Lust For Life

by Irving Stone

He felt extremely friendly to them all; they too knew what a splendid thing it was to be in love.

As a young chap he had been slightly morose and had avoided companionship. People had thought him queer, a bit eccentric. But Ursula had changed his nature completely. She had made him want to be agreeable and popular; she had brought him out of himself and helped him to see the goodness in the ordinary pattern of daily life.

In his love for Ursula there was nothing of passion or desire. He was young; he was an idealist; he was in love for the first time.

She saw no evil in the world and knew of none. She knew only of weakness, temptation, hardship, and pain.

Pain did curious things to him. It made him sensitive to the pain of others. It made him intolerant of everything that was cheap and blatantly successful in the world about him. He was no longer of any value at the gallery.

“How can we take such large profits for selling trash, Mr. Obach? And why is it that the only people who can afford to come in here are those who can’t bear to look at anything authentic? Is it because their money has made them callous? And why is it that the poor people who can really appreciate good art haven’t even a farthing to buy a print for their walls?”

“To act well in this world,” he read, “one must die within oneself. Man is not on this earth only to be happy, he is not there to be simply honest, he is there to realize great things for humanity, to attain nobility and to surpass the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on.”

“Rembrandt only liked to paint ugly old women, didn’t he?” she asked. “No,” replied Vincent. “He painted beautiful old women, women who were poor or in some way unhappy, but who through sorrow had gained a soul.”

“These workers,” said Mendes with a gentle sweep of his arm, “have a hard life of it. When illness comes they have no money for a doctor. The food for tomorrow comes from today’s labour, and hard labour it is, too. Their houses, as you see, are small and poor; they are never more than a stone’s throw away from privation and want. They’ve made a bad bargain with life; they need the thought of God to comfort them.”

“What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to paint. Whether he painted well or badly didn’t matter; painting was the stuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, lies in the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew to be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had been worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in Amsterdam.”

The quality of his perseverance and loyalty to his idea is what was important, not the quality of his work.”

“You can never be sure about anything for all time, Vincent,” said Mendes. “You can only have the courage and strength to do what you think is right. It may turn out to be wrong, but you will at least have done it, and that is the important thing.

Many times in your life you may think you are failing, but ultimately you will express yourself and that expression will justify your life.”

If he went out tomorrow as an evangelist, working for His people, would that be failure? If he cured the sick, comforted the weary, consoled the sinner, and converted the unbeliever, would that still be failure?

“Sorrow is better than joy—and even in mirth the heart is sad. It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasts, for by sadness the countenance of the heart is made better.

“Of course!” he said aloud. “That’s why they’ve accepted me. I’ve become one of them at last.” He rinsed his hands in the water and went to bed without touching his face. Every day that he remained in the Borinage he rubbed coal-dust on his face so that he would look like everyone else.

He had never seen such abject personal misery. For the first time he wondered of what benefit prayers and the Gospel would be to this woman when her babies were freezing to death. Where was God in all this?

At last he realized that he was a liar and a coward. He preached the virtues of poverty to the miners but he himself lived in comfort and plenty. He was nothing more than a hypocritical slinger of words. His religion was an idle, useless thing. The miners ought to despise him and run him out of the Borinage. He pretended to share their lot, and here he had warm, beautiful clothes, a comfortable bed to sleep in, and more food in one meal than the miners had in a week. He did not even work for his ease and luxuries. He just went about telling glib lies and posing as a good man. The Borains ought not to believe a word he said; they ought not to come to his sermons or accept his leadership. His whole easy life gave the lie to his words. He had failed again, more miserably than ever before!

The Word of God had become a luxury that the miners could not afford.

All this talk about God was childish evasion; desperate lies whispered by a frightened, lonely mortal to himself out in a cold, dark, eternal night. There was no God. Just as simply as that, there was no God. There was only chaos; miserable, suffering, cruel, tortuous, blind, endless chaos.

It was bankruptcy once again, and time to take stock. Only there was no stock. There was no job, no money, no health, no strength, no ideas, no enthusiasms, no desires, no ambitions, no ideals, and worst of all, no pivot upon which to hang his life. He was twenty-six, five times a failure, without the courage to begin anew.

And so Vincent was alone, utterly alone, without even his Maker, a dead man walking in a deserted world and wondering why he was still there.

With the passing of the weeks he absorbed the life stories of hundreds of ordinary people like himself, who strove, succeeded a little, and failed a great deal; and through them he slowly got a proper perspective on himself. The theme that ran through his brain: “I’m a failure. I’m a failure. I’m a failure,” gave way to “What shall I try now? What am I best fitted for? Where is my proper place in the world?” In every book he read, he looked for that pursuit which might give his life direction again.

He knew that his drawings were bad, but he was too close to them to see exactly why. What he needed was the ruthless eye of a stranger who was not blinded by the creative pride of the parent.

What did the hunger of his belly matter, when his spirit was being so well fed?

“Our inward thoughts, do they ever show outwardly? There may be a great fire in our soul and no one comes to warm himself by it. The passers-by see only a bit of smoke coming through the chimney and continue on their way. Now look here, what must be done? Mustn’t one tend that inward fire, have faith in oneself, wait patiently for the hour when somebody will come and sit near it?”

They mistrusted and were afraid of him because he was different, even though he did them no harm and asked only to be let alone. Vincent had no idea the people did not like him.

“Nature always begins by resisting the artist, Father,” he said, without putting down his pencil, “but if I really take my work seriously, I won’t allow myself to be led astray by that resistance. On the contrary, it will be a stimulus the more to fight for victory.”

“At bottom, nature and a true artist agree. It may take years of struggling and wrestling before she becomes docile and yielding, but in the end, the bad, very bad work will turn into good work and justify itself.”

In order to paint life one must understand not only anatomy, but what people feel and think about the world they live in. The painter who knows his own craft and nothing else will turn out to be a very superficial artist.”

If you want to create, go to life. Don’t imitate.

He saw how exquisite suffering had made her. Before, she had been only a happy girl; now she was a passionately suffering woman with all the richness that emotional misery can bring. Once again there flashed into his mind the old saying: “From out of pain, beauty.”

She lived in the past, always in the past, and she found it slightly distasteful that anyone should live with so much joy and vigour in the future.

Love was the salt of life; one needed it to bring out the flavour of the world.

Lack of love in his life could bring him infinite pain, but it could do him no harm; lack of sex could dry up the well springs of his art and kill him.

“Believe me, Vincent, if you try to arrive too soon, you will only kill yourself as an artist. The man of the day is usually the man of a day. In things of art the old saying is true, ‘Honesty is the best policy!’ It is better to take more trouble on a serious study than to develop a kind of chic that will flatter the public.”

No artist ever lets go of anything he thinks is good, Van Gogh. He only sells his garbage to the public.”

He did not know that Mauve was undergoing the metamorphosis of the creative artist. He began a canvas lethargically, working almost without interest. Slowly his energy would pick up as ideas began to creep into his mind and become formulated. He would work a little longer, a little harder each day. As objects appeared clearly on the canvas, his demands upon himself became more exacting. His mind would flee from his family, from his friends and other interests. His appetite would desert him and he would lie awake nights thinking of things to be done. As his strength went down his excitement went up. Soon he would be living on nervous energy. His body would shrink on its ample frame and the sentimental eyes become lost in a hazy mist. The more he became fatigued, the more desperately he worked. The nervous passion which possessed him would rise higher and higher. In his mind he knew how long it would take him to finish; he set his will to last until that very day. He was like a man ridden by a thousand demons; he had years in which to complete the canvas, but something forced him to lacerate himself every hour of the twenty-four. In the end, he would be in such a towering passion and nervous excitement that a frightful scene ensued if anyone got in his way. He hurled himself at the canvas with every last ounce of his strength. No matter how long it took to finish, he always had will enough to the last drop of paint. Nothing could have killed him before he was completely thro...

“Earn bread, Uncle Cor? How do you mean that? Earn bread . . . or deserve bread? Not to deserve one’s bread, that is to say, to be unworthy of it, that certainly is a crime, for every honest man is worthy of his bread. But unluckily, not being able to earn it, though deserving it, that is a misfortune, and a great one.”

“It has always seemed to me, Uncle Cor, that when an artist shows his work to the public he has the right to keep to himself the inward struggle of his own private life, which is directly and fatally connected with the peculiar difficulties involved in producing a work of art.”

‘J’aimerais mieux ne rien dire que de me’ exprimer faiblement.’ “De Bock can keep his charm and his money. I’ll take my life of reality and hardship. That is not the road on which one perishes.”

“My place is drawing diggers in a hole on the Geest, as I have been doing all day. There, my ugly face and shabby coat perfectly harmonize with the surroundings, and I am myself and work with pleasure. When I wear a fine coat, the working people I want to sketch are afraid of me and distrust me. The purpose of my drawing is to make people see things worth observing and which not everyone knows. If I sometimes have to sacrifice social manners to get my work done, am I not justified? Do I lower myself by living with the people I draw? Do I lower myself when I go into the houses of labourers and poor people, and when I receive them in my studio? I think my profession requires it. Is that what you call ruining myself?”

“Savoir souffrir sans se plaindre, ça c’est la seule chose partique, c’est la grande science, la leçon à apprendre, la solution du problème de la vie.”

it will make a real artist of you. The more you suffer, the more grateful you ought to be. That’s the stuff out of which first-rate painters are made. An empty stomach is better than a full one, Van Gogh, and a broken heart is better than happiness, never forget that!”

“Is that what being an artist means—selling? I thought it meant one who was always seeking without absolutely finding. I thought it means the contrary from ‘I know it, I have found it.’ When I say I am an artist, I only mean ‘I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.’”

“Human conduct, Mijnheer, is a great deal like drawing. The whole perspective changes with the shifted position of the eye, and depends not on the subject, but on the man who is looking.”

“L’art c’est un combat; dans I’art il faut y mettre sa peau”.

Whether he was drawing the figure or landscape, he wished to express not sentimental melancholy but serious sorrow. He wanted to reach out so far that people would say of his work, “He feels deeply, he feels tenderly.”

I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered, there may be mistakes or gaps, but there is something in it of what the woods or beach or figure has told me.

“But it is easy to love, Margot.” “Ah, you think so?’” “Yes. It’s only being loved in return that is difficult.”