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.

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.

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A change of skin.

"All this is very strange.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To his eyes, purity and impurity are like the dance of the six serpents:

"To his eyes, the search for the Way of Buddha is like the coming of flowers."

It is only by meditating long on this disillusioned mysticism of a man who was never more than half an European, that we are able to understand how the same mind could have conceived the exasperated sensuality of the bas-relief, Soyez Amoureuses et vous serez Heureuses and the somber despair of Le Christ au Jardin d'Oliviers. That mind, as we have seen, was neither wholly Christian or Pagan—though the untamed Pagan element in it was destined slowly to get the better of the more refined Christian side. Therefore it is useless to ask ourselves whether Gauguin as an artist, displayed more of the Classic tradition than of the Gothic. Gothic as well as Classical strains remained mingled in him up to the last. Throughout his work there runs a longing—obscure, tormented, and ultimately foiled—for a natural religion: a religion that would reconcile man with nature in one harmony, a religion, which, like the rest of his striving, would be a synthesis.

V

By the end of the year 1889, Gauguin's name had acquired a certain renown, and he naturally gravitated back to Paris. Being however still without resources, he took residence once more with Emile Schuffenecker.

At that period, the literary and artistic school which had produced naturalism and impressionism was growing rapidly old-fashioned. Paris was on the verge of her æsthetic nineties. A small group of writers, chief of whom were Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Huysmans, had proclaimed a sort of revolt against the nineteenth century, and had been, in consequence of their love for the remote past, at first labelled Decadents. This title was soon abandoned for the better designation of Symbolists.

Gauguin appeared to the smaller fry of Symbolism as a sort of hero. Here was a man whose revolt was something not fictitious. He had definitely broken away from his own commercial surroundings. He had defiantly ruptured his own family ties. He had abolished Impressionist science and had sought to restore art to its primitive condition, revealing in the process the inexhaustible strength and vitality of peasant and popular art. His appearance amongst them, in a sailor's jersey, a sailor cap, sailor's trousers, and carved wooden shoes, excited a sensation. He became to the facile crowd of hero-worshipers and hangers-on, a sort of symbol.

Some critics have stated that Gauguin's head was turned by this adulation, but in reality, under a new veneer of affectation, he remained what he had always been. No man was less fitted for living in the midst of cultivated society than he. For a time, during that strange epoch of his financial career, he had indeed become, to outward seeming, largely an European; but this was merely on the surface and had completely vanished in the course of his later vagabondage. An invincible shyness and indisposition to reveal himself to others were in him, masked by an appearance of sullen reserve and discourtesy. This shyness disappeared when he was with children, peasants, or natives. But to every one else Gauguin attempted to be as rude as possible, in order to keep them at a distance. And, generally, he succeeded.

It is small wonder then that Schuffenecker shortly found his guest again intolerable, and that Gauguin had to seek out a more modest lodging. Schuffenecker is scarcely to be pitied. He seems never to have realized that Gauguin was the sort of man whom it was worth while trying to love and understand. In losing Gauguin, he lost the one thing that was ever likely to bring him fame, the reputation which his studio had already acquired in the eyes of certain amateurs, as housing Gauguin's collection of pictures and sculptures by himself, by Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Odilon Redon.

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

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

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

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