The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

by Vincent Van Gogh

  […]

  A change for the better in my life, shouldn’t I long for that, or are there times when one has no need for betterment? I hope I do become much improved. But precisely because that is what I long for, I am afraid of remédes pires que le mal.1 Can you blame a patient for standing up to his doctor and preferring not to be given the wrong treatment or quack remedies?

  Is it wrong for someone suffering from consumption or typhus to insist that a more potent remedy than barley water might be indicated, might indeed be essential, or, while finding nothing wrong with barley water as such, to question its effectiveness and potency in his particular case? The doctor who prescribed the barley water would be wrong to say: this patient is an obstinate mule who is courting his own destruction because he refuses to take his medicine - no, it is not that the man is unwilling, but that the so-called remedy is worthless, because though it might well be good for something, it does not fit the case.

  Can you blame a person for remaining indifferent to a painting listed in the catalogue as a Memling, but having nothing more in common with a Memling than that it has a similar subject from the Gothic period, but without artistic merit?

  And if you should conclude from these remarks that I meant to suggest your advice was worthy of a quack, then you have completely misunderstood me, as I have no such thoughts or opinions about you. If, on the other hand, you believe that I would do well to follow your advice literally to become an engraver of invoice headings & visiting cards or a bookkeeper or a factotum - or the advice of my very dear sister Anna to devote myself to the baker’s trade or many other suchlike things, curiously at odds and hardly compatible - you would be making another mistake.

  And now, all joking aside, it is my honest opinion that it would be better if the relationship between us were to become closer on both sides. If ever I came to believe seriously that I was being a nuisance or a burden to you or to those at home, of no use to anyone, and were obliged to look upon myself as an intruder or to feel superfluous so far as you are concerned, so that it would be better if I were not there at all, and if I should have to try all the time to keep out of other people’s way - were I really to think that, then I should be overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness and should have to wrestle with despair.

  I find it hard to bear this thought and even harder to bear the thought that so much dissension, misery and sorrow between us, and in our home, may have been caused by me. Should that indeed be the case, then I might wish it were granted me not to have much longer to live.

  Yet when this thought sometimes depresses me beyond measure, far too deeply, then after a long time another occurs too: ‘Perhaps it is only an awful, frightening dream and later we may learn to see and understand it more clearly.’ Or is it real, and will it ever get better rather than worse? Many people would undoubtedly consider it foolish and superstitious to go on believing in a change for the better.

  It is sometimes so bitterly cold in the winter that one says, ‘The cold is too awful for me to care whether summer is coming or not; the harm outdoes the good.’ But with or without our approval, the severe weather does come to an end eventually and one fine morning the wind changes and there is a thaw. When I compare the state of the weather to our state of mind and our circumstances, subject to change and fluctuation like the weather, then I still have some hope that things may get better.

  If you were to write again soon, you would make me very happy. Should you do so, please address your letter care of J. B. Denis, Rue du Petit Wasmes á Wasmes (Hainaut).

  Walked to Wasmes the evening after you left. Have drawn yet another portrait since. Goodbye, accept a handshake in my thoughts and believe me,

  Yours truly,2

  Vincent

  Shortly after writing this letter, Van Gogh visited his parents in Etten, despite the reluctance he had confessed to Theo. For a whole year his correspondence with Theo then came to an end, and other family letters, too, are almost entirely lacking. This void seems to have been connected with the bad feeling between father and son during this period, the Reverend Theodoras van Gogh even threatening to have his son locked up in a mental institution in Gheel. All references to this painful incident were later cut from the letters by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. Only recently have these passages been restored, though letters written in this period from 1879 to 1880 seem to have been irretrievably lost.

  After a further stay with his parents in the spring of 1880, Van Gogh returned to the Borinage in the summer to become a full-time artist. It was not until July 1880, however, that he wrote to Theo again. Though he did so ‘rather reluctantly’ and considering Theo ‘a stranger’, his highly individual letter nevertheless ends with the grudging confession: ‘and know that it will do me good to hear from you.’

  133 [F]

  [July 1880]

  My dear Theo,

  I am writing to you rather reluctantly because, for a good many reasons, I have kept silent for such a long time. To some extent you have become a stranger to me, and I to you perhaps more than you think. It is probably better for us not to go on like that. It is probable that I would not have written to you even now, were it not that I feel obliged, compelled, to do so - because, be it noted, you yourself have compelled me to.

  I heard in Etten that you had sent fifty francs for me. Well, I have accepted them. With reluctance, of course, with a feeling of some despondency, of course, but I have reached a sort of impasse, am in trouble, what else can I do? And so I am writing to thank you.

  As you may know, I am back in the Borinage. Father said he would prefer me to stay somewhere near Etten, but I refused and I believe I was right to do so. To the family, I have, willy-nilly, become a more or less objectionable and shady sort of character, at any rate a bad lot. How could I then be of any use to anyone? And so I am inclined to think the best and most sensible solution all round would be for me to go away and to keep my distance, to cease to be, as it were. What the moulting season is for birds - the time when they lose their feathers -setbacks, misfortune and hard times are for us human beings. You can cling on to the moulting season, you can also emerge from it reborn, but it must not be done in public. The thing is far from amusing, not very exhilarating, and so one should take care to keep out of the way. Well, so be it.

  Now, although it is a fairly hopeless task to regain the trust of an entire family, one which has perhaps never been wholly weaned from prejudice and other equally honourable and respectable qualities, I am not entirely without hope that, bit by bit, slowly but surely, the good relationship between one and allmay be restored. In the first place I should be glad to see this good relationship - to put it no more strongly than that. -restored at least between Father and me, and further, I set great store by seeing it restored between the two of us. A good relationship is infinitely preferable to a misunderstanding.

  Now I must trouble you with certain abstract matters, hoping that you will listen to them patiently. I am a man of passions, capable of and given to doing more or less outrageous things for which I sometimes feel a little sorry. Every so often I say or do something too hastily, when it would have been better to have shown a little more patience. Other people also act rashly at times, I think.

  This being the case, what can be done about it? Should I consider myself a dangerous person, unfit for anything? I think not. Rather, every means should be tried to put these very passions to good effect.

  To mention just one by way of an example, I have a more or less irresistible passion for books and the constant need to improve my mind, to study if you like, just as I have a need to eat bread. You will understand that. When I lived in other surroundings, surroundings full of pictures and works of art, I conceived a violent, almost fanatical passion for those surroundings, as you know. And I do not regret that, and even now, far from home, I often feel homesick for the land of pictures.

  You may remember that I knew very well (and it may be that I know it still) what Rembrandt was or what Millet was or Jules
Dupré or Delacroix or Millais or Matthijs Maris.

  Well, today I am no longer in those surroundings, yet they say that what is known as the soul never dies but lives on for ever, continuing to seek for ever and again.

  So instead of succumbing to my homesickness I told myself: your land, your fatherland, is all around. So instead of giving in to despair I chose active melancholy, in so far as I was capable of activity, in other words I chose the kind of melancholy that hopes, that strives and that seeks, in preference to the melancholy that despairs numbly and in distress. I accordingly made a more or less serious study of the books within my reach, such as the Bible and Michelet’s La révolution française, and then last winter Shakespeare and a little Victor Hugo and Dickens and Beecher Stowe and recently Aeschylus and then various less classical writers, a few great minor masters. You know, don’t you, that Fabritius and Bida are counted among the minor masters?

  Now anyone who becomes absorbed in all this is sometimes considered outrageous, ‘shocking’,1 sinning more or less unwittingly against certain forms and customs and proprieties. It is a pity that people take that amiss.

  You know, for example, that I have often neglected my appearance. I admit it, and I also admit that it is ‘shocking’. But look here, lack of money and poverty have something to do with it too, as well as a profound disillusionment, and besides, it is sometimes a good way of ensuring the solitude you need, of concentrating more or less on whatever study you are immersed in. One essential study is that of medicine. There is scarcely anybody who does not try to acquire some knowledge of it, who does not at least try to grasp what it is about (and you see, I still know absolutely nothing about it). And all these things absorb you, preoccupy you, set you dreaming, musing and thinking.

  Now for the past 5 years or so, I don’t know how long exactly, I have been more or less without permanent employment, wandering from pillar to post. You will say, ever since such and such a time you have been going downhill, you have been feeble, you have done nothing. Is that entirely true?

  What is true is that I have at times earned my own crust, and at other times a friend has given it to me out of the goodness of his heart. I have lived whatever way I could, for better or for worse, taking things just as they came. It is true that I have forfeited the trust of various people, it is true that my financial affairs are in a sorry state, it is true that my future looks rather bleak, it is true that I might have done better, it is true that I have wasted time when it comes to earning a living, it is true that my studies are in a fairly lamentable and appalling state, and that my needs are greater, infinitely greater than my resources. But does that mean going downhill and doing nothing?

  You might say, but why didn’t you go through with university, continue as they wanted you to? To that I can only reply that it was too expensive, and besides, the future then looked no better than it does now, along the path I am now taking.

  And I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me,

  I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going come what may.

  But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the draft turns into the sketch and the sketch into the painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.

  You should know that it is the same with evangelists as it is with artists. There is an old academic school, often odious and tyrannical, the ‘abomination of desolation’, in short, men who dress, as it were, in a suit of steel armour, a cuirass, of prejudice and convention. Where they are in charge, it is they who hand out the jobs and try, with much red tape, to keep them for their protégés and to exclude the man with an open mind.

  Their God is like the God of Shakespeare’s drunken Falstaff, ‘the inside of a church’.2 Indeed, by a strange coincidence, some evangelical (???) gentlemen have the same view of matters spiritual as that drunkard (which might surprise them somewhat were they capable of human emotion). But there is little fear that their blindness will ever turn to insight.

  This is a bad state of affairs for anyone who differs from them and protests with heart and soul and all the indignation he can muster. For my part, I hold those academicians who are not like these academicians in high esteem, but the decent ones are thinner on the ground than you might think.

  Now, one of the reasons why I have no regular job, and why I have not had a regular job for years, is quite simply that my ideas differ from those of the gentlemen who hand out the jobs to individuals who think as they do. It is not just a question of my appearance, which is what they have sanctimoniously reproached me with. It goes deeper, I do assure you.

  I am telling you all this not to complain, not to make excuses for matters in which I may perhaps have been somewhat at fault, but very simply to tell you the following: during your final visit last summer when we were walking together near that abandoned mineshaft which they call La Sorcière, you reminded me of another walk we once took at another time near the old canal and the mill at Rijswijk, and, you said, we used to agree about many things, but, you added, ‘You have changed since then, you are no longer the same.’ Well, that is not entirely true. What has changed is that my life then was less difficult and my future seemingly less gloomy, but as far as my inner self, my way of looking at things and of thinking is concerned, that has not changed. But if there has indeed been a change, then it is that I think, believe and love more seriously now what I thought, believed and loved even then.

  So you would be mistaken should you continue to think that I have become less keen on, say, Rembrandt, Millet or Delacroix or whoever or whatever, for the reverse is the case, but there are many different things worth believing and loving, you see - there is something of Rembrandt in Shakespeare, something of Correggio in Michelet and something of Delacroix in V. Hugo, and there is also something of Rembrandt in the Gospel or, if you prefer, something of the Gospel in Rembrandt, it comes to much the same thing, provided you understand it properly, do not try to distort it and bear in mind that the elements of the comparisons are not intended to detract in any way from the merits of the original individuals.

  And there is something of M. Maris or of Millet in Bunyan, a reality that, in a manner of speaking, is more real than reality itself, something hitherto unknown that, if only you can read it, will tell you untold things. And in Beecher Stowe there is something of Ary Scheffer or of Sarto.

  Now, if you can forgive someone for immersing himself in pictures, perhaps you will also grant that the love of books is as sacred as that of Rembrandt, indeed, I believe that the two complement each other.

  I very much admire the portrait of a man by Fabritius that we stood looking at for a long time in the gallery in Haarlem one day when we took another walk together. Admittedly, I am as fond of Dickens’s ‘Richard Cartone’ in his Paris & Londres in 1793,3 and I could point to other particularly gripping characters in other books with a more or less striking resemblance. And I think that Kent, a character in Shakespeare’s King Lear, is as noble and distinguished a man as that figure by Th. de Keyser, though Kent and King Lear are reputed to have lived much earlier.

  Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

  So please don’t think that I am renouncing anything, I am reasonably faithful in my unfaithfulness and although I have changed, I am still the same, and what preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service or use in some way, how can I become more knowledge-able and study some subject or other in depth? That is what keeps preying on my mind, you see, and then one feels imprisoned by poverty, barred from taking part in this or that project and al
l sorts of necessities are out of one’s reach. As a result one cannot rid oneself of melancholy, one feels emptiness where there might have been friendship and sublime and genuine affection, and one feels dreadful disappointment gnawing at one’s spiritual energy, fate seems to stand in the way of affection or one feels a wave of disgust welling up inside. And then one says, ‘How long, my God!’

  Well, that’s how it is, can you tell what goes on within by looking at what happens without? There may be a great fire in your soul, but no one ever comes to warm himself by it, all that passers-by can see is a little smoke coming out of the chimney and they walk on.

  All right, then, what is to be done, should one tend that inner fire, turn to oneself for strength, wait patiently - yet with how much impatience! - wait, I say, for the moment when someone who wants to comes and sits down beside one’s fire and perhaps stays on? Let him who believes in God await the moment that will sooner or later arrive.

  Well, right now it seems that things are going badly for me, have been doing so for some considerable time, and may continue to do so well into the future. But it is possible that everything will get better after it has all seemed to go wrong. I am not counting on it, it may never happen, but if there should be a change for the better I should regard that as a gain, I should rejoice, I should say, at last! So there was something after all!

  But, you will say, what a dreadful person you are, with your impossible religious notions and idiotic scruples. If my ideas are impossible or idiotic then I would like nothing better than to be rid of them. But this is roughly the way I actually see things. In Le philosophe sous les toits by Souvestre you can read what a man of the people, a simple craftsman, pitiful if you will, thinks of his country: ‘Tu n’as peut-être jamais pensé á ce que c’est la patrie, reprit-il, en me posant une main sur l’épaule; c’est tout ce qui t’entoure, tout ce qui t’a élevé et nourri, tout ce que tu as aimé. Cette campagne que tu vois, ces maisons, ces arbres, ces jeunes filles qui passent lá en riant, c’est la patrie! Les lois qui te protégent, le pain qui paye ton travail, les paroles que tu échanges, la joie et la tristesse qui te viennent des hommes et des choses parmi lesquels tu vis, c’est la patrie! La petite chambre oú tu as autrefois vu ta mere, les souvenirs qu’elle t’a laisses, la terre oú elle repose, c’est la patrie! Tu la vois, tu la respires partout! Figure toi, tes droits et tes devoirs, tes affections et tes besoins, tes souvenirs et ta reconnaissance, réunis tout ça sous un seul nom et ce nom sera la patrie.’4