It may seem strange to consider this many-sided versatility as a proof, not of a complex, but of a primitive nature. Yet it is undoubtedly true that in the primitive stages of art the artist is able to do almost everything. The interchangeability, the essential unity of all the arts, is the strongest characteristic of art in its early stages. As civilization and consequently technique become more advanced, it grows more and more difficult for a man to become master of any single branch of art. Perhaps that is why, in our modern industrialized states, the arts tend to disappear, to become the interest and hobby of a rapidly diminishing minority. [Illustration: The painter Schuffenecker and his family.] All this was not suspected by Gauguin at the time, nor for years afterwards. For the time he was content to paint and to follow the prevailing fashions in his painting. And he soon found that the prevailing fashion of the day in Paris was Impressionism. * * * * * To define Impressionism it is not necessary, as many professional art-critics have done, to enter into long dissertations as to the supremacy of pure colors, nor to see in Constable or Turner the ancestry of the movement. Impressionism was neither more nor less than the cult of Realism--or to speak better, Naturalism--carried out in painting. This cult had already possessed in painting one important precursor, Gustave Courbet. But it is to literature, always the advance guard of the arts, that we must turn to understand what impressionism intended and why it failed. A little before 1870, which year marks a turning point not only in France's political but also in her intellectual life, there came a change over her literature. Romanticism, which had startled the world in 1830 with Lamartine, de Musset, de Vigny, Hugo and Balzac, was now dead. The heroic, the Napoleonic, the Byronic attitude had somehow gone out of life. Under the Second Empire, the bourgeois triumphed over the Tuileries. A few years before the crash of 1870, Charles Baudelaire gave to the world his _Fleurs du Mal_--the exasperated cry against life of a soul tortured with too great a sensibility. Almost at the same time Gustave Flaubert, in _Madame Bovary_, erected his monument of infamy to the memory of the bourgeois. These two books opened the path to Naturalism, to the "human document," to the de Goncourts, to de Maupassant, and to Zola. Impressionism was the logical outgrowth, in another sphere, of the work of these Naturalist writers. It abolished the lighting of the studio and substituted for it natural sunlight. It abolished the classical "subject" and left the painter free to paint, as Manet said, "_N'importe quoi_."