University of Virginia Library

IV.

Whilst the Southern provinces, henceforth subject
and Catholic, followed the Italian road in art, and
represented on their canvasses the mythological epos
of the grand and heroic nude figure, the provinces
of the North, becoming free and Protestant, developed
their life and art in another direction. The
climate is more rainy and colder, and for this reason
the presence of the nude is a rarer and less sympathetic
thing. The Germanic race is chaster, and
through this quality the mind is less inclined to
appreciate classic art, as it was conceived of by
the Italian renaissance. Life is more difficult, more
laborious, and more economic; man, therefore, accustomed
to effort, to forethought and to a methodical
self-government, has more trouble in comprehending
the fascinating dream of a sensuous and
full-blown existence. We can imagine the Dutch
citizen in his home after the day's toil at his business.
His dwelling consists of small apartments, somewhat

resembling the state-rooms of a ship; it would
be a troublesome matter to suspend on the walls the
large pictures decorating the saloons of an Italian palace; its owner's chief requirements are cleanliness
and comfort; with these he is content and does not
insist on decoration. According to the Venetian
ambassadors, "they are so moderate that, even with
the richest, one sees no unusual pomp or luxury.....
They make no use of retainers or silken habits, very
little silver-ware, and no tapestry in their houses;
the household numbers a very few and is very
limited. Outside and inside, in dress and in other
matters, all maintain the true moderation of small
fortunes, nothing superfluous being perceptible."[27]
When the Earl of Leicester came to take command
in Holland in the name of Elizabeth, and Spinola
arrived to negotiate peace for the King of Spain,
their regal magnificence formed a striking contrast
and even provoked scandal. The head of the republic,
William the Taciturn, the hero of the age,
wore an old mantle which a student would have pronounced
threadbare, with a pourpoint like it, unbut
toned, and a woollen waistcoat resembling that of a
bargeman. In the next century the adversary of
Louis XIV., the grand pensioner John de Witt kept
only one domestic; everybody could approach him;
he imitated his illustrious predecessor, who lived
cheek-by-jowl with "brewers and bourgeois." We
find yet at the present day, in their social ways,
many an indication of ancient sobriety. It is clear
that with such characters there is but little room for
the decorative and voluptuous instincts which elsewhere
in Europe fashioned aristocratic show, and
rendered comprehensible the pagan poesy of beautiful
bodies.

The opposite instincts, in effect, predominate.
Relieved of the drawback of the Southern provinces,
Holland, at the end of the sixteenth century, suddenly
and with extraordinary energy turns in the
direction of its natural proclivities. Primitive inclinations
and faculties appear with the most striking
results; they are not a new birth, but simply
a revelation. Good observers had detected them
a hundred and fifty years before. "Friesland is

free," said Pope Æneas Sylvius,[28] "lives in her own
fashion, will not endure foreign empire, and has no
desire to dominate over others. The Frieslander
does not hesitate to face death in behalf of liberty.
This spirited people, used to arms, of large and
robust frames, calm and intrepid in disposition,
glories in her freedom notwithstanding that Philip,
Duke of Burgundy, proclaims himself lord of the
country. They detest military and feudal arrogance,
and tolerate no man who seeks to raise his
head above his fellows. Their magistrates are
elected annually by themselves, and are obliged to
administer public matters with equity. . . . They
severely punish licentiousness among women . . .
They scarcely admit an unmarried priest lest he
should corrupt the wife of another, regarding continence
as a difficult thing and beyond the natural
powers." Every Germanic conception of state, marriage
and religion are here visible in germ, and
forecast the final flowering of the republic and of
Protestantism. Subjected to trial by Philip II.
they offer to sacrifice beforehand "their lives and
their property." A small population of traders,
lost on a mud-heap at the extremity of an empire
more vast and more feared than that of Napoleon
resisted, subsisted and increased under the weight
of the colossus who tried to crush her. Their sieges
are all admirable; citizens and women, supported
by a few hundreds of soldiers, arrest an entire army
before ruined ramparts, the best troops in Europe,
the greatest generals and the most skilful engineers;
and this remnant of emaciated people, after
feeding on rats, boiled leaves and leather for
months, determine, rather than surrender, to place
the infirm in the centre of a square and go forth to
die in the intrenchments of the enemy. The details
of this war must be read in order to realize the
extent to which man's patience, coolness and energy
may be carried.[29] On the sea a Dutch vessel is
blown up rather than strike its flag, while their voyages
of discovery, colonization and conquest, in
Nova Zembla, India and Brazil, by the way of the
Straits of Magellan, are as magnificent as their
combats. The more we demand of human nature
the more she gives; her faculties are exalted in
their exercise, while the limits to her power of
doing and suffering are no longer perceptible.
Finally, in 1609, after thirty years warfare, the cause
is won. Spain recognizes their independence, and
during the whole of the seventeenth century they
are to play a most prominent part in the affairs of
Europe. No power can make them yield, neither
Spain during a second war of twenty-seven years,
nor Cromwell, nor Charles II., nor England combined
with France, nor the fresh and formidable
power of Louis XIV.; after three wars their ambassadors
are all to be seen in humble and fruitless
entreaty at Gertruydenberg, and the grandpensioner
Heinsius, is to become one of the three
potentates to control the destinies of Europe.

Internally their government is as good as their
external position is exalted. For the first time in
the world conscience is free and the rights of the citizens
are respected. Their state consists of a community
of provinces voluntarily united, which, each
within its own borders, maintains with a degree of

perfection unknown till then the security of the public
and the liberty of the individual. "They all love
liberty," says Parival in 1660; "no one among them
is allowed to beat or abuse another, while the women
servants have so many privileges their masters,
even, dare not strike them." Full of his admiration,
he repeatedly insists on this wonderful respect for
human personality. "There is not to-day a province
in the world which enjoys so much liberty as
Holland, with so just a harmony that the little cannot
be imposed upon by the great, nor the poor by
the rich and opulent ... The moment a seignior
brings into this country any serfs or slaves they are
free; yes, and the money he laid out in their purchase
is lost ... The inhabitants of a village having
paid what they owe are as free as the inhabitants of
a city ... And above all each is king in his own
house, it being a very serious crime to have done
violence to a bourgeois in his own domicile." Everybody
can leave the country when he pleases, and take
all the money he pleases with him. The roads are
safe day and night even for a man traveling alone.
The master is not allowed to retain a domestic
against his will. Nobody is troubled on account of
his religion. One is free to say what he chooses,
"even of the magistrates," and to denounce them.
Equality is fundamental. "Those who hold office
obtain consideration rather through fair dealing than
advance themselves over others by a proud bearing."
A nation like this cannot fail to be prosperous; when
man is both just and energetic the rest comes to him
as surplus. At the beginning of the War of Independence
the population of Amsterdam was 70,000;
in 1618 it was 300,000. The Venetian ambassadors
reported that people swarmed in the streets every
hour of the day as at a fair. The city increased two-thirds;
a surface equal to the size of a man's foot
was worth a gold ducat. The country is as good as
the city. Nowhere is the peasant so rich and so
able to derive advantage from the soil; one village
possesses four thousand cows; an ox weighs two
thousand pounds. A farmer offers his daughter to
Prince Maurice with a dowry of one hundred thousand
florins. Nowhere are industrial pursuits and
manufactures so perfect; cloths, mirrors, sugar-refineries,
porcelain, pottery, rich stuffs of silk, satin and
brocade, iron-ware and ship-rigging. They supply
Europe with half of its luxuries and nearly all its
transportation. A thousand vessels traverse the
Baltic in quest of raw material. Eight hundred
boats are engaged in the herring fishery. Vast companies
monopolize trade with India, China and
Japan; Batavia is the centre of a Dutch empire; at
this moment, 1609, Holland on the sea and in the
world is what England was in the time of Napoleon.
She has a marine of one hundred thousand sailors; in
war time she can man two thousand vessels; fifty
years after she maintains herself against the combined
fleets of France and England; year after year
the great stream of her success and prosperity is
seen to increase. But its source is yet more bountiful
than the stream itself; that which sustains her is
an excess of courage, reason, abnegation, will and
genius; "this people," say the Venetian ambassadors,
"are inclined to labor and industry to such a
degree that no enterprise is too difficult for them to
succeed in ... They are born for work and for privation,
and all are doing something, some one way and
some another." Much production and light consumption
is the mode of growth of public prosperity.
The poorest, "in their small and humble habitations,"
have all necessary things. The richest in
their fine houses avoid the superfluous and ostentation;
nobody is in want, and nobody abuses; every
one is employed with his hands or his mind. "All
things are made profitable," says Parival; "there are
none, even to those who gather ordure out of the
canals who do not earn half-a-crown a day. Children
even who are learning their trades almost earn
their bread at the start. They are so inimical to bad
government and to indolence that they have places
in which the magistrates imprison idlers and vagabonds,
also those who do not properly attend to
their business—the complaints of wives or family
relations being a sufficient warrant, and in these
places they are obliged to work and earn their subsistence
whether they will or not." The convents
are transformed into hospitals, asylums and homes
for orphans, the former revenues of lazy monks supporting
invalids, the aged, and widows and children
of soldiers and sailors lost in war. The army is so
efficient that any of its soldiers might serve as
captain in an Italian army, while no Italian captain
would be admitted in it as a common soldier. In
culture and instruction, as well as in the arts of organization
and of government, the Dutch are two
centuries ahead of the rest of Europe. Scarcely a
man, woman or child can be found who does not
know how to read and write (1609). Every village
has a public school. In a bourgeois family all the
boys read Latin and all the girls French. Many
people write and converse in several foreign languages.
It is not owing to simple precaution, to
habits of laying up and calculations of utility, but
they appreciate the dignity of science. Leyden, to
which the States-General propose a recompense, after
its heroic defense, demands a University; no pains are
spared to attract to it the greatest savans of Europe.
The States themselves unite, and through Henry IV.
cause letters to be sent to Scaliger, who is poor and
a professor, begging him to honor the city with his
presence; no lessons will be required of him; they
merely wish him to come and converse with the erudites,
direct their efforts, and allow the nation to
participate in the fame of his writings. Under this
regime Leyden becomes the most renowned schooin
Europe; she has two thousand students; philosophy
hunted out of France finds refuge there; during
the seventeenth century Holland is the first of
thoughtful countries. The positive sciences here
find their native soil, or the land of their adoption.
Scaliger, Justus Lepsius, Saumaisius, Meursius, the
two Heinsius, the two Dousa, Marnix de Ste-Aldegonde,
Hugo Grotius and Snellius preside over
learning, laws, physics and mathematics. The Elzevirs
carry on printing. Lindshoten and Mercator
furnish instruction to travellers and develop geographical
science. Hooft, Bor and Meteren write
the history of the nation. Jacob Cats provides
its poetry. Theology, which is the philosophy of
the day, takes up, with Arminius and Gomar, the
question of grace, and, even in the smallest villages,
agitates the minds of peasants and bourgeois. The
Synod of Dordrecht at length in 1609 constitutes
the œcumenical council of the Reformation. To
this primacy of speculative intellect add that of
practical genius: from Barnevelt to De Witt, from
William the Taciturn to William III., from Heemskerck
the admiral to Von Tromp and De Ruyter,
a sequence of superior men are at the head of art
and business matters. It is under these circumstances
that the national art appears. All the
great original painters are born in the first thirty
years of the seventeenth century, after grave danger
had passed away, when the final victory was assured,
when man, sensible of great things accomplished,
points out to his children the onward path which
has been cleared by his vigorous arm and stout
heart. Here, as elsewhere, the artist is the offspring
of the hero. The faculties employed in the creation
of a real world, now that the work is accomplished,
reach beyond and are employed in the creation of
an imaginary world. Man has done too much to
go back to school; the field spread out before him
and around him has been peopled by his activity;
it is so glorious and so fecund he can long dwell
upon and admire it; he need no longer subdue his
own thought to a foreign thought; he seeks and discovers
his own peculiar sentiment; he dares to confide
himself to it, to pursue it to the end, to imitate
nobody, to derive all from himself, to invent with no
other guide but the voiceless preferences of his own
senses and his own affections. His inner forces, his
fundamental aptitudes, his primitive and hereditary
instincts drawn out and fortified by experience continue
to operate after his experience, and, when they
have formed a nation they form an art.

Let us consider this art. It manifests through colors
and forms all the instincts that have just appeared
in actions and in works. So long as the
seven provinces of the North and the ten provinces
of the South formed but one nation they had but one
school of art. Engelbrecht, Lucas of Leyden, John
Schoreel, the elder Heemskerck, Corneille of Harlem,
Bloemaert and Goltzius paint in the same style as
their contemporaries of Bruges and Antwerp. There
is not as yet a distinct Dutch school, because there is
not as yet a distinct Belgian school. At the time
when the War of Independence begins the painters
of the North are laboring to convert themselves
into Italians like the painters of the South. After
the year 1600, however, there is a complete change
in painting as in other things. The rising sap of the
nation gives predominance to the national instincts.

Nudities are no longer visible; the ideal figure, the
beautiful human animal living in full sunshine, the
noble symmetry of limbs and attitude, the grand al-
lgoric or mythological picture is no longer adapted
to Germanic taste. Calvanism, moreover, which now
rules, excludes it from its temples, and amidst this
population of earnest and economic laborers there is
no seigneurial display, no widespread and grandiose
epicureanism which, elsewhere, in the palaces and in
proximity to luxurious silver, liveries and furniture,
demands the sensual and pagan canvas. When
Amelia of Solm desires to raise a monument in this
style to her husband, the stadtholder Frederic Henry,
she is obliged to send to Orangesaal for the Flemish
artists Van Thulden and Jordaens. To these realistic
imaginations and amidst these republican customs,
in this land where a shoemaking privateer can
become vice-admiral, the most interesting figure is
one of its own citizens, a man of flesh and blood, not
draped or undraped like a Greek, but in his own costume
and ordinary attitude, some good magistrate
or valiant officer. The heroic style is suited to but
one thing, the great portraits which decorate the
town-halls and public institutions in commemoration
of services rendered. We see, in fact, a new kind of
picture make its appearance here, the vast canvas on
which are displayed five, ten, twenty and thirty fulllength
portraits as large as life, hospital directors,
arquebusiers on target excursions, syndics assembled
around a table, officers offering toasts at a banquet,
professors giving clinical lectures, all grouped according
to their pursuits, and all presented to view
with the costume, arms, banners, accessories and
surroundings belonging to their actual life; it is a
veritable historical picture, the most instructive and
most impressive of all, where Franz Hals, Rembrandt,
Govaêrt Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, Theodore de Keyser
and John Ravenstein depict the heroic age of their
nation, where sensible, energetic and loyal heads
possess the nobleness of power and of conscience,
where the fine costume of the renaissance, the scarfs,
the buff vests, the frills, the lace collars, the pourpoints
and the black mantles throw their gravity
and brilliancy around the solid portliness of the stout
forms and frank expressions of the faces, where the
artist, now through the virile simplicity of his
means, now through the strength of his convictions,
becomes the equal of his heroes.

Such is painting for the public; there now remains
painting for private life, that which decorates the
houses of individuals, and which, in its dimensions
as well as subjects, conforms to the condition and
character of its purchasers. "There is no bourgeois
so poor," says Parival, "who does not liberally indulge
his taste this way." A baker pays six hundred
florins for a single figure by Van der Meer of
Delft. This, along with a neat and agreeable interior,
constitutes their luxury; "they do not grudge
money in this direction, which they rather save on
their stomachs." The national instinct re-appears
here the same as revealed in the first epoch with
John Van Eyck, Quintin Matsys, and Lucas of Leyden;
and it is emphatically the national instinct, for
it is so deep and so active that, even in Belgium, in
close proximity to mythological and decorative art,
it runs through the Breughels and Teniers like a
small brook alongside of a broad river. It exacts
and provokes the representation of man as he is and
life as it is, both as the eye encounters them, citizens,

peasants, cattle, shops, taverns, rooms, streets and
landscapes. There is no need to transform them in
order to ennoble them; they are satisfied if they are
worthy of interest. Nature, in herself, whatever she
may be, whether human, animal, vegetable or inanimate,
with all her irregularities, minutiæ and omissions,
is inherently right, and, when comprehended,
people love and delight to contemplate her. The
object of art is not to change her, but to interpret
her; through sympathy it renders her beautiful.
Thus understood, painting may represent the housekeeper
spinning in her rural cot, the carpenter planing
on his work-bench, the surgeon dressing a rustic's
arm, the cook spitting a chicken, the rich dame
washing herself; all sorts of interiors, from the hovel
to the drawing-room; all sorts of types, from the
rubicund visage of the deep drinker to the placid
smile of the well-bred damsel; every scene of refined
or rustic life—a card-party in a gilded saloon, a peasant's
carouse in a bare tavern, skaters on a frozen
canal, cows drinking from a trough, vessels at sea,
the entire and infinite diversities of sky, earth, water,
darkness and daylight. Terburg, Metzu, Gerard
Dow, Van der Meer of Delft, Adrian Brouwer,
Schalcken, Franz Mieris, Jan Steen, Wouverman,
the two Ostades, Wynants, Cuyp, Van der Neer,
Ruysdael, Hobbema, Paul Potter, Backhuysen, the
two Vanderveldes, Philip of Kœnig, Van der Heyden,
and how many more! There is no school in which
artists of original talent are so numerous. When
the domain of art consists, not of a small summit,
but of the wide expanse of life, it offers to each mind
a distinct field; the ideal is narrow, and inhabited
only by two or three geniuses; the real is immense,
and provides places for fifty men of talent. A tranquil
and pleasing harmony emanates from all these
performances. We are conscious of repose in looking
at them. The spirit of the artist, like that of his
figures, is in equilibrium; we should be quite content
and comfortable in his picture. We realize that his
imagination does not go beyond. It seems as if he,
like his personages, were satisfied with mere living.
Nature appears to him excellent; all he cares for is
to add some arrangement, some tone side by side
with another, some effect of light, some choice of
attitude. In her presence he is like a happy-wedded
Hollander in the presence of his spouse; he would
not wish her otherwise; he loves her through affectionate
routine and innate concordance; at the utmost
his chief requirement of her will be to wear
at some festival her red frock instead of the blue
one. He bears no resemblance to our painters, expert
observers taught by æsthetic and philosophic
books and journals, who depict the peasant and the
laborer the same as the Turk and the Arab, that is
to say, as curious animals and interesting specimens;
who charge their landscapes with the subtleties, refinements
and emotions of poets and civilians in order
to rid themselves of the mute and dreamy revery
of life. He is of a more näive order; he is not dislocated
or over-excited by excessive cerebral activity;
as compared to us he is an artizan; when he
takes up painting he has none other than picturesque
intentions; he is less affected by unforeseen and
striking detail than by simple and leading general
traits. His work, on this account, healthier and less
poignant, appeals to less cultivated natures, and
pleases the greater number. Among all these painters,
two only—Ruysdael, in spiritual finesse and
marked superiority of education, and Rembrandt
especially, in a peculiar structure of the eye and a
wonderfully wild genius—developed, beyond their
age and nation, up to the common instincts which
bind the Germanic nations together and pave the
way for modern sentiments. The latter, constantly
collecting his materials, living in solitude and borne
along by the growth of an extraordinary faculty,
lived, like our Balzac, a magician and a visionary in
a world fashioned by his own hand and of which he
alone possessed the key. Superior to all painters in
the native delicacy and keenness of his optical perceptions,
he comprehended this truth and adhered to
it in all its consequences that, to the eye, the essence
of a visible object consists of the spot (tache), that
the simplest color is infinitely complex, that every
visual sensation is the product of its elements
coupled with its surroundings, that each object on
the field of sight is but a single spot modified by
others, and that, in this wise, the principal feature
of a picture is the ever-present, tremulous, colored
atmosphere into which figures are plunged like fishes
in the sea. He rendered this atmosphere palpable,
and revealed to us its mysterious and thronging population;
he impregnated it with the light of his own
country—a feeble, yellow illumination like that of a
lamp in a cellar; he felt the mournful struggle
between it and shadow, the weakness of vanishing
rays dying away in gloom, the tremulousness of reflections
vainly clinging to gleaming walls, the sum
of that vague multitude of half-darks which, invisible
to ordinary gaze, seem in his paintings and etchings
to form a submarine world dimly visible through an
abyss of waters. On emerging from this obscurity
the full light, to his eyes, proved a dazzling shower;
he felt as if it were flashes of lightning, or some
magical effulgence, or as myriads of beaming darts.
He found accordingly, in the inanimate world the
completest and most expressive drama, all contrasts
and all conflicts, whatever is overwhelming and painfully
lugubrious in night, whatever is most fleeting
and saddest in ambiguous shadow, whatever is most
violent and most irresistible in the irruption of daylight.
This done, all that remained was to impose
the human drama on the natural drama; a stage
thus fashioned indicates of itself its own characters.
The Greeks and Italians had known of man and
of life only the straightest and tallest stems, the
healthy flower blooming in sunshine; he saw the
root, everything which crawls and moulders in
shadow, the stunted and deformed sprouts, the
obscure crowd of the poor, the Jewry of Amsterdam,
the slimy, suffering populace of a large city
and unfavorable climate, the bandy-legged beggar,
the bloated idiot, the bald skull of an exhausted
craftsman, the pallid features of the sick, the whole
of that grovelling array of evil passions and hideous
miseries which infest our various civilizations like
worms in a rotten plank. Once on this road he
could comprehend the religion of grief, the genuine
Christianity; he could interpret the Bible as if he
were a Lollard; he could recognize the eternal Christ
as present now as formerly, as living in a cellar or
tavern of Holland as beneath a Jerusalem sun; the
healer and consoler of the miserable, alone capable
of saving them because as poor and as miserable as
themselves. He too, through a reaction, was conscious
of pity; by the side of others who seem
painters of the aristocracy he is of the people; he
is, at least, the most humane; his broader sympathies
embrace more of nature fundamentally; no
ugliness repels him, no craving for joyousness or
nobleness hides from him the lowest depths of truth.
Hence it is that, free of all trammels and guided by
the keen sensibility of his organs, he has succeeded
in portraying in man not merely the general structure
and the abstract type which answers for classic
art, but again that which is peculiar and profound
in the individual, the infinite and indefinable complications
of the moral being, the whole of that
changeable imprint which concentrates instantaneously
on a face the entire history of a soul and
which Shakespeare alone saw with an equally prodigious
lucidity. In this respect he is the most original
of modern artists, and forges one end of the
chain of which the Greeks forged the other; the
rest of the masters, Florentine, Venetian and Flemish,
stand between them; and when, nowadays, our
over-excited sensibility, our extravagant curiosity in
the pursuit of subtleties, our unsparing search of
the true, our divination of the remote and the
obscure in human nature, seeks for predecessors and
masters, it is in him and in Shakespeare that Balzao
and Delacroix are able to find them.

A blooming period like this is transient for the
reason that the sap which produces it is exhausted
by its production. Towards 1667, after the naval
defeats of England, slight indications show the
growing change in the manners, customs and sentiments
which had stimulated the national art. The
prosperity is too great. Already, in 1660, Parival,
speaking of this, grows ecstatic in every chapter;
the companies of the East and West Indies declare
dividends to their stockholders of forty and fifty per
cent. Heroes become citizens; Parival notices the
thirst for gain among those of the highest class.
And more, "they detest duels, contentions and quarrels,
and commonly assert that well-off people never
fight." They want to enjoy themselves, and the
houses of the great, which the Venetian ambassadors
early in the century find so bare and so simple, become
luxurious; among the leading citizens there
are found tapestries, high-priced pictures and "gold
and silver-plate." The rich interiors of Terburg and
Metzu show us the new-found elegance—the light

silk dresses, velvet bodices, the gems, the pearls,
the hangings honey-combed with gold, and the lofty
chimneys with marble columns. Ancient energy
relaxes. When Louis XIV. invades the country in
1672 he finds no resistance. The army has been
neglected; their troops are disbanded; their towns
surrender at the first blow; four French cavaliers
take Muyden which is the key to the floodgates; the
States-General implore peace on any terms. The
national sentiment degenerates, at the same time, in
the arts. Taste becomes transformed. Rembrandt
in 1669 dies poor, almost without anybody's knowledge;
the new-found luxury is satisfied with foreign
models obtained from France and Italy. Already,
during the most flourishing epoch, a number of painters
had gone to Rome to paint small figures and
landscapes; Jan Both, Berghem, Karl Dujardin, and
many others—Wouvermans himself—form a half-Italian
school alongside of the national school. But
this school was spontaneous and natural; amid the
mountains, ruins, structures and rags of the South
the vapory whiteness of the atmosphere, the geniality
of the figures, the mellow carnations, the gayety
and good humor of the painter denote the persistency
and freedom of the Dutch instinct. On the
other hand, we see at this moment this instinct becoming
enfeebled under the invasion of fashion. On
the Kaisergracht and the Heeregracht rise grand
hotels in the style of Louis XIV., while the Flemish
painter who founded the academic school, Gerard de
Lairesse, comes to decorate them with his learned
allegories and hybrid mythologies. The national
art, it is true, does not at once surrender; it is prolonged
by a succession of masterpieces up to the
first years of the eighteenth century; at the same
time the national sentiment, aroused by humiliation
and danger, excites a popular revolution, heroic
sacrifices, the inundation of the country, and all the
successes which afterwards ensue. But these very
successes complete the ruin of the energy and enthusiasm
which this temporary revival had stimulated.
During the whole of the war of the Spanish succession,
Holland, whose stadtholder became King of
England, is sacrificed to its ally; after the treaty of
1713 she loses her maritime supremacy, falls to the
second rank of powers, and, finally, still lower;
Frederic the Great is soon able to say that she is
dragged in the wake of England like a sloop behind
a man-of-war. France tramples on her during the
war of the Austrian succession; later, England imposes
on her the right of search and deprives her of
the coast of Coromandel. Finally, Prussia steps in,
overwhelms the republican party and establishes the
stadtholdership. Like all the weak she is hustled
by the strong, and, after 1789, conquered and reconquered.
What is worse she gives up and is content
to remain a good commercial banking-house. Already
in 1723 her historian, John Leclerc, a refugee,
openly ridicules the valiant seamen who, during the
War of Independence, blew themselves up rather
than strike their flag.[30] In 1732, another historian declares
that "the Dutch think of nothing but the accumulation
of riches." After 1748 both the army
and the fleet are allowed to decline. In 1787 the
Duke of Brunswick brings the country under subjection
almost without striking a blow. What a distance
between sentiments of this cast and those of
the companions of William the Taciturn, De Ruyter
and Von Tromp! Hence it is that, through an admirable
concordance, we see picturesque invention
terminating with practical energy. In ten years
after the commencement of the eighteenth century
all the great painters are dead. Already for a generation
a decline is manifest in the impoverished
style, in the more limited imagination and in more
minute finish of Franz Mieris, Schalcken, and the rest.
One of these, Adrian Van der Werf, in his cold and
polished painting, his mythologies and nudities, his
ivory carnations, his impotent return to the Italian
style, bears witness to the Dutch oblivion of native
tastes and its own peculiar genius. His successors
resemble men who attempt to speak with nothing
to say; brought up by masters or famous parents,
Peter Van der Werf, Henry Van Limborch, Philip
Van Dyck, Mieris the younger, and another the
grandson, Nicholas Verkolie, and Constantine Netscher
repeat sentences they have heard, but like automatons.
Talent survives only among painters of
accessories and flowers—Jacques de Witt, Rachel
Ruysch and Van Huysum—in a small way, which
requires less invention and which still lasts a few
years, similar to a tenacious clump of bushes on a
dry soil whereon all the great trees have died. This
dies in its turn, and the ground remains vacant. It
is the last evidence of the dependence which attaches
individual originality to social life, and proportions
the inventive faculties of the artist to the active
energies of the nation.