the ice-bound Greenland coast and the barren North Cape. This was bad, but still worse was to follow. The vessel was on its way to Spitzbergen when news was brought to its captain that France had declared war upon Prussia.

"Where are you going?" said the second officer, seeing the Captain put the helm about.

"To Charenton," replied the indignant first officer; Charenton being the great lunatic asylum near Paris!

The vessel got no nearer to France than Copenhagen, when the melancholy news of Sedan came. The name Jerome Napoleon was painted out, that of Desaix substituted, and the unfortunate cruiser was obliged to remain in the waters off Copenhagen till the close of the war in 1871, contenting herself with the capture of one small ship as prize.

III

In 1871, after the cessation of hostilities, Gauguin obtained leave, renewable at the end of eighteen months, to quit the navy. He was now heartily sick of the sea, because of the enforced idleness and wearisome discipline that he had now endured aboard the Desaix for three years. Besides the opportunity of another career was offering itself and he felt that he must seize it.

His mother had died in the interval since he had last seen France and, in dying, had confided the care of her two children to a well-to-do Paris banker, Gustave Arosa. This man immediately found for Paul a place at Bertin's, a banking house with which he was connected. And now there opened for the young man a period not only the most prosperous but in retrospect the most amazing of his career.

Though his character had already displayed itself to be that of an instinctive nomad, a lover of the tropics and essentially a pagan savage, yet it is apparent that he now yielded readily to the entrancing prospect of amassing a fortune by speculation on the Bourse, without troubling himself too much with the question whether his new position might not entail heavier responsibilities in the future. He had not been long at Bertin's before he found out how to make money quite easily. Possibly this was not a very difficult thing to do, for the Paris stock market had been utterly disorganized by the events of 1870-71, and, now that peace was signed, France was making one of those rapid recoveries that have been so common in her history. Stocks were going up and trade was booming. Gauguin was able to take advantage of these circumstances to such an extent that in one year, we are told, he made as much as forty thousand francs.

In 1873 he married, thus saddling himself with a responsibility he was never wholly to shake off. His wife, Mette Sophia Gad, was the daughter of a Protestant clergyman of Copenhagen. The family was a good one and enjoyed an honorable position in the society of the Danish capital. The daughters had been educated at Paris, and one of them had married a member of the Norwegian Parliament, while another had become the first wife of the painter, Fritz Thaulow.

When or where Gauguin first met his future bride is uncertain, but it was probably during the stay of the Desaix at Copenhagen. At any rate it seems that he was eager to marry, as the ceremony (a purely civil one, owing to his wife being a Protestant) was delayed owing to the loss of his father's certificate of birth in the bombardment of St. Cloud.

At this time, through his wife's friends and connections, through Gustave Arosa, through Emile Schuffenecker—a fellow employee at Bertin's—and through others, a new interest came into his life. He began to paint, although pressure of work did not permit him to regard this fresh occupation as more than an amusement at first. Arosa was, in his way, an amateur of art and had collected a number of pictures by French artists of the day—among them Delacroix and Courbet. These works he engraved in photogravure—an art then in its infancy—and sent copies of the engravings to his personal friends. Through Schuffenecker Gauguin was brought closely into touch with the Impressionists, who were then making a sensation in Paris. Gauguin bought brushes and colors and began by painting on Sundays and holidays. It was only slowly that he began to look upon painting as anything but a distraction.

His first essays in art were purely academic. He painted in the prevailing style of the Salons and even sent one picture to the Salon of 1876. At the same time he began to attempt sculpture. He worked at first in marble, a material afterwards entirely rejected in favor of the more coarsely-grained surface of wood, clay or paste. He liked a rough surface and counseled young sculptors to mix sand with the clay in order to emphasize this roughness.

Gauguin's was a many-sided and a versatile nature. His early years at sea had given him much of the sailor's ingenuity. He had a tremendous interest in the technical processes of art. During his life he was able to do almost equally well at painting, lithography and sculpture. He also attempted etching, stained glass and pottery. His writings, particularly his share in "Noa Noa," show a considerable grasp of direct, poetic narrative—a gift that might very possibly have made of him a good poet. Throughout his life we are unable to regard him solely as a painter of pictures; his influence in opening new channels for art-decoration is even more important than his pictorial work. Even in literature his achievements have a certain force as inspiration. The problems he set himself were as varied in their way as those that occupied his English contemporary, William Morris, almost as varied as those that occupied Leonardo da Vinci.

He acquired knowledge easily; his problem was always how to weigh, sift and make use of it. But his growth to artistic maturity was slower than in the case of artists who limit their field of effort, because he attacked many subjects at the same time.

It may seem strange to consider this many-sided versatility as a proof, not of a complex, but of a primitive nature. Yet it is undoubtedly true that in the primitive stages of art the artist is able to do almost everything. The interchangeability, the essential unity of all the arts, is the strongest characteristic of art in its early stages. As civilization and consequently technique become more advanced, it grows more and more difficult for a man to become master of any single branch of art. Perhaps that is why, in our modern industrialized states, the arts tend to disappear, to become the interest and hobby of a rapidly diminishing minority.

The painter Schuffenecker and his family.

All this was not suspected by Gauguin at the time, nor for years afterwards. For the time he was content to paint and to follow the prevailing fashions in his painting. And he soon found that the prevailing fashion of the day in Paris was Impressionism.

To define Impressionism it is not necessary, as many professional art-critics have done, to enter into long dissertations as to the supremacy of pure colors, nor to see in Constable or Turner the ancestry of the movement.

Impressionism was neither more nor less than the cult of Realism—or to speak better, Naturalism—carried out in painting. This cult had already possessed in painting one important precursor, Gustave Courbet. But it is to literature, always the advance guard of the arts, that we must turn to understand what impressionism intended and why it failed.

A little before 1870, which year marks a turning point not only in France's political but also in her intellectual life, there came a change over her literature. Romanticism, which had startled the world in 1830 with Lamartine, de Musset, de Vigny, Hugo and Balzac, was now dead. The heroic, the Napoleonic, the Byronic attitude had somehow gone out of life. Under the Second Empire,