Death surprised him suddenly and Paul Gauguin's appeal will never be heard in this world.
A letter from the only white man, the Protestant minister Vernier, who knew him, leaves no doubt on the subject of the cause of Gauguin's death. It was not the eczema of the legs, nor leprosy, as some have hinted, nor another dose of arsenic, nor syphilis, that ended his life; it was a simple syncope of the heart. His energy, with which he had kept up for so many years the struggle with the world and out of which he had drawn so many beautiful pictures, was worn out. The machine slackened and stopped.
Paul Gauguin died on the 6th of May, 1903.
A few days before his death he had written his last letter to Charles Morice, the words of which stir one like a trumpet.
"I am on the ground but I am not beaten. The Indian, who smiles while he is being tortured, is not conquered. You are mistaken if you meant that I am wrong in calling myself a savage. I am a savage, and the civilized feel this, for there is nothing in my work which could produce bewilderment save this savage strain in me, for which I am not myself responsible. It is therefore inimitable. Every human work is a revelation of the individual. Hence there are two kinds of beauty; one comes from instinct, the other from labor. The union of the two, with the modifications resulting therefrom, produces great and very complicated richness. Art-criticism has yet to discover the fact.... Raphael's great science does not for a moment prevent me from discovering the instinct of the beautiful as the essential quality in him. Raphael was born with beauty. All the rest in him is modification.
"Physics, chemistry, and above all the study of Nature, have produced an epoch of confusion in art, and it may be truly said that artists robbed of all their savagery have wandered into all kinds of paths in search of the productive element they no longer possess. They now act only in disorderly groups and are terrified if they find themselves alone. Solitude is not to be recommended to every one, for a man must have strength to bear it and to act alone. All I have learnt from others has been an impediment to me. It is true I know little, but what I do know is my own."
Yet civilization, after all, had the last word. The very bishop, whom Gauguin in life had hated and caricatured, intervened when he lay cold and lifeless and the body of the painter was interred with full Catholic rites in the cemetery of the Church at Atuana. And, by a concluding stroke of irony, the grave was left unmarked. Thus one of the greatest painters of the later nineteenth century, and one of the bravest men the world has ever seen, mingled his dust with that of the humblest natives, in the same way as Blake, one of the greatest painters of the early nineteenth century, had been buried before him in an unmarked grave among the paupers, at Bunhill Fields.
IV
The immense industrial development which occurred during the nineteenth century took place so rapidly and universally, that no one was able to estimate its significance or dispassionately to weigh its effects. At the outset of the century the vital idea that pervaded Europe and America was the spiritual idea of liberty and the rights of man, born in the fires of the French Revolution. After 1848 this idea gradually vanished, and another took its place; the purely material idea of progress. The perfected application of steam and the consequent development of machinery; the immense tapping of the world's resources of coal, metals, agricultural products; the equally immense, universal exploitation of human effort necessary to develop these resources to their maximum; the creation of an international finance, resting upon vast hoards of wealth in the hands of a limited few, whose world-wide interests were linked together by railways, steamship lines, telegraphs, telephones; the ordered regimenting of mankind into a small capitalist class, invisibly controlling the old, decayed aristocracy, the official church, the machinery of the law; a larger middle class, dependent upon and subservient to the capitalists; and an immense laboring class, exploited in the interests of the two preceding classes: all these were virtually the creation of a single century.