shocker for parlors and bedrooms, with the bitter odor of les fleurs du mal, and nothing of the real beauty of his dwelling-place or the sacrificing and prophetic genius of the real Gauguin. Perhaps the author is not to blame that, taking the bare idea of some of the incidents and the scenes of a PeruvianFrench artist's life, and with utterly different material and with AngloSaxon phlegm making a novel to flutter the bosoms of maids and matrons, he is charged with trying to portray Gauguin as he was. If he did so try, he failed, for he made a vulgar villain of his hero, and Gauguin was not that.

As was said best by his friend and biographer, Charles Morice, Gauguin was one of the most necessary artists of the nineteenth century. His name now signifies a distinctive conception of the nature of art, a certain spirit of creation and mastery of strange technic, and a revolt against established standards and methods, an opposition to the accepted thoughts and morals of art, which constitute, if not a school, at least a distinct class of graphic achievement. As the French say, it is a "category."

The man Gauguin, though dead nearly a score of years, persists as a legend wherever painting or Polynesia are much discussed. There was in him a seed of anarchism, a harking back to the absolute freedom of the individual man, a fierce hatred of the overlordship of money and fixed decency, of comme il faut, which lightens the eye of many conforming people as a glimpse of light through a distant door in a dark tunnel. In this stark, brooding, wounded insurrecto, this child of France and the ardent tropic of South America, each of us who has suffered and rebelled, if only in our hearts, gains a vicarious expression and an outlet for our atavistic and fearful desires. Some more, some less.

dead," said Mouth of God, my friend in the vale of Atuona, where Gauguin spent his last months and where Mouth of God served him for the love of him.

That smile was his ever brave defiance of life; but, too, a thought for France for the France he adored, and which he dreamed of often, though it had rejected him. His last picture, painted in the humid Marquesas, in his house set in a grove of cocoanut-palms and breadfruit-trees, was of Brittany, and was a snow-scene. He did not defeat his enemy, but sank into his last sleep content to go because the struggle had become too anguishing. He knew he was beaten, but he flew no flag of surrender. He passed alone, with only the smile as a token of his final moment of consciousness and the emotion that stirred his soul.

It was seventeen years ago that he was carried up the steep path to the Calvary on the height above Atuona where I looked vainly for his grave. His passing had merely met a mention in the Paris papers before the shrewd dealers quadrupled the prices of the pictures by him that they had hardly been able to sell before. Critics became mostly hot partizans of his genius, and a minority opposing stirred up a debate upon his worth that has not ceased, but has added to his note and to the money values of his canvases. Only very rich collectors can now possess them. Good and bad, and never was painter less uniform in execution, his sketches as well as his sculpture and carvings bring fabulous, perhaps artificially inflated,

sums.

Lovaina, the best known woman of the South Seas, was speaking to me of Gauguin. She had heard a whisper between Temana and Taata-Mata, two of her handmaids, that I might leave the Tiare, her impossible auberge in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, to lodge with Mme. Charbonnier or Mme. Fanny.

Lovaina, three-quarters American by blood, but all Tahitian in looks, language, and heart, was not assured that her impossible hotel was the only possible one within thousands of miles, as it was really, and she said:

"Berina, I think more better you go and see that damn' house before you

make one bargain. You know what Gauguin say. He have room with Madame Charbonnier, and eve'y day, sometime night, she come make peep his place. He had glass door between that room for him and for other man, and he say one day to me (I drink one Pernoud with him):

""That sacrée French woman she

make peep me. I beelong myself. I make ugely so nobody make look."

"You go look for yourse'f to-day. You see that door. Gauguin say he make ugely so nobody make look."

"That Gauguin was a very happy man in my maison," said Mme. Charbonnier in French to me. "He and I had but one disagreement. One day a native woman accompanied him here. I knew he must have models, but I want no hussies in my house. I am a respec

table citizeness of France. I looked through the glass door, and I warned him, though he had paid in advance, I must preserve my reputation. O! la! la la! He painted that mauvaise picture of that very Tahitian girl on my door to spite me. La voilà! Is it not affrighting?"

It was of a tall, robust native in a pareo, or loin-cloth, nude, except for it, from her waist to her knees, and holding a breadfruit in her left hand against her bare bosom. The figure and face are carelessly, almost rudely, drawn, and there is little if any beauty of form or color in the whole. It was an effort at opaqueness, not at a finished accomplishment. A rabbit and a futuristic tree are in the foreground, neither characteristic of the fauna or flora of Tahiti, nor in its folk lore.

I might have bought that door of Mme. Charbonnier or somewhat similar windows and doors in another house occupied by Gauguin, for a hundred francs or perhaps two or three times that much; at any rate, for an inconsiderable sum, because they had no value as examples of the painter's ability nor were they intrinsically beautiful or attractive.

I saw that door a day ago in a New York gallery. I asked the price, and was told that perhaps thirty-five hundred dollars might persuade the speculative author who had brought it from Tahiti to part with it.

Once in the valley of Taaoa, in the island of Hiva-Oa, in the Land of the War Fleet, I talked with a former cannibal of wonderful charm who had been friend to Gauguin as Mouth of God had been his casual attendant. It was Mouth of God who had told me that Kahuiti had a tiki, or ikon, made by Gauguin, and in this house I found it.

"In the huts of the natives where cataloguing ceases," said James Huneker years ago, "many pictures by that great master of decoration may be found."

Here was one, and dear to the spirit of that wonderful anthropophagus. When I asked him to sell it to me, he opened wide those large brown eyes which had looked a hundred times at the advancing spear and had watched the cooking of his slain enemy. He said nothing but the words, "Tiki hoa pii!” ("An image by my dear friend!")

I smoked a pipe with him, and went back to Atuona thoughtful. Gauguin made many enemies, but he kept his friends even in death.

"Toujours tout à vous de cœur," he signed his letters to his one or two friends with rare sincerity.

He was denounced by the church because he "pretended to worship the sun and never went to the mission. He also had an image of pottery he had made and which he bowed down before, though in mockery."

The law and the government sought to put him in jail. When he died he was under sentence to prison for asserting the right of the Marquesans to more individual liberty than permitted by the colonial interdicts. The white traders

despised him because he cared nothing for their desires to make money and would not assist their schemes. But the natives, those naïve and pure-souled primitives whom I knew so well, loved him, and wept when he was buried. For on the day his corpse was above ground they keened it, as do the Irish, whom they are much like. They cried over and over again:

"Ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke!
Aaaa aa aa aa aaa!
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I i ii ii iiiiiiiii!
O oooooooooo!
Uuuuuu uu uu u u!”

The Reverend Paul Vernier, the French Protestant missionary, whom I lived near, told me of his acquaintance with Gauguin and the last days of that stricken victim of conflicting passions. Vernier acknowledged that he had never been his friend. I would have known that, for to Gauguin professors of theology were as absurd and abhorrent as he to them. Vernier lived among his little flock of perhaps forty faithful,in attendance only,-well liked and much respected. He is a man of his word, a simple peasant by nature, kind, though a fierce Covenanter, and with a prowess in the killing of the wild bull and the boar that could not be gainsaid by any sneer against religion.

Gauguin's studio and residence was half a mile away, nearer the beach than Vernier's, and set quite apart. Two years he had lived there after ten in Tahiti, always in disappointment, always in bodily suffering and in the reaction from alcohol and drugs, an invalid for a dozen years.

"He was a savage," said Pastor Vernier to me. "I could have nothing to say to him. He was a bad influence on the indigènes. He had no respect for the law and less for the bon Dieu. The Catholics especially he quarreled with, for he made a caricature of the vicar here, at which the natives laughed uproariously, and which angered the vicar greatly. It was even unfit to be seen by a savage. You can imagine it!

"I had not seen him for some time when I had a note from Gauguin, scrawled on a piece of wrapping-paper. It said:

"Will it be asking too much for you to come to see me? My sight is all of a sudden leaving me. I am very ill, and

cannot move.'

"I went down the trail to his house, and found Mouth of God with him, as also the old Tioka. His legs were terribly ulcerated. He had on a red loincloth and a green béret d'écolier. His skin was as red as fire from the eczema he had long been afflicted with, and the pain must have been very severe. He shut his lips tight at moments, but he did not groan. He talked of art for an hour or two, passionately advocating his ideas, and without reference to his approaching end. I think he sent for me for conversation and no more. It was then he presented me with books and his portrait of Mallarmé.

"We chatted long, and I was filled with admiration for the courage of Gauguin and his prepossession with painting, at the expense of his douleur. About a fortnight I went back when Tioka summoned me, and found him worse, but still forgetful of everything else but his

art. It was the eighth of May that Tioka came again. Gauguin now was in agony. He had had periods of un

consciousness. He must have known his danger, but he talked fitfully of Flaubert and of Poe, of Salammbô and of Nevermore. When I said adieu he was praising Poe as the greatest poet in English.

"A few hours afterward I heard the shouts of the natives that Gauguin was dead.

"Haoe mate!' they called to me. "The white is dead!'

"I found Gauguin on his cot, one leg hanging down to the floor. Tioka was urging him in Marquesan to speak and was rubbing his chest. I took his arms and tried to cause respiration, but in vain. He was already beginning to grow cold. Do you know that the vicar went there at night before I was aware of it, and though Gauguin despised him and his superstitions, forced an entrance and had the body carried to the Catholic cemetery, with mass, candles, and other mummeries,"