Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh. By Peter Burra. (Duckworth. 2s.)
Tins short biography of Van Gogh appears in the series known 'as Great Lives," and within the limits thus imposed, Mr. Burnt has done very well. He has confined himself to a direct narrative of the painter's life, based mainly on the three 'volumes of his letters which his sister-in-law edited, and which were published in an English translation between 1927 and 1929. It is an opinion I have expressed before, and still hold, that these letters make one of the greatest books of the nine- teenth century, and if all Van Gogh's pictures had been lost, Inr if critical judgement were finally to reduce them to insignifi- cance, Van Gogh would-remain important as a man, and his letters a witness to one of the greatest spiritual experiences of the modern world. One has to go to the lives'of the saints for 'anything comparable, and then to some of the greatest among 'the saints. If such a comparison seems outrageous, those who are outraged should read Mr. Burra's clear outline of the painter's life, and then pass onto the letters. They will find the story of a man whose sole desire was !` to act well in this world," and who therefore resolved to give up all selfish aims. .“ Man is not on this earth only to be happy, he is only there to be simply honest, he is there to realize great things for humanity, to attain nobility and to surpass the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on." That purpose animated Van Gogh through the whole of his short and tragic life—as a youth in abandoning for the Church the family art-dealing business, which might have been a comfort- able career ; in his voluntary work among the miners of the Borinage ; in his final resolve to be a painter—a painter like Millet, a painter with a social passion. " In a picture I want to say something comforting as music is comforting, I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to give by the actual radiance and vibration of our colourings." To that end he sacrificed everything, became a pauper dependent all his life on the earnings of his brother Theo. He was already twenty-seven before he decided to become a painter, and the first six years of the remaining eleven were spent helplessly in Holland, out of contact with the real forces in contemporary painting. He arrived in Paris in 1886, and went to Arles in 1888. There, in the three final years e f his life, he painted practically all the pictures upon which his fame as a painter rests.
Two problems arise in connexion with Van Gogh's life. The first is the psychological problem of explaining convincingly his abnormal personality. To some extent this is the problem of every creative artist, and when Mr. Burra touches upon this question, he is convincing enough. Van Gogh is an example of " that conflict between the sensual and the ascetic, which makes such regular appearances, at any rate in poetry, that it seems to be an essential condition of creation." The inci- dental peculiarities of his fate are adequately accounted for by the possibility of hereditary epilepsy, and perhaps, as sug- gested by Mr. Burra in a footnote, by some underlying castra- tion complex. His suicide seems to have been calm and deliberate ; we can explain it simply as a reasonable escape from the terror of his recurrent epilepsy ; or less simply as a literal fulfilment of the counsel he had found in Renan : Poor agir dins le monde 'it faut mourir a soi-mime. Or as Van Gogh himself expressed it : " If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star." He was very calm in the face of death, and that is one of the proofs of his great- ness.
The other problem is not dealt with by Mr. Burra ; perhaps he does not recognize it. But Van Gogh's purpose, as ex- pressed in the letter I have quoted, is very disturbing for the modern aesthete. Mr. Clive Bell, I imagine, has very little good to say of Van Gogh. - I believe that Van Gogh cared a great deal for purely aesthetic qualities—for form and colour— and by patient study and experiment, he came to have a great understanding of these qualities. But equally he cared for something else—for something he would have called truth, or more simply, honesty ; and this was a social responsibility, an obligation to work for humanity. In this conception of his function as an artist he is with Rembrandt rather than Cezanne, with Tolstoy and with Wordsworth. Perhaps we cannot judge such questions from a local and a limited stand- point ; perhaps we can only be sure of our personal sympathies and our little sensory experiences, and Mr. Burin is perhaps wise to leave all other questions to the test of time.
HERBERT READ.
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