CEZANNE'S DOUBT
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been painted and renders it absolute painting." We forget the viscous,
equivocal appearances of things; through them we pass straight to
the things they represent. The painter takes up and converts into a
visible object what, without him, remains enclosed in the separate
life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearances which is the
cradle of things. For this painter a single emotion is possible: the
feeling of strangeness; a single lyricism: that of existence constantly
recommencing.
Leonardo da Vinci took as his motto: stubborn accuracy;
all
the classical creative
arts
declare that the work is difficult. But the
difficulties of Cezanne-as of Balzac or Mallarme-are not of this
classical kind. Balzac imagines, doubtless from suggestions of Delacroix,
a painter who wishes to express life itself purely by colors and keeps
his masterpiece hidden. When Frenhofer dies, his friends find only a
chaos of colors, of indiscernible lines, a whole wall of painting.
Cezanne was moved to tears when he read
The Unknown Masterpiece
and declared that he himself was Frenhofer. The effort of Balzac,
who was also obsessed by "realization," makes Cezanne's understand–
able. He speaks in the
Wild Ass's Skin
of a "thought to express," a
"system to construct," a "science to explain." Louis Lambert, a genius
manque of
The Human Comedy,
says: "I am moving toward certain
discoveries; what name can I give to the power which binds my hands,
closes my mouth and leads me in the opposite direction from my vo–
cation?"
It
is not enough to say that Balzac proposed to understand
the society of his time. To describe the type of the traveling salesman,
to make an "anatomy of the teaching professions," or to found a
sociology-this was not a superhuman task. Having once named the
visible forces, like money and the passions, having once described
their manifest functioning, Balzac asked himself what all this was
leading to, what was its reason for existence, what, for example, this
Europe
means
"in which every effort strains toward some mystery,
I know not what, of civilization"; what nourishes the world within
and makes the visible forms multiply. For Frenhofer, the meaning
of painting is the same: "A hand is not simply joined to a body,
it expresses a thought which must be seized and rendered. . .. The
real struggle is there! Many painters triumph instinctively without
recognizing this theme of art. You draw a woman, but you do not
see her." The artist is he who fixes and makes accessible to the most
"human" of men the spectacle in which they participate without
seeing.
There is, then, no art of pleasing. One can invent pleasing ob-
