PART IV: THE RETURN TO SAVAGERY 1891-1895

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.

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

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

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