And I only wish M. Vollard had perceived it when he was writing about Zola.  Zola failed to appreciate Cezanne, of course.  Zola was an ordinary middle-class man:  he was vain, vulgar, petty; he longed for the consideration of people like himself, and was therefore ostentatious; he had a passion for money and notoriety; he wanted to be thought not only clever but good; he preached, he deprecated, he took a moral standpoint and judged by results; and his taste was execrable.  We meet people of Zola’s sort every day in third-class railway carriages and first, on the tops of omnibuses and in Chelsea drawing-rooms, at the music-hall, at the opera, at classical concerts, and in Bond Street galleries.  We take them for granted and are perfectly civil to them.  So why, because he happened to have an astonishing gift of statement and rapid generalization, should Zola be treated as though he were a monster?  Though Diggle, the billiards champion, care little or nothing for poetry, he may have an excellent heart, as well as a hand far surpassing in dexterity that of our most accomplished portrait-painters.  No one dreams of reviling him.

Let us be equally just to Zola; let us notice, too, how amusingly he sets off Cezanne.  Both were greatly gifted men:  neither was the man of intelligence and talent, the brilliant man with the discursive intellect, who carries his gift about with him, takes it out when and where he pleases, and applies it where and how he likes.  Zola, when he was not using his gift, posed as an artist, a saint, or simply “a great man”; but he never contrived to be anything but a bourgeois—­a “sale bourgeois,” according to Cezanne.  Cezanne was all gift:  seen as anything but a painter he looked like a fool.  At Aix he tried to pass for a respectable rentier; he found no difficulty in being silly, but he could not achieve the necessary commonplaceness.  He could not be vulgar.  He was always an artist.

Instead of telling us so much about Zola and tutti quanti M. Vollard might have told us more about Cezanne’s artistic development.  What, for instance, is the history of his relations with Impressionism?  The matter is to me far from clear.  Cezanne began his artistic life amongst the Impressionists, he was reckoned a disciple of Pissarro; yet it is plain from his early work that he never swallowed much of the doctrine.  Gradually he came to think that the Impressionists were on the wrong tack, that their work was flimsy and their theory misleading, that they failed to “realize.”  He dreamed of combining their delicate vision, their exquisite sensation, with a more positive and elaborate statement.  He wanted to make of Impressionism “quelque chose de solide et de durable comme l’art des Musees.”  He succeeded.  But at what moment did his dissent become acute, and to what extent was he aware from the first of its existence?  Towards the end of his life he took to scolding the Impressionists, but one fancies that he was never very willing that anyone else should abuse them.  “Regardez,” said he to a young painter who had caught him coming out of church one stormy Sunday morning, as he pointed to a puddle touched by a sudden ray of sunlight, “comment voulez-vous rendre cela?  Il faut se mefier, je vous le dis, des Impressionnistes_..._Tout de meme, ils voient juste!”