CEZANNE'S DOUBT
465
doubted his own talent and did not dare to ask his father, a former
hatter who was then a banker, to send him to Paris. Zola in his letters
reproaches him for instability, weakness and indecision. He comes to
Paris but writes: "I have done nothing but change my habitation
and boredom has followed me." He tolerated no discussion because
it tired him, and he could never explain his reasons. The keynote of
his character was anxiety. At forty-two, thinking that he would die
young, he made his will. At forty-six, for a period of six months he
suffered an intense, overwhelming agony of the spirit, of which he
never spoke and the outcome of which is not known. At fifty-one he
withdrew to Aix to find there the natural surroundings best suited
to his genius, but it was also a retirement to the scene of his childhood,
his
mother and his sister. The death of the mother was a blow to the
son. "Life is terrifying," he often said. Religion, which he then begau
to practice, began for him with the fear of life and the fear of death.
"It's fear," he explains to a friend; "I feel I've got only four days more
on earth; then afterwards? I believe I will survive after death and I
don't want to risk roasting
in aeternum."
Although it later became
deeper, the initial motive of his religion was the need to
fix
his
life
and to resign it. He becomes constantly more timid, suspicious and
irritable. He comes to Paris sometimes, but, when he runs into friends,
nods from a distance without addressing them. In 1903, when his
pictures begin to sell in Paris for twice as much as those of Monet,
when young people like Joachim Gasquet and Emile Bernard come
to see him and ask questions, he expands a little. But the rancors
persist. A child in Aix, passing nearby, had once bumped against
him; from then on he had been unabk to endure physical contact.
On one occasion during his last years, he tripped and Emile Bernard
supported him with his arm. Cezanne flew into a terrible rage. He
was heard pacing his studio crying that he would not allow anyone
to get their "hooks" into him. Again, because of their "hooks" he
kept out of his studio women who could have served him as models;
out of his life priests, whom he called "sticky"; he kept out of
his
life
and out of his mind the theories of Emile Bernard when they be–
came too insistent.
This loss of easy contacts with men, this inability to meet new
situations, this flight into habits and an environment which present
no problems; this stiffnecked opposition of theory to practice, of
"hooks" to independent isolation- all these symptoms speak of a
morbid disposition, and, as has been said of El Greco, of schizoid
tendencies. The idea of painting based "on nature" in Cezanne came
