Against this overwhelming flood of change, a few exceptionally gifted men vaguely protested, affirming the greater value of human life over mechanical invention; maintaining the antique dignity of man. Their protest was incoherent, individualistic. These men were like broken and scattered fragments of dykes, still unsubmerged and striving to hold back the waters of a flood. Among them must be ranked the artist whose life-story I have written.
All that is vital and valuable in French painting of the nineteenth century, since Ingres, springs directly from the enthusiasm and spiritual energy of the French Revolution. The somber fury of Delacroix, the colossal caricature of Daumier; the peasant art of Millet; the sane realism of Courbet; the mordant irony of Degas and Forain; even the feeling for nature and the open air which the Impressionists gave us, all represent phases of humanity's vague and enormous hunger for personal freedom, for human liberty and development. When Gauguin arrived on the scene, the reaction was already taking place. The official, academic painters were merely ringing the changes upon a stock of outworn formulas. On the other hand, the Impressionists were striving to render nature scientifically, unemotionally. Nature was becoming to them no longer the mother and nurse of man but a collection of chemical formulas for soil, air, sunlight. Only Puvis de Chavannes remained, aloof and misunderstood, painting great decorations that seemed but the remembrance of some golden age of the past, and easel pictures of a profound, hopeless pessimism.
Gauguin began to paint, and the protest against science, against materialism, against unemotional vision began. At the outset he attempted to follow the scientific formulas of the Impressionists. But, by the purest instinct he discovered, as Cézanne had already discovered, that the sensation of light could not be painted, could only be rendered in color. And he also discovered (this time the discovery came from Puvis de Chavannes) that the sensation of form could not be painted either—that out of the variety of shifting forms offered to us by nature, the artist must select those most significant to him and that even these must be transposed, altered, accentuated or suppressed to suit the harmony of the composition. Thus unconsciously, almost without volition on his part, he was led to understand that the Primitives everywhere were the truly great artists, since they expressed great human emotions about man and nature, without troubling whether their vision was or was not exact. And so he fought, bitterly, savagely, for the actual restoration of primitive art and life; for the cause of natural humanity against the cause of mechanical, dehumanized efficiency.
Unless we realize this fact, we have not grasped the key, either to his art or to his life. Gauguin himself admitted that his painting was only a fragmentary indication, an unrealized promise of an unaccomplished world. And he may have had knowledge also of the fundamental discord and disorder of his own life, but have despaired of ever attaining to harmony with himself. At least the caricature of himself in Contes Barbares is here to remind us that he was not altogether the spoiled child that some imagine him to be. Having both the world and himself to struggle against, he at least determined that his pictorial work should represent the best part of his personality, even if his life proved only to be, as he said in his last letter to de Montfreid, "a downfall followed by an attempt to rise, followed by another downfall." And so in his pictures we realize the truth of the remark made by Van Gogh after the disaster that parted them: "Gauguin made one feel that a good picture should be the equivalent of a good action."
And indeed it is so. Every artist carries upon his shoulders a profound moral responsibility. This responsibility is not, as supposed, the duty of teaching us to conform to the modern official distortion of Christian ethics, by which we are ruled. It is not the duty of upholding a system of negations, of prohibitions, of compromises, striking at the very roots of life. It is a far nobler, far more difficult task. The duty of the artist is to affirm the dignity of life, the value of humanity, despite the morbid prejudices of Puritanism, the timid conventionality of the mob, despite even his own knowledge of the insoluble riddle of suffering, decay and death. This duty Gauguin in his art strove to accomplish. He affirmed his faith in man and in the scene of man's labor, the earth. Cézanne, perhaps a more accomplished painter, endowed perhaps with a deeper respect for nature and for the style of the great painters of the past, shrank from making Gauguin's affirmation. He accepted in his own life a compromise; in his art he ruthlessly eliminated the role of the creative and interpretive imagination. And then, towards the end of his life, Cézanne complained that Gauguin had vulgarized him.
"Gauguin has not understood me; never will I accept the lack of gradation and of tone; it's nonsense."
It would have been better for Cézanne to have said that he could not, dared not understand Gauguin.
Nor is this all that Gauguin accomplished. He restored painting to its proper place in the ordered hierarchy of the arts. He showed us that its place is between architecture and music, and that sculpture is its twin sister. He was the first man to suspect that the progress of the scientific spirit among the Greeks had produced the same effects in disassociating and destroying the arts, as has the progress of the scientific spirit in the present day. He believed, and constantly affirmed, that painting was entering upon a new musical phase and he built up his pictures on a definite scale of color harmonies, as well as upon the chosen architectural proportions of form, which, whether given by perspective or not, seemed to him necessary. Thus he reconciled the Venetians and the Primitives, and showed that the goal of both form and color is decoration.
William Blake might perhaps have admired this rude artisan, who painted his dream of a golden age in his own way, who steadfastly strove to grasp the essential truth in every tradition: Egyptian, Cambodian, Persian, Chinese, Gothic, Greek and Renaissance. But Gauguin could never, had he known of Blake, have pardoned in him the ultimate ascetic negation, the contemptuous denial of earthliness, of "the delusions of the goddess Nature." In Gauguin, the spirit never conquered the flesh, and he remained to the end, a man. Blake was possibly the greater visionary: Gauguin is certainly the better stone on which to build.