, this one-time sailor before
the mast, this explosive, dissipated, hard-living Paul Gauguin became
as a child, simulating as well as could an artificial civilised
Parisian with sick nerves the childlike attitude toward nature that he
observed in his companions, the gentle Tahitians. He married a Maori,
a trial marriage, oblivious of the fact that he had left behind him in
France a wife and children, and, clothed in the native girdle, he
roamed the island naked, unashamed, free, happy. With the burden of
European customs from his shoulders, his almost moribund interest in
his art revived. Gauguin there experienced visions, was haunted by
exotic spirits. One picture is the black goddess of evil, whom he has
painted as she lies on a couch with a white background, a colour
inversion of Manet's Olympe. With the cosmology of the islanders the
Frenchman was familiar.

He has, in addition to portraying the natives, made an agreeable
exposition of their ways and days, and their naive blending of
Christian and Maori beliefs. His description of the festival called
Areosis is startling. Magical practices, with their attendant
cruelties and voluptuousness, still prevail in Tahiti, though only at
certain intervals. Very superstitious, the natives see demons and
fairies in every bush.

The flowerlike beauty of the brown women comes in for much praise,
though to be truthful, the ladies on his canvases seem far from
beautiful to prejudiced Occidental eyes. This Noa Noa is a refreshing
contribution to the psychology of a painter who, in broad daylight
dreamed fantastic visions, a painter to whom the world was but a
painted vision, as the music of Richard Wagner is painted music
overheard in another world.

"A painter is either a revolutionist or a plagiarist," said Paul
Gauguin. But the tricksy god of irony has decreed that, if he lasts
long enough, every anarch will end as a conservative, upon which
consoling epigram let us pause.

If I were to write a coda to the foregoing, loosely heaped notes, I
might add that beauty and ugliness, sickness and health, are only
relative terms. The truth is the normal never happens in art or life,
so whenever you hear a painter or professor of aesthetics preaching the
"gospel of health in art" you will know that both are preaching pro
domo. The kingdom of art contains many mansions, and in even the
greatest art there may be found the morbid, the feverish, the sick, or
the mad. Such a world-geniu