The Celtic fringe of Europe--Cornwall, the Highlands of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Galicia--presents everywhere a great similarity in natural feature and in the character of its inhabitants. The Celt is an outcast. Driven backward by successive waves of civilization and conquest, he has finally occupied those lands which were so unprofitable to his conquerors that he was able to remain in them undisturbed. Long residence in these desolate places has made of him a natural mystic, a conservative. Perhaps he might never have been anything else had not the nineteenth century--with its railroads and the life-weariness of its cultivated classes--made of him a curiosity. The hordes of tourists, of bad artists, of dealers in journalese, who rave about Brittany, Cornwall, or Ireland as picturesque summer-resorts, show that civilization has obtained its revenge on the savage who prefers to remain a savage. Paul Gauguin did not assuredly go to Brittany to discover the picturesque. Had he done so his painting would have ranked no higher than the painting of Charles Cottet or of Lucien Simon. His real home as an artist, as he was later to discover, lay elsewhere--under less troubled skies, in the midst of more tropical vegetation. But the gloom, the melancholy inertia, the mystic faith, the simplicity of this land of wind-mills, small trees, granite coasts and menhirs, worked strongly on the yet untamed primitive in him. Stronger still perhaps was the appeal of the sea, the most restless and yet the most changeless element in nature. Gauguin was in appearance, as in manners, a sailor--the eye, the direct curt speech, the reserved disdain, the freedom of manners, all these in him had been accentuated by his early experiences. In Brittany he found the sea; he found an unspoiled people; he found, above all, repose from the everlasting chatter of art-theories that, like the bubbling of endless bottles of too light champagne, frothed eternally in the cafés of Paris. Brittany gave him greater faith in himself; Brittany began to dispel the nineteenth century skepticism that was slowly stifling him. [Illustration: Struggle of Jacob with the Angel.] His first stay in Pont-Aven was destined to be short. It is chiefly remarkable for the fact that here he was visited by Emile Bernard, then only about seventeen years of age, whose relations with Gauguin and other painters afford matter for so much controversy that they must be examined in detail.