Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence

by D. H. Lawrence

  In his very best pictures, the best of the still-life compositions, which seem to me Cezanne’s greatest achievement, the fight with the cliche is still going on. But it was in the still-life pictures he learned his final method of avoiding the cliche: just leaving gaps through which it fell into nothingness. So he makes his landscape succeed.

  In his art, all his life long, Cezanne was tangled in a twofold activity. He wanted to express something, and before he could do it he had to fight the hydra-headed cliche, whose last head he could never lop off. The fight with the cliche is the most obvious thing in his pictures. The dust of battle rises thick, and the splinters fly wildly. And it is this dust of battle and flying of splinters which his imitators still so fervently imitate. If you give a Chinese dressmaker a dress to copy, and the dress happens to have a darned rent in it, the dressmaker carefully tears a rent in the new dress, and darns it in exact replica. And this seems to be the chief occupation of Cezanne’s disciples, in every land. They absorb themselves reproducing imitation mistakes. He let off various explosions in order to blow up the stronghold of the cliche, and his followers make grand firework imitations of the explosions, without the faintest inkling of the true attack. They do, indeed, make an onslaught on representation, true-to-life representation: because the explosion in Cezanne’s pictures blew them up. But I am convinced that what Cezanne himself wanted was representation. He wanted true-to-life representation. Only he wanted it more true to life. And once you have got photography, it is a very, very difficult thing to get representation more true-to-life: which it has to be.

  Cezanne was a realist, and he wanted to be true to life. But he would not be content with the optical cliche. With the impressionists, purely optical vision perfected itself and fell at once into cliche, with a startling rapidity. Cezanne saw this. Artists like Courbet and Daumier were not purely optical, but the other element in these two painters, the intellectual element, was cliche. To the optical vision they added the concept of force-pressure, almost like an hydraulic brake, and this force-pressure concept is mechanical, a cliche, though still popular. And Daumier added mental satire, and Courbet added a touch of a sort of socialism: both cliche and unimaginative.

  Cezanne wanted something that was neither optical nor mechanical nor intellectual. And to introduce into our world of vision something which is neither optical nor mechanical nor intellectual- psychological requires a real revolution. It was a revolution Cezanne began, but which nobody, apparently, has been able to carry on.

  He wanted to touch the world of substance once more with the intuitive touch, to be aware of it with the intuitive awareness, and to express it in intuitive terms. That is, he wished to displace our present mode of mental-visual consciousness, the consciousness of mental concepts, and substitute a mode of consciousness that was predominantly intuitive, the awareness of touch. In the past the primitives painted intuitively, but in the direction of our present mental-visual, conceptual form of consciousness. They were working away from their own intuition. Mankind has never been able to trust the intuitive consciousness, and the decision to accept that trust marks a very great revolution in the course of human development.

  Without knowing it, Cezanne, the timid little conventional man sheltering behind his wife and sister and the Jesuit father, was a pure revolutionary. When he said to his models: “Be an apple! Be an apple!” he was uttering the foreword to the fall not only of Jesuits and the Christian idealists altogether, but to the collapse of our whole way of consciousness, and the substitution of another way. If the human being is going to be primarily an apple, as for Cezanne it was, then you are going to have a new world of men: a world which has very little to say, men that can sit still and just be physically there, and be truly non-moral. That was what Cezanne meant with his: “Be an apple!” He knew perfectly well that the moment the model began to intrude her personality and her “mind,” it would be cliche and moral, and he would have to paint cliche. The only part of her that was not banal, known ad nauseam, living cliche, the only part of her that was not living cliche was her appleyness. Her body, even her very sex, was known nauseously: connu, connu! the endless chance of known cause-and-effect, the infinite web of the hated cliche which nets us all down in utter boredom. He knew it all, he hated it all, he refused it all, this timid and “humble” little man. He knew, as an artist, that the only bit of a woman which nowadays escapes being ready-made and ready- known cliche is the appley part of her. Oh, be an apple, and leave out all your thoughts, all your feelings, all your mind and all your personality, which we know all about and find boring beyond endurance. Leave it all out — and be an apple! It is the appleyness of the portrait of Cezanne’s wife that makes it so permanently interesting: the appleyness, which carries with it also the feeling of knowing the other side as well, the side you don’t see, the hidden side of the moon. For the intuitive apperception of the apple is so tangibly aware of the apple that it is aware of it all round, not only just of the front. The eye sees only fronts, and the mind, on the whole, is satisfied with fronts. But intuition needs all-aroundness, and instinct needs insideness. The true imagination is for ever curving round to the other side, to the back of presented appearance.

  So to my feeling the portraits of Madame Cezanne, particularly the portrait in the red dress, are more interesting than the portrait of M. Geffroy, or the portraits of the housekeeper or the gardener. In the same way the Card-Players with two figures please me more than those with four.

  But we have to remember, in his figure-paintings, that while he was painting the appleyness he was also deliberately painting out the so-called humanness, the personality, the “likeness,” the physical cliche. He had deliberately to paint it out, deliberately to make the hands and face rudimentary, and so on, because if he had painted them in fully they would have been cliche. He never got over the cliche denominator, the intrusion and interference of the ready- made concept, when it came to people, to men and women. Especially to women he could only give a cliche response — and that maddened him. Try as he might, women remained a known, ready-made cliche object to him, and he could not break through the concept obsession to get at the intuitive awareness of her. Except with his wife — and in his wife he did at least know the appleyness. But with his housekeeper he failed somewhat. She was a bit cliche, especially the face. So really is M. Geffroy.

  With men Cezanne often dodged it by insisting on the clothes, those stiff cloth jackets bent into thick folds, those hats, those blouses, those curtains. Some of the Card-Players, the big ones with four figures, seem just a trifle banal, so much occupied with painted stuff, painted clothing, and the humanness a bit cliche. Nor good colour, nor clever composition, nor “planes” of colour, nor anything else will save an emotional cliche from being an emotional cliche, though they may, of course, garnish it and make it more interesting.

  Where Cezanne did sometimes escape the cliche altogether and really give a complete intuitive interpretation of actual objects is in some of the still-life compositions. To me these good still-life scenes are purely representative and quite true to life. Here Cezanne did what he wanted to do: he made the things quite real, he didn’t deliberately leave anything out, and yet he gave us a triumphant and rich intuitive vision of a few apples and kitchen pots. For once his intuitive consciousness triumphed, and broke into utterance. And here he is inimitable. His imitators imitate his accessories of tablecloths folded like tin, etc. — the unreal parts of his pictures — but they don’t imitate the pots and apples, because they can’t. It’s the real appleyness, and you can’t imitate it. Every man must create it new and different out of himself: new and different. The moment it looks “like” Cezanne, it is nothing.

  But at the same time Cezanne was triumphing with the apple and appleyness he was still fighting with the cliche. When he makes Madame Cezanne most still, most appley, he starts making the universe slip uneasily about her. It was part of his desire: to make the human form, the life form, come to rest. Not s
tatic — on the contrary. Mobile but come to rest. And at the same time he set the unmoving material world into motion. Walls twitch and slide, chairs bend or rear up a little, cloths curl like burning paper. Cezanne did this partly to satisfy his intuitive feeling that nothing is really statically at rest — a feeling he seems to have had strongly — as when he watched the lemons shrivel or go mildewed, in his still-life group, which he left lying there so long so that he could see that gradual flux of change: and partly to fight the cliche, which says that the inanimate world is static, and that walls are still. In his fight with the cliche he denied that walls are still and chairs are static. In his intuitive self he felt for their changes.

  And these two activities of his consciousness occupy his later landscapes. In the best landscapes we are fascinated by the mysterious shiftiness of the scene under our eyes; it shifts about as we watch it. And we realize, with a sort of transport, how intuitively true this is of landscape. It is not still. It has its own weird anima, and to our wide-eyed perception it changes like a living animal under our gaze. This is a quality that Cezanne sometimes got marvellously.

  Then again, in other pictures he seems to be saying: Landscape is not like this and not like this and not like this and not . . . etc. — and every not is a little blank space in the canvas, defined by the remains of an assertion. Sometimes Cezanne builds up a landscape essentially out of omissions. He puts fringes on the complicated vacuum of the cliche, so to speak, and offers us that. It is interesting in a repudiative fashion, but it is not the new thing. The appleyness, the intuition has gone. We have only a mental repudiation. This occupies many of the later pictures: and ecstasizes the critics.

  And Cezanne was bitter. He had never, as far as his life went, broken through the horrible glass screen of the mental concepts, to the actual touch of life. In his art he had touched the apple, and that was a great deal. He had intuitively known the apple and intuitively brought it forth on the tree of his life, in paint. But when it came to anything beyond the apple, to landscape, to people, and above all to nude woman, the cliche had triumphed over him. The cliche had triumphed over him, and he was bitter, misanthropic. How not to be misanthropic when men and women are just cliches to you, and you hate the cliche? Most people, of course, love the cliche — because most people are the cliche. Still, for all that, there is perhaps more appleyness in man, and even in nude woman, than Cezanne was able to get at. The cliche obtruded, so he just abstracted away from it. Those last water-colour landscapes are just abstractions from the cliche. They are blanks, with a few pearly- coloured sort of edges. The blank is vacuum, which was Cezanne’s last word against the cliche. It is a vacuum, and the edges are there to assert the vacuity.

  And the very fact that we can reconstruct almost instantly a whole landscape from the few indications Cezanne gives, shows what a cliche the landscape is, how it exists already, ready-made, in our minds, how it exists in a pigeon-hole of the consciousness, so to speak, and you need only be given its number to be able to get it out, complete. Cezanne’s last water-colour landscapes, made up of a few touches on blank paper, are a satire on landscape altogether. They leaxie so much to the imagination! — that immortal cant phrase, which means they give you the clue to a cliche and the cliche comes. That’s what the cliche exists for. And that sort of imagination is just a rag-bag memory stored with thousands and thousands of old and really worthless sketches, images, etc., cliches.

  We can see what a fight it means, the escape from the domination of the ready-made mental concept, the mental consciousness stuffed full of cliches that intervene like a complete screen between us and life. It means a long, long fight, that will probably last for ever. But Cezanne did get as far as the apple. I can think of nobody else who has done anything.

  When we put it in personal terms, it is a fight in a man between his own ego, which is his ready-made mental self which inhabits either a sky-blue, self-tinted heaven or a black, self-tinted hell, and his other free intuitive self. Cezanne never freed himself from his ego, in his life. He haunted the fringes of experience. “I who am so feeble in life” — but at least he knew it. At least he had the greatness to feel bitter about it. Not like the complacent bourgeois who now “appreciate” him!

  So now perhaps it is the English turn. Perhaps this is where the English will come in. They have certainly stayed out very completely. It is as if they had received the death-blow to their instinctive and intuitive bodies in the Elizabethan age, and since then they have steadily died, till now they are complete corpses. As a young English painter, an intelligent and really modest young man, said to me: “But I do think we ought to begin to paint good pictures, now that we know pretty well all there is to know about how a picture should be made. You do agree, don’t you, that technically we know almost all there is to know about painting?”

  I looked at him in amazement. It was obvious that a new-born babe was as fit to paint pictures as he was. He knew technically all there was to know about pictures: all about two-dimensional and three-dimensional composition, also the colour-dimension and the dimension of values in that view of- composition which exists apart from form: all about the value of planes, the value of the angle in planes, the different values of the same colour on different planes: all about edges, visible edges, tangible edges, intangible edges: all about the nodality of form-groups, the constellating of mass-centres: all about the relativity of mass, the gravitation and the centrifugal force of masses, the resultant of the complex impinging of masses, the isolation of a mass in the line of vision: all about pattern, line pattern, edge pattern, tone pattern, colour pattern, and the pattern of moving planes: all about texture, impasto, surface, and what happens at the edge of the canvas: also which is the aesthetic centre of the canvas, the dynamic centre, the effulgent centre, the kinetic centre, the mathematical centre, and the Chinese centre: also the points of departure in the foreground, and the points of disappearance in the background, together with the various routes between these points, namely, as the crow flies, as the cow walks, as the mind intoxicated with knowledge reels and gets there: all about spotting, what you spot, which spot, on the spot, how many spots, balance of spots, recedence of spots, spots on the explosive vision and spots on the co-ordinative vision: all about literary interest and how to hide it successfully from the policeman: all about photographic representation, and which heaven it belongs to, and which hell: all about the sex-appeal of a picture, and when you can be arrested for solicitation, when for indecency: all about the psychology of a picture, which section of the mind it appeals to, which mental state it is intended to represent, how to exclude the representation of all other states of mind from the one intended, or how, on the contrary, to give a hint of complementary states of mind fringing the state of mind portrayed: all about the chemistry of colours, when to use Winsor 8c Newton and when not, and the relative depth of contempt to display for Lefranc- on the history of colour, past and future, whether cadmium will really stand the march of ages, whether viridian will go black, blue, or merely greasy, and the effect on our great-great-grandsons of the flake white and zinc white and white lead we have so lavishly used: on the merits and demerits of leaving patches of bare, prepared canvas, and which preparation will bleach, which blacken: on the mediums to be used, the vice of linseed oil, the treachery of turps, the meanness of gums, the innocence or the unspeakable crime of varnish: on allowing your picture to be shiny, on insisting that it should be shiny, on weeping over the merest suspicion of gloss and rubbing it with a raw potato: on brushes, and the conflicting length of the stem, the best of the hog, the length of bristle most to be desired on the many varying occasions, and whether to slash in one direction only: on the atmosphere of London, on the atmosphere of Glasgow, on the atmosphere of Rome, on the atmosphere of Paris, and the peculiar action of them all upon vermilion, cinnabar, pale cadmium yellow, mid-chrome, emerald green, Veronese green, linseed oil, turps, and Lyall’s perfect medium: on quality, and its relation to light, and its abi
lity to hold its own in so radical a change of light as that from Rome to London — all these things the young man knew — and out of it, God help him, he was going to make pictures.

  Now, such innocence and such naivete, coupled with true modesty, must make us believe that we English have indeed, at least as far as paint goes, become again as little children: very little children: tiny children: babes: nay, babes unborn. And if we have really got back to the state of the unborn babe, we are perhaps almost ready to be born. The English may be born again, pictorially. Or, to tell the truth, they may begin for the first time to be born: since as painters of composition pictures they don’t really exist. They have reached the stage where their innocent egos are entirely and totally enclosed in pale-blue glass bottles of insulated inexperience. Perhaps now they must hatch out!

  “Do you think we may be on the brink of a Golden Age again in England?” one of our most promising young writers asked me, with that same half-timorous innocence and naivety of the young painter. I looked at him — he was a sad young man — and my eyes nearly fell out of my head. A golden age! He looked so ungolden, and though he was twenty years my junior, he felt also like my grandfather. A golden age! in England! a golden age! now, when even money is paper! when the enclosure in the ego is final, when they are hermetically sealed and insulated from all experience, from any touch, from anything solid.

  “I suppose it’s up to you,” said I.

  And he quietly accepted it.

  But such innocence, such naivete must be a prelude to something. It’s a ne plus ultra. So why shouldn’t it be a prelude to a golden age? If the innocence and naivete as regards artistic expression doesn’t become merely idiotic, why shouldn’t it become golden? The young might, out of a sheer sort of mental blankness, strike the oil of their live intuition, and get a gusher. Why not? A golden gush of artistic expression! “Now we know pretty well everything that can be known about the technical side of pictures.” A golden age!