Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art Part 7

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 fict.i.tious 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 superst.i.tions and even their easy tolerance of marital infidelity. If we look at the story in this light, it becomes an allegory easily readable, an allegory of civilization going down before primitive nature, expressed in a series of parables.

Unfortunately, Gauguin suspected that this story would seem too bare and devoid of literary charm if he published it as it stood, and he asked Charles Morice to collaborate. Morice thereupon wrote a series of highly florid descriptions and poems, inspired by Gauguin's pictures, in a style strongly tinged with the influence of Stephane Mallarme. These poems and descriptions were intercalated between the pages of Gauguin's recital.[1] The result is that "Noa Noa" contains two books; the first Gauguin's, the second, Morice's, and the reader is liable to be confused unless he remembers that the sections by Gauguin are all headed "Le Conteur Parle," and that these sections form by themselves a continuous story. Morice's contributions can therefore be disregarded.

It is perhaps better not to discuss whether or not these contributions add anything to Gauguin's recital. Some people may even prefer the glow of Morice's rhetoric to the naked blaze of Gauguin's poetry. Gauguin himself philosophically remarked that he wished Morice's work to stand beside his, in order that people might observe the difference between a civilized decadent and a nave and brutal savage.

[Footnote 1: They have been wisely omitted from the English translation.]

PART V: THE FIGHT AGAINST CIVILIZATION 1895-1903

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 G.o.ds he worshiped had become his enemies.

Before leaving France, a number of friends had agreed to buy his pictures, and a.s.sure 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 Serusier? 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, ent.i.tled _D'ou venons nous? Que sommes nous? Ou allons nous?_ and then took a.r.s.enic. 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, Serusier, 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 Mallarme. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Matamua (Olden Days).]

II

It is difficult to judge fairly the next stage in Gauguin's career, unless we remember that he had suffered so much from his physical ailments, from the complete solitude in which he found himself and from the terrible crisis of the previous year, that he was afflicted for the time being with something closely resembling persecutional mania. He had been driven to war on civilization and he believed that some unknown power was now pursuing him with its hatred. In his next stage, we find him turning even against the natives.

On his return to Tahiti he had taken a young native girl aged thirteen-and-a-half for wife, companion and model. She had served him devotedly, had procured him food when he was unable to walk, had nursed him in his illness. After his return to the house from Papeete, she had resumed with him the old life and had given birth to a child. Now, for some reason or no reason, Gauguin suddenly took it into his head that she had robbed him, and drove her out. The poor soul, however, returned and, as the painter was by this time a helpless cripple, he attempted to call in the law to enforce her removal, claiming that her return was a violation of his domicile. Of course, the law did nothing.

This only further enraged Gauguin. He decided to attack the entire colonial administration. Since his return, he had been everywhere treated by the Europeans at Tahiti as a madman or fool. Now he would get his revenge.

With the aid of a copying apparatus he set up and printed several numbers of a paper called, first _Les Guepes_, 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 a.s.sociated 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 _Nave Nave 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 a 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.ds 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 "_epater 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, ent.i.tled "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 alb.u.m ent.i.tled "Avant et Apres," 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 const.i.tuted 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 a.r.s.enic, 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