The author doesn't attempt a synopsis of the mental process that took Strickland to Tahiti, via Marseilles, though he depicts experiences that parallel those of Gauguin. Instead he animadverts on love and the sexual appetite to such purpose as to reveal that he is not expert in biology, psychology, or art. "For men love is an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid upon it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life." But what about the emphasis laid upon it by countless thousands who find in it a quality of that ennobling spiritual peace called faith, and which will be their reward when they repose in Abraham's bosom and live forever with God in paradise? "As lovers the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times." And the difference between male and female animals is that the female of the species permits contact at certain definite times, while the males are all Barkises. "Art is a manifestation of the sexual impulse. It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the 'Entombment' of Titian." After the author delivered himself of a statement so pregnant of platitude he must have experienced a sense of lightening, and a conviction that he would not have to consult the Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie at least until he wrote his next book. That art has a definite purpose to perpetuate the creative will and that God endowed his image with a genesic instinct that he might create and thus reproduce his kind every one knows, but to contend that one is a manifestation of the other is puerile, unenlightened, and harks back to barbarism. One might think that there is no such thing as the psychology of art or the science of æsthetics. Art has an intellectual significance as well as, or more than, an emotional significance, and the unfortunate, unhappy, disequilibrated man who is parodied in this book contributed his substantial mite in the twentieth century to make us see it. Any one who reads the "Lettres de Paul Gauguin," which are prefaced by a brief survey of his life by Victor Segalen, or his life by Jean de Rotonchamps, which was published at Weimar at the expense of Count von Kessler, will see how closely Maugham described Gauguin's life in the Polynesian cannibal islands. Strickland marries the native girl Ata, who had a "beguin" for him, but Gauguin had Tioka in his maison de joie without benefit of clergy. Doctor Coutras, who gives Mr. Maugham so much valuable information (via Rotonchamps and Segalen) is M. Paul Vernié, who attended Gauguin and wrote an account of his last days.