the bourgeois triumphed over the Tuileries.

A few years before the crash of 1870, Charles Baudelaire gave to the world his Fleurs du Mal—the exasperated cry against life of a soul tortured with too great a sensibility. Almost at the same time Gustave Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, erected his monument of infamy to the memory of the bourgeois. These two books opened the path to Naturalism, to the "human document," to the de Goncourts, to de Maupassant, and to Zola.

Impressionism was the logical outgrowth, in another sphere, of the work of these Naturalist writers.

It abolished the lighting of the studio and substituted for it natural sunlight.

It abolished the classical "subject" and left the painter free to paint, as Manet said, "N'importe quoi."

Thus, on the one side, it led directly to the analysis of atmospheric vibration, foreshadowed by Constable and Turner, but not by them elevated to the rank of a science; and on the other side, it led with equal inevitability to the total dependence of the painter upon Nature, and the consequent atrophy of his imagination. It was, as Manet said again, "Nature seen through a temperament."

Against Impressionism, as against Romanticism, only one artist had dared to continue the tradition of classical, decorative painting descending from Giotto, through Raphael and Poussin, to Prud'hon and to Ingres. This was the Norman, Puvis de Chavannes.

But Puvis, though nearly fifty, was still unknown, still dreaming of walls to conquer, still buried away from the eyes of the young men in the slumbrous depths of the official salons, while Impressionism was the succès de scandale of the day.

Gauguin heard of Impressionism and became a devout follower of its theories. He painted pictures in the manner of Camille Pissarro, who was a compatriot of Madame Gauguin, having been born in the Island of St. Thomas in the Antilles, then Danish territory. Gauguin took part in the exhibitions of the Impressionist group in 1880 and 1881.

Huysmans, then as later the disciple of Naturalism pushed to its extreme limit, praised a nude of his because it was ugly. Gauguin began to be talked about, not only as a well-to-do amateur, but as a coming artist. But his work at the Bourse was exhausting his strength and his time.

Although he had now a wife and five children dependent on him, Gauguin in January, 1883, took the rash step of quitting the financial world and devoting himself solely to art.

This decision was, as Dr. Segalen says in his valuable Preface to the letters Gauguin wrote from Tahiti, the true turning-point in his career. When Paul Gauguin said to himself, "Henceforward I will paint every day," he was not only satisfying his vague and latest personal ambition and aptitude, he was setting himself to the fulfillment of a great impersonal duty: he was beginning to clear away the sophistications not only of his own nature but of modern art.

IV

It is important to note that Gauguin was thirty-five years of age when he came to this decision. This proves that the decision was no hasty one, of which he was liable to repent later. At such an age a man has arrived at his intellectual maturity; and, when this man is a Paul Gauguin, we may feel sure that he does not alter his whole manner of living from a mere desire for change. Gauguin had something to express and knew it. He had better work to do than dabbling in stocks and shares. And to this work he was determined to devote himself despite all opposition.

But had he not been instinctively a nomad and a savage, with the desire for freedom, for life without compromise and for the harmony that comes only from a natural expression of one's deepest instincts, this decision might never have been taken. As a husband and father he now had others dependent upon him. That he set aside their claims to follow the deeper call proves that, as he later said, he believed himself to have the right to dare everything. And he was probably at first confident of success, thinking an artistic career likely to be as easy to manage as that of a speculator.

Madame Gauguin seems to have acquiesced in this decision. She was naturally desirous to be ranked as the wife of a famous and successful man, and her husband may well have dazzled her with the prospects of his success. In any case, she was soon destined to sad disillusionment.

Gauguin found it impossible to support himself and six others on the sums he had saved. As for his pictures, they were not sufficiently well known to sell. It was necessary, above all things, to gain time. So he decided to sacrifice a collection of modern pictures which he had bought with the proceeds of his career on the Bourse, in order to support himself. The list of these pictures is interesting, as it shows clearly the direction of his tastes at this period. It included a Manet, several Renoirs, some Claude Monets, two Cézannes (still life and landscape), an early Pissarro, together with examples of Guillamin, Sisley, Jongkind, Lewis Brown and, most significant of all, two designs by Daumier.

Whether it was that Gauguin had continued to maintain his family in a style above his present means and was therefore now in debt, we do not know. Nor do we know whether the sale of his collection realized an appreciable sum or not. Probably the amount was small, for the Impressionists, though talked about, had not achieved that purely commercial popularity which is the modern substitute for fame. In any case, the painter soon found himself again without resources. He had ignominiously failed to carve out a new career for himself in Paris. He found that he could not now obtain another commercial post to take the place of Bertin's. So it was Madame Gauguin's turn to act. She decided on a removal to Copenhagen, where she hoped her family would use their influence in obtaining a position for her husband.

Once in the Danish city, however, the basic difference between husband and wife showed itself in violent form. The atmosphere of rigid Protestant piety, in which his wife's family lived, jarred on the passionate southern temperament of the painter. He discovered that he hated everything in Denmark, the scenery, the climate, the prudery and provinciality of the inhabitants, the lack of Parisian Bohemianism—everything except the cookery of his mother-in-law! And he took no pains to conceal his hatred. He defiantly persisted in maintaining his Parisian freedom of speech and manners. One day, walking on the road that overlooks the bay of the Sund, he chanced to look down. Each of the estates adjoining the beach is equipped with a small cabin for bathing. It is the custom there for the sexes to bathe separately and entirely naked. Gauguin chanced to stop and look down at the moment when the wife of a Protestant minister was stepping into the water. Instead of going on, he decided to indulge his æsthetic interest in the nude. The daughter of the minister's wife saw him and called out to her mother to return. The lady turned and started hastily back to her cabin. But Gauguin continued his inspection. Next day there was the inevitable scandal.

Such a state of affairs could clearly not continue. Gauguin would yield nothing to the prejudices of the Danes, nor would his wife's family change their ideas of respectability to suit his queer notions. A separation between husband and wife was inevitable. In 1885 it came about with, one may imagine, no great regrets on either side. To the painter this marriage had all along been a matter of convenience. We shall have ample opportunity to observe throughout his career that Gauguin attached practically no sentiment to the sexual relations into which he entered with various women. He was probably more affectionate with his children, particularly with his daughter Aline, than ever with his wife.

It was now far more convenient for him that his wife should remain with her relations, where she would at least have a roof over her head, than accompany him to