howed by the
justice of his remarks in those assemblies of the artists which his
father so much loved. But in truth the arts were a matter he could but
just tolerate. Why add, by a forced and artificial production, to the
monotonous tide of competing, fleeting existence? Only, finding so
much fine art actually about him, he was compelled (so to speak) to
adjust himself to it; to ascertain and accept that in it which should
least collide with, or might even carry forward a little, his own
characteristic tendencies. Obviously somewhat jealous of his
intellectual interests, he loved inanimate nature, it might have been
thought, better than man. He cared nothing, indeed, for the warm
sandbanks of Wynants, nor for those eerie relics of the ancient Dutch
woodland which survive in Hobbema and Ruysdael, still less for the
highly-coloured [89] sceneries of the academic band at Rome, in spite
of the escape they provide one into clear breadth of atmosphere. For
though Sebastian van Storck refused to travel, he loved the
distant--enjoyed the sense of things seen from a distance, carrying us,
as on wide wings of space itself, far out of one's actual surrounding.
His preference in the matter of art was, therefore, for those prospects
a vol a'oiseau--of the caged bird on the wing at last--of which Rubens
had the secret, and still more Philip de Koninck, four of whose
choicest works occupied the four walls of his chamber; visionary
escapes, north, south, east, and west, into a wide-open though, it must
be confessed, a somewhat sullen land. For the fourth of them he had
exchanged with his mother a marvellously vivid Metsu, lately bequeathed
to him, in which she herself was presented. They were the sole
ornaments he permitted himself. From the midst of the busy and
busy-looking house, crowded with the furniture and the pretty little
toys of many generations, a long passage led the rare visitor up a
winding staircase, and (again at the end of a long passage) he found
himself as if shut off from the whole talkative Dutch world, and in the
embrace of that wonderful quiet which is also possible in Holland at
its height all around him. It was here that Sebastian could yield
himself, with the only sort of love he had ever felt, to the supremacy
of his difficult [90] thoughts.--A kind of empty place! Here, you
felt, all had been mentally put to rights by the working-out of a long
equation, which had zero is equal to zero for its resul