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presses Cezanne's deep obsession with reality, "the spectacle that the
Pater Ornnipotens spreads before our eyes." When he warns
his
friend, Emile Bernard, to "beware of the literary spirit which so
often causes painting to deviate from its true path-the concrete
study of nature-to lose itself all too long in intangible speculations,"
he seems to be speaking not so much of the critics he knew, as of
those more recent who profess to know him. The truth is that
Cezanne's work embodies profound insights into nature. And the
inner logic of
his
form is unthinkable without his ardent apprehension
of natural fact.
By what hazard do these moments of whole-hearted nature–
imitation synchronize so often with unforgettable art? In the formal–
istic system of ideas the recurrent coincidence of significant form
with deepened observation remains unexplained. To avoid perversity
we do better to gr.ant that nature-imitation in art is neither mechan–
ical skill nor irrelevant distraction. The most that can be said in its
disfavor is that we of this century happen to have turned our in–
terest elsewhere.
III
Where your treasure is, there (dropping the h) will your
art be also. Every picture is to some degree a value judgment, since
you cannot represent a thing without proclaiming
it
to be worthwhile.
Now the arts discussed in the foregoing section pertained to
those schools whose purpose was, at least in part, to depict the open
sights of nature. One and all they endorsed Constable's plea for the
pure apprehension of natural fact.
But natural fact can be purely apprehended only where the
human mind has first endowed it with the status of reality. Only
then is the act of seeing backed by a passion, being focused on ulti–
mate truth. From Masaccio to Cezanne men prized overt nature as
the locus of reality, and to it they directed their capacities of appre–
hension. But
if
we invoke a civilization for whom nature was a pale
and immaterial reflection of ideal types, we shall expect to find it
careless of the outer shapes of things. Its art will strive to incarnate
those forms which are the permanent exemplars behind the drift of
sensuous appearances. This indeed is the course taken by Christian
art after the fall of pagan Rome.
