The Letters of Vincent van Gogh by Vincent Van Gogh

Author:Vincent Van Gogh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.

Apart from a few years which I can scarcely comprehend myself, when I was confused by religious ideas, by some kind of mysticism - that period aside, I have always lived with a certain warmth. Now everything is getting grimmer and colder and more dreary around me. And when I tell you that in the first place I will not stand it, quite apart from the question of whether or not I can, I am referring to what I told you at the very beginning of our relationship.

What I have had against you this past year is a kind of relapse into cold respectability which seems to me sterile and futile -the diametrical opposite of everything that is active, and of everything that is artistic in particular.

I am putting this to you bluntly, not in order to make you miserable, but so that you can see, and if possible feel, what has gone wrong, why I can no longer think of you as a brother and a friend with the same pleasure as before.

There needs to be more gusto in my life if I am to get more brio into my brush - exercising patience will not get me a hair’s breadth further. If you, for your part, do relapse into the above-mentioned state, don’t blame me for not being the same towards you as I was during, say, the first year.

As to my drawings - at this moment it seems to me that the watercolours, the pen-and-ink drawings of weavers, the latest pen-and-ink drawings on which I am working now, are not on the whole so boring as to be utterly worthless. But if I should come to the conclusion myself that they are no good and Theo is right not to show them to anybody - then, then, it will be one proof more to me that I am right to object to our present false position, and I shall try all the harder to make a change quand meme, for better or for worse, just as long as things don’t remain the same…

Now supposing I realized that you, in the belief that I had not yet made enough progress, were trying to do something to further that progress - for instance, Mauve having fallen by the wayside, to put me in touch with some other able painter - or, anyway, something, some sign or other that would prove to me that you really believed in my progress or had it at heart. But instead there is - the money, yes - but for the rest nothing but ‘just carry on working’, ‘have patience’, as cold, as dead, as arid and as insufferable as if Father, for instance, had said it. I cannot live on that, it is getting too lonely, too cold, too empty and too dull for me.

I am no better than the next man, inasmuch as I have the same needs and desires as everyone else, and it is perfectly natural for one to kick when one knows for certain that one is being kept dangling, being kept in the dark.

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