I have said already that but for the hazard of a journey to Tahiti I
should doubtless never have written this book. It is thither that after
many wanderings Charles Strickland came, and it is there that he
painted the pictures on which his fame most securely rests. I suppose
no artist achieves completely the realisation of the dream that
obsesses him, and Strickland, harassed incessantly by his struggle with
technique, managed, perhaps, less than others to express the vision
that he saw with his mind’s eye; but in Tahiti the circumstances were
favourable to him; he found in his surroundings the accidents necessary
for his inspiration to become effective, and his later pictures give at
least a suggestion of what he sought. They offer the imagination
something new and strange. It is as though in this far country his
spirit, that had wandered disembodied, seeking a tenement, at last was
able to clothe itself in flesh. To use the hackneyed phrase, here he
found himself.
It would seem that my visit to this remote island should immediately
revive my interest in Strickland, but the work I was engaged in
occupied my attention to the exclusion of something that was
irrelevant, and it was not till I had been there some days that I even
remembered his connection with it. After all, I had not seen him for
fifteen years, and it was nine since he died. But I think my arrival at
Tahiti would have driven out of my head matters of much more immediate
importance to me, and even after a week I found it not easy to order
myself soberly. I remember that on my first morning I awoke early, and
when I came on to the terrace of the hotel no one was stirring. I
wandered round to the kitchen, but it was locked, and on a bench
outside it a native boy was sleeping. There seemed no chance of
breakfast for some time, so I sauntered down to the water-front. The
Chinamen were already busy in their shops. The sky had still the pallor
of dawn, and there was a ghostly silence on the lagoon. Ten miles away
the island of Murea, like some high fastness of the Holy Grail, guarded
its mystery.
I did not altogether believe my eyes. The days that had passed since I
left Wellington seemed extraordinary and unusual. Wellington is trim
and neat and English; it reminds you of a seaport town on the South
Coast. And for three days afterwards the sea was stormy. Gray clouds
chased one another across the sky. Then the wind dropped, and the sea
was calm and blue. The Pacific is more desolate than other seas; its
spaces seem more vast, and the most ordinary journey upon it has
somehow the feeling of an adventure. The air you breathe is an elixir
which prepares you for the unexpected. Nor is it vouchsafed to man in
the flesh to know aught that more nearly suggests the approach to the
golden realms of fancy than the approach to Tahiti. Murea, the sister
isle, comes into view in rocky splendour, rising from the desert sea
mysteriously, like the unsubstantial fabric of a magic wand. With its
jagged outline it is like a Monseratt of the Pacific, and you may
imagine that there Polynesian knights guard with strange rites
mysteries unholy for men to know. The beauty of the island is unveiled
as diminishing distance shows you in distincter shape its lovely peaks,
but it keeps its secret as you sail by, and, darkly inviolable, seems
to fold itself together in a stony, inaccessible grimness. It would not
surprise you if, as you came near seeking for an opening in the reef,
it vanished suddenly from your view, and nothing met your gaze but the
blue loneliness of the Pacific.
Tahiti is a lofty green island, with deep folds of a darker green, in
which you divine silent valleys; there is mystery in their sombre
depths, down which murmur and plash cool streams, and you feel that in
those umbrageous places life from immemorial times has been led
according to immemorial ways. Even here is something sad and terrible.
But the impression is fleeting, and serves only to give a greater
acuteness to the enjoyment of the moment. It is like the sadness which
you may see in the jester’s eyes when a merry company is laughing at
his sallies; his lips smile and his jokes are gayer because in the
communion of laughter he finds himself more intolerably alone. For
Tahiti is smiling and friendly; it is like a lovely woman graciously
prodigal of her charm and beauty; and nothing can be more conciliatory
than the entrance into the harbour at Papeete. The schooners moored to
the quay are trim and neat, the little town along the bay is white and
urbane, and the flamboyants, scarlet against the blue sky, flaunt their
colour like a cry of passion. They are sensual with an unashamed
violence that leaves you breathless. And the crowd that throngs the
wharf as the steamer draws alongside is gay and debonair; it is a
noisy, cheerful, gesticulating crowd. It is a sea of brown faces. You
have an impression of coloured movement against the flaming blue of the
sky. Everything is done with a great deal of bustle, the unloading of
the baggage, the examination of the customs; and everyone seems to
smile at you. It is very hot. The colour dazzles you.