This originality of Cézanne has been developed and perfected by an artist working in England to-day, whose work is more in sympathy with the moods and structure of mountains than even that of his great predecessor, and the artist is Professor C. J. Holmes, whom I have already quoted (see above).
Mr. Holmes is very modern, and he is an Englishman; that is to say, he is part of a movement which has a deep feeling for synthesis and the subtlety of rhythm--and this is important with a view to what has been said about the synthetic nature of mountains--and also he is a member of the race which has always shown more understanding for nature than any other in Europe or, perhaps, in the world.
France, the leader in matters artistic, has never had any real grasp of nature since the days of Ronsard. The French are too intelligent, too pitilessly logical, to accept the moods of nature without reasoning.
From such a generalisation one should, perhaps, except Rousseau. Although in much of his teaching it is difficult to escape the idea that the nature he preached has been touched up by civilisation, in comparison with many of his disciples he had a genuine desire to escape the works of men. In his political theory, in his morality, in his conception of the beautiful, he turned always to nature for his ideal. From his home in Geneva he learnt to love the mountains, to love the great calm and dignity of them, their aloofness from man and his pettiness:--
‘En effet, c’est une impression générale qu’éprouvent tous les hommes ... que sur les hautes montagnes ... les plaisirs sont moins ardents, les passions plus modérées. Il semble qu’en s’élevant au-dessus du séjour des hommes, on y laisse tous les sentiments bas et terrestres.’[10]
But even here one suspects that Rousseau is rather contrasting the worries of a race cursed with powers of emotion, with the sublime peace of unfeeling nature, than admitting the passion of the hills, which differs only from that of men in its loftiness and nobility. And this last belief is not only held by the England of to-day, but was a prominent conviction of William Wordsworth’s, and he lies behind the English fondness for nature throughout the nineteenth century.
