For a time Gauguin did not respond to Van Gogh's generous offer to share their fortunes in common. But he sent his own portrait to Vincent, a gloomy, powerful piece of painting which, in the opinion of some, so startlingly resembles Robert Louis Stevenson—like Gauguin a wanderer, but with what a difference! To Vincent this portrait suggested a prisoner, with its yellow flesh and deep blue shadows. He was more than ever determined to draw Gauguin out of the slough of despond into which he was falling, and to work together with him for the better establishment of both their reputations.
One can only admire Van Gogh for this decision. An artist of a childlike simplicity of soul, a combination of Don Quixote, the Good Samaritan and that Jesus of Nazareth whom he loved, Van Gogh was even greater as a man than as an artist. But Gauguin was, as he knew himself later, greater as an artist than as a man. It was natural for him to accept the invitation of a man whom he knew, after all, very slightly, because he saw in this acceptance possible advantages to himself.
Van Gogh's enthusiasm was unfortunately not backed, as was Gauguin's, by a strong reserve of nervous strength. His was one of those souls whose longing for spiritual reality followed inevitably the mystic path traced by William Blake:—
I will go down to self-annihilation and to eternal death
Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate,
And I be seiz'd and given into the hands of my own selfhood.
Gauguin's path tended to a different goal and followed the way foreseen by Whitman:—
O, to struggle against odds, to meet enemies undaunted!
To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand
To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium face to face,
To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect
nonchalance,
To be indeed a God!
Van Gogh was a lyric painter. His desire was to lose himself in the ecstacy of the divine. Gauguin was a narrative, an epic painter. His aim was to grow to divine stature through self-realization.
What could there be in common between the fervent admirer of Rembrandt, Delacroix, Monticelli, Ziem, and the brooding, patient workman who was building up his art on the classic tradition of Ingres, Cézanne and Degas? Surely even less than between Michaelangelo and Tintoretto.
A drama between these men was inevitable. It was not slow in declaring itself.[1] Of what actually occurred we have only Gauguin's account, of how Van Gogh first attacked him, and then strove to take his own life.
Van Gogh, upon whose shattered nervous organism the shock had spent itself, went voluntarily into a lunatic asylum at Arles, where, as his grip on life grew weaker under the pressure of the inner flame that devoured him, he painted visions of worlds tortured by the sun. Gauguin returned to Brittany, as he said, "armed against all suffering." But he had seen something. In striving to paint Van Gogh's portrait he had seen a vision, once again to quote his own words, of "Jesus preaching goodness and humility." And perhaps, in Vincent's hour of agony, while he lay bloodless and inanimate on the bed in that little room which he had loved and had painted so lovingly, Gauguin had another vision—of the sombre Garden of Gethsemane.