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Imaginary Portraits

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Imaginary Portraits




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.

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 [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.

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