There is a lot of inutile talk about "significant form" by propagandists of the New Æsthetic. As if form had not always been significant. No one can deny Cézanne's preoccupation with form; nor Courbet's either. Consider the Ornans landscapes, with their sombre flux of forest, by the crassest realist among French painters (he seems hopelessly romantic to our sharper and more petulant modern mode of envisaging the world); there is "significant form," and a solid structural sense. But Cézanne quite o'ercrows Courbet in his feeling for the massive. Sometimes you can't see the ribs because of the skeleton.
Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognise a master. The limitations of Paul Cézanne are patent to all. He is a profound investigator, and if he did not deem it wise to stray far from the territory he called his own then we should not complain, for therein he was monarch of all he surveyed. His non-conformism defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding Johann Sebastian Bach following Richard Strauss! The idea seems monstrous. Yet this, figuratively speaking, constitutes the case of Cézanne. He arrived after the classic, romantic, impressionistic, symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made, like Puvis, but one born to a crabbed simplicity. His veiled, cool harmonies sometimes recall the throb of a deep-bass organ-pipe. Oppositional splendour is there, and the stained radiance of a Bachian chorale. The music flows as if from a secret spring.
What poet asked: "When we drive out from the cloud of steam majestical white horses, are we greater than the first men, who led black ones by the mane?" Why can't we be truly catholic in our taste? The heaven of art contains many mansions, and the rainbow more colours than one. Paul Cézanne will be remembered as a painter who respected his material, and as a painter, pure and complex. No man who wields a brush need wish a more enduring epitaph.
After Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes Brahms. Wagner, the high priest of the music-drama; a great scene-painter in tones. Brahms, a wrestler with the Dwellers on the Threshold of the Infinite; a musical philosopher, but ever a poet. "Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms," cried Von Bülow; but he forgot Schumann. The molten tide of passion and extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe threescore years ago bore on its foaming crest Robert Schumann. He was first cousin to the prince of romancists, Heinrich Heine; Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall and sneered and wept in the same couplet. In the tangled, rich underwood of Schumann the young Brahms wandered. There he heard the moon sing silvery, and the leaves rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers. All German romance, fantasy, passion was in Schumann, the Schumann of the Papillons and the Carneval. Brahms walked as did Dante, with the Shades. Bach guided his footsteps; Beethoven bade him glance aloft at the stars. And Brahms had for his legacy polyphony, form, and masterful harmonies. In his music the formulist finds perfect things. Structurally he is as great as Beethoven, perhaps greater. His architectonic is superb. His melodic content is his own as he strides in stately pomp in the fugued Alexandrines of Bach. Brahms and Browning. Brahms and Freedom. Brahms and Now.
