I
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.
II
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.
A few days after his arrival a public event occurred which roused his
interest. It was the death of the last male representative of the old
royal house of Tahiti, Pomare V, the son of the unfortunate Queen
Pomare, who had vainly struggled to enlist Great Britain's sympathy in
her opposition to the French occupation. Pomare V had abdicated eleven
years previously; now he was dead and, with his death, the last dying
gleams of Tahitian hopes for independence became extinct.
Pomare was buried in the uniform of a French Admiral, with full official
ceremony and according to the rites of Christianity; but in the
attitude of the natives to this event, Gauguin was able to see that the
embers of paganism still smoldered in the island and were ready to
revive at any favorable opportunity.
He decided to quit Papeete and to hire in the interior a hut--a process
which went far to exhaust his small capital. There he attempted to live
as a native and to get in touch with the inhabitants. This made still
further inroads on the nine thousand francs he had brought away with him
from France. The natives held aloof, suspicious; they were only ready to
approach him and to act as models at the sight of provisions, liquor,
money. His efforts to get into closer touch with them were met only by
enigmatic and evasive smiles.
Nevertheless Gauguin persisted. Though we must regard the account given
by himself in the pages of "Noa Noa" as representing rather the dream
than the reality, he undoubtedly made a brave attempt to persuade the
natives to accept him as one of their own kind. But, unfortunately, the
natives had seen thousands of Europeans before him, either voyagers of
the Pierre Loti type or commercial exploiters looking upon them as
"dirty Kanakas." They now had their revenge in the only way possible to
a conquered race. They spent his money, flattered his painting and his
vanity, and smiled behind his back.
Before a year was out his capital had vanished. There were no buyers for
his pictures on the island and Paris was far away. Gauguin found that he
had suddenly aged--a common experience enough for white men coming
suddenly into a tropic climate. His heart began to give him trouble.
This savage Eden, which the white men had found and corrupted, was
taking its little revenge.
He attempted to persuade the governor to furnish funds for his passage
back to France. In vain. He hoped that buyers for his pictures would
come forward in Paris. Useless. Fortunately his fame was now
spreading to neutral countries. Thanks to his wife's efforts he was
invited to take part in an exhibition in Denmark.
[Illustration: The Old Spirit.]
On the eighth of December, 1892, he forwarded a packet of eight pictures
to this exhibition, among which was the superb canvas _L'Esprit Veille_.
The picture created an immense stir at Copenhagen when exhibited the
next year and brought him in some money. But in Paris his fame steadily
declined and he was every day less talked about.
Albert Aurier, a young critic who had written in his favor and helped to
make his art known, was dead. Theodore Van Gogh, who had supported him
and had attempted to find buyers for his work, had followed his
unfortunate brother into the grave. Meanwhile his pupils of yesterday,
Bernard, Sérusier and the rest, were going about Paris vaguely hinting
that they had taught Gauguin something and that Cézanne and Van Gogh
were better artists. The halo of victory which had crowned his
departure from Paris was rapidly fading.
He had painted already at Tahiti, as he knew, magnificent
pictures--pictures better than anything he had done before. Moreover, he
believed that he could now paint others from memory as well in Paris as
elsewhere. What he had seen in Tahiti had given him the necessary
material upon which his imagination, always synthetic and non-realistic,
could work. His health and his future prospects could only suffer by a
longer stay. He believed that in returning to Paris he could make
himself once and for all an outstanding figure. If he did not, perhaps
it would be better to give up painting altogether. He was growing old.
On the thirtieth of August 1893, he arrived at Marseilles with four
francs in his pocket, after a terrible voyage in the steerage, in the
height of summer, during which three unfortunate passengers died of heat
in the Red Sea. It is almost incredible to think of, that this man,
during the two years he had been away from France, had painted, despite
failing health, and financial miseries, over forty canvases, among them
such masterpieces as L'Esprit Veille, Matamua, and Ia Orana Maria. And
yet this very same man arrived back in France a pauper! Truly, he might
well say of himself, that he was born with the evil eye, which brings to
its owner, as well as others, only misfortune.
III
Paris has been for a century the most fickle and cruel city in the
world. Since her spoiled darling Napoleon fell, there has been no one to
whom she is willing to grant her favors for more than a day. There are a
few exceptions to this rule. Hugo, because he lived in exile; Balzac,
because he, too, was a hermit, continually pestered by his creditors;
and of recent years Verlaine, because he haunted the lowest cafés, the
vilest dens, and only emerged from these to go into a hospital or a
prison. Such men may be the idols of Paris. For the rest, Paris is
willing only to think of her children as sons for a day.
Gauguin returned, picturing a complete conquest of Paris. But he had
already enjoyed the brief hour of glory that was to be his.
Had he but managed his affairs more wisely, he might, on the strength
of the sensation his pictures had created in Denmark and subsequently in
Sweden, Norway, and Germany, have now concluded with a picture-dealer an
arrangement enabling him to obtain a small fixed sum every year for his
work. But Gauguin demanded all or nothing! And, as was the case before
with his mother and her Peruvian relatives, the result was nothing.
He decided to give a general exhibition of his entire Tahitian work,
forty-four pictures and two pieces of sculpture. Durand-Ruel gave him a
gallery and Charles Morice, chief of the young symbolists whom Gauguin
had met after the Volpini show, wrote a preface to the catalog, which
probably only served to mystify the public still further.
For the effect of the exhibition on public and press was to produce
frank bewilderment. Of the forty-four pictures exhibited, thirty-three
remained unsold. What misled visitors more than anything else were the
titles that Gauguin had seen fit to attach to his pictures. These titles
were in the Tahitian language. Every one immediately supposed that in
order to understand the pictures, it was necessary to be expert in the
history, the folk-lore, the manners and customs of Tahiti. Naturally
therefore the pictures seemed to be mere archæological and ethnological
puzzles, only to be read by those possessing the key.
Gauguin, of course, had intended something else. Just as he had used
Brittany to suggest the somber passion and suffering of Christ, so he
had used Tahiti to suggest the primal innocence, the enigmatic mystery
of life as it was lived in Eden and in the days of man's awakening--in
that Golden Age dreamed by every great poet and every great painter. But
it was useless for him to try to explain that Tahiti had merely given
him material out of which his imagination had evolved pictures.
Morice pictures him standing at the exhibition, day after day, and
listening with perfect composure to the stupid remarks and laughter of
the crowd. It was, as he later said of himself, the torture of the
Indian who smiles at the stake. Only Degas came and understood. To him
on the last day of the exhibit, Gauguin said: "Monsieur Degas, you have
forgotten your cane," and taking down a cane he himself had sculptured
handed it to the astonished painter.
The bitterness of sheer starvation would assuredly have been his, had
not fortune, with sly mockery and with perhaps a desire to save Gauguin
for better things, sent him means of salvation. A brother of his father
died in Orleans, well-to-do and a bachelor. From his estate, Gauguin
inherited thirteen thousand francs.
The exhibition had been a mistake, but his next move was sheer folly.
Instead of reflecting calmly upon his situation, he rented a studio and
determined to make one more attempt to impress and startle Paris. Morice
admits that this was done at the insistence of his so-called friends. If
this was the case Gauguin would have done well had he uttered the
well-known prayer, "Deliver me from my friends!" For Morice, even,
admitted later that it was, under the circumstances, a mistake.
About Gauguin's studio and his life at this period the legends have
grown with the years. It is undoubtedly a fact that his walls were
colored pale yellow, and his windows painted with Tahitian subjects in
imitation of stained glass (these same windows were, by the way, on
exhibition at a dealer's in Paris a few years ago). It is true that his
rooms were decorated with trophies, boomerangs, wooden clubs, spears. It
is true that he kept a monkey and a model, a mulatto woman who is said
to have come from Java and who was certainly more of a trial to him than
anything else. It is true also that he wore a strange costume,
consisting of a long blue riding coat with pearl buttons, a blue
waistcoat embroidered yellow, brown pantaloons, and a gray slouch hat
with a blue ribbon. But the importance of these and of similar details
is very slight. Gauguin has been dead now for some years and it is time
that the recollection of these pitiable attempts to attract the
attention of heedless Paris were dead also and forgotten.
Despite this parade of self-satisfied vanity, Gauguin found himself
ill-at-ease. The facile adulation of the symbolists, who frequented the
tea-parties he gave at his studio, could not hold him. He wandered off
to Bruges, where he remained rapt with admiration before Memling and
astounded, half-overwhelmed by the brutal energy of Rubens. He lost
interest in the new pupils who offered themselves, Seguin and O'Connor.
After a vain attempt to get a post from the Government as a resident in
Oceania, he again drifted back to Pont-Aven.
There, one day, promenading upon the beach with the persistent mulatto
model at his side, he was jeered at by some sailors. In a moment, all
his ridiculous artifices and carefully-studied poses slipped from him.
He was again a savage, fighting for the right to exist in his own way.
He attacked the sailors but they were too many for him and one, slipping
behind him, launched a well-aimed kick and broke his leg at the shin.
The mulatto fled, took a train to Paris, entered the empty studio,
seized whatever she could lay her hands on and vanished. As for Gauguin,
he lay on a stretcher, uttering not a groan but stoically rolling and
smoking a cigarette.
IV
Little by little there had been dawning in his mind a vague
understanding; and now, as he lay on his bed in the inn at Pont-Aven,
this understanding became a conviction.
He saw and understood at last what it was that he had tried to
accomplish and why he had failed. He knew now what his art had been; a
great protest, an external manifestation of the inner revolt that had
gone on in his soul. What he had fought against was the cunning
extortion, the moral degradation, the bargaining hypocrisy, of
nineteenth century Europe. And nineteenth century Europe had risen
against him, was casting him out, was destroying him. He must either
submit or declare war, for the sake of his life, his art, his soul.
Among the people of Tahiti, labeled contemptuously "savages" by the very
folk who had hampered the development of his art at every opportunity,
among these savages he knew that he had found honor, courage, moral
dignity, and disinterested kindness as he had found them nowhere else.
Among these oppressed and exploited savages, there still survived
vestiges of a civilization in which art had its proper place in the
scheme of things, as a means to fuller and more joyous life and as a
door opening upon the mysteries of that beyond which neither scientists
nor theologians could ever pierce. Among these savages he had found a
dark subterranean hatred of the new civilization, which they knew to be
destroying them; and now he looked and saw the same hatred in his own
soul.
On September 20, 1894, he wrote to Daniel de Monfreid:--
"As you say, I have not given any news of myself recently and every one
is complaining. The reason is, you see, that I have lost all my strength
through suffering, above all at night, which I frequently pass without
any sleep. And into the bargain naturally I have done nothing this
infernal month except spend money. For the rest, I have made a fixed
resolve to go back and live always in Oceania and shall return to Paris
in December in order to occupy myself exclusively in selling all my
bazar at no matter what price. If I succeed I shall leave as soon as
possible in February. I can then finish my days without care for the
morrow and without the external struggle against fools--Farewell to
painting, except as a means of distraction. My house will be in
sculptured wood."
The resolve expressed by this letter was carried out. Gauguin returned
to Paris and threw the "bazar," as he called it, upon the market. An
auction sale was planned of the pictures remaining in the studio. On his
return from Tahiti, Gauguin had met August Strindberg, then living in
Paris. Strindberg had taken a certain interest in his work and for a
time the two men had lived together. Gauguin now applied to him for a
preface to the sale catalog. The following letter was Strindberg's
response and in its words we read intellectual Europe's complaint
against Gauguin:
"You insist absolutely upon having the preface for your catalog which I
wrote in remembrance of the winter 1894-5, when we were living here,
behind the Institute, not far from the Pantheon, more important still,
close to the Cemetery of Montparnasse! I would have willingly given you
this souvenir, to take away with you to that isle of Oceania, where you
wish to seek a decoration in harmony with your powerful stature, and a
breathing space, but I feel myself in an equivocal position from the
outset, and I respond immediately to your request by an 'I cannot' or,
more brutally, by an 'I will not.'
... "I cannot grasp your art and I cannot love it--I know that this
avowal will neither astonish nor wound you, because you seem to be only
strengthened by the hatred of others; your personality, careful to
remain intact, is pleased by the antipathy that it arouses. Perhaps with
reason, for, from the instant when, approved and admired, you obtain
partisans, either they will rank you or classify you or give to your art
a name which the younger men shall have used for five years to designate
a super-annuated style of painting.
... "It was of Puvis de Chavannes that I thought last night, when to the
southern sounds of mandolin and guitar, I saw on the walls of your
studio an uproar of sunlit pictures, which pursued me in my sleep. I saw
trees which no botanist will discover, animals unsuspected by Cuvier and
men which only you can create.
"A sea which pours forth from a volcano, a sky in which no God can
live--Sir, said I in my dream, you have created a new heaven and earth,
but I am not delighted in the midst of your creation. It is too sunny
for me; I prefer more chiaroscuro. And in your paradise there lives an
Eve who is not my ideal, because truly I, too, have a feminine ideal or
two!
"This morning, I went to the Luxembourg gallery to look at Chavannes,
who always comes back to my mind. I contemplated with a profound
sympathy his picture of the Poor Fisherman, so attentively occupied in
watching the boat, which brings him to the faithful love of his spouse,
and slumbering child. That is beautiful. But it seemed to me this
Fisherman wore a crown of thorns, and that shocked me. For I hate Christ
and all crowns of thorns. You understand that I hate them. I do not
desire this pitiful God who accepts blows. My God is rather
Vitsliputsli, who, in the sun, eats the hearts of men.
"No, Gauguin is not formed from the work of Chavannes, nor from that of
Manet, nor from that of Bastien-Lepage.
"Who is he then? He is Gauguin, the savage who hates a wearisome
civilization; something of a Titan who, jealous of his Creator, in
his idle moments makes his own little creation; a child who breaks up
his toys to make others; he who denies and defies the rabble, preferring
to see the sky red, rather than blue, as they do.
[Illustration: Calvary.]
"Bon voyage, Master: but come back here to me. I shall by that time
perhaps have learned to understand your art better, which will permit me
to make a true preface for a new catalog of a new sale, since I am
beginning also to feel an immense need for becoming savage and creating
a new world."
To this letter, Gauguin replied-with the following profession of
faith:--
"I have received to-day your letter; your letter, which is a preface for
my catalog. I had the idea of asking you for a preface, when I saw you
the other day in my studio playing the guitar and singing, your blue
northern eyes gazing attentively at the pictures on the walls. I had
then the presentiment of a revolt, of a shock between your civilization
and my barbarism.
"You suffer from your civilization. My barbarism is to me a renewal of
youth.
"Before the Eve of my choice, which I have painted in forms and
harmonies of another world, your remembrances have perhaps evoked a
sorrow of the past. The Eve of your civilized conception makes you and
the rest of us almost always misogynists; the old Eve, which in my
studio frightens you, will perhaps smile at you less bitterly some day.
This world of mine, which neither a Cuvier nor a botanist can find, will
be a Paradise, which I shall have only sketched out. And from the sketch
to the realization of the dream is very far. What matter? To envisage
happiness, is that not a foretaste of Nirvana?
"The Eve that I have painted, she alone, logically can remain naked
before one's eyes. Yours in that simple state could not walk without
shame, and too beautiful (perhaps), would be the evocation of an evil
and a sorrow."
In February, 1895, the pictures were sold bringing in twelve thousand
francs. And shortly after the artist shook the dust of Europe from his
feet and departed for his final voyage to Tahiti. As Morice says, he
left Paris with a smile, and without turning his head to look back.
V
It was in the same spirit as that in which he quitted Europe finally,
that Gauguin set himself the task of writing the story of his life in
Tahiti. This story, which appears in the pages of the book he entitled
"Noa Noa" (a native word meaning "fragrant"), is at once the best
commentary on and the final analysis of his mind.
We do not know when Gauguin first conceived or executed the part of the
book that is his. It may have been during his long hours of solitude on
his first visit to the island; perhaps it was during his stay in Paris;
perhaps it was after his return. The part of the book that is not his
refers in passing to events that took place as late as 1897.
Gauguin wished to write the story of his conversion to savagery--the
conversion of a man who realized that he himself was tainted with
civilization, incapable of becoming more than half-a-savage, yet
realizing utterly that savagery was naked, healthy and sound, while
civilization was corrupt, over-luxuriant and decaying.
To accomplish this task, he sought for a style as free from literary
artifice as possible. His aim was to state what he had seen in Tahiti,
in the style of a folk-tale. He deliberately eschewed rhetoric, exotic
ornament, all the devices of the tourist, the journalist, the
professional litterature. What he wanted, above all, was to make others
feel, in the incidents of a naïve story, the essence of Tahiti--the soul
of the native.
It is therefore useless to ask whether the story of his return to
savagery told by Gauguin in this book, has any basis in fact or whether
it is largely allegory. It may be both or neither. It contains certain
undoubted facts: first, that Gauguin saw on his arrival at Papeete the
royal funeral and was struck by the attitude of the natives to that
event; second, that he quitted Papeete and attempted to live as a
native, abandoning European dress and speech as far as possible; third,
that in the course of his stay in the island he entered into relations
with one or more native women; finally, that he quitted the island,
owing to money troubles and in the hope of obtaining a substantial
triumph in France.
These facts are not important, and are merely the vague skeleton upon
which the fascinating story of Gauguin's spiritual development is bit by
bit, built up. He made use of these facts in the same way as he made use
of models in his pictures, as the basis for the suggestion of beautiful
forms. All art to him was transposition, and in the pages of his recital
he deliberately attempted to transpose his opinions on civilization,
savagery, and life, into a series of imaginary adventures, which we are
at liberty to believe or not as we choose.
So we follow him from Papeete into the backwoods. We find him holding
aloof from the savages at first and marveling at their simple
hospitality. We see him making his first tentative attempts at
establishing a community of thought. He tries to persuade the natives to
sit for their portraits--with little success. He tries to find solace
in the companionship of the half-caste Titi, in vain. Then Jotefa comes
upon the scene, the young man whose body reveals to him the hitherto
unsuspected fact that civilization has only accentuated differences of
sex, and thereby rendered sex more dangerous, more artificial, more
unnatural. So he gets his first gleam of intelligence. The next comes,
when Jotefa declares that he cannot touch the chisel, that an artist is
not like other men, but some one producing a thing useful to others.
This further enlightens him. He contrasts this opinion on art as
something useful to man with art as the European sees it, a mere
freakish amusement. Finally, he hazards everything. He takes a young
native girl and makes her his wife, not without qualms of fear. All goes
well until one day away from home, when he is out fishing with the
natives. They laugh at his luck. He asks them why. Because his line has
caught in the lower jaw of the fish and that is a sign of a man's wife
being unfaithful to him. He returns home, half-believing the
superstition. The native girl prays, weeps, asks to be beaten. He cannot
beat her. He can only forgive and understand. So the story closes.
From such a story, we should naturally receive the impression that
Gauguin's life in Tahiti was ideally happy. But his letters reveal that
he was even more unhappy there than in France. So whatever elements of
fact may be in his story, it is evident that they cannot be disentangled
from the fictional details. It is better to take "Noa Noa" altogether as
a series of fictitious adventures, designed to bring out the fact that
Gauguin became, despite himself, as nearly one with the natives as it is
possible for any European to be. Thus we see, bit by bit, the Tahitians
claiming him as one of their own, from the day that he is forced by
necessity to accept their food offered and at first scornfully refused,
to the day when he finds that he shares their superstitions and even
their easy tolerance of marital infidelity. If we look at the story in
this light, it becomes an allegory easily readable, an allegory of
civilization going down before primitive nature, expressed in a series
of parables.
Unfortunately, Gauguin suspected that this story would seem too bare and
devoid of literary charm if he published it as it stood, and he asked
Charles Morice to collaborate. Morice thereupon wrote a series of highly
florid descriptions and poems, inspired by Gauguin's pictures, in a
style strongly tinged with the influence of Stéphane Mallarmé. These
poems and descriptions were intercalated between the pages of Gauguin's
recital.[1] The result is that "Noa Noa" contains two books; the first
Gauguin's, the second, Morice's, and the reader is liable to be confused
unless he remembers that the sections by Gauguin are all headed "Le
Conteur Parle," and that these sections form by themselves a continuous
story. Morice's contributions can therefore be disregarded.
It is perhaps better not to discuss whether or not these contributions
add anything to Gauguin's recital. Some people may even prefer the glow
of Morice's rhetoric to the naked blaze of Gauguin's poetry. Gauguin
himself philosophically remarked that he wished Morice's work to stand
beside his, in order that people might observe the difference between a
civilized decadent and a naïve and brutal savage.
[Footnote 1: They have been wisely omitted from the English
translation.]