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Imaginary Portraits

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Imaginary Portraits




And that unrivalled fairness and freshness of aspect:--how did he
alone preserve it untouched, through the wind and heat? In truth, it
was not by magic, as some said, but by a natural simplicity in his
living. When that dark season of his troubles arrived he was heard
begging querulously one wintry night, "Give me wine, meat; dark wine
and brown meat!"--come back to the rude door of his old home in the
cliff-side. Till that time the great vine-dresser himself drank only
water; he had lived on spring-water and fruit. A lover of fertility
in all its forms, in what did but suggest it, he was curious and
penetrative concerning the habits of water, and had the secret of the
divining-rod. Long before it came he could detect the scent of rain
from afar, and would climb with delight to the great scaffolding on
the unfinished tower to watch its coming over the thirsty vine-land,
till it rattled on the great tiled roof of the church below; and
then, throwing off his mantle, allow it to bathe his limbs freely,
clinging firmly against the tempestuous wind among the carved
imageries of dark stone.

It was on his sudden return after a long journey (one of many
inexplicable disappearances), coming back changed somewhat, that he
ate flesh for the first time, tearing the hot, red morsels with his
delicate fingers in a kind of [65] wild greed. He had fled to the
south from the first forbidding days of a hard winter which came at
last. At the great seaport of Marseilles he had trafficked with
sailors from all parts of the world, from Arabia and India, and
bought their wares, exposed now for sale, to the wonder of all, at
the Easter fair--richer wines and incense than had been known in
Auxerre, seeds of marvellous new flowers, creatures wild and tame,
new pottery painted in raw gaudy tints, the skins of animals, meats
fried with unheard-of condiments. His stall formed a strange,
unwonted patch of colour, found suddenly displayed in the hot
morning.

The artists were more delighted than ever, and frequented his company
in the little manorial habitation, deserted long since by its owners
and haunted, so that the eyes of many looked evil upon it, where he
had taken up his abode, attracted, in the first instance, by its rich
though neglected garden, a tangle of every kind of creeping, vine-
like plant. Here, surrounded in abundance by the pleasant materials
of his trade, the vine-dresser as it were turned pedant and kept
school for the various artists, who learned here an art supplementary
to their own,--that gay magic, namely (art or trick) of his
existence, till they found themselves grown into a kind of
aristocracy, like veritable gens fleur-de-lisés, as they worked
together for the decoration of the great church and a hundred other
[66] places beside. And yet a darkness had grown upon him. The kind
creature had lost something of his gentleness. Strange motiveless
misdeeds had happened; and, at a loss for other causes, not the
envious only would fain have traced the blame to Denys. He was
making the younger world mad. Would he make himself Count of
Auxerre? The lady Ariane, deserted by her former lover, had looked
kindly upon him; was ready to make him son-in-law to the old count
her father, old and not long for this world. The wise monk Hermes
bethought him of certain old readings in which the Wine-god, whose
part Denys had played so well, had his contrast, his dark or
antipathetic side; was like a double creature, of two natures,
difficult or impossible to harmonise. And in truth the much-prized
wine of Auxerre has itself but a fugitive charm, being apt to sicken
and turn gross long before the bottle is empty, however carefully
sealed; as it goes indeed, at its best, by hard names, among those
who grow it, such as Chainette and Migraine.

A kind of degeneration, of coarseness--the coarseness of satiety, and
shapeless, battered-out appetite--with an almost savage taste for
carnivorous diet, had come over the company. A rumour went abroad of
certain women who had drowned, in mere wantonness, their new-born
babes. A girl with child was found hanged by her own act in a dark
cellar. Ah! [67] if Denys also had not felt himself mad! But when
the guilt of a murder, committed with a great vine-axe far out among
the vineyards, was attributed vaguely to him, he could but wonder
whether it had been indeed thus, and the shadow of a fancied crime
abode with him. People turned against their favourite, whose former
charms must now be counted only as the fascinations of witchcraft.
It was as if the wine poured out for them had soured in the cup. The
golden age had indeed come back for a while:--golden was it, or
gilded only, after all? and they were too sick, or at least too
serious, to carry through their parts in it. The monk Hermes was
whimsically reminded of that after-thought in pagan poetry, of a
Wine-god who had been in hell. Denys certainly, with all his flaxen
fairness about him, was manifestly a sufferer. At first he thought
of departing secretly to some other place. Alas! his wits were too
far gone for certainty of success in the attempt. He feared to be
brought back a prisoner. Those fat years were over. It was a time
of scarcity. The working people might not eat and drink of the good
things they had helped to store away. Tears rose in the eyes of
needy children, of old or weak people like children, as they woke up
again and again to sunless, frost-bound, ruinous mornings; and the
little hungry creatures went prowling after scattered hedge-nuts or
dried vine-tendrils.

[68] Mysterious, dark rains prevailed throughout the summer. The
great offices of Saint John were fumbled through in a sudden darkness
of unseasonable storm, which greatly damaged the carved ornaments of
the church, the bishop reading his mid-day Mass by the light of the
little candle at his book. And then, one night, the night which
seemed literally to have swallowed up the shortest day in the year, a
plot was contrived by certain persons to take Denys as he went and
kill him privately for a sorcerer. He could hardly tell how he
escaped, and found himself safe in his earliest home, the cottage in
the cliff-side, with such a big fire as he delighted in burning upon
the hearth. They made a little feast as well as they could for the
beautiful hunted creature, with abundance of waxlights.

And at last the clergy bethought themselves of a remedy for this evil
time. The body of one of the patron saints had lain neglected
somewhere under the flagstones of the sanctuary. This must be
piously exhumed, and provided with a shrine worthy of it. The
goldsmiths, the jewellers and lapidaries, set diligently to work, and
no long time after, the shrine, like a little cathedral with portals
and tower complete, stood ready, its chiselled gold framing panels of
rock crystal, on the great altar. Many bishops arrived, with King
Lewis the Saint himself accompanied by his mother, to assist at the
search for and disinterment of the sacred relics. In [69] their
presence, the Bishop of Auxerre, with vestments of deep red in honour
of the relics, blessed the new shrine, according to the office De
benedictione capsarum pro reliquiis. The pavement of the choir,
removed amid a surging sea of lugubrious chants, all persons fasting,
discovered as if it had been a battlefield of mouldering human
remains. Their odour rose plainly above the plentiful clouds of
incense, such as was used in the king's private chapel. The search
for the Saint himself continued in vain all day and far into the
night. At last from a little narrow chest, into which the remains
had been almost crushed together, the bishop's red-gloved hands drew
the dwindled body, shrunken inconceivably, but still with every
feature of the face traceable in a sudden oblique ray of ghastly
dawn.

That shocking sight, after a sharp fit as though a demon were going
out of him, as he rolled on the turf of the cloister to which he had
fled alone from the suffocating church, where the crowd still awaited
the Procession of the relics and the Mass De reliquiis quae
continentur in Ecclesiis, seemed indeed to have cured the madness of
Denys, but certainly did not restore his gaiety. He was left a
subdued, silent, melancholy creature. Turning now, with an odd
revulsion of feeling, to gloomy objects, he picked out a ghastly
shred from the common bones on the pavement to wear about his neck,
and in a little while found his way to the monks [70] of Saint
Germain, who gladly received him into their workshop, though
secretly, in fear of his foes.

The busy tribe of variously gifted artists, labouring rapidly at the
many works on hand for the final embellishment of the cathedral of
St. Étienne, made those conventual buildings just then cheerful
enough to lighten a melancholy, heavy even as that of our friend
Denys. He took his place among the workmen, a conventual novice; a
novice also as to whatever concerns any actual handicraft. He could
but compound sweet incense for the sanctuary. And yet, again by
merely visible presence, he made himself felt in all the varied
exercise around him of those arts which address themselves first of
all to sight. Unconsciously he defined a peculiar manner, alike of
feeling and expression, to those skilful hands at work day by day
with the chisel, the pencil, or the needle, in many an enduring form
of exquisite fancy. In three successive phases or fashions might be
traced, especially in the carved work, the humours he had determined.
There was first wild gaiety, exuberant in a wreathing of life-like
imageries, from which nothing really present in nature was excluded.
That, as the soul of Denys darkened, had passed into obscure regions
of the satiric, the grotesque and coarse. But from this time there
was manifest, with no loss of power or effect, a well-assured
seriousness, somewhat [71] jealous and exclusive, not so much in the
selection of the material on which the arts were to work, as in the
precise sort of expression that should be induced upon it. It was as
if the gay old pagan world had been blessed in some way; with effects
to be seen most clearly in the rich miniature work of the manuscripts
of the capitular library,--a marvellous Ovid especially, upon the
pages of which those old loves and sorrows seemed to come to life
again in medieval costume, as Denys, in cowl now and with tonsured
head, leaned over the painter, and led his work, by a kind of visible
sympathy, often unspoken, rather than by any formal comment.

Above all, there was a desire abroad to attain the instruments of a
freer and more various sacred music than had been in use hitherto--a
music that might express the whole compass of souls now grown to
manhood. Auxerre, indeed, then as afterwards, was famous for its
liturgical music. It was Denys, at last, to whom the thought
occurred of combining in a fuller tide of music all the instruments
then in use. Like the Wine-god of old, he had been a lover and
patron especially of the music of the pipe, in all its varieties.
Here, too, there had been evident those three fashions or "modes":--
first, the simple and pastoral, the homely note of the pipe, like the
piping of the wind itself from off the distant fields; then, the
wild, savage din, that had cost so much to quiet people, and [72]
driven excitable people mad. Now he would compose all this to
sweeter purposes; and the building of the first organ became like the
book of his life: it expanded to the full compass of his nature, in
its sorrow and delight. In long, enjoyable days of wind and sun by
the river-side, the seemingly half-witted "brother" sought and found
the needful varieties of reed. The carpenters, under his
instruction, set up the great wooden passages for the thunder; while
the little pipes of pasteboard simulated the sound of the human voice
singing to the victorious notes of the long metal trumpets. At times
this also, as people heard night after night those wandering sounds,
seemed like the work of a madman, though they awoke sometimes in
wonder at snatches of a new, an unmistakable new music. It was the
triumph of all the various modes of the power of the pipe, tamed,
ruled, united. Only, on the painted shutters of the organ-case
Apollo with his lyre in his hand, as lord of the strings, seemed to
look askance on the music of the reed, in all the jealousy with which
he put Marsyas to death so cruelly.

Meantime, the people, even his enemies, seemed to have forgotten him.
Enemies, in truth, they still were, ready to take his life should the
opportunity come; as he perceived when at last he ventured forth on a
day of public ceremony. The bishop was to pronounce a blessing upon
the foundations of a new bridge, [73] designed to take the place of
the ancient Roman bridge which, repaired in a thousand places, had
hitherto served for the chief passage of the Yonne. It was as if the
disturbing of that time-worn masonry let out the dark spectres of
departed times. Deep down, at the core of the central pile, a
painful object was exposed--the skeleton of a child, placed there
alive, it was rightly surmised, in the superstitious belief that, by
way of vicarious substitution, its death would secure the safety of
all who should pass over.

There were some who found themselves, with a little surprise, looking
round as if for a similar pledge of security in their new
undertaking. It was just then that Denys was seen plainly, standing,
in all essential features precisely as of old, upon one of the great
stones prepared for the foundation of the new building. For a moment
he felt the eyes of the people upon him full of that strange humour,
and with characteristic alertness, after a rapid gaze over the grey
city in its broad green framework of vineyards, best seen from this
spot, flung himself down into the water and disappeared from view
where the stream flowed most swiftly below a row of flour-mills.
Some indeed fancied they had seen him emerge again safely on the deck
of one of the great boats, loaded with grapes and wreathed
triumphantly with flowers like a floating garden, which were then
bringing down the vintage from the country; but generally the people
[74] believed their strange enemy now at last departed for ever.
Denys in truth was at work again in peace at the cloister, upon his
house of reeds and pipes. At times his fits came upon him again; and
when they came, for his cure he would dig eagerly, turned sexton now,
digging, by choice, graves for the dead in the various churchyards of
the town. There were those who had seen him thus employed (that form
seeming still to carry something of real sun-gold upon it) peering
into the darkness, while his tears fell sometimes among the grim
relics his mattock had disturbed.

In fact, from the day of the exhumation of the body of the Saint in
the great church, he had had a wonderful curiosity for such objects,
and one wintry day bethought him of removing the body of his mother
from the unconsecrated ground in which it lay, that he might bury it
in the cloister, near the spot where he was now used to work. At
twilight he came over the frozen snow. As he passed through the
stony barriers of the place the world around seemed curdled to the
centre--all but himself, fighting his way across it, turning now and
then right-about from the persistent wind, which dealt so roughly
with his blond hair and the purple mantle whirled about him. The
bones, hastily gathered, he placed, awefully but without ceremony, in
a hollow space prepared secretly within the grave of another.

Meantime the winds of his organ were ready [75] to blow; and with
difficulty he obtained grace from the Chapter for a trial of its
powers on a notable public occasion, as follows. A singular guest
was expected at Auxerre. In recompense for some service rendered to
the Chapter in times gone by, the Sire de Chastellux had the
hereditary dignity of a canon of the church. On the day of his
reception he presented himself at the entrance of the choir in
surplice and amice, worn over the military habit. The old count of
Chastellux was lately dead, and the heir had announced his coming,
according to custom, to claim his ecclesiastical privilege. There
had been long feud between the houses of Chastellux and Auxerre; but
on this happy occasion an offer of peace came with a proposal for the
hand of the Lady Ariane.

The goodly young man arrived, and, duly arrayed, was received into
his stall at vespers, the bishop assisting. It was then that the
people heard the music of the organ, rolling over them for the first
time, with various feelings of delight. But the performer on and
author of the instrument was forgotten in his work, and there was no
re-instatement of the former favourite. The religious ceremony was
followed by a civic festival, in which Auxerre welcomed its future
lord. The festival was to end at nightfall with a somewhat rude
popular pageant, in which the person of Winter would be hunted
blindfold through the streets. It was the sequel [76] to that
earlier stage-play of the Return from the East in which Denys had
been the central figure. The old forgotten player saw his part
before him, and, as if mechanically, fell again into the chief place,
monk's dress and all. It might restore his popularity: who could
tell? Hastily he donned the ashen-grey mantle, the rough haircloth
about the throat, and went through the preliminary matter. And it
happened that a point of the haircloth scratched his lip deeply, with
a long trickling of blood upon the chin. It was as if the sight of
blood transported the spectators with a kind of mad rage, and
suddenly revealed to them the truth. The pretended hunting of the
unholy creature became a real one, which brought out, in rapid
increase, men's evil passions. The soul of Denys was already at
rest, as his body, now borne along in front of the crowd, was tossed
hither and thither, torn at last limb from limb. The men stuck
little shreds of his flesh, or, failing that, of his torn raiment,
into their caps; the women lending their long hairpins for the
purpose. The monk Hermes sought in vain next day for any remains of
the body of his friend. Only, at nightfall, the heart of Denys was
brought to him by a stranger, still entire. It must long since have
mouldered into dust under the stone, marked with a cross, where he
buried it in a dark corner of the cathedral aisle.

So the figure in the stained glass explained [77] itself. To me,
Denys seemed to have been a real resident at Auxerre. On days of a
certain atmosphere, when the trace of the Middle Age comes out, like
old marks in the stones in rainy weather, I seemed actually to have
seen the tortured figure there--to have met Denys l'Auxerrois in the
streets.





III. SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK




[81] 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 [82] 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 [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?

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