IMAGINARY PORTRAITS

by

Walter Pater

4th edition

CONTENTS

 CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS CHAPTER II. DENYS L'AUXERROIS CHAPTER III. SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK CHAPTER IV. DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD

CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS

EXTRACTS FROM AN OLD FRENCH JOURNAL

Valenciennes, September 1701. 

They have been renovating my father's large workroom. That delightful, tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the greenweather-stains we have known all our lives on the high whitewashedwall, opposite which we sit, in the little sculptor's yard, for thecoolness, 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 variousdrawings which lie exposed here. My father will have it that he is agenius indeed, and a painter born. We have had our September Fair inthe Grande Place, a wonderful stir of sound and colour in the wide, open space beneath our windows. And just where the crowd was busiestyoung Antony was found, hoisted into one of those empty niches of theold Hotel de Ville, sketching the scene to the life, but with a kind ofgrace--a marvellous tact of omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own window--whichhas made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine, seem like people insome fairyland; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for thehumour of the thing, have put on motley for once, and are able to throwa world of serious innuendo into their burlesque looks, with a sort ofcomedy which shall be but tragedy seen from the other side. He broughthis sketch to our house to-day, and I was present when my fatherquestioned him and commended his work. But the lad seemed not greatlypleased, and left untasted the glass of old Malaga which was offered tohim. His father will hear nothing of educating him as a painter. Yethe 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 blacktimbers, in the Rue des Cardinaux, was prettier; dating from the timeof the Spaniards, and one of the oldest in Valenciennes. 

October 1701. 

Chiefly through the solicitations of my father, old Watteau hasconsented to place Antony with a teacher of painting here. I meet himbetimes on the way to his lessons, as I return from Mass; for he stillworks with the masons, but making the most of late and early hours, ofevery moment of liberty. And then he has the feast-days, of which thereare 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 awonderful progress. And yet, far from being set-up, and too easilypleased with what, after all, comes to him so easily, he has, my fatherthinks, too little self-approval for ultimate success. He is apt, intruth, to fall out too hastily with himself and what he produces. Yethere also there is the "golden mean. " Yes! I could fancy myselfoffended by a sort of irony which sometimes crosses the half-melancholysweetness of manner habitual with him; only that as I can see, hetreats himself to the same quality. 

October 1701. 

Antony Watteau comes here often now. It is the instinct of a naturalfineness in him, to escape when he can from that blank stone house, with so little to interest, and that homely old man and woman. Therudeness of his home has turned his feeling for even the simpler gracesof life into a physical want, like hunger or thirst, which might cometo greed; and methinks he perhaps overvalues these things. Still, madeas he is, his hard fate in that rude place must needs touch one. Andthen, he profits by the experience of my father, who has much knowledgein matters of art beyond his own art of sculpture; and Antony is notunwelcome to him. In these last rainy weeks especially, when he can'tsketch out of doors, when the wind only half dries the pavement beforeanother torrent comes, and people stay at home, and the only sound fromwithout is the creaking of a restless shutter on its hinges, or themarch across the Place of those weary soldiers, coming and going sointerminably, one hardly knows whether to or from battle with theEnglish and the Austrians, from victory or defeat:--Well! he has becomelike one of our family. "He will go far!" my father declares. He wouldgo far, in the literal sense, if he might--to Paris, to Rome. It mustbe admitted that our Valenciennes is a quiet, nay! a sleepy place;sleepier than ever since it became French, and ceased to be so near thefrontier. The grass is growing deep on our old ramparts, and it ispleasant to walk there--to walk there and muse; pleasant for a tame, unambitious soul such as mine. 

December 1792. 

Antony Watteau left us for Paris this morning. It came upon us quitesuddenly. They amuse themselves in Paris. A scene-painter we have here, well known in Flanders, has been engaged to work in one of the Parisianplay-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 thescene-painter to take him; that he would find the lad useful. Weoffered him our little presents--fine thread-lace of our own making forhis ruffles, and the like; for one must make a figure in Paris, and heis slim and well-formed. For myself, I presented him with a silkenpurse I had long ago embroidered for another. Well! we shall follow hisfortunes (of which I for one feel quite sure) at a distance. OldWatteau didn't know of his departure, and has been here in great anger. 

December 1703. 

Twelve months to-day since Antony went to Paris! The first strugglemust 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 ofhimself. The apprentices of the M. Metayer for whom he works, labourall day long, each at a single part only, --coiffure, or robe, orhand, --of the cheap pictures of religion or fantasy he exposes for saleat a low price along the footways of the Pont Notre-Dame. Antony isalready the most skilful of them, and seems to have been promoted oflate to work on church pictures. I like the thought of that. Hereceives three livres a week for his pains, and his soup daily. 

May 1705. 

Antony Watteau has parted from the dealer in pictures a bon marche andworks now with a painter of furniture pieces (those headpieces fordoors and the like, now in fashion) who is also concierge of the Palaceof the Luxembourg. Antony is actually lodged somewhere in that grandplace, which contains the king's collection of the Italian pictures hewould so willingly copy. Its gardens also are magnificent, withsomething, as we understand from him, altogether of a novel kind intheir disposition and embellishment. Ah! how I delight myself, in fancyat least, in those beautiful gardens, freer and trimmed less stifflythan those of other royal houses. Methinks I see him there, when hislong 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 hasits way almost as if it belonged to that open and unbuilt countrybeyond, over which the sun is sinking. 

His thoughts, however, in the midst of all this, are not wholly awayfrom home, if I may judge by the subject of a picture he hopes to sellfor as much as sixty livres--Un Depart de Troupes, SoldiersDeparting--one of those scenes of military life one can study so wellhere at Valenciennes. 

June 1705. 

Young Watteau has returned home--proof, with a character so independentas his, that things have gone well with him; and (it is agreed!) stayswith us, instead of in the stone-mason's house. The old people supposehe comes to us for the sake of my father's instruction. French peopleas we are become, we are still old Flemish, if not at heart, yet on thesurface. Even in French Flanders, at Douai and Saint Omer, as Iunderstand, in the churches and in people's houses, as may be seen fromthe very streets, there is noticeable a minute and scrupulous air ofcare-taking and neatness. Antony Watteau remarks this more than ever onreturning to Valenciennes, and savours greatly, after his lodging inParis, our Flemish cleanliness, lover as he is of distinction andelegance. Those worldly graces he seemed when a young lad to hunger andthirst for, as though truly the mere adornments of life were itsnecessaries, he already takes as if he had been always used to them. And there is something noble--shall I say?--in his half-disdainful wayof serving himself with what he still, as I think, secretly valuesover-much. There is an air of seemly thought--le bel serieux--abouthim, which makes me think of one of those grave old Dutch statesmen intheir youth, such as that famous William the Silent. And yet the effectof this first success of his (of more importance than its mere moneyvalue, 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 andthen, the gaieties which from time to time, surely, must refresh alltrue artists, however hard-working and "painful. "

July 1705. 

The charm of all this--his physiognomy and manner of being--has touchedeven my young brother, Jean-Baptiste. He is greatly taken with Antony, clings to him almost too attentively, and will be nothing but apainter, though my father would have trained him to follow his ownprofession. It may do the child good. He needs the expansion of somegenerous sympathy or sentiment in that close little soul of his, as Ihave thought, watching sometimes how his small face and hands are movedin sleep. A child of ten who cares only to save and possess, to hoardhis tiny savings! Yet he is not otherwise selfish, and loves us allwith a warm heart. Just now it is the moments of Antony's company hecounts, like a little miser. Well! that may save him perhaps fromdeveloping a certain meanness of character I have sometimes feared forhim. 

August 1705. 

We returned home late this summer evening--Antony Watteau, my fatherand sisters, young Jean-Baptiste, and myself--from an excursion toSaint-Amand, in celebration of Antony's last day with us. Aftervisiting the great abbey-church and its range of chapels, with theircostly encumbrance of carved shrines and golden reliquaries and funeralscutcheons in the coloured glass, half seen through a rich enclosure ofmarble and brasswork, we supped at the little inn in the forest. Antony, looking well in his new-fashioned, long-skirted coat, andtaller than he really is, made us bring our cream and wild strawberriesout of doors, ranging ourselves according to his judgment (for a hastysketch in that big pocket-book he carries) on the soft slope of one ofthose fresh spaces in the wood, where the trees unclose a little, whileJean-Baptiste and my youngest sister danced a minuet on the grass, tothe notes of some strolling lutanist who had found us out. He isvisibly cheerful at the thought of his return to Paris, and became fora moment freer and more animated than I have ever yet seen him, as hediscoursed to us about the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens in the churchhere. His words, as he spoke of them, seemed full of a kind of richsunset with some moving glory within it. Yet I like far better than anyof these pictures of Rubens a work of that old Dutch master, PeterPorbus, which hangs, though almost out of sight indeed, in our churchat home. The patron saints, simple, and standing firmly on either side, present two homely old people to Our Lady enthroned in the midst, withthe look and attitude of one for whom, amid her "glories" (depicted indim little circular pictures, set in the openings of a chaplet of paleflowers around her) all feelings are over, except a great pitifulness. Her robe of shadowy blue suits my eyes better far than the hotflesh-tints of the Medicean ladies of the great Peter Paul, in spite ofthat amplitude and royal ease of action under their stiff courtcostumes, at which Antony Watteau declares himself in dismay. 

August 1705. 

I am just returned from early Mass. I lingered long after the officewas ended, watching, pondering how in the world one could help a smallbird which had flown into the church but could find no way out again. Isuspect it will remain there, fluttering round and round distractedly, far up under the arched roof till it dies exhausted. I seem to haveheard of a writer who likened man's life to a bird passing just onceonly, on some winter night, from window to window, across acheerfully-lighted hall. The bird, taken captive by the ill-luck of amoment, re-tracing its issueless circle till it expires within theclose vaulting of that great stone church:--human life may be like thatbird too!

Antony Watteau returned to Paris yesterday. Yes!--Certainly, greatheights of achievement would seem to lie before him; access to regionswhither one may find it increasingly hard to follow him even inimagination, and figure to one's self after what manner his life movestherein. 

January 1709. 

Antony Watteau has competed for what is called the Prix de Rome, desiring greatly to profit by the grand establishment founded at Romeby Lewis the Fourteenth, for the encouragement of French artists. Heobtained only the second place, but does not renounce his desire tomake the journey to Italy. Could I save enough by careful economies forthat purpose? It might be conveyed to him in some indirect way thatwould not offend. 

February 1712. 

We read, with much pleasure for all of us, in the Gazette to-day, amongother events of the world, that Antony Watteau had been elected to theAcademy of Painting under the new title of Peintre des Fetes Galantes, and had been named also Peintre du Roi. My brother, Jean-Baptiste, ranto tell the news to old Jean-Philippe and Michelle Watteau. 

A new manner of painting! The old furniture of people's rooms mustneeds be changed throughout, it would seem, to accord with thispainting; or rather, the painting is designed exclusively to suit oneparticular kind of apartment. A manner of painting greatly prized, aswe understand, by those Parisian judges who have had the bestopportunity of acquainting themselves with whatever is most enjoyablein the arts:--such is the achievement of the young Watteau! He looks toreceive more orders for his work than he will be able to execute. Hewill certainly relish--he, so elegant, so hungry for the colours oflife--a free intercourse with those wealthy lovers of the arts, M. DeCrozat, M. De Julienne, the Abbe de la Roque, the Count de Caylus, andM. Gersaint, the famous dealer in pictures, who are so anxious to lodgehim in their fine hotels, and to have him of their company at theircountry houses. Paris, we hear, has never been wealthier and moreluxurious than now: and the great ladies outbid each other to carry hiswork upon their very fans. Those vast fortunes, however, seem to changehands very rapidly. And Antony's new manner? I am unable even to divineit--to conceive the trick and effect of it--at all. Only, something oflightness and coquetry I discern there, at variance, methinks, with hisown singular gravity and even sadness of mien and mind, more answerableto the stately apparelling of the age of Henry the Fourth, or of Lewisthe Thirteenth, in these old, sombre Spanish houses of ours. 

March 1713. 

We have all been very happy, --Jean-Baptiste as if in a delightfuldream. Antony Watteau, being consulted with regard to the lad'straining as a painter, has most generously offered to receive him forhis own pupil. My father, for some reason unknown to me, seemed tohesitate the first; but Jean-Baptiste, whose enthusiasm for Antonyvisibly refines and beautifies his whole nature, has won the necessarypermission, and this dear young brother will leave us to-morrow. Ourregrets and his, at his parting from us for the first time, overtookour joy at his good fortune by surprise, at the last moment, as we wereabout to bid each other good-night. For a while there had seemed to bean uneasiness under our cheerful talk, as if each one present wereconcealing something with an effort; and it was Jean-Baptiste himselfwho gave way at last. And then we sat down again, still together, andallowed free play to what was in our hearts, almost till morning, mysisters weeping much. I know better how to control myself. In a fewdays that delightful new life will have begun for him: and I have madehim promise to write often to us. With how small a part of my wholelife shall I be really living at Valenciennes!

January 1714. 

Jean-Philippe Watteau has received a letter from his son to-day. OldMichelle Watteau, whose sight is failing, though she still works (halfby touch, indeed) at her pillow-lace, was glad to hear me read theletter aloud more than once. It recounts--how modestly, and almost as amatter of course!--his late successes. And yet!--does he, in writing tothese old people, purposely underrate his great good fortune andseeming happiness, not to shock them too much by the contrast betweenthe delicate enjoyments of the life he now leads among the wealthy andrefined, and that bald existence of theirs in his old home? A life, agitated, exigent, unsatisfying! That is what this letter reallydiscloses, below so attractive a surface. As his gift expands so doesthat incurable restlessness one supposed but the humour natural to apromising youth who had still everything to do. And now the onlyrealised enjoyment he has of all this might seem to be the thought ofthe independence it has purchased him, so that he can escape from onelodging-place to another, just as it may please him. He has alreadydeserted, somewhat incontinently, more than one of those fine houses, the liberal air of which he used so greatly to affect, and which haveso readily received him. Has he failed truly to grasp the fact of hisgreat success and the rewards that lie before him? At all events, heseems, after all, not greatly to value that dainty world he is nowprivileged to enter, and has certainly but little relish for his ownworks--those works which I for one so thirst to see. 

March 1714. 

We were all--Jean-Philippe, Michelle Watteau, and ourselves--half inexpectation of a visit from Antony; and to-day, quite suddenly, he iswith us. I was lingering after early Mass this morning in the church ofSaint Vaast. It is good for me to be there. Our people lie under one ofthe great marble slabs before the jube, some of the memorial brassbalusters of which are engraved with their names and the dates of theirdecease. The settle of carved oak which runs all round the wide nave ismy father's own work. The quiet spaciousness of the place is itselflike a meditation, an "act of recollection, " and clears away theconfusions of the heart. I suppose the heavy droning of the carillonhad smothered the sound of his footsteps, for on my turning round, whenI supposed myself alone, Antony Watteau was standing near me. Constantobserver as he is of the lights and shadows of things, he visits placesof 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; thoughhe has spent the better part of to-day in my father's workroom. Hehasn't yet put off, in spite of all his late intercourse with the greatworld, his distant and preoccupied manner--a manner, it is true, thesame to every one. It is certainly not through pride in his success, assome might fancy, for he was thus always. It is rather as if, with allthat success, life and its daily social routine were somewhat of aburden to him. 

April 1714. 

At last we shall understand something of that new style of his-theWatteau style--so much relished by the fine people at Paris. He hastaken it into his kind head to paint and decorate our chief salon--theroom with the three long windows, which occupies the first floor of thehouse. 

The room was a landmark, as we used to think, an inviolable milestoneand landmark, of old Valenciennes fashion--that sombre style, indulgingmuch in contrasts of black or deep brown with white, which theSpaniards left behind them here. Doubtless their eyes had found itsshadows cool and pleasant, when they shut themselves in from thecutting sunshine of their own country. But in our country, where wemust needs economise not the shade but the sun, its grandiosity weighsa little on one's spirits. Well! the rough plaster we used to cover aswell as might be with morsels of old figured arras-work, is replaced bydainty panelling of wood, with mimic columns, and a quite aerialscrollwork around sunken spaces of a pale-rose stuff and certain ovalopenings--two over the doors, opening on each side of the great couchwhich faces the windows, one over the chimney-piece, and one above thebuffet which forms its vis-a-vis--four spaces in all, to be filled byand 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 wellon the chimney-piece. Odd, faint-coloured flowers fill coquettishly thelittle empty spaces here and there, like ghosts of nosegays left byvisitors long ago, which paled thus, sympathetically, at the decease oftheir old owners; for, in spite of its new-fashionedness, all thisarray is really less like a new thing than the last surviving result ofall the more lightsome adornments of past times. Only, the very wallsseem to cry out:--No! to make delicate insinuation, for a music, aconversation, nimbler than any we have known, or are likely to findhere. For himself, he converses well, but very sparingly. He assuresus, indeed, that the "new style" is in truth a thing of old days, ofhis own old days here in Valenciennes, when, working long hours as amason's boy, he in fancy reclothed the walls of this or that house hewas employed in, with this fairy arrangement--itself like a piece of"chamber-music, " methinks, part answering to part; while no tootrenchant note is allowed to break through the delicate harmony ofwhite and pale red and little golden touches. Yet it is all verycomfortable also, it must be confessed; with an elegant open place forthe fire, instead of the big old stove of brown tiles. The ancient, heavy furniture of our grandparents goes up, with difficulty, into thegarrets, much against my father's inclination. To reconcile him to thechange, Antony is painting his portrait in a vast perruque and withmore vigorous massing of light and shadow than he is wont to permithimself. 

June 1714. 

He has completed the ovals:--The Four Seasons. Oh! the summerlikegrace, the freedom and softness, of the "Summer"--a hayfield such as wevisited to-day, but boundless, and with touches of level Italianarchitecture in the hot, white, elusive distance, and wreaths offlowers, fairy hayrakes and the like, suspended from tree to tree, withthat wonderful lightness which is one of the charms of his work. I canunderstand through this, at last, what it is he enjoys, what he selectsby preference, from all that various world we pass our lives in. I amstruck by the purity of the room he has re-fashioned for us--a sort ofMORAL purity; yet, in the FORMS and COLOURS of things. Is the actuallife of Paris, to which he will soon return, equally pure, that itrelishes this kind of thing so strongly? Only, methinks 'tis a pity toincorporate so much of his work, of himself, with objects of use, whichmust perish by use, or disappear, like our own old furniture, with merechange of fashion. 

July 1714. 

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 ithappened that Monseigneur le Prince de Cambrai, the author ofTelemaque, was in his place in the choir. He appears to be of greatage, assists but rarely at the offices of religion, and is never to beseen in Paris; and Antony had much desired to behold him. Certainly itwas worth while to have come so far only to see him, and hear him givehis pontifical blessing, in a voice feeble but of infinite sweetness, and with an inexpressibly graceful movement of the hands. A veritablegrand seigneur! His refined old age, the impress of genius and honours, even his disappointments, concur with natural graces to make him seemtoo distinguished (a fitter word fails me) for this world. Omniavanitas! he seems to say, yet with a profound resignation, which makesthe 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 thatlife has to bestow? Yet he was never to be seen at court, and has livedhere almost as an exile. Was our "Great King Lewis" jealous of a truegrand seigneur or grand monarque by natural gift and the favour ofheaven, that he could not endure his presence?

July 1714. 

My own portrait remains unfinished at his sudden departure. I sat forit in a walking-dress, made under his direction--a gown of a peculiarsilken stuff, falling into an abundance of small folds, giving me "acertain air of piquancy" which pleases him, but is far enough from mytrue self. My old Flemish faille, which I shall always wear, suits mebetter. 

I notice that our good-hearted but sometimes difficult friend saidlittle of our brother Jean-Baptiste, though he knows us so anxious onhis account--spoke only of his constant industry, cautiously, and notaltogether with satisfaction, as if the sight of it wearied him. 

September 1714. 

Will Antony ever accomplish that long-pondered journey to Italy? Forhis 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 forproviding him with a sum sufficient for the purpose. But that he nolonger needs. 

With myself, how to get through time becomes sometimes thequestion, --unavoidably; though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sadin a life so short as ours. The sullenness of a long wet day isyielding just now to an outburst of watery sunset, which strikes fromthe far horizon of this quiet world of ours, over fields andwillow-woods, upon the shifty weather-vanes and long-pointed windows ofthe tower on the square--from which the Angelus is sounding-with amomentary 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 maymeet 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 longafterwards I used to try every piece of money that came into my hands, expecting it to open. 

September 1714. 

We were sitting in the Watteau chamber for the coolness, this sultryevening. A sudden gust of wind ruffled the lights in the sconces on thewalls: the distant rumblings, which had continued all the afternoon, broke out at last; and through the driving rain, a coach, rattlingacross the Place, stops at our door: in a moment Jean-Baptiste is withus once again; but with bitter tears in his eyes;--dismissed!

October 1714. 

Jean-Baptiste! he too, rejected by Antony! It makes our friendship andfraternal sympathy closer. And still as he labours, not less sedulouslythan of old, and still so full of loyalty to his old master, in thatWatteau chamber, I seem to see Antony himself, of whom Jean-Baptistedares not yet speak, --to come very near his work, and understand hisgreat parts. So Jean-Baptiste's work, in its nearness to his, maystand, for the future, as the central interest of my life. I burymyself in that. 

February 1715. 

If I understand anything of these matters, Antony Watteau paints thatdelicate life of Paris so excellently, with so much spirit, partlybecause, after all, he looks down upon it or despises it. To persuademyself of that, is my womanly satisfaction for his preference--hisapparent preference--for a world so different from mine. Thosecoquetries, those vain and perishable graces, can be rendered soperfectly, only through an intimate understanding of them. For him, tounderstand must be to despise them; while (I think I know why) henevertheless undergoes their fascination. Hence that discontent withhimself, which keeps pace with his fame. It would have been better forhim--he would have enjoyed a purer and more real happiness--had heremained here, obscure; as it might have been better for me!

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, producesa solid and veritable likeness of it and of its ways. 

March 1715. 

There are points in his painting (I apprehend this through his ownpersistently modest observations) at which he works out his purposemore excellently than Watteau; of whom he has trusted himself to speakat last, with a wonderful self-effacement, pointing out in each of hispictures, for the rest so just and true, how Antony would have managedthis or that, and, with what an easy superiority, have done the thingbetter--done the impossible. 

February 1716. 

There are good things, attractive things, in life, meant for one andnot for another--not meant perhaps for me; as there are pretty clotheswhich are not suitable for every one. I find a certain immobility ofdisposition in me, to quicken or interfere with which is like physicalpain. He, so brilliant, petulant, mobile! I am better far besideJean-Baptiste--in contact with his quiet, even labour, and manner ofbeing. 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 atlast, as a sullen day turns quite clear and fine by imperceptiblechange. With the earliest dawn he enters his workroom, the Watteauchamber, where he remains at work all day. The dark evenings he spendsin industrious preparation with the crayon for the pictures he is tofinish during the hours of daylight. His toil is also his amusement: hegoes 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, likesavings of fine gold, into one particular picture (true opus magnum, ashe hopes), The Swing. He has the secret of surprising effects with acertain pearl-grey silken stuff of his predilection; and it must beconfessed that he paints hands--which a draughtsman, of course, shouldunderstand at least twice as well other people--with surpassingexpression. 

March 1716. 

Is it the depressing result of this labour, of a too exacting labour? Iknow not. But at times (it is his one melancholy!) he expresses astrange apprehension of poverty, of penury and mean surroundings in oldage; reminding me of that childish disposition to hoard, which Inoticed in him of old. And then--inglorious Watteau, as he is!--attimes that steadiness, in which he is so great a contrast to Antony, asit were accumulates, changes, into a ray of genius, a grace, aninexplicable touch of truth, in which all his heaviness leaves him fora while, and he actually goes beyond the master; as himself protests tome, yet modestly. And still, it is precisely at those moments that hefeels most the difference between himself and Antony Watteau. "In THATcountry, ALL the pebbles are golden nuggets, " he says; with perfectgood-humour. 

June 1716. 

'Tis truly in a delightful abode that Antony Watteau is just nowlodged--the hotel or town-house of M. De Crozat, which is not only acomfortable dwelling-place, but also a precious museum lucky people gofar to see. Jean-Baptiste, too, has seen the place, and describes it. The antiquities, beautiful curiosities of all sorts--above all, theoriginal drawings of those old masters Antony so greatly admires-arearranged all around one there, that the influence, the genius, of thosethings may imperceptibly play upon and enter into one, and form whatone does. The house is situated near the Rue Richelieu, but has a largegarden bout it. M. De Crozat gives his musical parties there, andAntony Watteau has painted the walls of one of the apartments with theFour Seasons, after the manner of ours, but doubtless improved bysecond thoughts. This beautiful place is now Antony's home for a while. The house has but one story, with attics in the mansard roofs, likethose of a farmhouse in the country. I fancy Antony fled thither for afew moments, from the visitors who weary him; breathing the freshnessof that dewy garden in the very midst of Paris. As for me, I suffocatethis summer afternoon in this pretty Watteau chamber of ours, whereJean-Baptiste is at work so contentedly. 

May 1717. 

In spite of all that happened, Jean-Baptiste has been looking forwardto a visit to Valenciennes which Antony Watteau had proposed to make. He hopes always--has a patient hope--that Antony's former patronage ofhim may be revived. And now he is among us, actually at hiswork-restless and disquieting, meagre, like a woman with some nervousmalady. Is it pity, then, pity only, one must feel for the brilliantone? He has been criticising the work of Jean-Baptiste, who takes hisjudgments generously, gratefully. Can it be that, after all, hedespises and is no true lover of his own art, and is but chilled by anenthusiasm for it in another, such as that of Jean-Baptiste? as ifJean-Baptiste over-valued it, or as if some ignobleness or blunder, some sign that he has really missed his aim, started into sight fromhis work at the sound of praise--as if such praise could hardly bealtogether sincere. 

June 1717. 

And at last one has actual sight of his work--what it is. He hasbrought with him certain long-cherished designs to finish here inquiet, as he protests he has never finished before. That charmingNoblesse--can it be really so distinguished to the minutest point, sonaturally aristocratic? Half in masquerade, playing the drawing-room orgarden comedy of life, these persons have upon them, not less than thelandscape he composes, and among the accidents of which they groupthemselves with such a perfect fittingness, a certain light we shouldseek for in vain upon anything real. For their framework they havearound them a veritable architecture--a tree-architecture--to whichthose moss-grown balusters, termes, statues, fountains, are really butaccessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I findmyself always saying to myself involuntarily, "The evening will be awet one. " The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour ofthe trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where delicatechildren may be trusted thinly clad; and the secular trees themselveswill hardly outlast another generation. 

July 1717. 

There has been an exhibition of his pictures in the Hall of the Academyof Saint Luke; and all the world has been to see. 

Yes! Besides that unreal, imaginary light upon these scenes, thesepersons, which is pure gift of his, there was a light, a poetry, inthose persons and things themselves, close at hand WE had not seen. Hehas 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 itscare for purity, its cleanly preferences, in what one is to SEE--in theoutsides of things-and there is something, a sign, a memento, at theleast, of what makes life really valuable, even in that. There, is mysimple notion, wholly womanly perhaps, but which I may hold by, of thepurpose of the arts. 

August 1717. 

And yet! (to read my mind, my experience, in somewhat different terms)methinks Antony Watteau reproduces that gallant world, those patchedand powdered ladies and fine cavaliers, so much to its ownsatisfaction, partly because he despises it; if this be a possiblecondition of excellent artistic production. People talk of a new eranow dawning upon the world, of fraternity, liberty, humanity, of anovel sort of social freedom in which men's natural goodness of heartwill blossom at a thousand points hitherto repressed, of warsdisappearing from the world in an infinite, benevolent ease oflife--yes! perhaps of infinite littleness also. And it is the outwardmanner of that, which, partly by anticipation, and through pureintellectual power, Antony Watteau has caught, together with aflattering something of his own, added thereto. Himself really of theold time--that serious old time which is passing away, the impress ofwhich he carries on his physiognomy--he dignifies, by what in him isneither more nor less than a profound melancholy, the essentialinsignificance of what he wills to touch in all that, transforming itsmere 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 afallacious grace, not its own. For in truth Antony Watteau is still themason's boy, and deals with that world under a fascination, of thenature of which he is half-conscious methinks, puzzled at "the queertrick he possesses, " to use his own phrase. You see him growing evermore and more meagre, as he goes through the world and its applause. Yet he reaches with wonderful sagacity the secret of an adjustment ofcolours, a coiffure, a toilette, setting I know not what air of realsuperiority on such things. He will never overcome his early training;and these light things will possess for him always a kind ofrepresentative or borrowed worth, as characterising that impossible orforbidden world which the mason's boy saw through the closed gatewaysof the enchanted garden. Those trifling and petty graces, the insigniato him of that nobler world of aspiration and idea, even now that he isaware, as I conceive, of their true littleness, bring back to him, bythe power of association, all the old magical exhilaration of hisdream--his dream of a better world than the real one. There, is theformula, as I apprehend, of his success--of his extraordinary hold onthings so alien from himself. And I think there is more real hilarityin my brother's fetes champetres--more truth to life, and thereforeless distinction. Yes! The world profits by such reflection of itspoor, coarse self, in one who renders all its caprices from the heightof a Corneille. That is my way of making up to myself for the fact thatI think his days, too, would have been really happier, had he remainedobscure at Valenciennes. 

September 1717. 

My own poor likeness, begun so long ago, still remains unfinished onthe easel, at his departure from Valenciennes--perhaps for ever; sincethe old people departed this life in the hard winter of last year, atno distant time from each other. It is pleasanter to him to sketch andplan than to paint and finish; and he is often out of humour withhimself because he cannot project into a picture the life and spirit ofhis first thought with the crayon. He would fain begin where thatfamous master Gerard Dow left off, and snatch, as it were with a singlestroke, what in him was the result of infinite patience. It is the signof this sort of promptitude that he values solely in the work ofanother. To my thinking there is a kind of greed or grasping in thathumour; as if things were not to last very long, and one must snatchopportunity. And often he succeeds. The old Dutch painter cherishedwith a kind of piety his colours and pencils. Antony Watteau, on thecontrary, will hardly make any preparations for his work at all, oreven clean his palette, in the dead-set he makes at improvisation. 'Tisthe contrast perhaps between the staid Dutch genius and the petulant, sparkling French temper of this new era, into which he has thrownhimself. Alas! it is already apparent that the result also losessomething of longevity, of durability--the colours fading or changing, from the first, somewhat rapidly, as Jean-Baptiste notes. 'Tis true, amere trifle alters or produces the expression. But then, on the otherhand, 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 thewhole to outlast the fleeting grace of those social conjunctions it ismeant to perpetuate. This is what has happened, in part, to thatportrait on the easel. Meantime, he has commanded Jean-Baptiste tofinish it; and so it must be. 

October 1717. 

Antony Watteau is an excellent judge of literature, and I have beenreading (with infinite surprise!) in my afternoon walks in the littlewood here, a new book he left behind him--a great favourite of his; asit has been a favourite with large numbers in Paris. * Those patheticshocks of fortune, those sudden alternations of pleasure and remorse, which must always lie among the very conditions of an irregular andguilty love, as in sinful games of chance:--they have begun to talk ofthese things in Paris, to amuse themselves with the spectacle of them, set forth here, in the story of poor Manon Lescaut--for whom fidelityis 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, onthe one side: on the other, a faith so absolute as to give to anillicit love almost the regularity of marriage! And this is the bookthose fine ladies in Watteau's "conversations, " who look so exquisitelypure, lay down on the cushion when the children run up to have theirlaces righted. Yet the pity of it! What floods of weeping! There is atone about which strikes me as going well with the grace of theseleafless birch-trees against the sky, the pale silver of their bark, and a certain delicate odour of decay which rises from the soil. It isall one half-light; and the heroine, nay! The hero himself also, thatdainty Chevalier des Grieux, with all his fervour, have, I think, but ahalf-life in them truly, from the first. And I could fancy myselfalmost of their condition sitting here alone this evening, in which apremature touch of winter makes the world look but an inhospitableplace of entertainment for one's spirit. With so little genial warmthto hold it there, one feels that the merest accident might detach thatflighty guest altogether. So chilled at heart things seem to me, as Igaze on that glacial point in the motionless sky, like some mortal spotwhence death begins to creep over the body!

*Possibly written at this date, but almost certainly not printed tillmany years later. --Note in Second Edition. 

And yet, in the midst of this, by mere force of contrast, comes back tome, very vividly, the true colour, ruddy with blossom and fruit, of thepast summer, among the streets and gardens of some of our old towns wevisited; when the thought of cold was a luxury, and the earth dryenough to sleep on. The summer was indeed a fine one; and the wholecountry seemed bewitched. A kind of infectious sentiment passed uponus, like an efflux from its flowers and flowerlikearchitecture--flower-like to me at least, but of which I never felt thebeauty before. 

And as I think of that, certainly I have to confess that there is awonderful reality about this lovers' story; an accordance betweenthemselves and the conditions of things around them, so deep as to makeit seem that the course of their lives could hardly have been otherthan it was. That impression comes, perhaps, wholly of the writer'sskill; but, at all events, I must read the book no more. 

June 1718. 

And he has allowed that Mademoiselle Rosalba--"ce bel esprit"--who candiscourse upon the arts like a master, to paint his portrait: haspainted hers in return! She holds a lapful of white roses with her twohands. Rosa Alba--himself has inscribed it! It will be engraved, tocirculate and perpetuate it the better. 

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. Oneputs this and that angry spasm into it, and is delivered from it so. 

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, isconsumptive, like Antony himself, and like to die. And he, who hasalways lacked either the money or the spirits to make thatlong-pondered, much-desired journey to Italy, has found in her work theveritable accent and colour of those old Venetian masters he would sowillingly have studied under the sunshine of their own land. Alas! Howlittle peace have his great successes given him; how little of thatquietude of mind, without which, methinks, one fails in true dignity ofcharacter. 

November 1718. 

His thirst for change of place has actually driven him to England, thatveritable home of the consumptive. Ah me! I feel it may be thefinishing stroke. To have run into the native country of consumption!Strange caprice of that desire to travel, which he has really indulgedso little in his life--of the restlessness which, they tell me, isitself a symptom of this terrible disease!

January 1720. 

As once before, after long silence, a token has reached us, a slighttoken that he remembers--an etched plate, one of very few he hasexecuted, with that old subject: Soldiers on the March. And the wearysoldier himself is returning once more to Valenciennes, on his way fromEngland to Paris. 

February 1720. 

Those sharply-arched brows, those restless eyes which seem larger thanever--something that seizes on one, and is almost terrible, in hisexpression--speak clearly, and irresistibly set one on the thought of asumming-up of his life. I am reminded of the day when, already withthat air of seemly thought, le bel serieux, he was found sketching, with so much truth to the inmost mind in them, those picturesquemountebanks at the Fair in the Grande Place; and I find, throughout hiscourse of life, something of the essential melancholy of the comedian. He, so fastidious and cold, and who has never "ventured therepresentation of passion, " does but amuse the gay world; and is awareof that, though certainly unamused himself all the while. Just now, however, he is finishing a very different picture--that too, full ofhumour--an English family-group, with a little girl riding a woodenhorse: the father, and the mother holding his tobacco-pipe, stand inthe centre. 

March 1720. 

To-morrow he will depart finally. And this evening the Syndics of theAcademy of Saint Luke came with their scarves and banners to conducttheir illustrious fellow-citizen, by torchlight, to supper in theirGuildhall, where all their beautiful old corporation plate will bedisplayed. The Watteau salon was lighted up to receive them. There issomething in the payment of great honours to the living which fills onewith apprehension, especially when the recipient of them looks so likea dying man. God have mercy on him!

April 1721. 

We were on the point of retiring to rest last evening when a messengerarrived post-haste with a letter on behalf of Antony Watteau, desiringJean-Baptiste's presence at Paris. We did not go to bed that night; andmy brother was on his way before daylight, his heart full of a strangeconflict of joy and apprehension. 

May 1721. 

A letter at last! from Jean-Baptiste, occupied with cares of all sortsat the bedside of the sufferer. Antony fancying that the air of thecountry might do him good, the Abbe Haranger, one of the canons of theChurch of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, where he was in the habit ofhearing Mass, has lent him a house at Nogent-sur-Marne. There hereceives a few visitors. But in truth the places he once liked best, the people, nay! the very friends, have become to him nothing less thaninsupportable. Though he still dreams of change, and would fain try hisnative air once more, he is at work constantly upon his art; but solelyby 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 nowanxious for one thing only, to give his old "dismissed" disciple whatremains of himself and the last secrets of his genius. Hisproperty--9000 livres only--goes to his relations. Jean-Baptiste hasfound these last weeks immeasurably useful. 

For the rest, bodily exhaustion perhaps, and this new interest in anold friend, have brought him tranquillity at last, a tranquillity inwhich he is much occupied with matters of religion. Ah! it was ever sowith 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 pitywhich 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'slives. 'Tis that homely, but honest cure of Nogent he has caricaturedso often, who attends him. 

July 1721. 

Our incomparable Watteau is no more! Jean-Baptiste returnedunexpectedly. I heard his hasty footsteps on the stairs. We turnedtogether into that room; and he told his story there. Antony Watteaudeparted suddenly, in the arms of M. Gersaint, on one of the late hotdays of July. At the last moment he had been at work upon a crucifixfor the good cure of Nogent, liking little the very rude one hepossessed. He died with all the sentiments of religion. 

He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker aftersomething in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or notat all. 

CHAPTER II. DENYS L'AUXERROIS

Almost every people, as we know, has had its legend of a "golden age"and of its return--legends which will hardly be forgotten, howeverprosaic the world may become, while man himself remains the aspiring, never quite contented being he is. And yet in truth, since we are nolonger children, we might well question the advantage of the return tous of a condition of life in which, by the nature of the case, thevalues of things would, so to speak, lie wholly on their surfaces, unless we could regain also the childish consciousness, or ratherunconsciousness, in ourselves, to take all that adroitly and with theappropriate lightness of heart. The dream, however, has been left forthe most part in the usual vagueness of dreams: in their waking hourspeople have been too busy to furnish it forth with details. Whatfollows is a quaint legend, with detail enough, of such a return of agolden or poetically-gilded age (a denizen of old Greece itselfactually finding his way back again among men) as it happened in anancient town of medieval France. 

Of the French town, properly so called, in which the products ofsuccessive ages, not with-out lively touches of the present, areblended together harmoniously, with a beauty SPECIFIC--a beautycisalpine and northern, yet at the same time quite distinct from themassive German picturesque of Ulm, or Freiburg, or Augsburg, and ofwhich Turner has found the ideal in certain of his studies of therivers of France, a perfectly happy conjunction of river and town beingof the essence of its physiognomy--the town of Auxerre is perhaps themost complete realisation to be found by the actual wanderer. Certainly, for picturesque expression it is the most memorable of adistinguished group of three in these parts, --Auxerre, Sens, Troyes, --each gathered, as if with deliberate aim at such effect, aboutthe central mass of a huge grey cathedral. 

Around Troyes the natural picturesque is to be sought only in the rich, almost coarse, summer colouring of the Champagne country, of which thevery 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 tothe latest Flamboyant, may be noticed among the greater French churchesfor breadth of proportions internally, and is famous for its almostunrivalled treasure of stained glass, chiefly of a florid, elaborate, later type, with much highly conscious artistic contrivance in designas well as in colour. In one of the richest of its windows, forinstance, certain lines of pearly white run hither and thither, withdelightful distant effect, upon ruby and dark blue. Approaching neareryou find it to be a Travellers' window, and those odd lines of whitethe long walking-staves in the hands of Abraham, Raphael, the Magi, andthe other saintly patrons of journeys. The appropriate provincialcharacter of the bourgeoisie of Champagne is still to be seen, it wouldappear, among the citizens of Troyes. Its streets, for the most part intimber and pargeting, present more than one unaltered specimen of theancient hotel or town-house, with forecourt and garden in the rear; andits more devout citizens would seem even in their church-building tohave sought chiefly to please the eyes of those occupied with mundaneaffairs and out of doors, for they have finished, with abundant outlay, only the vast, useless portals of their parish churches, of surprisingheight and lightness, in a kind of wildly elegant Gothic-on-stilts, giving to the streets of Troyes a peculiar air of the grotesque, as ifin some quaint nightmare of the Middle Age. 

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 thesesumptuous decorations. Here all is cool and composed, with an almostEnglish austerity. The first growth of the Pointed style inEngland--the hard "early English" of Canterbury--is indeed the creationof William, a master reared in the architectural school of Sens; andthe severity of his taste might seem to have acted as a restrainingpower on all the subsequent changes of manner in this place--changes inthemselves for the most part towards luxuriance. In harmony with theatmosphere of its great church is the cleanly quiet of the town, keptfresh by little channels of clear water circulating through itsstreets, derivatives of the rapid Vanne which falls just below into theYonne. The Yonne, bending gracefully, link after link, through anever-ending rustle of poplar trees, beneath lowly vine-clad hills, with relics of delicate woodland here and there, sometimes close athand, sometimes leaving an interval of broad meadow, has all thelightsome characteristics of French river-side scenery on a smallerscale than usual, and might pass for the child's fancy of a river, likethe rivers of the old miniature-painters, blue, and full to a fairgreen margin. One notices along its course a greater proportion thanelsewhere of still untouched old seignorial residences, larger orsmaller. The range of old gibbous towns along its banks, expandingtheir gay quays upon the water-side, have a common character--Joigny, Villeneuve, Julien-du-Sault--yet tempt us to tarry at each and examineits relics, old glass and the like, of the Renaissance or the MiddleAge, for the acquisition of real though minor lessons on the variousarts which have left themselves a central monument atAuxerre. --Auxerre! A slight ascent in the winding road! and you havebefore you the prettiest town in France--the broad framework ofvineyard sloping upwards gently to the horizon, with distant whitecottages inviting one to walk: the quiet curve of river below, with allthe river-side details: the three great purple-tiled masses of SaintGermain, Saint Pierre, and the cathedral of Saint Etienne, rising outof the crowded houses with more than the usual abruptness andirregularity of French building. Here, that rare artist, thesusceptible painter of architecture, if he understands the value alikeof line and mass of broad masses and delicate lines, has "a subjectmade to his hand. "

A veritable country of the vine, it presents nevertheless an expressionpeaceful rather than radiant. Perfect type of that happy mean betweennorthern earnestness and the luxury of the south, for which we prizemidland France, its physiognomy is not quite happy--attractive in partfor its melancholy. Its most characteristic atmosphere is to be seenwhen 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 oldbuilding is defined in clear grey. A fine summer ripens its grapes intoa valuable wine; but in spite of that it seems always longing for alarger and more continuous allowance of the sunshine which is so muchto its taste. You might fancy something querulous or plaintive in thatrustling movement of the vine-leaves, as blue-frocked Jacques Bonhommefinishes his day's labour among them. 

To beguile one such afternoon when the rain set in early and walkingwas impossible, I found my way to the shop of an old dealer inbric-a-brac. It was not a monotonous display, after the manner of theParisian dealer, of a stock-in-trade the like of which one has seenmany times over, but a discriminate collection of real curiosities. Oneseemed to recognise a provincial school of taste in various relics ofthe housekeeping of the last century, with many a gem of earlier timesfrom the old churches and religious houses of the neighbourhood. Amongthem was a large and brilliant fragment of stained glass which mighthave come from the cathedral itself. Of the very finest quality incolour and design, it presented a figure not exactly conformable to anyrecognised ecclesiastical type; and it was clearly part of a series. Onmy eager inquiry for the remainder, the old man replied that no more ofit was known, but added that the priest of a neighbouring village wasthe possessor of an entire set of tapestries, apparently intended forsuspension in church, and designed to portray the whole subject ofwhich the figure in the stained glass was a portion. 

Next afternoon accordingly I repaired to the priest's house, in realitya little Gothic building, part perhaps of an ancient manor-house, closeto the village church. In the front garden, flower-garden and potagerin one, the bees were busy among the autumn growths--many-colouredasters, bignonias, scarlet-beans, and the old-fashioned parsonageflowers. The courteous owner readily showed me his tapestries, some ofwhich hung on the walls of his parlour and staircase by way of abackground for the display of the other curiosities of which he was acollector. Certainly, those tapestries and the stained glass dealt withthe same theme. In both were the same musical instruments--pipes, cymbals, long reed-like trumpets. The story, indeed, included thebuilding of an organ, just such an instrument, only on a larger scale, as was standing in the old priest's library, though almost soundlessnow, whereas in certain of the woven pictures the hearers appear as iftransported, some of them shouting rapturously to the organ music. Asort of mad vehemence prevails, indeed, throughout the delicatebewilderments of the whole series--giddy dances, wild animals leaping, above all perpetual wreathings of the vine, connecting, like some mazyarabesque, 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 wasthat of the organ-builder himself, a flaxen and flowery creature, sometimes wellnigh naked among the vine-leaves, sometimes muffled inskins against the cold, sometimes in the dress of a monk, but alwayswith a strong impress of real character and incident from the veritablestreets of Auxerre. What is it? Certainly, notwithstanding its grace, and wealth of graceful accessories, a suffering, tortured figure. Withall the regular beauty of a pagan god, he has suffered after a mannerof which we must suppose pagan gods incapable. It was as if one ofthose fair, triumphant beings had cast in his lot with the creatures ofan age later than his own, people of larger spiritual capacity andassuredly of a larger capacity for melancholy. With this fancy in mymind, by the help of certain notes, which lay in the priest's curiouslibrary, upon the history of the works at the cathedral during theperiod of its finishing, and in repeated examination of the oldtapestried designs, the story shaped itself at last. 

Towards the middle of the thirteenth century the cathedral of SaintEtienne was complete in its main outlines: what remained was thebuilding of the great tower, and all that various labour of finaldecoration which it would take more than one generation to accomplish. Certain circumstances, however, not wholly explained, led to a somewhatrapid finishing, as it were out of hand, yet with a marvellous fulnessat once and grace. Of the result much has perished, or been transferredelsewhere; a portion is still visible in sumptuous relics of stainedwindows, and, above all, in the reliefs which adorn the westernportals, very delicately carved in a fine, firm stone from Tonnerre, ofwhich time has only browned the surface, and which, for early masteryin art, may be compared with the contemporary work of Italy. They comenearer than the art of that age was used to do to the expression oflife; with a feeling for reality, in no ignoble form, caught, it mightseem, from the ardent and full-veined existence then current in theseactual streets and houses. Just then Auxerre had its turn in thatpolitical movement which broke out sympathetically, first in one, thenin another of the towns of France, turning their narrow, feudalinstitutions into a free, communistic life--a movement of which thosegreat centres of popular devotion, the French cathedrals, are in manyinstances the monument. Closely connected always with the assertion ofindividual freedom, alike in mind and manners, at Auxerre thispolitical stir was associated also, as cause or effect, with the figureand character of a particular personage, long remembered. He was thevery genius, it would appear, of that new, free, generous manner inart, active and potent as a living creature. 

As the most skilful of the band of carvers worked there one day, with alabour he could never quite make equal to the vision within him, afinely-sculptured Greek coffin of stone, which had been made to servefor some later Roman funeral, was unearthed by the masons. Here, itmight seem, the thing was indeed done, and art achieved, as far asregards those final graces, and harmonies of execution, which wereprecisely what lay beyond the hand of the medieval workman, who for hispart had largely at command a seriousness of conception lacking in theold Greek. Within the coffin lay an object of a fresh and brilliantclearness among the ashes of the dead--a flask of lively green glass, like a great emerald. It might have been "the wondrous vessel of theGrail. " Only, this object seemed to bring back no ineffable purity, butrather the riotous and earthy heat of old paganism itself. Coatedwithin, and, as some were persuaded, still redolent with the tawnysediment of the Roman wine it had held so long ago, it was set asidefor use at the supper which was shortly to celebrate the completion ofthe masons' work. Amid much talk of the great age of gold, and somerandom expressions of hope that it might return again, fine old wine ofAuxerre was sipped in small glasses from the precious flask as supperended. And, whether or not the opening of the buried vessel hadanything to do with it, from that time a sort of golden age seemedindeed to be reigning there for a while, and the triumphant completionof the great church was contemporary with a series of remarkable wineseasons. The vintage of those years was long remembered. Fine andabundant 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 artsbranched out exuberantly in a reign of quiet, delighted labour, at theprompting, as it seemed, of the singular being who came suddenly andoddly to Auxerre to be the centre of so pleasant a period, though intruth he made but a sad ending. 

A peculiar usage long perpetuated itself at Auxerre. On Easter Day thecanons, in the very centre of the great church, played solemnly atball. Vespers being sung, instead of conducting the bishop to hispalace, they proceeded in order into the nave, the people standing intwo long rows to watch. Girding up their skirts a little way, the wholebody of clerics awaited their turn in silence, while the captain of thesinging-boys cast the ball into the air, as high as he might, along thevaulted 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 portlychanters, the chaplains, the canons themselves, who finally played outthe game with all the decorum of an ecclesiastical ceremony. It wasjust then, just as the canons took the ball to themselves so gravely, that Denys--Denys l'Auxerrois, as he was afterwards called--appearedfor the first time. Leaping in among the timid children, he made thething really a game. The boys played like boys, the men almost likemadmen, and all with a delightful glee which became contagious, firstin the clerical body, and then among the spectators. The aged Dean ofthe Chapter, Protonotary of his Holiness, held up his purple skirt alittle higher, and stepping from the ranks with an amazing levity, asif suddenly relieved of his burden of eighty years, tossed the ballwith his foot to the venerable capitular Homilist, equal to theoccasion. And then, unable to stand inactive any longer, the laitycarried on the game among themselves, with shouts of not too boisterousamusement; the sport continuing till the flight of the ball could nolonger be traced along the dusky aisles. 

Though the home of his childhood was but a humble one--one of thoselittle cliff-houses cut out in the low chalky hillside, such as arestill to be found with inhabitants in certain districts of France-therewere some who connected his birth with the story of a beautiful countrygirl, who, about eighteen years before, had been taken from her ownpeople, not unwillingly, for the pleasure of the Count of Auxerre. Shehad wished indeed to see the great lord, who had sought her privately, in the glory of his own house; but, terrified by the strange splendoursof 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 violentstorm, and in her flight given birth prematurely to a child. The child, a singularly fair one, was found alive, but the mother dead, bylightning-stroke as it seemed, not far from her lord's chamber-door, under the shelter of a ruined ivy-clad tower. Denys himself certainlywas a joyous lad enough. At the cliff-side cottage, nestling actuallybeneath the vineyards, he came to be an unrivalled gardener, and, grownto manhood, brought his produce to market, keeping a stall in the greatcathedral square for the sale of melons and pomegranates, all manner ofseeds and flowers (omnia speciosa camporum), honey also, wax tapers, sweetmeats hot from the frying-pan, rough home-made pots and pans fromthe little pottery in the wood, loaves baked by the aged woman in whosehouse he lived. On that Easter Day he had entered the great church forthe first time, for the purpose of seeing the game. 

And from the very first, the women who saw him at his business, orwatering his plants in the cool of the evening, idled for him. The menwho noticed the crowd of women at his stall, and how even fresh younggirls from the country, seeing him for the first time, always loiteredthere, suspected--who could tell what kind of powers? hidden under thewhite veil of that youthful form; and pausing to ponder the matter, found themselves also fallen into the snare. The sight of him made oldpeople feel young again. Even the sage monk Hermes, devoted to studyand experiment, was unable to keep the fruit-seller out of his mind, and would fain have discovered the secret of his charm, partly for thefriendly purpose of explaining to the lad himself his perhaps more thannatural gifts with a view to their profitable cultivation. 

It was a period, as older men took note, of young men and theirinfluence. They took fire, no one could quite explain how, as if at hispresence, and asserted a wonderful amount of volition, of insolence, yet as if with the consent of their elders, who would themselvessometimes lose their balance, a little comically. That revolution inthe temper and manner of individuals concurred with the movement thenon foot at Auxerre, as in other French towns, for the liberation of thecommune from its old feudal superiors. Denys they called Frank, amongmany other nicknames. Young lords prided themselves on saying thatlabour 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 awhile made life like a stage-play. He first led those long processions, through which by and by "the little people, " the discontented, thedespairing, would utter their minds. One man engaged with another intalk in the market-place; a new influence came forth at the contact;another and then another adhered; at last a new spirit was abroadeverywhere. The hot nights were noisy with swarming troops ofdishevelled women and youths with red-stained limbs and faces, carryingtheir lighted torches over the vine-clad hills, or rushing down thestreets, to the horror of timid watchers, towards the cool spaces bythe river. A shrill music, a laughter at all things, was everywhere. And the new spirit repaired even to church to take part in the noveloffices of the Feast of Fools. Heads flung back in ecstasy--the morningsleep among the vines, when the fatigue of the night wasover--dew-drenched garments--the serf lying at his ease at last: theartists, then so numerous at the place, caught what they could, something, at least, of the richness, the flexibility of the visibleaspects 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, ofdelightful natural things. And the powers of nature concurred. Itseemed there would be winter no more. The planet Mars drew nearer tothe earth than usual, hanging in the low sky like a fiery red lamp. Amassive but well-nigh lifeless vine on the wall of the cloister, allowed to remain there only as a curiosity on account of its immenseage, in that great season, as it was long after called, clothed itselfwith fruit once more. The culture of the grape greatly increased. Thesunlight fell for the first time on many a spot of deep woodlandcleared for vine-growing; though Denys, a lover of trees, was carefulto leave a stately specimen of forest growth here and there. 

When his troubles came, one characteristic that had seemed most amiablein his prosperity was turned against him--a fondness for oddly grown oreven 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 fromthe butcher. He taught the people not to be afraid of the strange, uglycreatures which the light of the moving torches drew from theirhiding-places, nor think it a bad omen that approached. He tamed averitable wolf to keep him company like a dog. It was the first of manyambiguous circumstances about him, from which, in the minds of anincreasing number of people, a deep suspicion and hatred began todefine itself. The rich bestiary, then compiling in the library of thegreat church, became, through his assistance, nothing less than agarden of Eden--the garden of Eden grown wild. The owl alone heabhorred. A little later, almost as if in revenge, alone of all animalsit clung to him, haunting him persistently among the dusky stonetowers, when grown gentler than ever he dared not kill it. He movedunhurt in the famous menagerie of the castle, of which the commonpeople were so much afraid, and let out the lions, themselves timidprisoners enough, through the streets during the fair. The incidentsuggested 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 Wineshould return in triumph from the East. In the cathedral square thepageant was presented, amid an intolerable noise of every kind ofpipe-music, with Denys in the chief part, upon a gaily-painted chariot, in soft silken raiment, and, for headdress, a strange elephant-scalpwith gilded tusks. 

And that unrivalled fairness and freshness of aspect:--how did he alonepreserve it untouched, through the wind and heat? In truth, it was notby magic, as some said, but by a natural simplicity in his living. Whenthat dark season of his troubles arrived he was heard beggingquerulously one wintry night, "Give me wine, meat; dark wine and brownmeat!"--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 hadlived on spring-water and fruit. A lover of fertility in all its forms, in what did but suggest it, he was curious and penetrative concerningthe habits of water, and had the secret of the divining-rod. Longbefore it came he could detect the scent of rain from afar, and wouldclimb with delight to the great scaffolding on the unfinished tower towatch its coming over the thirsty vine-land, till it rattled on thegreat tiled roof of the church below; and then, throwing off hismantle, allow it to bathe his limbs freely, clinging firmly against thetempestuous wind among the carved imageries of dark stone. 

It was on his sudden return after a long journey (one of manyinexplicable disappearances), coming back changed somewhat, that he ateflesh for the first time, tearing the hot, red morsels with hisdelicate fingers in a kind of wild greed. He had fled to the south fromthe first forbidding days of a hard winter which came at last. At thegreat seaport of Marseilles he had trafficked with sailors from allparts of the world, from Arabia and India, and bought their wares, exposed now for sale, to the wonder of all, at the Easter fair--richerwines and incense than had been known in Auxerre, seeds of marvellousnew flowers, creatures wild and tame, new pottery painted in raw gaudytints, the skins of animals, meats fried with unheard-of condiments. His stall formed a strange, unwonted patch of colour, found suddenlydisplayed in the hot morning. 

The artists were more delighted than ever, and frequented his companyin the little manorial habitation, deserted long since by its ownersand haunted, so that the eyes of many looked evil upon it, where he hadtaken up his abode, attracted, in the first instance, by its richthough neglected garden, a tangle of every kind of creeping, vine-likeplant. Here, surrounded in abundance by the pleasant materials of histrade, the vine-dresser as it were turned pedant and kept school forthe various artists, who learned here an art supplementary to theirown, --that gay magic, namely (art or trick) of his existence, till theyfound themselves grown into a kind of aristocracy, like veritable gensfleur-de-lises, as they worked together for the decoration of the greatchurch and a hundred other places beside. And yet a darkness had grownupon him. The kind creature had lost something of his gentleness. Strange motiveless misdeeds had happened; and, at a loss for othercauses, not the envious only would fain have traced the blame to Denys. He was making the younger world mad. Would he make himself Count ofAuxerre? The lady Ariane, deserted by her former lover, had lookedkindly upon him; was ready to make him son-in-law to the old count herfather, old and not long for this world. The wise monk Hermes bethoughthim of certain old readings in which the Wine-god, whose part Denys hadplayed so well, had his contrast, his dark or antipathetic side; waslike a double creature, of two natures, difficult or impossible toharmonise. And in truth the much-prized wine of Auxerre has itself buta fugitive charm, being apt to sicken and turn gross long before thebottle is empty, however carefully sealed; as it goes indeed, at itsbest, by hard names, among those who grow it, such as Chainette andMigraine. 

A kind of degeneration, of coarseness--the coarseness of satiety, andshapeless, battered-out appetite--with an almost savage taste forcarnivorous diet, had come over the company. A rumour went abroad ofcertain 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, wasattributed vaguely to him, he could but wonder whether it had beenindeed thus, and the shadow of a fancied crime abode with him. Peopleturned against their favourite, whose former charms must now be countedonly as the fascinations of witchcraft. It was as if the wine pouredout for them had soured in the cup. The golden age had indeed come backfor a while:--golden was it, or gilded only, after all? and they weretoo sick, or at least too serious, to carry through their parts in it. The monk Hermes was whimsically reminded of that after-thought in paganpoetry, of a Wine-god who had been in hell. Denys certainly, with allhis flaxen fairness about him, was manifestly a sufferer. At first hethought of departing secretly to some other place. Alas! his wits weretoo far gone for certainty of success in the attempt. He feared to bebrought back a prisoner. Those fat years were over. It was a time ofscarcity. The working people might not eat and drink of the good thingsthey had helped to store away. Tears rose in the eyes of needychildren, of old or weak people like children, as they woke up againand again to sunless, frost-bound, ruinous mornings; and the littlehungry creatures went prowling after scattered hedge-nuts or driedvine-tendrils. Mysterious, dark rains prevailed throughout the summer. The great offices of Saint John were fumbled through in a suddendarkness of unseasonable storm, which greatly damaged the carvedornaments of the church, the bishop reading his mid-day Mass by thelight of the little candle at his book. And then, one night, the nightwhich seemed literally to have swallowed up the shortest day in theyear, a plot was contrived by certain persons to take Denys as he wentand kill him privately for a sorcerer. He could hardly tell how heescaped, and found himself safe in his earliest home, the cottage inthe cliff-side, with such a big fire as he delighted in burning uponthe hearth. They made a little feast as well as they could for thebeautiful hunted creature, with abundance of waxlights. 

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

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

The busy tribe of variously gifted artists, labouring rapidly at themany works on hand for the final embellishment of the cathedral of St. Etienne, made those conventual buildings just then cheerful enough tolighten a melancholy, heavy even as that of our friend Denys. He tookhis place among the workmen, a conventual novice; a novice also as towhatever concerns any actual handicraft. He could but compound sweetincense for the sanctuary. And yet, again by merely visible presence, he made himself felt in all the varied exercise around him of thosearts which address themselves first of all to sight. Unconsciously hedefined a peculiar manner, alike of feeling and expression, to thoseskilful hands at work day by day with the chisel, the pencil, or theneedle, in many an enduring form of exquisite fancy. In threesuccessive phases or fashions might be traced, especially in the carvedwork, the humours he had determined. There was first wild gaiety, exuberant in a wreathing of life-like imageries, from which nothingreally present in nature was excluded. That, as the soul of Denysdarkened, had passed into obscure regions of the satiric, the grotesqueand coarse. But from this time there was manifest, with no loss ofpower or effect, a well-assured seriousness, somewhat jealous andexclusive, not so much in the selection of the material on which thearts were to work, as in the precise sort of expression that should beinduced upon it. It was as if the gay old pagan world had been BLESSEDin some way; with effects to be seen most clearly in the rich miniaturework of the manuscripts of the capitular library, --a marvellous Ovidespecially, upon the pages of which those old loves and sorrows seemedto come to life again in medieval costume, as Denys, in cowl now andwith tonsured head, leaned over the painter, and led his work, by akind of visible sympathy, often unspoken, rather than by any formalcomment. 

Above all, there was a desire abroad to attain the instruments of afreer and more various sacred music than had been in use hitherto--amusic that might express the whole compass of souls now grown tomanhood. Auxerre, then as afterwards, was famous for its liturgicalmusic. It was Denys, at last, to whom the thought occurred of combiningin a fuller tide of music all the instruments then in use. Like theWine-god of old, he had been a lover and patron especially of the musicof the pipe, in all its varieties. Here, too, there had been evidentthose three fashions or "modes":--first, the simple and pastoral, thehomely note of the pipe, like the piping of the wind itself from offthe distant fields; then, the wild, savage din, that had cost so muchto quiet people, and driven excitable people mad. Now he would composeall this to sweeter purposes; and the building of the first organbecame like the book of his life: it expanded to the full compass ofhis nature, in its sorrow and delight. In long, enjoyable days of windand sun by the river-side, the seemingly half-witted "brother" soughtand found the needful varieties of reed. The carpenters, under hisinstruction, set up the great wooden passages for the thunder; whilethe little pipes of pasteboard simulated the sound of the human voicesinging to the victorious notes of the long metal trumpets. At timesthis also, as people heard night after night those wandering sounds, seemed like the work of a madman, though they awoke sometimes in wonderat snatches of a new, an unmistakable new music. It was the triumph ofall 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 inhis hand, as lord of the strings, seemed to look askance on the musicof the reed, in all the jealousy with which he put Marsyas to death socruelly. 

Meantime, the people, even his enemies, seemed to have forgotten him. Enemies, in truth, they still were, ready to take his life should theopportunity come; as he perceived when at last he ventured forth on aday of public ceremony. The bishop was to pronounce a blessing upon thefoundations of a new bridge, designed to take the place of the ancientRoman bridge which, repaired in a thousand places, had hitherto servedfor the chief passage of the Yonne. It was as if the disturbing of thattime-worn masonry let out the dark spectres of departed times. Deepdown, at the core of the central pile, a painful object wasexposed--the skeleton of a child, placed there alive, it was rightlysurmised, in the superstitious belief that, by way of vicarioussubstitution, its death would secure the safety of all who should passover. There were some who found themselves, with a little surprise, looking round as if for a similar pledge of security in their newundertaking. It was just then that Denys was seen plainly, standing, inall essential features precisely as of old, upon one of the greatstones prepared for the foundation of the new building. For a moment hefelt the eyes of the people upon him full of that strange humour, andwith characteristic alertness, after a rapid gaze over the grey city inits broad green framework of vineyards, best seen from this spot, flunghimself down into the water and disappeared from view where the streamflowed most swiftly below a row of flour-mills. Some indeed fanciedthey had seen him emerge again safely on the deck of one of the greatboats, loaded with grapes and wreathed triumphantly with flowers like afloating garden, which were then bringing down the vintage from thecountry; but generally the people believed their strange enemy now atlast departed for ever. Denys in truth was at work again in peace atthe cloister, upon his house of reeds and pipes. At times his fits cameupon him again; and when they came, for his cure he would dig eagerly, turned sexton now, digging, by choice, graves for the dead in thevarious churchyards of the town. There were those who had seen him thusemployed (that form seeming still to carry something of real sun-goldupon it) peering into the darkness, while his tears fell sometimesamong the grim relics his mattock had disturbed. 

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

Meantime the winds of his organ were ready to blow; and with difficultyhe obtained grace from the Chapter for a trial of its powers on anotable public occasion, as follows. A singular guest was expected atAuxerre. In recompense for some service rendered to the Chapter intimes gone by, the Sire de Chastellux had the hereditary dignity of acanon of the church. On the day of his reception he presented himselfat the entrance of the choir in surplice and amice, worn over themilitary habit. The old count of Chastellux was lately dead, and theheir had announced his coming, according to custom, to claim hisecclesiastical privilege. There had been long feud between the housesof Chastellux and Auxerre; but on this happy occasion an offer of peacecame with a proposal for the hand of the Lady Ariane. 

The goodly young man arrived, and, duly arrayed, was received into hisstall at vespers, the bishop assisting. It was then that the peopleheard the music of the organ, rolling over them for the first time, with various feelings of delight. But the performer on and author ofthe instrument was forgotten in his work, and there was nore-instatement of the former favourite. The religious ceremony wasfollowed by a civic festival, in which Auxerre welcomed its futurelord. The festival was to end at nightfall with a somewhat rude popularpageant, in which the person of Winter would be hunted blindfoldthrough the streets. It was the sequel to that earlier stage-play ofthe Return from the East in which Denys had been the central figure. The old forgotten player saw his part before him, and, as ifmechanically, fell again into the chief place, monk's dress and all. Itmight restore his popularity: who could tell? Hastily he donned theashen-grey mantle, the rough haircloth about the throat, and wentthrough the preliminary matter. And it happened that a point of thehaircloth scratched his lip deeply, with a long trickling of blood uponthe chin. It was as if the sight of blood transported the spectatorswith a kind of mad rage, and suddenly revealed to them the truth. Thepretended hunting of the unholy creature became a real one, whichbrought out, in rapid increase, men's evil passions. The soul of Denyswas already at rest, as his body, now borne along in front of thecrowd, was tossed hither and thither, torn at last limb from limb. Themen stuck little shreds of his flesh, or, failing that, of his tornraiment, into their caps; the women lending their long hairpins for thepurpose. The monk Hermes sought in vain next day for any remains of thebody of his friend. Only, at nightfall, the heart of Denys was broughtto him by a stranger, still entire. It must long since have moulderedinto dust under the stone, marked with a cross, where he buried it in adark corner of the cathedral aisle. 

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

CHAPTER III. SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK

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 thefrosty season was in the leafless branches turned to silver, the furreddresses of the skaters, the warmth of the red-brick house fronts underthe gauze of white fog, the gleams of pale sunlight on the cuirasses ofthe mounted soldiers as they receded into the distance. Sebastian vanStorck, confessedly the most graceful performer in all that skatingmultitude, moving in endless maze over the vast surface of the frozenwater-meadow, liked best this season of the year for its expression ofa perfect impassivity, or at least of a perfect repose. The earth was, or seemed to be, at rest, with a breathlessness of slumber which suitedthe young man's peculiar temper. The heavy summer, as it dried up themeadows now lying dead below the ice, set free a crowded and competingworld of life, which, while it gleamed very pleasantly russet andyellow for the painter Albert Cuyp, seemed wellnigh to suffocateSebastian van Storck. Yet with all his appreciation of the nationalwinter, Sebastian was not altogether a Hollander. His mother, ofSpanish descent and Catholic, had given a richness of tone and form tothe healthy freshness of the Dutch physiognomy, apt to preserve itsyouthfulness of aspect far beyond the period of life usual with otherpeoples. This mixed expression charmed the eye of Isaac van Ostade, whohad painted his portrait from a sketch taken at one of those skatingparties, with his plume of squirrel's tail and fur muff, in all themodest pleasantness of boyhood. When he returned home lately from hisstudies at a place far inland, at the proposal of his tutor, torecover, as the tutor suggested, a certain loss of robustness, something more than that cheerful indifference of early youth hadpassed away. The learned man, who held, as was alleged, the doctrinesof a surprising new philosophy, reluctant to disturb too early the fineintelligence of the pupil entrusted to him, had found it, perhaps, amatter of honesty to send back to his parents one likely enough tocatch from others any sort of theoretic light; for the letter he wrotedwelt much on the lad's intellectual fearlessness. "At present, " he hadwritten, "he is influenced more by curiosity than by a care for truth, according to the character of the young. Certainly, he differsstrikingly from his equals in age, by his passion for a vigorousintellectual gymnastic, such as the supine character of their mindsrenders distasteful to most young men, but in which he shows afearlessness that at times makes me fancy that his ultimate destinationmay be the military life; for indeed the rigidly logical tendency ofhis mind always leads him out upon the practical. Don't misunderstandme! At present, he is strenuous only intellectually; and has given nodefinite sign of preference, as regards a vocation in life. But heseems to me to be one practical in this sense, that his theorems willshape life for him, directly; that he will always seek, as a matter ofcourse, the effective equivalent to--the line of being which shall bethe proper continuation of--his line of thinking. This intellectualrectitude, or candour, which to my mind has a kind of beauty in it, hasreacted upon myself, I confess, with a searching quality. " That"searching quality, " indeed, many others also, people far from beingintellectual, had experienced--an agitation of mind in hisneighbourhood, oddly at variance with the composure of the young man'smanner and surrounding, so jealously preserved. 

In the crowd of spectators at the skating, whose eyes followed, sowell-satisfied, the movements of Sebastian van Storck, were the mothersof marriageable daughters, who presently became the suitors of thisrich and distinguished youth, introduced to them, as now grown to man'sestate, by his delighted parents. Dutch aristocracy had put forth allits graces to become the winter morn: and it was characteristic of theperiod that the artist tribe was there, on a grand footing, --inwaiting, for the lights and shadows they liked best. The artists were, in truth, an important body just then, as a natural consequence of thenation's hard-won prosperity; helping it to a full consciousness of thegenial yet delicate homeliness it loved, for which it had fought sobravely, and was ready at any moment to fight anew, against man or thesea. Thomas de Keyser, who understood better than any one else the kindof quaint new Atticism which had found its way into the world overthose waste salt marshes, wondering whether quite its finest type as heunderstood it could ever actually be seen there, saw it at last, inlively motion, in the person of Sebastian van Storck, and desired topaint his portrait. A little to his surprise, the young man declinedthe offer; not graciously, as was thought. 

Holland, just then, was reposing on its laurels after its long contestwith Spain, in a short period of complete wellbeing, before troubles ofanother kind should set in. That a darker time might return again, wasclearly enough felt by Sebastian the elder--a time like that of Williamthe Silent, with its insane civil animosities, which would demandsimilarly energetic personalities, and offer them similaropportunities. And then, it was part of his honest geniality ofcharacter to admire those who "get on" in the world. Himself had been, almost from boyhood, in contact with great affairs. A member of theStates-General which had taken so hardly the kingly airs of FrederickHenry, he had assisted at the Congress of Munster, and figuresconspicuously in Terburgh's picture of that assembly, which had finallyestablished Holland as a first-rate power. The heroism by which thenational wellbeing had been achieved was still of recent memory--theair full of its reverberation, and great movement. There was atradition to be maintained; the sword by no means resting in itssheath. The age was still fitted to evoke a generous ambition; and thisson, from whose natural gifts there was so much to hope for, might playhis part, at least as a diplomatist, if the present quiet continued. Had not the learned man said that his natural disposition would leadhim out always upon practice? And in truth, the memory of that Silenthero had its fascination for the youth. When, about this time, Peter deKeyser, Thomas's brother, unveiled at last his tomb of wrought bronzeand marble in the Nieuwe Kerk at Delft, the young Sebastian was one ofa small company present, and relished much the cold and abstractsimplicity of the monument, so conformable to the great, abstract, andunuttered force of the hero who slept beneath. 

In complete contrast to all that is abstract or cold in art, the homeof Sebastian, the family mansion of the Storcks--a house, the front ofwhich still survives in one of those patient architectural pieces byJan van der Heyde--was, in its minute and busy wellbeing, like anepitome of Holland itself with all the good-fortune of its "thrivinggenius" reflected, quite spontaneously, in the national taste. Thenation had learned to content itself with a religion which told little, or not at all, on the outsides of things. But we may fancy thatsomething of the religious spirit had gone, according to the law of thetransmutation of forces, into the scrupulous care for cleanliness, intothe grave, old-world, conservative beauty of Dutch houses, which meantthat the life people maintained in them was normally affectionate andpure. 

The most curious florists of Holland were ambitious to supply theBurgomaster van Storck with the choicest products of their skill forthe garden spread below the windows on either side of the portico, andalong the central avenue of hoary beeches which led to it. Naturallythis house, within a mile of the city of Haarlem, became a resort ofthe artists, then mixing freely in great society, giving and receivinghints as to the domestic picturesque. Creatures of leisure--of leisureon both sides--they were the appropriate complement of Dutchprosperity, as it was understood just then. Sebastian the elder couldalmost have wished his son to be one of them: it was the next bestthing to the being an influential publicist or statesman. The Dutch hadjust begun to see what a picture their country was--its canals, andboompjis, and endless, broadly-lighted meadows, and thousands of milesof quaint water-side: and their painters, the first true masters oflandscape for its own sake, were further informing them in the matter. They were bringing proof, for all who cared to see, of the wealth ofcolour there was all around them in this, supposably, sad land. Aboveall, they developed the old Low-country taste for interiors. Thoseinnumerable genre pieces--conversation, music, play--were in truth theequivalent of novel-reading for that day; its own actual life, in itsown proper circumstances, reflected in various degrees of idealisation, with no diminution of the sense of reality (that is to say) but withmore and more purged and perfected delightfulness of interest. Themselves illustrating, as every student of their history knows, thegood-fellowship of family life, it was the ideal of that life whichthese artists depicted; the ideal of home in a country where thepreponderant interest of life, after all, could not well be out ofdoors. Of the earth earthy--genuine red earth of the old Adam--it wasan ideal very different from that which the sacred Italian painters hadevoked from the life of Italy, yet, in its best types, was not withouta kind of natural religiousness. And in the achievement of a type ofbeauty so national and vernacular, the votaries of purely Dutch artmight well feel that the Italianisers, like Berghem, Boll, and JanWeenix went so far afield in vain. 

The fine organisation and acute intelligence of Sebastian would havemade him an effective connoisseur of the arts, as he showed by thejustice of his remarks in those assemblies of the artists which hisfather so much loved. But in truth the arts were a matter he could butjust tolerate. Why add, by a forced and artificial production, to themonotonous tide of competing, fleeting existence? Only, finding so muchfine art actually about him, he was compelled (so to speak) to adjusthimself to it; to ascertain and accept that in it which should leastcollide with, or might even carry forward a little, his owncharacteristic tendencies. Obviously somewhat jealous of hisintellectual interests, he loved inanimate nature, it might have beenthought, better than man. He cared nothing, indeed, for the warmsandbanks of Wynants, nor for those eerie relics of the ancient Dutchwoodland which survive in Hobbema and Ruysdael, still less for thehighly-coloured sceneries of the academic band at Rome, in spite of theescape they provide one into clear breadth of atmosphere. For thoughSebastian van Storck refused to travel, he loved the distant--enjoyedthe sense of things seen from a distance, carrying us, as on wide wingsof space itself, far out of one's actual surrounding. His preference inthe matter of art was, therefore, for those prospects a vold'oiseau--of the caged bird on the wing at last--of which Rubens hadthe secret, and still more Philip de Koninck, four of whose choicestworks occupied the four walls of his chamber; visionary escapes, north, south, east, and west, into a wide-open though, it must be confessed, asomewhat sullen land. For the fourth of them he had exchanged with hismother a marvellously vivid Metsu, lately bequeathed to him, in whichshe herself was presented. They were the sole ornaments he permittedhimself. From the midst of the busy and busy-looking house, crowdedwith the furniture and the pretty little toys of many generations, along passage led the rare visitor up a winding staircase, and (again atthe end of a long passage) he found himself as if shut off from thewhole talkative Dutch world, and in the embrace of that wonderful quietwhich is also possible in Holland at its height all around him. It washere that Sebastian could yield himself, with the only sort of love hehad ever felt, to the supremacy of his difficult thoughts. --A kind ofEMPTY place! Here, you felt, all had been mentally put to rights by theworking-out of a long equation, which had zero is equal to zero for itsresult. Here one did, and perhaps felt, nothing; one only thought. Ofliving creatures only birds came there freely, the sea-birdsespecially, to attract and detain which there were all sorts ofingenious contrivances about the windows, such as one may see in thecottage sceneries of Jan Steen and others. There was something, doubtless, of his passion for distance in this welcoming of thecreatures of the air. An extreme simplicity in their manner of lifewas, indeed, characteristic of many a distinguished Hollander--Williamthe Silent, Baruch de Spinosa, the brothers de Witt. But the simplicityof Sebastian van Storck was something different from that, andcertainly nothing democratic. His mother thought him like onedisembarrassing himself carefully, and little by little, of allimpediments, habituating himself gradually to make shift with as littleas possible, in preparation for a long journey. 

The Burgomaster van Storck entertained a party of friends, consistingchiefly of his favourite artists, one summer evening. The guests wereseen arriving on foot in the fine weather, some of them accompanied bytheir wives and daughters, against the light of the low sun, fallingred on the old trees of the avenue and the faces of those who advancedalong it:--Willem van Aelst, expecting to find hints for aflower-portrait in the exotics which would decorate thebanqueting-room; Gerard Dow, to feed his eye, amid all that glitteringluxury, on the combat between candle-light and the last rays of thedeparting sun; Thomas de Keyser, to catch by stealth the likeness ofSebastian the younger. Albert Cuyp was there, who, developing thelatent gold in Rembrandt, had brought into his native Dordrecht a heavywealth of sunshine, as exotic as those flowers or the eastern carpetson the Burgomaster's tables, with Hooch, the indoor Cuyp, and Willemvan 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, incompany with his brother Peter, his niece, and young Mr. Nicholas Stonefrom England, pupil of that brother Peter, who afterwards married theniece. For the life of Dutch artists, too, was exemplary in matters ofdomestic relationship, its history telling many a cheering story ofmutual faith in misfortune. Hardly less exemplary was the comradeshipwhich they displayed among themselves, obscuring their own best giftssometimes, one in the mere accessories of another man's work, so thatthey came together to-night with no fear of falling out, and spoilingthe 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 theHondecoeters--Giles, Gybrecht, and Melchior. They led the party beforethe house was entered, by fading light, to see the curious poultry ofthe Burgomaster go to roost; and it was almost night when thesupper-room was reached at last. The occasion was an important one toSebastian, and to others through him. For (was it the music of theduets? he asked himself next morning, with a certain distaste as heremembered it all, or the heady Spanish wines poured out so freely inthose narrow but deep Venetian glasses?) on this evening he approachedmore nearly than he had ever yet done to Mademoiselle van Westrheene, as she sat there beside the clavecin looking very ruddy and fresh inher white satin, trimmed with glossy crimson swans-down. 

So genially attempered, so warm, was life become, in the land of whichPliny had spoken as scarcely dry land at all. And, in truth, the seawhich Sebastian so much loved, and with so great a satisfaction andsense of wellbeing in every hint of its nearness, is never far distantin Holland. Invading all places, stealing under one's feet, insinuatingitself everywhere along an endless network of canals (by no means suchformal channels as we understand by the name, but picturesque rivers, with sedgy banks and haunted by innumerable birds) its incidentspresent themselves oddly even in one's park or woodland walks; the shipin full sail appearing suddenly among the great trees or above thegarden wall, where we had no suspicion of the presence of water. In thevery conditions of life in such a country there was a standing force ofpathos. The country itself shared the uncertainty of the individualhuman life; and there was pathos also in the constantly renewed, heavily-taxed labour, necessary to keep the native soil, fought for sounselfishly, there at all, with a warfare that must still be maintainedwhen that other struggle with the Spaniard was over. But thoughSebastian liked to breathe, so nearly, the sea and its influences, those were considerations he scarcely entertained. In his passion forSchwindsucht--we haven't the word--he found it pleasant to think of theresistless element which left one hardly a foot-space amidst theyielding sand; of the old beds of lost rivers, surviving now only asdeeper channels in the sea; of the remains of a certain ancient town, which within men's memory had lost its few remaining inhabitants, and, with its already empty tombs, dissolved and disappeared in the flood. 

It happened, on occasion of an exceptionally low tide, that someremarkable relics were exposed to view on the coast of the island ofVleeland. A countryman's waggon overtaken by the tide, as he returnedwith merchandise from the shore! you might have supposed, but for atouch of grace in the construction of the thing--lightly wroughttimber-work, united and adorned by a multitude of brass fastenings, like the work of children for their simplicity, while the rude, stiffchair, or throne, set upon it, seemed to distinguish it as a chariot ofstate. To some antiquarians it told the story of the overwhelming ofone of the chiefs of the old primeval people of Holland, amid all hisgala array, in a great storm. But it was another view which Sebastianpreferred; that this object was sepulchral, namely, in its motive--theone surviving relic of a grand burial, in the ancient manner, of a kingor hero, whose very tomb was wasted away. --Sunt metis metae! There camewith it the odd fancy that he himself would like to have been dead andgone as long ago, with a kind of envy of those whose deceasing was solong since over. 

On more peaceful days he would ponder Pliny's account of those primevalforefathers, but without Pliny's contempt for them. A cloyed Romanmight despise their humble existence, fixed by necessity from age toage, and with no desire of change, as "the ocean poured in its floodtwice a day, making it uncertain whether the country was a part of thecontinent or of the sea. " But for his part Sebastian found something ofpoetry in all that, as he conceived what thoughts the old Hollandermight 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 butairily on tall stakes, conformable to the elevation of the highesttides, like a navigator, thought the learned writer, when the sea wasrisen, like a ship-wrecked mariner when it was retired. For the fancyof Sebastian he lived with great breadths of calm light above andaround him, influenced by, and, in a sense, living upon them, andsurely might well complain, though to Pliny's so infinite surprise, onbeing made a Roman citizen. 

And certainly Sebastian van Storck did not felicitate his people on theluck which, in the words of another old writer, "hath disposed them toso thriving a genius. " Their restless ingenuity in making andmaintaining dry land where nature had willed the sea, was even morelike the industry of animals than had been that life of theirforefathers. Away with that tetchy, feverish, unworthy agitation! withthis and that, all too importunate, motive of interest! And then, "Myson!" said his father, "be stimulated to action!" he, too, thinking ofthat heroic industry which had triumphed over nature precisely wherethe contest had been most difficult. 

Yet, in truth, Sebastian was forcibly taken by the simplicity of agreat affection, as set forth in an incident of real life of which heheard just then. The eminent Grotius being condemned to perpetualimprisonment, his wife determined to share his fate, alleviated only bythe reading of books sent by friends. The books, finished, werereturned 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 itcomplaining of its weight, with a self-control, which she maintainedtill the captive was in safety, herself remaining to face theconsequences; and there was a kind of absoluteness of affection inthat, which attracted Sebastian for a while to ponder on the practicalforces which shape men's lives. Had he turned, indeed, to a practicalcareer it would have been less in the direction of the military orpolitical life than of another form of enterprise popular with hiscountrymen. In the eager, gallant life of that age, if the sword fellfor a moment into its sheath, they were for starting off on perilousvoyages to the regions of frost and snow in search after that"North-Western passage, " for the discovery of which the States-Generalhad offered large rewards. Sebastian, in effect, found a charm in thethought of that still, drowsy, spellbound world of perpetual ice, as inart and life he could always tolerate the sea. Admiral-general ofHolland, as painted by Van der Helst, with a marine background byBackhuizen:--at moments his father could fancy him so. 

There was still another very different sort of character to whichSebastian would let his thoughts stray, without check, for a time. Hismother, whom he much resembled outwardly, a Catholic from Brabant, hadhad saints in her family, and from time to time the mind of Sebastianhad been occupied on the subject of monastic life, its quiet, itsnegation. The portrait of a certain Carthusian prior, which, like thefamous statue of Saint Bruno, the first Carthusian, in the church ofSanta Maria degli Angeli at Rome, could it have spoken, would havesaid, "Silence!" kept strange company with the painted visages of menof affairs. A great theological strife was then raging in Holland. Grave ministers of religion assembled sometimes, as in the paintedscene by Rembrandt, in the Burgomaster's house, and once, not howeverin their company, came a renowned young Jewish divine, Baruch deSpinosa, with whom, most unexpectedly, Sebastian found himself insympathy, meeting the young Jew's far-reaching thoughts half-way, tothe confirmation of his own; and he did not know that his visitor, veryready with the pencil, had taken his likeness as they talked on thefly-leaf of his note-book. Alive to that theological disturbance in theair all around him, he refused to be moved by it, as essentially astrife on small matters, anticipating a vagrant regret which may havevisited many other minds since, the regret, namely, that the old, pensive, use-and-wont Catholicism, which had accompanied the nation'searlier struggle for existence, and consoled it therein, had been takenfrom it. And for himself, indeed, what impressed him in that oldCatholicism was a kind of lull in it--a lulling power--like that of themonotonous organ-music, which Holland, Catholic or not, still sogreatly loves. But what he could not away with in the Catholic religionwas its unfailing drift towards the concrete--the positive imageries ofa faith, so richly beset with persons, things, historical incidents. 

Rigidly logical in the method of his inferences, he attained the poeticquality only by the audacity with which he conceived the whole sublimeextension of his premises. The contrast was a strange one between thecareful, the almost petty fineness of his personal surrounding--all theelegant conventionalities of life, in that rising Dutch family--and themortal coldness of a temperament, the intellectual tendencies of whichseemed to necessitate straightforward flight from all that waspositive. He seemed, if one may say so, in love with death; preferringwinter to summer; finding only a tranquillising influence in thethought of the earth beneath our feet cooling down for ever from itsold cosmic heat; watching pleasurably how their colours fled out ofthings, and the long sand-bank in the sea, which had been the rampartof a town, was washed down in its turn. One of his acquaintance, apenurious young poet, who, having nothing in his pockets but theimaginative or otherwise barely potential gold of manuscript verses, would have grasped so eagerly, had they lain within his reach, at theelegant outsides of life, thought the fortunate Sebastian, possessed ofevery possible opportunity of that kind, yet bent only on dispensingwith it, certainly a most puzzling and comfortless creature. A fewonly, half discerning what was in his mind, would fain have shared hisintellectual clearness, and found a kind of beauty in this youthfulenthusiasm for an abstract theorem. Extremes meeting, his cold anddispassionate detachment from all that is most attractive to ordinaryminds came to have the impressiveness of a great passion. And for themost part, people had loved him; feeling instinctively that somewherethere must be the justification of his difference from themselves. Itwas like being in love: or it was an intellectual malady, such aspleaded for forbearance, like bodily sickness, and gave at times aresigned and touching sweetness to what he did and said. Only once, ata moment of the wild popular excitement which at that period was easyto provoke in Holland, there was a certain group of persons who wouldhave 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, inthe interest of the English or the French. Or, had he already committedsome treasonable act, who was so anxious to expose no writing of histhat he left his very letters unsigned, and there were littlestratagems to get specimens of his fair manuscript? For with all hisbreadth of mystic intention, he was persistent, as the hours crept on, to leave all the inevitable details of life at least in order, inequation. And all his singularities appeared to be summed up in hisrefusal to take his place in the life-sized family group (tresdistingue et tres soigne remarks a modern critic of the work) paintedabout this time. His mother expostulated with him on the matter:--shemust needs feel, a little icily, the emptiness of hope, and somethingmore than the due measure of cold in things for a woman of her age, inthe presence of a son who desired but to fade out of the world like abreath--and she suggested filial duty. "Good mother, " he answered, "there are duties towards the intellect also, which women can butrarely understand. "

The artists and their wives were come to supper again, with theBurgomaster van Storck. Mademoiselle van Westrheene was also come, withher sister and mother. The girl was by this time fallen in love withSebastian; and she was one of the few who, in spite of his terriblecoldness, really loved him for himself. But though of good birth shewas poor, while Sebastian could not but perceive that he had manysuitors of his wealth. In truth, Madame van Westrheene, her mother, didwish to marry this daughter into the great world, and plied many artsto that end, such as "daughterful" mothers use. Her healthy freshnessof mien and mind, her ruddy beauty, some showy presents that hadpassed, were of a piece with the ruddy colouring of the very housethese people lived in; and for a moment the cheerful warmth that may befelt in life seemed to come very close to him, --to come forth, andenfold him. Meantime the girl herself taking note of this, that on aformer occasion of their meeting he had seemed likely to respond to herinclination, and that his father would readily consent to such amarriage, surprised him on the sudden with those coquetries andimportunities, all those little arts of love, which often succeed withmen. Only, to Sebastian they seemed opposed to that absolute nature wesuppose 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 ofquiet happiness, he was coming to an estimate of the situation, withstrict regard to that ideal of a calm, intellectual indifference, ofwhich he was the sworn chevalier. Set in the cold, hard light of thatideal, this girl, with the pronounced personal views of her mother, andin 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 mannerthat she and those about them thought him thus bound. He did notreflect on the inconsistency of the feeling of honour (living, as itdoes essentially, upon the concrete and minute detail of socialrelationship) for one who, on principle, set so slight a value onanything whatever that is merely relative in its character. 

The guests, lively and late, were almost pledging the betrothed in therich wine. Only Sebastian's mother knew; and at that advanced hour, while the company were thus intently occupied, drew away theBurgomaster to confide to him the misgiving she felt, grown to a greatheight just then. The young man had slipped from the assembly; butcertainly not with Mademoiselle van Westrheene, who was suddenlywithdrawn also. And she never appeared again in the world. Already, next day, with the rumour that Sebastian had left his home, it wasknown that the expected marriage would not take place. The girl, indeed, alleged something in the way of a cause on her part; but seemedto fade away continually afterwards, and in the eyes of all who saw herwas like one perishing of wounded pride. But to make a clean breast ofher poor girlish worldliness, before she became a beguine, sheconfessed to her mother the receipt of the letter--the cruel letterthat 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--wasfound, oddly tacked on, as their last word, to the studious record ofthe abstract thoughts which had been the real business of Sebastian'slife, in the room whither his mother went to seek him next day, littered with the fragments of the one portrait of him in existence. 

The neat and elaborate manuscript volume, of which this letter formedthe final page (odd transition! by which a train of thought so abstractdrew its conclusion in the sphere of action) afforded at length to thefew who were interested in him a much-coveted insight into thecuriosity of his existence; and I pause just here to indicate inoutline the kind of reasoning through which, making the "Infinite" hisbeginning and his end, Sebastian had come to think all definite formsof being, the warm pressure of life, the cry of nature itself, no morethan a troublesome irritation of the surface of the one absolute mind, a passing vexatious thought or uneasy dream there, at its height ofpetulant importunity in the eager, human creature. 

The volume was, indeed, a kind of treatise to be:--a hard, systematic, well-concatenated train of thought, still implicated in thecircumstances of a journal. Freed from the accidents of that particularliterary form with its unavoidable details of place and occasion, thetheoretic strain would have been found mathematically continuous. Thealready so weary Sebastian might perhaps never have taken in hand, orsucceeded in, this detachment of his thoughts; every one of which, beginning with himself as the peculiar and intimate apprehension ofthis or that particular day and hour, seemed still to protest againstsuch disturbance, as if reluctant to part from those accidentalassociations of the personal history which had prompted it, and sobecome a purely intellectual abstraction. 

The series began with Sebastian's boyish enthusiasm for a strange, finesaying of Doctor Baruch de Spinosa, concerning the Divine Love:--Thatwhoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by him in return. Inmere reaction against an actual surrounding of which every circumstancetended to make him a finished egotist, that bold assertion defined forhim the ideal of an intellectual disinterestedness, of a domain ofunimpassioned mind, with the desire to put one's subjective side out ofthe way, and let pure reason speak. 

And what pure reason affirmed in the first place, as the "beginning ofwisdom, " 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 fixedthe mental eye with more and more of self-absorption on the phenomenaof his intellectual existence, a picture or vision of the universe asactually the product, so far as he really knew it, of his own lonelythinking power--of himself, there, thinking: as being zero without him:and as possessing a perfectly homogeneous unity in that fact. "Thingsthat have nothing in common with each other, " said the axiomaticreason, "cannot be understood or explained by means of each other. " Butto pure reason things discovered themselves as being, in their essence, thoughts:--all things, even the most opposite things, meretransmutations, of a single power, the power of thought. All was butconscious mind. Therefore, all the more exclusively, he must ministerto mind, to the intellectual power, submitting himself to the soledirection of that, whithersoever it might lead him. Everything must bereferred to, and, as it were, changed into the terms of that, if itsessential value was to be ascertained. "Joy, " he said, anticipatingSpinosa--that, for the attainment of which men are ready to surrenderall beside--"is but the name of a passion in which the mind passes to agreater perfection or power of thinking; as grief is the name of thepassion in which it passes to a less. "

Looking backward for the generative source of that creative power ofthought in him, from his own mysterious intellectual being to its firstcause, he still reflected, as one can but do, the enlarged pattern ofhimself into the vague region of hypothesis. In this way, some, at allevents, would have explained his mental process. To him that processwas nothing less than the apprehension, the revelation, of the greatestand most real of ideas--the true substance of all things. He, too, withhis vividly-coloured existence, with this picturesque and sensuousworld of Dutch art and Dutch reality all around that would fain havemade him the prisoner of its colours, its genial warmth, its strugglefor life, its selfish and crafty love, was but a transient perturbationof the one absolute mind; of which, indeed, all finite things whatever, time itself, the most durable achievements of nature and man, and allthat seems most like independent energy, are no more than pettyaccidents or affections. Theorem and corollary! Thus they stood:

"There can be only one substance: (corollary) it is the greatest oferrors to think that the non-existent, the world of finite things seenand 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 therestoration of equilibrium, the calm surface of the absolute, untroubled mind, to tabula rasa, by the extinction in one's self of allthat is but correlative to the finite illusion--by the suppression ofourselves. "

In the loneliness which was gathering round him, and, oddly enough, asa somewhat surprising thing, he wondered whether there were, or hadbeen, others possessed of like thoughts, ready to welcome any such ashis veritable compatriots. And in fact he became aware just then, inreadings difficult indeed, but which from their all-absorbing interestseemed almost like an illicit pleasure, a sense of kinship with certainolder minds. The study of many an earlier adventurous theoristsatisfied his curiosity as the record of daring physical adventure, forinstance, might satisfy the curiosity of the healthy. It was atradition--a constant tradition--that daring thought of his; an echo, or haunting recurrent voice of the human soul itself, and as suchsealed with natural truth, which certain minds would not fail to heed;discerning also, if they were really loyal to themselves, its practicalconclusion. --The one alone is: and all things beside are but itspassing affections, which have no necessary or proper right to be. 

As but such "accidents" or "affections, " indeed, there might have beenfound, within the circumference of that one infinite creative thinker, some scope for the joy and love of the creature. There have beendispositions in which that abstract theorem has only induced a renewedvalue for the finite interests around and within us. Centre of heat andlight, truly nothing has seemed to lie beyond the touch of itsperpetual summer. It has allied itself to the poetical or artisticsympathy, which feels challenged to acquaint itself with and explorethe various forms of finite existence all the more intimately, justbecause of that sense of one lively spirit circulating through allthings--a tiny particle of the one soul, in the sunbeam, or the leaf. Sebastian van Storck, on the contrary, was determined, perhaps by someinherited satiety or fatigue in his nature, to the opposite issue ofthe practical dilemma. For him, that one abstract being was as thepallid Arctic sun, disclosing itself over the dead level of a glacial, a barren and absolutely lonely sea. The lively purpose of life had beenfrozen out of it. What he must admire, and love if he could, was"equilibrium, " the void, the tabula rasa, into which, through all thoseapparent energies of man and nature, that in truth are but forces ofdisintegration, the world was really settling. And, himself a merecircumstance in a fatalistic series, to which the clay of the potterwas no sufficient parallel, he could not expect to be "loved inreturn. " At first, indeed, he had a kind of delight in his thoughts--inthe eager pressure forward, to whatsoever conclusion, of a rigidintellectual 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 outof him. In fact, the conclusion was there already, and might have beenforeseen, in the premises. By a singular perversity, it seemed to himthat every one of those passing "affections"--he too, alas! attimes--was for ever trying to be, to assert ITSELF, to maintain itsisolated and petty self, by a kind of practical lie in things; althoughthrough every incident of its hypothetic existence it had protestedthat its proper function was to die. Surely! those transient affectionsmarred the freedom, the truth, the beatific calm, of the absoluteselfishness, which could not, if it would, pass beyond thecircumference of itself; to which, at times, with a fantastic sense ofwellbeing, he was capable of a sort of fanatical devotion. And those, as he conceived, were his moments of genuine theoretic insight, inwhich, under the abstract "perpetual light, " he died to self; while theintellect, after all, had attained a freedom of its own through thevigorous act which assured him that, as nature was but a thought ofhis, so himself also was but the passing thought of God. 

No! rather a puzzle only, an anomaly, upon that one, white, unruffledconsciousness! His first principle once recognised, all the rest, thewhole array of propositions down to the heartless practical conclusion, must follow of themselves. Detachment: to hasten hence: to fold upone's whole self, as a vesture put aside: to anticipate, by suchindividual force as he could find in him, the slow disintegration bywhich nature herself is levelling the eternal hills:--here would be thesecret of peace, of such dignity and truth as there could be in a worldwhich after all was essentially an illusion. For Sebastian at least, the world and the individual alike had been divested of all effectivepurpose. The most vivid of finite objects, the dramatic episodes ofDutch history, the brilliant personalities which had found their partsto play in them, that golden art, surrounding us with an ideal world, beyond which the real world is discernible indeed, but etherealised bythe medium through which it comes to one: all this, for most men sopowerful a link to existence, only set him on the thought ofescape--means of escape--into a formless and nameless infinite world, quite evenly grey. The very emphasis of those objects, theirimportunity to the eye, the ear, the finite intelligence, was but themeasure of their distance from what really is. One's personal presence, the presence, such as it is, of the most incisive things and personsaround us, could only lessen by so much, that which really is. Torestore tabula rasa, then, by a continual effort at self-effacement!Actually proud at times of his curious, well-reasoned nihilism, hecould but regard what is called the business of life as no better thana trifling and wearisome delay. Bent on making sacrifice of the richexistence possible for him, as he would readily have sacrificed that ofother people, to the bare and formal logic of the answer to a query(never proposed at all to entirely healthy minds) regarding the remoteconditions and tendencies of that existence, he did not reflect that ifothers had inquired as curiously as himself the world could never havecome so far at all--that the fact of its having come so far was itselfa weighty exception to his hypothesis. His odd devotion, soaring orsinking into fanaticism, into a kind of religious mania, with what wasreally a vehement assertion of his individual will, he had formulatedduty as the principle to hinder as little as possible what he calledthe restoration of equilibrium, the restoration of the primaryconsciousness to itself--its relief from that uneasy, tetchy, unworthydream of a world, made so ill, or dreamt so weakly--to forget, to beforgotten. 

And at length this dark fanaticism, losing the support of his pride inthe mere novelty of a reasoning so hard and dry, turned round upon him, as our fanaticism will, in black melancholy. The theoretic orimaginative desire to urge Time's creeping footsteps, was felt now asthe physical fatigue which leaves the book or the letter unfinished, orfinishes eagerly out of hand, for mere finishing's sake, unimportantbusiness. Strange! that the presence to the mind of a metaphysicalabstraction should have had this power over one so fortunately endowedfor the reception of the sensible world. It could hardly have been sowith him but for the concurrence of physical causes with the influencesproper to a mere thought. The moralist, indeed, might have noted that ameaner kind of pride, the morbid fear of vulgarity, lent secretstrength to the intellectual prejudice, which realised duty as therenunciation of all finite objects, the fastidious refusal to be or doany limited thing. But besides this it was legible in his ownadmissions from time to time, that the body, following, as it does withpowerful temperaments, the lead of mind and the will, the intellectualconsumption (so to term it) had been concurrent with, had strengthenedand been strengthened by, a vein of physical phthisis--by a merelyphysical accident, after all, of his bodily constitution, such as mighthave taken a different turn, had another accident fixed his home amongthe hills instead of on the shore. Is it only the result of disease? hewould ask himself sometimes with a sudden suspicion of his intellectualcogency--this persuasion that myself, and all that surrounds me, arebut a diminution of that which really is?--this unkindly melancholy?

The journal, with that "cruel" letter to Mademoiselle van Westrheenecoming 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 bylaw; that they were, or might become, dangerous to society. Perhaps itwas the confessor of his mother who thought of the matter most justly. The aged man smiled, observing how, even for minds by no meanssuperficial, the mere dress it wears alters the look of a familiarthought; with a happy sort of smile, as he added (reflecting that suchtruth as there was in Sebastian's theory was duly covered by thepropositions of his own creed, and quoting Sebastian's favourite paganwisdom from the lips of Saint Paul) "in Him, we live, and move, andhave our being. "

Next day, as Sebastian escaped to the sea under the long, monotonousline of wind-mills, in comparative calm of mind--reaction of thatpleasant morning from the madness of the night before--he was makinglight, or trying to make light, with some success, of his latedistress. He would fain have thought it a small matter, to beadequately set at rest for him by certain well-tested influences ofexternal nature, in a long visit to the place he liked best: a desolatehouse, amid the sands of the Helder, one of the old lodgings of hisfamily property now, rather, of the sea-birds, and almost surrounded bythe encroaching tide, though there were still relics enough of hardy, sweet things about it, to form what was to Sebastian the most perfectgarden in Holland. Here he could make "equation" between himself andwhat was not himself, and set things in order, in preparation towardssuch deliberate and final change in his manner of living ascircumstances so clearly necessitated. 

As he stayed in this place, with one or two silent serving people, asudden rising of the wind altered, as it might seem, in a few dark, tempestuous hours, the entire world around him. The strong wind changednot again for fourteen days, and its effect was a permanent one; sothat people might have fancied that an enemy had indeed cut the dykessomewhere--a pin-hole enough to wreck the ship of Holland, or at leastthis portion of it, which underwent an inundation of the sea the likeof 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 roomof the old tower, to which the tide was almost risen; though thebuilding still stood firmly, and still with the means of life inplenty. And it was in the saving of this child, with a great effort, ascertain circumstances seemed to indicate, that Sebastian had lost hislife. 

His parents were come to seek him, believing him bent onself-destruction, and were almost glad to find him thus. A learnedphysician, moreover, endeavoured to comfort his mother by remarkingthat in any case he must certainly have died ere many years werepassed, slowly, perhaps painfully, of a disease then coming into theworld; disease begotten by the fogs of that country--waters, heobserved, not in their place, "above the firmament"--on people grownsomewhat over-delicate in their nature by the effects of modern luxury. 

CHAPTER IV. DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD

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

Time, at the court of the Grand-duke of Rosenmold, at the beginning ofthe eighteenth century might seem to have been standing still almostsince the Middle Age--since the days of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, at which period, by the marriage of the hereditary Grand-duke with aprincess of the Imperial house, a sudden tide of wealth, flowingthrough the grand-ducal exchequer, had left a kind of goldenarchitectural splendour on the place, always too ample for itspopulation. The sloping Gothic roofs for carrying off the heavy snowsstill indented the sky--a world of tiles, with space uncurtailed forthe awkward gambols of that very German goblin, Hans Klapper, on thelong, slumberous, northern nights. Whole quarryfuls of wrought stonehad been piled along the streets and around the squares, and were nowgrown, in truth, like nature's self again, in their rough, time-wornmassiveness, with weeds and wild flowers where their decay accumulated, blossoming, always the same, beyond people's memories, every summer, asthe 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 architecturaleffect, was unbroken by a single new gable. And within, human life--itsthoughts, its habits, above all, its etiquette--had keen put out by nomatter of excitement, political or intellectual, ever at all, one mightsay, at any time. The rambling grand-ducal palace was full tooverflowing with furniture, which, useful or useless, was allornamental, and none of it new. Suppose the various objects, especiallythe contents of the haunted old lumber-rooms, duly arranged andticketed, and their Highnesses would have had a historic museum, afterwhich those famed "Green Vaults" at Dresden would hardly have countedas one of the glories of Augustus the Strong. An immense heraldry, thattruly German vanity, had grown, expatiating, florid, eloquent, overeverything, without and within--windows, house-fronts, church walls, and church floors. And one-half of the male inhabitants were big orlittle State functionaries, mostly of a quasi decorative order--thetreble-singer to the town-council, the court organist, the court poet, and the like--each with his deputies and assistants, maintaining, allunbroken, a sleepy ceremonial, to make the hours just noticeable asthey slipped away. At court, with a continuous round of ceremonies, which, though early in the day, must always take place under a jealousexclusion of the sun, one seemed to live in perpetual candle-light. 

It was in a delightful rummaging of one of those lumber-rooms, escapedfrom 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 year1486, printed in heavy type, with frontispiece, perhaps, by AlbertDuerer--Ars Versificandi: The Art of Versification: by Conrad Celtes. Crowned poet of the Emperor Frederick the Third, he had the right tospeak on that subject; for while he vindicated as best he might oldGerman literature against the charge of barbarism, he did also a man'spart towards reviving in the Fatherland the knowledge of the poetry ofGreece and Rome; and for Carl, the pearl, the golden nugget, of thevolume was the Sapphic ode with which it closed--To Apollo, prayingthat he would come to us from Italy, bringing his lyre with him: AdApollinem, Ut ab Italis cum lyra ad Germanos veniat. The god of light, coming to Germany from some more favoured world beyond it, over leaguesof rainy hill and mountain, making soft day there: that had ever beenthe dream of the ghost-ridden yet deep-feeling and certainly meekGerman soul; of the great Duerer, for instance, who had been the friendof this Conrad Celtes, and himself, all German as he was, like a gleamof real day amid that hyperborean German darkness--a darkness whichclave to him, too, at that dim time, when there were violent robbers, nay, real live devils, in every German wood. And it was precisely theaspiration of Carl himself. Those verses, coming to the boy's hand atthe right moment, brought a beam of effectual daylight to a wholemagazine of observation, fancy, desire, stored up from the firstimpressions of childhood. To bring Apollo with his lyre to Germany! Itwas precisely that he, Carl, desired to do--was, as he might flatterhimself, actually doing. 

The daylight, the Apolline aurora, which the young Duke Carl claimed tobe bringing to his candle-lit people, came in the somewhat questionableform of the contemporary French ideal, in matters of art andliterature--French plays, French architecture, Frenchlooking-glasses--Apollo in the dandified costume of Lewis theFourteenth. Only, confronting the essentially aged and decrepit gracesof his model with his own essentially youthful temper, he invigoratedwhat he borrowed; and with him an aspiration towards the classicalideal, so often hollow and insincere, lost all its affectation. Hisdoating grandfather, the reigning Grand-duke, afforded readily enough, from the great store of inherited wealth which would one day be thelad's, the funds necessary for the completion of the vast unfinishedResidence, with "pavilions" (after the manner of the famous Mansard)uniting its scattered parts; while a wonderful flowerage ofarchitectural fancy, with broken attic roofs, passed over and beyondthe earlier fabric; the later and lighter forms being in part carvedadroitly out of the heavy masses of the old, honest, "stump Gothic"tracery. One fault only Carl found in his French models, and wasresolute to correct. He would have, at least within, real marble inplace of stucco, and, if he might, perhaps solid gold for gilding. There was something in the sanguine, floridly handsome youth, with hisalertness of mind turned wholly, amid the vexing preoccupations of anage of war, upon embellishment and the softer things of life, whichsoothed the testy humours of the old Duke, like the quiet physicalwarmth of a fire or the sun. He was ready to preside with all ceremonyat a presentation of Marivaux's Death of Hannibal, played in theoriginal, with such imperfect mastery of the French accent as thelovers of new light in Rosenmold had at command, in a theatre copiedfrom that at Versailles, lined with pale yellow satin, and with apicture, amid the stucco braveries of the ceiling, of the SeptentrionalApollo himself, in somewhat watery red and blue. Innumerable wax lightsin cut-glass lustres were a thing of course. Duke Carl himself, attiredafter the newest French fashion, played the part of Hannibal. The oldDuke, indeed, at a council-board devoted hitherto to matters of state, would nod very early in certain long discussions on matters ofart--magnificent schemes, from this or that eminent contractor, forspending his money tastefully, distinguishings of the rococo and thebaroque. On the other hand, having been all his life in closeintercourse with select humanity, self-conscious and arrayed forpresentation, he was a helpful judge of portraits and the variousdegrees of the attainment of truth therein--a phase of fine art whichthe grandson could not value too much. The sergeant-painter and thedeputy sergeant-painter were, indeed, conventional performers enough;as mechanical in their dispensation of wigs, finger-rings, ruffles, andsimpers, as the figure of the armed knight who struck the bell in theResidence tower. But scattered through its half-deserted rooms, statebed-chambers and the like, hung the works of more genuine masters, still as unadulterate as the hock, known to be two generations old, inthe grand-ducal cellar. The youth had even his scheme of inviting theillustrious Antony Coppel to the court; to live there, if he would, with the honours and emoluments of a prince of the blood. Theillustrious Mansard had actually promised to come, had not his suddendeath taken him away from earthly glory. 

And at least, if one must forgo the masters, masterpieces might be hadfor their price. For ten thousand marks--day ever to be remembered!--agenuine work of "the Urbinate, " from the cabinet of a certaincommercially-minded Italian grand-duke, was on its way to Rosenmold, anxiously awaited as it came over rainy mountain-passes, and along therough German roads, through doubtful weather. The tribune, the throneitself, were made ready in the presence-chamber, with hangings in thegrand-ducal colours, laced with gold, together with a speech and anode. Late at night, at last, the waggon was heard rumbling into thecourtyard, with the guest arrived in safety, but, if one must confessone's self, perhaps forbidding at first sight. From a comfortlessportico, with all the grotesqueness of the Middle Age, supported bybrown, aged bishops, whose meditations no incident could distract, OurLady looked out no better than an unpretending nun, with nothing to saythe like of which one was used to hear. Certainly one was notstimulated by, enwrapped, absorbed in the great master's doings; only, with much private disappointment, put on one's mettle to defend himagainst critics notoriously wanting in sensibility, and against one'sself. In truth, the painter whom Carl most unaffectedly enjoyed, thereal vigour of his youthful and somewhat animal taste finding here itsproper sustenance, was Rubens--Rubens reached, as he is reached at hisbest, in well-preserved family portraits, fresh, gay, ingenious, as ofprivileged young people who could never grow old. Had not he, too, brought something of the splendour of a "better land" into thosenorthern regions; if not the glowing gold of Titian's Italian sun, yetthe carnation and yellow of roses or tulips, such as might really growthere with cultivation, even under rainy skies? And then, about thistime something was heard at the grand-ducal court of certain mysteriousexperiments in the making of porcelain; veritable alchemy, for theturning of clay into gold. The reign of Dresden china was at hand, withone's own world of little men and women more delightfully diminutivestill, amid imitations of artificial flowers. The young Duke bracedhimself for a plot to steal the gifted Herr Boettcher from his enforcedresidence, as if in prison, at the fortress of Meissen. Why not bringpots and wheels to Rosenmold, and prosecute his discoveries there? TheGrand-duke, indeed, preferred his old service of gold plate, and wouldhave had the lad a virtuoso in nothing less costly than gold--goldsnuff-boxes. 

For, in truth, regarding what belongs to art or culture, as elsewhere, we may have a large appetite and little to feed on. Only, in the thingsof the mind, the appetite itself counts for so much, at least inhopeful, unobstructed youth, with the world before it. "You are theApollo you tell us of, the northern Apollo, " people were beginning tosay to him, surprised from time to time by a mental purpose beyondtheir guesses--expressions, liftings, softly gleaming or vehementlights, in the handsome countenance of the youth, and his effectivespeech, as he roamed, inviting all about him to share the honey, frommusic to painting, from painting to the drama, all alike florid instyle, yes! and perhaps third-rate. And so far consistently throughouthe had held that the centre of one's intellectual system must beunderstood to be in France. He had thoughts of proceeding to thatcountry, secretly, in person, there to attain the very impress of itsgenius. 

Meantime, its more portable flowers came to order in abundance. Thatthe roses, so to put it, were but excellent artificial flowers, redolent only of musk, neither disproved for Carl the validity of hisideal 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 thereceiver; and the higher informing capacity, if it exist within, willmould an unpromising matter to itself, will realise itself byselection, and the preference of the better in what is bad orindifferent, asserting its prerogative under the most unlikelyconditions. People had in Carl, could they have understood it, thespectacle, under those superficial braveries, of a really heroic effortof mind at a disadvantage. That rococo seventeenth-century Frenchimitation of the true Renaissance, called out in Carl a boundlessenthusiasm, as the Italian original had done two centuries before. Heput into his reception of the aesthetic achievements of Lewis theFourteenth what young France had felt when Francis the First broughthome the great Da Vinci and his works. It was but himself truly, afterall, that he had found, so fresh and real, among those artificial roses. 

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

In music, it might be thought, Germany had already vindicated itsspiritual liberty. One and another of those North-german towns werealready aware of the youthful Sebastian Bach. The first notes had beenheard of a music not borrowed from France, but flowing, as naturally assprings from their sources, out of the ever musical soul of Germanyitself. And the Duke Carl was a sincere lover of music, himself playingmelodiously on the violin to a delighted court. That new Germany of thespirit would be builded, perhaps, to the sound of music. In those otherartistic enthusiasms, as the prophet of the French drama or thearchitectural taste of Lewis the Fourteenth, he had contributed himselfgenerously, helping out with his own good-faith the inadequacy of theirappeal. Music alone hitherto had really helped HIM, and taken him outof himself. To music, instinctively, more and more he was dedicate; andin his desire to refine and organise the court music, from which, byleave of absence to official performers enjoying their salaries at adistance, many parts had literally fallen away, like the favouritenotes 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 RomanChurch amid a people chiefly of the Reformed religion, Duke Carl wouldcreep sometimes into the curtained court pew of the Lutheran Church, towhich he had presented its massive golden crucifix, to listen to thechorales, the execution of which he had managed to time to his liking, relishing, he could hardly explain why, those passages of a pleasantlymonotonous and, as it might seem, unending melody--which certainlynever came to what could rightly be called an ending here on earth; andhaving also a sympathy with the cheerful genius of Dr. Martin Luther, with his good tunes, and that ringing laughter which sent dull goblinsflitting. 

At this time, then, his mind ran eagerly for awhile on the project ofsome musical and dramatic development of a fancy suggested by that oldLatin poem of Conrad Celtes--the hyperborean Apollo, sojourning, in therevolutions of time, in the sluggish north for a season, yet Apollostill, prompting art, music, poetry, and the philosophy whichinterprets man's life, making a sort of intercalary day amid thenatural darkness; not meridian day, of course, but a soft derivativedaylight, good enough for us. It would be necessarily a mystic piece, abounding in fine touches, suggestions, innuendoes. His vague proposalwas met half-way by the very practical executant power of his friend orservant, the deputy organist, already pondering, with just a satiricflavour (suppressible in actual performance, if the time for thatshould ever come) a musical work on Duke Carl himself; Balder, anInterlude. He was contented to re-cast and enlarge the part of thenorthern god of light, with a now wholly serious intention. But still, the near, the real and familiar, gave precision to, or actuallysuperseded, the distant and the ideal. The soul of the music was but atransfusion from the fantastic but so interesting creature close athand. And Carl was certainly true to his proposed part in that hegladdened others by an intellectual radiance which had ceased to meanwarmth or animation for himself. For him the light was still to seek inFrance, in Italy, above all in old Greece, amid the precious thingswhich might yet be lurking there unknown, in art, in poetry, perhaps invery life, till Prince Fortunate should come. 

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

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

And meantime those dreams of remote and probably adventurous travellent the youth, still so healthy of body, a wing for more distantexpeditions than he had ever yet inclined to, among his own wholesomeGerman woodlands. In long rambles, afoot or on horseback, by day andnight, he flung himself, for the resettling of his sanity, on thecheerful influences of their simple imagery; the hawks, as if asleep onthe air below him; the bleached crags, evoked by late sunset among thedark oaks; the water-wheels, with their pleasant murmur, in thefoldings of the hillside. 

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

It was his desire to test the sincerity of the people about him, andunveil flatterers, which in the first instance suggested a trick heplayed upon the court, upon all Europe. In that complex but whollyTeutonic genealogy lately under research, lay a much-prized thread ofdescent from the fifth Emperor Charles, and Carl, under direction, readwith much readiness to be impressed all that was attainable concerningthe great ancestor, finding there in truth little enough to reward hispains. One hint he took, however. He determined to assist at his ownobsequies. 

That he might in this way facilitate that much-desired journey occurredto him almost at once as an accessory motive, and in a little whiledefinite motives were engrossed in the dramatic interest, the pleasinggloom, the curiosity, of the thing itself. Certainly, amid the livingworld in Germany, especially in old, sleepy Rosenmold, death made greatparade of itself. Youth even, in its sentimental mood, was ready toindulge in the luxury of decay, and amuse itself with fancies of thetomb; as in periods of decadence or suspended progress, when the worldseems to nap for a time, artifices for the arrest or disguise of oldage 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 thewhole world almost seemed buried thus--made and re-made of thedead--its entire fabric of politics, of art, of custom, beingessentially heraldic "achievements, " dead men's mementoes such asthose. You see he was a sceptical young man, and his kinsmen dead andgone had passed certainly, in his imaginations of them, into no otherworld, save, perhaps, into some stiffer, slower, sleepier, and morepompous phase of ceremony--the last degree of court etiquette--as theylay there in the great, low-pitched, grand-ducal vault, in theircoffins, dusted once a year for All Souls' Day, when the courtofficials descended thither, and Mass for the dead was sung, amid anarray of dropping crape and cobwebs. The lad, with his full red lipsand open blue eyes, coming as with a great cup in his hands to life'sfeast, revolted from the like of that, as from suffocation. And stillthe suggestion of it was everywhere. In the garish afternoon, up to thewholesome heights of the Heiligenberg suddenly from one of the villagesof the plain came the grinding death-knell. It seemed to come out ofthe ugly grave itself, and enjoyment was dead. On his way homewardsadly, an hour later, he enters by chance the open door of a villagechurch, half buried in the tangle of its churchyard. The rude coffin islying there of a labourer who had but a hovel to live in. The enemydogged one's footsteps! The young Carl seemed to be flying, not fromdeath simply, but from assassination. 

And as these thoughts sent him back in the rebounding power of youth, with renewed appetite, to life and sense, so, grown at last familiar, they gave additional purpose to his fantastic experiment. Had it notbeen said by a wise man that after all the offence of death was in itstrappings? Well! he would, as far as might be, try the thing, while, presumably, a large reversionary interest in life was still his. Hewould purchase his freedom, at least of those gloomy "trappings, " andlisten while he was spoken of as dead. The mere preparations gavepleasant proof of the devotion to him of a certain number, who enteredwithout question into his plans. It is not difficult to mislead theworld concerning what happens to those who live at the artificialdistance from it of a court, with its high wall of etiquette. Howeverthe matter was managed, no one doubted, when, with a blazon ofceremonious words, the court news went forth that, after a briefillness, according to the way of his race, the hereditary Grand-dukewas deceased. In momentary regret, bethinking them of the lad's tastefor splendour, those to whom the arrangement of such matters belonged(the grandfather now sinking deeper into bare quiescence) backed by thepopular wish, determined to give him a funeral with even more thangrand-ducal measure of lugubrious magnificence. The place of his reposewas marked out for him as officiously as if it had been thedelimitation of a kingdom, in the ducal burial vault, through thecobwebbed windows of which, from the garden where he played as a child, the young Duke had often peered at the faded glories of the immensecoroneted coffins, the oldest shedding their velvet tatters aroundthem. Surrounded by the whole official world of Rosenmold, arrayed forthe occasion in almost forgotten dresses of ceremony as if for amasquerade, the new coffin glided from the fragrant chapel where theRequiem was sung, down the broad staircase lined with peach-colour andyellow marble, into the shadows below. Carl himself, disguised as astrolling musician, had followed it across the square through adrenching rain, on which circumstance he overheard the old peoplecongratulate the "blessed" dead within, had listened to a dirge of hisown composing brought out on the great organ with much bravura by hisfriend, the new court organist, who was in the secret, and that nightturned the key of the garden entrance to the vault, and peeped in uponthe sleepy, painted, and bewigged young pages whose duty it would befor a certain number of days to come to watch beside their latemaster's couch. 

And a certain number of weeks afterwards it was known that "the madDuke" had reappeared, to the dismay of court marshals. Things mighthave gone hard with the youth had the strange news, at first asfantastic rumour, then as matter of solemn enquiry, lastly asascertained fact, pleasing or otherwise, been less welcome than it wasto the grandfather, too old, indeed, to sorrow deeply, but grown sodecrepit as to propose that ministers should possess themselves of theperson of the young Duke, proclaim him of age and regent. From thosedim travels, presenting themselves to the old man, who had never beenfifty miles away from home, as almost lunar in their audacity, he wouldcome back--come back "in time, " he murmured faintly, eager to feel thatyouthful, animating life on the stir about him once more. 

Carl himself, now the thing was over, greatly relishing its satiricelements, must be forgiven the trick of the burial and his stillgreater enormity in coming to life again. And then, duke or no duke, itwas understood that he willed that things should in no case beprecisely as they had been. He would never again be quite so nearpeople's lives as in the past--a fitful, intermittent visitor--almostas if he had been properly dead; the empty coffin remaining as a kindof symbolical "coronation incident, " setting forth his future relationsto his subjects. Of all those who believed him dead one human creatureonly, save the grandfather, had sincerely sorrowed for him; a woman, intears as the funeral train passed by, with whom he had sympatheticallydiscussed his own merits. Till then he had forgotten the incident whichhad 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 policerules, whereupon the officers were about to carry her away to be fined, or worse, amid the jeers of the bystanders, always ready to deal hardlywith "the gipsy, " at which precise moment the tall Duke Carl, like theflash of a trusty sword, had leapt from the palace stair and caused herto pass on in peace. She had half detected him through his disguise; indue time news of his reappearance had been ceremoniously carried to herin her little cottage, and the remembrance of her hung about him notungratefully, as he went with delight upon his way. 

The first long stage of his journey over, in headlong flight night andday, he found himself one summer morning under the heat of what seemeda southern sun, at last really at large on the Bergstrasse, with therich plain of the Palatinate on his left hand; on the right handvineyards, seen now for the first time, sloping up into the crispbeeches of the Odenwald. By Weinheim only an empty tower remained ofthe Castle of Windeck. He lay for the night in the great whitewashedguest-chamber of the Capuchin convent. 

The national rivers, like the national woods, have a family likeness:the Main, the Lahn, the Moselle, the Neckar, the Rhine. By help of suchaccommodation as chance afforded, partly on the stream itself, partlyalong the banks, he pursued the leisurely winding course of one of theprettiest of these, tarrying for awhile in the towns, grey, white, orred, which came in his way, tasting their delightful native "little"wines, peeping into their old overloaded churches, inspecting thechurch furniture, or trying the organs. For three nights he slept, warmand dry, on the hay stored in a deserted cloister, and, attracted intothe neighbouring minster for a snatch of church music, narrowly escapeddetection. By miraculous chance the grimmest lord of Rosenmold wasthere within, recognised the youth and his companions--visitorsnaturally conspicuous, amid the crowd of peasants around them--and forsome hours was upon their traces. After unclean town streets thecountry air was a perfume by contrast, or actually scented withpinewoods. One seemed to breathe with it fancies of the woods, thehills, and water--of a sort of souls in the landscape, but cheerful andgenial now, happy souls! A distant group of pines on the verge of agreat upland awoke a violent desire to be there--seemed to challengeone to proceed thither. Was their infinite view thence? It was like anoutpost of some far-off fancy land, a pledge of the reality of such. Above Cassel, the airy hills curved in one black outline against aglowing sky, pregnant, one could fancy, with weird forms, which mightbe at their old diableries again on those remote places ere night wasquite come there. At last in the streets, the hundred churches, ofCologne, he feels something of a "Gothic" enthusiasm, and all aGerman's enthusiasm for the Rhine. 

Through the length and breadth of the Rhine country the vintage wasbegun. The red ruins on the heights, the white-walled villages, whiteSaint Nepomuc upon the bridges, were but isolated high notes ofcontrast in a landscape, sleepy and indistinct under the flood ofsunshine, with a headiness in it like that of must, of the new wine. The noise of the vineyards came through the lovely haze, still, attimes, with the sharp sound of a bell--death-bell, perhaps, or only acrazy summons to the vintagers. And amid those broad, willowy reachesof the Rhine at length, from Bingen to Mannheim, where the brown hillswander into airy, blue distance, like a little picture of paradise, hefelt that France was at hand. Before him lay the road thither, easy andstraight. --That well of light so close! But, unexpectedly, thecapricious incidence of his own humour with the opportunity did notsuggest, as he would have wagered it must, "Go, drink at once!" Was itthat France had come to be of no account at all, in comparison ofItaly, of Greece? or that, as he passed over the German land, theconviction had come, "For you, France, Italy, Hellas, is here!"--thatsome recognition of the untried spiritual possibilities of meek Germanyhad for Carl transferred the ideal land out of space beyond the Alps orthe Rhine, into future time, whither he must be the leader? A littlechilly of humour, in spite of his manly strength, he was journeyingpartly in search of physical heat. To-day certainly, in this greatvineyard, physical heat was about him in measure sufficient, at leastfor a German constitution. Might it be not otherwise with theimaginative, the intellectual, heat and light; the real need being thatof an interpreter--Apollo, illuminant rather as the revealer than asthe bringer of light? With large belief that the Eclaircissement, theAufklaerung (he had already found the name for the thing) would indeedcome, he had been in much bewilderment whence and how. Here, he beganto see that it could be in no other way than by action of informingthought upon the vast accumulated material of which Germany was inpossession: art, poetry, fiction, an entire imaginative world, following reasonably upon a deeper understanding of the past, ofnature, of one's self--an understanding of all beside through theknowledge of one's self. To understand, would be the indispensablefirst step towards the enlargement of the great past, of one's littlepresent, by criticism, by imagination. Then, the imprisoned souls ofnature would speak as of old. The Middle Age, in Germany, where thepast has had such generous reprisals, never far from us, would reassertits mystic spell, for the better understanding of our Raffaelle. Thespirits of distant Hellas would reawake in the men and women of littleGerman towns. Distant times, the most alien thoughts, would come neartogether, as elements in a great historic symphony. A kind of ardent, new patriotism awoke in him, sensitive for the first time at the wordsNATIONAL poesy, NATIONAL art and literature, GERMAN philosophy. To theresources of the past, of himself, of what was possible for Germanmind, more and more his mind opens as he goes on his way. A free, openspace had been determined, which something now to be created, createdby him, must occupy. "Only, " he thought, "if I had coadjutors! If thesethoughts would awake in but one other mind?"

At Strasbourg, with its mountainous goblin houses, nine stories high, grouped snugly, in the midst of that inclement plain, like a greatstork's nest around the romantic red steeple of its cathedral, DukeCarl became fairly captive to the Middle Age. Tarrying there week afterweek he worked hard, but (without a ray of light from others) in onelong mistake, at the chronology and history of the coloured windows. Antiquity's very self seemed expressed there, on the visionary imagesof king or patriarch, in the deeply incised marks of character, thehoary hair, the massive proportions, telling of a length of yearsbeyond what is lived now. Surely, past ages, could one get at thehistoric soul of them, were not dead but living, rich in company, forthe entertainment, the expansion, of the present; and Duke Carl wasstill without suspicion of the cynic afterthought that such historicsoul was but an arbitrary substitution, a generous loan of one's self. 

The mystic soul of Nature laid hold on him next, saying, "Come!understand, interpret me!" He was awakened one morning by the jingle ofsledge-bells along the street beneath his windows. Winter had descendedbetimes from the mountains: the pale Rhine below the bridge of boats onthe long way to Kehl was swollen with ice, and for the first time herealised that Switzerland was at hand. On a sudden he was captive tothe enthusiasm of the mountains, and hastened along the valley of theRhine by Alt Breisach and Basle, unrepelled by a thousand difficulties, to Swiss farmhouses and lonely villages, solemn still, and untouched bystrangers. At Grindelwald, sleeping at last in the close neighbourhoodof the greater Alps, he had the sense of an overbrooding presence, ofsome strange new companions around him. Here one might yield one's selfto the unalterable imaginative appeal of the elements in their highestforce and simplicity--light, air, water, earth. On very early springdays a mantle was suddenly lifted; the Alps were an apex of naturalglory, towards which, in broadening spaces of light, the whole ofEurope sloped upwards. Through them, on the right hand, as he journeyedon, were the doorways to Italy, to Como or Venice, from yonder peakItaly's self was visible!--as, on the left hand, in the South-germantowns, in a high-toned, artistic fineness, in the dainty, floweredironwork for instance, the overflow of Italian genius was traceable. These things presented themselves at last only to remind him that, in anew intellectual hope, he was already on his way home. Straight throughlife, straight through nature and man, with one's own self-knowledge asa light thereon, not by way of the geographical Italy or Greece, laythe road to the new Hellas, to be realised now as the outcome ofhome-born German genius. At times, in that early fine weather, lookingnow not southwards, but towards Germany, he seemed to trace theoutspread of a faint, not wholly natural, aurora over the dark northerncountry. And it was in an actual sunrise that the news came whichfinally put him on the directest road homewards. One hardly daredbreathe in the rapid uprise of all-embracing light which seemed likethe intellectual rising of the Fatherland, when up the straggling pathto his high beech-grown summit (was one safe nowhere?) protesting overthe roughness of the way, came the too familiar voices (ennui itselfmade audible) of certain high functionaries of Rosenmold, come to claimtheir new sovereign, close upon the runaway. 

Bringing news of the old Duke's decease! With a real grief at hisheart, he hastened now over the ground which lay between him and thebed of death, still trying, at quieter intervals, to snatch profit bythe way; peeping, at the most unlikely hours, on the objects of hiscuriosity, waiting for a glimpse of dawn through glowing churchwindows, penetrating into old church treasuries by candle-light, taxingthe old courtiers to pant up, for "the view, " to this or thatconspicuous point in the world of hilly woodland. From one such atlast, in spite of everything with pleasure to Carl, old Rosenmold wasvisible--the attic windows of the Residence, the storks on thechimneys, the green copper roofs baking in the long, dry German summer. The homeliness of true old Germany! He too felt it, and yearnedtowards his home. 

And the "beggar-maid" was there. Thoughts of her had haunted his mindall the journey through, as he was aware, not unpleased, graciouslyoverflowing towards any creature he found dependent upon him. The merefact that she was awaiting him, at his disposition, meekly, and asthough through his long absence she had never quitted the spot on whichhe had said farewell, touched his fancy, and on a sudden concentratedhis wavering preference into a practical decision. "King Cophetua"would be hers. And his goodwill sunned her wild-grown beauty intomajesty, into a kind of queenly richness. There was natural majesty inthe heavy waves of golden hair folded closely above the neck, built alittle massively; and she looked kind, beseeching also, capable ofsorrow. She was like clear sunny weather, with bluebells and the greenleaves, between rainy days, and seemed to embody Die Ruh auf demGipfel--all the restful hours he had spent of late in the wood-sidesand on the hilltops. One June day, on which she seemed to havewithdrawn into herself all the tokens of summer, brought decision toour lover of artificial roses, who had cared so little hitherto for thelike of her. Grand-duke perforce, he would make her his wife, and hadalready re-assured her with lively mockery of his horrified ministers. "Go straight to life!" said his new poetic code; and here was theopportunity;--here, also, the real "adventure, " in comparison of whichhis previous efforts that way seemed childish theatricalities, fit onlyto cheat a little the profound ennui of actual life. In a hundredstolen interviews she taught the hitherto indifferent youth the art oflove. 

Duke Carl had effected arrangements for his marriage, secret, butcomplete and soon to be made public. Long since he had cast complacenteyes on a strange architectural relic, an old grange or hunting-lodgeon the heath, with he could hardly have defined what charm ofremoteness and old romance. Popular belief amused itself with reportsof the wizard who inhabited or haunted the place, his fantastictreasures, his immense age. His windows might be seen glittering afaron stormy nights, with a blaze of golden ornaments, said the moreadventurous loiterer. It was not because he was suspicious still, butin a kind of wantonness of affection, and as if by way of giving yetgreater zest to the luxury of their mutual trust that Duke Carl addedto his announcement of the purposed place and time of the event apretended test of the girl's devotion. He tells her the story of theaged wizard, meagre and wan, to whom she must find her way alone forthe purpose of asking a question all-important to himself. The fierceold man will try to escape with terrible threats, will turn, or halfturn, into repulsive animals. She must cling the faster; at last thespell will be broken; he will yield, he will become a youth once more, and give the desired answer. 

The girl, otherwise so self-denying, and still modestly anxious for aprivate union, not to shame his high position in the world, had wishedfor one thing at least--to be loved amid the splendours habitual tohim. Duke Carl sends to the old lodge his choicest personalpossessions. For many days the public is aware of something on hand; afew get delightful glimpses of the treasures on their way to "the placeon the heath. " Was he preparing against contingencies, should the greatarmy, soon to pass through these parts, not leave the country asinnocently as might be desired?

The short grey day seemed a long one to those who, for various reasons, were waiting anxiously for the darkness; the court people fretful andon their mettle, the townsfolk suspicious, Duke Carl full of amorouslonging. At her distant cottage beyond the hills, Gretchen kept herselfready for the trial. It was expected that certain great militaryofficers would arrive that night, commanders of a victorious hostmaking its way across Northern Germany, with no great respect for therights of neutral territory, often dealing with life and property toorudely to find the coveted treasure. It was but one episode in a cruelwar. Duke Carl did not wait for the grandly illuminated supper preparedfor their reception. Events precipitated themselves. Those officerscame as practically victorious occupants, sheltering themselves for thenight in the luxurious rooms of the great palace. The army was in factin motion close behind its leaders, who (Gretchen warm and happy in thearms, not of the aged wizard, but of the youthful lover) are discussingterms for the final absorption of the duchy with those traitorous oldcouncillors. At their delicate supper Duke Carl amuses his companionwith caricature, amid cries of cheerful laughter, of the sleepycourtiers entertaining their martial guests in all their pedanticpoliteness, like people in some farcical dream. A priest, and certainchosen friends to witness the marriage, were to come ere nightfall tothe grange. The lovers heard, as they thought, the sound of distantthunder. The hours passed as they waited, and what came at last was notthe priest with his companions. Could they have been detained by thestorm? Duke Carl gently re-assures the girl--bids her believe in him, and wait. But through the wind, grown to tempest, beyond the sound ofthe violent thunder--louder than any possible thunder--nearer andnearer comes the storm of the victorious army, like some disturbance ofthe earth itself, as they flee into the tumult, out of the intolerableconfinement and suspense, dead-set upon them. 

The Enlightening, the Aufklaerung, according to the aspiration of DukeCarl, was effected by other hands; Lessing and Herder, brilliantprecursors of the age of genius which centered in Goethe, coming wellwithin the natural limits of Carl's lifetime. As precursors Goethegratefully recognised them, and understood that there had been athousand others, looking forward to a new era in German literature withthe desire which is in some sort a "forecast of capacity, " awakeningeach other to the permanent reality of a poetic ideal in human life, slowly forming that public consciousness to which Goethe actuallyaddressed himself. It is their aspirations I have tried to embody inthe portrait of Carl. 

"A hard winter had covered the Main with a firm footing of ice. Theliveliest social intercourse was quickened thereon. I was unfailingfrom early morning onwards; and, being lightly clad, found myself, whenmy mother drove up later to look on, fairly frozen. My mother sat inthe carriage, quite stately in her furred cloak of red velvet, fastenedon the breast with thick gold cord and tassels. 

"'Dear mother, ' I said, on the spur of the moment, 'give me your furs, I am frozen. '

"She was equally ready. In a moment I had on the cloak. Falling belowthe knee, with its rich trimming of sables, and enriched with gold, itbecame me excellently. So clad I made my way up and down with acheerful heart. "

That was Goethe, perhaps fifty years later. His mother also related theincident to Bettina Brentano;--"There, skated my son, like an arrowamong 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 forjoy. Never shall I forget him as he darted out from one arch of thebridge, and in again under the other, the wind carrying the trainbehind him as he flew. " In that amiable figure I seem to see thefulfilment of the Resurgam on Carl's empty coffin--the aspiring soul ofCarl himself, in freedom and effective, at last.