A Practical Man
MR. BURNETT has written what will probably remain the standard life of Paul Gauguin. No one else is likely to add to the facts he has collected, and probably there are no further facts to be bad. In this, at least, Mr. Burnett has done his duty as a biographer, and being free from exagger- ation and speculation his book destroys the Gauguin legeni propagated by tradition and by such a book as Mr. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence. It is a pity, however, that the way of thinking and writing of Gauguin's biographer is far below the level of his subject.
Gauguin was born in Montmartre on June 7th, 1848, the son of an obscure journalist and grandson of a woman described by Proudhon as a genius. Four years of his childhood, from 1851-1855, were spent in Peru, six years of his youth, from 1865-1871, as a sailor, and 12 years, from 1871-1883, as an exchange broker in Paris, marrying, begetting children, making a small fortune, painting assiduously in his spare tune and showing in several exhibitions of the impressionists. At the age of 35 he gave up his business and devoted himself entirely to painting, failed to make a living at it, parted from his wife and family, and in 1891 sailed for Tahiti. There and in the Marquesas, with two short intervals, he spent the rest of his life, in continuous poverty, and at the end in con- tinuous pain until his death in 1904.
Gauguin had a violent temper ; he was self-assertive and self-opinionated, conscious of his own abilities and of the sacrifices he had made to become a painter. lie was sensuall and had a strong sense of justice ; he abandoned his wife and family, but this seemed to have caused more pain and suffering to him than to them. In his friendship with Van Gogh, with its terrible ending, he may seem to have behaved callously ; yet callousness is probably the only defence against destruction, certainly against loss of self respect, if you find yourself pursued with passionate Ilassliebe by one who, like Van Gogh, is at once a saint, a genius and a homicidal maniac. His letters from Tahiti and the Mar-
quesas are almost entirely about money, and Mr. Burnett finds it necessary to excuse this, as if it were not essential to think almost continuously about money if you have none and are far from home.
This life and this character have earned Gauguin the con- demnation of the many and the adulation of some who think that to genius everything is pardonable. Mr. Burnett avoids these extremes and, in fact, Gauguin deserves' neither of these tributes. He was not a genius and, as he knew himself, he was not a great painter. He began his career as a professional painter with great disadvantages, and his imagination, in the concrete as well- as the abstract, was violent rather than profound. Yet he could and did paint some masterpieces. From .1883 on, to do this was his aim in life, and he pursued-his purpose, which was an admirable one, with a consistency, a determination,- a resistance to pain, for himself even more than for others, which in business would have made him a millionaire and in the church a saint. There is nothing in this to merit condemnation, and it is a sign of the depths to which moral arrogance can sink that Gauguin should be :thought to deserve excuse or defence. Mr. Burnett rightly emphasises his patience, his . courage, and his honesty ; his years in Polynesia were justified if only by his persistent defence of the natives against the corrupt French administration. He both liked the natives and found them physically attractive. What drove him away from France was, even more than his own failure, his profound disgust with the imbecility of life in Europe. This irritation with the in:bit-des. he shires with Flaubert and Baudelaire ; it is remarkable that all three frequently expresi their feelings in almost precisely the same words. It had little idealism in it and none of the social uplift with which it is identified in our own day. It was simply an inability to endure any longer what they felt to be the corruption, idiocy and hypocrisy• of their time. As it drove Flaubert into his Tour d'Iroire and Baudelaire into his Paradis Artificiekso it drove Gauguin, who liked to give practical shape to his 'instincts, to the South Seas ; from the heights of fashionable morality Mr. Burnett characterises
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