Paul Gauguin by John Gould Fletcher — Read

The immense industrial development which occurred during the nineteenth century took place so rapidly and universally, that no one was able to estimate its significance or dispassionately to weigh its effects. At the outset of the century the vital idea that pervaded Europe and America was the spiritual idea of liberty and the rights of man, born in the fires of the French Revolution. After 1848 this idea gradually vanished, and another took its place; the purely material idea of progress. The perfected application of steam and the consequent development of machinery; the immense tapping of the world's resources of coal, metals, agricultural products; the equally immense, universal exploitation of human effort necessary to develop these resources to their maximum; the creation of an international finance, resting upon vast hoards of wealth in the hands of a limited few, whose world-wide interests were linked together by railways, steamship lines, telegraphs, telephones; the ordered regimenting of mankind into a small capitalist class, invisibly controlling the old, decayed aristocracy, the official church, the machinery of the law; a larger middle class, dependent upon and subservient to the capitalists; and an immense laboring class, exploited in the interests of the two preceding classes: all these were virtually the creation of a single century.

Against this overwhelming flood of change, a few exceptionally gifted men vaguely protested, affirming the greater value of human life over mechanical invention; maintaining the antique dignity of man. Their protest was incoherent, individualistic. These men were like broken and scattered fragments of dykes, still unsubmerged and striving to hold back the waters of a flood. Among them must be ranked the artist whose life-story I have written.