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Imaginary Portraits

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Imaginary Portraits




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




[119] One stormy season about the beginning of the present century, a
great tree came down among certain moss-covered ridges of old masonry
which break the surface of the Rosenmold heath, exposing, together
with its roots, the remains of two persons. Whether the bodies (male
and female, said German bone-science) had been purposely buried there
was questionable. They seemed rather to have been hidden away by the
accident, whatever it was, which had caused death--crushed, perhaps,
under what had been the low wall of a garden--being much distorted,
and lying, though neatly enough discovered by the upheaval of the
soil, in great confusion. People's attention was the more attracted
to the incident because popular fancy had long run upon a tradition
of buried treasures, golden treasures, in or about the antiquated
ruin which the garden boundary enclosed; the roofless shell of a
small but solidly-built stone house, burnt or overthrown, perhaps in
the time of the wars at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Many persons went to [120] visit the remains lying out on the dark,
wild plateau, which stretches away above the tallest roofs of the old
grand-ducal town, very distinctly outlined, on that day, in deep
fluid grey against a sky still heavy with coming rain. No treasure,
indeed, was forthcoming among the masses of fallen stone. But the
tradition was so far verified, that the bones had rich golden
ornaments about them; and for the minds of some long-remembering
people their discovery set at rest an old query. It had never been
precisely known what was become of the young Duke Carl, who
disappeared from the world just a century before, about the time when
a great army passed over those parts, at a political crisis, one
result of which was the final absorption of his small territory in a
neighbouring dominion. Restless, romantic, eccentric, had he passed
on with the victorious host, and taken the chances of an obscure
soldier's life? Certain old letters hinted at a different ending--
love-letters which provided for a secret meeting, preliminary perhaps
to the final departure of the young Duke (who, by the usage of his
realm, could only with extreme difficulty go whither, or marry whom,
he pleased) to whatever worlds he had chosen, not of his own people.
The minds of those still interested in the matter were now at last
made up, the disposition of the remains suggesting to them the lively
picture of a sullen night, the unexpected passing of the great army,
[121] and the two lovers rushing forth wildly at the sudden tumult
outside their cheerful shelter, caught in the dark and trampled out
so, surprised and unseen, among the horses and heavy guns.

Time, at the court of the Grand-duke of Rosenmold, at the beginning
of the eighteenth century might seem to have been standing still
almost since the Middle Age--since the days of the Emperor Charles
the Fifth, at which period, by the marriage of the hereditary Grand-
duke with a princess of the Imperial house, a sudden tide of wealth,
flowing through the grand-ducal exchequer, had left a kind of golden
architectural splendour on the place, always too ample for its
population. The sloping Gothic roofs for carrying off the heavy
snows still indented the sky--a world of tiles, with space
uncurtailed for the awkward gambols of that very German goblin, Hans
Klapper, on the long, slumberous, northern nights. Whole quarryfuls
of wrought stone had been piled along the streets and around the
squares, and were now grown, in truth, like nature's self again, in
their rough, time-worn massiveness, with weeds and wild flowers where
their decay accumulated, blossoming, always the same, beyond people's
memories, every summer, as the storks came back to their platforms on
the remote chimney-tops. Without, all was as it had been on the eve
of the Thirty Years' War: the venerable dark-green mouldiness,
priceless pearl of architectural effect, was unbroken [122] by a
single new gable. And within, human life--its thoughts, its habits,
above all, its etiquette--had been put out by no matter of
excitement, political or intellectual, ever at all, one might say, at
any time. The rambling grand-ducal palace was full to overflowing
with furniture, which, useful or useless, was all ornamental, and
none of it new. Suppose the various objects, especially the contents
of the haunted old lumber-rooms, duly arranged and ticketed, and
their Highnesses would have had a historic museum, after which those
famed "Green Vaults" at Dresden would hardly have counted as one of
the glories of Augustus the Strong. An immense heraldry, that truly
German vanity, had grown, expatiating, florid, eloquent, over
everything, without and within--windows, house-fronts, church walls,
and church floors. And one-half of the male inhabitants were big or
little State functionaries, mostly of a quasi decorative order--the
treble-singer to the town-council, the court organist, the court
poet, and the like--each with his deputies and assistants,
maintaining, all unbroken, a sleepy ceremonial, to make the hours
just noticeable as they slipped away. At court, with a continuous
round of ceremonies, which, though early in the day, must always take
place under a jealous exclusion of the sun, one seemed to live in
perpetual candle-light.

It was in a delightful rummaging of one of those lumber-rooms,
escaped from that candle-light [123] into the broad day of the
uppermost windows, that the young Duke Carl laid his hand on an old
volume of the year 1486, printed in heavy type, with frontispiece,
perhaps, by Albert Dürer--Ars Versificandi: The Art of Versification:
by Conrad Celtes. Crowned poet of the Emperor Frederick the Third,
he had the right to speak on that subject; for while he vindicated as
best he might old German literature against the charge of barbarism,
he did also a man's part towards reviving in the Fatherland the
knowledge of the poetry of Greece and Rome; and for Carl, the pearl,
the golden nugget, of the volume was the Sapphic ode with which it
closed--To Apollo, praying that he would come to us from Italy,
bringing his lyre with him: Ad Apollinem, ut ab Italis cum lyra ad
Germanos veniat. The god of light, coming to Germany from some more
favoured world beyond it, over leagues of rainy hill and mountain,
making soft day there: that had ever been the dream of the ghost-
ridden yet deep-feeling and certainly meek German soul; of the great
Dürer, for instance, who had been the friend of this Conrad Celtes,
and himself, all German as he was, like a gleam of real day amid that
hyperborean German darkness--a darkness which clave to him, too, at
that dim time, when there were violent robbers, nay, real live
devils, in every German wood. And it was precisely the aspiration of
Carl himself. Those verses, coming to the boy's hand at the [124]
right moment, brought a beam of effectual day-light to a whole
magazine of observation, fancy, desire, stored up from the first
impressions of childhood. To bring Apollo with his lyre to Germany!
It was precisely that he, Carl, desired to do--was, as he might
flatter himself, actually doing.

The daylight, the Apolline aurora, which the young Duke Carl claimed
to be bringing to his candle-lit people, came in the somewhat
questionable form of the contemporary French ideal, in matters of art
and literature--French plays, French architecture, French looking-
glasses--Apollo in the dandified costume of Lewis the Fourteenth.
Only, confronting the essentially aged and decrepit graces of his
model with his own essentially youthful temper, he invigorated what
he borrowed; and with him an aspiration towards the classical ideal,
so often hollow and insincere, lost all its affectation. His doating
grandfather, the reigning Grand-duke, afforded readily enough, from
the great store of inherited wealth which would one day be the lad's,
the funds necessary for the completion of the vast unfinished
Residence, with "pavilions" (after the manner of the famous Mansard)
uniting its scattered parts; while a wonderful flowerage of
architectural fancy, with broken attic roofs, passed over and beyond
the earlier fabric; the later and lighter forms being in part carved
adroitly out of the [125] heavy masses of the old, honest, "stump
Gothic" tracery. One fault only Carl found in his French models, and
was resolute to correct. He would have, at least within, real marble
in place of stucco, and, if he might, perhaps solid gold for gilding.
There was something in the sanguine, floridly handsome youth, with
his alertness of mind turned wholly, amid the vexing preoccupations
of an age of war, upon embellishment and the softer things of life,
which soothed the testy humours of the old Duke, like the quiet
physical warmth of a fire or the sun. He was ready to preside with
all ceremony at a presentation of Marivaux's Death of Hannibal,
played in the original, with such imperfect mastery of the French
accent as the lovers of new light in Rosenmold had at command, in a
theatre copied from that at Versailles, lined with pale yellow satin,
and with a picture, amid the stucco braveries of the ceiling, of the
Septentrional Apollo himself, in somewhat watery red and blue.
Innumerable wax lights in cut-glass lustres were a thing of course.
Duke Carl himself, attired after the newest French fashion, played
the part of Hannibal. The old Duke, indeed, at a council-board
devoted hitherto to matters of state, would nod very early in certain
long discussions on matters of art--magnificent schemes, from this or
that eminent contractor, for spending his money tastefully,
distinguishings of the rococo [126] and the baroque. On the other
hand, having been all his life in close intercourse with select
humanity, self-conscious and arrayed for presentation, he was a
helpful judge of portraits and the various degrees of the attainment
of truth therein--a phase of fine art which the grandson could not
value too much. The sergeant-painter and the deputy sergeant-painter
were, indeed, conventional performers enough; as mechanical in their
dispensation of wigs, finger-rings, ruffles, and simpers, as the
figure of the armed knight who struck the bell in the Residence
tower. But scattered through its half-deserted rooms, state bed-
chambers and the like, hung the works of more genuine masters, still
as unadulterate as the hock, known to be two generations old, in the
grand-ducal cellar. The youth had even his scheme of inviting the
illustrious Antony Coppel to the court; to live there, if he would,
with the honours and emoluments of a prince of the blood. The
illustrious Mansard had actually promised to come, had not his sudden
death taken him away from earthly glory.

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