The Birth of Tragedy |
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived … I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms..." (Walden, 1854). |
For at bottom this strange man, who seemed in life to be of an exasperation innocence, this man who read nothing but the Catholic daily paper, trusted always to the Pope for direction, and believed all the reassuring plausibilities of the social and intellectual reaction, had non the less a great intellect where his one passion was concerned, in whatever affect his art. He was, in short, too much of an intellectual in that respect to remain satisfied with pure Impressionism. In that he found a valuable method and an unexpected inspiration of the highest importance for his art, but he passed beyond it, and from this moment begins the thrilling drama of this determined explorer, who could not be turned from his purpose by the contempt of the world, the insults of the public, and the utter isolation in which he had to take refuge Disillusioned and discouraged no doubt became. The author of those high-spirtied letters to the Ministry of Fine Arts, of those celebrated gibes at the official clique of the Salon, no longer had the heart to trouble them with any sign of his existence. He faded out so completely from the general artistic consciousness of his day that the present writer, when he was an art student in Paris in the ‘nineties— a very ignorant and helpless, but still an inquisitive student — never once heard the name of the recluse of Aix. But for all this, though he had abandoned the struggle with the world and veiled himself in unbroken silence, he never according to his own favorite expression. He gave himself beneath the veil of appearance, this reality which he had to draw forth and render apparent. And it is precisely this which gives to all his utterances in form their tremendous, almost prophetic, significance.
P38 IX
"Cezanne: a Study of His Development
by Fry, Roger
