Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1046
We, dear reader, you and I, we were born corpses, and we are corpses. I doubt if there is even one of us who has ever known so much as an apple, a whole apple. All we know is shadows, even of apples. Shadows of everything, of the whole world, shadows even of ourselves. We are inside the tomb, and the tomb is wide and shadowy like hell, even if sky-blue by optimistic paint, so we think it is all the world. But our world is a wide tomb full of ghosts, replicas. We are all spectres, we have not been able to touch even so much as an apple. Spectres we are to one another. Spectre you are to me, spectre I am to you. Shadow you are even to yourself. And by shadow I mean idea, concept, the abstracted reality, the ego. We are not solid. We don’t live in the flesh. Our instincts and intuitions are dead, we live wound round with the winding-sheet of abstraction. And the touch of anything solid hurts us. For our instincts and intuitions, which are our feelers of touch and knowing through touch, diey are dead, amputated. We walk and talk and eat and copulate and laugh and evacuate wrapped in our winding-sheets, all the time wrapped in our winding-sheets.
So that Cezanne’s apple hurts. It made people shout with pain. And it was not till his followers had turned him again into an abstraction that he was ever accepted. Then the critics stepped forth and abstracted his good apple into Significant Form, and henceforth Cezanne was saved. Saved for democracy. Put safely in the tomb again, and the stone rolled back. The resurrection was postponed once more.
As the resurrection will be postponed ad infinitum by the good bourgeois corpses in their cultured winding-sheets. They will run up a chapel to the risen body, even if it is only an apple, and kill it on the spot. They are wide awake, are the corpses, on the alert. And a poor mouse of a Cezanne is alone in the years. Who else shows a spark of awakening life, in our marvellous civilized cemetery? All is dead, and dead breath preaching with phosphorescent effulgence about aesthetic ecstasy and Significant Form. If only the dead would bury their dead. But the dead are not dead for nothing. Who buries his own sort? The dead are cunning and alert to pounce on any spark of life and bury it, even as they have already buried Cezanne’s apple and put up to it a white tombstone of Significant Form.
For who of Cezanne’s followers does anything but follow at the triumphant funeral of Cezanne’s achievement? They follow him in order to bury him, and they succeed. Cezanne is deeply buried under all the Matisses and Vlamincks of his following, while the critics read the funeral homily.
It is quite easy to accept Matisse and Vlaminck and Friesz and all the rest. They are just Cezanne abstracted again. They are all just tricksters, even if clever ones. They are all mental, mental, egoists, egoists, egoists. And therefore they are all acceptable now to the enlightened corpses of connoisseurs. You needn’t be afraid of Matisse and Vlaminck and the rest. They will never give your corpse-anatomy a jar. They are just shadows, minds mountebanking and playing charades on canvas. They may be quite amusing charades, and I am all for the mountebank. But of course it is all games inside the cemetery, played by corpses and hommes d’esprit, even femmes d’esprit, like Mademoiselle Laurencin. As for I’esprit, said Cezanne, I don’t give a fart for it. Perhaps not! But the connoisseurs will give large sums of money. Trust the dead to pay for their amusement, when the amusement is deadly!
The most interesting figure in modern art, and the only really interesting figure, is Cezanne: and that, not so much because of his achievement as because of his struggle. Cezanne was born at Aix in Provence in 1839: small, timorous, yet sometimes bantam defiant, sensitive, full of grand ambition, yet ruled still deeper by a naive, Mediterranean sense of truth or reality, imagination, call it what you will. He is not a big figure. Yet his struggle is truly heroic. He was a bourgeois, and one must never forget it. He had a moderate bourgeois income. But a bourgeois in Provence is much more real and human than a bourgeois in Normandy. He is much nearer the actual people, and the actual people are much less subdued by awe of his respectable bourgeois money.
Cezanne was naive to a degree, but not a fool. He was rather insignificant, and grandeur impressed him terribly. Yet still stronger in him was the little flame of life where he felt things to be true. He didn’t betray himself in order to get success, because he couldn’t: to his nature it was impossible: he was too pure to be able to betray his own small real flame for immediate rewards. Perhaps that is the best one can say of a man, and it puts Cezanne, small and insignificant as he is, among the heroes. He would not abandon his own vital imagination.
He was terribly impressed by physical splendour and flamboyancy, as people usually are in the lands of the sun. He admired terribly the splendid virtuosity of Paul Veronese and Tintoretto, and even of later and less good baroque painters. He wanted to be like that — terribly he wanted it. And he tried very, very hard, with bitter effort. And he always failed. It is a cant phrase with the critics to say “he couldn’t draw.” Mr. Fry says: “With all his rare endowments, he happened to lack the comparatively common gift of illustration, the gift that any draughtsman for the illustrated papers learns in a school of commercial art.”
Now this sentence gives away at once the hollowness of modern criticism. In the first place, can one learn a “gift” in a school of commercial art, or anywhere else? A gift surely is given, we tacitly assume, by God or Nature or whatever higher power we hold responsible for the things we have no choice in.
Was, then, Cezanne devoid of this gift? Was he simply incapable of drawing a cat so that it would look like a cat? Nonsense! Cezanne’s work is full of accurate drawing. His more trivial pictures, suggesting copies from other masters, are perfectly well drawn — that is, conventionally: so are some of the landscapes, so even is that portrait of M. Geffroy and his books, which is, or was, so famous. Why these cant phrases about not being able to draw? Of course Cezanne could draw, as well as anybody else. And he had learned everything that was necessary in the art-schools.
He could draw. And yet, in his terrifically earnest compositions in the late Renaissance or baroque manner, he drew so badly. Why? Not because he couldn’t. And not because he was sacrificing “significant form” to “insignificant form,” or mere slick representation, which is apparently what artists themselves mean when they talk about drawing. Cezanne knew all about drawing: and he surely knew as much as his critics do about significant form. Yet he neither succeeded in drawing so that things looked right, nor combining his shapes so that he achieved real form. He just failed.
He failed, where one of his little slick successors would have succeeded with one eye shut. And why? Why did Cezanne fail in his early pictures? Answer that, and you’ll know a little better what art is. He didn’t fail because he understood nothing about drawing or significant form or aesthetic ecstasy. He knew about them all, and didn’t give a spit for them.
Cezanne failed in his earlier pictures because he was trying with his mental consciousness to do something which his living Provencal body didn’t want to do, or couldn’t do. He terribly wanted to do something grand and voluptuous and sensuously satisfying, in the Tintoretto manner. Mr. Fry calls that his “willed ambition,” which is a good phrase, and says he had to learn humility, which is a bad phrase.
The “willed ambition” was more than a mere willed ambition- it was a genuine desire. But it was a desire that thought it would be satisfied by ready-made baroque expressions, whereas it needed to achieve a whole new marriage of mind and matter. If we believed in reincarnation, then we should have to believe that after a certain number of new incarnations into the body of an artist, the soul of Cezanne would produce grand and voluptuous and sensually rich pictures — but not at all in the baroque manner. Because the pictures he actually did produce with undeniable success are the first steps in that direction, sensual and rich, with not the slightest hint of baroque, but new, the man’s new grasp of substantial reality.
There was, then, a certain discrepancy between Cezanne’s notion of what he wanted to produce, and his other, intuitive knowledge of what he could produce. For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or “consciously” desire is nine times out of ten impossible: hitch your wagon to a star, and you’ll just stay where you are.
So the conflict, as usual, was not between the artist and his medium, but between the artist’s mind and the artist’s intuition and instinct. And what Cezanne had to learn was not humility — cant word! — but honesty, honesty with himself. It was not a question of any gift or significant form or aesthetic ecstasy: it was a question of Cezanne being himself, just Cezanne. And when Cezanne is himself he is not Tintoretto, nor Veronese, nor anything baroque at all. Yet he is something physical, and even sensual: qualities which he had identified with the masters of virtuosity.
In passing, if we think of Henri Matisse, a real virtuoso, and imagine him possessed with a “willed ambition” to paint grand and flamboyant baroque pictures, then we know at once that he would not have to “humble” himself at all, but that he would start in and paint with great success grand and flamboyant modern-baroque pictures. He would succeed because he has the gift of virtuosity. And the gift of virtuosity simply means that you don’t have to humble yourself, or even be honest with yourself, because you are a clever mental creature who is capable at will of making the intuitions and instincts subserve some mental concept: in short, you can prostitute your body to your mind, your instincts and intuitions you can prostitute to your “willed ambition,” in a sort of masturbation process, and you can produce the impotent glories of virtuosity. But Veronese and Tintoretto are real painters; they are not mere virtuosi, as some of the later men are.
The point is very important. Any creative act occupies the whole consciousness of a man. This is true of the great discoveries of science as well as of art. The truly great discoveries of science and real works of art are made by the whole consciousness of man working together in unison and oneness: instinct, intuition, mind, intellect all fused into one complete consciousness, and grasping what we may call a complete truth, or a complete vision, a complete revelation in sound. A discovery, artistic or otherwise, may be more or less intuitional, more or less mental; but intuition will have entered into it, and mind will have entered too. The whole consciousness is concerned in every case. — And a painting requires the activity of the whole imagination, for it is made of imagery, and the imagination is that form of complete consciousness in which predominates the intuitive awareness of forms, images, the physical awareness.
And the same applies to the genuine appreciation of a work of art, or the grasp of a scientific law, as to the production of the same. The whole consciousness is occupied, not merely the mind alone, or merely the body. The mind and spirit alone can never really grasp a work of art, though they may, in a masturbating fashion, provoke the body into an ecstasized response. The ecstasy will die out into ash and more ash. And the reason we have so many trivial scientists promulgating fantastic “facts” is that so many modern scientists likewise work with the mind alone, and force the intuitions and instincts into a prostituted acquiescence. The very statement that water is H20 is a mental tour de force. With our bodies we know that water is not H20, our intuitions and instincts both know it is not so. But they are bullied by the impudent mind. Whereas if we said that water, under certain circumstances, produces two volumes of hydrogen and one of oxygen, then the intuitions and instincts would agree entirely. But that water is composed of two volumes of hydrogen t(5 one of oxygen we cannot physically believe. It needs something else. Something is missing. Of course, alert science does not ask us to believe the commonplace assertion of: water is H20, but school children have to believe it.
A parallel case is all this modern stuff about astronomy, stars, their distances and speeds and so on, talking of billions and trillions of miles and years and so forth: it is just occult. The mind is revelling in words, the intuitions and instincts are just left out, or prostituted into a sort of ecstasy. In fact, the sort of ecstasy that lies in absurd figures such as 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles or years or tons, figures which abound in modern scientific books on astronomy, is just the sort of aesthetic ecstasy that the over-mental critics of art assert they experience today from Matisse’s pictures.
It is all poppycock. The body is either stunned to a corpse, or prostituted to ridiculous thrills, or stands coldly apart.
When I read how far off the suns are, and what they are made of, and so on, and so on, I believe all I am able to believe, with the true imagination. But when my intuition and instinct can grasp no more, then I call my mind to a halt. I am not going to accept mere mental asseverations. The mind can assert anything, and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept. The same is true of great scientific “laws,” like the law of evolution. After years of acceptance of the “laws” of evolution — rather desultory or “humble” acceptance — now I realize that my vital imagination makes great reservations. I find I can’t, with the best will in the world, believe that the species have “evolved” from one common life-form. I just can’t feel it, I have to violate my intuitive and instinctive awareness of something else, to make myself believe it. But since I know that my intuitions and instincts may still be held back by prejudice, I seek in the world for someone to make me intuitively and instinctively feel the truth of the “law” — and I don’t find anybody. I find scientists, just like artists, asserting things they are mentally sure of, in fact cocksure, but about which they are much too egoistic and ranting to be intuitively, instinctively sure. When I find a man, or a woman, intuitively and instinctively sure of anything, I am all respect. But for scientific or artistic braggarts how can one have respect? The intrusion of the egoistic element is a sure proof of intuitive uncertainty. No man who is sure by instinct and intuition brags, though he may fight tooth and nail for his beliefs.
Which brings us back to Cezanne, why he couldn’t draw, and why he couldn’t paint baroque masterpieces. It is just because he was real, and could only believe in his own expression when it expressed a moment of wholeness or completeness of consciousness in himself. He could not prostitute one part of himself to the other. He could not masturbate, in paint or words. And that is saying a very great deal, today; today, the great day of the masturbating consciousness, when the mind prostitutes the sensitive responsive body, and just forces the reactions. The masturbating consciousness produces all kinds of novelties, which thrill for the moment, then go very dead. It cannot produce a single genuinely new utterance.
What we have to thank Cezanne for is not his humility, but for his proud, high spirit that refused to accept the glib utterances of his facile mental self. He wasn’t poor-spirited enough to be facile — nor humble enough to be satisfied with visual and emotional cliches. Thrilling as the baroque masters were to him in themselves, he realized that as soon as he reproduced them he produced nothing but cliche. The mind is full of all sorts of memory, visual, tactile, emotional memory, memories, groups of memories, systems of memories. A cliche is just a worn-out memory that has no more emotional or intuitional root, and has become a habit. Whereas a novelty is just a new grouping of cliches, a new arrangement of accustomed memories. That is why a novelty is so easily accepted: it gives the little shock or thrill of surprise, but it does not disturb the emotional and intuitive self. It forces you to see nothing new. It is only a novel compound of cliches. The work of most of Cezanne’s successors is just novel, just a new arrangement of cliches, soon growing stale. And the cliches are Cezanne cliches, just as in Cezanne’s own earlier pictures the cliches were all, or mostly, baroque cliches.
Cezanne’s early history as a painter is a history of his fight with his own cliche. His consciousness wanted a new realization. And his ready-made mind offered him all the time a ready-made expression. And Cezanne, far too inwardly proud and haughty to accept the ready-made cliches that came from his mental consciousness, stocked with memories, and which appeared mocking at him on his canvas, spent most of his time smashing his own forms to bits. To a true artist, and to the living imagination, the cliche is the deadly enemy. Cezanne had a bitter fight with it. He hammered it to pieces a thousand times. And still it reappeared.
Now again we can see why Cezanne’s drawing was so bad. It was bad because it represented a smashed, mauled cliche, terribly knocked about. If Cezanne had been willing to accept his own baroque cliche, his drawing would have been perfectly conventionally “all right,” and not a critic would have had a word to say about it. But when his drawing was conventionally all right, to Cezanne himself it was mockingly all wrong, it was cliche. So he flew at it and knocked all the shape and stuffing out of it, and when it was so mauled that it was all wrong, and he was exhausted with it, he let it go; bitterly, because it still was not what he wanted. And here comes in the comic element in Cezanne’s pictures. His rage with the cliche made him distort the cliche sometimes into parody, as we see in pictures like The Pasha and La Femme. “You will be cliche, will you?” he gnashes. “Then be it!” And he shoves it in a frenzy of exasperation over into parody. And the sheer exasperation makes the parody still funny; but the laugh is a little on the wrong side of the face.
This smashing of the cliche lasted a long way into Cezanne’s life; indeed, it went with him to the end. The way he worked over and over his forms was his nervous manner of laying the ghost of his cliche, burying it. Then when it disappeared perhaps from his forms themselves, it lingered in his composition, and he had to fight with the edges of his forms and contours, to bury the ghost there. Only his colour he knew was not cliche. He left it to his disciples to make it so.
