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