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It is only necessary to recall the exquisitely austere "Sebastian Van Storck" and the strangely contrasting Dionysiac "Denys L'Auxerrois" to justify one's claim for Pater as a creative artist of a rare kind, with a singular and fascinating power of incarnating a philosophic formula, a formula no less dry than Spinoza's, or a mood of the human spirit, in living, breathing types and persuasive tragic fables.
The Burgomaster van Storck entertained a party of friends, consisting chiefly of his favourite artists, one summer evening.
In the crowd of spectators at the skating, whose eyes followed, so well-satisfied, the movements of Sebastian van Storck, were the mothers of marriageable daughters, who presently became the suitors of this rich and distinguished youth, introduced to them, as now grown to man's estate, by his delighted parents.
Two, three, four o'clock, and yet no Baron Von Storck. Terror and dread reigned in the hearts of the Swigg family. Towards five o'clock, a policeman, accompanied by a coarse-looking German woman, arrived at the mansion. He informed Mr. Swigg that he had orders to arrest Conrad Kreutzer, alias the Baron Von Storck. The denouement had come at last.
Pater, you will remember, has a remarkable study of a similar temperament in his Imaginary Portraits. Sebastian van Storck, like Amiel, had become hypnotised by the Infinite. It paralysed in him all impulse or power 'to be or do any limited thing. 'For Sebastian, at least, we read, 'the world and the individual alike had been divested of all effective purpose.
The most curious florists of Holland were ambitious to supply the Burgomaster van Storck with the choicest products of their skill for the garden spread below the windows on either side of the portico, and along the central avenue of hoary beeches which led to it.
Like the lightning flash, intelligence had gone through the land that the empress was in danger, and her subjects had lost interest in every thing except the bulletins issued from the palace where Van Swieten and Von Storck watched day and night by the bedside of their beloved sovereign.
Sebastian van Storck refused 'to be or do any limited thing, but the answer to his mysticism is to be found in a finer mysticism, that which says that there is no limited act or thing, but that the significance, as well as the pathos, of eternity is in our smallest joys and sorrows, as in our most everyday transactions, and the greatness of God incarnate in His humblest child.
And certainly Sebastian van Storck did not felicitate his people on the luck which, in the words of another old writer, "hath disposed them to so thriving a genius." Their restless ingenuity in making and maintaining dry land where nature had willed the sea, was even more like the industry of animals than had been that life of their forefathers.
And certainly Sebastian van Storck did not felicitate his people on the luck which, in the words of another old writer, "hath disposed them to so thriving a genius." Their restless ingenuity in making and maintaining dry land where nature had willed the sea, was even more like the industry of animals than had been that life of their forefathers.
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