In his rigid, intense ignorance there was no room for climate, personal charm, not even for sunshine. Think of the blazing blue sky and sun of Provence; the romantic, semitropical riot of its vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and search for this mellow richness and misty golden air in the pictures of our master. You won't find them, though a mystic light permeates the entire series. The sallow-sublime. He did not paint portraits of Provence, as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan, or Bizet in L'Arlésienne. He sought for profounder meanings. The superficial, the facile, the staccato, and the brilliant repelled him. Not that he was an "abstract" painter--as the jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a legitimate trompe-l'[oe]il on the optic nerve. His is not a pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow, patient delineation by a geologist of art of a certain hill on old Mother Earth, shamelessly exposing her bare torso, bald rocky pate, and gravelled feet. The illusion is not to be escaped. As drab as the orchestration of Brahms, and as austere in linear economy; and as analytical as Stendhal or Ibsen, Cézanne never becomes truly lyrical except in his still-life. Upon an apple he lavishes his palette of smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion for him is as beautiful as a naked woman. And he possesses a positive genius for the tasteless. The chiefest misconception of Cézanne is that of the theoretical fanatics who not only proclaim him their chief of school, which may be true, but also declare him to be the greatest painter that ever wielded a brush since the Byzantines. The nervous, shrinking man I saw at Paris would have been astounded at some of the things printed since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of the official Salon (as did Zola for a seat in the Academy) he disliked notoriety. He loved work; above all, solitude. He took with him a fresh batch of canvases every morning and trudged to his pet landscapes, the Motive he called it, and it was there that he slaved away with technical heroism, though he didn't kill himself with his labours as some of his fervent disciples have asserted. He died of unromantic diabetes. When I first saw him he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial notary, A rare impersonality, I should say.