists have drawn inspiration from his work.  That is why it implies no disparagement of any living artist when I say that the prime characteristic of the new movement is its derivation from Cezanne.

The world into which Cezanne tumbled was a world still agitated by the quarrels of Romantics and Realists.  The quarrel between Romance and Realism is the quarrel of people who cannot agree as to whether the history of Spain or the number of pips is the more important thing about an orange.  The Romantics and Realists were deaf men coming to blows about the squeak of a bat.  The instinct of a Romantic invited to say what he felt about anything was to recall its associations.  A rose, for instance, made him think of old gardens and young ladies and Edmund Waller and sundials, and a thousand quaint and gracious things that, at one time or another, had befallen him or someone else.  A rose touched life at a hundred pretty points.  A rose was interesting because it had a past.