Such was the doctrine of Paul Gauguin. It may seem strange that such ideas could have ever been considered revolutionary. In the Far East at all events, they had been the commonplaces of art for centuries. Revolutionary or not, Gauguin went on his way undisturbed. From an examination of his letters, and of the statements of those who knew him, the fact emerged that this "anarchist" preserved throughout his life a great respect for artists of the past. Rembrandt especially, in his mystical and visionary phase, appealed to him and Rembrandt's influence may be traced in more than one of Gauguin's Tahitian pictures. Velazquez, Rubens, Proudhon, Corot, Whistler--Gauguin was able to learn something from all these men as well as from Memling and Holbein. As for his pupils, the measure of the intelligence they displayed in following his precepts may be judged by the fact that Gauguin remarked about one of them: "His faults are not sufficiently accentuated for him to be considered a master," and by the fact that the first synthetic picture of another was, according to Maurice Denis, painted on the lid of a cigar box! IV It is in the works of this period that we must seek for a solution of Gauguin's mystic doctrine and for an explanation of the struggle that went on in his soul: a struggle that was solved finally by his denial of civilization and affirmation of pagan savagery at Tahiti. Gauguin, as has been seen, was not naturally but only deliberately a teacher of others. Especially in his intimate and personal concerns, he commonly guarded an air of defiant reserve. In the matter of views on art, he contented himself with the expression of dogmatic and paradoxical opinions which, if disputed, were merely affirmed with greater violence. It is related of him that, if any one persisted in holding an opinion contrary to his own, Gauguin would reply only by an oblique glance from those cold gray eyes an answer that usually reduced the speaker to an embarrassed silence. Nevertheless, we owe to the fortunate preservation of various fragmentary notes, made in the solitude of his last desperate years, indications of what Gauguin's religious and political opinions were. Here are some of them:-- "If I gaze before me into space, I have a vague sense of the Infinite; nevertheless I am the conclusion of something that has been begun. I understand then, that there has been a beginning and that there will be no end. "In this I do not possess the explanation of a mystery, but merely the mysterious sense of this mystery--and this sensation is intimately linked to the belief in an eternal life, promised by Jesus. "But then, if we in ourselves are not the beginning when we come into the world, it is necessary to believe, with the Buddhists, that we have always existed. "A change of skin. "All this is very strange.