Poor Strickland, in the throes of mental dissolution, obsessed, enmeshed in stereotypy, is still capable of sufficient mental reaction to realize that "You are a damn fool" or "Go to hell" was not an appropriate rejoinder or comment to such a speech, so "He stared at me without the slightest movement. I held his eyes with mine. I spoke very closely." "When it's over you feel so extraordinarily pure; you feel like a disembodied spirit, immaterial, and you seem to be able to touch beauty as though it were a palpable thing; and you feel an intimate communion with the breeze, and with the trees breaking into leaf, and with the iridescence of the river. You feel like God." The antivivisectionists should get after Doctor Maugham. It is cruelty to humans to hold unfortunate Strickland with hypnotic eye, and then thrust a record of experience so obviously personal upon him—or was it only a recollection of some published experiences of George Sand and Alfred de Musset—garnered from those days when he "idled on the quays, fingering a second-hand book that I never meant to buy," after he settled down in Paris and began to write a play?
Every Johnson has his Boswell, though he may be mute, unrecording, and sterile, and every sadist has his masochist. The young Dutchman, Vincent Van Gogh, a constitutional psychopath, whose mental aberrations took him into spiritual exhortation, social reformation, and finally "art," often tried to kill Gauguin. When the latter showed himself versed in mayhem Van Gogh made his bed, lit his pipe, wrapped himself in serenity and shot himself in the abdomen, as lunatics often do. Not so Dick Stroeve, Strickland's fidus Achates. He worshipped Strickland, who reviled him, kicked him, spat upon him; Stroeve, who naïvely asks, "Have I ever been mistaken?" in his estimate of artists, knew that Strickland was a great artist, greater than Manet or Corot, more puissant than El Greco or Cézanne, and that he had been sent to complete the cycle which Delacroix and Turner ushered in. Stroeve, a passive, asexual creature, had married a temperamental English governess in Rome, where he had earned the soubriquet of "le Maître de la Boîte à Chocolats" after she had had a disastrous experience with the son of an Italian prince whose children she had been hired to instruct.
When Strickland falls desperately ill from the combined effects of insufficient food, touting for prurient Anglicans, and translating the advertisements of French patent medicines that "restore" Doctor Maugham's countrymen to such a degree that they may go to Paris with pleasurable anticipation, Stroeve takes him to his house, despite the strenuous opposition and pathetic protests of Mrs. Stroeve, whose previous fleeting contacts with Strickland echoed the call of the wild in her and presaged disaster. From the moment he arrived the fat was in the fire. No affinities are so difficult to keep from blending as sex affinities, facetiously called soul affinities by the newspapers. Strickland's spark was fanned lovingly into glow by Stroeve, and when it flamed he threw Stroeve out of his house, possessed complaisant Mrs. Stroeve violently, and then put her on canvas, nude, "one arm beneath her head and the other along her body, one knee raised, the other leg stretched out." After nature's cataclysm had spent itself, Mrs. Stroeve committed suicide in approved feminine fashion by taking a corroding acid, without condoning her husband's offense—that of being virtuous. When she died Stroeve, a true masochist, looked up Strickland, forgave him, invited him to go with him to Holland, because "we both loved Blanche. There would have been room for him in my mother's house. The company of poor, simple people would have done his soul a great good." But Strickland, becoming for the moment verbally more expansive, replied: "I have other fish to fry." When Mr. Maugham spoke to him about Stroeve's visit he said: "I thought it damned silly and sentimental."
The author doesn't attempt a synopsis of the mental process that took Strickland to Tahiti, via Marseilles, though he depicts experiences that parallel those of Gauguin. Instead he animadverts on love and the sexual appetite to such purpose as to reveal that he is not expert in biology, psychology, or art. "For men love is an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid upon it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life." But what about the emphasis laid upon it by countless thousands who find in it a quality of that ennobling spiritual peace called faith, and which will be their reward when they repose in Abraham's bosom and live forever with God in paradise? "As lovers the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times." And the difference between male and female animals is that the female of the species permits contact at certain definite times, while the males are all Barkises. "Art is a manifestation of the sexual impulse. It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the 'Entombment' of Titian." After the author delivered himself of a statement so pregnant of platitude he must have experienced a sense of lightening, and a conviction that he would not have to consult the Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie at least until he wrote his next book.
That art has a definite purpose to perpetuate the creative will and that God endowed his image with a genesic instinct that he might create and thus reproduce his kind every one knows, but to contend that one is a manifestation of the other is puerile, unenlightened, and harks back to barbarism. One might think that there is no such thing as the psychology of art or the science of æsthetics. Art has an intellectual significance as well as, or more than, an emotional significance, and the unfortunate, unhappy, disequilibrated man who is parodied in this book contributed his substantial mite in the twentieth century to make us see it.
Any one who reads the "Lettres de Paul Gauguin," which are prefaced by a brief survey of his life by Victor Segalen, or his life by Jean de Rotonchamps, which was published at Weimar at the expense of Count von Kessler, will see how closely Maugham described Gauguin's life in the Polynesian cannibal islands. Strickland marries the native girl Ata, who had a "beguin" for him, but Gauguin had Tioka in his maison de joie without benefit of clergy. Doctor Coutras, who gives Mr. Maugham so much valuable information (via Rotonchamps and Segalen) is M. Paul Vernié, who attended Gauguin and wrote an account of his last days.
Despite the fact that in July, 1914, the London Times lifted the veil of secrecy from the face of the most prevalent disease in the world, and thus announced that the name of the disease which Fracastorius, the poet-physician of Verona, borrowed from the shepherd Syphlus should be no longer taboo by "nice people," the prevalence of the disease and the efforts to combat it have been widely discussed, though they are not topics of conversation at dinner-parties or at "welfare meetings" in churches, as tuberculosis is. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the author prefers to kill his "hero" with leprosy. But Doctor Maugham has been devoting so much of his time in latter years to novels and dramas that he finds the differentiation between them difficult, and, too, Gauguin's disease has been diagnosticated leprosy, elephantiasis, syphilis. "La dernière de ces avaries est exacte, mais ne doit pas être imputées au pays: c'était une pure vérole parisienne."
"The Moon and Sixpence" is interesting. There is scarcely any diversion more engrossing than reading about others' infirmities unless it be relating one's own. Hence the continued popularity of Pepys, Amiel, Rousseau, Marie Bashkirsteff, and other garrulous sufferers. But it is a book that no one can be the better or happier for reading, and it does Gauguin's memory an injury because it parodies it. His life as it has been revealed to us was bizarre and irregular enough. We could wish that he had been less like Rimbaud and more like Rodin, but, distressing as his behavior was, seen in conventional light, we should like not to have seen it featured in fiction.
Mr. Maugham wrote a novel, "Out of Human Bondage," which is a far more meritorious piece of work than "The Moon and Sixpence," in which some of his professional colleagues—he is a physician—recognized portraitures. Perhaps it was his success with them that encouraged him to try a larger canvas.
The author's admitted cleverness was never more evident than in the depiction of Mrs. Strickland's character and characteristics—a smug Philistine, who runs the gamut of preciosity, jealousy, martyrdom, autorighteousness, and autosanctification. She is pleased and proud as she views the veneer of sanctimoniousness which her son, in holy orders, gives the dearly beloved husband of Mrs. Charles Strickland, who wrote his father's biography "to remove certain misconceptions which had gained currency," viz., that Doctor Maugham is masquerading as a psychiatrist and publishing his experiences with the insane, meanwhile throwing off "punk" about art and traducing normal, though admittedly "immoral," man.