CEZANNE'S DOUBT
475
must not only create and express an idea, but also awaken experiences
which will implant it in other consciousnesses.
If
the work is successful,
it
has the strange power of teaching itself. By following the indications
of the picture or book, establishing verifications, knocking here and
there, guided by the clarity, still obscure, of the style, the reader or
spectator ends by discovering what the artist wished to communicate
to him. The painter could only construct an image. He must wait for
this image to come alive for others. Then the work of art will have
joined these separate lives, it will no longer exist in one of them as
a tenacious dream or a persistent delirium, or in space as a piece of
colored canvas, but will live undivided in many minds, presumably in
every possible mind, as a permanent acquisition.
Thus "heredities,"-the accidents of Cezanne,-are the text
which nature and history have given him as his share
to
decipher.
They furnish only the literal meaning of
his
work. The creations of
the artist, as elsewhere the free decisions of man, impose on this datum
a figurative sense which did not exist before them.
If
the life of
Cezanne seems to us to carry his work in germ, it is because we know
the work first, and, seeing through it the circumstances of
his
life, we
charge t."'"Iem with a mear.ing borrowed from the work. Cezanne's data,
which we enumerate as insistent conditions, if they were to figure in
the tissue of projects which he was, could only do so by presenting
themselves to him as what had to be lived, while leaving undetermined
the manner of living. A necessary theme at the start, they are, rein–
vested
in
the existence which embraces them, only the monogram and
the emblem of a life which interprets itself freely.
But let us understand this freedom. Let us guard against imag–
ining some abstract force which superimposes its effects on the "given"
of life, or which introduces breaks in its development.
It
is certain
that the life does not
exfJlain
the work, but certain also that they
communicate with each other. The truth is:
to do this work demands
this life.
From the beginning, the life of Cezanne found its equilibrium
only by lear.ing on the future work; the work was the life's project,
and is announced there by premonitory signs which we would be
wrong to take as causes, but which make of the work and the life a
single venture. Here there are neither causes nor effects, they are
joined together in the simultaneity of an eternal Cezanne who is the
formula at the same time of what he wanted to be and of what he
wanted to do. There is a relation between the schizoid constitution and
Cezanne's work because the work reveals a metaphysical meaning of
