A few only,
half discerning what was in his mind, would fain have shared his
intellectual clearness, and found a kind of beauty in this youthful
enthusiasm for an abstract theorem. Extremes meeting, his cold and
dispassionate detachment from all that is most attractive to ordinary
minds came to have the impressiveness of a great passion. And for
the most part, people had loved him; feeling instinctively that
somewhere there must be the justification of his difference from
themselves. It was like being in love: or it was an intellectual
malady, such as pleaded for forbearance, like bodily sickness, and
gave at times a resigned and touching sweetness to what he did and
said. Only once, at a moment of the wild popular excitement which at
that period was easy to provoke in Holland, there was a certain [100]
group of persons who would have shut him up as no well-wisher to, and
perhaps a plotter against, the common-weal. A single traitor might
cut the dykes in an hour, in the interest of the English or the
French. Or, had he already committed some treasonable act, who was
so anxious to expose no writing of his that he left his very letters
unsigned, and there were little stratagems to get specimens of his
fair manuscript? For with all his breadth of mystic intention, he
was persistent, as the hours crept on, to leave all the inevitable
details of life at least in order, in equation. And all his
singularities appeared to be summed up in his refusal to take his
place in the life-sized family group (tres distingue et tres soigne,
remarks a modern critic of the work) painted about this time.
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