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Imaginary Portraits

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Imaginary Portraits




And at least, if one must forgo the masters, masterpieces might be
had for their price. For ten thousand marks--day ever to be
remembered!--a genuine work of "the Urbinate," from the cabinet of a
certain commercially-minded Italian grand-duke, was on its way to
Rosenmold, anxiously awaited as it came over rainy mountain-passes,
and along the rough German [127] roads, through doubtful weather.
The tribune, the throne itself, were made ready in the presence-
chamber, with hangings in the grand-ducal colours, laced with gold,
together with a speech and an ode. Late at night, at last, the wagon
was heard rumbling into the courtyard, with the guest arrived in
safety, but, if one must confess one's self, perhaps forbidding at
first sight. From a comfortless portico, with all the grotesqueness
of the Middle Age, supported by brown, aged bishops, whose
meditations no incident could distract, Our Lady looked out no better
than an unpretending nun, with nothing to say the like of which one
was used to hear. Certainly one was not stimulated by, enwrapped,
absorbed in the great master's doings; only, with much private
disappointment, put on one's mettle to defend him against critics
notoriously wanting in sensibility, and against one's self. In
truth, the painter wham Carl most unaffectedly enjoyed, the real
vigour of his youthful and somewhat animal taste finding here its
proper sustenance, was Rubens--Rubens reached, as he is reached at
his best, in well-preserved family portraits, fresh, gay, ingenious,
as of privileged young people who could never grow old. Had not he,
too, brought something of the splendour of a "better land" into those
northern regions; if not the glowing gold of Titian's Italian sun,
yet the carnation and yellow of roses or tulips, such as [128] might
really grow there with cultivation, even under rainy skies? And
then, about this time something was heard at the grand-ducal court of
certain mysterious experiments in the making of porcelain; veritable
alchemy, for the turning of clay into gold. The reign of Dresden
china was at hand, with one's own world of little men and women more
delightfully diminutive still, amid imitations of artificial flowers.
The young Duke braced himself for a plot to steal the gifted Herr
Böttcher from his enforced residence, as if in prison, at the
fortress of Meissen. Why not bring pots and wheels to Rosenmold, and
prosecute his discoveries there? The Grand-duke, indeed, preferred
his old service of gold plate, and would have had the lad a virtuoso
in nothing less costly than gold--gold snuff-boxes.

For, in truth, regarding what belongs to art or culture, as
elsewhere, we may have a large appetite and little to feed on. Only,
in the things of the mind, the appetite itself counts for so much, at
least in hopeful, unobstructed youth, with the world before it. "You
are the Apollo you tell us of, the northern Apollo," people were
beginning to say to him, surprised from time to time by a mental
purpose beyond their guesses--expressions, liftings, softly gleaming
or vehement lights, in the handsome countenance of the youth, and his
effective speech, as he roamed, inviting all about him to share the
[129] honey, from music to painting, from painting to the drama, all
alike florid in style, yes! and perhaps third-rate. And so far
consistently throughout he had held that the centre of one's
intellectual system must be understood to be in France. He had
thoughts of proceeding to that country, secretly, in person, there to
attain the very impress of its genius.

Meantime, its more portable flowers came to order in abundance. That
the roses, so to put it, were but excellent artificial flowers,
redolent only of musk, neither disproved for Carl the validity of his
ideal nor for our minds the vocation of Carl himself in these
matters. In art, as in all other things of the mind, again, much
depends on the receiver; and the higher informing capacity, if it
exist within, will mould an unpromising matter to itself, will
realise itself by selection, and the preference of the better in what
is bad or indifferent, asserting its prerogative under the most
unlikely conditions. People had in Carl, could they have understood
it, the spectacle, under those superficial braveries, of a really
heroic effort of mind at a disadvantage. That rococo seventeenth-
century French imitation of the true Renaissance, called out in Carl
a boundless enthusiasm, as the Italian original had done two
centuries before. He put into his reception of the aesthetic
achievements of Lewis the Fourteenth what young France had felt when
Francis the First brought home the great [130] Da Vinci and his
works. It was but himself truly, after all, that he had found, so
fresh and real, among those artificial roses.

He was thrown the more upon such outward and sensuous products of
mind--architecture, pottery, presently on music--because for him,
with so large intellectual capacity, there was, to speak properly, no
literature in his mother-tongue. Books there were, German books, but
of a dulness, a distance from the actual interests of the warm,
various, coloured life around and within him, to us hardly
conceivable. There was more entertainment in the natural train of
his own solitary thoughts, humoured and rightly attuned by pleasant
visible objects, than in all the books he had hunted through so
carefully for that all-searching intellectual light, of which a
passing gleam of interest gave fallacious promise here or there. And
still, generously, he held to the belief, urging him to fresh
endeavour, that the literature which might set heart and mind free
must exist somewhere, though court librarians could not say where.
In search for it he spent many days in those old book-closets where
he had lighted on the Latin ode of Conrad Celtes. Was German
literature always to remain no more than a kind of penal apparatus
for the teasing of the brain? Oh! for a literature set free,
conterminous with the interests of life itself.

In music, it might be thought, Germany had [131] already vindicated
its spiritual liberty. One and another of those North-german towns
were already aware of the youthful Sebastian Bach. The first notes
had been heard of a music not borrowed from France, but flowing, as
naturally as springs from their sources, out of the ever musical soul
of Germany itself. And the Duke Carl was a sincere lover of music,
himself playing melodiously on the violin to a delighted court. That
new Germany of the spirit would be builded, perhaps, to the sound of
music. In those other artistic enthusiasms, as the prophet of the
French drama or the architectural taste of Lewis the Fourteenth, he
had contributed himself generously, helping out with his own good-
faith the inadequacy of their appeal. Music alone hitherto had
really helped him, and taken him out of himself. To music,
instinctively, more and more he was dedicate; and in his desire to
refine and organise the court music, from which, by leave of absence
to official performers enjoying their salaries at a distance, many
parts had literally fallen away, like the favourite notes of a worn-
out spinet, he was ably seconded by a devoted youth, the deputy
organist of the grand-ducal chapel. A member of the Roman Church
amid a people chiefly of the Reformed religion, Duke Carl would creep
sometimes into the curtained court pew of the Lutheran Church, to
which he had presented its massive golden crucifix, to listen to the
chorales, the execution of which he [132] had managed to time to his
liking, relishing, he could hardly explain why, those passages of a
pleasantly monotonous and, as it might seem, unending melody--which
certainly never came to what could rightly be called an ending here
on earth; and having also a sympathy with the cheerful genius of Dr.
Martin Luther, with his good tunes, and that ringing laughter which
sent dull goblins flitting.

At this time, then, his mind ran eagerly for awhile on the project of
some musical and dramatic development of a fancy suggested by that
old Latin poem of Conrad Celtes--the hyperborean Apollo, sojourning,
in the revolutions of time, in the sluggish north for a season, yet
Apollo still, prompting art, music, poetry, and the philosophy which
interprets man's life, making a sort of intercalary day amid the
natural darkness; not meridian day, of course, but a soft derivative
daylight, good enough for us. It would be necessarily a mystic
piece, abounding in fine touches, suggestions, innuendoes. His vague
proposal was met half-way by the very practical executant power of
his friend or servant, the deputy organist, already pondering, with
just a satiric flavour (suppressible in actual performance, if the
time for that should ever come) a musical work on Duke Carl himself;
Balder, an Interlude. He was contented to re-cast and enlarge the
part of the northern god of light, with a now wholly serious
intention. But still, [133] the near, the real and familiar, gave
precision to, or actually superseded, the distant and the ideal. The
soul of the music was but a transfusion from the fantastic but so
interesting creature close at hand. And Carl was certainly true to
his proposed part in that he gladdened others by an intellectual
radiance which had ceased to mean warmth or animation for himself.
For him the light was still to seek in France, in Italy, above all in
old Greece, amid the precious things which might yet be lurking there
unknown, in art, in poetry, perhaps in very life, till Prince
Fortunate should come.

Yes! it was thither, to Greece, that his thoughts were turned during
those romantic classical musings while the opera was made ready.
That, in due time, was presented, with sufficient success. Meantime,
his purpose was grown definite to visit that original country of the
Muses, from which the pleasant things of Italy had been but
derivative; to brave the difficulties in the way of leaving home at
all, the difficulties also of access to Greece, in the present
condition of the country.

At times the fancy came that he must really belong by descent to a
southern race, that a physical cause might lie beneath this strange
restlessness, like the imperfect reminiscence of something that had
passed in earlier life. The aged ministers of heraldry were set to
work (actually prolonging their days by an unexpected [134] revival
of interest in their too well-worn function) at the search for some
obscure rivulet of Greek descent--later Byzantine Greek, perhaps,--in
the Rosenmold genealogy. No! with a hundred quarterings, they were
as indigenous, incorruptible heraldry reasserted, as the old yew-
trees asquat on the heath.

And meantime those dreams of remote and probably adventurous travel
lent the youth, still so healthy of body, a wing for more distant
expeditions than he had ever yet inclined to, among his own wholesome
German woodlands. In long rambles, afoot or on horseback, by day and
night, he flung himself, for the resettling of his sanity, on the
cheerful influences of their simple imagery; the hawks, as if asleep
on the air below him; the bleached crags, evoked by late sunset among
the dark oaks; the water-wheels, with their pleasant murmur, in the
foldings of the hillside.

Clouds came across his heaven, little sudden clouds, like those which
in this northern latitude, where summer is at best but a flighty
visitor, chill out the heart, though but for a few minutes at a time,
of the warmest afternoon. He had fits of the gloom of other people--
their dull passage through and exit from the world, the threadbare
incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals--which, unless he
drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled into a
gloom more properly his own. Yet at such times [135] outward things
also would seem to concur unkindly in deepening the mental shadow
about him, almost as if there were indeed animation in the natural
world, elfin spirits in those inaccessible hillsides and dark
ravines, as old German poetry pretended, cheerfully assistant
sometimes, but for the most part troublesome, to their human kindred.
Of late these fits had come somewhat more frequently, and had
continued. Often it was a weary, deflowered face that his favourite
mirrors reflected. Yes! people were prosaic, and their lives
threadbare:--all but himself and organist Max, perhaps, and Fritz the
treble-singer. In return, the people in actual contact with him
thought him a little mad, though still ready to flatter his madness,
as he could detect. Alone with the doating old grandfather in their
stiff, distant, alien world of etiquette, he felt surrounded by
flatterers, and would fain have tested the sincerity even of Max, and
Fritz who said, echoing the words of the other, "Yourself, Sire, are
the Apollo of Germany!"

It was his desire to test the sincerity of the people about him, and
unveil flatterers, which in the first instance suggested a trick he
played upon the court, upon all Europe. In that complex but wholly
Teutonic genealogy lately under research, lay a much-prized thread of
descent from the fifth Emperor Charles, and Carl, under direction,
read with much readiness to be impressed [136] all that was
attainable concerning the great ancestor, finding there in truth
little enough to reward his pains. One hint he took, however. He
determined to assist at his own obsequies.

That he might in this way facilitate that much-desired journey
occurred to him almost at once as an accessory motive, and in a
little while definite motives were engrossed in the dramatic
interest, the pleasing gloom, the curiosity, of the thing itself.
Certainly, amid the living world in Germany, especially in old,
sleepy Rosenmold, death made great parade of itself. Youth even, in
its sentimental mood, was ready to indulge in the luxury of decay,
and amuse itself with fancies of the tomb; as in periods of decadence
or suspended progress, when the world seems to nap for a time,
artifices for the arrest or disguise of old age are adopted as a
fashion, and become the fopperies of the young. The whole body of
Carl's relations, saving the drowsy old grandfather, already lay
buried beneath their expansive heraldries: at times the whole world
almost seemed buried thus--made and re-made of the dead--its entire
fabric of politics, of art, of custom, being essentially heraldic
"achievements," dead men's mementoes such as those. You see he was a
sceptical young man, and his kinsmen dead and gone had passed
certainly, in his imaginations of them, into no other world, save,
perhaps, into some stiffer, slower, sleepier, [137] and more pompous
phase of ceremony--the last degree of court etiquette--as they lay
there in the great, low-pitched, grand-ducal vault, in their coffins,
dusted once a year for All Souls' Day, when the court officials
descended thither, and Mass for the dead was sung, amid an array of
dropping crape and cobwebs. The lad, with his full red lips and open
blue eyes, coming as with a great cup in his hands to life's feast,
revolted from the like of that, as from suffocation. And still the
suggestion of it was everywhere. In the garish afternoon, up to the
wholesome heights of the Heiligenberg suddenly from one of the
villages of the plain came the grinding death-knell. It seemed to
come out of the ugly grave itself, and enjoyment was dead. On his
way homeward sadly, an hour later, he enters by chance the open door
of a village church, half buried in the tangle of its churchyard.
The rude coffin is lying there of a labourer who had but a hovel to
live in. The enemy dogged one's footsteps! The young Carl seemed to
be flying, not from death simply, but from assassination.

And as these thoughts sent him back in the rebounding power of youth,
with renewed appetite, to life and sense, so, grown at last familiar,
they gave additional purpose to his fantastic experiment. Had it not
been said by a wise man that after all the offence of death was in
its trappings? Well! he would, as far as might be, try the thing,
while, presumably, a [138] large reversionary interest in life was
still his. He would purchase his freedom, at least of those gloomy
"trappings," and listen while he was spoken of as dead. The mere
preparations gave pleasant proof of the devotion to him of a certain
number, who entered without question into his plans. It is not
difficult to mislead the world concerning what happens to these who
live at the artificial distance from it of a court, with its high
wall of etiquette. However the matter was managed, no one doubted,
when, with a blazon of ceremonious words, the court news went forth
that, after a brief illness, according to the way of his race, the
hereditary Grand-duke was deceased. In momentary regret, bethinking
them of the lad's taste for splendour, those to whom the arrangement
of such matters belonged (the grandfather now sinking deeper into
bare quiescence) backed by the popular wish, determined to give him a
funeral with even more than grand-ducal measure of lugubrious
magnificence. The place of his repose was marked out for him as
officiously as if it had been the delimitation of a kingdom, in the
ducal burial vault, through the cobwebbed windows of which, from the
garden where he played as a child, the young Duke had often peered at
the faded glories of the immense coroneted coffins, the oldest
shedding their velvet tatters around them. Surrounded by the whole
official world of Rosenmold, arrayed for the occasion in almost [139]
forgotten dresses of ceremony as if for a masquerade, the new coffin
glided from the fragrant chapel where the Requiem was sung, down the
broad staircase lined with peach-colour and yellow marble, into the
shadows below. Carl himself, disguised as a strolling musician, had
followed it across the square through a drenching rain, on which
circumstance he overheard the old people congratulate the "blessed"
dead within, had listened to a dirge of his own composing brought out
on the great organ with much bravura by his friend, the new court
organist, who was in the secret, and that night turned the key of the
garden entrance to the vault, and peeped in upon the sleepy, painted,
and bewigged young pages whose duty it would be for a certain number
of days to come to watch beside their late master's couch.

And a certain number of weeks afterwards it was known that "the mad
Duke" had reappeared, to the dismay of court marshals. Things might
have gone hard with the youth had the strange news, at first as
fantastic rumour, then as matter of solemn enquiry, lastly as
ascertained fact, pleasing or otherwise, been less welcome than it
was to the grandfather, too old, indeed, to sorrow deeply, but grown
so decrepit as to propose that ministers should possess themselves of
the person of the young Duke, proclaim him of age and regent. From
those dim travels, presenting themselves to the old man, who had
never been [140] fifty miles away from home, as almost lunar in their
audacity, he would come back--come back "in time," he murmured
faintly, eager to feel that youthful, animating life on the stir
about him once more.

Carl himself, now the thing was over, greatly relishing its satiric
elements, must be forgiven the trick of the burial and his still
greater enormity in coming to life again. And then, duke or no duke,
it was understood that he willed that things should in no case be
precisely as they had been. He would never again be quite so near
people's lives as in the past--a fitful, intermittent visitor--almost
as if he had been properly dead; the empty coffin remaining as a kind
of symbolical "coronation incident," setting forth his future
relations to his subjects. Of all those who believed him dead one
human creature only, save the grandfather, had sincerely sorrowed for
him; a woman, in tears as the funeral train passed by, with whom he
had sympathetically discussed his own merits. Till then he had
forgotten the incident which had exhibited him to her as the very
genius of goodness and strength; how, one day, driving with her
country produce into the market, and, embarrassed by the crowd, she
had broken one of a hundred little police rules, whereupon the
officers were about to carry her away to be fined, or worse, amid the
jeers of the bystanders, always ready to deal hardly with "the
gipsy," at which precise [141] moment the tall Duke Carl, like the
flash of a trusty sword, had leapt from the palace stair and caused
her to pass on in peace. She had half detected him through his
disguise; in due time news of his reappearance had been ceremoniously
carried to her in her little cottage, and the remembrance of her hung
about him not ungratefully, as he went with delight upon his way.

The first long stage of his journey over, in headlong flight night
and day, he found himself one summer morning under the heat of what
seemed a southern sun, at last really at large on the Bergstrasse,
with the rich plain of the Palatinate on his left hand; on the right
hand vineyards, seen now for the first time, sloping up into the
crisp beeches of the Odenwald. By Weinheim only an empty tower
remained of the Castle of Windeck. He lay for the night in the great
whitewashed guest-chamber of the Capuchin convent.

The national rivers, like the national woods, have a family likeness:
the Main, the Lahn, the Moselle, the Neckar, the Rhine. By help of
such accommodation as chance afforded, partly on the stream itself,
partly along the banks, he pursued the leisurely winding course of
one of the prettiest of these, tarrying for awhile in the towns,
grey, white, or red, which came in his way, tasting their delightful
native "little" wines, peeping into their old overloaded churches,
inspecting the church furniture, or trying the [142] organs. For
three nights he slept, warm and dry, on the hay stored in a deserted
cloister, and, attracted into the neighbouring minster for a snatch
of church music, narrowly escaped detection. By miraculous chance
the grimmest lord of Rosenmold was there within, recognised the youth
and his companions--visitors naturally conspicuous, amid the crowd of
peasants around them--and for some hours was upon their traces.
After unclean town streets the country air was a perfume by contrast,
or actually scented with pinewoods. One seemed to breathe with it
fancies of the woods, the hills, and water--of a sort of souls in the
landscape, but cheerful and genial now, happy souls! A distant group
of pines on the verge of a great upland awoke a violent desire to be
there--seemed to challenge one to proceed thither. Was their
infinite view thence? It was like an outpost of some far-off fancy
land, a pledge of the reality of such. Above Cassel, the airy hills
curved in one black outline against a glowing sky, pregnant, one
could fancy, with weird forms, which might be at their old diableries
again on those remote places ere night was quite come there. At last
in the streets, the hundred churches, of Cologne, he feels something
of a "Gothic" enthusiasm, and all a German's enthusiasm for the
Rhine.

Through the length and breadth of the Rhine country the vintage was
begun. The red ruins on the heights, the white-walled villages,
white [143] Saint Nepomuc upon the bridges, were but isolated high
notes of contrast in a landscape, sleepy and indistinct under the
flood of sunshine, with a headiness in it like that of must, of the
new wine. The noise of the vineyards came through the lovely haze,
still, at times, with the sharp sound of a bell--death-bell, perhaps,
or only a crazy summons to the vintagers. And amid those broad,
willowy reaches of the Rhine at length, from Bingen to Mannheim,
where the brown hills wander into airy, blue distance, like a little
picture of paradise, he felt that France was at hand. Before him lay
the road thither, easy and straight.--That well of light so close!
But, unexpectedly, the capricious incidence of his own humour with
the opportunity did not suggest, as he would have wagered it must,
"Go, drink at once!" Was it that France had come to be of no account
at all, in comparison of Italy, of Greece? or that, as he passed over
the German land, the conviction had come, "For you, France, Italy,
Hellas, is here!"--that some recognition of the untried spiritual
possibilities of meek Germany had for Carl transferred the ideal land
out of space beyond the Alps or the Rhine, into future time, whither
he must be the leader? A little chilly of humour, in spite of his
manly strength, he was journeying partly in search of physical heat.
To-day certainly, in this great vineyard, physical heat was about him
in measure sufficient, at least for [144] a German constitution.
Might it be not otherwise with the imaginative, the intellectual,
heat and light; the real need being that of an interpreter--Apollo,
illuminant rather as the revealer than as the bringer of light? With
large belief that the Éclaircissement, the Aufklärung (he had already
found the name for the thing) would indeed come, he had been in much
bewilderment whence and how. Here, he began to see that it could be
in no other way than by action of informing thought upon the vast
accumulated material of which Germany was in possession: art, poetry,
fiction, an entire imaginative world, following reasonably upon a
deeper understanding of the past, of nature, of one's self--an
understanding of all beside through the knowledge of one's self. To
understand, would be the indispensable first step towards the
enlargement of the great past, of one's little present, by criticism,
by imagination. Then, the imprisoned souls of nature would speak as
of old. The Middle Age, in Germany, where the past has had such
generous reprisals, never far from us, would reassert its mystic
spell, for the better understanding of our Raffaelle. The spirits of
distant Hellas would reawake in the men and women of little German
towns. Distant times, the most alien thoughts, would come near
together, as elements in a great historic symphony. A kind of
ardent, new patriotism awoke in him, sensitive for the first time at
the words national [145] poesy, national art and literature, German
philosophy. To the resources of the past, of himself, of what was
possible for German mind, more and more his mind opens as he goes on
his way. A free, open space had been determined, which something now
to be created, created by him, must occupy. "Only," he thought, "if
I had coadjutors! If these thoughts would awake in but one other
mind!"

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