The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Page 30
I have recently been reading Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical. This book has been very well translated into Dutch. I hope you know it. If you don’t, see if you can get hold of it. It somewhere contains certain views of life that I find outstandingly good - profound things expressed in a droll way. It is a book written with great verve, and various scenes are described as Frank Holl or someone similar might have drawn them. The way of thinking and the outlook are similar. There are not many writers as utterly sincere and good as Eliot. This book, The Radical, is not as well known in Holland as, say, her Adam Bede, and her Scenes from Clerical Life are not all that well known either -more’s the pity, much as it’s a great pity that not everyone knows Israels’s work.
I am enclosing a little booklet on Corot, which I believe you will read with pleasure if you don’t know it already. It contains a number of accurate biographical details. I saw the exhibition at the time for which this is the catalogue.
It’s remarkable, I think, that this man should have taken so long to settle down and mature. Just look what he did at different periods of his life. I saw things in the first of his real contributions - the result of years of study - that were as honest as the day is long, thoroughly sound - but how people must have despised them! For me Corot’s studies were a lesson when I saw them, and I was even then struck by the difference between them and the studies of many other landscape painters. I would compare your little country churchyard with them, if I didn’t find more technique in it than in Corot’s studies. The sentiment is identical, an endeavour to render only what is intimate and essential.
The gist of what I am saying in this letter is this. Let us try to grasp the secrets of technique so well that people will be taken in and swear by all that is holy that we have no technique. Let our work be so savant3 that it seems naive and does not reek of our cleverness. I do not believe that I have reached this desirable point, and I do not believe that even you, who are more advanced than I, have reached it yet.
I hope you’ll see something more than verbal nitpicking in this letter.
I believe that the more contact one has with nature herself, the more deeply one delves into her, the less attracted one is by all the trucs d’atelier4 and yet I do want to give them their due and watch them painting. I often look forward to visiting studios myself
‘Not in books have I found it. And from the “learned”, ah, but little have I learned,’ says De Genestet, as you know. By way of a variation one might say, ‘Not in the studio have I found it, and from painters/connoisseurs, ah, but little have I learned.’ Perhaps you are shocked to find me putting in painters or connoisseurs indiscriminately.
But to change the subject, it is fiendishly difficult not to feel anything, not to be affected when those bloody idiots say ‘does he paint for money?’ One hears that drivel day in, day out, and one gets angry with oneself later for having taken it to heart. That’s how it is with me - and I think it must be much the same with you. One doesn’t really care a rap, but it gets on one’s nerves all the same, just like listening to off-key singing or being pursued by a malicious barrel organ. Don’t you find that to be true of the barrel organ, and that it always seems to have picked on you in particular? For wherever one goes, it’s the same old tune.
As for me, I’m going to do what I tell you: when people say something or other to me, I shall finish their sentences even before they are out - in the same way as I treat someone I know to be in the habit of extending his finger to me instead of his hand (I tried the trick on a venerable colleague of my father’s yesterday) - I too have a single finger ready and, with an absolutely straight face, carefully touch his with it when we shake hands, in such a way that the man cannot take exception, yet realizes that I am giving as good as I damned well got. The other day I put a fellow’s back up with something similar. Does one lose anything as a result? No, for to be sure, such people are sent to try us, and when I write to you about certain expressions of yours I do so only in order to ask you: are you certain that those who are so loud in their praises of technique are de bonne foi?5 I’m only asking because I know that your aim is to avoid studio chic.
Van Gogh remained dissatisfied with his brother’s ineffectual attempts to sell his work. For the time being he resigned himself to the situation, but in early April 1884, he managed to wring a form of contract out of Theo. They agreed that what money Theo sent his brother would no longer be considered ‘a handout to a poor beggar’ but a business transaction, namely payment for the work Vincent would be sending Theo month by month. Vincent, for his part, stated: ‘That work will then be your property, as you say - and I completely agree with you that you will then be fully entitled to put it to one side - indeed, I should not even be able to object if you saw fit to tear it up.’
Van Gogh spent the summer of 1884 recording the landscape all round Nuenen. ‘And reality sometimes comes very close to the Brabant of our dreams.’ In the middle of May the Protestant pastor’s son abandoned the little mangle room and rented two adjoining rooms in the Roman Catholic presbytery, there to set up a somewhat more spacious studio.
Van Gogh had a keen eye not only for the weavers but also for the beauty of nature in his immediate surroundings. He painted the presbytery garden and the little church in which his father preached, and made short excursions to paint the striking water-mills in the neighbourhood. During this first part of his stay in Brabant, he again immersed himself in Sensier’s biography of Millet, which strengthened his resolve to become a painter of peasant life. In addition, he read a great deal on the theory of colours: ‘The colour laws are unutterably beautiful, precisely because they are not accidental. Just as people have ceased to believe in arbitrary miracles, in a God who capriciously and despotically changes his mind, but are beginning to be filled with greater respect and admiration for, and faith in, nature, so also, & for the same reasons, I think that the old-fashioned ideas in art of innate genius, inspiration, &c, must be, I would not say discarded, but re-examined closely, verified and - modified very considerably.’
In August he met ‘someone in Eindhoven who wants to decorate a dining room’. Van Gogh was now able to put his experience to practical use and suggested to the man, one Antoon Hermans, that he choose six representations from peasant life in the Meijerij (the area around ‘s-Hertogenbosch). Van Gogh himself designed the compositions and made the preliminary oil sketches, but his client, who was an amateur painter, insisted on painting the final panels himself.
Having read about Van Gogh’s final meeting with Sien, in the late summer of 1884, we are quite unprepared for the new sentimental attachment he had meanwhile formed, and its dramatic denouement. Though the relationship between Vincent and Margot Begemann, his next-door neighbour in Nuenen, had become quite a close one, her sisters fiercely opposed any possible marriage.
Margot sought a way out of this dilemma by taking poison. The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, however, and she was placed under the care of a doctor in Utrecht, where Van Gogh visited her. From his response to a letter from Theo which has been lost, it seems that he felt fate had once again driven him into a corner, from which he now defended his worship of ‘the love which they, the theologians, call sin’.
Even in these dramatic circumstances, Van Gogh could not contemplate his situation without drawing parallels with famous passages in literature. In reply to a letter in which Theo had obviously identified himself with the art dealer Octave Mouret, the eponymous hero of Zola’s novel, Vincent compared Margot Begemann’s attempted suicide with that of Madame Bovary. His next few letters to Theo were full of indignation at what ‘present-day Christianity’ was doing to man’s talents, ‘though its founder was sublime’. Van Gogh also continued to voice his regrets about his dependence and his inability to do anything to change his financial situation.
378 [D]
[October 1884]
My dear Theo,
Thanks for your letter, thanks for the enclosure.
Now look here
. What you say is all very well and good, but as for scandal, I’m somewhat better prepared now than I used to be to nip it in the bud. No fear that Father and Mother might leave, for example. Although they have only just received a new call. (Father and Mother could, if anything, consolidate their position here, if they managed things properly.)
Now, there are people saying to me, ‘Why did you have anything to do with her?’ - that’s one fact. And there are people saying to her, ‘Why did you have anything to do with him?’ -that’s another fact.
Apart from that, both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets - neither of us has any. Look here - I believe without question, or have the certain knowledge, that she loves me. I believe without question, or have the certain knowledge, that I love her. It has been sincerely meant. But has it also been foolish, etc.?
Perhaps, if you like - but aren’t the wise ones, those who never do anything foolish, even more foolish in my eyes than I am in theirs? That’s my reply to your argument and to other people’s arguments. I say all this simply by way of explanation, not out of ill-will or spite.
You say that you like Octave Mouret, you say that you are like him. I’ve read the second volume too, since last year, and like him much better in that than I did in the first. The other day I heard it said that ‘Au bonheur des dames’ would not add greatly to Zola’s reputation. I consider it contains some of his greatest and best things. I have just looked it up and am copying out a few of Octave Mouret’s words for you.
Don’t you think you’ve been moving in Bourdoncle’s direction during the last 1^ years or so? You would have done better to stick to ‘Mouret’, that was and still is my opinion. Save for the enormous difference in circumstances, indeed, the diametrically opposed circumstances, I actually lean more in the direction of Mouret than you might think - when it comes to belief in women and the realization that one needs them, must love them. Mouret says, ‘Chez nous on aime la clientele.’1 Do give this some thought - and remember my regret when you said you had ‘cooled off’.
I now repeat more emphatically than ever everything I said by way of bitter warning against the influence of what I called Guizot-esqueness. Why? It leads to mediocrity. And I don’t want to see you among the mediocrities, because I have loved you too much, indeed still do, to bear watching you petrify. I know things are difficult, I know that I know too little about you, I know that I may be mistaken. But anyway, do read your Mouret again.
I mentioned the difference and yet the parallels between Mouret and what I should like. Now look. Mouret worships the modern Parisian woman - fine. But Millet and Breton [worship] the peasant woman with the same passion. The two passions are one and the same.
Read Zola’s description of women in a room in the twilight -most of the women aged between 30 to 50 - such a sombre, mysterious place. I find it splendid, indeed sublime.
But to me, Millet’s Ang61us is just as sublime, with that same twilight, that same boundless emotion - or that single figure of Breton’s in the Luxembourg, or his Source.
You will say that I am not a success - vaincre or etre vaincu,2 it doesn’t matter to me, one has feeling and movement in any event, and they are more akin than they may seem to be or than can be put into words.
As for this particular woman, it remains a mystery how it will turn out, but neither she nor I will do anything stupid. I am afraid that the old religion will once again benumb her and freeze her with that damnable icy coldness that broke her once before, many years ago, to the point of death.
Oh, I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its founder was sublime - I have seen through present-day Christianity only too well. That icy coldness mesmerized even me, in my youth - but I have taken my revenge since then. How? By worshipping the love which they, the theologians, call sin, by respecting a whore, etc., and not too many would be3 respectable, pious ladies. To some, woman is heresy and diabolical. To me she is the opposite.
Regards,
Ever yours,
Vincent
Here you are, from Octave Mouret
Mouret dit: ‘Si tu te crois fort, parce que tu refuses d’étre béte et de souffrir! Eh bien - alors tu n’es qu’une dupe, pas davantage.’
‘Tu t’amuses?’
Mouret ne parut pas comprendre tout de suite, mais lorsqu’il se fat rappelé leurs conversations anciennes sur la bétise vide et l’inutile torture de la vie, il répondit: ‘Sans doute - jamais je n’ai tant vecu… Ah! mon vieux - ne te moques pas! Ce sont les heures les plus courtes o l’on meurt de souffrrance.’
Je la veux, je l’aurai!… et - s’il [sic] elle m’echappe tu verras les choses que je ferai pour m’en guérir - Tu n’entends pas cette langue, mon vieux; autrement tu saurais que Faction contient en elle sa recompense - agir, cr éer. Se battre contre les faits, les vaincre ou étre vaincu par eux, toute la joie et toute la santè humaines sont 1á!
Simple façon de s’étourdir - murmura l’autre: ‘Eh bien: j’aime mieux m’6tourdir - crever pour crever - je préfère crever de passion que de crever d’ennui.’4
It is not only I who say this quand méme,5 but she, too, and instinctively so, quand méme. That is why I saw something grand in her from the outset. Only it’s a confounded pity that she allowed herself to be overwhelmed by disappointments in her youth, overwhelmed in the sense that her old-fashioned religious family felt they had to suppress the active, indeed, highly gifted element in her and so rendered her passive for evermore. If only they had not broken her in her youth! Or if they had left it at that instead of once again driving her to distraction, and this time with 5 or 6 or even more women fighting against her alone. Just read Daudet’s L’evangeliste about those women’s intrigues - those here were different, yet of the same sort.
Oh, Theo, why should I change - I used to be very passive and very gentle and quiet - I’m that no longer, but then I’m no longer a child either now - sometimes I feel my own man.
Take Mauve, why is he quick-tempered and difficult to get on with at times? I haven’t come as far as he has, but I, too, shall go further than I am now.
I tell you, if one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm - but that’s a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.
Tust slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring at you like some imbecile. You don’t know how paralysing that is, that stare of a blank canvas, which says to the painter: you can’t do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of you can’t’ once and for all.
Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, disheartening, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, ‘defiles’ - they say. Let them talk, those cold theologians.
Theo, I feel so much confounded pity for this woman, just because her age and just possibly a liver and gallbladder complaint hang so threateningly over her head. And this is aggravated by emotions. For all that, we shall find out what can or what, fatally, cannot be done. However I shall do nothing without a very good doctor, so I shall do her no harm.
Just because I anticipate that, if our roads should lead us to one and the same place, we might have rather strong differences of opinion - for that very reason I don’t want you to be able to hold my dependence on you against me. I am still in two minds about what I should try to do, but in all probability I shall not be staying on here - and the question will then be, where to?
I don’t think you’ll be pleased about my coming to Paris - but what am I meant to do about that, since you refuse point blank to look after my interests - all right, but for my part I can’t possibly leave things as they are. Had you written less peremptorily that it was beneath you, I should never have given it a thought, but now - well, now, I must go my own way.
In brief, I have no wish to barter the chance (be it no more than a chance) of making my own way for the certainty of a patronage that is, apres tout,6 somewhat confining. Since I can see that I am forfeiting my chance of selling by continuing to take money from you, we shall just have to go our separate ways.
Don’t you think it eminently reasonable that, hearing you say that you won’t be able to do anything with my work for the next few years, I get the feeling that there is a marked contrast here, that while you stand on your dignity, I - precisely because I don’t sell, no matter how hard I work - am forced to say, ‘Theo, I am 2 5 guilders short, couldn’t you see your way to letting me have a little bit extra?’ which then proves to be impossible.
What is so very contrary about you is that when one sends you something or one asks, please try to find me an opening with the illustrated papers so that I can earn something - one hears nothing in reply and you do not lift a finger - but one is not allowed to say, I can’t manage on the money. Up to now, at any rate - but things can’t go on like this.
And I should like to add that I shan’t be asking you whether you approve or disapprove of anything I do or don’t do - I shall have no scruples, and if I should feel like going to Paris, for example, I shan’t ask whether or not you have any objections.
Although Vincent wrote to his brother shortly afterwards that he was ‘still badly upset about it all’, Margot Begemann’s name soon vanished from their correspondence. In 1887, writing from Paris, he asked his sister Wil about Margot’s health once more and two years later, in 1889, he again wrote to Wil from Saint-Rémy, saying that he would like Margot to be given one of his paintings.