"To his eyes, purity and impurity are like the dance of the six serpents:
"To his eyes, the search for the Way of Buddha is like the coming of flowers."
It is only by meditating long on this disillusioned mysticism of a man who was never more than half an European, that we are able to understand how the same mind could have conceived the exasperated sensuality of the bas-relief, Soyez Amoureuses et vous serez Heureuses and the somber despair of Le Christ au Jardin d'Oliviers. That mind, as we have seen, was neither wholly Christian or Pagan—though the untamed Pagan element in it was destined slowly to get the better of the more refined Christian side. Therefore it is useless to ask ourselves whether Gauguin as an artist, displayed more of the Classic tradition than of the Gothic. Gothic as well as Classical strains remained mingled in him up to the last. Throughout his work there runs a longing—obscure, tormented, and ultimately foiled—for a natural religion: a religion that would reconcile man with nature in one harmony, a religion, which, like the rest of his striving, would be a synthesis.
V
By the end of the year 1889, Gauguin's name had acquired a certain renown, and he naturally gravitated back to Paris. Being however still without resources, he took residence once more with Emile Schuffenecker.
At that period, the literary and artistic school which had produced naturalism and impressionism was growing rapidly old-fashioned. Paris was on the verge of her æsthetic nineties. A small group of writers, chief of whom were Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Huysmans, had proclaimed a sort of revolt against the nineteenth century, and had been, in consequence of their love for the remote past, at first labelled Decadents. This title was soon abandoned for the better designation of Symbolists.
Gauguin appeared to the smaller fry of Symbolism as a sort of hero. Here was a man whose revolt was something not fictitious. He had definitely broken away from his own commercial surroundings. He had defiantly ruptured his own family ties. He had abolished Impressionist science and had sought to restore art to its primitive condition, revealing in the process the inexhaustible strength and vitality of peasant and popular art. His appearance amongst them, in a sailor's jersey, a sailor cap, sailor's trousers, and carved wooden shoes, excited a sensation. He became to the facile crowd of hero-worshipers and hangers-on, a sort of symbol.
Some critics have stated that Gauguin's head was turned by this adulation, but in reality, under a new veneer of affectation, he remained what he had always been. No man was less fitted for living in the midst of cultivated society than he. For a time, during that strange epoch of his financial career, he had indeed become, to outward seeming, largely an European; but this was merely on the surface and had completely vanished in the course of his later vagabondage. An invincible shyness and indisposition to reveal himself to others were in him, masked by an appearance of sullen reserve and discourtesy. This shyness disappeared when he was with children, peasants, or natives. But to every one else Gauguin attempted to be as rude as possible, in order to keep them at a distance. And, generally, he succeeded.
It is small wonder then that Schuffenecker shortly found his guest again intolerable, and that Gauguin had to seek out a more modest lodging. Schuffenecker is scarcely to be pitied. He seems never to have realized that Gauguin was the sort of man whom it was worth while trying to love and understand. In losing Gauguin, he lost the one thing that was ever likely to bring him fame, the reputation which his studio had already acquired in the eyes of certain amateurs, as housing Gauguin's collection of pictures and sculptures by himself, by Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Odilon Redon.