Ideas which shuts the stream of its
flow. I have felt the same gift for life in a still-life or a landscape
of Cezanne's that I have felt in any of Whitman's best pieces.
The element in common with these two exceptional creators is
liberation.
They have done more, these modern pioneers, for the liberation of the
artist,
and for the "freeing" of painting and poetry
than any other men of
modern time. Through them, painting and poetry have become literally
free, and through them it is that the young painters and poets have
sought new fields for self deliverance. Discipleship does not hold out
long with the truly understanding.
Those who really know what
originality is are not long the slave of the power of imitation: it is
the gifted assimilator that suffers
most under the spell of mastery. Legitimate influence is a quality
which all earnest
creators learn to handle at once. Both poetry and painting are, or so
it seems to me, revealing well the gift of understanding, and as a
result we have a better variety of painting and of poetry than at the
first outbreak of this so called modern esthetic epidemic. The real
younger creators
are learning the difference between
surface and depth, between exterior
semblances, and the
underlying substances. Both Whitman and Cezanne stand together in the
name of one common purpose, freedom from characteristics not one's own.
They have taught the creators of this time to know what classicism
really is, that it is the outline of all things that endure. They have
both shown that it is not idiosyncrasy alone which creates originality,
that idiosyncrasy is but the husk
of personal penetration,
that it is in no way the constituent essential
for genius. For genius is nothing
but the name for higher perception, the greater degree of
understanding. Cezanne's fine landscapes and still-lifes, and Whitman's
majestic line with its gripping imagery are one and the same thing, for
it reaches the same
height in the mind. They walk together out of a vivid past, these
two geniuses, opening the corridors
to a possibly vivid future for the artists of now, and to come. They
are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of
the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have
begun, they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential
personalism, of direct expression out of direct experience, with an eye
to nothing but quality and proportion as conceived by
them. Their dogmas we
