CEZANNE'S DOUBT
469
order. He does not wish to separate the fixed things appearing before
our glance from the fugitive manner of their appearance; he wishes
to paint matter in the process of acquiring form, order being born
by spontaneous organization. He sets no gap between "the senses"
and "the intelligence," but between the spontaneous order of per–
oeived things and the human order of ideas and science. We perceive
things in relation to them, we are anchored in them and it is on this
base of "nature" that we construct sciences.
It
is
this primordial
world that Cezanne wished to paint, and that is why his pictures give
the impression of nature at its origin, while photographs of the same
landscapes suggest the works of men, their commodities, their immi–
nent presence. Cezanne never wished to "paint like a brute," but
to restore intelligence, ideas, theJ sciences, perspective, tradition, to
contact with the natural world that they are destined to understand;
to confront, as he puts it, the sciences, "which have left it," with
nature.
Cezanne's researches in perspective discover by their fidelity to
phenomena what later psychology was to formulate. Perspective as
experienced, the perspective of our perception, is not geometric or
photographic perspective: in perspective, near objects appear smaller,
distant objects greater, which
is
not the case in a photograph, as can
be seen in the movies when a train approaches and becomes larger
much more quickly than a real train in the same conditions. To say
that a circle seen obliquely is seen as an ellipse is to substitute for
actual perception the schema of what we would see if we were a
photographic apparatus:
in
fact, we see a form which oscillates around
the ellipses without
being
an ellipse. In a portrait of Mme. Cezanne,
the border of tapestry on both sides of the body does not make a
straight line; but we know that if a line passes under a large band of
paper, the two visible segments appear dislocated. Gustave Geffroy's
table spreads out at the base of thie picture; but when our eye traverses
a broad surface, the images it obtains bit by bit are taken from differ–
ent points of view and the total surface
is
warped. It
is
true that by
bringing these deformations onto the canvas I freeze them, I arrest
the spontaneous movement by which they are heaped one upon the
other in perception and tend towards geometric perception. This is also
what happens in the case of colors.... Cezanne's genius
is
through
the total arrangement of the picture to make the deformations
in
perspective cease to be visible in themselves when we look at them
in the lump; and they only contribute, as they do in natural vision,
to give the impression of an order
in
process of birth, an obJect in
