I
With Gauguin's last return to Tahiti there opened for him the final and
most important phase of his life, the last stand of the savage against
encroaching civilization. The letters that he sent to de Monfreid during
this period are painful reading. They breathe the weary cry of a man who
knows that Fate's dice are loaded against him, the complaint of a
warrior who realizes that fighting is useless, but who has no choice but
to fight on. For Gauguin was now exhausted by the struggle that he had
carried on so long with the world out-side and within himself. The wound
in his leg, given him by the sailors, had never properly healed; under
the climate of Tahiti, it reopened. Owing to the rash exposure of his
skin to the effects of tropical light, both legs were attacked by
eczema. Night after night was spent in sleepless pain. To add to his
troubles, his eyesight began to fail; nature was taking her revenge on
him, was wreaking upon his body retribution for the sins of which the
white race had been guilty in their dealings with the natives. It seemed
to him that the gods he worshiped had become his enemies.
Before leaving France, a number of friends had agreed to buy his
pictures, and assure him a steady income. These now withdrew their
support. He had leased a plot of ground in order to build the house of
sculptured wood which he dreamed of; the construction of the house
carried away his remaining capital. He was everywhere fleeced, not only
by the French colonists, but also by the natives, who were growing more
and more corrupt every day, thanks to the happy influence of
civilization. Even after his house was built, he was not allowed to
keep it in peace. The owner of the ground died, leaving his affairs in a
tangle; Gauguin was forced to obtain another plot and to reconstruct the
house, or see it destroyed. This last he refused to do, so he was
forced, finally, to borrow money, a thing he had never done in his life
before.
Towards the end of 1897, his situation grew even worse. His eyes, now
permanently inflamed, were so painful that he could not even touch a
brush. The tragic portrait of himself in profile, which he sent about
this time to de Monfreid, clearly reveals the condition of his eyesight.
De Monfreid had sent him colors, but these were useless--he could not
even exchange them for bread. And to add to all he was in debt, more and
more heavily, month after month. De Monfreid wrote him encouragingly,
tried to sell his pictures, spoke of articles, of a press campaign on
his behalf. The answer was--"I only desire silence, silence and again
silence. Let me die in peace, forgotten, or if I ought to live, let me
live in peace, forgotten.... What matter if I am the pupil of Bernard or
Sérusier? If I have painted daubs, why set out to gild them, to deceive
people as to their quality?"
Early in 1898 his resolution was taken. Weary, exhausted, at the end of
his tether, he decided to meet death half-way. He finished a large
picture, a sort of strange allegory of despair, entitled _D'où venons
nous? Que sommes nous? Où allons nous?_ and then took arsenic. The dose
was too strong and only brought about terrible nausea, which recurred
for some months afterwards whenever he attempted to take food. Meanwhile
his creditors menaced him with the destruction of the house that had
taken him so much trouble to build.
In order to obtain food, he shortly afterwards returned to Papeete and,
at the age of fifty, took up a position as a shipping clerk at the Board
of Public Works, with a salary of six francs a day. To such straits was
he reduced, and yet he continued the fight. Can one help admiring his
tenacity?
Meanwhile, the devoted de Monfreid had been busy. He had enlisted the
interest of Degas, of Vollard and others, and had succeeded in selling
some of the artist's pictures. Gauguin might now have counted upon a
steady income, had he chosen to forget past injuries. But with him,
there was to be no compromise. Because Bernard, Sérusier, Maurice Denis
had made his theories popular and had even claimed to have some
influence on his development, he refused either to be ranked with them
or to exhibit in their company. Of course he merely made himself more
unpopular in Paris by such conduct. But Gauguin's personality was of a
kind unable to endure the society of second-rate people. He admired
genius where he found it, in a few solitaries such as Degas, Poe,
Balzac, and Mallarmé. For ordinary society, he preferred either natives
or children. Nevertheless his pictures were sold and, by de Monfreid's
efforts, he found himself out of debt in 1899 and able to return to his
house, now in a deplorable state of neglect and decay. Things seemed to
improve a little, though he was now permanently crippled by the disease
of his legs. He set himself once more to paint and to plant the flower
seeds which de Monfreid had sent, at his request, from France. Ill,
ruined in health and physique, a victim to drugs, he went onward to his
goal.
[Illustration: Matamua (Olden Days).]
II
It is difficult to judge fairly the next stage in Gauguin's career,
unless we remember that he had suffered so much from his physical
ailments, from the complete solitude in which he found himself and from
the terrible crisis of the previous year, that he was afflicted for the
time being with something closely resembling persecutional mania. He had
been driven to war on civilization and he believed that some unknown
power was now pursuing him with its hatred. In his next stage, we find
him turning even against the natives.
On his return to Tahiti he had taken a young native girl aged
thirteen-and-a-half for wife, companion and model. She had served him
devotedly, had procured him food when he was unable to walk, had nursed
him in his illness. After his return to the house from Papeete, she had
resumed with him the old life and had given birth to a child. Now, for
some reason or no reason, Gauguin suddenly took it into his head that
she had robbed him, and drove her out. The poor soul, however, returned
and, as the painter was by this time a helpless cripple, he attempted to
call in the law to enforce her removal, claiming that her return was a
violation of his domicile. Of course, the law did nothing.
This only further enraged Gauguin. He decided to attack the entire
colonial administration. Since his return, he had been everywhere
treated by the Europeans at Tahiti as a madman or fool. Now he would get
his revenge.
With the aid of a copying apparatus he set up and printed several
numbers of a paper called, first _Les Guèpes_, and later _Le Sourire_.
The contents of these papers have been printed and are the poorest stuff
that Gauguin ever wrote. But these crude gibes at the governor and at
the colonial administrations generally, together with the equally crude
caricatures that Gauguin drew of prominent people in the colony, seem to
have produced a stir. People began to fear him at last; it was, for a
moment, a triumph.
But Tahiti had by this time grown too civilized to hold him. A railway
had been built into the interior; the Protestant missionaries grew every
day more powerful; disease and drink were rapidly carrying off the
natives. Gauguin for a time thought of turning doctor and even wrote to
de Monfreid for medicines. But shortly he found his own need of medicine
as great as that of any of the wretched natives. An epidemic of
influenza struck the island and the painter was obliged to take to the
hospital, where he had to pay twelve francs a day. To add to his griefs,
the supply of food in the island became scarce and prices ran up to an
impossible figure.
Hearing that life in the Marquesas Islands was cheaper, that the natives
there were physically more unspoilt, also that Europeans were few and
far between, he decided to quit Tahiti and install himself in the
island of Hiva-Hoa or Dominica. He hoped to find there elements of a
purer savagery and to paint with fresh strength. This hope was destined
to be realized only in part.
Gauguin's art is almost entirely associated with three spots,
Martinique, Brittany and Tahiti. He might have done better work at other
places, had he had the time, the opportunity or the strength. In the
case of his removal to the Marquesas it was the strength that was
lacking.
Traces of the exhaustion of his endurance and of the affection of his
eyes are to be found even in his latest Tahitian pictures. Owing to his
habit of dating his pictures, we can follow the failure of his power.
The first things that he painted after his return are, on the whole,
superior to the productions of 1891-93. The _Te Arii Vahine_ or
Reclining Woman, of 1896 is finer in design even than the _L'Esprit
Veille_ of 1892-3. The _Youth Between Two Girls, La Case_ (1897), the
beautiful _Navé Navé Mahana_ (Delightful Days) of 1896, with its feeling
of a terrestrial paradise--these are masterpieces of their kind. But the
portrait of himself (1897) already shows signs of inability to finish
and remains a sketch, albeit a powerful one. And with many of the
succeeding works there came a greater impatience, a greater
carelessness, a more hectic and feverish lack of control. The more
savage Gauguin's work grew, the less became his strength to produce it.
One is reminded of a similar case to his, that of the Irish dramatist,
Synge.
The Gauguin who sought solitude of far-off Hiva-Hoa was not the Gauguin
of ten years before. He was an extinct volcano, a burned-out crater. And
he was destined to find only death in this last solitude. Nevertheless,
before death came, his art attained its final summit of expression.
Pictures like the _Jeune Fille à l'Eventail_ (1902) or the magnificent
_Contes Barbares_ (also 1902) in which the Marquesas type appears, are
the last word of Gauguin's gospel of beauty, the revelation of a new
heaven and earth. The flame burned clear in him just before the
close--then the shattered body yielded and all was darkness.
III
The Marquesas Islands are small and, in contrast to the coral and
basaltic formation of Tahiti, of volcanic origin. They lie about a
thousand miles nearer to the equator and this makes their climate more
humid and less supportable to white men. Owing to this fact, and to the
fact that they are out of the track of steamers between San Francisco
and Sydney, they have preserved more of their unspoilt character.
The natives are said to be the finest in appearance of any Polynesian
peoples. In distinction to the Tahitians, who are either red or olive
brown, their skin is largely of a clear golden color. In this they
resemble the Maories of New Zealand, as in the practice of
face-tattooing common among the males. They were formerly great
fighters and ferocious cannibals, as Herman Melville's "Omoo" tells us.
The first white settlers amongst them were French Roman Catholic
missionaries who, by buying up most of the valuable land, by
discouraging the drink traffic and by preventing other familiar colonial
abuses, have succeeded in preserving the native stock fairly well. The
Marquesas have never become the sink of vice and corruption which is
Tahiti.
It was on the chief island of this group that Gauguin installed himself.
His capital enabled him to buy a plot of ground and to start
constructing another house. This, like his house in Tahiti, was
ornamented with bas-reliefs in wood and large decorative paintings. In
the garden, stood a rude clay statue--a sort of combination of a Buddha
and a Maori idol--under a canopy. Gauguin called this statue Te
Atua--the God, and was reported to say his prayers to it every day. On
the base of the statue were engraved these words, taken from Morice's
verses in "Noa Noa":
"The Gods are dead and Tahiti dies of their death,
The sun, which once lit the isles with flame, now sleeps,
A sorrowful sleep, with brief dream wakenings:
Now the shadow of regret pierces the eyes of Eve,
Who pensively smiles, gazing upon her breast,
Sterile gold, sealed by some divine design."
Altogether in the Marquesas, Gauguin found a great charm and repose. He
seems to have rapidly established a great friendship with the natives
and to have looked upon himself as being a sort of king. But his health
was so bad that he was unable to leave the house and but for one Chinese
boy, he lived alone. He even dreamed of abandoning the Marquesas (not
because he was weary of the place, but because he knew his strength was
small) and seeking a more favorable climate in Spain, where he thought
he might be able to paint.
Except for the constant trouble with his health, his only difficulty was
with the missionaries. With the exception of a few settlers, they were
the only whites on the islands. Gauguin had advanced in savagery to
such a point as to be unable to bear the presence of white people. He
refused to see that the Catholic Missionaries had at least attempted to
save the natives from the worse fate that had befallen them under the
Protestant Missionaries in Tahiti. The insistence of the Catholics upon
monogamy, upon European dress, upon mission schools and religious
observances infuriated him. He made a statue of a nude woman and set it
up in his garden. The Bishop protested. Gauguin promptly made a
caricature in clay of the bishop, with horns on his head like the Devil,
and set it up facing the statue. Something of the old Gothic love of the
grotesque, something, too, of the typically Parisian desire to "_épater
de bourgeois_" remained in him to the last.
But this was not all. Gauguin was not the sort of man to end his days in
peace. Although de Monfreid had worked devotedly, his position in France
was still insecure; Vollard might at any moment refuse to take more
pictures to sell. The wound he had received by his failure to impress
Paris in 1893 still smarted. He determined to write two articles
containing his opinions on art, technique, painting, life and morality,
in order to confound the Parisian critics. These articles, entitled
"Anecdotes of an Apprentice" and "Before and After," are little more
than a series of feverishly jotted notes. Later, with other notes of a
similar nature, they were embodied in a large album entitled "Avant et
Après," which remains the fullest body of information about Gauguin's
life and art we possess. The _Mercure de France_ judged, perhaps
rightly, that their tone was too personally violent and refused to print
them.
The other old score that he had to wipe out was with the French colonial
administration. In Tahiti, he had fought the governor, the law courts,
and the gendarmes. Here it was the customs officials who roused his
wrath. Two American ships had recently visited the island and a certain
amount of goods had been sold to the natives, through the connivance of
the gendarmes, without paying tax. Gauguin immediately wrote a letter on
the subject to the Administration, stating the facts as he understood
them and protesting, on behalf of the natives, against the bribery and
corruption of the Customs in this instance. The only reply made was a
notice from the law courts that the Administration intended to take
steps against him for the dissemination of an untrue statement. Gauguin
appeared in court, where he was promptly condemned to prison for three
months and to a fine of a thousand francs.
It was ruin, but Gauguin determined to appeal. The tribunal was
irregularly constituted and his facts had been proven to be in part, at
least, true. He was sure of winning his case, but an appeal necessitated
a return to Tahiti and the costs of an attorney, and his capital was
again running low. He wrote to de Montfreid, begging him to find a buyer
for three pictures, at the price of fifteen hundred francs; he sent off
ten more pictures to Vollard. Then he prepared to make his appeal.
Death surprised him suddenly and Paul Gauguin's appeal will never be
heard in this world.
A letter from the only white man, the Protestant minister Vernier, who
knew him, leaves no doubt on the subject of the cause of Gauguin's
death. It was not the eczema of the legs, nor leprosy, as some have
hinted, nor another dose of arsenic, nor syphilis, that ended his life;
it was a simple syncope of the heart. His energy, with which he had kept
up for so many years the struggle with the world and out of which he had
drawn so many beautiful pictures, was worn out. The machine slackened
and stopped.
Paul Gauguin died on the 6th of May, 1903.
A few days before his death he had written his last letter to Charles
Morice, the words of which stir one like a trumpet.
"I am on the ground but I am not beaten. The Indian, who smiles while he
is being tortured, is not conquered. You are mistaken if you meant that
I am wrong in calling myself a savage. I _am_ a savage, and the
civilized feel this, for there is nothing in my work which could produce
bewilderment save this savage strain in me, for which I am not myself
responsible. It is therefore inimitable. Every human work is a
revelation of the individual. Hence there are two kinds of beauty; one
comes from instinct, the other from labor. The union of the two, with
the modifications resulting therefrom, produces great and very
complicated richness. Art-criticism has yet to discover the fact....
Raphael's great science does not for a moment prevent me from
discovering the instinct of the beautiful as the essential quality in
him. Raphael was born with beauty. All the rest in him is modification.
"Physics, chemistry, and above all the study of Nature, have produced an
epoch of confusion in art, and it may be truly said that artists robbed
of all their savagery have wandered into all kinds of paths in search of
the productive element they no longer possess. They now act only in
disorderly groups and are terrified if they find themselves alone.
Solitude is not to be recommended to every one, for a man must have
strength to bear it and to act alone. All I have learnt from others has
been an impediment to me. It is true I know little, but what I do know
is my own."
Yet civilization, after all, had the last word. The very bishop, whom
Gauguin in life had hated and caricatured, intervened when he lay cold
and lifeless and the body of the painter was interred with full Catholic
rites in the cemetery of the Church at Atuana. And, by a concluding
stroke of irony, the grave was left unmarked. Thus one of the greatest
painters of the later nineteenth century, and one of the bravest men the
world has ever seen, mingled his dust with that of the humblest
natives, in the same way as Blake, one of the greatest painters of the
early nineteenth century, had been buried before him in an unmarked
grave among the paupers, at Bunhill Fields.
IV
The immense industrial development which occurred during the nineteenth
century took place so rapidly and universally, that no one was able to
estimate its significance or dispassionately to weigh its effects. At
the outset of the century the vital idea that pervaded Europe and
America was the spiritual idea of liberty and the rights of man, born in
the fires of the French Revolution. After 1848 this idea gradually
vanished, and another took its place; the purely material idea of
progress. The perfected application of steam and the consequent
development of machinery; the immense tapping of the world's resources
of coal, metals, agricultural products; the equally immense, universal
exploitation of human effort necessary to develop these resources to
their maximum; the creation of an international finance, resting upon
vast hoards of wealth in the hands of a limited few, whose world-wide
interests were linked together by railways, steamship lines, telegraphs,
telephones; the ordered regimenting of mankind into a small capitalist
class, invisibly controlling the old, decayed aristocracy, the official
church, the machinery of the law; a larger middle class, dependent upon
and subservient to the capitalists; and an immense laboring class,
exploited in the interests of the two preceding classes: all these were
virtually the creation of a single century.
Against this overwhelming flood of change, a few exceptionally gifted
men vaguely protested, affirming the greater value of human life over
mechanical invention; maintaining the antique dignity of man. Their
protest was incoherent, individualistic. These men were like broken and
scattered fragments of dykes, still unsubmerged and striving to hold
back the waters of a flood. Among them must be ranked the artist whose
life-story I have written.
All that is vital and valuable in French painting of the nineteenth
century, since Ingres, springs directly from the enthusiasm and
spiritual energy of the French Revolution. The somber fury of Delacroix,
the colossal caricature of Daumier; the peasant art of Millet; the sane
realism of Courbet; the mordant irony of Degas and Forain; even the
feeling for nature and the open air which the Impressionists gave us,
all represent phases of humanity's vague and enormous hunger for
personal freedom, for human liberty and development. When Gauguin
arrived on the scene, the reaction was already taking place. The
official, academic painters were merely ringing the changes upon a stock
of outworn formulas. On the other hand, the Impressionists were striving
to render nature scientifically, unemotionally. Nature was becoming to
them no longer the mother and nurse of man but a collection of chemical
formulas for soil, air, sunlight. Only Puvis de Chavannes remained,
aloof and misunderstood, painting great decorations that seemed but the
remembrance of some golden age of the past, and easel pictures of a
profound, hopeless pessimism.
Gauguin began to paint, and the protest against science, against
materialism, against unemotional vision began. At the outset he
attempted to follow the scientific formulas of the Impressionists. But,
by the purest instinct he discovered, as Cézanne had already discovered,
that the sensation of light could not be painted, could only be rendered
in color. And he also discovered (this time the discovery came from
Puvis de Chavannes) that the sensation of form could not be painted
either--that out of the variety of shifting forms offered to us by
nature, the artist must select those most significant to him and that
even these must be transposed, altered, accentuated or suppressed to
suit the harmony of the composition. Thus unconsciously, almost without
volition on his part, he was led to understand that the Primitives
everywhere were the truly great artists, since they expressed great
human emotions about man and nature, without troubling whether their
vision was or was not exact. And so he fought, bitterly, savagely, for
the actual restoration of primitive art and life; for the cause of
natural humanity against the cause of mechanical, dehumanized
efficiency.
Unless we realize this fact, we have not grasped the key, either to his
art or to his life. Gauguin himself admitted that his painting was only
a fragmentary indication, an unrealized promise of an unaccomplished
world. And he may have had knowledge also of the fundamental discord and
disorder of his own life, but have despaired of ever attaining to
harmony with himself. At least the caricature of himself in _Contes
Barbares_ is here to remind us that he was not altogether the spoiled
child that some imagine him to be. Having both the world and himself to
struggle against, he at least determined that his pictorial work should
represent the best part of his personality, even if his life proved
only to be, as he said in his last letter to de Montfreid, "a downfall
followed by an attempt to rise, followed by another downfall." And so in
his pictures we realize the truth of the remark made by Van Gogh after
the disaster that parted them: "Gauguin made one feel that a good
picture should be the equivalent of a good action."
And indeed it is so. Every artist carries upon his shoulders a profound
moral responsibility. This responsibility is not, as supposed, the duty
of teaching us to conform to the modern official distortion of Christian
ethics, by which we are ruled. It is not the duty of upholding a system
of negations, of prohibitions, of compromises, striking at the very
roots of life. It is a far nobler, far more difficult task. The duty of
the artist is to affirm the dignity of life, the value of humanity,
despite the morbid prejudices of Puritanism, the timid conventionality
of the mob, despite even his own knowledge of the insoluble riddle of
suffering, decay and death. This duty Gauguin in his art strove to
accomplish. He affirmed his faith in man and in the scene of man's
labor, the earth. Cézanne, perhaps a more accomplished painter, endowed
perhaps with a deeper respect for nature and for the style of the great
painters of the past, shrank from making Gauguin's affirmation. He
accepted in his own life a compromise; in his art he ruthlessly
eliminated the role of the creative and interpretive imagination. And
then, towards the end of his life, Cézanne complained that Gauguin had
vulgarized him.
"Gauguin has not understood me; never will I accept the lack of
gradation and of tone; it's nonsense."
It would have been better for Cézanne to have said that he could not,
dared not understand Gauguin.
Nor is this all that Gauguin accomplished. He restored painting to its
proper place in the ordered hierarchy of the arts. He showed us that its
place is between architecture and music, and that sculpture is its twin
sister. He was the first man to suspect that the progress of the
scientific spirit among the Greeks had produced the same effects in
disassociating and destroying the arts, as has the progress of the
scientific spirit in the present day. He believed, and constantly
affirmed, that painting was entering upon a new musical phase and he
built up his pictures on a definite scale of color harmonies, as well as
upon the chosen architectural proportions of form, which, whether given
by perspective or not, seemed to him necessary. Thus he reconciled the
Venetians and the Primitives, and showed that the goal of both form and
color is decoration.
William Blake might perhaps have admired this rude artisan, who painted
his dream of a golden age in his own way, who steadfastly strove to
grasp the essential truth in every tradition: Egyptian, Cambodian,
Persian, Chinese, Gothic, Greek and Renaissance. But Gauguin could
never, had he known of Blake, have pardoned in him the ultimate ascetic
negation, the contemptuous denial of earthliness, of "the delusions of
the goddess Nature." In Gauguin, the spirit never conquered the flesh,
and he remained to the end, a man. Blake was possibly the greater
visionary: Gauguin is certainly the better stone on which to build.
V
After Gauguin's death, his art rapidly became almost forgotten in
France. He remarked himself towards the end of his life that there were
not fifty of his pictures in that country. Even the few there are, hang
in scattered private collections, each containing one or at most three
or four. The great bulk of his work is in Germany, Scandinavia and
Russia. It proved impossible even in 1911 to raise sufficient money to
buy _L'Esprit Veille_ for the Louvre.
It is greatly to be regretted that no museum or collection has been able
to assemble a considerable quantity of his work. Gauguin was, above all
things, a decorator, and half a dozen of his pictures make a greater
effect than one. One does not judge Puvis de Chavannes, another
decorator, solely by his easel pictures, but by the great decorative
schemes in Paris, at Amiens and in Boston. This remark applies equally
to other decorators, such as Raphael, Michelangelo, Tintoretto and
Veronese. A room hung with twenty Gauguins would produce an immense
effect of monumental power. That such a room exists in Moscow can be
small consolation to Western Europeans at present.
His pupils and followers either plodded along unimaginatively, like
Sérusier, or drifted off into academicism, like Bernard, or watered down
their technique into the tasteless picture-book and stage-costume
decoration of Maurice Denis. None of them seized Gauguin's secret of
remaining simple, direct and savage. Aristide Maillol is an honorable
exception. A sculptor and tapestry designer, he was able to work upon
the indications that Gauguin had left for the guidance of these branches
and to show us, in part at least, how they might be realized.
The main stream of French art simply ignored Gauguin. Instead of making
with him a bold leap backwards to the origins of all tradition, it went
forward to even more scientific and unemotional essays in painting. The
Neo-Impressionists with their spots of complementary colors were
followed by disciples of Cézanne, who sought to reduce all forms to
certain geometrical primaries, basing their doctrine on certain words
which the master of Aix had let fall concerning the simplification of
form. Out of these emerged Matisse, whose art became, through a more and
more ruthless elimination of modeling, through a more and more arbitrary
placing of colors, an abstraction, an utterly unemotional series of
hieroglyphs. Then Picasso came upon the scene, eliminated color
altogether and began to paint the abstract geometry of form. The Cubists
followed Picasso. The Futurists in their turn started another kind of
abstract painting, the painting of mechanical energy, the dynamism
latent in form.
The Expressionists, meanwhile, held to Van Gogh's and Gauguin's idea
that the picture must represent some emotion, but they denied Gauguin's
corollary that some form derived from nature was necessary to transpose
this emotion into its pictorial equivalent. Consequently they eliminated
form and strove to paint abstract emotion. Finally, the Vorticists
combined Futurism and Expressionism into a single whole and painted the
abstraction of an abstraction--the emotion of dynamic energy, thus
declaring painting to be an absolute-thing-in-itself, an art utterly
innocent of any illustrative purpose whatsoever.
The motives of all these confused art movements, perplexing and
apparently in-congruous, were identical. They were all actuated by a
mania for scientific discovery, a desire to analyze phenomena until the
reality behind phenomena could be found. The physicists, chemists,
philosophers had proven that the world of appearances was not the real
world--that everything that existed was merely a question of ions and
electrons, of radiant or non-radiant energy, or perhaps of elasticity
and inelasticity. These young art revolutionaries, who gave themselves
so many queer labels, were not, as many supposed, either insincere or
insane. They were merely smitten with the desire to make painting--and
not only painting, but even other arts as well--a branch of abstract
science. The world of phenomena had been proved to be an illusion,
making some abstract concept. Therefore they strove to paint, not what
seemed to them unreal, but their absolute conceptions. This new
metaphysic, this new attempt at absolute realism, this final development
of scholastic art-dogma, as narrow and soul-destroying in its way as the
rules for painting religious ikons, evolved and practiced for centuries
by the Byzantine monks of Mount Athos, was rapidly conquering the whole
field of aft when the past war broke out. Nor has the war altogether
suppressed its manifestations.
The enormous destruction of human life, of nature, of art, in the past
war has been altogether out of proportion to the military results
achieved by either side. However true it may be to hold the Germans as
primarily responsible for this destruction, in the first instance, yet
it remains true that none of the contending forces can escape
responsibility for the later developments of the struggle. Apart from
Germany's undeniable guilt in starting the war, civilization as a whole
must answer for the horror of its method. A piece of heavy artillery is
equally destructive, whether it be cast at Essen or at Le Creusot; a
Caproni aeroplane can carry as many bombs as a Gotha; the submarine was
first employed in war by the Americans; the machine gun is an English
invention. For all these devices of destruction we of the twentieth
century, with our belief in purely material progress, stand guilty
to-day; and the blood of our guilt has reddened earth already for over
four years and may continue to do so for many generations to come.
The past war before it came to an end had long ceased to be a contest
between national ideals and had become a struggle between man and an
inhuman, scientific, organized machine. And the machine was victorious.
Just as the scientific spirit, conquering art before the war, led to the
extravagances of Cubism and Vorticism so, since the war, it has attacked
life itself; and made of national existence, no longer a problem of
human bravery, resource and intelligence, but merely a problem of
relative man-power and munitions. We have learned to speak of
"man-power" as our books on physics speak of "horse-power." The task we,
in the war, set ourselves was a grisly paradox; we proposed to save
civilization, to undo a great wrong, by destroying the very basis of
human life on which all civilization stands.
It is therefore with a sense of liberation that we now turn back to a
few artists who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, foresaw
that material progress would end in annihilating humanity, that nature
and humanity, hand in hand, are more sacred than all the shells that
could ever be produced, the guns that could ever be mounted or the laws
that could ever be written. With a sense of spiritual release we revert
to those who dreamed of the great return to nature--to Rousseau,
Whitman, Gauguin, as well as to others who, although perhaps lesser men
than they, followed in their path--David Thoreau, Richard Jefferies.
They were the prophets of the new gospel that must some day prevail--the
gospel that will set humanity above material progress and nature above
æsthetic negation. Their vision was of something not in themselves but
of something higher and nobler, as Gauguin knew when he deliberately
caricatured himself in _Contes Barbares_. As he knew also, the vision
was of something stated only fragmentarily, inscribed as a promise, a
foretaste, an indication of what might be. In Rousseau's prose, in
Whitman's poetry and in Gauguin's painting we see the only gleam of hope
for self-tortured humanity, and the promise of a land where nature and
man are one and where reigns a peace that passes all understanding.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CONSULTED
WORKS OF BIOGRAPHY:
1. Paul Gauguin par Jean de Rotonchamp, Imprimé à Weimar par les Soins
du Comte de Kessler et se Trouve à Paris, chez Edouard Druet, Rue de
Faubourg Saint Honoré, No. 114. 1906. Edition limited to 250 copies.
2. Gauguin, by Charles Morice. Floury, Paris, 1919. This and the
preceding work are the standard sources of Gauguin's life.
3. Lettres de Paul Gauguin à Charles Daniel de Monfreid. Paris, Cres,
1919.
4. White Shadows in the South Seas, by Frederick O'Brien. New York, The
Century Co., 1920. A travel book, with a few new sidelights on Gauguin's
final period.
5. Avant et Après. Paul Gauguin aux Marquises. 1903. 100 copies only
published in photo-reproduction from the original manuscript. A
translation into German has also appeared. Kurt Wolf Verlag, Berlin,
1920.
WORKS OF ART CRITICISM IN ENGLISH:
1. Modern Painting, by Willard Huntingdon Wright. New York, The John
Lane Company.