PAUL GAUGUIN

PART I: THE FORMATION 1849-1885

About the middle of the last century, there occurred in Paris a series of events which seemed at the time likely to be of importance to future history, secondary only to the days of the French Revolution. You will seek Paris in vain for any public monument to these events, known as the Revolution of 1848. Only the name of the hideously utilitarian Boulevard Raspail may perhaps remind you, that in this year France achieved another one of those political failures which have been so curiously common in her history since 1789.

In February of that year, King Louis Philippe and his ministers had fled before the rising storm of popular feeling. It seemed at last that the great popular revolution of the working classes, dreamed of by every artist since 1789, proclaimed in the Rabelaisian caricatures of Daumier, latent in the troubled Romanticism of the epoch, was at hand. A provisional republic was formed and elections were held to the National Assembly. But the provinces showed that it mattered little to them whether the form of Government was changed or not. So long as the peasant had his farm, his cow, his money safely stowed away in a stocking, a hard-working wife, a pipe and a glass of wine, he was content with things as they were. If the industrial classes of Paris were starving, that was not his affair. He shared none of their fanatic Socialism, none of their dreams of the millennium. He wanted to be left alone.

The National Assembly proved to be overwhelmingly moderate, and the leaders of the Provisional Government discovered that they preferred to stand with the majority rather than to fall with the Parisian extremists. But the latter were not to be beaten without a struggle. On the fifteenth of May, a mob attempted to take the Assembly by storm, and failed. On the eighteenth, Lamartine, the former idol of the Revolutionaries, was hooted down while making a conciliatory speech. The Government found that it must either provide work and wages for the Parisian unemployed or run the risk of an appeal to force. A scheme was started, but it proved to be costly, and on the twenty-first of June the Government faced about and announced that it intended to proceed no further with its project. Three days later the storm broke. Two hundred and twenty-one barricades arose as if by magic in the streets, crowned with red flags and manned by sixty thousand men. For three days the mob kept up a desperate resistance; then the last barricade fell, the blood was washed off the pavements, the cause of "moderation" and "good sense" was restored.

There is a poetic justice in the coincidence of some events. On the seventh of June a son, Paul, was born to M. and Madame Gauguin, residing in Paris. This infant, brought obscurely into the world to the sound of cannon, was destined by one of the ironic dispensations of Nature to become later the leader of an art-revolution as far reaching and as important in its effects as the great attempt of 1848. His life was to be a constant struggle with the growing bourgeois civilization, the middle-class morality, of the late nineteenth century; his art was to speak the promise of a renewed world, a world where man could again walk naked, unashamed and free, as in Eden. He was destined to break beneath the inert weight of social conventions and stupidities, as the revolution had been broken by the armed forces at the disposal of the government: but his ideas were to point the way to, new conceptions of art and of life, which only the future can realize.

Clovis Paul Gauguin, to give the father his full name, was a petty journalist from Orleans. He had a post as collaborator on one of the obscure newspapers of Liberal opinion, that so greatly flourished about this time. His influence upon his son was slight, as is the case with the fathers of most artists. It is to Madame Gauguin that we must turn for an explanation of the character of her famous son.

Portrait of Gauguin's mother.

Aline Marie Gauguin was the daughter of a certain Chazal, of whom we know nothing, and of the then celebrated Socialist pamphleteer and agitator, Flora Tristan.

Flora Tristan was born in 1803 at Lima, Peru. Her father was a Spaniard of noble descent, Mariano Tristan y Moscoso. He served as an officer in the Peruvian Army, and probably took part in the wars of independence which severed Peru from Spain, since we find him and his family later occupying positions of dignity and affluence under the Republic. In 1818 he sent his daughter to school in Paris. She eloped the next year with Chazal and was disowned by her parents. After the birth of her child she separated from her husband and returned to Peru, seeking a reconciliation with her family. But the family had determined to do nothing for the self-willed, impulsive daughter, and she drifted back to Paris, where she attempted to support herself by writing pamphlets of strongly Socialistic tendencies. She became a pioneer of woman's suffrage, of humanitarianism, of the trade-union movement. She toured France making speeches. In 1836 she had the misfortune to meet Chazal again in Paris, who stabbed her in a fit of jealousy and was condemned to twenty years of penal servitude for the offense. A few years later she died in Bordeaux, and the trade-unions, remembering her zeal for their cause and her personal beauty—which had moved them perhaps more than the fervor of her speeches—subscribed the sum necessary to put up a monument.

Such were the parents and the grand-parents of the child who had just been born into the world. The tragic and violent union of Chazal and Flora Tristan serves to explain the man and the artist he later became. In Chazal we find the source of his violence and headstrong irritability; in Flora Tristan we see whence he drew his love of personal and individual liberty, his hatred of moral restraint, his scorn of the bourgeoisie, his Spanish hauteur and stoicism. Half-savage Spanish blood flowed in his veins, a mixture of Arab, Celt and African. Perhaps in his Peruvian descent there were even other currents—currents of that Inca race which the Spaniards had subdued but not conquered. Whatever else destiny held in store for him, it was certain from the beginning that Paul Gauguin could never be wholly assimilated to the intellectual effort of the frivolous and fickle city of Paris.

The earliest adventures of the future painter combined the peculiar strands of tragedy, romance and savagery which were to recur so often in his later life. In December, 1851, the makeshift Republic came to an end and Louis Napoleon, by an easy coup d'état, restored the Empire. Clovis Gauguin found himself ruined with the suspension of the Liberal paper for which he wrote. There was only one hope remaining: that Flora Tristan's relations in Lima might do something for Paul and his sister Marie. So the family set out for Peru. On the way, during the terrible passage through the Straits of Magellan, Clovis Gauguin was seized with heart failure and died. His body was taken ashore and buried at Port Famine, or Punta Arenas, the southernmost town in the world, in Chile.

The mother and her two orphaned children were received with kindness by the head of the family, Flora Tristan's uncle, Don Pio Tristan y Moscoso. Concerning this personage Gauguin himself told many anecdotes in later years. Probably most of these were inexact to the point of being fable pure and simple. We must remember that Gauguin at this time was scarcely four years of age. We know that the family were wealthy nobles, of high social standing, who lived in the old Castillian manner of luxury and indolence. From such surroundings Gauguin doubtless derived much of the "hidalgo manner" that distinguished him throughout life—a blend of haughtiness, reserve and egoism, masking often a real shyness before people. And here he saw, also for the first time, works of art produced by a non-European civilization: ceramics, jewelry, fabrics of Inca origin. The remembrance of these specimens of savage, primitive art undoubtedly influenced his mind in later years.

Gauguin's stay in Lima did not last long. Four years later his paternal grandfather died in France, and his mother returned to that country in order to obtain her share of his estate, which proved to be only a small sum.

In later years, the painter believed, or affected to believe, that if his mother had remained in Peru and had neglected her relations in France she would have been left heiress to Don Pio Tristan's property. It is probable that Gauguin was here merely romancing, as he often did, when desiring to mystify and startle people about his life. It is an enchanting but fruitless speculation to wonder what course the boy's mind might have taken had it been subjected for a few more years to the influence of Peruvian life. Peru undoubtedly gave him a love for the tropics, for exotic, out-of-the-way, old-fashioned places, unspoiled by the nineteenth century. Unconsciously many of the traits that made his character so little comprehensible to the Frenchmen of his day were planted in him during these years.

France was now to give him something different. He was to be educated, or rather to receive what passed for an education. He remained at a seminary at Orleans till the age of seventeen, hating his studies, becoming more and more intractable and unteachable. This seminary, as all such institutions in France at the time, was conducted by Jesuit priests.

In later days he declared that all he had learned from the years that he had spent at the seminary were a hatred of hypocrisy, false virtue and spying. And with malicious irony he said: "And I also learnt there a little of that spirit of Jesuit casuistry, which is a force not to be despised in the struggle with other people."

His sole ambition was to escape, to get to sea again, to make voyages to the tropics. His mother dreamed of placing him as a cadet in the navy, but he ignominiously failed to pass the necessary examination. He was therefore placed in the merchant marine. This decision of his mother he regretted bitterly to the end of his life.

In 1865 he embarked aboard the Luzitano, a cargo boat, on a voyage from Havre to Rio de Janeiro. His grade aboard this ship was that of a pilot's apprentice.

Of this voyage, which enabled him to see again the tropics, Gauguin retained in later years important memories.

In the fragmentary note-books he kept in Tahiti he declared that it was during this voyage that he heard from the lips of a ship-mate a story of the latter's life when ship-wrecked among the natives of the Society Islands in the Pacific. The remembrance of that story may have influenced him later in his choice of Tahiti as an ideal residence. At least the appearance of Rio de Janeiro's harbor awakened in his mind fresh enthusiasm for the tropics. The stay at Rio was further signalized by a liaison with an actress, of that eminently casual kind which Gauguin was to experience so often later on. Finally the return voyage brought about another liaison, this time with a Prussian woman, and in defiance of ship's discipline. It was certain that his character—was not of the sort that could be fitted easily into the mold of self-restraint necessary to produce a capable naval officer. At all events, the next thing we hear is that Gauguin quitted the merchant service and enlisted in the French Navy as a common sailor, in February, 1868. Probably by this time his mother had refused to support him, and he was forced into this position through necessity.

The cruiser Jerome Napoleon, on which he found himself, was, to his chagrin, ordered to cruise in northern waters. So instead of seeing the tropics again, Gauguin's new experiences were only of the ice-bound Greenland coast and the barren North Cape. This was bad, but still worse was to follow. The vessel was on its way to Spitzbergen when news was brought to its captain that France had declared war upon Prussia.

"Where are you going?" said the second officer, seeing the Captain put the helm about.

"To Charenton," replied the indignant first officer; Charenton being the great lunatic asylum near Paris!

The vessel got no nearer to France than Copenhagen, when the melancholy news of Sedan came. The name Jerome Napoleon was painted out, that of Desaix substituted, and the unfortunate cruiser was obliged to remain in the waters off Copenhagen till the close of the war in 1871, contenting herself with the capture of one small ship as prize.

III

In 1871, after the cessation of hostilities, Gauguin obtained leave, renewable at the end of eighteen months, to quit the navy. He was now heartily sick of the sea, because of the enforced idleness and wearisome discipline that he had now endured aboard the Desaix for three years. Besides the opportunity of another career was offering itself and he felt that he must seize it.

His mother had died in the interval since he had last seen France and, in dying, had confided the care of her two children to a well-to-do Paris banker, Gustave Arosa. This man immediately found for Paul a place at Bertin's, a banking house with which he was connected. And now there opened for the young man a period not only the most prosperous but in retrospect the most amazing of his career.

Though his character had already displayed itself to be that of an instinctive nomad, a lover of the tropics and essentially a pagan savage, yet it is apparent that he now yielded readily to the entrancing prospect of amassing a fortune by speculation on the Bourse, without troubling himself too much with the question whether his new position might not entail heavier responsibilities in the future. He had not been long at Bertin's before he found out how to make money quite easily. Possibly this was not a very difficult thing to do, for the Paris stock market had been utterly disorganized by the events of 1870-71, and, now that peace was signed, France was making one of those rapid recoveries that have been so common in her history. Stocks were going up and trade was booming. Gauguin was able to take advantage of these circumstances to such an extent that in one year, we are told, he made as much as forty thousand francs.

In 1873 he married, thus saddling himself with a responsibility he was never wholly to shake off. His wife, Mette Sophia Gad, was the daughter of a Protestant clergyman of Copenhagen. The family was a good one and enjoyed an honorable position in the society of the Danish capital. The daughters had been educated at Paris, and one of them had married a member of the Norwegian Parliament, while another had become the first wife of the painter, Fritz Thaulow.

When or where Gauguin first met his future bride is uncertain, but it was probably during the stay of the Desaix at Copenhagen. At any rate it seems that he was eager to marry, as the ceremony (a purely civil one, owing to his wife being a Protestant) was delayed owing to the loss of his father's certificate of birth in the bombardment of St. Cloud.

At this time, through his wife's friends and connections, through Gustave Arosa, through Emile Schuffenecker—a fellow employee at Bertin's—and through others, a new interest came into his life. He began to paint, although pressure of work did not permit him to regard this fresh occupation as more than an amusement at first. Arosa was, in his way, an amateur of art and had collected a number of pictures by French artists of the day—among them Delacroix and Courbet. These works he engraved in photogravure—an art then in its infancy—and sent copies of the engravings to his personal friends. Through Schuffenecker Gauguin was brought closely into touch with the Impressionists, who were then making a sensation in Paris. Gauguin bought brushes and colors and began by painting on Sundays and holidays. It was only slowly that he began to look upon painting as anything but a distraction.

His first essays in art were purely academic. He painted in the prevailing style of the Salons and even sent one picture to the Salon of 1876. At the same time he began to attempt sculpture. He worked at first in marble, a material afterwards entirely rejected in favor of the more coarsely-grained surface of wood, clay or paste. He liked a rough surface and counseled young sculptors to mix sand with the clay in order to emphasize this roughness.

Gauguin's was a many-sided and a versatile nature. His early years at sea had given him much of the sailor's ingenuity. He had a tremendous interest in the technical processes of art. During his life he was able to do almost equally well at painting, lithography and sculpture. He also attempted etching, stained glass and pottery. His writings, particularly his share in "Noa Noa," show a considerable grasp of direct, poetic narrative—a gift that might very possibly have made of him a good poet. Throughout his life we are unable to regard him solely as a painter of pictures; his influence in opening new channels for art-decoration is even more important than his pictorial work. Even in literature his achievements have a certain force as inspiration. The problems he set himself were as varied in their way as those that occupied his English contemporary, William Morris, almost as varied as those that occupied Leonardo da Vinci.

He acquired knowledge easily; his problem was always how to weigh, sift and make use of it. But his growth to artistic maturity was slower than in the case of artists who limit their field of effort, because he attacked many subjects at the same time.

It may seem strange to consider this many-sided versatility as a proof, not of a complex, but of a primitive nature. Yet it is undoubtedly true that in the primitive stages of art the artist is able to do almost everything. The interchangeability, the essential unity of all the arts, is the strongest characteristic of art in its early stages. As civilization and consequently technique become more advanced, it grows more and more difficult for a man to become master of any single branch of art. Perhaps that is why, in our modern industrialized states, the arts tend to disappear, to become the interest and hobby of a rapidly diminishing minority.

The painter Schuffenecker and his family.

All this was not suspected by Gauguin at the time, nor for years afterwards. For the time he was content to paint and to follow the prevailing fashions in his painting. And he soon found that the prevailing fashion of the day in Paris was Impressionism.

To define Impressionism it is not necessary, as many professional art-critics have done, to enter into long dissertations as to the supremacy of pure colors, nor to see in Constable or Turner the ancestry of the movement.

Impressionism was neither more nor less than the cult of Realism—or to speak better, Naturalism—carried out in painting. This cult had already possessed in painting one important precursor, Gustave Courbet. But it is to literature, always the advance guard of the arts, that we must turn to understand what impressionism intended and why it failed.

A little before 1870, which year marks a turning point not only in France's political but also in her intellectual life, there came a change over her literature. Romanticism, which had startled the world in 1830 with Lamartine, de Musset, de Vigny, Hugo and Balzac, was now dead. The heroic, the Napoleonic, the Byronic attitude had somehow gone out of life. Under the Second Empire, the bourgeois triumphed over the Tuileries.

A few years before the crash of 1870, Charles Baudelaire gave to the world his Fleurs du Mal—the exasperated cry against life of a soul tortured with too great a sensibility. Almost at the same time Gustave Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, erected his monument of infamy to the memory of the bourgeois. These two books opened the path to Naturalism, to the "human document," to the de Goncourts, to de Maupassant, and to Zola.

Impressionism was the logical outgrowth, in another sphere, of the work of these Naturalist writers.

It abolished the lighting of the studio and substituted for it natural sunlight.

It abolished the classical "subject" and left the painter free to paint, as Manet said, "N'importe quoi."

Thus, on the one side, it led directly to the analysis of atmospheric vibration, foreshadowed by Constable and Turner, but not by them elevated to the rank of a science; and on the other side, it led with equal inevitability to the total dependence of the painter upon Nature, and the consequent atrophy of his imagination. It was, as Manet said again, "Nature seen through a temperament."

Against Impressionism, as against Romanticism, only one artist had dared to continue the tradition of classical, decorative painting descending from Giotto, through Raphael and Poussin, to Prud'hon and to Ingres. This was the Norman, Puvis de Chavannes.

But Puvis, though nearly fifty, was still unknown, still dreaming of walls to conquer, still buried away from the eyes of the young men in the slumbrous depths of the official salons, while Impressionism was the succès de scandale of the day.

Gauguin heard of Impressionism and became a devout follower of its theories. He painted pictures in the manner of Camille Pissarro, who was a compatriot of Madame Gauguin, having been born in the Island of St. Thomas in the Antilles, then Danish territory. Gauguin took part in the exhibitions of the Impressionist group in 1880 and 1881.

Huysmans, then as later the disciple of Naturalism pushed to its extreme limit, praised a nude of his because it was ugly. Gauguin began to be talked about, not only as a well-to-do amateur, but as a coming artist. But his work at the Bourse was exhausting his strength and his time.

Although he had now a wife and five children dependent on him, Gauguin in January, 1883, took the rash step of quitting the financial world and devoting himself solely to art.

This decision was, as Dr. Segalen says in his valuable Preface to the letters Gauguin wrote from Tahiti, the true turning-point in his career. When Paul Gauguin said to himself, "Henceforward I will paint every day," he was not only satisfying his vague and latest personal ambition and aptitude, he was setting himself to the fulfillment of a great impersonal duty: he was beginning to clear away the sophistications not only of his own nature but of modern art.

It is important to note that Gauguin was thirty-five years of age when he came to this decision. This proves that the decision was no hasty one, of which he was liable to repent later. At such an age a man has arrived at his intellectual maturity; and, when this man is a Paul Gauguin, we may feel sure that he does not alter his whole manner of living from a mere desire for change. Gauguin had something to express and knew it. He had better work to do than dabbling in stocks and shares. And to this work he was determined to devote himself despite all opposition.

But had he not been instinctively a nomad and a savage, with the desire for freedom, for life without compromise and for the harmony that comes only from a natural expression of one's deepest instincts, this decision might never have been taken. As a husband and father he now had others dependent upon him. That he set aside their claims to follow the deeper call proves that, as he later said, he believed himself to have the right to dare everything. And he was probably at first confident of success, thinking an artistic career likely to be as easy to manage as that of a speculator.

Madame Gauguin seems to have acquiesced in this decision. She was naturally desirous to be ranked as the wife of a famous and successful man, and her husband may well have dazzled her with the prospects of his success. In any case, she was soon destined to sad disillusionment.

Gauguin found it impossible to support himself and six others on the sums he had saved. As for his pictures, they were not sufficiently well known to sell. It was necessary, above all things, to gain time. So he decided to sacrifice a collection of modern pictures which he had bought with the proceeds of his career on the Bourse, in order to support himself. The list of these pictures is interesting, as it shows clearly the direction of his tastes at this period. It included a Manet, several Renoirs, some Claude Monets, two Cézannes (still life and landscape), an early Pissarro, together with examples of Guillamin, Sisley, Jongkind, Lewis Brown and, most significant of all, two designs by Daumier.

Whether it was that Gauguin had continued to maintain his family in a style above his present means and was therefore now in debt, we do not know. Nor do we know whether the sale of his collection realized an appreciable sum or not. Probably the amount was small, for the Impressionists, though talked about, had not achieved that purely commercial popularity which is the modern substitute for fame. In any case, the painter soon found himself again without resources. He had ignominiously failed to carve out a new career for himself in Paris. He found that he could not now obtain another commercial post to take the place of Bertin's. So it was Madame Gauguin's turn to act. She decided on a removal to Copenhagen, where she hoped her family would use their influence in obtaining a position for her husband.

Once in the Danish city, however, the basic difference between husband and wife showed itself in violent form. The atmosphere of rigid Protestant piety, in which his wife's family lived, jarred on the passionate southern temperament of the painter. He discovered that he hated everything in Denmark, the scenery, the climate, the prudery and provinciality of the inhabitants, the lack of Parisian Bohemianism—everything except the cookery of his mother-in-law! And he took no pains to conceal his hatred. He defiantly persisted in maintaining his Parisian freedom of speech and manners. One day, walking on the road that overlooks the bay of the Sund, he chanced to look down. Each of the estates adjoining the beach is equipped with a small cabin for bathing. It is the custom there for the sexes to bathe separately and entirely naked. Gauguin chanced to stop and look down at the moment when the wife of a Protestant minister was stepping into the water. Instead of going on, he decided to indulge his æsthetic interest in the nude. The daughter of the minister's wife saw him and called out to her mother to return. The lady turned and started hastily back to her cabin. But Gauguin continued his inspection. Next day there was the inevitable scandal.

Such a state of affairs could clearly not continue. Gauguin would yield nothing to the prejudices of the Danes, nor would his wife's family change their ideas of respectability to suit his queer notions. A separation between husband and wife was inevitable. In 1885 it came about with, one may imagine, no great regrets on either side. To the painter this marriage had all along been a matter of convenience. We shall have ample opportunity to observe throughout his career that Gauguin attached practically no sentiment to the sexual relations into which he entered with various women. He was probably more affectionate with his children, particularly with his daughter Aline, than ever with his wife.

It was now far more convenient for him that his wife should remain with her relations, where she would at least have a roof over her head, than accompany him to Paris, whither he was determined to return. Madame Gauguin agreed with this arrangement, hoping to see her husband, now disembarrassed of his family, make a rapid conquest of the Parisian art-world. And so in 1885 Paul Gauguin returned to France once more to try his fortune.

He was now thirty-seven years old. Hitherto the events of his life had been largely controlled by chance; from now on he began to strive more consciously to be the master of his own destiny. It is therefore necessary, before going further with this story, to take stock of the man, both as regards his physical appearance and his intellectual equipment.

Gauguin was of not more than middle height, but stockily built and of strong physical development. His hair, which later grew thinner and lost much of its coloring, was chestnut inclining towards red, and fell in large straggling masses over a broad but rather low forehead. The eye-brows were arched and gave a skeptical appearance to the eyes, which were heavy-lidded, small and gray-green in color—the eyes of one who has spent many years at sea. The nose was large, thick and aquiline. A thin drooping mustache, lighter in color than the hair, hung over the mouth, with its large, coarse lips drooping at the corners. The chin was pointed and retreating and, in later life, furnished with a short tufted beard similar in color to the mustache.

After Gauguin's return from the Antilles in 1887 it is the testimony of all who knew him that his skin had become as bronzed as an Indian's, and that he dressed and looked altogether like a sailor. Even his excessive devotion to tobacco, a habit that later was seriously to injure his health, had something sailor-like in it. Gauguin rolled his own cigarettes in the Spanish fashion and smoked commonly a short clay pipe. His hands, too, were not those of an artist but of a seaman—coarse, square and red. Altogether he was in appearance curiously Creole; he did not resemble a Frenchman of France. The dark tint of his skin and the formation of the face and features belied the color of the eyes and hair.

His personal characteristics were unfavorably judged by most of those with whom he came in contact. It must be remembered, however, that he was by nature reserved and even suspicious, as are many people of fundamental genius. He differed from those about him in that he worked by instinct, while they worked according to some conscious method. He therefore obtained out of himself, by means of slow thinking and laborious effort, the knowledge which many have at the beginning. Further, the study and practice of art is in itself so exhausting of physical and emotional fibre as to leave its possessor with little reserve of tact and dissimulation with which to face the world. Finally, Gauguin was shy, actually and by nature shy. People took this shyness for rudeness and this reserve for disdain. And Gauguin was not always unwilling to profit by this misunderstanding. He carefully cultivated his rudeness, both to create an effect and to keep bores at a distance.

As regards his work, he was on the way to find his path, although he never entirely found it, even to the end of his career. His versatility prevented his art from ever becoming fixed and dead, like that of many popular and highly successful painters.

Mention has already been made of his appearance in 1880 among the Impressionists and of the praise bestowed by Huysmans on one of his pictures for its frank realism. This very nude, however, shows Gauguin massing his shadows, making them heavy and dark, which was the direct contrary to Impressionist practice. A year later we find Huysmans complaining of the low and muddy color of his pictures; another proof that the painter was already trying to mass tones, to escape from the division of tones employed by the Impressionist group.

We are safe in assuming also that Gauguin felt already an inward desire to paint nature as he had seen her in the tropics. His early years had shown him the tropics; and the art of the greatest masters, as well as of the worst daubers, is based on the instinctive knowledge they have obtained during childhood and the use they have made of it in later years. Pissarro, too, had seen the tropics; but they had not in any way influenced his color sense, which, indeed, grew colder and grayer as his years advanced. But he may have had something to do with Gauguin's inclination towards tropical subjects, though the feeling of kinship with Nature which Gauguin brought to such subjects was all his own.

If Gauguin had but known it, there waited for him not the future of fame and fortune of which he dreamed, but seventeen years of life-and-death struggle with actual hunger in a world that gave him neither the means of living nor the slightest encouragement, but only hampered him in every way, so that he was forced to paint his finest decorative pictures on small pieces of board or canvas instead of on great walls. He was to quit his own country, and to go to the ends of the earth, only to find that the system of civilization possessed by his country, whatever its other advantages, did not permit of an artist to live and enjoy the fruits of his labor. He was finally to sink into an unmarked grave, to be almost forgotten, and to attain to a commercial apotheosis only when no longer able to profit by it. Even if Gauguin could have realized this, it is doubtful if he would have changed his mind. Ready to dare everything, he strode forward into the future.

PART II: THE STRUGGLE WITH IMPRESSIONISM 1885-1889

With the return of Gauguin to Paris there opened for him the second stage of his career, the struggle to maintain himself on the productions of his brush and chisel. During the first stage his character had been formed by the hard experiences of seafaring and by the comparative leisure and affluence of his epoch of splendor, during which he found time to discuss the principles of art with the best exponents of the latest French tradition. He had not only met and talked with men like Manet, Pissarro, and Cézanne, he also visited the museums of Paris, and did not confine himself to the Louvre, but made a special study of the Musée Guimet with its collection of art works from the far East, and later of the Trocadero, with its casts of Cambodian sculpture. His stay at Bertin's had been of good service in giving him the mental equipment, the self-education necessary to begin the struggle for artistic independence.

Yet in his case we know far less of what passed in his mind during these important years of development than in the case of most of his contemporaries. "He was the sort of man to be awake to everything new in art that was going on," says one who knew him in this period, "but not to acknowledge indebtedness to anything or anybody." What he absorbed was by instinct; and instinct cautioned him not to share his knowledge with people who might fail to make good use of it.

Amid the noisy chatter of Parisian art-circles he passed silent and unnoted. He rented a studio and began to busy himself with all sorts of experimental projects, particularly with sculpture. But very shortly his resolution and character were further tested by the new experience of hunger.

For a time he suffered extreme privation. He was forced at last to accept a salary of three francs fifty centimes a day for pasting advertisements on the walls of the Gare du Nord in order to save himself from starvation.

"I have known," he wrote in a small notebook dedicated to his daughter Aline, "extreme misery, that is to say hunger and everything that follows upon hunger. It is nothing, or almost nothing. One grows accustomed to it and, with will-power, one can end by laughing at it. But what is terrible is to be prevented from working, from developing one's intellectual faculties. It is true that suffering sharpens one's ability. But it is necessary not to suffer too much or suffering will kill you.

"With a great deal of pride I have ended by having a great deal of energy, and I have forced myself to be full of will-power.

"Is pride a fault, or must one develop one's pride? I believe pride must be developed. It is the best weapon we have against the human animal that is in us."

This quotation gives us the man entirely. He was one of those who are not to be beaten, one of those who do not turn back. He was to go forward and to maintain himself while seeking a path.

In 1886 he contributed no less than nineteen pictures to an exhibition of the Impressionist group, together with a relief in wood, which seems to foreshadow the later creator of La Guerre et la Paix.

Most of these early works of Gauguin seem to have disappeared. Very few can recall seeing one. It is therefore interesting to read the following appreciation by Felix Fenéon, which shows that Gauguin was already traveling far from the formulas that satisfied the other impressionists:—

"The tones of M. Paul Gauguin's pictures are very little separated from each other; because of this, there is in his work a dull harmony. Dense trees rise from the fertile soil, abundant and humid, invade the frame, pursue the sky. The air is heavy. Bricks seen between the trunks indicate a nearby house; things are lying about, muzzles are scattered in the thicket—cows. These reds of roofs and of cattle the artist constantly opposes to his greens and reflects them again in the waters, encumbered with long grasses, which run between the tree-trunks."

This shows clearly that Gauguin was treating landscape at this period already as a synthesis, a decorative whole and not, like Manet, Pissarro or the Divisionists, as an exercise in the analysis of atmospheric vibration. As for the relief on wood, Fenéon writes:

"On the pear-tree wood, which we regret to see left in monochrome, a naked woman stands out in half relief, her hand to her hair, seated rectangularly in a landscape. This is the only number of sculpture. Nothing in painted wood, in glass-paste, in wax."

Paris with her art-theories had nothing now to teach Gauguin. He must find his own way, create his own tradition. Aloof alike from the theories of the Impressionists and from those of their successors, the Pointillists—theories of the disassociation of tones and of the analytic disintegration of light, based on the scientific treatises of Chevreuil and Helmholtz—he was painfully tending back to the old decorative tradition that a picture must be an unit, the harmonious expression of a single emotion. Hunger proved again the best friend of the independent artist. He fled from Paris and sought refuge in the country.

The place of refuge which Gauguin found was the village of Pont-Aven in the district of Finistère in Brittany.

There is no doubt that this chosen spot and its surroundings had upon his art an influence only secondary to that exercised later by Tahiti. Indeed the charm of Tahiti itself was slow to efface this influence.

The Celtic fringe of Europe—Cornwall, the Highlands of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Galicia—presents everywhere a great similarity in natural feature and in the character of its inhabitants. The Celt is an outcast. Driven backward by successive waves of civilization and conquest, he has finally occupied those lands which were so unprofitable to his conquerors that he was able to remain in them undisturbed. Long residence in these desolate places has made of him a natural mystic, a conservative. Perhaps he might never have been anything else had not the nineteenth century—with its railroads and the life-weariness of its cultivated classes—made of him a curiosity. The hordes of tourists, of bad artists, of dealers in journalese, who rave about Brittany, Cornwall, or Ireland as picturesque summer-resorts, show that civilization has obtained its revenge on the savage who prefers to remain a savage.

Paul Gauguin did not assuredly go to Brittany to discover the picturesque. Had he done so his painting would have ranked no higher than the painting of Charles Cottet or of Lucien Simon. His real home as an artist, as he was later to discover, lay elsewhere—under less troubled skies, in the midst of more tropical vegetation. But the gloom, the melancholy inertia, the mystic faith, the simplicity of this land of wind-mills, small trees, granite coasts and menhirs, worked strongly on the yet untamed primitive in him. Stronger still perhaps was the appeal of the sea, the most restless and yet the most changeless element in nature. Gauguin was in appearance, as in manners, a sailor—the eye, the direct curt speech, the reserved disdain, the freedom of manners, all these in him had been accentuated by his early experiences. In Brittany he found the sea; he found an unspoiled people; he found, above all, repose from the everlasting chatter of art-theories that, like the bubbling of endless bottles of too light champagne, frothed eternally in the cafés of Paris. Brittany gave him greater faith in himself; Brittany began to dispel the nineteenth century skepticism that was slowly stifling him.

Struggle of Jacob with the Angel.

His first stay in Pont-Aven was destined to be short. It is chiefly remarkable for the fact that here he was visited by Emile Bernard, then only about seventeen years of age, whose relations with Gauguin and other painters afford matter for so much controversy that they must be examined in detail.

Bernard was the type of infant phenomenon that springs up, mushroom-like, in an overheated atmosphere of artistic and literary controversy. At the age of sixteen he was writing violently naturalistic and extremely bad poetry. He next went in for painting, raced off to Brittany to see Gauguin, was received with coolness, ran back to Paris. Here he found Van Gogh fresh from Holland and, when Van Gogh in turn went to Arles, became his most industrious correspondent. Later he heard that the crazy old hermit, Paul Cézanne, was living at Aix—so off to Aix went Bernard. More letters were the outcome of the visit.

Meanwhile he progressed in painting from a divisionist and neo-impressionist technique to a facile imitation of Gauguin's Breton style, then to a combination of Cézanne and Gauguin, to conclude with painting of Oriental subjects in a style not so very far removed from that of Gerome. He imitated everyone in turn, only to end by becoming that drab eclectic thing—what the French call a "pompier" or we an "Academician." Thus he justified Gauguin's sardonic prophecy that "Bernard would end up something like Benjamin Constant!"

We owe Bernard a debt in that he has preserved for us the beautiful letters which Van Gogh wrote to him, and—more precious debt—that he has given us those rare talks and letters in which that old stoic Cézanne revealed a glimpse of his agony. But we owe Bernard nothing in that he has seen fit to defame the art and character of the man whose style he was the first to copy—Paul Gauguin. But of this more later.

III

The winter of 1886 found Gauguin again in Paris. Here he met another artist whose life was destined to have upon his an influence quite different from that of Emile Bernard.

This was Vincent Van Gogh, newly arrived from Holland. Gauguin has left on record in a piece of prose called Les Crevettes Roses his first impression of Van Gogh, which proves beyond dispute that Gauguin loved Van Gogh and admired him, despite his habitual reserve and the haughty disdain with which he was already looking upon all things European.

At this time Gauguin was still painfully seeking, still patiently and laboriously struggling towards his own self-realization. Van Gogh, although five years younger, had fully realized himself in essence—was, in fact, realized from the beginning. The difference between them was that Van Gogh was an humble Dutch peasant, with the mystic blend of religion and animality which is common to Flemish and Dutch artists (for example, Breughel, Rubens or Verhaeren), while Gauguin was a Spaniard, hard and aristocratic, but corrupted by cosmopolitan influences and the strain of French blood.

For Van Gogh the future only held the liberating spiritual worship of the sun, which was to raise his art to its highest pitch of lyric ecstacy and to destroy the brain that had created it. For Gauguin the future held a long and stoic struggle with the ironic destiny that left him half-an-European to the end, his work only a broken fragment of what he had dreamed.

It is a pity, in a way, that these men ever met. But their meeting and the drama which was played out later between them, had in it the inevitable quality of Greek tragedy. For the moment their meeting was without result, except that perhaps it woke Gauguin to a realization that to be a great artist one must love life as well as love art. In short, one must be religious. But where was Gauguin to find his religion?

Certainly not in Paris, the capital of intellectual skepticism. Nor, for the moment, in sleepy and mournful Brittany. The memories of his early initiation into the splendors of the tropics awoke in him and he undertook, in 1887, a voyage to the Martinique in company with a young painter, Charles Laval.

There is no doubt that this journey completely revealed to Gauguin his own primitivism, although it left him for the time an invalid, threatened with dysentery, suffering from constant intestinal pains, and although it brought Laval to the brink of the grave.

If the reader wishes to know something of what Martinique was at this time, he should turn to Lafcadio Hearn's "Two Years in the French West Indies." Hearn, like Gauguin, was a disillusionized cosmopolite, disgusted with the banal artifice, the blatant commercialism, the pedantic and Puritanic hypocrisy of our Occidental civilization. Like Gauguin, Hearn found in the West Indies a revelation of a world which had not lost touch with Nature—a world of men who were content to remain, in Nature's eyes, something as ephemeral and as harmonious as the trees, the flowers, the beasts among which they lived. Like Gauguin again, Hearn was nearly destroyed by this vision, but yet kept faith with it to the last.

The Idol.

In the pictures which Gauguin produced during his stay in Martinique, we find the first rude indications of his later manner—the manner of a mystic poet who sees all life, the life of man, of vegetation, of the earth and the sea, as being parallel, harmonious manifestations of the same Divine presence and therefore essentially in unity with each other.

If Gauguin did not realize himself in Martinique, he at least found himself on the road to realization. But the unchecked power of the sun, steadily sapping not only the white race, but also the race of mixed blood, with which he, like Hearn, felt so much sympathy, banished him from this Eden at the same time as it gave him a hint for the future.

His health demanded a return to France. He came back, bringing with him pictures—experimental, tentative efforts to reconcile the glow and gloom of the tropics with Pissarro's analysis of paler northern sunlight. He brought back also the germ of thousands of other pictures which he, as yet, could not paint. He brought back with him an idea.

After seeing the Antilles and returning to Paris, Gauguin was again brought face to face with the problem against which he had already struggled—the problem of his poverty.

He had obtained at Martinique the vision of a new world of art, which he knew he was some day destined to realize. But for the present he had neither lodging and studio, nor resources of any kind. He was forced to live on charity.

Charity came to him in the shape of Emile Schuffenecker, who had also given up finance for a career as artist.

Schuffenecker was not a genius, but he knew ability when he saw it, and opened his doors freely to this needy colleague. It is a pity that Gauguin repaid this generous hospitality of a friend by insulting Schuffenecker as an artist.

Gauguin's relations with his friends are amongst the most painful episodes of his life. One is almost inclined to think with Emile Bernard that "the basis of Gauguin's character was a deep-seated egoism," or, with Meier-Graefe, that Gauguin was nothing but a great child. Neither of these views is, however, wholly correct.

Gauguin was the son, be it remembered, of a radical journalist and the grandson of a Socialist pamphleteer. Journalism in France is not the same thing as in England. There is scarcely any polite journalism in France. Gauguin himself was always talking, according to Bernard, of art and life needing "the blow of the fist." Paul Déroulède, Edmond Drumont, Henri Rochefort, Octave Mirbeau, Zola, Clemenceau, and other celebrated journalists of the Dreyfus period (the heyday of French journalism) knew quite well what this "blow of the fist" meant, and practiced it upon every opportunity.

Moreover, Gauguin was nearly forty, had knocked about the world a great deal, banging himself against many sharp corners in the process, and was face to face with want. It is also possible that he felt bound, for the sake of his wife and children, to make as much money as possible. Finally, he believed in himself as an artist, if no one else did. The world had well hammered into him the hard lesson that one must either hold a high opinion of oneself or become an object of contempt. As he put it himself, "Is it necessary to be modest, or, in other words, an imbecile?"

So he accepted the use of Schuffenecker's studio, sold as many of his own pictures as he could, and sneered loudly at Schuffenecker's attempt to paint. Later on we find him accepting similarly Van Gogh's hospitality, irritating Van Gogh to the pitch of madness, and—after Van Gogh's death—sending to Bernard and seeking to oppose the proposed exhibition of Van Gogh's pictures on the ground that Van Gogh was only a madman. And later still, when Van Gogh's reputation began to rise in public esteem, Gauguin declared that Van Gogh had learned from him and had called him master.

Such traits are deplorable, if we consider Gauguin as an ordinary man. But if we treat genius as ordinary humanity and insist upon it conforming in every particular to ordinary standards, it is quite certain that we will never have any genius worthy of the name. Gauguin sinned in good company, with Michaelangelo who thought Raphael had plotted against him, and with Berlioz who has left on record his opinion of Wagner's music. To understand Gauguin one must share to some extent the opinion of Flaubert—which, incidentally, Browning almost endorses—that the man is nothing, the work is all.

It is not easy to read between the lines of Gauguin's self-imposed reserve and self-determined resolve to shock the bourgeoisie. If we attempt to do so, we find a man so set upon his own path that he was almost without friends. Van Gogh he loved without understanding. Daniel de Monfreid he perhaps loved and understood. The shadowy figure of Tehura, a figure perhaps idealized, was to be the only woman who greatly moved him.

Puvis de Chavannes, an artist to whom Gauguin owed much, similarly held himself aloof from all. So did Degas and Ingres, two other artists of Gauguin's stamp. So in ancient Greece did Sophocles.

The truly strong spirits of this world are not those who exist solely on the surface of things. One can only sympathize with them, share their imaginings through long and patient study. Gauguin was not altogether strong; on some sides he was weak, as he himself admitted. But his work increased in vitality and in strength as his aim became more clear. Schuffenecker's studio was useful to him; he stayed in Paris just long enough to sell as many pictures as he could and to copy Manet's Olympia, a picture he greatly admired. Then once more he took the road to Brittany.

Despite the fact that Gauguin had, before leaving Paris, held his first one-man show and had actually sold a few pictures, his general situation was not improved. He was now heavily in debt, and his health, undermined at Martinique, remained bad.

He was at an age at which most men find themselves obliged to take stock of the past and to calculate their chances for the future. In Gauguin's case the chances were very small. He was crushed by his own impotence to realize the art he had dreamed.

It was at this juncture that Vincent Van Gogh, now at Aries, came forward and offered him a lodging, despite the fact that he himself could not sell his own pictures and was entirely dependent on the self-sacrificing efforts of his brother Theodore.

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.

Thus maybe there was awakened still more clearly in his spirit that desire for harmony between the flesh and the soul, between nature and God, between the earth and the stars that hang over the earth, which he was to seek desperately to the last and strive to realize, despite the baseness of that other part in him, the civilized, unprimitive part, which strove merely to destroy the harmony and to smile at its work of baseness.

[1] Gauguin and Van Gogh were actually together from the 20th October to the 23d December, 1888.

PART III: THE SCHOOL OF PONT-AVEN 1889-1891

In 1889 there opened in Paris on the Champ-de-Mars the Universal Exposition, to celebrate the centennial of the taking of the Bastile. Of this exhibition and of the palace built to house it, nothing now remains except the melancholy Eiffel Tower.

The pictures admitted to the exhibition were, rather naturally, of a kind sanctioned by academic officialdom. Wherefore visitors who happened to patronize the Café Volpini near the entrance were doubtless startled to find upon the walls a hundred pictures of a kind calculated to shock all their susceptibilities in art matters. Their perplexity cannot have been greatly lessened by the receipt of a catalogue bearing this title: "Catalogue of the Exposition of Pictures of the Impressionist and Syntheticist Group, held on the Premises of M. Volpini, at the Champ-de-Mars, 1889."

The exhibitors were people of whom the respectable patrons of the Café Volpini had for the most part never heard. Their names were:—E. Schuffenecker, Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, Louis Anquetin, Louis Roy, Léon Fauché, Georges Daniel, Ludovic Nemo (a pseudonym of Bernard's) and lastly, Paul Gauguin. Lithographs, printed in black upon yellow paper and not less extraordinary than the pictures, were also visible upon request. These were by Bernard and Gauguin.

The result of this exhibition was that the public laughed, the papers protested, the young students of art in the various ateliers of Paris were stimulated to furious discussion. But a few spirits, more venturesome or more prophetic, took the trouble to test the new ideas. A few, chief among them Sérusier of the Académie Julian, even set out to visit the birthplace of the new movement, a lonely inn kept by a family of the name of Gloanec at Le Poldu, a short distance from Pont-Aven.

A brief survey of the history of Syntheticism is necessary to an understanding of the theories of the new school. Here we enter upon debatable ground. It has already been said that the chief opponents of the academicism of Cabanel and Bougereau were the Impressionists. Their movement was already through its second phase and entering upon its third. The earliest of the Impressionists, led by Manet, insisted that a picture was only nature seen through a temperament; in other words, that a picture must be naturalistic. This doctrine found parallel literary expression in the writings of the de Goncourts, de Maupassant and Zola. The first phase in Impressionism was therefore synthetic and maintained a belief in form.

It was succeeded by an analytical phase, based upon the application to color of the scientific theories of light, of Rood, Chevreuil and Helmholtz. To Claude Monet, the founder of this new school of Impressionism, nothing mattered in a picture but the atmosphere. Form was abandoned.

After Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Guillamin, a new group, of whom the chief were Seurat and Signac, attempted to combine the tenets of their two sets of predecessors. They retained formal composition but broke up color into minute points or dots. This third generation of Impressionists were originally termed Neo-Impressionists but now, more frequently, Pointillists.

Three artists stood out against the tendency towards scientific theory. Puvis de Chavannes had, within the very precincts of the official salon, created an art based on something wholly distinct, alike from the photographic and frigid eclecticism of Cabanel and Bougereau and from the work of both Manet and Monet. Puvis was a decorator who could think and paint only in terms of walls. He had achieved, after a long struggle, a decorative synthesis of his own, based upon the ruthless simplification of masses, contours and coloring. Reserved, cold, solitary, he had emptied his art of all rhetorical emphasis and in his old age was tending closer and closer to the methods of Giotto, that father of all European painting.

Paul Cézanne, the hermit of Aix, had faced the problem of painting with the Impressionist palette while preserving the mass structure of his true spiritual ancestors—the Venetians and El Greco. As a result he was thought to be mad and even considered by some to be a myth, for he lived far from Paris and had for long enough sent no pictures to be exhibited. Finally, Degas, associating himself with the Impressionists at the outset, had been careful to preserve the classic line and composition of Ingres, who might be called the last of Florentines. Degas was considered an artist of small importance because, unlike Manet, he scorned to give himself airs. He lived a retired life in Paris, and did not exhibit.

These three men—Puvis de Chavannes, Cézanne and Degas—had, through their own inner necessity, become syntheticists. But no one of them preached Syntheticism, because their adherence to the creed was unconscious. The doctrine was first voiced by the men who exhibited with Paul Gauguin at the Café Volpini in 1889, who lived and worked with him at the Gloanec inn, near Pont-Aven. It was from these men that the reaction against Impressionism started, a reaction which, in its turn, was destined to provoke another reaction towards the theories of mathematical and analytical abstraction of line, color and form, which we know as Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism. It was these men surrounding Gauguin, who forged the last living link in the chain of art tradition which goes back through Giotto and Cimabue to the Byzantine mosaics, and, through these, to the first essays in art of cave-men and savages. With Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism we may be witnessing the beginning of a new tradition. With Gauguin and his fellows we see the renaissance of an old one.

As early as 1886, in an article in the Revue Indépendante, the well-known critic Eduard Dujardin had spoken of a group calling themselves the Cloissonists, who painted in flat patches of tone, divided from each other by black lines.

Cloissonism, as the name indicates, was borrowed from the Japanese. But as a method of painting, it had been derived less from cloisonné enamel than from the technique of the Japanese color-print artists.

The artistic gods of the Cloissonists were Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro. It may be remembered that since 1865 men like Zola, Manet, Monet, Whistler, the de Goncourts—in short the entire generation of the naturalists—had collected these color prints, written about them, talked about them.

Gauguin himself, when he returned to Paris at the close of this year 1889, pinned a frieze of Hokusai and Utamaro prints round the walls of his studio.

But the existence of this somewhat baroque and exotic school of Cloissonism, of which the leader was Anquetin (later ranked with the Syntheticists), does not fully explain the use of Syntheticism with its greater insistence upon decorative unity, and its clearer affinities to the work of the Italian primitives.

As to the origin of Syntheticism we have divergent statements from contemporary witnesses.

The English artist, A.S. Hartrick, who was studying in Paris from 1886 to 1889 and who knew personally both Gauguin and Van Gogh, ascribes the Synthetic theory to Gauguin in these terms:—

"From a study of thirteenth century glass he (Gauguin) got an idea of design and color which exactly suited his state of development, and he then proceeded to translate it into an art of his own, using oil paint as a vehicle."[1]

Of similar opinion is the well known French artist and writer, Maurice Denis, whose work has done so much to popularise Gauguin. He declares in his book "Theories,"[2] that Gauguin was the "incontestable originator" and master of the new movement, to which he gives two names: Neo-Traditionism and Symbolism. In the first account which he wrote of the movement in 1890, an account obtained from the lips of Paul Sérusier, one of the earliest of Gauguin's disciples after 1889, Denis includes the following interesting paragraph:

"Did not Paul Gauguin originate this ingenious and unpublished history of modeling?

"At the beginning there was the pure arabesque, as little deceptive of the eye as possible; a wall is empty; cover it with symmetrical spots of form, harmonious in color:—stained glass, Egyptian pictures, Byzantine mosaics.

"From this comes the painted bas-relief:—metopes of the Greek temple, the church of the Middle Ages.

"Then the attempt to attain to the ornamental deception of the eye practised in Antiquity is resumed in the fifteenth century by the Italian primitives, who replace the painted bas-relief by paintings modeled to imitate bas-relief, but in other respects preserve the first idea of decorative unity. Recall also under what conditions Michaelangelo, a sculptor, decorated the Sistine ceiling.

"Perfection of this modeling; modeling in high-relief. This leads from the first academy of the Caracchi to our decadence."

Emile Bernard holds a contrary opinion. His view was originally published in the Mercure de France and reasserted in his preface to the letters written to him by Van Gogh.[3] Bernard, who revolted from the Atelier Cormon with Anquetin, had, as we have seen, been repulsed by Gauguin in in 1886. After a brief return to Paris he went off to Saint-Briac, where he covered the walls of the inn with frescoes and painted the windows, in imitation of stained-glass, employing essence of turpentine as a medium. In 1888, before Gauguin came to Arles, Bernard was brought into contact with him again through the mediation of Theodore Van Gogh and, although young enough to be Gauguin's son (being about twenty at this time), shared with him the honors of the Volpini exhibition.

Bernard claims that he, and he alone, invented Syntheticism, and bases his claim on the evidence of the pictures (all dated) which Gauguin painted previous to 1888, and in which Gauguin was still definitely Impressionist in technique. He maintains that Gauguin abruptly changed his style after the second meeting in 1888, when he first saw what his younger rival had been doing. Furthermore, Bernard contends that this style was solely based upon the application of Cézanne's discoveries in technique.

Against these contentions there are three objections to be made.

In the first place it is known that Gauguin, during his stay in Martinique in 1887, painted pictures that are undeniably essays in syntheticism. Martinique showed Gauguin the impossibility of painting tropic sunlight by means of the Impressionistic division of tones. Always purely intuitive as an artist, Gauguin began to realize at Martinique, however vaguely, that one cannot reproduce the natural decomposition of light by the artificial decomposition of color attempted by Pissarro and the other Impressionists. He therefore sought to translate sunlight into color by simplifying and exaggerating the contrast of colors.

In the second place, Bernard's argument leaves unexplained why it was not he, but Gauguin, who after 1888 painted those magnificent pictures Le Christ Jaune, Le Christ Vert and La Vision après le Sermon[4] and carved the two superb bas-reliefs Soyez Amoureuses et vous serez Heureuses and Soyez Mystérieuses. Moreover, the careful reader of Van Gogh's letters to his brother will find that throughout '88 and '89 Bernard stood in relation to Gauguin as a pupil to a master. Finally, even if Bernard's contention be partially true and if his own essays did induce Gauguin to reject the last vestiges of Impressionism, his story fails to account for the masterly grasp of Synthetic Symbolism shown by Gauguin immediately after their second meeting.

It is quite impossible to trace to Cézanne's essays in Synthetic Impressionism the more severely linear and decorative design of either Bernard or Gauguin. Cézanne, later on, even went so far as to assert that Gauguin had misunderstood him. Therefore it is clear that the opinions of A.S. Hartrick and of Maurice Denis better fit the facts. Gauguin was the sole originator of the Synthetic style. That style was derived, perhaps mainly, from the careful study of thirteenth century glass, which does perfectly what Gauguin wished to do: translate the effect of sunlight into luminous color. But it was also derived from Egyptian painting, Byzantine mosaics and the Kakemonos of the Japanese. In short, it was as complete a rejection of Impressionism as possible and a return to the linear arabesque and decorative spacing of balanced color and form practiced by the primitives of all times and preserved, in the nineteenth century, in the works of artists whom Gauguin admired: Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes, Cézanne and Degas.

[1] "Post-Impressionism," by A.S. Hartrick. Imprint, May, 1913.

[2] Paris, l'Occident, 1912.

[3] Paris, Vollard, 1911.

[4] Now known as La Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange.

III

The exhibition at the Café Volpini brought notoriety to Gauguin. Various young artists, wearying of the academic "receipt for art"—the phrase is Gauguin's—which they were being taught in the ateliers of Paris, took the road for Pont-Aven. Among these were Paul Sérusier, Chamaillard, and the Dutchman, De Haahn.

Acting under the influence of these, and especially under that of Sérusier, whose mind was metaphysical and filled with Neo-Platonic mysticism, Gauguin attempted to become the teacher of a definite doctrine. Hitherto he had been an artist of the type of Ingres, working purely intuitively, with one eye upon tradition and another upon nature. But his new pupils were eager for a theory, a formula, and a formula this hater of the dogmatic attempted to create.

Artists are singularly unhappy in their attempts to explain themselves. Whistler is not the only example of an artist who might have been greater had he not wasted so much time in controversy. The public always takes too literally the efforts of an artist to analyze his own methods. All art is a synthesis, and no artist can be at the same time synthetic and analytical.

Gauguin was no exception to this rule. Take for example, his often-quoted statement about the use of primary colors:—

"Always use colors of the same origin. Indigo is the best basis. It becomes yellow in saltpeter, red in vinegar. You can obtain it at any chemist's. Keep to these three colors."

Gauguin himself did not follow this precept. An examination of his palette shows that it was arranged thus, from left to right:—ultramarine, silver white, emerald green, veronese green, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, yellow chrome, vermilion, and crimson lake. No artist needs to be told that many of these colors are dangerously fugitive, whether used pure or in mixture.

So with another celebrated saying: "Seek harmony and not contrast, the agreement and not—the clash of color." This saying not only goes contrary to the previously quoted remark on the use of primary colors, but is opposed to those equally famous dicta: "Does that trunk of a tree seem to you blue? Paint it as blue as possible," and, "A mile of green, is more green than half a mile."

It is therefore more valuable to summarize the main lines of Gauguin's teaching than to quote this or that paradoxical remark. Gauguin was not a man holding a high-school debate on theory, but a creator. He refused even to be called a decorator, he preferred the title of artisan. He declared outright that he had no technique. "Or perhaps I have one, but very vagabond, very elastic, according to the way I feel when I awaken in the morning, a technique which I apply to my own liking in order to express my thought, without taking account of the truth of Nature, externally apparent. People think nowadays that all the technical means of painting are exhausted. I do not believe it, if I am to judge by the numerous observations which I have made and put into practice.... Painters have still much to discover."

Gauguin therefore boldly called his pupils anarchists and left to them this remark: "Do what you please, so long as it is intelligent." This did not prevent him from having a great respect for art tradition. He knew that tradition is not a "recipe for making art," but the sum-total of collective human intelligence working in the past on the same problems that face the artists of to-day. He realized that the essential substance of art is always the same. Art is an eternal renewal of this substance. "The artist is not born of a single unity. If he adds a new link to the chain already begun, it is much. The artist is known by the quality of his transposition."

The "transposition" that he himself strove for may be clearly read in his pictures. He strove incessantly for a renewal of the decorative art of the great Venetians, by blending the Venetian glow of color with the calm line of Primitive and especially of Egyptian Primitive design. His problem was essentially the same as that of Puvis de Chavannes, the problem of how to cover a flat wall space with design and color so as to leave it still essentially a wall and not, as Veronese and Tiepolo left it, an optically deceptive piece of stage-scenery. Puvis had solved the problem by the artificial means of lowering his scale of colors and by simplifying his drawing. Gauguin solved his by the elimination of modeling, and of graduations of tone, and by reducing his drawing to the strongest possible arabesque of outline. In everything he sought for the essential form, the form that contains all the other inessential forms. As Sérusier puts it: "The synthetic theory of art consists in reducing all form to the smallest possible number of component forms:—straight lines, arcs of a circle, a few angles, arcs of an ellipse." And to express this form he sought for the most harmonious balance of color. Maurice Denis says:—"Recall that a picture, before being a war-horse, a nude or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order."

Tahitian Women.

Therefore and above all, Gauguin told his pupils not to draw from the model, but from memory. He admitted that it was useful for young painters to have a model, as all knowledge of facts could only be obtained from the study of models. But he added that it was better to draw a curtain before the model while painting it. One of his pupils declared: "We went into the country to paint seascapes and to the seashore to do landscapes."

Gauguin's teaching in this respect exactly agrees with the methods practiced for centuries by the great Chinese and Japanese painters. He would have enjoyed that story of a Chinese painter, who was sent out by the Emperor to paint the most celebrated landscape views in the Empire, and who returned without having painted anything. When the Emperor asked him: "But where are your pictures?" he replied: "I have them here"—and pointed to his forehead. Gauguin, with his hatred of copying either from nature or from the masters of the past, would also have appreciated the Chinese idea of a "copy"—a free rearrangement of old material according to one's temperament.

Lastly, he counseled his pupils not to paint movement but repose. "Let everything you do breathe peace and calm of soul. Avoid all animated attitudes. Each of your figures should be perfectly static. Give everything a clear outline." This counsel sounds strange to ears deafened by the tumult of modern life and by the clamorous theories of Cubists, Futurists and Vorticists. But to Gauguin it was the basis of his own mystical religion. He gave it to the world, however, not for this reason, but because he realized that painting to be decorative must be architectural. He himself was a builder, an artisan. In Brittany he painted the walls and windows of the inn where he lived; he made furniture, carved and ornamented a pair of wooden sabots for himself, worked at bas-reliefs, decorated pottery. Movement, restlessness, would have but troubled the lines of that ideal building, which, even then, he was erecting in his dreams.

Such was the doctrine of Paul Gauguin. It may seem strange that such ideas could have ever been considered revolutionary. In the Far East at all events, they had been the commonplaces of art for centuries. Revolutionary or not, Gauguin went on his way undisturbed. From an examination of his letters, and of the statements of those who knew him, the fact emerged that this "anarchist" preserved throughout his life a great respect for artists of the past. Rembrandt especially, in his mystical and visionary phase, appealed to him and Rembrandt's influence may be traced in more than one of Gauguin's Tahitian pictures. Velazquez, Rubens, Proudhon, Corot, Whistler—Gauguin was able to learn something from all these men as well as from Memling and Holbein. As for his pupils, the measure of the intelligence they displayed in following his precepts may be judged by the fact that Gauguin remarked about one of them: "His faults are not sufficiently accentuated for him to be considered a master," and by the fact that the first synthetic picture of another was, according to Maurice Denis, painted on the lid of a cigar box!

It is in the works of this period that we must seek for a solution of Gauguin's mystic doctrine and for an explanation of the struggle that went on in his soul: a struggle that was solved finally by his denial of civilization and affirmation of pagan savagery at Tahiti.

Gauguin, as has been seen, was not naturally but only deliberately a teacher of others. Especially in his intimate and personal concerns, he commonly guarded an air of defiant reserve. In the matter of views on art, he contented himself with the expression of dogmatic and paradoxical opinions which, if disputed, were merely affirmed with greater violence.

It is related of him that, if any one persisted in holding an opinion contrary to his own, Gauguin would reply only by an oblique glance from those cold gray eyes an answer that usually reduced the speaker to an embarrassed silence.

Nevertheless, we owe to the fortunate preservation of various fragmentary notes, made in the solitude of his last desperate years, indications of what Gauguin's religious and political opinions were. Here are some of them:—

"If I gaze before me into space, I have a vague sense of the Infinite; nevertheless I am the conclusion of something that has been begun. I understand then, that there has been a beginning and that there will be no end.

"In this I do not possess the explanation of a mystery, but merely the mysterious sense of this mystery—and this sensation is intimately linked to the belief in an eternal life, promised by Jesus.

"But then, if we in ourselves are not the beginning when we come into the world, it is necessary to believe, with the Buddhists, that we have always existed.

"A change of skin.

"All this is very strange.

"The unfathomable mystery remains what it has always been and what it is, unfathomable. God does not belong to the scholar, the logician. He belongs to the poets, to their dreams. He is the symbol of Beauty, Beauty itself."

From these and other jottings we can understand what was passing in Gauguin's mind when he painted the pictures: Le Christ Jaune and Le Christ au Jardin d'Oliviers; when he carved the contrasted bas-reliefs: Soyez Amoureuses and Soyez Mystérieuses; when he drew the lithographs: La Cigale et les Fourmis, and Léda which bears the defiant inscription "Honi soit qui mal y pense."

Gauguin was a mystic who sought instinctively for religious illumination, not in the systems of philosophers and theologians, but in nature and in man. Among the higher types of civilized man he saw only a false system of morality, politics and religion, which elevated the wealthy above the level of the rest of humanity and forbade to the thinker, the artist, the independent workman, the very right to live.

Against the organized materialism of the nineteenth century, he recognized in Jesus Christ a revolt and a protest; but a revolt and a protest that had failed. Humanity had not yet produced, save by exception, the higher type of man, the man capable of "selling all and giving to the poor," the man chosen "to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." A terrible epoch, he foresaw, was coming in Europe for the next generation: an epoch where the tyranny of money would destroy mankind.

Therefore, in contemplating Christ, he was moved by a sense of despair, of the futility of this sacrifice. His attitude to Christianity became purely Protestant. Across his pictures there moves no gracious shadow of the beneficent Virgin, sharing with humanity the joys and sorrows of maternity.

In Le Christ Jaune he gives us the symbol of a faith which has proved impotent to elevate mankind to its level. Le Christ au Jardin d'Oliviers echoes the awful cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The terrible little picture, Les Misères Humaines sums up in its two figures the despair and hypocrisy of our vaunted civilization. Even the later Tahitian Birth of Christ renders nothing but the physical anguish and exhaustion of maternity. In the Ia Orana Maria, or the Salutation to Mary, the Virgin is represented merely as a happy human mother.

Nature, on the other hand, seen by him luxuriant and unfettered, as at Martinique, taught him the uselessness of revolt, struggle and effort, the need of fatalism, of resignation. He grew to believe that man was better, more rational, more harmonious when no longer struggling against the inexorable laws of birth, begetting, and death. Thus in his art he aimed at repose, the quietism of the Buddhists. His knowledge of Buddhism was not deep—indeed in his eyes, Buddhism, too, was a vain revolt against nature—but his respect for Buddhistic doctrine remained greater than his respect for Christianity. At the bottom of his soul there dwelt an old, old thought, the essence of all paganism: "Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we may die."

As he put it later in the pages of his Tahitian recital:—

"To the eyes of Tagatha (the God) the most splendid glories of kings and their ministers are but dust and spittle:

"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.

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.

Gauguin shortly found a better friend perhaps the only real friend he ever had—who was willing to give him the use of a studio. This was Daniel de Monfreid, who had, incidentally, under the name George Daniel taken part in the Volpini exhibition.

It is worthy of note that what brought them together was not a community of taste in matters of art, but a common love of the sea.

De Monfreid, like Gauguin, had been a sailor. He was a man enjoying a certain competence who had taken to yachting as an amusement. Every summer, he dropped his palette and brushes, put on his master mariner's cap, which he had won after an apprenticeship aboard a coasting vessel, and set forth in his own schooner of thirty-six tons for a cruise in the Mediterranean. This went on for years until de Monfreid, weary of dodging quarantine restrictions, and getting entangled in the complications of maritime law, retired from the sea, generously offering his schooner to the Naval School at Cette, where she ultimately met her end. At this period he was known to his artistic friends in Paris as "the captain," and had been introduced to Gauguin by Schuffenecker, on the former's return from Martinique in 1887.

To this man all lovers of Gauguin's art owe an immense debt. Whether it was due to the independent and roving disposition, shared by both, or to their common love and experience of the sea, or to the fact that both were painters (de Monfreid's experiences in the Mediterranean had made of him a good colorist), or to a certain bond of savage frankness and nomad primitiveness to which all the rest of their common tastes were due, is unknown. The fact remains that the friendship between them was of that ideal kind that is never broken: the friendship between the creator and helper, which all artists long for and to which so few attain. In finding de Monfreid, Gauguin experienced almost the last stroke of good fortune that he was to have in life. The last stroke of all came a little afterwards when, in the year after accepting de Monfreid's hospitality, he suddenly decided to leave Europe for Tahiti.

Hina Maruru (Feast to Hina).

The happy discovery of a letter which Gauguin wrote at this time to a Danish painter, Willemsen by name, clears up the long-vexed point of what induced him to take this decision.[1] He chanced to attend, or to read the report of, a lecture on Tahiti, given by a certain Van der Veere. Van der Veere apparently pitched the tone of his discourse to suit the tastes of a fashionable audience. He pictured Tahiti as a terrestrial paradise where money was unknown. "Under a sky without winter, upon an earth of a marvelous fertility, the Tahitian has only to lift his hands to gather in his food; so he never works. For him life means singing and making love." It is easy to picture the effect of such phrases on the mind of a born lover of repose like Gauguin. Tahiti held out the hope that Martinique had failed to realize; the hope that he might be the first painter of the tropics. Gauguin's imagination was fired by the idea. He declared that he intended to quit Europe and live in Tahiti henceforward. There he could perhaps forget all the hardships of the past, and die forgotten by Paris, happy and free to paint "sans gloire aucune pour les autres." And if his children could join him there, all the better—his isolation would then be complete.[2]

The young Symbolists of course shouted "Bravo!" at the news of the proposed voyage. Tahiti! Another symbol! They had already spoilt Gauguin sufficiently for serious art, by persuading him to embark on various symbolistic enterprises, such as the production of a masterpiece entitled Loss Of Maidenhood, which has fortunately vanished, and an etching representing Mallarmé with Poe's Raven in the background. Perhaps their eagerness to see Gauguin safely embarked for Tahiti only concealed a growing boredom with their idol of yesterday.

At all events Gauguin was fêted, wined, dined. Thirty of his works were auctioned off at the Hôtel Drouot, producing the small sum of nine thousand six hundred and eighty francs. The Government consented to make his voyage to Oceania an official "artistic mission," on condition that this did not involve them in a responsibility for the expenses. A banquet was held at the Café Voltaire, where all the Symbolists were assembled. Gauguin has left some ironical observations on this or on a similar banquet, which show clearly his opinion of the ceremony. Finally a benefit performance was given by the Théâtre d'Art for the departing artist and also for Verlaine, then rapidly sinking into the squalor of his last years.[3]

The most interesting fact about the performance was that, included in the program by a strange stroke of irony, Maurice Maeterlinck's play L'Intruse made on this occasion its first appearance on the stage. Death walked the stage before Gauguin's eyes, as if to show him what to expect. And yet he did not draw back.

On the fourth of April 1891, Gauguin, abandoning Paris, started on his voyage of discovery to Tahiti. Morice, in his interesting book on Gauguin, declares that when the decision was irrevocably made, and the mission to Tahiti had been stamped with official approval, Gauguin's self-possession momentarily abandoned him, and he broke down, and wept. And when Morice asked the reason, he replied in these strange, tragic, touching words:—

"Listen to me.... I have never known how to keep alive both my family and my thought. I have not even been able, up to now, to keep alive my thought alone. And now that I can hope for the future, I feel more terribly than I have ever felt, the horror of the sacrifice I have made, which is utterly irreparable."

With this knowledge in his heart, Gauguin abandoned civilization.

[1] Les Marges, Paris, May 15, 1918.

[2] Gauguin had also undoubtedly read Loti's book. His letters show that before deciding upon Tahiti he had considered the possibility of going to Tonkin or Madagascar.

[3] It may be noticed that Gauguin received no financial profit whatever from this performance, and Verlaine very little.

PART IV: THE RETURN TO SAVAGERY 1891-1895

Tahiti, the largest of the French Society Islands, lies in the South Pacific Ocean. That is about the limit of the average person's knowledge. Many perhaps understand vaguely that the climate is tropical but modified by sea breezes, the scenery wonderful, the people famous for beauty and licentiousness. Nevertheless, a more thorough knowledge of the island's mysterious racial story could not fail to interest. Tahiti, Samoa (known to us through Stevenson), Hawaii, New Zealand and the Marquesas (familiar to readers of Melville's "Omoo"), which are the chief links in that story, were all, at the time the islands were discovered, inhabited by the same people and a people utterly different in appearance from the woolly-haired Papuans of New Guinea and Fiji, or from the straight-haired Malays of the peninsula, made familiar to us through the stories of Joseph Conrad. These island people, the Polynesians, were found speaking all the same tongue, though in different dialects; they had, for the most part, the same social organization and their religion, manners and customs were very similar; they had, in many cases, traditions pointing to a common place of origin in the island of Samoa. And yet from Samoa they lived separated by thousands of miles of intervening ocean, still imperfectly known, abounding in coral reefs, liable to dangerous storms, full of shifting currents. How then had they reached Tahiti?

The anthropologists assure us that the race is physically a branch of the Caucasian or Indo-European. Though their skin is dark, it is for the most part less dark than that of the natives of India. Set a Maori soldier from New Zealand beside an Indian cavalryman and note the difference between the clear yellow skin of the former, which seems to give out light and the swarthy, somber brown of the latter. In other characteristics too the Polynesians are essentially Caucasian. They are a tall, well built, massive race, contrasting favorably with the Malay. Their hair is black—or in some cases copper brown—and wavy, again contrasting with the straight hair of the Malay or the fuzzy mop of the Papuan. Finally, the cast of face is purely Caucasian and in many cases very beautiful. Only the nose appears abnormally broad and flat, due to artificial flattening in infancy.

We must suppose then, that at some period unknown, but probably after the Christian era (the folk-lore of Hawaii, which must have been settled late, goes back to the fifth century) a seafaring race of Indo-European stock set sail from some part of the Indian peninsula in decked ships, capable of carrying one or two hundred persons and provisions for a voyage of some weeks. (We know the Polynesians were capable of building such ships.) From India they made their way to the Malay peninsula, where traces of their passing still exist, and so gradually to Samoa, whence they spread northwards to Hawaii, southwards to New Zealand, eastwards to Tahiti, to the Marquesas and to Easter Island. In order to accomplish all this, their seafaring enterprise, warlike energy and astronomical knowledge must have been great. Later on, under the influence of too luxuriant a climate, the Polynesians became indolent, careless, effeminate. And, as such, they were discovered by the enterprising Anglo-Saxon, by the Frenchman with his Parisian vices, by the thorough and scientific German. The combined influences of missionaries, drink, disease and the labor market reduced the inhabitants from 150,000 in 1774 to 10,000 in 1889.

To these people came Paul Gauguin, unwitting of the tragedy of their history. It is true that he was weary of Europe and had set out with the aim he had cherished since the Martinique days—to be the first painter of the tropics. But it is probable that he chose Tahiti at hazard, because he believed that here was a country where one could live for almost nothing. It must always be remembered that Gauguin had no private means and that his pictures, like all works in advance of their time, did not sell. Cezanne, Degas, could afford not to sell their pictures because they had other resources. But Gauguin was forced to find some way of existing while producing pictures that, as he knew well, it would take the public some time to accept. In a letter to de Monfreid he stated his system: "From the beginning, I knew that this would be a life from day to day; so, logically, I habituated myself to it. Instead of losing my strength in work and worry for the moment, I put all my strength into the day—like the wrestler who does not employ his body except in the moment of wrestling. When I lie down in the evening I say to myself: One more day is gained, perhaps to-morrow I shall be dead. In my work as a painter, ditto—I do not trouble about anything, but each day for itself—at the end of a certain time, this covers a considerable extent of surface. If men would not waste their time in disconnected struggles and labors! Every day a link. That is the great point."

Such was the frame of mind in which Gauguin went to Tahiti. What he found there was not the "Pays de Cocaigne" he probably expected. The Gods do not give their gifts in this fashion. Gauguin asked much from Tahiti and much was given. But he asked for material comfort and was offered instead spiritual salvation. In Tahiti, Paul Gauguin found, at last, his soul; and the work that he achieved there, though it brought him in no material fortune, was to stand and speak to later ages, its own terrible parable to all men.

On the night of the eighth of June 1891, after sixty-three days of voyaging, Gauguin at last arrived at Papeete, the capital of Tahiti. He was at the time suffering from bronchitis, contracted during the last winter in Paris, and within a few days of his arrival was obliged to take to his bed.

He was now within a few days of his forty-third birthday. Although possessed of a normally strong constitution, fortified by the open-air existence of his youth and by various athletic exercises, such as boxing, fencing and swimming, of which he was very fond, his health, when he reached Tahiti, became immediately worse. This was largely due to his constant over-indulgence in tobacco and partly also to the privations which he had endured throughout his five years' struggle for livelihood.

His prospects were not brilliant. The governor, Lacascade, an ignorant and brutal negro, learning that he had an official mission, at once took him for a spy sent out from Paris, and by every possible means attempted to hinder his getting into contact with the degraded and exploited native population. The society of the pseudo-European capital, Papeete, disgusted him. The natives of the interior were suspiciously hostile to all whites.

PAUL GAUGUIN

His Life and Art

BY

JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

WITH TEN ILLUSTRATIONS

NICHOLAS L. BROWN

NEW YORK

MCMXXI

TO

M.T.H.S.

WHO HELPED ME WITH

ADVICE AND CRITICISM

PAUL GAUGUIN

PART I: THE FORMATION 1849-1885

PART II: THE STRUGGLE WITH IMPRESSIONISM 1885-1889

PART III: THE SCHOOL OF PONT-AVEN 1889-1891

PART IV: THE RETURN TO SAVAGERY 1891-1895