University of Virginia Library

I. PART I.
PERMANENT CAUSES.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART IN
THE NETHERLANDS.

During the last three years I have explained to
you the history of painting in Italy; this year I
propose to set before you the history of painting in
the Netherlands.

Two groups of mankind have been, and still are,
the principal factors of modern civilization; on the
one hand, the Latin or Latinized people—the Italians,
French, Spanish and Portuguese, and on the other,
the Germanic people—the Belgians, Dutch, Germans,
Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, English, Scotch and
Americans. In the Latin group the Italians are undeniably
the best artists; in the Germanic group they
are indisputably the Flemings and the Dutch. In
studying, accordingly, the history of art along with
these two races, we are studying the history of modern
art with its greatest and most opposite representatives.

A product so vast and varied, an art enduring
nearly four hundred years, an art enumerating so
many masterpieces and imprinting on all its works
an original and common character, is a national product;
it is consequently intimately associated with
the national life, and is rooted in the national character
itself. It is a flowering long and deeply matured
through a development of vitality conformably to the
acquired structure and primitive organization of the
plant. According to our method we shall first study
the innate and preliminary history which explains
the outward and final history. I shall first show you
the seed, that is to say the race, with its fundamental
and indelible qualities, those that persist through all
circumstances and in all climates; and next the plant,
that is to say the people itself, with its original qualities
expanded or contracted, in any case grafted on
and transformed by its surroundings and its history;
and finally the flower, that is to say the art,
and especially painting, in which this development
culminates.

I.

The men who inhabit the Netherlands belong, for
the most part, to that race which invaded the Roman
empire in the fifth century, and which then, for the
first time, claimed its place in broad sunshine alongside
of Latin nations. In certain countries, in Gaul,
Spain and Italy, it simply brought chiefs and a
supplement to the primitive population. In other
countries, as in England and the Netherlands, it drove
out, destroyed and replaced the ancient inhabitants,
its blood, pure, or almost pure, still flowing in the
veins of the men now occupying the same soil.
Throughout the middle ages the Netherlands were
called Low Germany. The Belgic and Dutch languages
are dialects of the German, and, except in
the Walloon district, where a corrupt French is
spoken, they form the popular idiom of the whole
country.

Let us consider the common characteristics of the
Germanic race, and the differences by which it is
opposed to the Latin race. Physically, we have

a whiter and softer skin, generally speaking, blue
eyes, often of a porcelain or pale hue, paler as you
approach the north, and sometimes glassy in Holland;
hair of a flaxy blonde, and, with children, almost
white; the ancient Romans early wondered at
it, and stated that infants in Germany had the hair
of old men. The complexion is of a charming rose,
infinitely delicate among young girls, and lively
and tinged with vermilion among young men, and
sometimes even among the aged; ordinarily, however,
among the laboring classes and in advanced
life I have found it wan, turnip-hued, and in Holland
cheese-colored, and mouldy cheese at that.
The body is generally large, but thick-set or burly,
heavy and inelegant. In a similar manner the
features are apt to be irregular, especially in Holland,
where they are flabby, with projecting cheekbones
and strongly-marked jaws. They lack, in
short, sculptural nobleness and delicacy. You will
rarely find the features regular like the numerous
pretty faces of Toulouse and Bordeaux, or like the
spirited and handsome heads which abound in the
vicinity of Rome and Florence. You will much
oftener find exaggerated features, incoherent combinations
of form and tones, curious fleshy protuberances,
so many natural caricatures. Taking them for
works of art, living forms testify to a clumsy and
fantastic hand through their more incorrect and
weaker drawing.

Observe now this body in action, and you will
find its animal faculties and necessities of a grosse
kind than among the Latins; matter and mass seem
to predominate over motion and spirit; it is voracious
and even carnivorous. Compare the appetite of an
Englishman, or even a Hollander, with that of a
Frenchman or an Italian; those among you who
have visited the country can call to mind the public
dinner tables and the quantities of food, especially
meat, tranquilly swallowed several times a day by
a citizen of London, Rotterdam or Antwerp. In
English novels people are always lunching—the most
sentimental heroine, at the end of the third volume,
having consumed an infinite number of buttered muffins,
cups of tea, bits of chicken, and sandwiches.
The climate contributes to this; in the fogs of the
north, people could not sustain themselves, like a

peasant of the Latin race, on a bowl of soup or a
piece of bread flavored with garlic, or on a plate of
macaroni. For the same reason the German is fond
of potent beverages. Tacitus had already remarked
it, and Ludovico Guiccardini, an eye-witness in the
sixteenth century, whom I shall repeatedly quote,
says, in speaking of the Belgians and Hollanders:
"Almost all are addicted to drunkenness, which vice,
with them, is a passion. They fill themselves with
liquor every evening, and even at day-break." At
the present time, in America and in Europe, in most
of the German countries, intemperance is the national
bane; half of the suicides and mental maladies flow
from it. Even among the reflective and those in
good circumstances the fondness for liquor is very
great: in Germany and in England it is not regarded
as disreputable for a well-educated man to rise from
the table partially intoxicated; now and then he becomes
completely drunk. With us, on the contrary,
it is a reproach, in Italy a disgrace, and in Spain,
during the last century, the name of drunkard was an
insult which a duel could not wholly wipe out, provoking,
as it often did, the dagger. There is nothing of
this sort in German countries; hence the great number
and frequency of breweries and the innumerable
shops for the retailing of ardent spirits and different
kinds of beer, all bearing witness to the public taste.
Enter, in Amsterdam, one of these little shops, garnished
with polished casks, where glass after glass is
swallowed of white, yellow, green and brown brandy,
strengthened with pepper and pimento. Place yourself
at nine o'clock in the evening in a Brussels
brewery, near a dark wooden table around which
the hawkers of crabs, salted rolls and hard-boiled
eggs circulate; observe the people quietly seated
there, each one intent on himself, sometimes in
couples, but generally silent, smoking, eating, and
drinking bumpers of beer which they now and then
warm up with a glass of spirits; you can understand
sympathetically the strong sensation of heat and
animal plenitude which they feel in their speechless
solitude, in proportion as superabundant solid and
liquid nourishment renews in them the living substance,
and as the whole body partakes in the gratification
of the satisfied stomach.

One point more of their exterior remains to be

shown which especially strikes people of southern
climes, and that is the sluggishness and torpidity of
their impressions and movements. An umbrella-dealer
of Amsterdam, a Toulousian, almost threw
himself into my arms on hearing me speak French,
and for a quarter of an hour I had to listen to the
story of his griefs. To a temperament as lively as
his, the people of this country were intolerable—
"stiff, frigid, with no sensibility or sentiment, dull
and insipid, perfect turnips, sir, perfect turnips!"
And, truly, his cackling and expansiveness formed a
contrast. It seems, on addressing them, as if they
did not quite comprehend you, or that they required
time to set their expressional machinery agoing;
the keeper of a gallery, a household servant, stands
gaping at you a minute before answering. In coffeehouses
and in public conveyances the phlegm and
passivity of their features are remarkable; they do
not feel as we do the necessity of moving about
and talking—they remain stationary for hours,
absorbed with their own ideas or with their pipes.
At evening parties in Amsterdam, ladies, bedecked
like shrines, and motionless on their chairs, seem to
be statues. In Belgium, in Germany and in England,
the faces of the peasantry seem to us inanimate,
devitalized or benumbed. A friend, returning
from Berlin, remarked to me, "those people all
have dead eyes." Even the young girls look simple
and drowsy. Many a time have I paused before a
shop-window to contemplate some rosy, placid and
candid face, a mediæval madonna making up the
fashions. It is the very reverse of this in our land
and in Italy, where the grisette's eyes seem to be
gossiping with the chairs for lack of something
better, and where a thought, the moment it is born,
translates itself into gesture. In Germanic lands
the channels of sensation and expression seem to be
obstructed; delicacy, impulsiveness, and readiness
of action appear impossible; a southerner has to
exclaim at their awkwardness and lack of adroitness,
and this was the deliberate opinion of our
French in the wars of the Revolution and the
Empire. In this respect the toilette and deportment
afford us the best indications, especially if we take
the middle and lower classes of society. Compare
the grisettes of Rome, Bologna, Paris and Toulouse
with the huge mechanical dolls to be seen at Hampton
Court on Sundays, starched and stiff in their
blue scarfs, staring silks and gilded belts, and other
details of a pompous extravagance. I remember at
this moment two fêtes—one at Amsterdam to which
the rich peasant women of Friesland flocked, their
heads decked with a fluted cap and a hat like a cabriolet
rearing itself convulsively, whilst on the temples
and brow were two gold plates, a gold pediment
and gold corkscrews surrounding a wan and distorted
countenance; the other at Fribourg, in Brisgau,
where, planted on their solid feet, the village
women stood vaguely staring at us and exhibiting
themselves in their national costume—so many black,
red, purple and green skirts, with stiff folds like
those of gothic statues, a swollen corsage front and
rear, massive sleeves puffed out like legs of mutton,
forms girded close under the armpits, dull, yellow
hair twisted into a knot and drawn towards the top
of the head, chignons in a net of gold and silver
embroidery, and above this a man's hat, like an
orange-colored pipe, the heteroclite crown of a body
seemingly hewn out with a cleaver, and vaguely
suggesting a painted sign-post. In brief, the human
animal of this race is more passive and more gross
than the other. One is tempted to regard him as
inferior on comparing him with the Italian or southern
Frenchman, so temperate, so quick intellectually,
who is naturally apt in expression, in chatting and
in pantomine, possessing taste and attaining to
elegance, and who, without effort, like the Provençals
of the twelfth, and the Florentines of the fourteenth
century, become cultivated, civilized and
accomplished at the first effort.

We must not confine ourselves to this first glance
which presents only one phase of things; there is
another associated with it, as light accompanies
dark. This finesse, and this precocity, natural to
the Latin families, leads to many bad results. It
is the soruce of their craving for agreeable sensations;
they are exacting in their comforts; they
demand many and varied pleasures, whether coarse
or refined, an entertaining conversation, the amenities
of politeness, the satisfactions of vanity, the
sensualities of love, the delights of novelty and of
accident, the harmonious symmetries of form and

of phrase; they readily develope into rhetoricians,
dilettanti, epicureans, voluptuaries, libertines, gallants
and worldlings. It is indeed through these
vices that their civilization becomes corrupt or ends;
you encounter them in the decline of ancient Greece
and Rome, in Provençe of the twelfth, in Italy of
the sixteenth, in Spain of the seventeenth, and in
France of the eighteenth centuries. Their more
quickly cultivated temperament bears them more
speedily on to subtleties. Coveting keen emotions,
they cannot be happy with moderate ones: they
are like people who, accustomed to eating oranges,
throw away carrots and turnips; and yet it is
carrots and turnips, and other equally insipid vegetables,
which make up our ordinary diet. It is in
Italy that a noble lady exclaims, on partaking of a
delicious ice-cream, "What a pity there is no sin in
it!" In France a noble lord remarks, speaking of
a diplomatic roué, "Who wouldn't admire him, he is
so wicked!" In other directions their vivacity of
impression and promptness of action render them
improvisators; they are so quickly and so deeply
excited by a crisis as to forget duty and reason,
resorting to daggers in Italy and Spain, and to pistols
in France; showing by this that they are only
moderately capable of biding their time, of self-subordination,
and of maintaining order. Success in
life depends on knowing how to be patient, how to
endure drudgery, how to unmake and remake, how
to recommence and continue without allowing the
tide of anger or the flight of the imagination to
arrest or divert the daily effort. In fine, if we compare
their faculties with the world as it runs, it is
too mechanical, too rude, and too monotonous for
them, and they too lively, too delicate, and too
brilliant for it. Always after the lapse of centuries
this discord shows itself in their civilization; they
demand too much of things, and, through their misconduct,
fail even to reach that which things might
confer on them.

Suppress, now, these fortunate endowments, and,
on the dark side, these mischievous tendencies,—imagine
on the slow and substantial body of the German
a well-organized brain, a sound mind, and trace
the effects. With less lively impressions a man thus
fashioned will be more collected and more thoughtful;

less solicitous of agreeable emotions, he can, without
weariness, do disagreeable things. His senses
being blunter, he prefers depth to form, and truth
within to show without. As he is less impulsive he
is less subject to impatience and to unreasonable outbursts;
he has an idea of sequence, and can persist
in enterprises the issue of which is of long achievement.
Finally, with him the understanding is the
better master, because outward temptations are
weaker and inward explosions rarer; reason governs
better where there is less inward rebellion and less
outward attack. Consider, in effect, the Germanic
people of the present day and throughout history.
They are, primarily, the great laborers of the world;
in matters of intellect none equal them; in erudition,
in philosophy, in the most crabbed linguistic studies,
in voluminous editions, dictionaries and other compilations,
in researches of the laboratory, in all science,
in short, whatever stern and hard, but necessary and
preparatory work there is to be done, that is their
province; patiently, and with most commendable
self-sacrifice they hew out every stone that enters into
the edifice of modern times. In material matters the
English, Americans and Dutch perform the same service.
I should like to show you an English spinner
or cloth-dresser at work; he is a perfect automaton,
occupied day in and day out without a moment's
relaxation, and the tenth hour as well as the first.
If he is in a workshop with French workmen, these
form a striking contrast; they are unable to adapt
themselves to the same mechanical regularity; they
are sooner tired and inattentive, and thus produce
less at the end of the day; instead of eighteen hundred
spools, they only turn out twelve hundred.
The farther south you go the less the capacity. A
Provençal or Italian must gossip, sing and dance;
he is a willing lounger, and lives as he can, and in
this way easily contents himself with a threadbare
coat. Indolence there seems natural and honorable.
A noble life, the laziness of the man who, to save his
honor, lives on expedients, and sometimes fasts, has
been the curse of Spain and Italy for the last two
hundred years. On the other hand, in the same
epoch, the Fleming, the Hollander, the Englishman
and the German have gloried in providing themselves
with all useful things; the instinctive repugnance
which leads an ordinary man to shun trouble, the
puerile vanity which leads the cultivated man to distinguish
himself from the artizan, disappear alongside
of their good sense and reason.

This same reason and this same good sense establish
and maintain amongst them diverse descriptions
of social engagements, and first, the conjugal bond.
You are aware that among the Latin families this is
not over respected; in Italy, Spain and France
adultery is always the principal subject of the play
and the romance; at all events, literature in these
lands always incarnates passion in the hero, and is
prodigal of sympathy for him by granting him all
privileges. In England, on the contrary, the novel
is a picture of loyal affection and the laudation of
wedlock; in Germany, gallantry is not honorable,
even among students. In Latin countries it is
excused or accepted, and even sometimes approved
of. The matrimonial yoke, and the monotony of the
household, there seem galling. Sensational allurements
penetrate too deeply; the caprices of the
imagination there are too brusque; the mind creates
for itself visions of transports and of ecstatic

delight, or at least a romance of exciting and
varied sensuality, and at the first opportunity the
suppressed flood bursts forth, carrying with it every
barrier of duty and of law. Consider Spain, Italy
and France in the sixteenth century; read the tales
of Bandello, the comedies of Lope de Vega, the narratives
of Brantôme, and listen for a moment to the
comment of Guiccardini, a contemporary, on the
social habits of the Netherlands. "They hold
adultery in horror . . . Their women are extremely
circumspect, and are consequently allowed much
freedom. They go out alone to make visits, and
even journeys without evil report; they are able to
take care of themselves. Moreover they are housekeepers,
and love their households." Only very
lately, again, a wealthy and noble Hollander named
to me several young ladies belonging to his family
who had no desire to see the Great Exposition, and
who remained at home whilst their husbands and
brothers visited Paris. A disposition so calm and
so sedentary diffuses much happiness throughout
domestic life; in the repose of curiosity and of desire
the ascendancy of pure ideas is much greater;
the constant presence of the same person not being
wearisome, the memory of plighted faith, the sentiment
of duty and of self-respect easily prevails
against temptations which elsewhere triumph because
they are elsewhere more powerful. I can say
as much of other descriptions of association, and especially
of the free assemblage. This, practically, is
a very difficult thing. To make the machine work
regularly, without obstruction, those who compose
it must have calm nerves and be governed by the
end in view. One is expected to be patient in a
`meeting,' to allow himself to be contradicted and
even vilified, await his turn for speaking, reply
with moderation, and submit twenty times in succession
to the same argument enlivened with figures
and documentary facts. It will not answer to fling
aside the newspaper the moment its political interest
flags, nor take up politics for the pleasure of discussion
and speech-making, nor excite insurrections
against officials the moment they become distasteful,
which is the fashion in Spain and elsewhere. You
yourselves have some knowledge of a country where
the government has been overthrown because inactive
and because the nation felt ennui. Among
Germanic populations, people meet together not to
talk but to act; politics is a matter to be wisely
managed, they bring to bear on it the spirit of business;
speech is simply a means, while the effect,
however remote, is the end in view. They subordinate
themselves to this end, and are full of deference
for the persons who represent it. How unique!
Here the governed respect the governing; if the
latter prove objectionable they are resisted, but
legally and patiently; if institutions prove defective,
they are gradually reformed without being disrupted.
Germanic countries are the patrimony of
free parliamentary rule. You see it established today
in Sweden, in Norway, in England, in Belgium,
in Holland, in Prussia, and even in Austria; the
colonists engaged in clearing Australia and the
West of America, plant it in their soil, and, however
rude the new-comers may be, it prospers at
once, and is maintained without difficulty. We find
it at the outset in Belgium and Holland; the old
cities of the Netherlands were republics, and
maintained themselves throughout the middle ages
in spite of their feudal suzerains. Free communities
arose, and maintained themselves without effort, at
once, the small as well as the great, and in the great
whole. In the sixteenth century we find in each
city, and even in small towns, companies of arquebusiers
and rhetoricians, of which more than two hundred
have been enumerated. In Belgium to-day
there still flourish an infinity of similar corporations,
societies of archers, of musicians, of pigeon fanciers,
and for singing birds. In Holland volunteer associations
of private individuals minister to every
requirement of public charity. To act in a body, no
one person oppressing another, is a wholly Germanic
talent, and one which gives them such an empire
over matter; through patience and reflection they
conform to the laws of physical and human nature,
and instead of opposing them profit by them.

If, now, from action we turn to speculation, that
is to say to the mode of conceiving and figuring
the world, we shall find the same imprint of this
thoughtful and slightly sensualistic genius. The
Latins show a decided taste for the external and
decorative aspect of things, for a pompous display

feeding the senses and vanity, for logical order, outward
symmetry and pleasing arrangement, in short,
for form. The Germanic people, on the contrary,
have rather inclined to the inward order of things,
to truth itself, in fact, to the fundamental. Their
instinct leads them to avoid being seduced by
appearances, to remove mystery, to seize the hidden,
even when repugnant and sorrowful, and not to
eliminate or withhold any detail, even when vulgar
and unsightly. Among the many products of this
instinct there are two which place it in full light
through the strongly marked contrast in each of
form and substance, and these are literature and
religion. The literatures of Latin populations are
classic and nearly or remotely allied to Greek poesy,
Roman eloquence, the Italian renaissance, and the
age of Louis XIV.; they refine and ennoble, they
embellish and prune, they systematize and give proportion.
Their latest masterpiece is the drama of
Racine, who is the painter of princely ways, court
proprieties, social paragons, and cultivated natures;
the master of an oratorical style, skilful composition
and literary elegance. The Germanic literatures,
on the contrary, are romantic; their primitive
source is the Edda and the ancient sagas of the
north; their greatest masterpiece is the drama of
Shakespeare, that is to say the crude and complete
representation of actual life, with all its atrocious,
ignoble and common-place details, its sublime and
brutal instincts, the entire outgrowth of human
character displayed before us, now in a familiar
style bordering on the trivial, and now poetic even
to lyricism, always independent of rule, incoherent,
excessive, but of an incomparable force, and filling
our souls with the warm and palpitating passion of
which it is the outcry. In a similar manner take
religion, and view it at the critical moment when the
people of Europe had to choose their faith, that is to
say in the sixteenth century; those who have
studied original documents know what this at that
time meant; what secret preferences kept some in
the ancient faith and led others to take the new one.
All Latin populations, up to the last, remained
Catholic; they were not willing to renounce their
intellectual habits; they remained faithful to tradition;
they continued subject to authority; they
were affected through sensuous externalities—the
pomp of worship, the imposing system of the Catho-
ic hierarchy, the majestic conception of Catholic
unity and Catholic perpetuity; they attached absolute
importance to the rites, outward works and visible
acts through which piety is manifested. Almost
all the Germanic nations, on the contrary, became
Protestants. If Belgium, which inclined to the
Reformation, escaped, it was owing to force through
the successes of Farnese, the destruction and flight
of so many Protestant families, and to a special
moral crisis which you will find in the history of
Rubens. All other Germanic peoples subordinated
outward to inward worship. They made salvation
to consist of a renewal of the heart and of religious
sentiment; they made the formal authority of the
Church yield to personal convictions; through this
predominance of the fundamental form became accessory,
worship, daily life and rites being modified in
the same degree. We shall soon see that in the
arts the same opposition of instincts produced an
analogous contrast of taste and style. Meanwhile
let it suffice for us to seize the cardinal points which
distinguish the two races. If the latter, compared
with the former, presents a less sculpturesque form,
grosser appetites and a more torpid temperament,
it furnishes through tranquillity of nerve and coolness
of blood a stronger hold on pure reason; its
mind, less diverted from the right road by delight
in sensuous attractions, the impetuosities of impulse
and the illusions of external beauty, is better able to
accommodate itself now to comprehend things and
now to direct them.

II.

This race, thus endowed, has received various imprints,
according to the various conditions of its
abiding-place. Sow a number of seeds of the same
vegetable species in different soils, under various
temperatures, and let them germinate, grow, bear
fruit and reproduce themselves indefinitely, each on
its own soil, and each will adapt itself to its soil,
producing several varieties of the same species so
much the more distinct as the contrast is greater
between the diverse climates. Such is the experience
of the Germanic race in the Netherlands. Ten centuries
of habitation have done their work; the end
of the middle ages shows us that, in addition to its
innate character, there is an acquired character.

It becomes necessary, therefore, to study the soil
and the sky; in default of travel take the next best
thing, a map. Excepting the mountainous district
to the south-east, the Netherlands consist of a watery
plain, formed out of the deposits of three large rivers
—the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt, besides several

smaller streams. Add to this numerous inlets,
ponds and marshes. The country is an outflow of
mighty waters, which, as they reach it, become sluggish
and remain stagnant for want of a fall. Dig
hole anywhere and water comes. Examine the landscapes
of Van der Neer and you will obtain some idea
of the vast sluggish streams which, on approaching
the sea, become a league wide, and lie asleep, wallowing
in their beds like some huge, flat, slimy fish,
turbid and feebly glimmering with scaly reflections.
The plain is oftentimes below their level, and is only
protected by levées of earth. You feel as if some of
them were going to give way; a mist is constantly
rising from their surfaces, and at night a dense fog
envelopes all things in a bluish humidity. Follow
them down to the sea, and here a second and more
violent inundation, arising from the daily tides, completes
the work of the first. The northern ocean is
hostile to man. Look at the "Estacade" of Ruysdael,
and imagine the frequent tempests casting up ruddy
waves and monstrous foaming billows on the low, flat
band of earth already half submerged by the enlargement
of the rivers. A belt of islands, some of them
equal to the half of a department, indicates, along
the coast, this choking up of inland currents and the
assaults of the sea—Walcheren, North and South
Beveland, Tholen, Schouwen, Voorn, Beierland, Texel,
Vlieland and others. Sometimes the ocean runs up
and forms inner seas like that of Harlem, or deep
gulfs like the Zuyder Zee. If Belgium is an alluvial
expanse, formed by the rivers, Holland is simply a
deposit of mud surrounded by water. Add to all
this an unpropitious soil and a rigorous climate,
and you are tempted to conclude that the country
was not made for man but for storks and
beavers.

When the first Germanic tribes came to encamp
here it was still worse. In the time of Cæsar and
Strabo there was nothing but a swampy forest;
travellers narrate that one could pass from tree to
tree over all Holland without touching the ground.
The uprooted oaks falling into the streams formed
rafts, as nowadays on the Mississippi, and barred
the way to the Roman flotillas. The Waal, the
Meuse and the Scheldt annually overflowed their
banks, the water covering the flat country around to

a great distance. Autumnal tempests every year
submerged the island of Batavia, while in Holland
the line of the coast changed constantly. Rain fell
incessantly, and the fog was as impenetrable as in
Russian America; daylight lasted only three or four
hours. A solid coating of ice annually covered the
Rhine. Civilization, meanwhile, as the soil became
cleared, tempered the climate; the rude Holland of
that day possessed the climate of Norway. Flanders,
four centuries after the invasion, was still called "the
interminable and merciless forest." In 1197 the
country about Waes, now a garden, remained untilled,
the monks on it being besieged by wolves. In the fourteenth
century droves of wild horses roamed through
the forests of Holland. The sea encroached on the
land. Ghent was a seaport in the ninth century,
Thorout, St. Omer and Bruges in the twelfth century,
Damme in the thirteenth, and Ecloo in the fourteenth.
On looking at the Holland of old maps we no
longer recognize it.[1] Still, at the present day its
inhabitants are obliged to guard the soil against the
rivers and the sea. In Belgium the margin of the
sea is below the level of the water at high tide, the
polders or low spots thus reclaimed displaying vast
argillaceous flats, with a slimy soil tinged with purple
reflections, between dykes, which, even in our days,
sometimes break away. The danger in Holland is
still greater, life there seeming to be very precarious.
For thirteen centuries a great inundation has taken
place, on an average, every seven years, besides
smaller ones; one hundred thousand persons were
drowned in 1230, eighty thousand in 1287, twenty
thousand in 1470, thirty thousand in 1570, and twelve
thousand in 1717. Similar disasters occurred in 1776,
in 1808, and still later in 1825. Dollart Bay, about
seven miles wide by twenty deep, and the Zuyder
Zee, forty-four leagues square, are invasions of the
sea in the thirteenth century. In order to protect
Friesland it was necessary to drive three rows of
piles a distance of twenty-two leagues, each pile costing
seven florins. To protect the coast of Harlem
they had to build a dyke of Norway granite five
miles long by forty feet in height, and which is
buried two hundred feet beneath the waves. Amsterdam,
which has two hundred and sixty thousand
inhabitants, is entirely built on piles, frequently
thirty feet long. The foundations of every town and
village in Friesland are artificial constructions. It
is estimated that seven and a half billions of francs
have been expended on protective works between the
Scheldt and the Dollart. Life has to be purchased
in Holland. And when from Harlem or Amsterdam
you see the enormous yellow surf beating against
that narrow strip of mud, and enclosing it as far as
the eye can reach, it is evident that man, in casting
this sop to the monster, obtains safety at a low rate.[2]

Imagine, now, on this quagmire, the ancient Germanic
tribes, so many fishers and hunters roaming
about in hide boats and clad in seal-skin tunics, and
estimate if you can the effort those barbarians were
forced to make in order to create a habitable soil
and transform themselves into a civilized people.
Men of another stamp would not have succeeded;
the milieu was too unfavorable. In analogous conditions
the inferior races of Canada and Russian

America have remained savage; other well-endowed
races, the Celts of Ireland and the Highland Scotch,
attained only to a chivalric standard of society and
poetic legends. Here there had to be good, sound
heads, a capacity to subject sensation to thought, to
patiently endure ennui and fatigue, to accept privation
and labor in view of a remote end, in short a
Germanic race, meaning by this men organized to
co-operate together, to toil, to struggle, to begin
over and over again and ameliorate unceasingly, to
dike streams, to oppose tides, to drain the soil, to
turn wind, water, flats, and argillaceous mud to
account, to build canals, ships and mills, to make
brick, raise cattle, and organize various manufacturing
and commercial enterprises. The difficulty
being very great the mind was absorbed in overcoming
it, and, turned wholly in this direction,
was diverted from other things. To subsist, to
obtain shelter, food and raiment, to protect themselves
against cold and damp, to accumulate stores
and lay up wealth left the settlers no time to think
of other matters; the mind got to be wholly positive
and practical. It is impossible in such a country to
indulge in revery, to philosophize German fashion,
to stray off amidst chimeras of the fancy and
through the world of metaphysical systems.[3] One
is immediately brought back to the earth. The
necessity of action is too universal, too urgent, too
constant; if people think at all, it is to act. Under
this steady pressure the character forms; that which
was habit becomes instinct; the form acquired by
the parent is found hereditary in the child; laborer,
artisan, trader, factor, householder, man of common
sense and nothing more, he is by birth and without
effort what his ancestors got to be through necessity
and constraint.[4]

This positive spirit, moreover, is found to be tranquillized.
Compared with other nations of the same
stock and with a genius no less practical, the denizen
of the Netherlands appears better balanced and more
capable of being content. We do not see in him the
violent passions, the militant disposition, the overstrained
will, the bull-dog instincts, the sombre and

grandiose pride which three permanent conquests and
the secular establishment of political strife have implanted
in the English; nor that restless and exaggerated
desire for action which a dry atmosphere,
sudden changes from heat to cold, a surplus electricity,
have implanted in the Americans of the
United States. He lives in a moist and equable
climate, one which relaxes the nerves and developes
the lymphatic temperament, which moderates the
insurrections, explosions and impetuosity of the spirit,
soothing the asperities of passion and diverting the
character to the side of sensuality and good humor.
You have already observed this effect of climate in
our comparisons of the genius and the art of the
Venetians with those of the Florentines. Here,
moreover, events come to the aid of climate, history
laboring in the same direction as physiology. The
natives of these countries have not undergone, like
their neighbors over the channel, two or three invasions,
the overrunning of an entire people, Saxons,
Danes and Normans installed on their premises;
they have not garnered a heritage of hatred which
oppression, resistance, rancor, prolonged struggle,
warfare—at first open and violent, and afterwards
subdued and legal—transmit from one generation to
another. From the earliest times down we find them
engaged; as in the age of Pliny, in making salt,
"combined together, according to ancient usage, in
bringing under cultivation marshy grounds,"[5] free in
their guilds, asserting their independence, claiming
their rights and immemorial privileges, devoted to
whaling, trade and manufacturing, calling their towns
ports, in brief, as Guiccardini describes them in the
sixteenth century, "very desirous of gain and watchful
of profit, but without anything feverish or irrational
in their desire to provide for themselves.
They are by nature cool and self-possessed. They
delight in wealth and other wordly things prudently
and as occasion offers, and are not easily disturbed,
which is at once apparent both in their discourse and
in their physiognomies. They are not prone to anger
or to pride, but live together on good terms, and are
especially of a gay and lively humor." According to
him they entertain no vast and overweening ambition;
many of them retire from business early, amusing
themselves with building, and taking life easily
and pleasantly. All circumstances, moral and physical,
their geographical and political state, the past
and the present, combine to one end, namely, the
development of one faculty and one tendency at the
expense of the rest, shrewd management and temperate
emotions, a practical understanding and limited
desires; they comprehend the amelioration of
outward things, and, this accomplished, they crave
no more.

Consider, in effect, their work; its perfection and
lacunœ indicate at once the limits and the power of
their intellect. The profound philosophy which is so
natural in Germany, and the elevated poetry which
flourishes in England, they lack. They fail to overlook
material things and positive interests in order
to yield to pure speculation, to follow the temerities
of logic, to attenuate the delicacy of analysis, and
bury themselves in the depths of abstraction. They
ignore that spiritual turmoil, those eruptions of
suppressed feeling which give to style a tragic
accent, and that vagabond fancy, those exquisite

and sublime reveries which outside of life's vulgari
ties reveal a new universe. They can boast of no
great philosopher; their Spinoza is a Jew, a pupil
of Descartes and the rabbis, an isolated recluse of a
different genius and a different race. None of their
books have become European like those of Burns
and Camoens, who, nevertheless, were born out of
nations equally small. One only of their authors
has been read by every man of his epoch, Erasmus,
a refined writer but who wrote in Latin, and who,
in education, taste, style and ideas belongs to the
erudites and humanists of Italy. The old Dutch
poets, as for example, Jacob Cats, are grave, sensible,
somewhat tedious moralists, who laud home enjoyments
and the life of the family. The Flemish
poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries tell
their auditors that they do not recount chivalric
fables—but veritable histories, their poesy ending in
practical maxims and contemporary events. In vain
do their belle-lettre academies cultivate and make
poetry prominent, there being no talent to produce
out of such resources any great or beautiful performance.
Chroniclers arise like Châtelain, and pam
phleteers like Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, but their
unctuous narratives are inflated; their overcharged
eloquence, coarse and crude, recalls, without equalling
it, the rude color and vigorous grossness of their
national art. They have scarcely any literature at
the present day. Their only novelist, Conscience,
seems to us, although a tolerable observer, dull and
unrefined. If we visit their country and read their
journals, those at least not got up in Paris, we seem
to have fallen upon the provinces, and even lower.
Polemical discussions are gross, the flowers of rhetoric
stale, humor rudely indulged, and wit pointless;
a coarse joviality and a coarse anger supply the
material; their very caricatures seem to us stupid.
If we attempt to ascertain their contributions to
the great edifice of modern thought we find that
patiently and methodically, like honest and faithful
workmen, they have hewn out a few blocks. They
can point to a learned school of philologists at
Leyden, to jurisprudential authorities like Grotius,
to naturalists and physicians like Leeuvenhoeck,
Swammerdam and Boerhaave, to physicists like
Huyghens, and to cosmographers like Ortelius and
Mercator, in short, to a contingent of specialist
and useful men, but to no creative intellect disclosing
to the world grand original ideas or enshrining
original conceptions in beautiful forms capable
of universal ascendancy. They have left to neighboring
nations the part filled by the contemplative
Mary at the feet of Jesus, choosing for themselves
that of Martha; in the seventeenth century they
provided pulpits for the Protestant erudites exiled
from France, a country for free thought persecuted
throughout Europe, and editors for all books of
science and polemics; at a later period they furnished
printers for the whole of our eighteenth
century philosophy, and finally booksellers, brokers
and counterfeiters for the entire literature of modern
times. All this is of service to them for they
are versed in languages, and read and are instructed,
instruction being an acquisition and something
which it is good to lay up like other things.
But there they stop, and neither their ancient nor
their modern works show any need of or faculty for
contemplating the abstract beyond the apparent
world and the imaginary world outside of reality. |

On the contrary they have always excelled and
they still excel in the arts called useful. "First
among transalpine people," says Guiccardini, "they
invented woolen fabrics." Up to 1404 they alone
were capable of weaving and manufacturing them.
England supplied them with the raw material, the
English doing no more than raise and shear the
sheep. At the end of the sixteenth century, an
unique thing in Europe, "almost everybody, even
the peasantry, could read and write; a great many
even acquired the principles of grammar." We
find, accordingly, belle-lettre academies, that is to
say associations for oratory and dramatic representations,
even in the small towns. This indicates the
degree of perfection to which they brought their
civilization. "They have," says Guiccardini, "a
special and happy talent for the ready invention of
all sorts of machines, ingenious and suitable for
facilitating, shortening and dispatching everything
they do, even in the matter of cooking." They,
indeed, with the Italians, are the first in Europe to
attain to prosperity, wealth, security, liberty, com
fort, and all other benefits which seem to us the

paraphernalia of modern times. In the thirteenth
century Bruges was equal to Venice; in the sixteenth
century Antwerp was the industrial and commercial
capital of the North. Guiccardini never
wearies in praising it, and he only saw it when it
was in full decline, reconquered by the Duke of
Parma after the terrible siege of 1585. In the seventeenth
century Holland, remaining free, occupies
for a century the place which England now holds in
the world of to-day. It is in vain for Flanders to
fall back into Spanish hands, to be ravaged by the
wars of Louis XIV., to be surrendered to Austria, to
serve as a battle-ground for the wars of the Revolution;
she never descends to the level of Spain or
Italy; the partial prosperity she maintains throughout
the miseries of repeated invasion and under a
bungling despotism shows the energy of her inspiring
good sense and the fecundity of her assiduous labor.

Of all the countries of Europe at the present day,
Belgium is the one which with an equal area supports
the most inhabitants; she feeds twice as many
as France; the most populous of our departments,

that of the North, is a portion which Louis XIV
detached from her. Towards Lille and Douai you
already see spread out in an indefinable circle, extending
up to the horizon, this great kitchen garden,
a deep and fertile soil diapered with pale grain
sheaves, poppy-fields, and the large-leaved beet, and
richly stimulated by a low, warm sky swimming with
vapor. Between Brussels and Malines begins the
broad prairie, here and there striped with rows of
poplars, intersected with water-courses and fences,
where cattle browse throughout the year, an inexhaustible
storehouse of hay, milk, cheese and meat.
In the environs of Ghent and Bruges, the land of
Waes, "the classic soil of agriculture," is nourished
by fertilizers gathered in all countries, and by barnyard
manure brought from Zealand. Holland, in like
manner, is simply a pasturage, a natural tillage,
which, instead of exhausting the soil, renews it, providing
its cultivators with the amplest crops, and
affording to the consumer the most strengthening
aliments. In Holland, at Buicksloot, there are millionaire
cow-herds, the Netherlands ever seeming
to the stranger to be a land of feasting and good
cheer. If you turn from agricultural to industrial
results, you will everywhere encounter the same art
of utilizing and making the best of things. Obstacles
with them are transformed into aids. The soil
was flat and soaked with water; they took advantage
of it to cover it with canals and railroads, no
place in Europe presenting so many channels of communication
and of transport. They were in want of
fuel; they dug down into the bowels of the earth,
the coal-pits of Belgium being as rich as those of
England. The rivers annoyed them with their inundations
and inland pools deprived them of a portion
of their territory; they drained the pools, diked the
streams, and profited by the rich alluvions and the
slow deposits of vegetable mould with which the
surplus or stagnant waters overspread their land.
Their canals freeze up; they take skates and travel
in winter five leagues an hour. The sea threatened
them; after forcing it back, they avail themselves of
it to traffic with all nations. The winds sweep unimpeded
across their flat country and over the turbulent
ocean; they make them swell the sails of their
vessels and move the wings of their windmills. In
Holland you will observe at every turn of the road
one of these enormous structures, a hundred feet
high, furnished with machinery and pumps, busy in
emptying the overflow of water, sawing ship-timber
and manufacturing oil. From the steamer, in front
of Amsterdam, you see, stretching off as far as the
eye can reach, an infinite spider's web, a light, indistinct
and complex fringe of masts and arms of windmills
encircling the horizon with their innumerable
fibres. The impression you carry away is that of a
country transformed from end to end by the hand
and the art of man; and sometimes entirely created
until it becomes a comfortable and productive territory.

Let us go further; let us take a near view of man,
and appreciate the most important object belonging
to him—his habitation. There is no stone in this
country—nothing but an adhesive clay, suitable for
men and horses to mire their feet in. It occurred to
the people, however, to bake it, and in this way
brick and tile, which are the best of defences against
humidity, came into their hands. You see well contrived
buildings of an agreeable aspect, with red.

brown and rosy walls covered with a bright stucco
white façades varnished and sometimes decorated
with sculptured flowers, animals, medallions and
small columns. In the older cities the house often
stands with its gable to the street, festooned with
arcades, branchings and leafage, which terminate in
a bird, an apple or a bust; it is not, as in our
cities, a continuation of its neighbor—an abstract
compartment of vast barracks, but an object apart,
endowed with a special and private character, at
once interesting and picturesque. Nothing could
be better kept and cleaner. At Doar the poorest
have their domicile whitewashed once a year, outside
and in, it being necessary to engage the whitewasher
six months in advance. At Antwerp, in
Ghent and in Bruges, and especially in the small
towns, most of the façades seem to be newly painted
or freshened the day before. Washing and sweeping
are going on on all sides. When you reach
Holland there is extra care even to exaggeration.
You see domestics at five o'clock in the
morning scrubbing the sidewalks. In the environs
of Amsterdam the villages seem to be scenery
from the Opera-Comique, so tidy and so well-dusted
are they. There are stables for cows, the
flooring of which is cabinet work; you can enter
them only in slippers or sabots placed at the
entrance for that purpose; a spot of dirt would be
scandalous, and still more so any odor; the cows'
tails are held up by a small cord to prevent them
from soiling themselves. Vehicles are prohibited
from entering the village; the sidewalks of brick
and blue porcelain are more irreproachable than a
vestibule with us. In autumn children come and
gather up the fallen leaves in the streets to deposit
them in a pit. Everywhere, in the small rooms,
seemingly the state-rooms of a ship, the order and
arrangement are the same as on a ship. In Broeck,
it is said, there is in each house a particular room
which is entered only once a week in order to clean
and rub the furniture, and then carefully closed; in
a country so damp, dirt immediately becomes a
deleterious mould; man, compelled to scrupulous
cleanliness, contracts the habit, experiences its necessity,
and at last falls under its tyranny. You would
be pleased, however, to see the humblest shop of
the smallest street in Amsterdam, with its brown
casks, its immaculate counter, its scoured benches,
everything in its place, the economy of small quarters,
the intelligent and handy arrangement of all
utensils. Guiccardini already remarks "that their
houses and clothes are clean, handsome and well-arranged,
that they have much furniture, utensils
and domestic objects, kept in better order and with
a finer lustre than in any other country." It is
necessary to see the comfort of their apartments,
especially the houses of the middle classes—carpets,
waxed cloths for the floors, warm and heat-saving
chimneys of iron and porcelain, triple curtains at the
windows, clear, dark and highly polished windowpanes,
vases of flowers and green plants, innumerable
knick-knacks indicative of sedentary habits and
which render home life pleasant, mirrors placed so as
to reflect the people passing in the street together
with its changing aspects;—every detail shows some
inconvenience remedied, some want satisfied, some
pleasant contrivance, some thoughtful provision, in
short, the universal reign of a sagacious activity and
the extreme of comfort.

Man, in effect, is that which his work indicates.
Thus endowed and thus situated, he enjoys and knows
how to enjoy. The bountiful soil furnishes him with
abundant nutriment—meat, fish, vegetables, beer
and brandy; he eats and drinks copiously, while in
Belgium the Germanic appetite, as it grows in fastidiousness
without decreasing, becomes gastronomic
sensuality. Cooking there is scientific and perfect,
even to the hotel tables; I believe that they are the
best in Europe. There is a certain hotel in Mons to
which visitors from the small neighboring towns
come to dine every Saturday, especially to enjoy a
delicate meal. They lack wine, but they import it
from Germany and France, and boast the possession
of the best vintages: we do not, in their opinion,
treat our wines with the respect they deserve; it is
necessary to be a Belgian to care for and relish them
in a proper manner. There is no important hotel
which is not supplied with a varied and select stock;
its reputation and custom are made by the selection;
in the railroad cars the conversation tends spontaneously
to the merits of two rival cellars. A prudent
merchant will have twelve thousand bottles in his

sanded cellars, duly classified; it constitutes his
library. The burgomaster of a petty Dutch town
possesses a cask of genuine Johannisberger, made in
the best year, and this cask adds to the consideration
of its owner. A man there, who gives a dinner party,
knows how to make his wines succeed each other in
such a way as not to impair the taste and have as
many as possible consumed. As to the pleasures of
the ear and the eye, they understand them as well
as those of the palate and the stomach. They instinctively
love the music which we only appreciate
through culture. In the sixteenth century they are
first in this art; Guiccardini states that their vocalists
and instrumentalists are esteemed in all the courts
of Christendom; abroad, their professors found
schools, and their compositions are standards of authority.
Even nowadays the great musical endowment
of being able to sing in parts is encountered
even amongst the populace; the coal-miners organize
choral societies; I have heard laborers in Brussels
and Antwerp, and the ship caulkers and sailors of
Amsterdam sing in chorus, and in true time, while at
work and in the street on returning home at night.
There is no large Belgian town in which a chime of
bells, perched in the belfry, does not every quarter
of an hour amuse the artizan in his shop and the
trader at his counter with the peculiar harmonies of
their sonorous metal. In like manner their city halls,
their house-fronts, even their old drinking-cups are,
through their complex ornamentation, their intricate
lines and their original and often fantastic design,
agreeable to the eye. Add to this the free or well-composed
tones of the bricks forming the walls, and
the richness of the brown and red tints relieving on
white displayed on the roofs and façades—assuredly
the towns of the Netherlands are as picturesque of
their kind as any in Italy. In all times they have
delighted in kermesses and fêtes de Gayant, in corporation
processions, and in the parade and glitter of
costumes and materials. I shall show you the completely
Italian pomp of the civic entries and other
ceremonies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
They are epicureans as well as gourmands in the
matter of comfortable living; regularly, calmly,
without heat ór enthusiasm they glean up every
pleasing harmony of savor, sound, color and form
that arises out of their prosperity and abundance,
like tulips on a heap of compost. All this produces
good sense somewhat limited, and happiness somewhat
gross. A Frenchman would soon yawn over
it, but he would make a mistake, for this civilization,
which seems to him unctuous and vulgar, possesses
one sterling merit—it is healthy; the men
living here have a gift we lack the most—wisdom
and a compensation we are equally undeserving
contentment.

III.

Such, in this country, is the human plant; we
have now to examine its art, which is the flower.
Among all the branches of the Germanic trunk,
this plant alone has produced a complete flower
the art which developes so happily and so naturally
in the Netherlands proves aborative with the other
Germanic nations for the reason that this glorious
privilege emanates from the national character as
we have just set it forth.

To comprehend and love painting requires an eye
sensitive to forms and to colors, and, without education
or apprenticeship, one which takes pleasure
in the juxtaposition of tones and is delicate in the
matter of optical sensations; the man who would be
a painter must be capable of losing himself in viewing
the rich consonance of red and green, in watching
the diminution of light as it is transformed into
darkness, and in detecting the subtle hues of silks
and satins, which according to their breaks, recesses
and depths of fold, assume opaline tints, vague

luminous gleams and imperceptible shades of blue.
The eye is epicurean like the palate, and painting is
an exquisite feast served up to it. For this reason
it is that Germany and England have had no
great pictorial art. In Germany the too great domination
of abstract ideas has left no room for the
sensuousness of the eye. Its early school, that of
Cologne, instead of representing bodies, represented
mystic, pious and tender souls. In vain did the
great German artist of the sixteenth century, Albert
Dürer, familiarize himself with the Italian masters;
he retains his graceless forms, his angular folds,
his ugly nudities, his dull color, his barbarous,
gloomy and saddened faces; the wild imagination,
the deep religious sentiment and the vague philosophic
divinations which shine through his works,
show an intellect to which form is inadequate.
Examine the infant Christ in the Louvre, by Wohlgemuth,
his master, and an Eve, by Lucas Cranach,
a contemporary; you will realize that the men who
executed such groups and such bodies were born
for theology and not for painting. Again at the
present day they esteem and enjoy the inward
rather than the outward; Cornelius and the Munich
masters regard the idea as principal, and exe
cution as secondary; the master conceives and the
pupil paints; the aim of their wholly philosophic
and symbolic work is to excite the spectator to
reflect on some great moral or social verity. In
like manner Overbeck aims at edification and
preaches sentimental asceticism; and even Knauss,
again, who is such an able psychologist that his
pictures form idyls and comedies. As to the English,
up to the eighteenth century, they do but
little more than import pictures and artists from
abroad. Temperament in this country is too militant,
the will too stern, the mind too utilitarian,
man too case-hardened, too absorbed and too overtasked
to linger over and revel in the beautiful
and delicate gradations of contours and colors.
Their national painter, Hogarth, simply produced
moral caricatures. Others, like Wilkie, use their
pencil to render sentiments and characteristic traits
visible; even in landscape they depict the spiritual
element, corporeal objects serving them simply as
an index or suggestion; it is even apparent in their
two great landscapists, Constable and Turner, and
in their two great portrait painters, Gainsborough
and Reynolds. Their coloring of to-day, finally, is
shockingly crude, and their drawing literal minutiæ.
The Flemings and Hollanders alone have
prized forms and colors for their own sake. This
sentiment still persists. Proof of this is to be
found in the picturesqueness of their towns and in
the agreeable aspect of their homes; last year at
the Universal Exposition (1867) you could see for
yourselves that genuine art—painting exempt from
philosophic motive and literary deviation, capable of
manipulating form without servility and color without
barbarisms—scarcely exists anywhere but with
them and with ourselves.

Thanks to this national endowment, in the fifteenth,
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when
circumstances became favorable, they were able to
maintain in the face of Italy a great school of painting.
But as they were Germans their school fol
lowed the German track. What distinguishes their
race from classic races is, as you have seen, a pref
rence for substance over form, of actual verity to

bautiful externals, of the real, complex, irregular
and natural object to the well-ordered, pruned,
efined and transformed object. This instinct, of
which you remark the aseendancy in their religion
and literature, has likewise controlled their art and
notably their painting. "The prime significance of
the Flemish school," says M. Wäagen, "proceeds
from its having, through its freedom from foreign
influences, revealed to us the contrast of sentiments
of the Greek and the German races, the two columnar
capitals of ancient and modern civilization. Whilst
the Greeks sought to idealize not merely conceptions
taken from the ideal world, but even portraits,
by simplifying the forms and accentuating the most
important features, the early Flemings on the contrary
translated into portraiture the ideal personifications
of the Virgin, the apostles, the prophets and
the martyrs, ever striving to represent in an exact
manner the petty details of nature. Whilst the
Greeks expressed the details of landscape, rivers,
fountains and trees under abstract forms, the Flemings
strove to render them precisely as they saw
them. In relation to the ideal and the tendency of
the Greeks to personify everything, the Flemings
created a realistic school, a school of landscape. In
this respect the Germans first and the English afterwards
have pursued the same course."[6] Run over
a collection of engravings containing the works of
German origin from Albert Dürer, Martin Schongauer,
the Van Eycks, Holbein and Lucas of Leyden,
down to Rubens, Rembrandt, Paul Potter, Jan Steen
and Hogarth; if your imagination is filled with noble
Italian or with elegant French forms, your eyes will
be offended; you will experience some difficulty in
taking the proper standpoint; you will often fancy
that the artist purposely studied the ugly. The
truth is he is not repelled by the trivialities and
deformities of life. He does not naturally enter into
the symmetrical composition, the tranquil and easy
action, the beautiful proportions, the healthiness and
agility of the naked figure. When the Flemings in
the sixteenth century resorted to the Italian school,
they only succeeded in spoiling their original style.
During seventy years of patient imitation they
brought forth nothing but hybrid abortions. This
long period of failure, placed between two long periods
of superiority, shows the limits and the power
of their original aptitudes. They were incapable of
simplifying nature; they aimed to reproduce her entire.
They did not concentrate her in the nude body;
they assigned equal importance to all her appearances—landscapes,
edifices, animals, costumes and
accessories.[7] They are not qualified to comprehend
and prize the ideal body; they are constituted to
aint and enforce the actual body.

Allowing this, we easily discern in what particulars
they differ from other masters of the same race.
I have described to you their national genius, so
sensible and so well-balanced, exempt from lofty
aspiration, limited to the present and disposed to
enjoyment. Such artists will not create the melancholy

beings in painful abstraction, weighed down
with the burden of life and obstinately resigned, of
Albert Dürer. They will not devote themselves
like the mystic painters of Cologne, or the moralist
painters of England, to the representation of spiritual
traits and characters; little will they concern
themselves with the disproportion between mind
and matter. In a fertile and luxurious country,
amidst jovial customs, in the presence of placid,
honest and blooming faces they are to obtain the
models suited to their genius. They almost always
paint man in a well-to-do condition and content
with his lot. When they exalt him it is without
raising him above his terrestrial condition. The
Flemish school of the seventeenth century does no
more than expand his appetite, his lusts, his energy
and his gayety. Generally they leave him as he
is. The Dutch school confines itself to reproducing
the repose of the bourgeois interior, the comforts
of shop and farm, out-door sports and tavern
enjoyments, all the petty satisfactions of an orderly
and tranquil existence. Nothing could be better
adapted to painting; too much thought and emo
tion is detrimental to it. Subjects of this order con
ceived in such a spirit, furnish works of a rare harmony;
the Greeks alone, and a few great Italian
artists have set us the example; the painters of the
Netherlands on a lower stage do as they did, they
represent man to us complete of his type, adapted
to things around him and therefore happy without
effort.

One point remains to be considered. One of the
leading merits of this art is the excellence and delicacy
of its coloring. This is owing to the education
of the eye, which in Flanders and in Holland is peculiar.
The country is a saturated delta like that of
the Po, while Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Amsterdam,
Rotterdam, Hague and Utrecht, through their rivers,
canals, sea and atmosphere resemble Venice. Here,
as at Venice, nature has made man colorist. Observe
the different aspect of things according as you
are in a dry country like Provençe and the neighborhood
of Florence, or on a wet plain like the Netherlands.
In the dry country the line predominates,
and at once attracts attention; the mountains cut
sharp against the sky, with their stories of architecture

of a grand and noble style, all objects projecting
upward in the limpid air in varied prominence.
Here the low horizon is without interest, and the
contours of objects are softened, blended and blurred
out by the imperceptible vapor with which the at
mosphere is always filled; that which predominates
is the spot. A cow pasturing, a roof in the centre
of a field, a man leaning on a parapet appear as one
tone among other tones. The object emerges; it
does not start suddenly out of its surroundings as if
punched out; you are struck by its modelling, that
is to say by the different degrees of advancing luminousness
and the diverse gradations of melting color
which transforms its general tint into a relief and
gives to the eye a sensation of thickness.[8] You
would have to pass many days in this country in
order to appreciate this subordination of the line to
the spot. A bluish or gray vapor is constantly rising
from the canals, the rivers, the sea, and from the
saturated soil; a universal haze forms a soft gauze
over objects, even in the finest weather. Flying
scuds, like thin, half-torn white drapery, float over
the meadows night and morning. I have repeatedly
stood on the quays of the Scheldt contemplating the
broad, pallid and slightly rippled water, on which
float the dark hulks. The river shines, and on its
flat surface the hazy light reflects here and there
unsteady scintillations. Clouds ascend constantly
around the horizon, their pale, leaden hue and their
motionless files suggesting an army of spectres, the
spectres of the humid soil, like so many phantoms,
always revived and bringing back the eternal show
ers. Towards the setting sun they become ruddy,
while their corpulent masses, trellissed all over with
gold, remind one of the damascene copes, the brocaded
simarres and the embroidered silks with which
Jordaens and Rubens envelope their bleeding martyrs
and their sorrowful madonnas. Quite low down
on the sky the sun seems an enormous blaze subsiding
into smoke. On reaching Amsterdam or Ostend the
impression again deepens; both sea and sky have no
form; the fog and interposed showers leave nothing
to remember but colors. The water changes in hue
every half hour—now of a pale wine tinge, now of a
chalky whiteness, now yellow like softened mortar,
now black like liquid soot, and sometimes of a sombre
purple striped with dashes of green. After a
few days' experience you find that, in such a nature
only gradations, contrasts and harmonies, in short,
the value of tones is of any importance.

These tones, moreover, are full and rich. A dry
country is of a dull aspect; southern France and
the whole of the mountainous portion of Italy leave
on the eye no sensation but that of a gray and
yellow checker-board. Besides this, all the tones
of the soil and of buildings are lost in the preponderating
splendor of the sky and the all-pervading
luminousness of the atmosphere. In truth, a southern
city, and a Provençe or Tuscan landscape are
simply drawings; with white paper, charcoal, and
the feeble tints of colored crayons you can express

the whole thing. On the contrary, in a country of
humidity like the Netherlands, the earth is green, a
quantity of lively spots diversifying the uniformity
of the wide prairie—sometimes it is the dark or
brown color of the wet mould, again the deep red
of tiles and bricks, again the white or rosy coating
of the façades, again the ruddy spots of reclining
cattle, again the flickering sheen of canals and
streams. And these spots are not subdued by the
too powerful light of the sky. Contrary to the dry
country it is not the sky but the earth which has
a preponderating influence. In Holland especially,
for several months, "there is no transparency of atmosphere;
a kind of opaque vail hovering between
sky and ground intercepts all radiance. In winter
darkness seems to come from above."[9] The rich
colors, accordingly, with which all terrestrial objects
are clothed, remain unrivalled. To their strength
must be added their gradation and their mobility.
In Italy a tone remains fixed; the steady light of the
sky maintains it so for many hours, and as it was
yesterday so it will be to-morrow. Return to it and
you will find it the same as you placed it on your
palette a month before. In Flanders it varies incessantly
along with the variations of light and the ambient
vapor. Here again, I should like to take you
into the country and let you appreciate yourselves
the original beauty of the towns and the landscape.
The red of the bricks, the lustrous white of the
façades are agreeable to the eye because they are
softened by the grayish atmosphere; against the neutral
background of the sky extend rows of peaked,
shell-like roofs, all of deep brown, here and there a
gothic gutter, or some gigantic belfry covered with
elaborate finials and heraldic animals. Frequently
the crenelated cornice of chimney and of ridge is
reflected as it glows in a canal or in an arm of the
sea. Outside the cities, as within them, all is
material for pictures—you have nothing to do but
to copy. The universal green of the country is neither
crude nor monotonous; it is tinted by diverse
degrees of maturity of foliage and herbage and by
the various densities and perpetual changes of haziness
and clouds. It has for complement or for relief
the blackness of clouds which suddenly melt away
in transient showers, the grayness of scattered and
ragged banks of fog, the vague, bluish network
enveloping distances, the sparkling of flickering
light arrested in flying scuds—sometimes the dazzling
satin of a motionless cloud, or some abrupt
opening through which the azure penetrates. A sky
which is thus filled up, thus mobile, thus adapted
to harmonizing, varying and emphasizing the tones
of the earth, affords a colorist school. Here, as at
Venice, art has followed nature, the hand having
been forcibly guided by optical sensations.

If, however, the analogies of climate have endowed
the Venetian eye and that of the inhabitant of the
Netherlands with an analogous education, differences
of climate have given them a different education.
The Netherlands are situated three hundred leagues
to the north of Venice. The atmosphere there is
colder, rains more frequent, and the sun the oftenest
concealed. Hence a natural gamut of colors, which
has provoked a corresponding artificial gamut. A
full light being rare, objects do not reflect the imprint
of the sun. You do not meet with those golden
tones, that magnificent ruddiness so frequent in the

monuments of Italy. The water is not of that deep
sea-green resembling silkiness, as in the lagoons of
Venice. The fields and trees have not that solid and
vigorous tone visible in the verdure of Verona and
Padua. The herbage is pale and softened, the water
dull or dark, the flesh white, now pink like a flower
grown in the shade, now rubicund after exposure to
the weather and rendered coarse by food, generally
yellow and fiabby, sometimes, in Holland, pallid and
inanimate and of a waxy tone. The tissues of the
living organism, whether man, animal or plant, imbibe
too much fluid, and lack the ripening power of
sunshine. This is why, if we compare the two schools
of painting, we find a difference in the general tone.
Examine, in any gallery, the Venetian school, and
afterwards the Flemish school; pass from Canaletto
and Guardi to Ruysdael, Paul Potter, Hobbema,
Adrian Van der Velde, Teniers and Ostade; from
Titian and Veronese to Rubens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt,
and consult your optical impressions. On
going from the former to the latter, color loses a portion
of its warmth. Shadowed, ruddy and autumnal
tones disappear; you see the fiery furnace enveloping
the Assumptions going out; flesh becomes of the
whiteness of milk or snow, the deep purple of draperies
grows lighter, and paler silks have cooler reflections.
The intense brown which faintly impregnates
foliage, the powerful reds gilding sunlit distances,
the tones of veined marble, amethyst and
sapphire with which water is resplendent, all decline,
in order to give place to the deadened whiteness of
expanded vapor, the bluish glow of misty twilight,
the slaty reflections of the ocean, the turbid hue of
rivers, the pallid verdure of the fields, and the grayish
atmosphere of household interiors.

Between these new tones there is established a
new harmony. Sometimes a full light falls upon
objects, and to which they are not accustomed; the
green campagna, the red roofs, the polished façades
and the satiny flesh flushed with blood show extraordinary
brilliancy. They are adapted to the subdued
light of a northerly and humid country; they
have not been transformed as at Venice by the slow
scorching of the sun; beneath this irruption of luminousness
their tones become too vivid, almost crude;
they vibrate together like the blasts of trumpets,

leaving on the mind and senses an impression of
energetic and boisterous joyousness. Such is the
coloring of the Flemish painters who love the full
light of day. Rubens furnishes us with the best
example; if his restored canvasses in the Louvre
represent his work to us as it left his hands, it is certain
that he did not discipline his eyes; in any event
his color lacks the rich and mellow harmony of the
Venetian; the greatest extremes meet; the snowy
whiteness of flesh, the sanguine red of the draperies,
the dazzling lustre of silks have their full force and
are not united, tempered and enveloped, as at Venice,
in that amber tint which prevents contrasts from
being discordant and effects from being too startling.
Sometimes, on the contrary, the light is feeble or
nearly gone, which is commonly the case, and especially
in Holland. Objects issue painfully out of
shadow; they are almost lost in their surroundings;
at evening, in a cellar, beneath a lamp, in an apartment
into which a dying ray from a window glides,
they are effaced and seem to be only more intense
darks in a universal duskiness. The eye is led to
noticing these gradations of obscurity, this vague
train of light mingling with shadow, the remains of
brightness clinging to the lingering lustre of the furniture,
a reflection from a greenish window-sash, a
piece of embroidery, a pearl, some golden spark
astray upon a necklace. Having become sensitive to
these delicacies, the painter, instead of uniting the
extremes of the gamut, simply selects the beginning
of it; his entire picture, except in one point, is in
shadow; the concert he offers us is a continuous sordine
in which now and then occurs some brilliant
passage. He thus discloses unknown harmonies,
those of chiaroscuro, those of modeling, those of
emotion, all of them infinite and penetrating; using
a daub of dirty yellow, or of wine lees, or a mixed
gray, or vague darks, here and there accentuated by
a vivid spot, he succeeds in stirring the very depths
of our nature. Herein consists the last great picturesque
creation; it is through this that painting
nowadays most powerfully addresses the modern
mind, and this is the coloring with which the light
of Holland supplied the genius of Rembrandt.

You have seen the seed, the plant and the flower.
A race with a genius totally opposed to that of the

Latin peoples makes for itself, after and alongside of
them its place in the world. Among the numerous
nations of this race, one there is in which a special
territory and climate develope a particular character
predisposing it to art and to a certain phase of art.
Painting is born with it, lasts, becomes complete,
and the physical milieu surrounding it, like the
national genius which founds it, give to and impose
upon it its subjects, its types and its coloring.
Such are the remote preparatives, the profound
causes, the general conditions which have nourished
this sap, directed this vegetation, and produced the
final efflorescence. It only remains to us now to
expose historical events, the diversity and succession
of which have brought about the successive and
diverse phases of the great flowering epoch.