The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Page 15
And, my goodness, I didn’t have to look all that far. I found a woman, by no means young, by no means beautiful, nothing special if you like. But perhaps you are a little curious. She was fairly tall, and strongly built, she didn’t have the hands of a lady, like K. V., but the hands of a woman who does a great deal of work. But she was not coarse or common and had something very feminine about her. She reminded me of some quaint figure by Chardin or Frère or perhaps Jan Steen. Anyway, what the French call *une ouvrière’.9 She had had many cares, you could see, and life had been hard for her. Oh, nothing refined, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing unusual.
Toute femme à tout âge, si elle aime et si elle est bonne, peut donner à l’homme non l’infini du moment, mais le moment de l’infini.10
Theo, for me that faded je ne sais quoi,11 that something over which life has passed, has infinite charm. Ah! for me she did have charm, something of Feyen-Perrin, of Perugino. See here, I am not quite as innocent as a ’bec blanc’,12 much less a baby in a cradle.
It was not the first time that I was unable to resist that feeling of affection, that special affection and love for those women who are so damned and condemned and despised by clergymen from the lofty heights of their pulpits. I do not damn them, I do not condemn them, I do not despise them.
See here, I am nearly thirty and do you really think that [I] have never felt the need for love? K. V. is even older than I am, she has also known love in the past, but she is all the dearer to me for it. She is not inexperienced, but neither am I. If she wants to hold on to an old love and have nothing to do with a new, that is her affair, but if she insists on doing that and cold-shoulders me, I shan’t stifle my energy and my mental powers on her account. No, I refuse to do that, I love her but I will not allow myself to become frozen and my mind crippled because of her. And the spur, the spark we need, is love, and not mystical love either.
That woman has not cheated me — oh, he who takes all such women for cheats is so wrong and has so little understanding. That woman was good to me, very good, very dear, very kind, in a way I shall not even tell my brother Theo, because I strongly suspect that my brother Theo has had a similar experience. Tant mieux pour lui.13
Did we spend much money? No, because I didn’t have much, and I said to her, ’Look here, you and I don’t have to make ourselves drunk to feel something for each other, you had best put what I can spare in your pocket’ And I wish I could have spared more, for she was worth it. And we talked about everything, about her life, about her worries, about her misery, about her health, and I had a more exhilarating conversation with her than, for instance, with my learned, professorial cousin Jan.
Now I am telling you these things not least because I hope you will realize that though I do have some sentiment, I don’t want to be sentimental in a silly way. That I want quand bien même14 to keep some warmth and vitality and my mind clear and my constitution sound in order to be able to work. And that I conceive my love for ?. V. in this light, that for her sake I don’t want to get down to work feeling melancholy and will not allow myself to be thrown off course.
That is something you will understand, you who have written something on the question of hygiene in your letter. You mentioned the fact that you haven’t been enjoying good health lately — make every effort you can to get better again.
The clergymen call us sinners, conceived and born in sin. Bah! What confounded nonsense that is. Is it a sin to love, to feel the need for love, not to be able to live without love? I consider a life without love a sinful and immoral state.
If there is anything I regret then it is that period when I allowed mystical and theological profundities to mislead me into withdrawing too much into myself. I have gradually come to change my mind. When you wake up in the morning and find you are not alone but can see a fellow creature there in the half-light, it makes the world look so much more welcoming. Much more welcoming than the devotional journals and whitewashed church walls beloved of clergymen. She lived in a modest, simple little room lent a quiet grey tone by the plain wallpaper, yet warm like a picture by Chardin, a wooden floor with a mat and a piece of old dark-red carpet, an ordinary kitchen stove, a chest of drawers, a large, perfectly simple bed, in short, a real ouvrière’s home. The next day she had to work at the washtub. Fair enough, I should have found her no more charming in a purple camisole jacket and a black skirt than I did now in a dress of brown or reddish-grey. And she was no longer young, perhaps the same age as K. V., and she had a child, yes, life had left its mark and her youth was gone. Gone? - il n’y a point de vieille femme.15 Ah, and she was strong and healthy - and yet not coarse, not common.
Are those who set such great store by distinction always able to spot the distinguished? Good heavens, people search high and low for what is right under their noses, and I do too, now and then.
I am glad I did as I did because I can think of no earthly reason that would keep me from my work or cause me to lose my good humour. When I think of K. V., then yes, I still say, ’she and no other’, then I still think as I did in the summer about ’looking for another girl in the meanwhile’. But it isn’t since yesterday that I have been taking a warm interest in those women whom the clergy condemn, despise and damn, indeed my love for them is rather older than that for Kee Vos. Many times when I walked the streets all alone with time hanging heavily on my hands, half sick and down in the dumps, with no money in my pocket, I would look at them and envy the people who could go with one, and I felt that those poor girls were my sisters in respect of circumstance and experience of life. And, you see, that is an old feeling of mine, and goes deep. Even as a boy I would often look up with infinite sympathy, indeed with respect, at a woman’s face past its prime, inscribed as it were with the words: here life and reality have left their mark.
But my feeling for K. V. is quite new and something quite different. Sans le savoir,16 she is in a kind of prison, she too is poor and cannot do as she pleases, she feels a kind of resignation, and it is my belief that the Jesuitisms of clergymen and devout ladies often make a greater impression on her than on me, Jesuitisms which, precisely because I have acquired some dessous de cartes,17 no longer have any hold on me now. But she is devoted to them and would be unable to bear it if the system of resignation and sin and God and I know not what else, proved to be vain.
And I don’t think it ever occurs to her that God may only appear once we say the words, those words with which Multatuli ends his prayer of an unbeliever: ’Oh God, there is no God.’ You see, for me that God of the clergy is as dead as a doornail. But does that make me an atheist’ Clergymen consider me one - que soit — but you see, I love, and how could I feel love if I were not alive myself or if others were not alive, and if we are alive there is something wondrous about it. Now call that God or human nature or whatever you like, but there is a certain something I cannot define systematically, although it is very much alive and real, and you see, for me that something is God or as good as God. You see, when in due course my time comes, one way or other, to die, well, what will keep me going even then? Won’t it be the thought of love (moral or immoral love, what do I know about it)?
And good heavens, I love Kee Vos for a thousand reasons, but precisely because I believe in life and in something real I am no longer as given to abstractions as before, when I had more or less the same ideas about God and religion as Kee Vos seems to have now. I am not giving her up, but that spiritual crisis with which she is perhaps struggling must be given time, and I am prepared to be patient about it and nothing she says or does now makes me angry. But while she cherishes and clings to the old, I must work and keep my mind clear for painting and drawing and for business. So I did what I did from a need for affection and for reasons of mental hygiene.
I am telling you all this so that you won’t again think that I am in a melancholy or abstracted, brooding mood. On the contrary, most of the time I am fiddling around with and thinking about paints, making watercolours, looking for a st
udio, &c, &c. Old fellow, if only I could find a suitable studio!
Well, my letter has become rather long, but there you are. Sometimes I wish that the three months before I can go back to M. were already over, but as it is they may do me some good. But do write to me now and then. Is there any chance of your coming here this winter?
And believe me, I shan’t rent a studio, &c, without first finding out what Mauve thinks. I shall send him the floor plan, as agreed, and he may come and have a look at it himself if need be. But Father must stay out of it. Father is not the man to get mixed up in artistic matters. And the less I am involved in dealings with Father, the better I get on with him. I must be free and independent in very many respects, that goes without saying. I sometimes shudder when I think of K. V. and of her burying herself in her past and clinging to old and dead ideas. There is something fatal about it and, oh, it would not diminish her if she were to change her views. I think it quite possible that there will be some reaction, there is so much that is healthy and spirited in her.
And so in March I shall go back to The Hague and, and, to Amsterdam as well. But when I left Amsterdam that time, I told myself: under no circumstances will you become melancholy or allow things to get you down, letting your work suffer just when you have started to make some headway. Eating strawberries in the spring is indeed part of life, but it is only one short moment in the year and right now it is still a long way off.
And so you envy me for some reason or other? Oh, my dear fellow, no need for that, since what I seek can be found by everyone, perhaps even sooner by you than by me. And oh, I am so backward and narrow-minded in many things, if only I knew exactly where the trouble lay and how to go about putting it right. But alas, we often do not see the beams in our own eye.
Write to me soon and try to separate the wheat from the chaff in my letters. If there is some good in them, some truth, tant mieux,18 but there is, of course, much in them that is more or less wrong, or exaggerated perhaps, without my always being aware of it. I am anything but a man of learning, and I am so amazingly ignorant, oh, just like so many others and even more so than others, but I am unable to judge that myself and can judge others even less than myself, and am often mistaken. But we pick up the scent as we wander about and il y a du bon en tout mouvement19 (I chanced to hear Jules Breton say that, by the way, and remembered the remark).
Incidentally, have you ever heard Mauve preach? I’ve heard him mimicking several clergymen - once he preached about Peter’s boat. The sermon was divided into 3 parts: Ist, was he given the boat or did he inherit it? 2nd, did he purchase it in instalments or by taking out shares? 3 rd, had he (dreadful thought) stolen it? Then he went on to preach about ’the Lord’s good intentions’ and about ’the Tigris and the Euphrates’ and finally he mimicked J. P. S. marrying A.20 and Lecomte.
But when I told him that I had once said during a discussion with Father that I believed that even in church, even in the pulpit, one could say something edifying, M. agreed. And then he mimicked Father Bernhard: ’God - God - is almighty - He has made the sea, He has made the earth and the sky and the stars and the sun and the moon, He can do everything -everything — everything — but — no, He is not almighty, there is one thing that He cannot do. What is that thing that God Almighty cannot do? God Almighty cannot cast out a sinner.’
Well, goodbye, Theo, write soon, a handshake in my thoughts, and believe me,
Ever yours,
Vincent
The Hague
With money borrowed from Mauve, Van Gogh set up a studio at 138 Schenkweg, The Hague, not far from Rijnspoor railway station. This was the first of a long series of plainly furnished rooms which would form the background to his work and of which his Bedroom in Aries would later become a world-famous symbol: ‘A room & alcove, the light is bright enough as the window is large, twice as large as an ordinary window.’ The furniture was simple, with ‘proper kitchen chairs and a really sturdy kitchen table’.
Theo supported Vincent’s plan to stay in The Hague but remonstrated with him about the way he had treated his parents, ‘people who have lived in the country all their lives & who have had no chance of participating in modern life’. Vincent, for his part, preferred to keep his contacts with his parents to a minimum: ‘When I think of Etten it gives me the shudders, just as if I were in church.’ He defended himself vigorously against Theo’s claim that he had embittered his parents’ life and rendered it ‘almost impossible’. Numbering Theo’s reproaches he vehemently refuted them one by one.
133 [F]
169 [D]
[7 or 8 January 1882]
Please don’t think I’m sending your letter back to offend you, I simply believe this is the quickest way of answering it clearly. And if you didn’t have your own letter to hand, you might not be able to understand quite so well what my answer refers to. Now the numbers will guide you. I’m short of time, I’m still expecting a model today.
Paris, 5 Jan. 1882
My dear Vincent,
I have received your two letters & thank you for keeping me in the picture. I think it is a very good thing that you have settled permanently in The Hague & hope to do as much as I can to help you out until you can start earning your own money. But what I do not approve of is the way in which you contrived to leave Father & Mother.(1)
That you could not bear it there is possible & that you should differ in your views from people who have lived in the country all their lives & who have had no chance of participating in modern life, is only too natural, but what the devil made you so childish & so shameless as to embitter Father & Father’s life & render it almost impossible by setting about things in the way you did?(2) It isn’t hard to fight with someone who is already weary.(3)
When Father wrote to me about it, I thought it must be a misunderstanding, but you yourself say in your letter, ‘As far as the relationship between Father & me is concerned, it will not be remedied in a hurry.’(4) Don’t you know him then, & don’t you realize that Father cannot live while there is all this bickering between the two of you?(5) Coûte que coûte,1 you are in duty bound to ensure that matters are put right & I guarantee that one day you will be extremely sorry for having been so callous in this matter.(6)
It is Mauve who attracts you at the moment, & carried away as usual, you find anyone who is not like him objectionable, because you look for the same qualities in everybody.(7) Is it not a bitter pill for Father to swallow to see himself belittled by someone who claims to be more of a freethinker,(8) and whom, au fond,2 he possibly envies from time to time for his clearer insights?(9) Does his life count for nothing then?(10) I don’t understand you.(11) Write to me again when you can(12) & give my regards to Mauve & Jet.
Ever yours,
Theo
[7 or 8 January 1882]
Because I have only a little time to spare, I can think of no better means of replying to your letter than by doing it in this way, answering your points one by one in orderly sequence.
(1) I did not ‘contrive’ anything, on the contrary, when Father was here, Mauve, Father & I talked about my renting a studio in Etten - spending the winter there - and returning to The Hague in the spring. Because of the models and because I had settled down to my work in Etten & had begun to make headway.
That does not alter the fact that I should have liked to prolong my stay in The Hague a bit more, seeing that I was here already, but it was nevertheless my definite intention to continue my studies of the Brabant peasant types. And when my plans were thwarted, after they had been discussed with M. & I had already entered into correspondence with him about the studio in question (a shed in need of some repair), I could no longer contain my anger.
Do you recall a letter I wrote to you in which I expanded at some length on my plan to continue those studies? I mean the letter in which I asked you to impress upon Father & Mother once more in plain terms that working in Etten was of the greatest importance to me, &c. I remember the way I put it: it would be too
bad if, because of a whim of Father’s, I had to abandon work that had begun to make headway and on which I had been engaged for months. Give it some thought yourself -despite Mauve’s help I am in much more of a fix here than at home, and I’ll be blowed if I know how I am going to get through it.
(2) The reproach that I set about embittering Father’s & Mother’s life is not really your own. I know it, and of old, as one of Father’s Jesuitisms and have told Father, & Mother too, that I considered it to be a Jesuitism and that I didn’t take the slightest notice of it.
Whenever one says something to Father to which he has no reply, he comes out with a reproach of that sort and says, for example, ‘You will be the death of me,’ while he sits there perfectly calmly reading his newspaper and smoking his pipe. So I take such reproaches for what they are.
Or else Father flies into an enormous rage, is used to people being frightened by it and is astonished when somebody does not give way before his anger.
Father is extremely touchy and irritable and obstinate in domestic affairs and is used to having his way. And the heading ‘the rules and regulations of this house’, with which I am obliged to comply, includes literally anything that comes into Father’s head.
(3) It’s easy enough to fight with an old man, &c. Because Father is an old man, I have spared his feelings a hundred times & tolerated things that are little short of intolerable. Anyway, there wasn’t any fighting this time either, but just an ‘enough!’, and because he wouldn’t listen to reason & common sense, I spoke straight out & it can only be to the good that for once Father should have heard a few home truths expressed that others too think now and then.