318
PARTISAN REVIEW
dence, it is also the result of intuition and imagination. But Mr. Rewald's
conception of his function as a coordinator is too exclusive and mech–
anical to tolerate the intrusion of any such qualities. In the end the read–
er is successfully insulated against any appeal in Cezanne's personality.
But we know that Cezanne's personality was, in its way, attractive,
from Ambroise Vollard's delightful little biography which, sketchy and
incomplete as it is, provides us with an intimate sense of Cezanne's
reality as a person that no amount of documentation can achieve.
But in justice one should remember that the biographer of Cezanne
is presented with an unusual difficulty. The problem is how to separate
the life and its events from the painting which imparted significance to
those events. Imperceptibly a life of Cezanne
must
merge into a critique
of his work, for it is there that his life is centered and defined. Any at–
tempt to effect a working separation between the two leaves Cezanne
a singularly anonymous personality, and Mr. Rewald allows the paint–
ing to recede too far into the background.
It
is not that he gives it too
little space, or that he shows himself unknowing when he speaks of the
paintings. It is simply that he never manages to seem interested or to
arouse interest
in
Cezanne's pictures; and while giving all the facts, he
yet fails to convey adequately any idea of Cezanne's own intensity
towards his art. Perhaps, after all, it is not odd that the critical analyses
of Roger Fry or Albert Barnes make Cezanne seem more intimately pre–
sent in the imagination than all the factual data which Mr. Rewald
presents with such scrupulous accuracy.
But on one point it
is
easy to grow enthusiastic. Mr. Rewald has
made a fine selection of photographs of the countryside Cezanne painted,
and of the houses he lived in. Frequently he has reproduced one of
Cezanne's paintings beside a photograph of the same subject, and the
comparison afforded is extremely interesting. The method proves to
be
one of the best ways of looking at and studying the paintings themselves.
Marius Bewley
PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM
THEORY OF LITERATURE.
By
Rene Wellek end Austin Werren. Hercourt.
Broce, and Co. $4.50.
This is both an ambitious and an impressive book. Mr. Wellek
and Mr. Warren have managed to ask virtually all the difficult questions
that interest literary critics and literary scholars in our period; and in
answering them-or better, in suggesting modest and tentative answers-
