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Updated: July 20, 2025
A determination to free artists from utilitarian vision and the disastrous science of representation was the theoretic basis of that movement which is associated with the name of Cézanne. From the latter, at any rate, the douanier needed no freeing. Such science as he acquired in the course of his life was a means to expressing himself and not to picture-making.
The douanier gave us up as hopeless, with a resigned shrug of his shoulders. He vanished into his lair, consulted a superior officer, and after a long delay returned with the news that we must pay ten centimes, probably as a penance for our mulish stupidity in leaving France. I dropped a penny into his palm. "Will you have a receipt for this sum?" he asked. "No, thanks," I smiled.
But unless that subject has been carried to the high regions of art, and there, in a dry æsthetic atmosphere, sealed up in a purely æsthetic conception it can never be externalized in pure form. That is what the great Primitives did, and what the douanier could not do always. In his pudding there are doughy patches. He is sentimental; and he is not sentimental as Raphael and El Greco are.
The wardrobe was voluminous; I exchanged a paternal glance with my charge as the <i>douanier</i> plunged his brown fists into it. Who was the lady at Cadenabbia? What was she to me or I to her? She wouldn't know, when she rustled down to dinner next day, that it was I who had guided the frail skiff of her public basis of vanity to port. So unseen but not unfelt do we cross each other's orbits.
Now, could his cantankerous relative have seen my friend, he would once more have shaken his head over talents wasted. The oily eloquence which Terry lavished on that comparatively insignificant French douanier ought to have earned him a billet as first secretary to a Legation.
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