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 [99] 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 [100]
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 (très distingué et très soigné,
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
toward 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 [101] 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 [102] 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 [103] perishing of wounded pride. But to
make a clean breast of her poor girlish worldliness, before she
became a béguine, 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.
[104] 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 [105] 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."
[106] 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 [107] 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 [108] 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 [109] 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 [l10] 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 [111] 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.
[112] 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,
[113] 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 [114] 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 [115]
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.
IV. DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD