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 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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CONSULTED

WORKS OF BIOGRAPHY:

1. Paul Gauguin par Jean de Rotonchamp, Imprimé à Weimar par les Soins du Comte de Kessler et se Trouve à Paris, chez Edouard Druet, Rue de Faubourg Saint Honoré, No. 114. 1906. Edition limited to 250 copies.

2. Gauguin, by Charles Morice. Floury, Paris, 1919. This and the preceding work are the standard sources of Gauguin's life.

3. Lettres de Paul Gauguin à Charles Daniel de Monfreid. Paris, Cres, 1919.

4. White Shadows in the South Seas, by Frederick O'Brien. New York, The Century Co., 1920. A travel book, with a few new sidelights on Gauguin's final period.

5. Avant et Après. Paul Gauguin aux Marquises. 1903. 100 copies only published in photo-reproduction from the original manuscript. A translation into German has also appeared. Kurt Wolf Verlag, Berlin, 1920.

WORKS OF ART CRITICISM IN ENGLISH:

1. Modern Painting, by Willard Huntingdon Wright. New York, The John Lane Company.