I
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.
II
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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
IV
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.
V
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.
[Footnote 1: Gauguin and Van Gogh were actually together from the 20th
October to the 23d December, 1888.]