Ordeal by Fire Further Letters by Vincent Van Gogh. Written

to his Brother, 1886-89. (Constable. 31s. 6d.) THESE letters make painful but heroic reading. They should not be given to the Philistine, for they would afford him too gloating an opportunity to bring out his toy clockwork morality and his ugly little mass-produced ethical ruler. For here is the story, naked and unashamed, of the conflict of spirit and flesh. But it is the story told in terms of the Olympians. Everything is on the grand scale, with incident and colour heightened, and apposition and significance multiplied, until the onlooker is forced to recoil before the magnificence and horror of the Aeschylean tragedy.

" Madness ! A squalid disgrace!" the Philistine will say. "Yes, Sir," we reply, "it is everything you say. Here are degeneration, disease ; mental, moral, and physical ruin. You can dabble your fingers up to the elbow in this stew of • depravity. Good-day, Sir ! "

Now we can be alone with the pity of it ; with the deep serenity of reverence which glows like an evening light of revelation over the world of our thought.

All art-lovers know a little of the story of this man's life ; the queer boyhood, the early manifestation of religious fervour, the harsh asceticism that imposed upon the sensitive nerves a missionary crusade which must have tortured them ; the failure of that crusade and the outcropping of streaks of sensuality which, properly diagnosed, would have given warning of the abnormal primitive force underlying the distracted young man's intelligence. That force was the creative egoism which writhed like an angel wing-cribbed in the clothing of mortality. It beat against the bars of custom, and in its impotent rage trampled on the common decencies that make everyday social life.

The letters here deal with the phase, occupying the last three years of Van Gogh's life, during which he lived in the south of France at Arles, kept by the labour of his married brother, while the angel within struggled to freedom. The result was madness for the poor mortal singled out for this angelic visit, and a harvest of pictures stamped with indi- viduality more pronounced than anything in pictorial art since the work of El Greco. They represent a unity of vision, which sees all the phantasmagoria of terrestrial life in terms of flame-shapes, as though the principles of Heracleitus- who taught that all things were but various forms of the ele- ment of fire—were here incarnate in these demoniac paintings.

Under this efflorescence Van Gogh's material life was sordid enough : a battle with poverty, the fatal attraction towards women and drink in an effort to escape from the exhausting loneliness of spirit demanded by such work : the pitiful endeavour to rearrange the jangled and strained nerves following the harping of that music, the "orchestration a 1 colours" as he called it.

These letters are a linking together of the two -worlds, and they enable us to interpret the light in terms of the' shadow. In consequence they are a valuable textbook for the person who wants to understand the elliptical, workings of the artist-mind.. Here we see those quiakened processes by which thought emerges from the chain of conscious logic to the .higher and dazzling incandescence of intuition, which is really a thinking by symbols. We recogniie thus the swift articulation beneath the apparently inconsecutive -moods of the artist. Here is an example. The painter is working feverishly during the

Wing days of his first year at Arles. The orchards are a cold fire of colour, and he is spending every hour of precious daylight at his easel. "At the moment," he says," I am work- ing on some plum trees, yellowish white, with thousands of black branches. I am using a tremendous lot of colOurs and canvases, but I hope it isn't waste of money all the same."

In the midst of this activity he hears of the death of the painter, Mauve, and he writes to his brother : "Mauve's death was a terrible blow to me. You will see that the rose- coloured peach trees were painted with a sort of passion." Do you see that ? If you have caught that lightning transition, the whole process of art lies open to you. There is the science of aesthetics suddenly revealed !

But the man is built that way. He sets fire to the shrouds and curtains which hide the meaning of life, and in the conflagration the figure shines strangely illuminated. Whether in paint or words, he is the same energetic force. "I must also have a starry night with cypresses, or perhaps above all, a field of ripe corn ; there are some wonderful nights here. I am in a continual fever of work." A few simple phrases, yet they have the stamp of that individuality on them, and we see those now famous canvases through the words. It reminds me of the Victor Hugo Museum in Paris, where are gathered together hundreds of amateur paintings by the hand that wrote Les Miserable& Through the washy daubings of those monochromes shines the same spirit—Victor Hugo the mag- nificent Romantic. So it is with Van Gogh ; and as one closes this collection of letters to his brother Theo, one sighs with the exhaustion that follows a period of revelation.

I have been mistaken, however, if I have made the reader feel that this splendour so typical of the man was nothing but a sort of nebulous inebriation of mind. As in all great characters, it was an agent towards simplicity, and made him, in his commentary on life, lucid and practical. He was full of schemes for the gathering of artists into guilds for the more profitable sale of their pictures ; and in spite of his vagrant and despairing habits, he longed for the concise joys of marriage, parenthood, and home life ; and he regretted the exile from these things which his work imposed upon riim

" Oh ! ' he says, it seems to me more and more that people are the root of everything, and though it will always be a melancholy thought that you yourself are not in real life, I mean, that it's more worth while to work in flesh and blood than in paint or plaster, more worth while to make children than pictures or carry on business, all the same you feel that you're alive when you remember that you have got friends who are out of the real life as much as you."

These regrets for the loss of social and domestic ties were only sporadic. Usually his faith and energy supported him, so that he could plan further and wider schemes of work, in a spirit which enabled him to say :—

" It's my constant hope that I am not working for myself alone. I believe in the absolute necessity for a new art of colour, of design, and—of the artistic life. And if we work in that faith, it seems to me there is a chance that our hope is not in vain."

That saying holds a religious passion which justifies a man's leaving his kith and kin. In this hope Van Gogh gave everything he possessed. That is the lot of the true artist : to give the whole of his being in the desperate attempt to • master the- particular. technique of symbols by which his art is expressed. He has to sell even his self-respect, for words, for paint, for musical notes, for chips of stone. But if he perseveres, he regains all that he has given. As Van Gogh says :—

" There is an art of the future, and it is going to be so lovely and so young, that even if we give up our youth for A, we must gain by it in serenity. Perhaps it is very silly to write all this but I feel A so ; it seems to me that, like me, you have been triffering to iee your youth pass like a drift of smoke ; but if it springs again, and comes to life in what you do, nothing has been lost, and the power. to work is another youth."

That is -an ,inspiring creed, which will sustain every artist through the inevitable disasters and disappointments which will form' the 'major part of his harvest in this life.

RICHARD CHURCH.