It was a winter-scene, by Adrian van de Velde, or by Isaac van Ostade.
All the delicate poetry together with all the delicate comfort of the
frosty season was in the leafless branches turned to silver, the furred
dresses of the skaters, the warmth of the red-brick house fronts under
the gauze of white fog, the gleams of pale sunlight on the cuirasses of
the mounted soldiers as they receded into the distance. Sebastian van
Storck, confessedly the most graceful performer in all that skating
multitude, moving in endless maze over the vast surface of the frozen
water-meadow, liked best this season of the year for its expression of
a perfect impassivity, or at least of a perfect repose. The earth was,
or seemed to be, at rest, with a breathlessness of slumber which suited
the young man's peculiar temper. The heavy summer, as it dried up the
meadows now lying dead below the ice, set free a crowded and competing
world of life, which, while it gleamed very pleasantly russet and
yellow for the painter Albert Cuyp, seemed wellnigh to suffocate
Sebastian van Storck. Yet with all his appreciation of the national
winter, Sebastian was not altogether a Hollander. His mother, of
Spanish descent and Catholic, had given a richness of tone and form to
the healthy freshness of the Dutch physiognomy, apt to preserve its
youthfulness of aspect far beyond the period of life usual with other
peoples. This mixed expression charmed the eye of Isaac van Ostade, who
had painted his portrait from a sketch taken at one of those skating
parties, with his plume of squirrel's tail and fur muff, in all the
modest pleasantness of boyhood. When he returned home lately from his
studies at a place far inland, at the proposal of his tutor, to
recover, as the tutor suggested, a certain loss of robustness,
something more than that cheerful indifference of early youth had
passed away. The learned man, who held, as was alleged, the doctrines
of a surprising new philosophy, reluctant to disturb too early the fine
intelligence of the pupil entrusted to him, had found it, perhaps, a
matter of honesty to send back to his parents one likely enough to
catch from others any sort of theoretic light; for the letter he wrote
dwelt much on the lad's intellectual fearlessness. "At present," he had
written, "he is influenced more by curiosity than by a care for truth,
according to the character of the young. Certainly, he differs
strikingly from his equals in age, by his passion for a vigorous
intellectual gymnastic, such as the supine character of their minds
renders distasteful to most young men, but in which he shows a
fearlessness that at times makes me fancy that his ultimate destination
may be the military life; for indeed the rigidly logical tendency of
his mind always leads him out upon the practical. Don't misunderstand
me! At present, he is strenuous only intellectually; and has given no
definite sign of preference, as regards a vocation in life. But he
seems to me to be one practical in this sense, that his theorems will
shape life for him, directly; that he will always seek, as a matter of
course, the effective equivalent to--the line of being which shall be
the proper continuation of--his line of thinking. This intellectual
rectitude, or candour, which to my mind has a kind of beauty in it, has
reacted upon myself, I confess, with a searching quality." That
"searching quality," indeed, many others also, people far from being
intellectual, had experienced--an agitation of mind in his
neighbourhood, oddly at variance with the composure of the young man's
manner and surrounding, so jealously preserved.
In the crowd of spectators at the skating, whose eyes followed, so
well-satisfied, the movements of Sebastian van Storck, were the mothers
of marriageable daughters, who presently became the suitors of this
rich and distinguished youth, introduced to them, as now grown to man's
estate, by his delighted parents. Dutch aristocracy had put forth all
its graces to become the winter morn: and it was characteristic of the
period that the artist tribe was there, on a grand footing,--in
waiting, for the lights and shadows they liked best. The artists were,
in truth, an important body just then, as a natural consequence of the
nation's hard-won prosperity; helping it to a full consciousness of the
genial yet delicate homeliness it loved, for which it had fought so
bravely, and was ready at any moment to fight anew, against man or the
sea. Thomas de Keyser, who understood better than any one else the kind
of quaint new Atticism which had found its way into the world over
those waste salt marshes, wondering whether quite its finest type as he
understood it could ever actually be seen there, saw it at last, in
lively motion, in the person of Sebastian van Storck, and desired to
paint his portrait. A little to his surprise, the young man declined
the offer; not graciously, as was thought.
Holland, just then, was reposing on its laurels after its long contest
with Spain, in a short period of complete wellbeing, before troubles of
another kind should set in. That a darker time might return again, was
clearly enough felt by Sebastian the elder--a time like that of William
the Silent, with its insane civil animosities, which would demand
similarly energetic personalities, and offer them similar
opportunities. And then, it was part of his honest geniality of
character to admire those who "get on" in the world. Himself had been,
almost from boyhood, in contact with great affairs. A member of the
States-General which had taken so hardly the kingly airs of Frederick
Henry, he had assisted at the Congress of Munster, and figures
conspicuously in Terburgh's picture of that assembly, which had finally
established Holland as a first-rate power. The heroism by which the
national wellbeing had been achieved was still of recent memory--the
air full of its reverberation, and great movement. There was a
tradition to be maintained; the sword by no means resting in its
sheath. The age was still fitted to evoke a generous ambition; and this
son, from whose natural gifts there was so much to hope for, might play
his part, at least as a diplomatist, if the present quiet continued.
Had not the learned man said that his natural disposition would lead
him out always upon practice? And in truth, the memory of that Silent
hero had its fascination for the youth. When, about this time, Peter de
Keyser, Thomas's brother, unveiled at last his tomb of wrought bronze
and marble in the Nieuwe Kerk at Delft, the young Sebastian was one of
a small company present, and relished much the cold and abstract
simplicity of the monument, so conformable to the great, abstract, and
unuttered force of the hero who slept beneath.
In complete contrast to all that is abstract or cold in art, the home
of Sebastian, the family mansion of the Storcks--a house, the front of
which still survives in one of those patient architectural pieces by
Jan van der Heyde--was, in its minute and busy wellbeing, like an
epitome of Holland itself with all the good-fortune of its "thriving
genius" reflected, quite spontaneously, in the national taste. The
nation had learned to content itself with a religion which told little,
or not at all, on the outsides of things. But we may fancy that
something of the religious spirit had gone, according to the law of the
transmutation of forces, into the scrupulous care for cleanliness, into
the grave, old-world, conservative beauty of Dutch houses, which meant
that the life people maintained in them was normally affectionate and
pure.
The most curious florists of Holland were ambitious to supply the
Burgomaster van Storck with the choicest products of their skill for
the garden spread below the windows on either side of the portico, and
along the central avenue of hoary beeches which led to it. Naturally
this house, within a mile of the city of Haarlem, became a resort of
the artists, then mixing freely in great society, giving and receiving
hints as to the domestic picturesque. Creatures of leisure--of leisure
on both sides--they were the appropriate complement of Dutch
prosperity, as it was understood just then. Sebastian the elder could
almost have wished his son to be one of them: it was the next best
thing to the being an influential publicist or statesman. The Dutch had
just begun to see what a picture their country was--its canals, and
boompjis, and endless, broadly-lighted meadows, and thousands of miles
of quaint water-side: and their painters, the first true masters of
landscape for its own sake, were further informing them in the matter.
They were bringing proof, for all who cared to see, of the wealth of
colour there was all around them in this, supposably, sad land. Above
all, they developed the old Low-country taste for interiors. Those
innumerable genre pieces--conversation, music, play--were in truth the
equivalent of novel-reading for that day; its own actual life, in its
own proper circumstances, reflected in various degrees of idealisation,
with no diminution of the sense of reality (that is to say) but with
more and more purged and perfected delightfulness of interest.
Themselves illustrating, as every student of their history knows, the
good-fellowship of family life, it was the ideal of that life which
these artists depicted; the ideal of home in a country where the
preponderant interest of life, after all, could not well be out of
doors. Of the earth earthy--genuine red earth of the old Adam--it was
an ideal very different from that which the sacred Italian painters had
evoked from the life of Italy, yet, in its best types, was not without
a kind of natural religiousness. And in the achievement of a type of
beauty so national and vernacular, the votaries of purely Dutch art
might well feel that the Italianisers, like Berghem, Boll, and Jan
Weenix went so far afield in vain.
The fine organisation and acute intelligence of Sebastian would have
made him an effective connoisseur of the arts, as he showed by the
justice of his remarks in those assemblies of the artists which his
father so much loved. But in truth the arts were a matter he could but
just tolerate. Why add, by a forced and artificial production, to the
monotonous tide of competing, fleeting existence? Only, finding so much
fine art actually about him, he was compelled (so to speak) to adjust
himself to it; to ascertain and accept that in it which should least
collide with, or might even carry forward a little, his own
characteristic tendencies. Obviously somewhat jealous of his
intellectual interests, he loved inanimate nature, it might have been
thought, better than man. He cared nothing, indeed, for the warm
sandbanks of Wynants, nor for those eerie relics of the ancient Dutch
woodland which survive in Hobbema and Ruysdael, still less for the
highly-coloured sceneries of the academic band at Rome, in spite of the
escape they provide one into clear breadth of atmosphere. For though
Sebastian van Storck refused to travel, he loved the distant--enjoyed
the sense of things seen from a distance, carrying us, as on wide wings
of space itself, far out of one's actual surrounding. His preference in
the matter of art was, therefore, for those prospects a vol
d'oiseau--of the caged bird on the wing at last--of which Rubens had
the secret, and still more Philip de Koninck, four of whose choicest
works occupied the four walls of his chamber; visionary escapes, north,
south, east, and west, into a wide-open though, it must be confessed, a
somewhat sullen land. For the fourth of them he had exchanged with his
mother a marvellously vivid Metsu, lately bequeathed to him, in which
she herself was presented. They were the sole ornaments he permitted
himself. From the midst of the busy and busy-looking house, crowded
with the furniture and the pretty little toys of many generations, a
long passage led the rare visitor up a winding staircase, and (again at
the end of a long passage) he found himself as if shut off from the
whole talkative Dutch world, and in the embrace of that wonderful quiet
which is also possible in Holland at its height all around him. It was
here that Sebastian could yield himself, with the only sort of love he
had ever felt, to the supremacy of his difficult thoughts.--A kind of
EMPTY place! Here, you felt, all had been mentally put to rights by the
working-out of a long equation, which had zero is equal to zero for its
result. Here one did, and perhaps felt, nothing; one only thought. Of
living creatures only birds came there freely, the sea-birds
especially, to attract and detain which there were all sorts of
ingenious contrivances about the windows, such as one may see in the
cottage sceneries of Jan Steen and others. There was something,
doubtless, of his passion for distance in this welcoming of the
creatures of the air. An extreme simplicity in their manner of life
was, indeed, characteristic of many a distinguished Hollander--William
the Silent, Baruch de Spinosa, the brothers de Witt. But the simplicity
of Sebastian van Storck was something different from that, and
certainly nothing democratic. His mother thought him like one
disembarrassing himself carefully, and little by little, of all
impediments, habituating himself gradually to make shift with as little
as possible, in preparation for a long journey.
The Burgomaster van Storck entertained a party of friends, consisting
chiefly of his favourite artists, one summer evening. The guests were
seen arriving on foot in the fine weather, some of them accompanied by
their wives and daughters, against the light of the low sun, falling
red on the old trees of the avenue and the faces of those who advanced
along it:--Willem van Aelst, expecting to find hints for a
flower-portrait in the exotics which would decorate the
banqueting-room; Gerard Dow, to feed his eye, amid all that glittering
luxury, on the combat between candle-light and the last rays of the
departing sun; Thomas de Keyser, to catch by stealth the likeness of
Sebastian the younger. Albert Cuyp was there, who, developing the
latent gold in Rembrandt, had brought into his native Dordrecht a heavy
wealth of sunshine, as exotic as those flowers or the eastern carpets
on the Burgomaster's tables, with Hooch, the indoor Cuyp, and Willem
van de Velde, who painted those shore-pieces with gay ships of war,
such as he loved, for his patron's cabinet. Thomas de Keyser came, in
company with his brother Peter, his niece, and young Mr. Nicholas Stone
from England, pupil of that brother Peter, who afterwards married the
niece. For the life of Dutch artists, too, was exemplary in matters of
domestic relationship, its history telling many a cheering story of
mutual faith in misfortune. Hardly less exemplary was the comradeship
which they displayed among themselves, obscuring their own best gifts
sometimes, one in the mere accessories of another man's work, so that
they came together to-night with no fear of falling out, and spoiling
the musical interludes of Madame van Storck in the large back parlour.
A little way behind the other guests, three of them together, son,
grandson, and the grandfather, moving slowly, came the
Hondecoeters--Giles, Gybrecht, and Melchior. They led the party before
the house was entered, by fading light, to see the curious poultry of
the Burgomaster go to roost; and it was almost night when the
supper-room was reached at last. The occasion was an important one to
Sebastian, and to others through him. For (was it the music of the
duets? he asked himself next morning, with a certain distaste as he
remembered it all, or the heady Spanish wines poured out so freely in
those narrow but deep Venetian glasses?) on this evening he approached
more nearly than he had ever yet done to Mademoiselle van Westrheene,
as she sat there beside the clavecin looking very ruddy and fresh in
her white satin, trimmed with glossy crimson swans-down.
So genially attempered, so warm, was life become, in the land of which
Pliny had spoken as scarcely dry land at all. And, in truth, the sea
which Sebastian so much loved, and with so great a satisfaction and
sense of wellbeing in every hint of its nearness, is never far distant
in Holland. Invading all places, stealing under one's feet, insinuating
itself everywhere along an endless network of canals (by no means such
formal channels as we understand by the name, but picturesque rivers,
with sedgy banks and haunted by innumerable birds) its incidents
present themselves oddly even in one's park or woodland walks; the ship
in full sail appearing suddenly among the great trees or above the
garden wall, where we had no suspicion of the presence of water. In the
very conditions of life in such a country there was a standing force of
pathos. The country itself shared the uncertainty of the individual
human life; and there was pathos also in the constantly renewed,
heavily-taxed labour, necessary to keep the native soil, fought for so
unselfishly, there at all, with a warfare that must still be maintained
when that other struggle with the Spaniard was over. But though
Sebastian liked to breathe, so nearly, the sea and its influences,
those were considerations he scarcely entertained. In his passion for
Schwindsucht--we haven't the word--he found it pleasant to think of the
resistless element which left one hardly a foot-space amidst the
yielding sand; of the old beds of lost rivers, surviving now only as
deeper channels in the sea; of the remains of a certain ancient town,
which within men's memory had lost its few remaining inhabitants, and,
with its already empty tombs, dissolved and disappeared in the flood.
It happened, on occasion of an exceptionally low tide, that some
remarkable relics were exposed to view on the coast of the island of
Vleeland. A countryman's waggon overtaken by the tide, as he returned
with merchandise from the shore! you might have supposed, but for a
touch of grace in the construction of the thing--lightly wrought
timber-work, united and adorned by a multitude of brass fastenings,
like the work of children for their simplicity, while the rude, stiff
chair, or throne, set upon it, seemed to distinguish it as a chariot of
state. To some antiquarians it told the story of the overwhelming of
one of the chiefs of the old primeval people of Holland, amid all his
gala array, in a great storm. But it was another view which Sebastian
preferred; that this object was sepulchral, namely, in its motive--the
one surviving relic of a grand burial, in the ancient manner, of a king
or hero, whose very tomb was wasted away.--Sunt metis metae! There came
with it the odd fancy that he himself would like to have been dead and
gone as long ago, with a kind of envy of those whose deceasing was so
long since over.
On more peaceful days he would ponder Pliny's account of those primeval
forefathers, but without Pliny's contempt for them. A cloyed Roman
might despise their humble existence, fixed by necessity from age to
age, and with no desire of change, as "the ocean poured in its flood
twice a day, making it uncertain whether the country was a part of the
continent or of the sea." But for his part Sebastian found something of
poetry in all that, as he conceived what thoughts the old Hollander
might have had at his fishing, with nets themselves woven of seaweed,
waiting carefully for his drink on the heavy rains, and taking refuge,
as the flood rose, on the sand-hills, in a little hut constructed but
airily on tall stakes, conformable to the elevation of the highest
tides, like a navigator, thought the learned writer, when the sea was
risen, like a ship-wrecked mariner when it was retired. For the fancy
of Sebastian he lived with great breadths of calm light above and
around him, influenced by, and, in a sense, living upon them, and
surely might well complain, though to Pliny's so infinite surprise, on
being made a Roman citizen.
And certainly Sebastian van Storck did not felicitate his people on the
luck which, in the words of another old writer, "hath disposed them to
so thriving a genius." Their restless ingenuity in making and
maintaining dry land where nature had willed the sea, was even more
like the industry of animals than had been that life of their
forefathers. Away with that tetchy, feverish, unworthy agitation! with
this and that, all too importunate, motive of interest! And then, "My
son!" said his father, "be stimulated to action!" he, too, thinking of
that heroic industry which had triumphed over nature precisely where
the contest had been most difficult.
Yet, in truth, Sebastian was forcibly taken by the simplicity of a
great affection, as set forth in an incident of real life of which he
heard just then. The eminent Grotius being condemned to perpetual
imprisonment, his wife determined to share his fate, alleviated only by
the reading of books sent by friends. The books, finished, were
returned in a great chest. In this chest the wife enclosed the husband,
and was able to reply to the objections of the soldiers who carried it
complaining of its weight, with a self-control, which she maintained
till the captive was in safety, herself remaining to face the
consequences; and there was a kind of absoluteness of affection in
that, which attracted Sebastian for a while to ponder on the practical
forces which shape men's lives. Had he turned, indeed, to a practical
career it would have been less in the direction of the military or
political life than of another form of enterprise popular with his
countrymen. In the eager, gallant life of that age, if the sword fell
for a moment into its sheath, they were for starting off on perilous
voyages to the regions of frost and snow in search after that
"North-Western passage," for the discovery of which the States-General
had offered large rewards. Sebastian, in effect, found a charm in the
thought of that still, drowsy, spellbound world of perpetual ice, as in
art and life he could always tolerate the sea. Admiral-general of
Holland, as painted by Van der Helst, with a marine background by
Backhuizen:--at moments his father could fancy him so.
There was still another very different sort of character to which
Sebastian would let his thoughts stray, without check, for a time. His
mother, whom he much resembled outwardly, a Catholic from Brabant, had
had saints in her family, and from time to time the mind of Sebastian
had been occupied on the subject of monastic life, its quiet, its
negation. The portrait of a certain Carthusian prior, which, like the
famous statue of Saint Bruno, the first Carthusian, in the church of
Santa Maria degli Angeli at Rome, could it have spoken, would have
said, "Silence!" kept strange company with the painted visages of men
of affairs. A great theological strife was then raging in Holland.
Grave ministers of religion assembled sometimes, as in the painted
scene by Rembrandt, in the Burgomaster's house, and once, not however
in their company, came a renowned young Jewish divine, Baruch de
Spinosa, with whom, most unexpectedly, Sebastian found himself in
sympathy, meeting the young Jew's far-reaching thoughts half-way, to
the confirmation of his own; and he did not know that his visitor, very
ready with the pencil, had taken his likeness as they talked on the
fly-leaf of his note-book. Alive to that theological disturbance in the
air all around him, he refused to be moved by it, as essentially a
strife on small matters, anticipating a vagrant regret which may have
visited many other minds since, the regret, namely, that the old,
pensive, use-and-wont Catholicism, which had accompanied the nation's
earlier struggle for existence, and consoled it therein, had been taken
from it. And for himself, indeed, what impressed him in that old
Catholicism was a kind of lull in it--a lulling power--like that of the
monotonous organ-music, which Holland, Catholic or not, still so
greatly loves. But what he could not away with in the Catholic religion
was its unfailing drift towards the concrete--the positive imageries of
a faith, so richly beset with persons, things, historical incidents.
Rigidly logical in the method of his inferences, he attained the poetic
quality only by the audacity with which he conceived the whole sublime
extension of his premises. The contrast was a strange one between the
careful, the almost petty fineness of his personal surrounding--all the
elegant conventionalities of life, in that rising Dutch family--and the
mortal coldness of a temperament, the intellectual tendencies of which
seemed to necessitate straightforward flight from all that was
positive. He seemed, if one may say so, in love with death; preferring
winter to summer; finding only a tranquillising influence in the
thought of the earth beneath our feet cooling down for ever from its
old cosmic heat; watching pleasurably how their colours fled out of
things, and the long sand-bank in the sea, which had been the rampart
of a town, was washed down in its turn. One of his acquaintance, a
penurious young poet, who, having nothing in his pockets but the
imaginative or otherwise barely potential gold of manuscript verses,
would have grasped so eagerly, had they lain within his reach, at the
elegant outsides of life, thought the fortunate Sebastian, possessed of
every possible opportunity of that kind, yet bent only on dispensing
with it, certainly a most puzzling and comfortless creature. A few
only, half discerning what was in his mind, would fain have shared his
intellectual clearness, and found a kind of beauty in this youthful
enthusiasm for an abstract theorem. Extremes meeting, his cold and
dispassionate detachment from all that is most attractive to ordinary
minds came to have the impressiveness of a great passion. And for the
most part, people had loved him; feeling instinctively that somewhere
there must be the justification of his difference from themselves. It
was like being in love: or it was an intellectual malady, such as
pleaded for forbearance, like bodily sickness, and gave at times a
resigned and touching sweetness to what he did and said. Only once, at
a moment of the wild popular excitement which at that period was easy
to provoke in Holland, there was a certain group of persons who would
have shut him up as no well-wisher to, and perhaps a plotter against,
the common-weal. A single traitor might cut the dykes in an hour, in
the interest of the English or the French. Or, had he already committed
some treasonable act, who was so anxious to expose no writing of his
that he left his very letters unsigned, and there were little
stratagems to get specimens of his fair manuscript? For with all his
breadth of mystic intention, he was persistent, as the hours crept on,
to leave all the inevitable details of life at least in order, in
equation. And all his singularities appeared to be summed up in his
refusal to take his place in the life-sized family group (tres
distingue et tres soigne remarks a modern critic of the work) painted
about this time. His mother expostulated with him on the matter:--she
must needs feel, a little icily, the emptiness of hope, and something
more than the due measure of cold in things for a woman of her age, in
the presence of a son who desired but to fade out of the world like a
breath--and she suggested filial duty. "Good mother," he answered,
"there are duties towards the intellect also, which women can but
rarely understand."
The artists and their wives were come to supper again, with the
Burgomaster van Storck. Mademoiselle van Westrheene was also come, with
her sister and mother. The girl was by this time fallen in love with
Sebastian; and she was one of the few who, in spite of his terrible
coldness, really loved him for himself. But though of good birth she
was poor, while Sebastian could not but perceive that he had many
suitors of his wealth. In truth, Madame van Westrheene, her mother, did
wish to marry this daughter into the great world, and plied many arts
to that end, such as "daughterful" mothers use. Her healthy freshness
of mien and mind, her ruddy beauty, some showy presents that had
passed, were of a piece with the ruddy colouring of the very house
these people lived in; and for a moment the cheerful warmth that may be
felt in life seemed to come very close to him,--to come forth, and
enfold him. Meantime the girl herself taking note of this, that on a
former occasion of their meeting he had seemed likely to respond to her
inclination, and that his father would readily consent to such a
marriage, surprised him on the sudden with those coquetries and
importunities, all those little arts of love, which often succeed with
men. Only, to Sebastian they seemed opposed to that absolute nature we
suppose in love. And while, in the eyes of all around him to-night,
this courtship seemed to promise him, thus early in life, a kind of
quiet happiness, he was coming to an estimate of the situation, with
strict regard to that ideal of a calm, intellectual indifference, of
which he was the sworn chevalier. Set in the cold, hard light of that
ideal, this girl, with the pronounced personal views of her mother, and
in the very effectiveness of arts prompted by a real affection,
bringing the warm life they prefigured so close to him, seemed vulgar!
And still he felt himself bound in honour; or judged from their manner
that she and those about them thought him thus bound. He did not
reflect on the inconsistency of the feeling of honour (living, as it
does essentially, upon the concrete and minute detail of social
relationship) for one who, on principle, set so slight a value on
anything whatever that is merely relative in its character.
The guests, lively and late, were almost pledging the betrothed in the
rich wine. Only Sebastian's mother knew; and at that advanced hour,
while the company were thus intently occupied, drew away the
Burgomaster to confide to him the misgiving she felt, grown to a great
height just then. The young man had slipped from the assembly; but
certainly not with Mademoiselle van Westrheene, who was suddenly
withdrawn also. And she never appeared again in the world. Already,
next day, with the rumour that Sebastian had left his home, it was
known that the expected marriage would not take place. The girl,
indeed, alleged something in the way of a cause on her part; but seemed
to fade away continually afterwards, and in the eyes of all who saw her
was like one perishing of wounded pride. But to make a clean breast of
her poor girlish worldliness, before she became a beguine, she
confessed to her mother the receipt of the letter--the cruel letter
that had killed her. And in effect, the first copy of this letter,
written with a very deliberate fineness, rejecting her--accusing her,
so natural, and simply loyal! of a vulgar coarseness of character--was
found, oddly tacked on, as their last word, to the studious record of
the abstract thoughts which had been the real business of Sebastian's
life, in the room whither his mother went to seek him next day,
littered with the fragments of the one portrait of him in existence.
The neat and elaborate manuscript volume, of which this letter formed
the final page (odd transition! by which a train of thought so abstract
drew its conclusion in the sphere of action) afforded at length to the
few who were interested in him a much-coveted insight into the
curiosity of his existence; and I pause just here to indicate in
outline the kind of reasoning through which, making the "Infinite" his
beginning and his end, Sebastian had come to think all definite forms
of being, the warm pressure of life, the cry of nature itself, no more
than a troublesome irritation of the surface of the one absolute mind,
a passing vexatious thought or uneasy dream there, at its height of
petulant importunity in the eager, human creature.
The volume was, indeed, a kind of treatise to be:--a hard, systematic,
well-concatenated train of thought, still implicated in the
circumstances of a journal. Freed from the accidents of that particular
literary form with its unavoidable details of place and occasion, the
theoretic strain would have been found mathematically continuous. The
already so weary Sebastian might perhaps never have taken in hand, or
succeeded in, this detachment of his thoughts; every one of which,
beginning with himself as the peculiar and intimate apprehension of
this or that particular day and hour, seemed still to protest against
such disturbance, as if reluctant to part from those accidental
associations of the personal history which had prompted it, and so
become a purely intellectual abstraction.
The series began with Sebastian's boyish enthusiasm for a strange, fine
saying of Doctor Baruch de Spinosa, concerning the Divine Love:--That
whoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by him in return. In
mere reaction against an actual surrounding of which every circumstance
tended to make him a finished egotist, that bold assertion defined for
him the ideal of an intellectual disinterestedness, of a domain of
unimpassioned mind, with the desire to put one's subjective side out of
the way, and let pure reason speak.
And what pure reason affirmed in the first place, as the "beginning of
wisdom," was that the world is but a thought, or a series of thoughts:
that it exists, therefore, solely in mind. It showed him, as he fixed
the mental eye with more and more of self-absorption on the phenomena
of his intellectual existence, a picture or vision of the universe as
actually the product, so far as he really knew it, of his own lonely
thinking power--of himself, there, thinking: as being zero without him:
and as possessing a perfectly homogeneous unity in that fact. "Things
that have nothing in common with each other," said the axiomatic
reason, "cannot be understood or explained by means of each other." But
to pure reason things discovered themselves as being, in their essence,
thoughts:--all things, even the most opposite things, mere
transmutations, of a single power, the power of thought. All was but
conscious mind. Therefore, all the more exclusively, he must minister
to mind, to the intellectual power, submitting himself to the sole
direction of that, whithersoever it might lead him. Everything must be
referred to, and, as it were, changed into the terms of that, if its
essential value was to be ascertained. "Joy," he said, anticipating
Spinosa--that, for the attainment of which men are ready to surrender
all beside--"is but the name of a passion in which the mind passes to a
greater perfection or power of thinking; as grief is the name of the
passion in which it passes to a less."
Looking backward for the generative source of that creative power of
thought in him, from his own mysterious intellectual being to its first
cause, he still reflected, as one can but do, the enlarged pattern of
himself into the vague region of hypothesis. In this way, some, at all
events, would have explained his mental process. To him that process
was nothing less than the apprehension, the revelation, of the greatest
and most real of ideas--the true substance of all things. He, too, with
his vividly-coloured existence, with this picturesque and sensuous
world of Dutch art and Dutch reality all around that would fain have
made him the prisoner of its colours, its genial warmth, its struggle
for life, its selfish and crafty love, was but a transient perturbation
of the one absolute mind; of which, indeed, all finite things whatever,
time itself, the most durable achievements of nature and man, and all
that seems most like independent energy, are no more than petty
accidents or affections. Theorem and corollary! Thus they stood:
"There can be only one substance: (corollary) it is the greatest of
errors to think that the non-existent, the world of finite things seen
and felt, really is: (theorem): for, whatever is, is but in that:
(practical corollary): one's wisdom, therefore, consists in hastening,
so far as may be, the action of those forces which tend to the
restoration of equilibrium, the calm surface of the absolute,
untroubled mind, to tabula rasa, by the extinction in one's self of all
that is but correlative to the finite illusion--by the suppression of
ourselves."
In the loneliness which was gathering round him, and, oddly enough, as
a somewhat surprising thing, he wondered whether there were, or had
been, others possessed of like thoughts, ready to welcome any such as
his veritable compatriots. And in fact he became aware just then, in
readings difficult indeed, but which from their all-absorbing interest
seemed almost like an illicit pleasure, a sense of kinship with certain
older minds. The study of many an earlier adventurous theorist
satisfied his curiosity as the record of daring physical adventure, for
instance, might satisfy the curiosity of the healthy. It was a
tradition--a constant tradition--that daring thought of his; an echo,
or haunting recurrent voice of the human soul itself, and as such
sealed with natural truth, which certain minds would not fail to heed;
discerning also, if they were really loyal to themselves, its practical
conclusion.--The one alone is: and all things beside are but its
passing affections, which have no necessary or proper right to be.
As but such "accidents" or "affections," indeed, there might have been
found, within the circumference of that one infinite creative thinker,
some scope for the joy and love of the creature. There have been
dispositions in which that abstract theorem has only induced a renewed
value for the finite interests around and within us. Centre of heat and
light, truly nothing has seemed to lie beyond the touch of its
perpetual summer. It has allied itself to the poetical or artistic
sympathy, which feels challenged to acquaint itself with and explore
the various forms of finite existence all the more intimately, just
because of that sense of one lively spirit circulating through all
things--a tiny particle of the one soul, in the sunbeam, or the leaf.
Sebastian van Storck, on the contrary, was determined, perhaps by some
inherited satiety or fatigue in his nature, to the opposite issue of
the practical dilemma. For him, that one abstract being was as the
pallid Arctic sun, disclosing itself over the dead level of a glacial,
a barren and absolutely lonely sea. The lively purpose of life had been
frozen out of it. What he must admire, and love if he could, was
"equilibrium," the void, the tabula rasa, into which, through all those
apparent energies of man and nature, that in truth are but forces of
disintegration, the world was really settling. And, himself a mere
circumstance in a fatalistic series, to which the clay of the potter
was no sufficient parallel, he could not expect to be "loved in
return." At first, indeed, he had a kind of delight in his thoughts--in
the eager pressure forward, to whatsoever conclusion, of a rigid
intellectual gymnastic, which was like the making of Euclid. Only,
little by little, under the freezing influence of such propositions,
the theoretic energy itself, and with it his old eagerness for truth,
the care to track it from proposition to proposition, was chilled out
of him. In fact, the conclusion was there already, and might have been
foreseen, in the premises. By a singular perversity, it seemed to him
that every one of those passing "affections"--he too, alas! at
times--was for ever trying to be, to assert ITSELF, to maintain its
isolated and petty self, by a kind of practical lie in things; although
through every incident of its hypothetic existence it had protested
that its proper function was to die. Surely! those transient affections
marred the freedom, the truth, the beatific calm, of the absolute
selfishness, which could not, if it would, pass beyond the
circumference of itself; to which, at times, with a fantastic sense of
wellbeing, he was capable of a sort of fanatical devotion. And those,
as he conceived, were his moments of genuine theoretic insight, in
which, under the abstract "perpetual light," he died to self; while the
intellect, after all, had attained a freedom of its own through the
vigorous act which assured him that, as nature was but a thought of
his, so himself also was but the passing thought of God.
No! rather a puzzle only, an anomaly, upon that one, white, unruffled
consciousness! His first principle once recognised, all the rest, the
whole array of propositions down to the heartless practical conclusion,
must follow of themselves. Detachment: to hasten hence: to fold up
one's whole self, as a vesture put aside: to anticipate, by such
individual force as he could find in him, the slow disintegration by
which nature herself is levelling the eternal hills:--here would be the
secret of peace, of such dignity and truth as there could be in a world
which after all was essentially an illusion. For Sebastian at least,
the world and the individual alike had been divested of all effective
purpose. The most vivid of finite objects, the dramatic episodes of
Dutch history, the brilliant personalities which had found their parts
to play in them, that golden art, surrounding us with an ideal world,
beyond which the real world is discernible indeed, but etherealised by
the medium through which it comes to one: all this, for most men so
powerful a link to existence, only set him on the thought of
escape--means of escape--into a formless and nameless infinite world,
quite evenly grey. The very emphasis of those objects, their
importunity to the eye, the ear, the finite intelligence, was but the
measure of their distance from what really is. One's personal presence,
the presence, such as it is, of the most incisive things and persons
around us, could only lessen by so much, that which really is. To
restore tabula rasa, then, by a continual effort at self-effacement!
Actually proud at times of his curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he
could but regard what is called the business of life as no better than
a trifling and wearisome delay. Bent on making sacrifice of the rich
existence possible for him, as he would readily have sacrificed that of
other people, to the bare and formal logic of the answer to a query
(never proposed at all to entirely healthy minds) regarding the remote
conditions and tendencies of that existence, he did not reflect that if
others had inquired as curiously as himself the world could never have
come so far at all--that the fact of its having come so far was itself
a weighty exception to his hypothesis. His odd devotion, soaring or
sinking into fanaticism, into a kind of religious mania, with what was
really a vehement assertion of his individual will, he had formulated
duty as the principle to hinder as little as possible what he called
the restoration of equilibrium, the restoration of the primary
consciousness to itself--its relief from that uneasy, tetchy, unworthy
dream of a world, made so ill, or dreamt so weakly--to forget, to be
forgotten.
And at length this dark fanaticism, losing the support of his pride in
the mere novelty of a reasoning so hard and dry, turned round upon him,
as our fanaticism will, in black melancholy. The theoretic or
imaginative desire to urge Time's creeping footsteps, was felt now as
the physical fatigue which leaves the book or the letter unfinished, or
finishes eagerly out of hand, for mere finishing's sake, unimportant
business. Strange! that the presence to the mind of a metaphysical
abstraction should have had this power over one so fortunately endowed
for the reception of the sensible world. It could hardly have been so
with him but for the concurrence of physical causes with the influences
proper to a mere thought. The moralist, indeed, might have noted that a
meaner kind of pride, the morbid fear of vulgarity, lent secret
strength to the intellectual prejudice, which realised duty as the
renunciation of all finite objects, the fastidious refusal to be or do
any limited thing. But besides this it was legible in his own
admissions from time to time, that the body, following, as it does with
powerful temperaments, the lead of mind and the will, the intellectual
consumption (so to term it) had been concurrent with, had strengthened
and been strengthened by, a vein of physical phthisis--by a merely
physical accident, after all, of his bodily constitution, such as might
have taken a different turn, had another accident fixed his home among
the hills instead of on the shore. Is it only the result of disease? he
would ask himself sometimes with a sudden suspicion of his intellectual
cogency--this persuasion that myself, and all that surrounds me, are
but a diminution of that which really is?--this unkindly melancholy?
The journal, with that "cruel" letter to Mademoiselle van Westrheene
coming as the last step in the rigid process of theoretic deduction,
circulated among the curious; and people made their judgments upon it.
There were some who held that such opinions should be suppressed by
law; that they were, or might become, dangerous to society. Perhaps it
was the confessor of his mother who thought of the matter most justly.
The aged man smiled, observing how, even for minds by no means
superficial, the mere dress it wears alters the look of a familiar
thought; with a happy sort of smile, as he added (reflecting that such
truth as there was in Sebastian's theory was duly covered by the
propositions of his own creed, and quoting Sebastian's favourite pagan
wisdom from the lips of Saint Paul) "in Him, we live, and move, and
have our being."
Next day, as Sebastian escaped to the sea under the long, monotonous
line of wind-mills, in comparative calm of mind--reaction of that
pleasant morning from the madness of the night before--he was making
light, or trying to make light, with some success, of his late
distress. He would fain have thought it a small matter, to be
adequately set at rest for him by certain well-tested influences of
external nature, in a long visit to the place he liked best: a desolate
house, amid the sands of the Helder, one of the old lodgings of his
family property now, rather, of the sea-birds, and almost surrounded by
the encroaching tide, though there were still relics enough of hardy,
sweet things about it, to form what was to Sebastian the most perfect
garden in Holland. Here he could make "equation" between himself and
what was not himself, and set things in order, in preparation towards
such deliberate and final change in his manner of living as
circumstances so clearly necessitated.
As he stayed in this place, with one or two silent serving people, a
sudden rising of the wind altered, as it might seem, in a few dark,
tempestuous hours, the entire world around him. The strong wind changed
not again for fourteen days, and its effect was a permanent one; so
that people might have fancied that an enemy had indeed cut the dykes
somewhere--a pin-hole enough to wreck the ship of Holland, or at least
this portion of it, which underwent an inundation of the sea the like
of which had not occurred in that province for half a century. Only,
when the body of Sebastian was found, apparently not long after death,
a child lay asleep, swaddled warmly in his heavy furs, in an upper room
of the old tower, to which the tide was almost risen; though the
building still stood firmly, and still with the means of life in
plenty. And it was in the saving of this child, with a great effort, as
certain circumstances seemed to indicate, that Sebastian had lost his
life.
His parents were come to seek him, believing him bent on
self-destruction, and were almost glad to find him thus. A learned
physician, moreover, endeavoured to comfort his mother by remarking
that in any case he must certainly have died ere many years were
passed, slowly, perhaps painfully, of a disease then coming into the
world; disease begotten by the fogs of that country--waters, he
observed, not in their place, "above the firmament"--on people grown
somewhat over-delicate in their nature by the effects of modern luxury.