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 [83] 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 [84] 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
[85] 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 [86]
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 rnay 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 [87] 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 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--[88] 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 [89] 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 à vol a'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 [90]
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 [91]
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. [92] 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 [93] 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 [94] 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, [95] 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.
[96] 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, [97] 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 [98] 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.