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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.