erty and sorrow. By preference
Munch selects his themes among the poor and the middle class. He can
paint an empty room traversed by a gleam of moonlight and set one to
thinking a half day on such an apparently barren theme. He may suggest
the erotic, but never the lascivious. A thinker doubled by an artist
he is the one man north who recalls the harsh but pregnant truths of
Henrik Ibsen.

III

Every decade, or thereabouts, a revolution occurs in the multicoloured
world of the Seven Arts; in Paris, at least a half dozen times in the
year, a new school is formed on the left bank of the Seine or under
some tent in the provinces. Without variety--as well as vision--the
people perish. Hence the invention known as a "new art," which always
can be traced back to a half-forgotten one. After the hard-won
victories of Impressionism there was bound to ensue a reaction. The
symbolists crowded out the realists in literature and the
Neo-Impressionists felt the call of Form as opposed to Colour. Well,
we are getting form with a vengeance, and seldom has colour been so
flouted in favour of cubes, cylinders, and wooden studio models and
muddy paste.

Paul Gauguin, before he went to the equator, saw the impending change.
He was weary of a Paris where everything had been painted, described,
modelled, so he sailed for Tahiti, landing at Papeete. Even there he
found the taint of European ideas, and after the funeral of King
Pomare and an interlude of flirtation with an absinthe-drinking native
princess, niece of the departed royalty (he made a masterly portrait
of her), he fled to the interior and told his experiences in Noa Noa,
The Land of Lovely Scents. This little book, illustrated with
appropriate sketches by the author-painter, is a highly important
contribution to the scanty literature dealing with Gauguin. I've read
Charles Morice and Emil Bernard, but beyond telling us details about
the Pont-Aven School and the art and madness of gifted Vincent Van
Gogh, both are reticent about Gauguin's pilgrimage to the South Seas.
We knew why he went there, now we know what he did while he was there.
The conclusion of the book is illuminating. "I returned to Paris two
years older than when I left, but feeling twenty years younger."

The cause of this rejuvenation was a complete change in his habits.
With an extraordinary frankness, not at all in the perfumed manner of
that eternal philanderer, Pierre Loti