diff options
| author | Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org> | 2025-10-15 05:19:04 -0700 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org> | 2025-10-15 05:19:04 -0700 |
| commit | 62b58c9b3acccecaa691b22317bcfe98783eb568 (patch) | |
| tree | c072890653a1089e6b0d299e60eb69156282d0ac /2399-h | |
Diffstat (limited to '2399-h')
| -rw-r--r-- | 2399-h/2399-h.htm | 4047 |
1 files changed, 4047 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/2399-h/2399-h.htm b/2399-h/2399-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fb7df3f --- /dev/null +++ b/2399-h/2399-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,4047 @@ +<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> +<HTML> +<HEAD> + +<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> + +<TITLE> +The Project Gutenberg E-text of Imaginary Portraits, by Walter Pater +</TITLE> + +<STYLE TYPE="text/css"> +BODY { color: Black; + background: White; + margin-right: 10%; + margin-left: 10%; + font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; + text-align: justify } + +P {text-indent: 4% } + +P.noindent {text-indent: 0% } + +P.poem {text-indent: 0%; + margin-left: 10%; + font-size: small } + +P.letter {text-indent: 0%; + font-size: small ; + margin-left: 10% ; + margin-right: 10% } + +P.footnote {font-size: smaller ; + text-indent: 0% ; + margin-left: 10% ; + margin-right: 10% } + +P.finis { font-size: larger ; + text-align: center ; + text-indent: 0% ; + margin-left: 0% ; + margin-right: 0% } + +</STYLE> + +</HEAD> + +<BODY> + + +<pre> + +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Imaginary Portraits, by Walter Pater + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Imaginary Portraits + +Author: Walter Pater + +Posting Date: March 27, 2009 [EBook #2399] +Release Date: November, 2000 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IMAGINARY PORTRAITS *** + + + + +Produced by Bruce McClintock. HTML version by Al Haines. + + + + + +</pre> + + +<BR><BR> + +<H1 ALIGN="center"> +IMAGINARY PORTRAITS +</H1> + +<BR> + +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +by +</H3> + +<H2 ALIGN="center"> +Walter Pater +</H2> + +<BR><BR> + +<H5 ALIGN="center"> +4th edition +</H5> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<H2 ALIGN="center"> +CONTENTS +</H2> + +<TABLE ALIGN="center" WIDTH="80%"> + +<TR> +<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">CHAPTER I. </TD> +<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top"> +<A HREF="#chap01">A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS</A></TD> +</TR> + +<TR> +<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">CHAPTER II. </TD> +<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top"> +<A HREF="#chap02">DENYS L'AUXERROIS</A></TD> +</TR> + +<TR> +<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">CHAPTER III. </TD> +<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top"> +<A HREF="#chap03">SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK</A></TD> +</TR> + +<TR> +<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">CHAPTER IV. </TD> +<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top"> +<A HREF="#chap04">DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD</A></TD> +</TR> + +</TABLE> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap01"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS +</H3> + +<BR> + +<H4> +EXTRACTS FROM AN OLD FRENCH JOURNAL +</H4> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +Valenciennes, September 1701. +</P> + +<P> +They have been renovating my father's large workroom. That delightful, +tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the green +weather-stains we have known all our lives on the high whitewashed +wall, opposite which we sit, in the little sculptor's yard, for the +coolness, in summertime. Among old Watteau's workpeople came his son, +"the genius," my father's godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth, +whose large, unquiet eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various +drawings which lie exposed here. My father will have it that he is a +genius indeed, and a painter born. We have had our September Fair in +the Grande Place, a wonderful stir of sound and colour in the wide, +open space beneath our windows. And just where the crowd was busiest +young Antony was found, hoisted into one of those empty niches of the +old Hotel de Ville, sketching the scene to the life, but with a kind of +grace—a marvellous tact of omission, as my father pointed out to us, +in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own window—which +has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine, seem like people in +some fairyland; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for the +humour of the thing, have put on motley for once, and are able to throw +a world of serious innuendo into their burlesque looks, with a sort of +comedy which shall be but tragedy seen from the other side. He brought +his sketch to our house to-day, and I was present when my father +questioned him and commended his work. But the lad seemed not greatly +pleased, and left untasted the glass of old Malaga which was offered to +him. His father will hear nothing of educating him as a painter. Yet +he is not ill-to-do, and has lately built himself a new stone house, +big and grey and cold. Their old plastered house with the black +timbers, in the Rue des Cardinaux, was prettier; dating from the time +of the Spaniards, and one of the oldest in Valenciennes. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +October 1701. +</P> + +<P> +Chiefly through the solicitations of my father, old Watteau has +consented to place Antony with a teacher of painting here. I meet him +betimes on the way to his lessons, as I return from Mass; for he still +works with the masons, but making the most of late and early hours, of +every moment of liberty. And then he has the feast-days, of which there +are so many in this old-fashioned place. Ah! such gifts as his, surely, +may once in a way make much industry seem worth while. He makes a +wonderful progress. And yet, far from being set-up, and too easily +pleased with what, after all, comes to him so easily, he has, my father +thinks, too little self-approval for ultimate success. He is apt, in +truth, to fall out too hastily with himself and what he produces. Yet +here also there is the "golden mean." Yes! I could fancy myself +offended by a sort of irony which sometimes crosses the half-melancholy +sweetness of manner habitual with him; only that as I can see, he +treats himself to the same quality. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +October 1701. +</P> + +<P> +Antony Watteau comes here often now. It is the instinct of a natural +fineness in him, to escape when he can from that blank stone house, +with so little to interest, and that homely old man and woman. The +rudeness of his home has turned his feeling for even the simpler graces +of life into a physical want, like hunger or thirst, which might come +to greed; and methinks he perhaps overvalues these things. Still, made +as he is, his hard fate in that rude place must needs touch one. And +then, he profits by the experience of my father, who has much knowledge +in matters of art beyond his own art of sculpture; and Antony is not +unwelcome to him. In these last rainy weeks especially, when he can't +sketch out of doors, when the wind only half dries the pavement before +another torrent comes, and people stay at home, and the only sound from +without is the creaking of a restless shutter on its hinges, or the +march across the Place of those weary soldiers, coming and going so +interminably, one hardly knows whether to or from battle with the +English and the Austrians, from victory or defeat:—Well! he has become +like one of our family. "He will go far!" my father declares. He would +go far, in the literal sense, if he might—to Paris, to Rome. It must +be admitted that our Valenciennes is a quiet, nay! a sleepy place; +sleepier than ever since it became French, and ceased to be so near the +frontier. The grass is growing deep on our old ramparts, and it is +pleasant to walk there—to walk there and muse; pleasant for a tame, +unambitious soul such as mine. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +December 1792. +</P> + +<P> +Antony Watteau left us for Paris this morning. It came upon us quite +suddenly. They amuse themselves in Paris. A scene-painter we have here, +well known in Flanders, has been engaged to work in one of the Parisian +play-houses; and young Watteau, of whom he had some slight knowledge, +has departed in his company. He doesn't know it was I who persuaded the +scene-painter to take him; that he would find the lad useful. We +offered him our little presents—fine thread-lace of our own making for +his ruffles, and the like; for one must make a figure in Paris, and he +is slim and well-formed. For myself, I presented him with a silken +purse I had long ago embroidered for another. Well! we shall follow his +fortunes (of which I for one feel quite sure) at a distance. Old +Watteau didn't know of his departure, and has been here in great anger. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +December 1703. +</P> + +<P> +Twelve months to-day since Antony went to Paris! The first struggle +must be a sharp one for an unknown lad in that vast, overcrowded place, +even if he be as clever as young Antony Watteau. We may think, however, +that he is on the way to his chosen end, for he returns not home; +though, in truth, he tells those poor old people very little of +himself. The apprentices of the M. Metayer for whom he works, labour +all day long, each at a single part only,—coiffure, or robe, or +hand,—of the cheap pictures of religion or fantasy he exposes for sale +at a low price along the footways of the Pont Notre-Dame. Antony is +already the most skilful of them, and seems to have been promoted of +late to work on church pictures. I like the thought of that. He +receives three livres a week for his pains, and his soup daily. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +May 1705. +</P> + +<P> +Antony Watteau has parted from the dealer in pictures a bon marche and +works now with a painter of furniture pieces (those headpieces for +doors and the like, now in fashion) who is also concierge of the Palace +of the Luxembourg. Antony is actually lodged somewhere in that grand +place, which contains the king's collection of the Italian pictures he +would so willingly copy. Its gardens also are magnificent, with +something, as we understand from him, altogether of a novel kind in +their disposition and embellishment. Ah! how I delight myself, in fancy +at least, in those beautiful gardens, freer and trimmed less stiffly +than those of other royal houses. Methinks I see him there, when his +long summer-day's work is over, enjoying the cool shade of the stately, +broad-foliaged trees, each of which is a great courtier, though it has +its way almost as if it belonged to that open and unbuilt country +beyond, over which the sun is sinking. +</P> + +<P> +His thoughts, however, in the midst of all this, are not wholly away +from home, if I may judge by the subject of a picture he hopes to sell +for as much as sixty livres—Un Depart de Troupes, Soldiers +Departing—one of those scenes of military life one can study so well +here at Valenciennes. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +June 1705. +</P> + +<P> +Young Watteau has returned home—proof, with a character so independent +as his, that things have gone well with him; and (it is agreed!) stays +with us, instead of in the stone-mason's house. The old people suppose +he comes to us for the sake of my father's instruction. French people +as we are become, we are still old Flemish, if not at heart, yet on the +surface. Even in French Flanders, at Douai and Saint Omer, as I +understand, in the churches and in people's houses, as may be seen from +the very streets, there is noticeable a minute and scrupulous air of +care-taking and neatness. Antony Watteau remarks this more than ever on +returning to Valenciennes, and savours greatly, after his lodging in +Paris, our Flemish cleanliness, lover as he is of distinction and +elegance. Those worldly graces he seemed when a young lad to hunger and +thirst for, as though truly the mere adornments of life were its +necessaries, he already takes as if he had been always used to them. +And there is something noble—shall I say?—in his half-disdainful way +of serving himself with what he still, as I think, secretly values +over-much. There is an air of seemly thought—le bel serieux—about +him, which makes me think of one of those grave old Dutch statesmen in +their youth, such as that famous William the Silent. And yet the effect +of this first success of his (of more importance than its mere money +value, as insuring for the future the full play of his natural powers) +I can trace like the bloom of a flower upon him; and he has, now and +then, the gaieties which from time to time, surely, must refresh all +true artists, however hard-working and "painful." +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +July 1705. +</P> + +<P> +The charm of all this—his physiognomy and manner of being—has touched +even my young brother, Jean-Baptiste. He is greatly taken with Antony, +clings to him almost too attentively, and will be nothing but a +painter, though my father would have trained him to follow his own +profession. It may do the child good. He needs the expansion of some +generous sympathy or sentiment in that close little soul of his, as I +have thought, watching sometimes how his small face and hands are moved +in sleep. A child of ten who cares only to save and possess, to hoard +his tiny savings! Yet he is not otherwise selfish, and loves us all +with a warm heart. Just now it is the moments of Antony's company he +counts, like a little miser. Well! that may save him perhaps from +developing a certain meanness of character I have sometimes feared for +him. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +August 1705. +</P> + +<P> +We returned home late this summer evening—Antony Watteau, my father +and sisters, young Jean-Baptiste, and myself—from an excursion to +Saint-Amand, in celebration of Antony's last day with us. After +visiting the great abbey-church and its range of chapels, with their +costly encumbrance of carved shrines and golden reliquaries and funeral +scutcheons in the coloured glass, half seen through a rich enclosure of +marble and brasswork, we supped at the little inn in the forest. +Antony, looking well in his new-fashioned, long-skirted coat, and +taller than he really is, made us bring our cream and wild strawberries +out of doors, ranging ourselves according to his judgment (for a hasty +sketch in that big pocket-book he carries) on the soft slope of one of +those fresh spaces in the wood, where the trees unclose a little, while +Jean-Baptiste and my youngest sister danced a minuet on the grass, to +the notes of some strolling lutanist who had found us out. He is +visibly cheerful at the thought of his return to Paris, and became for +a moment freer and more animated than I have ever yet seen him, as he +discoursed to us about the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens in the church +here. His words, as he spoke of them, seemed full of a kind of rich +sunset with some moving glory within it. Yet I like far better than any +of these pictures of Rubens a work of that old Dutch master, Peter +Porbus, which hangs, though almost out of sight indeed, in our church +at home. The patron saints, simple, and standing firmly on either side, +present two homely old people to Our Lady enthroned in the midst, with +the look and attitude of one for whom, amid her "glories" (depicted in +dim little circular pictures, set in the openings of a chaplet of pale +flowers around her) all feelings are over, except a great pitifulness. +Her robe of shadowy blue suits my eyes better far than the hot +flesh-tints of the Medicean ladies of the great Peter Paul, in spite of +that amplitude and royal ease of action under their stiff court +costumes, at which Antony Watteau declares himself in dismay. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +August 1705. +</P> + +<P> +I am just returned from early Mass. I lingered long after the office +was ended, watching, pondering how in the world one could help a small +bird which had flown into the church but could find no way out again. I +suspect it will remain there, fluttering round and round distractedly, +far up under the arched roof till it dies exhausted. I seem to have +heard of a writer who likened man's life to a bird passing just once +only, on some winter night, from window to window, across a +cheerfully-lighted hall. The bird, taken captive by the ill-luck of a +moment, re-tracing its issueless circle till it expires within the +close vaulting of that great stone church:—human life may be like that +bird too! +</P> + +<P> +Antony Watteau returned to Paris yesterday. Yes!—Certainly, great +heights of achievement would seem to lie before him; access to regions +whither one may find it increasingly hard to follow him even in +imagination, and figure to one's self after what manner his life moves +therein. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +January 1709. +</P> + +<P> +Antony Watteau has competed for what is called the Prix de Rome, +desiring greatly to profit by the grand establishment founded at Rome +by Lewis the Fourteenth, for the encouragement of French artists. He +obtained only the second place, but does not renounce his desire to +make the journey to Italy. Could I save enough by careful economies for +that purpose? It might be conveyed to him in some indirect way that +would not offend. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +February 1712. +</P> + +<P> +We read, with much pleasure for all of us, in the Gazette to-day, among +other events of the world, that Antony Watteau had been elected to the +Academy of Painting under the new title of Peintre des Fetes Galantes, +and had been named also Peintre du Roi. My brother, Jean-Baptiste, ran +to tell the news to old Jean-Philippe and Michelle Watteau. +</P> + +<P> +A new manner of painting! The old furniture of people's rooms must +needs be changed throughout, it would seem, to accord with this +painting; or rather, the painting is designed exclusively to suit one +particular kind of apartment. A manner of painting greatly prized, as +we understand, by those Parisian judges who have had the best +opportunity of acquainting themselves with whatever is most enjoyable +in the arts:—such is the achievement of the young Watteau! He looks to +receive more orders for his work than he will be able to execute. He +will certainly relish—he, so elegant, so hungry for the colours of +life—a free intercourse with those wealthy lovers of the arts, M. de +Crozat, M. de Julienne, the Abbe de la Roque, the Count de Caylus, and +M. Gersaint, the famous dealer in pictures, who are so anxious to lodge +him in their fine hotels, and to have him of their company at their +country houses. Paris, we hear, has never been wealthier and more +luxurious than now: and the great ladies outbid each other to carry his +work upon their very fans. Those vast fortunes, however, seem to change +hands very rapidly. And Antony's new manner? I am unable even to divine +it—to conceive the trick and effect of it—at all. Only, something of +lightness and coquetry I discern there, at variance, methinks, with his +own singular gravity and even sadness of mien and mind, more answerable +to the stately apparelling of the age of Henry the Fourth, or of Lewis +the Thirteenth, in these old, sombre Spanish houses of ours. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +March 1713. +</P> + +<P> +We have all been very happy,—Jean-Baptiste as if in a delightful +dream. Antony Watteau, being consulted with regard to the lad's +training as a painter, has most generously offered to receive him for +his own pupil. My father, for some reason unknown to me, seemed to +hesitate the first; but Jean-Baptiste, whose enthusiasm for Antony +visibly refines and beautifies his whole nature, has won the necessary +permission, and this dear young brother will leave us to-morrow. Our +regrets and his, at his parting from us for the first time, overtook +our joy at his good fortune by surprise, at the last moment, as we were +about to bid each other good-night. For a while there had seemed to be +an uneasiness under our cheerful talk, as if each one present were +concealing something with an effort; and it was Jean-Baptiste himself +who gave way at last. And then we sat down again, still together, and +allowed free play to what was in our hearts, almost till morning, my +sisters weeping much. I know better how to control myself. In a few +days that delightful new life will have begun for him: and I have made +him promise to write often to us. With how small a part of my whole +life shall I be really living at Valenciennes! +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +January 1714. +</P> + +<P> +Jean-Philippe Watteau has received a letter from his son to-day. Old +Michelle Watteau, whose sight is failing, though she still works (half +by touch, indeed) at her pillow-lace, was glad to hear me read the +letter aloud more than once. It recounts—how modestly, and almost as a +matter of course!—his late successes. And yet!—does he, in writing to +these old people, purposely underrate his great good fortune and +seeming happiness, not to shock them too much by the contrast between +the delicate enjoyments of the life he now leads among the wealthy and +refined, and that bald existence of theirs in his old home? A life, +agitated, exigent, unsatisfying! That is what this letter really +discloses, below so attractive a surface. As his gift expands so does +that incurable restlessness one supposed but the humour natural to a +promising youth who had still everything to do. And now the only +realised enjoyment he has of all this might seem to be the thought of +the independence it has purchased him, so that he can escape from one +lodging-place to another, just as it may please him. He has already +deserted, somewhat incontinently, more than one of those fine houses, +the liberal air of which he used so greatly to affect, and which have +so readily received him. Has he failed truly to grasp the fact of his +great success and the rewards that lie before him? At all events, he +seems, after all, not greatly to value that dainty world he is now +privileged to enter, and has certainly but little relish for his own +works—those works which I for one so thirst to see. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +March 1714. +</P> + +<P> +We were all—Jean-Philippe, Michelle Watteau, and ourselves—half in +expectation of a visit from Antony; and to-day, quite suddenly, he is +with us. I was lingering after early Mass this morning in the church of +Saint Vaast. It is good for me to be there. Our people lie under one of +the great marble slabs before the jube, some of the memorial brass +balusters of which are engraved with their names and the dates of their +decease. The settle of carved oak which runs all round the wide nave is +my father's own work. The quiet spaciousness of the place is itself +like a meditation, an "act of recollection," and clears away the +confusions of the heart. I suppose the heavy droning of the carillon +had smothered the sound of his footsteps, for on my turning round, when +I supposed myself alone, Antony Watteau was standing near me. Constant +observer as he is of the lights and shadows of things, he visits places +of this kind at odd times. He has left Jean-Baptiste at work in Paris, +and will stay this time with the old people, not at our house; though +he has spent the better part of to-day in my father's workroom. He +hasn't yet put off, in spite of all his late intercourse with the great +world, his distant and preoccupied manner—a manner, it is true, the +same to every one. It is certainly not through pride in his success, as +some might fancy, for he was thus always. It is rather as if, with all +that success, life and its daily social routine were somewhat of a +burden to him. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +April 1714. +</P> + +<P> +At last we shall understand something of that new style of his-the +Watteau style—so much relished by the fine people at Paris. He has +taken it into his kind head to paint and decorate our chief salon—the +room with the three long windows, which occupies the first floor of the +house. +</P> + +<P> +The room was a landmark, as we used to think, an inviolable milestone +and landmark, of old Valenciennes fashion—that sombre style, indulging +much in contrasts of black or deep brown with white, which the +Spaniards left behind them here. Doubtless their eyes had found its +shadows cool and pleasant, when they shut themselves in from the +cutting sunshine of their own country. But in our country, where we +must needs economise not the shade but the sun, its grandiosity weighs +a little on one's spirits. Well! the rough plaster we used to cover as +well as might be with morsels of old figured arras-work, is replaced by +dainty panelling of wood, with mimic columns, and a quite aerial +scrollwork around sunken spaces of a pale-rose stuff and certain oval +openings—two over the doors, opening on each side of the great couch +which faces the windows, one over the chimney-piece, and one above the +buffet which forms its vis-a-vis—four spaces in all, to be filled by +and by with "fantasies" of the Four Seasons, painted by his own hand. +He will send us from Paris arm-chairs of a new pattern he has devised, +suitably covered, and a clavecin. Our old silver candlesticks look well +on the chimney-piece. Odd, faint-coloured flowers fill coquettishly the +little empty spaces here and there, like ghosts of nosegays left by +visitors long ago, which paled thus, sympathetically, at the decease of +their old owners; for, in spite of its new-fashionedness, all this +array is really less like a new thing than the last surviving result of +all the more lightsome adornments of past times. Only, the very walls +seem to cry out:—No! to make delicate insinuation, for a music, a +conversation, nimbler than any we have known, or are likely to find +here. For himself, he converses well, but very sparingly. He assures +us, indeed, that the "new style" is in truth a thing of old days, of +his own old days here in Valenciennes, when, working long hours as a +mason's boy, he in fancy reclothed the walls of this or that house he +was employed in, with this fairy arrangement—itself like a piece of +"chamber-music," methinks, part answering to part; while no too +trenchant note is allowed to break through the delicate harmony of +white and pale red and little golden touches. Yet it is all very +comfortable also, it must be confessed; with an elegant open place for +the fire, instead of the big old stove of brown tiles. The ancient, +heavy furniture of our grandparents goes up, with difficulty, into the +garrets, much against my father's inclination. To reconcile him to the +change, Antony is painting his portrait in a vast perruque and with +more vigorous massing of light and shadow than he is wont to permit +himself. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +June 1714. +</P> + +<P> +He has completed the ovals:—The Four Seasons. Oh! the summerlike +grace, the freedom and softness, of the "Summer"—a hayfield such as we +visited to-day, but boundless, and with touches of level Italian +architecture in the hot, white, elusive distance, and wreaths of +flowers, fairy hayrakes and the like, suspended from tree to tree, with +that wonderful lightness which is one of the charms of his work. I can +understand through this, at last, what it is he enjoys, what he selects +by preference, from all that various world we pass our lives in. I am +struck by the purity of the room he has re-fashioned for us—a sort of +MORAL purity; yet, in the FORMS and COLOURS of things. Is the actual +life of Paris, to which he will soon return, equally pure, that it +relishes this kind of thing so strongly? Only, methinks 'tis a pity to +incorporate so much of his work, of himself, with objects of use, which +must perish by use, or disappear, like our own old furniture, with mere +change of fashion. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +July 1714. +</P> + +<P> +On the last day of Antony Watteau's visit we made a party to Cambrai. +We entered the cathedral church: it was the hour of Vespers, and it +happened that Monseigneur le Prince de Cambrai, the author of +Telemaque, was in his place in the choir. He appears to be of great +age, assists but rarely at the offices of religion, and is never to be +seen in Paris; and Antony had much desired to behold him. Certainly it +was worth while to have come so far only to see him, and hear him give +his pontifical blessing, in a voice feeble but of infinite sweetness, +and with an inexpressibly graceful movement of the hands. A veritable +grand seigneur! His refined old age, the impress of genius and honours, +even his disappointments, concur with natural graces to make him seem +too distinguished (a fitter word fails me) for this world. Omnia +vanitas! he seems to say, yet with a profound resignation, which makes +the things we are most of us so fondly occupied with look petty enough. +Omnia vanitas! Is that indeed the proper comment on our lives, coming, +as it does in this case, from one who might have made his own all that +life has to bestow? Yet he was never to be seen at court, and has lived +here almost as an exile. Was our "Great King Lewis" jealous of a true +grand seigneur or grand monarque by natural gift and the favour of +heaven, that he could not endure his presence? +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +July 1714. +</P> + +<P> +My own portrait remains unfinished at his sudden departure. I sat for +it in a walking-dress, made under his direction—a gown of a peculiar +silken stuff, falling into an abundance of small folds, giving me "a +certain air of piquancy" which pleases him, but is far enough from my +true self. My old Flemish faille, which I shall always wear, suits me +better. +</P> + +<P> +I notice that our good-hearted but sometimes difficult friend said +little of our brother Jean-Baptiste, though he knows us so anxious on +his account—spoke only of his constant industry, cautiously, and not +altogether with satisfaction, as if the sight of it wearied him. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +September 1714. +</P> + +<P> +Will Antony ever accomplish that long-pondered journey to Italy? For +his own sake, I should be glad he might. Yet it seems desolately far, +across those great hills and plains. I remember how I formed a plan for +providing him with a sum sufficient for the purpose. But that he no +longer needs. +</P> + +<P> +With myself, how to get through time becomes sometimes the +question,—unavoidably; though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sad +in a life so short as ours. The sullenness of a long wet day is +yielding just now to an outburst of watery sunset, which strikes from +the far horizon of this quiet world of ours, over fields and +willow-woods, upon the shifty weather-vanes and long-pointed windows of +the tower on the square—from which the Angelus is sounding-with a +momentary promise of a fine night. I prefer the Salut at Saint Vaast. +The walk thither is a longer one, and I have a fancy always that I may +meet Antony Watteau there again, any time; just as, when a child, +having found one day a tiny box in the shape of a silver coin, for long +afterwards I used to try every piece of money that came into my hands, +expecting it to open. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +September 1714. +</P> + +<P> +We were sitting in the Watteau chamber for the coolness, this sultry +evening. A sudden gust of wind ruffled the lights in the sconces on the +walls: the distant rumblings, which had continued all the afternoon, +broke out at last; and through the driving rain, a coach, rattling +across the Place, stops at our door: in a moment Jean-Baptiste is with +us once again; but with bitter tears in his eyes;—dismissed! +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +October 1714. +</P> + +<P> +Jean-Baptiste! he too, rejected by Antony! It makes our friendship and +fraternal sympathy closer. And still as he labours, not less sedulously +than of old, and still so full of loyalty to his old master, in that +Watteau chamber, I seem to see Antony himself, of whom Jean-Baptiste +dares not yet speak,—to come very near his work, and understand his +great parts. So Jean-Baptiste's work, in its nearness to his, may +stand, for the future, as the central interest of my life. I bury +myself in that. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +February 1715. +</P> + +<P> +If I understand anything of these matters, Antony Watteau paints that +delicate life of Paris so excellently, with so much spirit, partly +because, after all, he looks down upon it or despises it. To persuade +myself of that, is my womanly satisfaction for his preference—his +apparent preference—for a world so different from mine. Those +coquetries, those vain and perishable graces, can be rendered so +perfectly, only through an intimate understanding of them. For him, to +understand must be to despise them; while (I think I know why) he +nevertheless undergoes their fascination. Hence that discontent with +himself, which keeps pace with his fame. It would have been better for +him—he would have enjoyed a purer and more real happiness—had he +remained here, obscure; as it might have been better for me! +</P> + +<P> +It is altogether different with Jean-Baptiste. He approaches that life, +and all its pretty nothingness, from a level no higher than its own; +and beginning just where Antony Watteau leaves off in disdain, produces +a solid and veritable likeness of it and of its ways. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +March 1715. +</P> + +<P> +There are points in his painting (I apprehend this through his own +persistently modest observations) at which he works out his purpose +more excellently than Watteau; of whom he has trusted himself to speak +at last, with a wonderful self-effacement, pointing out in each of his +pictures, for the rest so just and true, how Antony would have managed +this or that, and, with what an easy superiority, have done the thing +better—done the impossible. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +February 1716. +</P> + +<P> +There are good things, attractive things, in life, meant for one and +not for another—not meant perhaps for me; as there are pretty clothes +which are not suitable for every one. I find a certain immobility of +disposition in me, to quicken or interfere with which is like physical +pain. He, so brilliant, petulant, mobile! I am better far beside +Jean-Baptiste—in contact with his quiet, even labour, and manner of +being. At first he did the work to which he had set himself, sullenly; +but the mechanical labour of it has cleared his mind and temper at +last, as a sullen day turns quite clear and fine by imperceptible +change. With the earliest dawn he enters his workroom, the Watteau +chamber, where he remains at work all day. The dark evenings he spends +in industrious preparation with the crayon for the pictures he is to +finish during the hours of daylight. His toil is also his amusement: he +goes but rarely into the society whose manners he has to re-produce. +The animals in his pictures, pet animals, are mere toys: he knows it. +But he finishes a large number of works, door-heads, clavecin cases, +and the like. His happiest, his most genial moments, he puts, like +savings of fine gold, into one particular picture (true opus magnum, as +he hopes), The Swing. He has the secret of surprising effects with a +certain pearl-grey silken stuff of his predilection; and it must be +confessed that he paints hands—which a draughtsman, of course, should +understand at least twice as well other people—with surpassing +expression. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +March 1716. +</P> + +<P> +Is it the depressing result of this labour, of a too exacting labour? I +know not. But at times (it is his one melancholy!) he expresses a +strange apprehension of poverty, of penury and mean surroundings in old +age; reminding me of that childish disposition to hoard, which I +noticed in him of old. And then—inglorious Watteau, as he is!—at +times that steadiness, in which he is so great a contrast to Antony, as +it were accumulates, changes, into a ray of genius, a grace, an +inexplicable touch of truth, in which all his heaviness leaves him for +a while, and he actually goes beyond the master; as himself protests to +me, yet modestly. And still, it is precisely at those moments that he +feels most the difference between himself and Antony Watteau. "In THAT +country, ALL the pebbles are golden nuggets," he says; with perfect +good-humour. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +June 1716. +</P> + +<P> +'Tis truly in a delightful abode that Antony Watteau is just now +lodged—the hotel or town-house of M. de Crozat, which is not only a +comfortable dwelling-place, but also a precious museum lucky people go +far to see. Jean-Baptiste, too, has seen the place, and describes it. +The antiquities, beautiful curiosities of all sorts—above all, the +original drawings of those old masters Antony so greatly admires-are +arranged all around one there, that the influence, the genius, of those +things may imperceptibly play upon and enter into one, and form what +one does. The house is situated near the Rue Richelieu, but has a large +garden bout it. M. de Crozat gives his musical parties there, and +Antony Watteau has painted the walls of one of the apartments with the +Four Seasons, after the manner of ours, but doubtless improved by +second thoughts. This beautiful place is now Antony's home for a while. +The house has but one story, with attics in the mansard roofs, like +those of a farmhouse in the country. I fancy Antony fled thither for a +few moments, from the visitors who weary him; breathing the freshness +of that dewy garden in the very midst of Paris. As for me, I suffocate +this summer afternoon in this pretty Watteau chamber of ours, where +Jean-Baptiste is at work so contentedly. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +May 1717. +</P> + +<P> +In spite of all that happened, Jean-Baptiste has been looking forward +to a visit to Valenciennes which Antony Watteau had proposed to make. +He hopes always—has a patient hope—that Antony's former patronage of +him may be revived. And now he is among us, actually at his +work-restless and disquieting, meagre, like a woman with some nervous +malady. Is it pity, then, pity only, one must feel for the brilliant +one? He has been criticising the work of Jean-Baptiste, who takes his +judgments generously, gratefully. Can it be that, after all, he +despises and is no true lover of his own art, and is but chilled by an +enthusiasm for it in another, such as that of Jean-Baptiste? as if +Jean-Baptiste over-valued it, or as if some ignobleness or blunder, +some sign that he has really missed his aim, started into sight from +his work at the sound of praise—as if such praise could hardly be +altogether sincere. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +June 1717. +</P> + +<P> +And at last one has actual sight of his work—what it is. He has +brought with him certain long-cherished designs to finish here in +quiet, as he protests he has never finished before. That charming +Noblesse—can it be really so distinguished to the minutest point, so +naturally aristocratic? Half in masquerade, playing the drawing-room or +garden comedy of life, these persons have upon them, not less than the +landscape he composes, and among the accidents of which they group +themselves with such a perfect fittingness, a certain light we should +seek for in vain upon anything real. For their framework they have +around them a veritable architecture—a tree-architecture—to which +those moss-grown balusters, termes, statues, fountains, are really but +accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find +myself always saying to myself involuntarily, "The evening will be a +wet one." The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour of +the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where delicate +children may be trusted thinly clad; and the secular trees themselves +will hardly outlast another generation. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +July 1717. +</P> + +<P> +There has been an exhibition of his pictures in the Hall of the Academy +of Saint Luke; and all the world has been to see. +</P> + +<P> +Yes! Besides that unreal, imaginary light upon these scenes, these +persons, which is pure gift of his, there was a light, a poetry, in +those persons and things themselves, close at hand WE had not seen. He +has enabled us to see it: we are so much the better-off thereby, and I, +for one, the better. The world he sets before us so engagingly has its +care for purity, its cleanly preferences, in what one is to SEE—in the +outsides of things-and there is something, a sign, a memento, at the +least, of what makes life really valuable, even in that. There, is my +simple notion, wholly womanly perhaps, but which I may hold by, of the +purpose of the arts. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +August 1717. +</P> + +<P> +And yet! (to read my mind, my experience, in somewhat different terms) +methinks Antony Watteau reproduces that gallant world, those patched +and powdered ladies and fine cavaliers, so much to its own +satisfaction, partly because he despises it; if this be a possible +condition of excellent artistic production. People talk of a new era +now dawning upon the world, of fraternity, liberty, humanity, of a +novel sort of social freedom in which men's natural goodness of heart +will blossom at a thousand points hitherto repressed, of wars +disappearing from the world in an infinite, benevolent ease of +life—yes! perhaps of infinite littleness also. And it is the outward +manner of that, which, partly by anticipation, and through pure +intellectual power, Antony Watteau has caught, together with a +flattering something of his own, added thereto. Himself really of the +old time—that serious old time which is passing away, the impress of +which he carries on his physiognomy—he dignifies, by what in him is +neither more nor less than a profound melancholy, the essential +insignificance of what he wills to touch in all that, transforming its +mere pettiness into grace. It looks certainly very graceful, fresh, +animated, "piquant," as they love to say—yes! and withal, I repeat, +perfectly pure, and may well congratulate itself on the loan of a +fallacious grace, not its own. For in truth Antony Watteau is still the +mason's boy, and deals with that world under a fascination, of the +nature of which he is half-conscious methinks, puzzled at "the queer +trick he possesses," to use his own phrase. You see him growing ever +more and more meagre, as he goes through the world and its applause. +Yet he reaches with wonderful sagacity the secret of an adjustment of +colours, a coiffure, a toilette, setting I know not what air of real +superiority on such things. He will never overcome his early training; +and these light things will possess for him always a kind of +representative or borrowed worth, as characterising that impossible or +forbidden world which the mason's boy saw through the closed gateways +of the enchanted garden. Those trifling and petty graces, the insignia +to him of that nobler world of aspiration and idea, even now that he is +aware, as I conceive, of their true littleness, bring back to him, by +the power of association, all the old magical exhilaration of his +dream—his dream of a better world than the real one. There, is the +formula, as I apprehend, of his success—of his extraordinary hold on +things so alien from himself. And I think there is more real hilarity +in my brother's fetes champetres—more truth to life, and therefore +less distinction. Yes! The world profits by such reflection of its +poor, coarse self, in one who renders all its caprices from the height +of a Corneille. That is my way of making up to myself for the fact that +I think his days, too, would have been really happier, had he remained +obscure at Valenciennes. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +September 1717. +</P> + +<P> +My own poor likeness, begun so long ago, still remains unfinished on +the easel, at his departure from Valenciennes—perhaps for ever; since +the old people departed this life in the hard winter of last year, at +no distant time from each other. It is pleasanter to him to sketch and +plan than to paint and finish; and he is often out of humour with +himself because he cannot project into a picture the life and spirit of +his first thought with the crayon. He would fain begin where that +famous master Gerard Dow left off, and snatch, as it were with a single +stroke, what in him was the result of infinite patience. It is the sign +of this sort of promptitude that he values solely in the work of +another. To my thinking there is a kind of greed or grasping in that +humour; as if things were not to last very long, and one must snatch +opportunity. And often he succeeds. The old Dutch painter cherished +with a kind of piety his colours and pencils. Antony Watteau, on the +contrary, will hardly make any preparations for his work at all, or +even clean his palette, in the dead-set he makes at improvisation. 'Tis +the contrast perhaps between the staid Dutch genius and the petulant, +sparkling French temper of this new era, into which he has thrown +himself. Alas! it is already apparent that the result also loses +something of longevity, of durability—the colours fading or changing, +from the first, somewhat rapidly, as Jean-Baptiste notes. 'Tis true, a +mere trifle alters or produces the expression. But then, on the other +hand, in pictures the whole effect of which lies in a kind of harmony, +the treachery of a single colour must needs involve the failure of the +whole to outlast the fleeting grace of those social conjunctions it is +meant to perpetuate. This is what has happened, in part, to that +portrait on the easel. Meantime, he has commanded Jean-Baptiste to +finish it; and so it must be. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +October 1717. +</P> + +<P> +Antony Watteau is an excellent judge of literature, and I have been +reading (with infinite surprise!) in my afternoon walks in the little +wood here, a new book he left behind him—a great favourite of his; as +it has been a favourite with large numbers in Paris.* Those pathetic +shocks of fortune, those sudden alternations of pleasure and remorse, +which must always lie among the very conditions of an irregular and +guilty love, as in sinful games of chance:—they have begun to talk of +these things in Paris, to amuse themselves with the spectacle of them, +set forth here, in the story of poor Manon Lescaut—for whom fidelity +is impossible, vulgarly eager for the money which can buy pleasures, +such as hers—with an art like Watteau's own, for lightness and grace. +Incapacity of truth, yet with such tenderness, such a gift of tears, on +the one side: on the other, a faith so absolute as to give to an +illicit love almost the regularity of marriage! And this is the book +those fine ladies in Watteau's "conversations," who look so exquisitely +pure, lay down on the cushion when the children run up to have their +laces righted. Yet the pity of it! What floods of weeping! There is a +tone about which strikes me as going well with the grace of these +leafless birch-trees against the sky, the pale silver of their bark, +and a certain delicate odour of decay which rises from the soil. It is +all one half-light; and the heroine, nay! The hero himself also, that +dainty Chevalier des Grieux, with all his fervour, have, I think, but a +half-life in them truly, from the first. And I could fancy myself +almost of their condition sitting here alone this evening, in which a +premature touch of winter makes the world look but an inhospitable +place of entertainment for one's spirit. With so little genial warmth +to hold it there, one feels that the merest accident might detach that +flighty guest altogether. So chilled at heart things seem to me, as I +gaze on that glacial point in the motionless sky, like some mortal spot +whence death begins to creep over the body! +</P> + +<P CLASS="footnote"> +*Possibly written at this date, but almost certainly not printed till +many years later.—Note in Second Edition. +</P> + +<P> +And yet, in the midst of this, by mere force of contrast, comes back to +me, very vividly, the true colour, ruddy with blossom and fruit, of the +past summer, among the streets and gardens of some of our old towns we +visited; when the thought of cold was a luxury, and the earth dry +enough to sleep on. The summer was indeed a fine one; and the whole +country seemed bewitched. A kind of infectious sentiment passed upon +us, like an efflux from its flowers and flowerlike +architecture—flower-like to me at least, but of which I never felt the +beauty before. +</P> + +<P> +And as I think of that, certainly I have to confess that there is a +wonderful reality about this lovers' story; an accordance between +themselves and the conditions of things around them, so deep as to make +it seem that the course of their lives could hardly have been other +than it was. That impression comes, perhaps, wholly of the writer's +skill; but, at all events, I must read the book no more. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +June 1718. +</P> + +<P> +And he has allowed that Mademoiselle Rosalba—"ce bel esprit"—who can +discourse upon the arts like a master, to paint his portrait: has +painted hers in return! She holds a lapful of white roses with her two +hands. Rosa Alba—himself has inscribed it! It will be engraved, to +circulate and perpetuate it the better. +</P> + +<P> +One's journal, here in one's solitude, is of service at least in this, +that it affords an escape for vain regrets, angers, impatience. One +puts this and that angry spasm into it, and is delivered from it so. +</P> + +<P> +And then, it was at the desire of M. de Crozat that the thing was done. +One must oblige one's patrons. The lady also, they tell me, is +consumptive, like Antony himself, and like to die. And he, who has +always lacked either the money or the spirits to make that +long-pondered, much-desired journey to Italy, has found in her work the +veritable accent and colour of those old Venetian masters he would so +willingly have studied under the sunshine of their own land. Alas! How +little peace have his great successes given him; how little of that +quietude of mind, without which, methinks, one fails in true dignity of +character. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +November 1718. +</P> + +<P> +His thirst for change of place has actually driven him to England, that +veritable home of the consumptive. Ah me! I feel it may be the +finishing stroke. To have run into the native country of consumption! +Strange caprice of that desire to travel, which he has really indulged +so little in his life—of the restlessness which, they tell me, is +itself a symptom of this terrible disease! +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +January 1720. +</P> + +<P> +As once before, after long silence, a token has reached us, a slight +token that he remembers—an etched plate, one of very few he has +executed, with that old subject: Soldiers on the March. And the weary +soldier himself is returning once more to Valenciennes, on his way from +England to Paris. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +February 1720. +</P> + +<P> +Those sharply-arched brows, those restless eyes which seem larger than +ever—something that seizes on one, and is almost terrible, in his +expression—speak clearly, and irresistibly set one on the thought of a +summing-up of his life. I am reminded of the day when, already with +that air of seemly thought, le bel serieux, he was found sketching, +with so much truth to the inmost mind in them, those picturesque +mountebanks at the Fair in the Grande Place; and I find, throughout his +course of life, something of the essential melancholy of the comedian. +He, so fastidious and cold, and who has never "ventured the +representation of passion," does but amuse the gay world; and is aware +of that, though certainly unamused himself all the while. Just now, +however, he is finishing a very different picture—that too, full of +humour—an English family-group, with a little girl riding a wooden +horse: the father, and the mother holding his tobacco-pipe, stand in +the centre. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +March 1720. +</P> + +<P> +To-morrow he will depart finally. And this evening the Syndics of the +Academy of Saint Luke came with their scarves and banners to conduct +their illustrious fellow-citizen, by torchlight, to supper in their +Guildhall, where all their beautiful old corporation plate will be +displayed. The Watteau salon was lighted up to receive them. There is +something in the payment of great honours to the living which fills one +with apprehension, especially when the recipient of them looks so like +a dying man. God have mercy on him! +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +April 1721. +</P> + +<P> +We were on the point of retiring to rest last evening when a messenger +arrived post-haste with a letter on behalf of Antony Watteau, desiring +Jean-Baptiste's presence at Paris. We did not go to bed that night; and +my brother was on his way before daylight, his heart full of a strange +conflict of joy and apprehension. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +May 1721. +</P> + +<P> +A letter at last! from Jean-Baptiste, occupied with cares of all sorts +at the bedside of the sufferer. Antony fancying that the air of the +country might do him good, the Abbe Haranger, one of the canons of the +Church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, where he was in the habit of +hearing Mass, has lent him a house at Nogent-sur-Marne. There he +receives a few visitors. But in truth the places he once liked best, +the people, nay! the very friends, have become to him nothing less than +insupportable. Though he still dreams of change, and would fain try his +native air once more, he is at work constantly upon his art; but solely +by way of a teacher, instructing (with a kind of remorseful diligence, +it would seem) Jean-Baptiste, who will be heir to his unfinished work, +and take up many of his pictures where he has left them. He seems now +anxious for one thing only, to give his old "dismissed" disciple what +remains of himself and the last secrets of his genius. His +property—9000 livres only—goes to his relations. Jean-Baptiste has +found these last weeks immeasurably useful. +</P> + +<P> +For the rest, bodily exhaustion perhaps, and this new interest in an +old friend, have brought him tranquillity at last, a tranquillity in +which he is much occupied with matters of religion. Ah! it was ever so +with me. And one lives also most reasonably so.—With women, at least, +it is thus, quite certainly. Yet I know not what there is of a pity +which strikes deep, at the thought of a man, a while since so strong, +turning his face to the wall from the things which most occupy men's +lives. 'Tis that homely, but honest cure of Nogent he has caricatured +so often, who attends him. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +July 1721. +</P> + +<P> +Our incomparable Watteau is no more! Jean-Baptiste returned +unexpectedly. I heard his hasty footsteps on the stairs. We turned +together into that room; and he told his story there. Antony Watteau +departed suddenly, in the arms of M. Gersaint, on one of the late hot +days of July. At the last moment he had been at work upon a crucifix +for the good cure of Nogent, liking little the very rude one he +possessed. He died with all the sentiments of religion. +</P> + +<P> +He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after +something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not +at all. +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap02"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +CHAPTER II. DENYS L'AUXERROIS +</H3> + +<P> +Almost every people, as we know, has had its legend of a "golden age" +and of its return—legends which will hardly be forgotten, however +prosaic the world may become, while man himself remains the aspiring, +never quite contented being he is. And yet in truth, since we are no +longer children, we might well question the advantage of the return to +us of a condition of life in which, by the nature of the case, the +values of things would, so to speak, lie wholly on their surfaces, +unless we could regain also the childish consciousness, or rather +unconsciousness, in ourselves, to take all that adroitly and with the +appropriate lightness of heart. The dream, however, has been left for +the most part in the usual vagueness of dreams: in their waking hours +people have been too busy to furnish it forth with details. What +follows is a quaint legend, with detail enough, of such a return of a +golden or poetically-gilded age (a denizen of old Greece itself +actually finding his way back again among men) as it happened in an +ancient town of medieval France. +</P> + +<P> +Of the French town, properly so called, in which the products of +successive ages, not with-out lively touches of the present, are +blended together harmoniously, with a beauty SPECIFIC—a beauty +cisalpine and northern, yet at the same time quite distinct from the +massive German picturesque of Ulm, or Freiburg, or Augsburg, and of +which Turner has found the ideal in certain of his studies of the +rivers of France, a perfectly happy conjunction of river and town being +of the essence of its physiognomy—the town of Auxerre is perhaps the +most complete realisation to be found by the actual wanderer. +Certainly, for picturesque expression it is the most memorable of a +distinguished group of three in these parts,—Auxerre, Sens, +Troyes,—each gathered, as if with deliberate aim at such effect, about +the central mass of a huge grey cathedral. +</P> + +<P> +Around Troyes the natural picturesque is to be sought only in the rich, +almost coarse, summer colouring of the Champagne country, of which the +very tiles, the plaster and brickwork of its tiny villages and great, +straggling, village-like farms have caught the warmth. The cathedral, +visible far and wide over the fields seemingly of loose wild-flowers, +itself a rich mixture of all the varieties of the Pointed style down to +the latest Flamboyant, may be noticed among the greater French churches +for breadth of proportions internally, and is famous for its almost +unrivalled treasure of stained glass, chiefly of a florid, elaborate, +later type, with much highly conscious artistic contrivance in design +as well as in colour. In one of the richest of its windows, for +instance, certain lines of pearly white run hither and thither, with +delightful distant effect, upon ruby and dark blue. Approaching nearer +you find it to be a Travellers' window, and those odd lines of white +the long walking-staves in the hands of Abraham, Raphael, the Magi, and +the other saintly patrons of journeys. The appropriate provincial +character of the bourgeoisie of Champagne is still to be seen, it would +appear, among the citizens of Troyes. Its streets, for the most part in +timber and pargeting, present more than one unaltered specimen of the +ancient hotel or town-house, with forecourt and garden in the rear; and +its more devout citizens would seem even in their church-building to +have sought chiefly to please the eyes of those occupied with mundane +affairs and out of doors, for they have finished, with abundant outlay, +only the vast, useless portals of their parish churches, of surprising +height and lightness, in a kind of wildly elegant Gothic-on-stilts, +giving to the streets of Troyes a peculiar air of the grotesque, as if +in some quaint nightmare of the Middle Age. +</P> + +<P> +At Sens, thirty miles away to the west, a place of far graver aspect, +the name of Jean Cousin denotes a more chastened temper, even in these +sumptuous decorations. Here all is cool and composed, with an almost +English austerity. The first growth of the Pointed style in +England—the hard "early English" of Canterbury—is indeed the creation +of William, a master reared in the architectural school of Sens; and +the severity of his taste might seem to have acted as a restraining +power on all the subsequent changes of manner in this place—changes in +themselves for the most part towards luxuriance. In harmony with the +atmosphere of its great church is the cleanly quiet of the town, kept +fresh by little channels of clear water circulating through its +streets, derivatives of the rapid Vanne which falls just below into the +Yonne. The Yonne, bending gracefully, link after link, through a +never-ending rustle of poplar trees, beneath lowly vine-clad hills, +with relics of delicate woodland here and there, sometimes close at +hand, sometimes leaving an interval of broad meadow, has all the +lightsome characteristics of French river-side scenery on a smaller +scale than usual, and might pass for the child's fancy of a river, like +the rivers of the old miniature-painters, blue, and full to a fair +green margin. One notices along its course a greater proportion than +elsewhere of still untouched old seignorial residences, larger or +smaller. The range of old gibbous towns along its banks, expanding +their gay quays upon the water-side, have a common character—Joigny, +Villeneuve, Julien-du-Sault—yet tempt us to tarry at each and examine +its relics, old glass and the like, of the Renaissance or the Middle +Age, for the acquisition of real though minor lessons on the various +arts which have left themselves a central monument at +Auxerre.—Auxerre! A slight ascent in the winding road! and you have +before you the prettiest town in France—the broad framework of +vineyard sloping upwards gently to the horizon, with distant white +cottages inviting one to walk: the quiet curve of river below, with all +the river-side details: the three great purple-tiled masses of Saint +Germain, Saint Pierre, and the cathedral of Saint Etienne, rising out +of the crowded houses with more than the usual abruptness and +irregularity of French building. Here, that rare artist, the +susceptible painter of architecture, if he understands the value alike +of line and mass of broad masses and delicate lines, has "a subject +made to his hand." +</P> + +<P> +A veritable country of the vine, it presents nevertheless an expression +peaceful rather than radiant. Perfect type of that happy mean between +northern earnestness and the luxury of the south, for which we prize +midland France, its physiognomy is not quite happy—attractive in part +for its melancholy. Its most characteristic atmosphere is to be seen +when the tide of light and distant cloud is travelling quickly over it, +when rain is not far off, and every touch of art or of time on its old +building is defined in clear grey. A fine summer ripens its grapes into +a valuable wine; but in spite of that it seems always longing for a +larger and more continuous allowance of the sunshine which is so much +to its taste. You might fancy something querulous or plaintive in that +rustling movement of the vine-leaves, as blue-frocked Jacques Bonhomme +finishes his day's labour among them. +</P> + +<P> +To beguile one such afternoon when the rain set in early and walking +was impossible, I found my way to the shop of an old dealer in +bric-a-brac. It was not a monotonous display, after the manner of the +Parisian dealer, of a stock-in-trade the like of which one has seen +many times over, but a discriminate collection of real curiosities. One +seemed to recognise a provincial school of taste in various relics of +the housekeeping of the last century, with many a gem of earlier times +from the old churches and religious houses of the neighbourhood. Among +them was a large and brilliant fragment of stained glass which might +have come from the cathedral itself. Of the very finest quality in +colour and design, it presented a figure not exactly conformable to any +recognised ecclesiastical type; and it was clearly part of a series. On +my eager inquiry for the remainder, the old man replied that no more of +it was known, but added that the priest of a neighbouring village was +the possessor of an entire set of tapestries, apparently intended for +suspension in church, and designed to portray the whole subject of +which the figure in the stained glass was a portion. +</P> + +<P> +Next afternoon accordingly I repaired to the priest's house, in reality +a little Gothic building, part perhaps of an ancient manor-house, close +to the village church. In the front garden, flower-garden and potager +in one, the bees were busy among the autumn growths—many-coloured +asters, bignonias, scarlet-beans, and the old-fashioned parsonage +flowers. The courteous owner readily showed me his tapestries, some of +which hung on the walls of his parlour and staircase by way of a +background for the display of the other curiosities of which he was a +collector. Certainly, those tapestries and the stained glass dealt with +the same theme. In both were the same musical instruments—pipes, +cymbals, long reed-like trumpets. The story, indeed, included the +building of an organ, just such an instrument, only on a larger scale, +as was standing in the old priest's library, though almost soundless +now, whereas in certain of the woven pictures the hearers appear as if +transported, some of them shouting rapturously to the organ music. A +sort of mad vehemence prevails, indeed, throughout the delicate +bewilderments of the whole series—giddy dances, wild animals leaping, +above all perpetual wreathings of the vine, connecting, like some mazy +arabesque, the various presentations of one oft-repeated figure, +translated here out of the clear-coloured glass into the sadder, +somewhat opaque and earthen hues of the silken threads. The figure was +that of the organ-builder himself, a flaxen and flowery creature, +sometimes wellnigh naked among the vine-leaves, sometimes muffled in +skins against the cold, sometimes in the dress of a monk, but always +with a strong impress of real character and incident from the veritable +streets of Auxerre. What is it? Certainly, notwithstanding its grace, +and wealth of graceful accessories, a suffering, tortured figure. With +all the regular beauty of a pagan god, he has suffered after a manner +of which we must suppose pagan gods incapable. It was as if one of +those fair, triumphant beings had cast in his lot with the creatures of +an age later than his own, people of larger spiritual capacity and +assuredly of a larger capacity for melancholy. With this fancy in my +mind, by the help of certain notes, which lay in the priest's curious +library, upon the history of the works at the cathedral during the +period of its finishing, and in repeated examination of the old +tapestried designs, the story shaped itself at last. +</P> + +<P> +Towards the middle of the thirteenth century the cathedral of Saint +Etienne was complete in its main outlines: what remained was the +building of the great tower, and all that various labour of final +decoration which it would take more than one generation to accomplish. +Certain circumstances, however, not wholly explained, led to a somewhat +rapid finishing, as it were out of hand, yet with a marvellous fulness +at once and grace. Of the result much has perished, or been transferred +elsewhere; a portion is still visible in sumptuous relics of stained +windows, and, above all, in the reliefs which adorn the western +portals, very delicately carved in a fine, firm stone from Tonnerre, of +which time has only browned the surface, and which, for early mastery +in art, may be compared with the contemporary work of Italy. They come +nearer than the art of that age was used to do to the expression of +life; with a feeling for reality, in no ignoble form, caught, it might +seem, from the ardent and full-veined existence then current in these +actual streets and houses. Just then Auxerre had its turn in that +political movement which broke out sympathetically, first in one, then +in another of the towns of France, turning their narrow, feudal +institutions into a free, communistic life—a movement of which those +great centres of popular devotion, the French cathedrals, are in many +instances the monument. Closely connected always with the assertion of +individual freedom, alike in mind and manners, at Auxerre this +political stir was associated also, as cause or effect, with the figure +and character of a particular personage, long remembered. He was the +very genius, it would appear, of that new, free, generous manner in +art, active and potent as a living creature. +</P> + +<P> +As the most skilful of the band of carvers worked there one day, with a +labour he could never quite make equal to the vision within him, a +finely-sculptured Greek coffin of stone, which had been made to serve +for some later Roman funeral, was unearthed by the masons. Here, it +might seem, the thing was indeed done, and art achieved, as far as +regards those final graces, and harmonies of execution, which were +precisely what lay beyond the hand of the medieval workman, who for his +part had largely at command a seriousness of conception lacking in the +old Greek. Within the coffin lay an object of a fresh and brilliant +clearness among the ashes of the dead—a flask of lively green glass, +like a great emerald. It might have been "the wondrous vessel of the +Grail." Only, this object seemed to bring back no ineffable purity, but +rather the riotous and earthy heat of old paganism itself. Coated +within, and, as some were persuaded, still redolent with the tawny +sediment of the Roman wine it had held so long ago, it was set aside +for use at the supper which was shortly to celebrate the completion of +the masons' work. Amid much talk of the great age of gold, and some +random expressions of hope that it might return again, fine old wine of +Auxerre was sipped in small glasses from the precious flask as supper +ended. And, whether or not the opening of the buried vessel had +anything to do with it, from that time a sort of golden age seemed +indeed to be reigning there for a while, and the triumphant completion +of the great church was contemporary with a series of remarkable wine +seasons. The vintage of those years was long remembered. Fine and +abundant wine was to be found stored up even in poor men's cottages; +while a new beauty, a gaiety, was abroad, as all the conjoint arts +branched out exuberantly in a reign of quiet, delighted labour, at the +prompting, as it seemed, of the singular being who came suddenly and +oddly to Auxerre to be the centre of so pleasant a period, though in +truth he made but a sad ending. +</P> + +<P> +A peculiar usage long perpetuated itself at Auxerre. On Easter Day the +canons, in the very centre of the great church, played solemnly at +ball. Vespers being sung, instead of conducting the bishop to his +palace, they proceeded in order into the nave, the people standing in +two long rows to watch. Girding up their skirts a little way, the whole +body of clerics awaited their turn in silence, while the captain of the +singing-boys cast the ball into the air, as high as he might, along the +vaulted roof of the central aisle to be caught by any boy who could, +and tossed again with hand or foot till it passed on to the portly +chanters, the chaplains, the canons themselves, who finally played out +the game with all the decorum of an ecclesiastical ceremony. It was +just then, just as the canons took the ball to themselves so gravely, +that Denys—Denys l'Auxerrois, as he was afterwards called—appeared +for the first time. Leaping in among the timid children, he made the +thing really a game. The boys played like boys, the men almost like +madmen, and all with a delightful glee which became contagious, first +in the clerical body, and then among the spectators. The aged Dean of +the Chapter, Protonotary of his Holiness, held up his purple skirt a +little higher, and stepping from the ranks with an amazing levity, as +if suddenly relieved of his burden of eighty years, tossed the ball +with his foot to the venerable capitular Homilist, equal to the +occasion. And then, unable to stand inactive any longer, the laity +carried on the game among themselves, with shouts of not too boisterous +amusement; the sport continuing till the flight of the ball could no +longer be traced along the dusky aisles. +</P> + +<P> +Though the home of his childhood was but a humble one—one of those +little cliff-houses cut out in the low chalky hillside, such as are +still to be found with inhabitants in certain districts of France-there +were some who connected his birth with the story of a beautiful country +girl, who, about eighteen years before, had been taken from her own +people, not unwillingly, for the pleasure of the Count of Auxerre. She +had wished indeed to see the great lord, who had sought her privately, +in the glory of his own house; but, terrified by the strange splendours +of her new abode and manner of life, and the anger of the true wife, +she had fled suddenly from the place during the confusion of a violent +storm, and in her flight given birth prematurely to a child. The child, +a singularly fair one, was found alive, but the mother dead, by +lightning-stroke as it seemed, not far from her lord's chamber-door, +under the shelter of a ruined ivy-clad tower. Denys himself certainly +was a joyous lad enough. At the cliff-side cottage, nestling actually +beneath the vineyards, he came to be an unrivalled gardener, and, grown +to manhood, brought his produce to market, keeping a stall in the great +cathedral square for the sale of melons and pomegranates, all manner of +seeds and flowers (omnia speciosa camporum), honey also, wax tapers, +sweetmeats hot from the frying-pan, rough home-made pots and pans from +the little pottery in the wood, loaves baked by the aged woman in whose +house he lived. On that Easter Day he had entered the great church for +the first time, for the purpose of seeing the game. +</P> + +<P> +And from the very first, the women who saw him at his business, or +watering his plants in the cool of the evening, idled for him. The men +who noticed the crowd of women at his stall, and how even fresh young +girls from the country, seeing him for the first time, always loitered +there, suspected—who could tell what kind of powers? hidden under the +white veil of that youthful form; and pausing to ponder the matter, +found themselves also fallen into the snare. The sight of him made old +people feel young again. Even the sage monk Hermes, devoted to study +and experiment, was unable to keep the fruit-seller out of his mind, +and would fain have discovered the secret of his charm, partly for the +friendly purpose of explaining to the lad himself his perhaps more than +natural gifts with a view to their profitable cultivation. +</P> + +<P> +It was a period, as older men took note, of young men and their +influence. They took fire, no one could quite explain how, as if at his +presence, and asserted a wonderful amount of volition, of insolence, +yet as if with the consent of their elders, who would themselves +sometimes lose their balance, a little comically. That revolution in +the temper and manner of individuals concurred with the movement then +on foot at Auxerre, as in other French towns, for the liberation of the +commune from its old feudal superiors. Denys they called Frank, among +many other nicknames. Young lords prided themselves on saying that +labour should have its ease, and were almost prepared to take freedom, +plebeian freedom (of course duly decorated, at least with wild-flowers) +for a bride. For in truth Denys at his stall was turning the grave, +slow movement of politic heads into a wild social license, which for a +while made life like a stage-play. He first led those long processions, +through which by and by "the little people," the discontented, the +despairing, would utter their minds. One man engaged with another in +talk in the market-place; a new influence came forth at the contact; +another and then another adhered; at last a new spirit was abroad +everywhere. The hot nights were noisy with swarming troops of +dishevelled women and youths with red-stained limbs and faces, carrying +their lighted torches over the vine-clad hills, or rushing down the +streets, to the horror of timid watchers, towards the cool spaces by +the river. A shrill music, a laughter at all things, was everywhere. +And the new spirit repaired even to church to take part in the novel +offices of the Feast of Fools. Heads flung back in ecstasy—the morning +sleep among the vines, when the fatigue of the night was +over—dew-drenched garments—the serf lying at his ease at last: the +artists, then so numerous at the place, caught what they could, +something, at least, of the richness, the flexibility of the visible +aspects of life, from all this. With them the life of seeming idleness, +to which Denys was conducting the youth of Auxerre so pleasantly, +counted but as the cultivation, for their due service to man, of +delightful natural things. And the powers of nature concurred. It +seemed there would be winter no more. The planet Mars drew nearer to +the earth than usual, hanging in the low sky like a fiery red lamp. A +massive but well-nigh lifeless vine on the wall of the cloister, +allowed to remain there only as a curiosity on account of its immense +age, in that great season, as it was long after called, clothed itself +with fruit once more. The culture of the grape greatly increased. The +sunlight fell for the first time on many a spot of deep woodland +cleared for vine-growing; though Denys, a lover of trees, was careful +to leave a stately specimen of forest growth here and there. +</P> + +<P> +When his troubles came, one characteristic that had seemed most amiable +in his prosperity was turned against him—a fondness for oddly grown or +even misshapen, yet potentially happy, children; for odd animals also: +he sympathised with them all, was skilful in healing their maladies, +saved the hare in the chase, and sold his mantle to redeem a lamb from +the butcher. He taught the people not to be afraid of the strange, ugly +creatures which the light of the moving torches drew from their +hiding-places, nor think it a bad omen that approached. He tamed a +veritable wolf to keep him company like a dog. It was the first of many +ambiguous circumstances about him, from which, in the minds of an +increasing number of people, a deep suspicion and hatred began to +define itself. The rich bestiary, then compiling in the library of the +great church, became, through his assistance, nothing less than a +garden of Eden—the garden of Eden grown wild. The owl alone he +abhorred. A little later, almost as if in revenge, alone of all animals +it clung to him, haunting him persistently among the dusky stone +towers, when grown gentler than ever he dared not kill it. He moved +unhurt in the famous menagerie of the castle, of which the common +people were so much afraid, and let out the lions, themselves timid +prisoners enough, through the streets during the fair. The incident +suggested to the somewhat barren pen-men of the day a "morality" +adapted from the old pagan books—a stage-play in which the God of Wine +should return in triumph from the East. In the cathedral square the +pageant was presented, amid an intolerable noise of every kind of +pipe-music, with Denys in the chief part, upon a gaily-painted chariot, +in soft silken raiment, and, for headdress, a strange elephant-scalp +with gilded tusks. +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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-lises, as they worked together for the decoration of the great +church and a hundred other 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 newborn babes. +A girl with child was found hanged by her own act in a dark cellar. Ah! +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. 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 of Saint Germain, who gladly received him into their +workshop, though secretly, in fear of his foes. +</P> + +<P> +The busy tribe of variously gifted artists, labouring rapidly at the +many works on hand for the final embellishment of the cathedral of St. +Etienne, 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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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, 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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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, 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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +Meantime the winds of his organ were ready 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +So the figure in the stained glass explained 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. +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap03"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +CHAPTER III. SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK +</H3> + +<P> +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 +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +In the crowd of spectators at the skating, whose eyes followed, so +well-satisfied, the movements of Sebastian van Storck, were the mothers +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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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? 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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 may 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 +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 the 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—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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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 a vol +d'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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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, 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. +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +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, as painted by Van der Helst, with a marine background by +Backhuizen:—at moments his father could fancy him so. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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 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 (tres +distingue et tres soigne 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 towards the intellect also, which women can but +rarely understand." +</P> + +<P> +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 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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 perishing of wounded pride. But to make a clean breast of +her poor girlish worldliness, before she became a beguine, 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. +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +And what pure reason affirmed in the first place, as the "beginning of +wisdom," was that 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." +</P> + +<P> +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: +</P> + +<P> +"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 the extinction in one's self of all +that is but correlative to the finite illusion—by the suppression of +ourselves." +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +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 +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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 +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. +</P> + +<P> +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. 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? +</P> + +<P> +The journal, with that "cruel" letter to Mademoiselle van Westrheene +coming as the last step in the rigid process of theoretic deduction, +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." +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap04"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +CHAPTER IV. DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD +</H3> + +<P> +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 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, 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 by a single new gable. And within, human life—its +thoughts, its habits, above all, its etiquette—had keen 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. +</P> + +<P> +It was in a delightful rummaging of one of those lumber-rooms, escaped +from that candle-light 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 +Duerer—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 Duerer, 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 right moment, brought a beam of effectual daylight 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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 waggon 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 whom 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 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 Boettcher 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 Da Vinci and his works. It was but himself truly, after +all, that he had found, so fresh and real, among those artificial roses. +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +In music, it might be thought, Germany had 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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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, +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. +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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!" +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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, 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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 those 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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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 +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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +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. +</P> + +<P> +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 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. +</P> + +<P> +Through the length and breadth of the Rhine country the vintage was +begun. The red ruins on the heights, the white-walled villages, white +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 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 Eclaircissement, the +Aufklaerung (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 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?" +</P> + +<P> +At Strasbourg, with its mountainous goblin houses, nine stories high, +grouped snugly, in the midst of that inclement plain, like a great +stork's nest around the romantic red steeple of its cathedral, Duke +Carl became fairly captive to the Middle Age. Tarrying there week after +week he worked hard, but (without a ray of light from others) in one +long mistake, at the chronology and history of the coloured windows. +Antiquity's very self seemed expressed there, on the visionary images +of king or patriarch, in the deeply incised marks of character, the +hoary hair, the massive proportions, telling of a length of years +beyond what is lived now. Surely, past ages, could one get at the +historic soul of them, were not dead but living, rich in company, for +the entertainment, the expansion, of the present; and Duke Carl was +still without suspicion of the cynic afterthought that such historic +soul was but an arbitrary substitution, a generous loan of one's self. +</P> + +<P> +The mystic soul of Nature laid hold on him next, saying, "Come! +understand, interpret me!" He was awakened one morning by the jingle of +sledge-bells along the street beneath his windows. Winter had descended +betimes from the mountains: the pale Rhine below the bridge of boats on +the long way to Kehl was swollen with ice, and for the first time he +realised that Switzerland was at hand. On a sudden he was captive to +the enthusiasm of the mountains, and hastened along the valley of the +Rhine by Alt Breisach and Basle, unrepelled by a thousand difficulties, +to Swiss farmhouses and lonely villages, solemn still, and untouched by +strangers. At Grindelwald, sleeping at last in the close neighbourhood +of the greater Alps, he had the sense of an overbrooding presence, of +some strange new companions around him. Here one might yield one's self +to the unalterable imaginative appeal of the elements in their highest +force and simplicity—light, air, water, earth. On very early spring +days a mantle was suddenly lifted; the Alps were an apex of natural +glory, towards which, in broadening spaces of light, the whole of +Europe sloped upwards. Through them, on the right hand, as he journeyed +on, were the doorways to Italy, to Como or Venice, from yonder peak +Italy's self was visible!—as, on the left hand, in the South-german +towns, in a high-toned, artistic fineness, in the dainty, flowered +ironwork for instance, the overflow of Italian genius was traceable. +These things presented themselves at last only to remind him that, in a +new intellectual hope, he was already on his way home. Straight through +life, straight through nature and man, with one's own self-knowledge as +a light thereon, not by way of the geographical Italy or Greece, lay +the road to the new Hellas, to be realised now as the outcome of +home-born German genius. At times, in that early fine weather, looking +now not southwards, but towards Germany, he seemed to trace the +outspread of a faint, not wholly natural, aurora over the dark northern +country. And it was in an actual sunrise that the news came which +finally put him on the directest road homewards. One hardly dared +breathe in the rapid uprise of all-embracing light which seemed like +the intellectual rising of the Fatherland, when up the straggling path +to his high beech-grown summit (was one safe nowhere?) protesting over +the roughness of the way, came the too familiar voices (ennui itself +made audible) of certain high functionaries of Rosenmold, come to claim +their new sovereign, close upon the runaway. +</P> + +<P> +Bringing news of the old Duke's decease! With a real grief at his +heart, he hastened now over the ground which lay between him and the +bed of death, still trying, at quieter intervals, to snatch profit by +the way; peeping, at the most unlikely hours, on the objects of his +curiosity, waiting for a glimpse of dawn through glowing church +windows, penetrating into old church treasuries by candle-light, taxing +the old courtiers to pant up, for "the view," to this or that +conspicuous point in the world of hilly woodland. From one such at +last, in spite of everything with pleasure to Carl, old Rosenmold was +visible—the attic windows of the Residence, the storks on the +chimneys, the green copper roofs baking in the long, dry German summer. +The homeliness of true old Germany! He too felt it, and yearned +towards his home. +</P> + +<P> +And the "beggar-maid" was there. Thoughts of her had haunted his mind +all the journey through, as he was aware, not unpleased, graciously +overflowing towards any creature he found dependent upon him. The mere +fact that she was awaiting him, at his disposition, meekly, and as +though through his long absence she had never quitted the spot on which +he had said farewell, touched his fancy, and on a sudden concentrated +his wavering preference into a practical decision. "King Cophetua" +would be hers. And his goodwill sunned her wild-grown beauty into +majesty, into a kind of queenly richness. There was natural majesty in +the heavy waves of golden hair folded closely above the neck, built a +little massively; and she looked kind, beseeching also, capable of +sorrow. She was like clear sunny weather, with bluebells and the green +leaves, between rainy days, and seemed to embody Die Ruh auf dem +Gipfel—all the restful hours he had spent of late in the wood-sides +and on the hilltops. One June day, on which she seemed to have +withdrawn into herself all the tokens of summer, brought decision to +our lover of artificial roses, who had cared so little hitherto for the +like of her. Grand-duke perforce, he would make her his wife, and had +already re-assured her with lively mockery of his horrified ministers. +"Go straight to life!" said his new poetic code; and here was the +opportunity;—here, also, the real "adventure," in comparison of which +his previous efforts that way seemed childish theatricalities, fit only +to cheat a little the profound ennui of actual life. In a hundred +stolen interviews she taught the hitherto indifferent youth the art of +love. +</P> + +<P> +Duke Carl had effected arrangements for his marriage, secret, but +complete and soon to be made public. Long since he had cast complacent +eyes on a strange architectural relic, an old grange or hunting-lodge +on the heath, with he could hardly have defined what charm of +remoteness and old romance. Popular belief amused itself with reports +of the wizard who inhabited or haunted the place, his fantastic +treasures, his immense age. His windows might be seen glittering afar +on stormy nights, with a blaze of golden ornaments, said the more +adventurous loiterer. It was not because he was suspicious still, but +in a kind of wantonness of affection, and as if by way of giving yet +greater zest to the luxury of their mutual trust that Duke Carl added +to his announcement of the purposed place and time of the event a +pretended test of the girl's devotion. He tells her the story of the +aged wizard, meagre and wan, to whom she must find her way alone for +the purpose of asking a question all-important to himself. The fierce +old man will try to escape with terrible threats, will turn, or half +turn, into repulsive animals. She must cling the faster; at last the +spell will be broken; he will yield, he will become a youth once more, +and give the desired answer. +</P> + +<P> +The girl, otherwise so self-denying, and still modestly anxious for a +private union, not to shame his high position in the world, had wished +for one thing at least—to be loved amid the splendours habitual to +him. Duke Carl sends to the old lodge his choicest personal +possessions. For many days the public is aware of something on hand; a +few get delightful glimpses of the treasures on their way to "the place +on the heath." Was he preparing against contingencies, should the great +army, soon to pass through these parts, not leave the country as +innocently as might be desired? +</P> + +<P> +The short grey day seemed a long one to those who, for various reasons, +were waiting anxiously for the darkness; the court people fretful and +on their mettle, the townsfolk suspicious, Duke Carl full of amorous +longing. At her distant cottage beyond the hills, Gretchen kept herself +ready for the trial. It was expected that certain great military +officers would arrive that night, commanders of a victorious host +making its way across Northern Germany, with no great respect for the +rights of neutral territory, often dealing with life and property too +rudely to find the coveted treasure. It was but one episode in a cruel +war. Duke Carl did not wait for the grandly illuminated supper prepared +for their reception. Events precipitated themselves. Those officers +came as practically victorious occupants, sheltering themselves for the +night in the luxurious rooms of the great palace. The army was in fact +in motion close behind its leaders, who (Gretchen warm and happy in the +arms, not of the aged wizard, but of the youthful lover) are discussing +terms for the final absorption of the duchy with those traitorous old +councillors. At their delicate supper Duke Carl amuses his companion +with caricature, amid cries of cheerful laughter, of the sleepy +courtiers entertaining their martial guests in all their pedantic +politeness, like people in some farcical dream. A priest, and certain +chosen friends to witness the marriage, were to come ere nightfall to +the grange. The lovers heard, as they thought, the sound of distant +thunder. The hours passed as they waited, and what came at last was not +the priest with his companions. Could they have been detained by the +storm? Duke Carl gently re-assures the girl—bids her believe in him, +and wait. But through the wind, grown to tempest, beyond the sound of +the violent thunder—louder than any possible thunder—nearer and +nearer comes the storm of the victorious army, like some disturbance of +the earth itself, as they flee into the tumult, out of the intolerable +confinement and suspense, dead-set upon them. +</P> + +<P> +The Enlightening, the Aufklaerung, according to the aspiration of Duke +Carl, was effected by other hands; Lessing and Herder, brilliant +precursors of the age of genius which centered in Goethe, coming well +within the natural limits of Carl's lifetime. As precursors Goethe +gratefully recognised them, and understood that there had been a +thousand others, looking forward to a new era in German literature with +the desire which is in some sort a "forecast of capacity," awakening +each other to the permanent reality of a poetic ideal in human life, +slowly forming that public consciousness to which Goethe actually +addressed himself. It is their aspirations I have tried to embody in +the portrait of Carl. +</P> + +<P> +"A hard winter had covered the Main with a firm footing of ice. The +liveliest social intercourse was quickened thereon. I was unfailing +from early morning onwards; and, being lightly clad, found myself, when +my mother drove up later to look on, fairly frozen. My mother sat in +the carriage, quite stately in her furred cloak of red velvet, fastened +on the breast with thick gold cord and tassels. +</P> + +<P> +"'Dear mother,' I said, on the spur of the moment, 'give me your furs, +I am frozen.' +</P> + +<P> +"She was equally ready. In a moment I had on the cloak. Falling below +the knee, with its rich trimming of sables, and enriched with gold, it +became me excellently. So clad I made my way up and down with a +cheerful heart." +</P> + +<P> +That was Goethe, perhaps fifty years later. His mother also related the +incident to Bettina Brentano;—"There, skated my son, like an arrow +among the groups. Away he went over the ice like a son of the gods. +Anything so beautiful is not to be seen now. I clapped my hands for +joy. Never shall I forget him as he darted out from one arch of the +bridge, and in again under the other, the wind carrying the train +behind him as he flew." In that amiable figure I seem to see the +fulfilment of the Resurgam on Carl's empty coffin—the aspiring soul of +Carl himself, in freedom and effective, at last. +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR><BR> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Imaginary Portraits, by Walter Pater + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IMAGINARY PORTRAITS *** + +***** This file should be named 2399-h.htm or 2399-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/2/3/9/2399/ + +Produced by Bruce McClintock. HTML version by Al Haines. + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, +set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to +copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to +protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project +Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you +charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you +do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the +rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose +such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and +research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do +practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is +subject to the trademark license, especially commercial +redistribution. + + + +*** START: FULL LICENSE *** + +THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE +PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK + +To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free +distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work +(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project +Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project +Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at +https://gutenberg.org/license). + + +Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic works + +1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to +and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property +(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all +the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy +all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. +If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the +terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or +entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. + +1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be +used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who +agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few +things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works +even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See +paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement +and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. See paragraph 1.E below. + +1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" +or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the +collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an +individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are +located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from +copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative +works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg +are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project +Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by +freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of +this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with +the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by +keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project +Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. + +1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern +what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in +a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check +the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement +before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or +creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project +Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning +the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United +States. + +1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: + +1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate +access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently +whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the +phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project +Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, +copied or distributed: + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + +1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived +from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is +posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied +and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees +or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work +with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the +work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 +through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the +Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or +1.E.9. + +1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted +with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution +must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional +terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked +to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the +permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work. + +1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this +work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm. + +1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this +electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without +prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with +active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project +Gutenberg-tm License. + +1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, +compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any +word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or +distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than +"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version +posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org), +you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a +copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon +request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other +form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1. + +1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, +performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works +unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. + +1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing +access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided +that + +- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from + the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method + you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is + owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he + has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the + Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments + must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you + prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax + returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and + sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the + address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to + the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation." + +- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies + you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he + does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm + License. You must require such a user to return or + destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium + and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of + Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any + money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the + electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days + of receipt of the work. + +- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free + distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set +forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from +both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael +Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the +Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below. + +1.F. + +1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable +effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread +public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm +collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain +"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or +corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual +property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a +computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by +your equipment. + +1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right +of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project +Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all +liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal +fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT +LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE +PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE +TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE +LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR +INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH +DAMAGE. + +1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a +defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can +receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a +written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you +received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with +your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with +the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a +refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity +providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to +receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy +is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further +opportunities to fix the problem. + +1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth +in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER +WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO +WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE. + +1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied +warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. +If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the +law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be +interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by +the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any +provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions. + +1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the +trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone +providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance +with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, +promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works, +harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, +that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do +or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm +work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any +Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause. + + +Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm + +Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of +electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers +including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists +because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from +people in all walks of life. + +Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the +assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's +goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will +remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure +and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations. +To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation +and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 +and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org. + + +Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive +Foundation + +The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit +501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the +state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal +Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification +number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at +https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent +permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws. + +The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S. +Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered +throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at +809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email +business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact +information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official +page at https://pglaf.org + +For additional contact information: + Dr. Gregory B. Newby + Chief Executive and Director + gbnewby@pglaf.org + + +Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation + +Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide +spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of +increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be +freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest +array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations +($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt +status with the IRS. + +The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating +charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United +States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a +considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up +with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations +where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To +SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any +particular state visit https://pglaf.org + +While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we +have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition +against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who +approach us with offers to donate. + +International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make +any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from +outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff. + +Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation +methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other +ways including including checks, online payments and credit card +donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate + + +Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. + +Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm +concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared +with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project +Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support. + + +Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. +unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + https://www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. + + +</pre> + +</BODY> + +</HTML> + + |