University of Virginia Library

II. PART II.
HISTORIC EPOCHS.

I.

We find four distinct periods in the pictorial art of
the Netherlands, and, through a remarkable coincidence,
each corresponds to a distinct historic period.
Here, as everywhere, art translates life; the talent
and taste of the painter change at the same time and
in the same sense as the habits and sentiments of the
public. Just as each profound geological revolution
brings with it its own fauna and flora, so does each
great transformation of society and intellect bring
with it its ideal figures. In this respect our galleries
of art resemble museums, the imaginary creations
they contain being, like living organisms, both the
fruit and the index of their surroundings.

The first period of art lasts about a century and a
half, and extends from Hubert Van Eyck to Quintin
Matsys (1400-1530). It issues from a renaissance,
that is to say, from a great development of prosperity,
wealth and intellect. Here, as in Italy, the
cities at an early period are flourishing, and almost
free. I have already stated to you that in the thirteenth

century serfdom was abolished in Flanders,
and that the guilds to manufacture salt "for the purpose
of bringing under cultivation marshy grounds,"
ascend to the Roman epoch. From the seventh and
ninth centuries, Bruges, Antwerp and Ghent are
"ports," or privileged markets; they carry on commerce
on a large scale; they fit out cruisers for the
whale fishery; they serve as the entrepôts of the
North and the South. Prosperous people, well supplied
with arms and provisions, accustomed through
association and activity to foresight and enterprise,
are better qualified to protect themselves than miserable
serfs scattered about in defenceless villages.
Their great populous cities with narrow streets, and
a saturated soil intersected with deep canals, are not
a suitable ground for the cavalry of barons.[10] Hence
it is that the feudal net, so close and so tightly
drawn over all Europe, had, in Flanders, to enlarge
its meshes. In vain did the Count appeal for aid to
his suzerain, the French king, and urge his Burgun
dian chivalry against the cities; overcome at Monsen-Puelle,
at Cassel, at Rosebecque, at Othée, at
Gavre, at Brusthem, at Liege, they always recover
themselves, and from revolt to revolt preserve the
best portion of their liberties, even under the princes
of the house of Austria. The fourteenth century
is the heroic and tragic epoch of Flanders. She possesses
brewers like Arteveldt, who are tribunes, dictators
and captains, and who end life on the field of
battle or are assassinated; civil war is mixed up with
foreign war; people fight from city to city, trade
against trade, and man to man; there are fourteen
hundred murders in Ghent in one year; the stores
of energy are so great that she survives all ills and
sustains all efforts. Men seek death twenty thousand
at a time, and fall in heaps before lances without
giving an inch. "Banish all hope of returning without
honor," said the citizens of Ghent to the five
thousand volunteers under Philip Van Arteveldt, for
"so soon that we hear that you are dead or discomfited
we shall fire the city and destroy ourselves with
our own hands."[11] In 1384, in the country of the
Four Trades, prisoners refused their lives, declaring
that after death their bones would rise up against
the French. Fifty years later, around rebellious
Ghent, the peasantry "chose death rather than ask
quarter, declaring that they would perish as martyrs
in a fair fight." In these swarming hives an abun
dance of food and habits of personal activity maintain
courage, turbulence, audacity and even insolence,
all excesses of brutal and boundless energy;
these weavers were men, and when we encounter
man we may expect soon to encounter the arts.

An interval of prosperity at this time was sufficient;
under this ray of sunshine the flowering thus
maturing is perfected. At the end of the fourteenth
century Flanders, with Italy, is the most industrious,
the wealthiest and most flourishing country in
Europe.[12] In 1370 there are thirty-two hundred
woollen factories at Malines and on its territory.
One of its merchants carries on an immense trade
with Damascus and Alexandria. Another, of Valenciennes,
being at Paris during the fair, monopolizes
all provisions exposed for sale with a view to display
his opulence. Ghent in 1389 has one hundred
and eighty-nine thousand men bearing arms; the

drapers alone furnish eighteen thousand men in a
revolt; the weavers form twenty-seven sections, and
at the sound of the great bell, fifty-two corporations
under their own banners rush to the market-place.
In 1380 the goldsmiths of Bruges are numerous
enough to form in war time an entire division of the
army. A little later Œnius Sylvius states that she is
one of the three most beautiful cities in the world;
a canal four leagues and a half in length joins her to
the sea; a hundred vessels a day pass through it.
Bruges was then what London is at the present
time. Political matters at this period attain to a
sort of equilibrium. The Duke of Burgundy finds
himself by inheritance, in 1384, sovereign of Flanders.
The grandeur of his possessions and the multiplication
of civil wars during the minority and
madness of Charles VI. divorce him from France;
he is no longer, like the ancient counts, a dependant
of the king, domiciliated in Paris and soliciting
aid to reduce and tax his Flemish merchants. His
power and the misfortunes of France render him
independent. Although a prince he belongs, in
Paris, to the popular party, and the butchers shout
for him. Although a Frenchman his politics are
Flemish, and when not in alliance with the English
he negotiates with them. In the matter of money
he certainly quarrels with his Flemings more than
once, and is obliged to kill a good many of them.
But to one who is familiar with the disturbances and
violence of the middle ages, the order and harmony
which is then established seem sufficient; at all
events they are greater than ever before. Henceforth,
as at Florence about the year 1400, authority
becomes recognized and society organized; henceforth,
as in Italy about the year 1400, man abandons
the ascetic and ecclesiastic regime that he may
interest himself in nature and enjoy life. The ancient
compression is relaxed; he begins to prize strength,
health, beauty and pleasure. On all sides we see the
mediæval spirit undergoing change and disintegration.
An elegant and refined architecture converts
stone into lace, festooning churches with pinnacles,
trefoils and intricate mullions, and in such a fashion
that the honey-combed, gilded and flowering edifice
becomes a vast and romantic casket, a product of
fancy rather than of faith, less calculated to excite
piety than wonder. In like manner chivalry becomes
a mere parade. The nobles frequent the Valois
court, devote themselves to pleasure, to "pretty conceits"
and especially to the "conceits of love." In
Chaucer and in Froissart we are spectators of their
pomp—their tourneys, their processions and their
banquets, of the new reign of frivolity and fashion,
of the creations of an infatuated and licentious imagination,
of their extravagant and overcharged costumes—robes
twelve ells long, tight hose and Bohemian
jackets with sleeves falling to the ground, shoes
terminating in the claws, horns and tail of the scorpion,
suits embroidered with letters, animals, and
with musical notes enabling one to read and sing
a song on the owner's back, hoods adorned with
golden garlands and with animals, robes covered
with sapphires, rubies and jewelled swallows, each
holding in its beak a golden cup; one costume has
fourteen hundred of these cups, and we find nine hundred
and sixty pearls used in embroidering a song on
a coat. Women in magnificently ornamented veils,
the breast nude, the head crowned with huge cones
and crescents, and dressed in gaudy robes covered
with the figures of unicorns, lions and savages, place
themselves on seats representing small sculptured
and gilded cathedrals. The life of the court and
of princes seems a carnival. When Charles VI.
is knighted a hall is prepared in the abbey of St.
Denis, thirty-two toises (about two hundred feet)
long, hung in white and green, with a lofty pavilion
of tapestry: here, after three days of feasting and
jousting, a nocturnal masked ball ends in an orgie.
"Many a damsel forgot herself, many were the
husbands who suffered," and, in contrast to this,
showing the sentiments of the age, they celebrate
the funeral of Duguesclin at the end of it.
In the accounts and chronicles of the period we
follow the course of a broad, golden stream, flowing,
glistening, ostentatious and interminable, that is to
say, the domestic history of the king and queen and
the dukes of Orleans and Burgundy; there is nothing
but entries into cities, cavalcades, masks, dances,
voluptuous caprices, and the prodigality of the newly
enriched. The Burgundian and French chevaliers
who go to contend with Bagazet at Nicopolis equip
themselves as if for a party of pleasure; their banners
and the trappings of their horses are loaded
with gold and silver, their dishes are all of silver
plate and their tents are of green satin; exquisite
wines follow them in boats on the Danube, and their
camps are filled with courtesans. This excess of
animal spirits, which, in France, is mingled with
morbid curiosity and lugubrious fancies, breaks out
in Burgundy into a grand and jolly kermesse. Philip
the Good has three legitimate wives, twenty-four
mistresses, and sixteen bastards; he attends to all,
feasting, making merry and admitting the townswomen
to his court; seeming at the outset to be
one of Jordaens' characters. A Count of Clèves has
sixty-three bastards; the chroniclers in their narration
of ceremonies constantly and gravely mention
those of both sexes; the institution appears to be
official: seeing them swarming in this manner, we
are reminded of the buxom nurses of Rubens and
the Gangamelles of Rabelais. "It was," says a contemporary,
"a great pity, this sin of luxury which
prevailed far and wide, and especially amongst princes
and the wedded. . . IIe was the gentlest companion
who was able to deceive and possess at the
same time more than one woman . . . and even there
prevailed likewise the sin of luxury among the prelates
of the Church and among all Church people."[13]
Jacques de Croy, archbishop of Cambray, officiated
pontifically with his thirty-six bastards and bastards'
sons, and kept in reserve a sum of money for
those to come. At the third marriage of Philip the
Good the gala seems to be a Gamache's wedding
commanded by Gargantua; the streets of Bruges
were hung with tapestry; for eight days and eight
nights a stone lion spurted Rhine wine, while a stone
stag discharged Beaune Burgundy; at meal times
an unicorn poured forth rosewater or malvoisie. On
the entry of the Dauphin into the city, eight hundred
merchants of divers nations advanced to meet
him, all in garments of silk and velvet. At another
ceremonial the duke appears with a saddle and bridle
covered with precious stones; "nine pages covered
with plumes of jewels" followed behind him,
and "one of the said pages bore a salad which was
stated to be of the value of one hundred thousand
gold crowns." Another time the jewels worn by
the duke are estimated at a million. I wish to
describe one of these fêtes to you; like those of
Florence at the same epoch they bear witness to the
picturesque and decorative tastes which here as in
Florence produced pictorial art. One of them took
place at Lille under Philip the Good, the Festival of
the Pheasant, which may be compared with the triumph
of Lorenzo de Medici; you will observe here
in a hundred naive details the resemblances and the
differences of the two societies, and accordingly of
their culture, their taste and their art.

The Duke of Clèves had given a "superb banquet"
at Lille, at which were present "Monseigneur," (of
Burgundy) "together with the lords, ladies and damsels
of his house." At this banquet there was seen
on the table an "entremets," that is to say, a decoration
representing "a ship with lifted sails, in which
was a knight erect and armed . . . . and before it a
silver swan, bearing on his neck a gold collar, to
which hung a long chain, with which the said swan

appeared to draw the vessel, and on the back of the
said vessel stood a castle most skilfully contrived."
On this allegorical machine the Duke of Clèves,
Knight of the Swan, and "slave of the fair," caused
proclamation to be made that he might be encountered
in the lists, "armed in jousting harness and in
war saddle, and that he who should do the best would
gain a rich golden swan, chained with a chain of gold,
and on the end of this chain a magnificent ruby."

Ten days after this the Count d'Etampes gave the
second act of the fairy spectacle. Bear in mind that
the second as well as the first act with all the others
began with a feast. In this court life is gross, and
people never tire of bumpers. "When the `entremets'
were removed there issued from an apartment a
multitude of torches, and after these there appeared
an armed attendant clad in his coat of mail, and
after him two knights clad in long velvet robes
furred with sable, with no covering to the head, each
one bearing in his hand a gay hood of flowers;" after
them, on a palfrey caparisoned in blue silk, "a most
beautiful lady appeared, young, of the age of twelve
years, attired in a robe of violet silk, richly embroidered

and padded with gold," she is "the princess
of joy." Three squires clothed in vermilion silk lead
her up to the duke, singing a song as they introduce
her. She descends, and kneeling on the table
she places on his brow a crown of flowers. At this
moment the joust is proclaimed, the drums beat, a
pursuivant-at-arms appears in a mailed suit covered
with swans, and then enters the Duke of Clèves,
Knight of the Swan, richly armed, seated on a horse
caparisoned in white damask and fringed with gold;
he leads by a gold chain a large swan accompanied
by two mounted archers; behind him march children
on horseback, grooms, knights armed with lances,
all, like himself, in white damask fringed with gold.
Toison d'Or, the herald, presents them to the duchess.
The other knights then defile before her on
their horses, decked with gray and crimson cloth of
gold, cloth decked with small golden bells, crimson
velvet trimmed with sable, violet velvet fringed with
gold and silk, and black velvet studded with golden
tear-drops. Suppose that the great personages of
state of the present day should amuse themselves
with dressing up like actors at the opera and in
making passes like circus-riders! The oddity of
such a supposition enables you to appreciate the
liveliness of the picturesque instinct at that day, as
well as the taste for outward display and the feebleness
of both at present.

These, however, were only preludes. Eight days
after the tourney the Duke of Burgundy gave his festival,
which surpassed all the others. A vast hall,
hung with tapestry representing the career of Hercules,
had five doors, guarded by archers dressed in
robes of gray and black cloth. Around the sides
extended five platforms or galleries, occupied by foreign
spectators, noble personages and ladies, most
of these being disguised. In their midst arose "a
lofty buffet, loaded with vessels of gold and silver,
and crystal vases garnished with gold and precious
stones." And erect, in the centre of the hall, stood
a great pillar, bearing "a female image with hair
falling to her loins, her head covered with a very rich
hat, and her breast spouting hypocras so long as the
supper lasted." Three gigantic tables were arranged,
each one being adorned with several "entremets,"
so many huge machines reminding one, on a grand

scale, of the toy presents given nowadays to the
children of the wealthy. The men of this time, in-
eed, in curiosity and in flights of the imagination
are nothing but children; their strongest desire is
to amuse the eye; they sport with life as with a
magic lantern. The two principal "entremets" consist
of a monstrous pie, containing twenty-eight persons,
"alive," playing on musical instruments, also a
"church with windows and glass, provided with four
choristers and a ringing bell." Besides these there
were twenty more,—a great castle, its fosses filled
with orange-water, and on a tower the fairy Melusina;
a windmill with archers and cross-bowmen firing
at mark; a cask in a vineyard with two fluids,
one bitter and the other sweet; a vast desert with a
lion and serpent contending; a savage on a camel; a
clown prancing on a bear amidst rocks and glaciers;
a lake surrounded by cities and castles; a carrack at
anchor, bearing rigging, masts and seamen; a beautiful
fountain of earth and lead, with small trees of
glass in leaf and blooming, and a St. Andrew with
his cross; a fountain of rose-water, representing a
naked infant in the attitude of the "Mannekenpiss"
of Brussels. You would imagine yourself in a variety
store at New Year time. This pêle-mêle of motionless
decoration did not suffice; over and above
this an active parade was necessary; we see defiling
in turn a dozen of interludes, and in the intervals the
church and the pie keep busy the ears at the same
time as the eyes of the guests; the bell rings with
all its might; a shepherd plays on a bag-pipe; little
children sing a song; organs, German cornets, trumpets,
glees, flutes, a lute with voices, drums, hunting
horns and the yelping of hounds succeed each other.
Meanwhile a rearing horse appears, richly covered
with vermilion silk, mounted by two trumpeters
"scated backward and without saddle," led by sixteen
knights in long robes; then a hobgoblin, half
man, half griffon, who, mounted on a boar and carrying
a man, advances with a target and two darts;
then a large white mechanical stag, harnessed in
silk, with golden horns, and bearing on his back a
child in a short dress of crimson velvet, who sings
while the stag performs the bass. All these figures
make the circuit of the table, while the last invention
especially delights the company. A flying dragon
passes through the air, his fiery scales lighting up
the recesses of the gothic ceiling. A heron and
two falcons are loosed, and the vanquished bird is
presented to the Duke. Trumpets sound a blast
behind a curtain, which curtain being withdrawn
discloses Jason reading a letter from Medea, then
combating the bulls, then killing the serpent, then
ploughing the ground and sowing the monster's teeth
from which arises a crop of armed men. At this
point the interest of the fête deepens. It becomes
a romance of chivalry, a scene from Amadis, or one
of Don Quixote's dreams in action. A giant arrives
bearing a pike and turban and leading an elephant
caparisoned in silk with a castle on his back,
and in this castle a lady attired as a nun and representing
the Holy Church; she orders a halt, proclaims
her name, and summons the company to the
crusade. Thereupon Toison d'Or, with his officers
of arms, fetches a live pheasant wearing a golden
collar decked with precious stones; the Duke swears
upon the pheasant to succor Christendom against
the Turk, and all the knights do likewise, each in
a document of the style of Galaor, and this is the
pheasant's vow. The fête terminates with a mystic
and moral ball. At the sound of instruments and
by the light of torches a lady in white, bearing the
name of the "Grace of God" on her shoulder, approaches
the Duke, recites a stanza and, on retiring,
leaves with him the twelve virtues—Faith,
Charity, Justice, Reason, Temperance, Strength,
Truth, Liberality, Diligence, Hope and Valor—each
led by a knight in a crimson pourpoint, the sleeves
of which are of satin embroidered with foliage and
jewelry. They betake themselves to dancing with
their knights, crowning the Count of Charolais the
victor in the lists, and, upon the announcement of
a new tourney, the ball ends at three o'clock in the
morning. Really there is too much of it; the mind
and the senses both flag; these people in the
way of diversions are gluttons and not epicureans.
This uproar and this profusion of quaint conceits
shows us a rude society, a race of the North, an
incipient civilization still infantile and barbarous;
the grandeur and simplicity of Italian taste is
wanting in these contemporaries of the Medicis.
And yet the groundwork of their habits and imag
ination is the same; here, as with the chariots and
pomp of the Florentine carnival, the legends, history
and philosophy of the middle ages take shape;
moral abstractions assume visible form; the virtues
become actual women; they are accordingly
tempted to paint and sculpture them; all decoration,
in effect, consists of reliefs and paintings. The
symbolic age gives way to the picturesque age;
the intellect is no longer content with a scholastic
entity; it seeks to contemplate a living form, the
human mind finding it necessary for its completeness
to be translated to the eye by a work of art.

But this work of art bears no resemblance to that
of Italy for the reason that the culture and direction
of the intellect are different; this is evident in reading
the simple and dull verses recited by the "Holy
Church" and the "Virtues," an empty, senile poetry,
the worn-out babble of the trouvères, a rattle of
rhymed phrases in which the rythm is as flimsy as
the idea. The Netherlands never had a Dante, a
Petrarch, a Boccaccio, a Villani. The mind, less
precocious and further removed from Latin traditions,
remained a longer time subject to mediæval

discipline and inertia. There were no sceptical
Averrhöeists and physicians like those described by
Petrarch; there were no humanist restorers of
ancient literature, almost pagans, like those who surrounded
Lorenzo de Medici. Christian faith and
sentiment are much more active and tenacious here
than in Venice or in Florence. They continue to
subsist under the sensual pomp of the Burgundian
court. If there are epicureans in social matters there
are none in theory; the most gallant serve religion,
as the ladies, through a principle of honor. In 1396
seven hundred seigniors of Burgundy and France
enlist in the crusade; all, save twenty-seven die at
Nicopolis, and Boucicaut calls them "blessed and
happy martyrs." You have just witnessed the buffoonery
of Lille which ended in a solemn vow to war
with the infidels. Here and there scattered traits
show the persistency of the primitive devotion. In
1477, in the neighboring town of Nuremburg, Martin
Kœtzel, a pilgrim in Palestine, counts the steps
between Golgotha and the house of Pilate, that he
may, on his return, build seven stations and a calvary
between his own house and the cemetery of his
native town; losing his measure he repeats the journey,
and this time has the work executed by the
sculptor, Adam Kraft. In the Low Countries, as in
Germany, the middle class, a sedate and somewhat
dull people, restricted to their own narrow circle and
attached to ancient usages, preserve much better
than court-seigniors the faith and the fervor of the
middle ages. Their literature bears witness to this.
The moment it takes an original turn, that is to say
from the end of the thirteenth century, it furnishes
ample testimony to the practical, civic and bourgeois
spirit, with abundant evidences of pious fervor; on
the one hand appear moral maxims, pictures of domestic
life, and historic and political poems relating
to recent and true occurences; on the other, lyric
laudation of the Virgin, and mystic and tender poetic
effusions.[14] In fine, the national genius, which is
Germanic, inclines much more to faith than to incredulity.
Through the Lollards and the mystics of
the middle ages, also through the iconoclasts and
the innumerable martyrs of the sixteenth century, it
turns in the direction of Protestant ideas. Left to
itself it would have developed not, as in Italy, into
a pagan renaissance, but, as in Germany, into a
recrudescence of Christianity. The art, moreover,
which, of all the others, best reveals the cravings
of the popular imagination, architecture, remains
gothic and Christian up to the end of the sixteenth
century; Italian and classic importations do not
affect it; the style gets to be complicated and effeminate,
but the art does not change. It prevails not
only in the churches but in laic edifices; the town-halls
of Bruges, Louvain, Brussels, Liege and Audenarde
show to what extent it was cherished not
only by the priesthood but by the nation; the
people remained faithful to it to the end: the town-hall
of Audenarde was begun seven years after the
death of Raphael. In 1536, in the hands of a Flemish
woman, Margaret of Austria, the church of
Brou, the latest and prettiest flower of gothic art,
bloomed out in its perfection. Sum up all these
indications and consider, in the protraiture of the
day, the personages themselves,[15] the donors, abbés,
burgomasters, townspeople and matrons, so grave
and so simple in their Sunday clothes and spotless
linen, with their rigid air and their expression of
deep and settled faith, and you will recognize that
here the sixteenth century renaissance took place
within religious limits, that man in making the present
life more attractive never lost sight of that to
come, and that his picturesque invention is the manifestation
of a vivacious Christianity instead of expressing,
as in Italy, a restored paganism.

A Flemish renaissance underneath Christian ideas,
such, in effect, is the two-fold nature of art under
Hubert and John Van Eyck, Roger Van der Weyde,
Hemling and Quintin Matsys; and from these two
characteristics proceed all the others. On the one
hand, artists take interest in actual life; their figures
are no longer symbols like the illuminations of
ancient missals, nor purified spirits like the Madonnas
of the school of Cologne, but living beings and
bodies. They attend to anatomy, the perspective is
exact, the minutest details are rendered of stuffs, of
architecture, of accessories and of landscape; the
relief is strong, and the entire scene stamps itself on

the eye and on the mind with extraordinary force
and sense of stability; the greatest masters of coming
times are not to surpass them in all this, nor
even go so far. Nature evidently is now discovered
by them. The scales fall from their eyes; they have
just mastered, almost in a flash, the proportions, the
structure and the coloring of visible realities; and
moreover, they delight in them. Consider the superb
copes wrought in gold and decked with diamonds,
the embroidered silks, the flowered and dazzling
diadems with which they ornament their saints and
divine personages,[16] all of which represents the pomp
of the Burgundian court. Look at the calm and
transparent water, the bright meadows, the red and
white flowers, the blooming trees, the sunny distances
of their admirable landscapes.[17] Observe their
coloring—the strongest and richest ever seen, the
pure and full tones side by side as in a Persian carpet,
and united solely through their harmony, the
superb breaks in the folds of purple mantles, the
azure recesses of long falling robes, the green draperies
like a summer field permeated with sunshine,
the display of gold skirts trimmed with black, the
strong light which warms and enlivens the whole
scene; you have a concert in which each instrument
sounds its proper note, and the more true because
the more sonorous. They see the world on the
bright side and make a holiday of it, a genuine fête,
similar to those of this day, glowing under a more
bounteous sunlight and not a heavenly Jerusalem
suffused with supernatural radiance such as Fra
Angelico painted. They are Flemings, and they
stick to the earth. They copy the real with scrupulous
accuracy, and all that is real—the ornaments of
armor, the polished glass of a window, the scrolls of
a carpet, the hairs of fur,[18] the undraped body of an
Adam and an Eve, a canon's massive, wrinkled and
obese features, a burgomaster's or soldier's broad
shoulders, projecting chin and prominent nose, the
spindling shanks of a hangman, the over large head
and diminutive limbs of a child, the costumes and
furniture of the age; their entire work being a glorification
of this present life. But, on the other hand,
it is a glorification of Christian belief. Not only are
their subjects almost all of a religious order, but
again they are imbued with a religious sentiment
which, in the following age, is not to be found in the
same scenes. Their best pictures represent no actual
event in sacred history but a verity of faith, a summary
of doctrine. Hubert Van Eyck regards painting
in the same light as Simone Memmi, or Taddeo
Gaddi, that is to say, as an exposition of higher theology;
his figures and his accessories may be realistic,
but they are likewise symbolic. The cathedral
in which Roger Van der Weyde portrays the seven
sacraments is at once a material church and a spiritual
church; Christ appears bleeding on his cross,
while at the same time the priest is performing mass
at the altar. The chamber or portico in which John
Van Eyck and Memling place their kneeling saints
is an illusion in its detail and finish, but the Virgin
on her throne and the angels who crown her show
the believer that he is in a superior realm. A hierarchical
symmetry groups personages and stiffens
attitudes. With Hubert Van Eyck the eye is fixed
and the face impassible; it is the eternal immobility
of divine life; in heaven all is fulfilled and time is
no more. In other instances, as with Memling, there
is the quietude of absolute faith, the peace of mind
preserved in the cloister as in a sleeping forest, the
immaculate purity, mournful sweetness, the infinite
trust of the truly pious nun absorbed with her own
reveries, and whose large open eyes look out upon
vacancy. These paintings, in turn, are subjects for
the altar or private chapel; they do not appeal like
those of later ages to grand seigniors whose churchgoing
consists of mere routine, and who crave, even
in religious history, pagan pomp and the torsos of
wrestlers; they appeal to the faithful, in order to
suggest to them the form of the supernatural world
or the emotions of fervid piety, to show them the immutable
serenity of beatified saints and the tender
humility of the elect; Ruysbroeck, Eckart, Tauler
and Henry de Suzo, the theological mystics of Germany
antecedent to Luther, might here resort. It is
a strange sight, and one which does not seem to
accord with the sensuous parade of the court and the
sumptuous entries of the cities. We find a similar
contrast between the profound religious sentiment
of the Madonnas of Albert Dürer and the wordly
splendor of his "House of Maximilian." The reason
is, we are in a Germanic country; the renaissance
of general prosperity and the emancipation of the
intellect which results from it here revive Christianity
instead of destroying it as in a Latin country.

II.

When a great change is effected in human affairs
it brings on by degrees a corresponding change in
human conceptions. After the discovery of the Indies
and of America, after the invention of printing
and the multiplication of books, after the restoration
of classic antiquity and the Reformation of Luther,
any conception of the world then formed could no
longer remain monastic and mystic. The tender and
melancholy aspiration of a soul sighing for the celestial
kingdom and humbly subjecting its conduct to the
authority of an undisputed Church gave way to free
inquiry nourished on so many fresh conceptions, and
disappeared at the admirable spectacle of this real
world which man now began to comprehend and to
conquer. The rhetorical academies which, at first,
were composed of a clerical body passed into the
hands of the laity; they had preached the payment of
tithes and submission to the Church; they now ridiculed
the clergy and combated ecclesiastical abuses.

In 1533 nine citizens of Amsterdam were condemned
to a pilgrimage to Rome for having represented one
of these satirical pieces. In 1539, at Ghent, the
question having been proposed of: Who are the
greatest fools in the world? eleven out of nineteen
academies reply: The monks. "A few poor monks
and nuns," says a contemporary, "always appear in
the comedies; it seems as if people could not enjoy
themselves without making sport of God and the
Church." Philip II. had decreed the punishment of
death against authors and actors whose pieces were
not authorized or were impious. But they were performed,
nevertheless, even in the villages. "The
word of God," says the same author, "first found its
way into these countries through plays, and for this
reason they are forbidden much more rigidly than
the writings of Martin Luther."[19] It is evident that
the mind had become emancipated from ancient
tutelage, and that people and burghers, artizans and
merchants began to think for themselves on matters
of salvation and morality.

The extraordinary wealth and prosperity of the
country lead to picturesque and sensuous customs;
here, as in England at the same epoch, a renaissance
pomp overlays a silent Protestant fermentation.
When Charles V., in 1520, made his entry
into the city of Antwerp, Albert Dürer saw four
hundred triumphal arches, two stories high and forty
feet long, decorated with paintings on which allegorical
representations were given. The performers
consisted of young girls belonging to the best bourgeois
class, clothed simply in thin gauze, "almost
naked," says the honest German artist,—"I have
rarely seen more beautiful. I gazed at them very
attentively, and even passionately, inasmuch as I am
a painter." The festivals of the belle-lettre academies
become magnificent; cities and communities
rival each other in luxurious allegorical creations. At
the invitation of the violinists of Antwerp fourteen
academies, in 1562, send their "triumphs," and the
academy called the Guirlande de Marie, at Brussels,
obtains the prize. "For," says Van Meteren, "there

were full three hundred and forty men on horseback,
all dressed in velvet and in dark purple silk, with
long Polish cassocks embroidered with silver lace,
and wearing red hats fashioned like antique helmets;
their pourpoints; plumes and bootees were
white. They wore belts of silver tocque, very ingeniously
woven with yellow, red, blue and white.
They had seven chariots made after the antique
pattern, with divers personages borne thereon.
They had, beside, seventy-eight ordinary chariots
with torches; the said chariots were covered with
red cloth bordered with white. The charioteers all
wore red mantles, and on these chariots were divers
personages representing a number of beautiful antique
figures, all of which goes to show how people
will assemble in friendship to share in amity." La
Pione de Malines provides a parade almost equal to
this consisting of three hundred and twenty men on
horseback, attired in a flesh-colored material embroidered
with gold, seven antique chariots emblazoned
and flaming with all sorts of lights. Add to
this the entry of twelve other processions, and then
enumerate the plays, pantomines, fireworks and banquets
which follow after. "There were several similar
games given during the peace in other cities.....
I have deemed it proper to narrate all this," says Van
Meteren, "for the purpose of showing the happy
union and prosperity of those countries in those
days." After the departure of Philip II., "instead of
one court there seemed to be a hundred and fifty."
The nobles vied with each other in magnificence,
maintaining free tables and spending without stint.
On one occasion the Prince of Orange, wishing to
diminish his train, discharged in a body twenty-eight
head cooks. Lordly mansions swarmed with
pages and gentlemen and superb liveries; the full
tide of the renaissance overflowed in folly and
extravagance, as under Elizabeth in England, in
pompous array, cavalcades, games and good cheer.
The Count of Brederode drank so much at one of
St. Martin's feasts that he came near dying; the
rhinegrave's brother did actually die at the table
through too great fondness of Malvoisie wine. Never
did life seem more bright or beautiful. Like Florence
under the Medicis in the preceding century, it
ceased to be tragic; man had expanded; murderous
revolts and sanguinary wars between city and city
and corporation and corporation quietly subsided;
only one sedition takes place in Ghent in 1536 which
is easily quelled without much bloodshed, the last
and a feeble convulsion, not to be compared with
the formidable insurrections of the fifteenth century.
Margaret of Austria, Mary of Hungary, and Margaret
of Parma, the three rulers, are popular;
Charles V. is a national prince, speaking Flemish,
boasting of his nativity in Ghent, and protecting, by
treaties, the manufactures and trade of the country.
He fosters and nourishes it; Flanders, in return,
supplies him with the half of his entire revenue;[20]
in his herd of states she is the fat milch cow which
is milked constantly without being dried up. Thus,
while the mind is expanding, the temperature around
it becomes modified and establishes the conditions
of a new growth; we see the dawn of it in the festivals
of the belle-lettre academies, which are classic
representations precisely like those of the Florence
carnival and quite different from the quaint conceits
accumulated at the banquets of the Dukes of Burgundy.
"The `Violet,' `Olive' and `Thought'
academies of Antwerp," says Guiccardini, "give
public performances of comedies, tragedies and other
histories in imitation of the Greeks and Romans."
Society, ideas and tastes have undergone a transformation,
and there is room for a new art.

Already in the preceding epoch we see premonitory
symptoms of the coming change. From
Hubert Van Eyck to Quintin Matsys the grandeur
and gravity of religious conceptions have diminished.
Nobody now dreams of portraying the
whole of Christian faith and doctrine in a single
picture; scenes are selected from the Gospel and
from history—annunciations, shepherd adorations,
last judgments, martyrdoms and moral legends.
Painting, which is epic in the hands of Hubert Van
Eyck, becomes idyllic in those of Hemling and
almost worldly in those of Quintin Matsys. It
gets to be pathetic, interesting and pleasing. The
charming saints, the beautiful Herodias and the
lithe Salome of Quintin Matsys are richly attired
noble dames and already laic; the artist loves the
world as it is and for itself, and does not subordinate

it to the representation of the supernatural world
he does not employ it as a means but as an end.
Scenes of profane life multiply; he paints townspeople
in their shops; money changers, amorous
couples, and the attenuated features and stealthy
smiles of a miser. Lucas of Leyden, his contemporary,
is an ancestor of the painters whom we call
the lesser Flemings; his "Presentation of Christ"
and "The Magdalen's Dance" have nothing religious
about them but their titles; the evangelical
subject is lost in the accessories; that which the
picture truly presents is a rural Flemish festival, or
a gathering of Flemings on an open field. Jerome
Bosch, of the same period, paints grotesque, infernal
scenes. Art, it is clear, falls from heaven to earth,
and is no longer to treat divine but human incidents.
Artists, in other respects, lack no process, and no
preparation; they understand perspective, they
know the use of oil, and are masters of modelling
and relief; they have studied actual types; they
know how to paint dresses, accessories, architecture
and landscape with wonderful accuracy and finish;
their manipulative skill is admirable. One defect
only still chains them to hieratic art, which is the
immobility of their faces and the rigid folds of thei
stuffs. They have but to observe the rapid play of
physiognomies and the easy movement of loose drapery,
and the renaissance is complete; the breeze
of the age is behind them and already fills their
sails. On looking at their portraits, their interiors,
and even their sacred personages, as in the "Entombment"
of Quintin Matsys, one is tempted to
address them thus: "You are alive—one effort
more! Come, bestir yourselves! Shake off the
middle age entirely! Depict the modern man for
us as you find him within you and outside of you.
Paint him vigorous, healthy and content with existence.
Forget the meagre, ascetic and pensive
spirit, dreaming in the chapels of Hemling. If you
choose a religious scene for the motive of your picture,
compose it, like the Italians, of active and
healthy figures, only let these figures proceed from
your national and personal taste. You have a soul
of your own, which is Flemish and not Italian; let
the flower bloom; judging by the bud it will be a
beautiful one." And, indeed, when we regard the
sculptures of the time, such as the chimney of the
Palais de Justice and the tomb of Charles the Bold
at Bruges, the church and monuments of Brou,
we see the promise of an original and complete art,
less sculptural and less refined than the Italian, but
more varied, more expressive and closer to nature,
less subject to rule but nearer to the real, more
capable of manifesting spirit and personality, the
impulses, the unpremeditated, the diversities, the
lights and darks of education, temperament and
age of the individual; in short, a Germanic art
which indicates remote successors to the Van Eycks
and remote predecessors of Rubens.

They never appeared, or at all events, they imperfectly
fulfilled their task. No nation, it must be
noted, lives alone in the world; alongside of the
Flemish renaissance there existed the Italian renaissance,
and the large tree stifled the small plant. It
flourished and grew for a century; the literature,
the ideas and the masterpieces of precocious Italy
imposed themselves on sluggish Europe, and the
Flemish cities, through their commerce, and the Austrian
dynasty, through its possessions and its Italian

affairs, introduced into the North the tastes and mod
els of the new civilization. Towards 1520 the Flem
ish painters began to borrow from the artists of
Florence and Rome. John of Mabuse is the first one
who, in 1513, on returning from Italy, introduced
the Italian into the old style, and the rest followed.
It is so natural in advancing into an unexplored
country to take the path already marked out! This
path, however, is not made for those who follow it;
the long line of Flemish carts is to be delayed and
stuck fast in the disproportionate ruts which another
set of wheels have worn. There are two traits characteristic
of Italian art, both of which run counter to
the Flemish imagination. On the one hand Italian
art centres on the natural body, healthy, active and
vigorous, endowed with every athletic aptitude, that
is to say, naked or semi-draped, frankly pagan, enjoying
freely and nobly in full sunshine every limb,
instinct and animal faculty, the same as an ancient
Greek in his city or palestrum, or, as at this very
epoch, a Cellini on the Italian streets and highways.
Now a Fleming does not easily enter into this conception.
He belongs to a cold and humid climate; a
man there in a state of nudity shivers. The human
form here does not display the fine proportions nor
the easy attitudes required by classic art; it is often
dumpy or too gross; the white, soft, yielding flesh,
easily flushed, requires to be clothed. When the
painter returns from Rome and strives to pursue Italian
art, his surroundings oppose his education; his
sentiment being no longer renewed through his contact
with living nature, he is reduced to his souvenirs.
Moreover, he is of Germanic race; in other terms he
is organically a morally good-natured man, and even
modest; he has difficulty in appreciating the pagan
idea of nudity, and still greater difficulty in comprehending
the fatal and magnificent idea[21] which governs
civilization and stimulates the arts beyond the
Alps, namely, that of the complete and sovereign
individual, emancipated from every law, subordinating
the rest, men and things, to the development of
his own nature and the growth of his own faculties.
Our painter is related, although distantly, to Martin
Schœn and Albert Dürer; he is a bourgeois, almost
docile and staid, a lover of the comfortable and the
decent, and adapted to family and domestic life. His
biographer, Karl Van Mander, at the beginning of
his book, furnishes him with moral precepts. Read
this patriarchal treatise, and imagine the distance
between a Rosso, a Giulio Romano, a Titian and a
Giorgione, and their pupils of Leyden or Antwerp.
"All vices," says the good Fleming, "bring their
own punishment. Distrust the maxim that the best
painter is he who is the most dissipated. Unworthy
of the name of artist is he who leads an evil life.
Painters should never dispute or enter into strife with
each other. To squander one's property is not a meritorious
art. Avoid paying court to women in your
youthful days. Shun the society of frivolous women,
who corrupt so many painters. Reflect before you
depart for Rome, for the opportunities to spend
money there are great, and none are there for earning
it. Ever be thankful to God for His bounties."
Special recommendations follow concerning Italian
inns, bed linen and fleas. It is evident that pupils
of this class, even with great labor, will produce but
little more than academic figures; man, according
to their conceptions, is a draped body; when, following
the example of the Italian masters, they attempt
the nude, they render it without freedom,
without spirit, without vivacity of invention; their
pictures, in fact, are simply cold and meagre imitation;
their motive is pedantic; they execute servilely
and badly that which, in Italy, is done naturally
and well. On the other hand, Italian art, like
Greek art, and, in general, all classic art, simplifies
in order to embellish; it eliminates, effaces, and reduces
detail; by this means it gives greater value to
grander features. Michael Angelo and the admirable
Florentine school subordinate or suppress accessories,
landscape, fabrics and costume; with them
the essential consists of the noble and the grandiose
type, the anatomical and muscular structure, the
nude or lightly draped form taken by itself, abstractly,
through the retrenchment of particulars constituting
the individual and denoting his profession,
education and condition; you have man in general
represented, and not a special man. Their personages
are in a superior world, because they are of a
world which is not; the peculiar feature of the scene
they depict is the nullity of time and space. Nothing
is more opposed to Germanic and Flemish genius,
which sees things as they are in their entirety and
complexity; which, in man, takes in, besides man in
general, the contemporary, the citizen, the peasant,
the laborer, this citizen, that laborer, that peasant;
which attaches as much importance to the accessories
of a man as to the man himself; which loves
not merely human nature but all nature, animate and
inanimate—cattle, horses, plants, landscape, sky, and
even the atmosphere—its broader sympathies forestalling
any neglect of objects, and its more minute
observation requiring the fullest expression. You can
comprehend how, in subjecting itself to a discipline
so contrary, it loses the qualities it had without acquiring
those it had not; how, in order that it may
arrogate the ideal, it reduces color, loses the sentiment
of light and atmosphere, obliterates the true
details of costume and of interiors, deprives figures
of original diversities peculiar to portrait and person,
and is led to moderate the suddenness of motion
constituting the impulsiveness of nature's activity,
and thereby impairing ideal symmetry. It finds
difficulty, however, in making all these sacrifices;
its instinct only partially yields to its education.
Flemish reminiscences may be traced underneath
Italian velleity; both in turn predominate in the
same picture; each prevents the other from having
their full effect; their painting, consequently, uncertain,
imperfect and diverted by two tendencies, furnishing
us with historical documents and not beautiful
works of art.

Such is the spectacle presented in Flanders during
the last three quarters of the sixteenth century.
Like a small river receiving a large stream, the mingled
waters of which are disturbed until the foreign
affluent imposes its more powerful tint on the entire
current, so do we find the national style, invaded by
the Italian, dappled irregularly and in places, gradually
disappearing, only rarely rising to the surface,
and at last sinking into obscure depths, whilst the
other displays itself in the light and attracts universal
attention. It is interesting to trace in the public
galleries this conflict of the two currents and the
peculiar effects of their commingling. The first Italian

influx takes place with John de Mabuse, Bernard
Van Orley, Lambert Lombard, John Mostaert,
John Schorel, and Launcelot Blondel. They import
in their pictures classic architecture, veined marble
pilasters, medallions, shell niches, sometimes triumphal
arches and cariatides, sometimes also noble and
vigorous female figures in antique drapery, a sound
nude form, well proportioned and vitalized, of the
fine pagan stock, and healthy; their imitation reduces
itself to this, while in other respects they follow
national traditions. They still paint small pictures,
suitable for genre subjects; they almost always preserve
the strong and rich coloring of the preceding
age, the mountains and blue distances of John Van
Eyck, the clear skies vaguely tinged with emerald
on the horizon, the magnificent stuffs covered with
gold and jewels, the powerful relief, the minute precision
of detail, and the solid honest heads of the
bourgeoisie. But as they are no longer restrained by
hieratic gravity they fall, in attempting to emancipate
themselves, into simple awkwardness and ridiculous
inconsistencies. The children of Job, crushed
by their falling palace, sprawl about grimacing and
writhing as if possessed; on the other panel of the
triptych is the devil in the air mounting upward like
a bat towards the petty Christ of a missal. Long
feet and lean ascetic hands form the odd appurtenances
of a shapely body. A "Last Supper" by
Lambert Lombard mingles together Flemish clumsiness
and vulgarity with the composition of Da Vinci.
A "Last Judgment" by Bernard Van Orley introduces
demons by Martin Schœn amidst the academic
figures of Raphael. In the next generation the rising
flood begins to engulph all; Michael Van Coxcyen,
Heemskerk, Franz Floris, Martin de Vos, the
Franckens, Van Mander, Spranger, Pourbus the elder,
and later, Goltzius, besides many others, resemble
people ambitious of speaking Italian but who do so
laboriously, with an accent and some barbarisms.
The canvas is enlarged and approaches the usual
dimensions of an historical subject; the manner of
painting is less simple; Karl Van Mander reproaches
his contemporaries with "overloading their brushes,"
which was not formerly done, and with carrying impasto
to excess. Coloring dies out; it becomes more
and more white, chalky and pallid. Painters enter
passionately into the study of anatomy, foreshortenings
and muscular development; their drawing beomes
dry and hard, reminding one at once of the
goldsmiths contemporary with Pollaiolo and the exaggerating
disciples of Michael Angelo; they lay
great or violent stress on their science, they insist on
proving their ability to manipulate the skeleton and
produce action; you will find Adams and Eves,
Saint Sebastians, Massacres of the Innocents, and
Horatii resembling grotesque forms of living and
bare muscles; their personages look as if casting
their skins. When they show more moderation, and
the painter, like Franz Floris in his "Fall of the Angels,"
discreetly copies good classic models, his nudities
are scarcely any better; realistic sentiment and
the quaint Germanic imagination peer out among
ideal forms; demons with the heads of cats, fishes
and swine, and with horns, claws and humps, and
blowing fire from their jaws, introduce bestial comedy
and a fantastic sabbat into the midst of the noble
Olympus; we have one of Teniers' buffooneries inserted
in a poem by Raphael. Others, like Martin
Vos, strain themselves to produce the great sacred
picture, figures imitated from the antique, cuirasses,
draperies and tunics, studied correctness in composition,
gestures indicative of noble action and stage
heads and head gear, while they are substantially
genre painters and lovers of reality and accessories.
They constantly fall back to their Flemish types and
their domestic details; their pictures seem to be
enlarged colored engravings; they would be much
better were they of small size. We feel in the artist
a perverted talent, a natural disposition thwarted,
an instinct working against the grain, a prose-writer
born for narrating social incidents of whom the public
commands epics in sounding Alexandrines.[22] Still
another wave, and the remains of national genius seem
wholly submerged. A painter of noble family, well
brought up, instructed by an erudite, a man of the
world and a courtier, a favorite of the great Italian
and Spanish leaders who manage matters in the
Netherlands, Otto Venius, after passing seven years
in Italy, brings from that country noble and pure
antique types, beautiful Venetian color, melting and
subtly graduated tones, shadows permeated with
light, and the vague purples of flesh and of ruddy
foliage. Excepting his native stimulus he is Italian,
and no longer belongs to his race; scarcely more
than a fragment of costume or the simple attitude of
a stooping old man connects him with his country.
Nothing remains to the painter but to abandon it
entirely. Denis Calvaert establishes himself at Bologna,
enters into competition with the Caraccis, and
is the master of Guido. Flemish art accordingly
seems, through its own course, to suppress itself for
the advantage of another.

And yet it still subsists underneath the other. In
vain does the genius of a people yield to foreign influences.
It always recovers. These are temporary,
while that is eternal; it belongs to the flesh and the
blood, the atmosphere and the soil, the structure and
degree of activity of brain and senses; all are animating
forces incessantly renewed and everywhere
present, and which the transient applause of a superior
civilization neither undermines nor destroys.
This is apparent in the preservation of two styles

which continue pure amidst the growing transforma
tion of the others. Mabuse, Morstaert, Van Orley,
the two Pourbus, John Van Cleve, Antonis Moor, the
two Mierevelts and Paul Moreelze produce excellent
portraits; often, in the triptychs, the faces of the
donataires, arranged in rows on the shutters, form a
contrast in their homely sincerity, calm gravity and
profound simplicity of expression with the frigidity
and artificial composition of the principal subject;
the spectator feels himself quite re-animated; instead
of manikins he finds men. On the other hand there
arises the painting of genre subjects, landscapes and
interiors. After Quintin Matsys, and Lucas of Leyden,
we see it developing with John Matsys, Van
Hemessen, the Breughels, Vinckenbooms, the three
Valkenburgs, Peter Neefs and Paul Bril, and especially
in the multitude of engravers and illustrators
who reproduce, on scattered sheets or in books, the
moralities, social incidents, professions, conditions
and events of the day. They are, undoubtedly, to
remain for a long time fantastic and humorous.
This art mixes up nature promiscuously, according
to its own disordered fancies; it is unconscious of the
true forms and the true tint of trees and mountains;
it makes its figures howling, and introduces amidst
the costumes of the period grotesque monsters sim
ilar to those promenading through the kermesses.
But all these intermediary objects are natural, and
insensibly lead on to its final state, which is the
knowledge and love of actual life, as the eye contemplates
it. Here, as in the painting of portraits,
the chain is complete; the metal of all its links is
national; through Breughel, Paul Bril and Peter
Neefs, through Antonis Moor, the Pourbus and the
Mierevelts, it joins on to the Flemish and Dutch
masters of the seventeenth century. The rigidity of
ancient figures is relaxed; a mystic landscape becomes
real; the transition from the divine to the
human age is accomplished. This spontaneous and
regular development shows that national instincts
are maintained under the empire of foreign fashions;
let a crisis intervene to arouse them, and they recover
their ascendancy, while art is transformed according
to the public taste. This crisis is the great
revolution commencing in 1572, the long and terrible
War of Independence, as grand in its events and as
fecund of results as our French Revolution. Here,
as with us, the renewal of the moral world is the
renewal of the ideal world; the Flemish and Dutch
art of the seventeenth century, like the French art
and literature of the nineteenth century, is the reaction
of a vast tragedy performed for thirty years at
the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Here,
however, the scaffolds and battles, having divided the
nation, form two peoples; one Catholic and legitimist
in Belgium, and the other Protestant and republican
in Holland. While both were combined there
was but one spirit; divided and opposed there were
two. Antwerp and Amsterdam held different conceptions
of life, and, accordingly, display different
schools of painting; the same political crisis which
divided their country divided their art.

III.

We must look closely into the formation of Belgium[23] in order to comprehend the rise of the school
which bears the name of Rubens. Previous to the
War of Independence the Southern provinces seemed
to tend to the Reformation as well as the provinces
of the North. In 1566 bands of iconoclasts had
devastated the cathedrals of Antwerp, Ghent and
Tournay, and broken everywhere, in the churches
and the abbeys, all images and ornaments deemed
idolatrous. In the environs of Ghent thousands of
armed Calvinists flocked to the preachings of Hermann
Stricker. Crowds gathered around the stake,
sang psalms, sometimes stoned the executioners and
set the condemned free. Death penalties had to be
enacted in order to suppress the satires of the belle-lettre
academies, and when the Duke of Alba began

his massacres the whole country rushed to arms.
The resistance, however, was not the same in the
South as in the North; in the South the Germanic
race, the independent and Protestant race, was not
pure; the Walloons, a mixed population speaking
French, constituted one half of the inhabitants.
The soil, moreover, being richer, and living easier,
there was less energy and greater sensuality; man
was less resolved to suffer and more inclined to
enjoy. Finally, almost all the Walloons, besides the
families of the great, being attached to court sentiment
through a court life, were Catholic. Hence it
is that the Southern provinces did not contend with
the indomitable stubbornness of the Northern provinces.
There is nothing in them like the sieges of
Maestricht, Harlem, Alkmaar and Leyden, where
women enlisted, fought, and were slaughtered in
the breach. After the taking of Antwerp by the
Duke of Parma the ten provinces returned to their
allegiance, and began apart a new existence. The
most spirited citizens and the most fervent Calvinists
had perished in battle and on the scaffold, or had
fled to the North in the seven free provinces. The
belle-lettre academies exiled themselves there in a
body. On the termination of the Duke of Alva's
administration it was estimated that sixty thousand
families had emigrated; after the capture of Ghent
eleven thousand more departed, and after the capitulation
of Antwerp four thousand weavers betook
themselves to London. Antwerp lost the half of
its inhabitants, and Ghent and Bruges two-thirds;
whole streets were empty; in the principal street of
Ghent a couple of horses cropped the grass. A
mighty surgical operation had relieved the nation
of what the Spaniards called its bad blood; at all
events that which remained was the most quiescent.
There is a great substratum of docility in the
Germanic races; think of the German regiments
exported to America and sold there to die by their
petty absolute princes: the sovereign once accepted,
they are faithful to him; with guaranteed rights
he seems legitimate; they are inclined to respect
the established order of things. The continued constraint,
moreover, of irremediable necessity produces
its effect; man accommodates himself to things
when he is satisfied that he cannot change them
certain portions of his character which cannot be
developed languish, and others expand the more.
There are moments in the history of a nation when
it bears some resemblance to Christ taken to the
top of a high mountain by Satan, and there bid
to choose between a heroic and a common life;
here the tempter is Philip II., with his armies and
executioners; the people of the North and the
South, both subject to the same trial, decide differently
according to the petty diversities of their
composition and character. The choice made these
diversities grow, and are exaggerated by the effects
of the situation they themselves have produced.
Both people being two almost indeterminate varieties
of one species become two distinct species. It
is with moral types as with organic types; they
issue at the beginning from a common origin, but as
they complete their development they grow wider
apart and are thus formed through their divergencies.
The Southern provinces henceforth become
Belgium. The dominant trait is the craving for
peace and comfort, the disposition to take life on the
jovial and pleasant side, in brief, the sentiment of
Teniers. In fact, even in a dilapidated cabin or in
a bare tavern on a wooden bench a man may laugh,
sing, smoke a good pipe and swallow deep draughts
of beer; it is not disagreeable to attend mass as
a fine ceremony, nor to recount one's sins to an
accommodating Jesuit. After the capture of Antwerp,
Philip II. is delighted to hear that communions
have become more and more frequent. Convents
are founded twenty at a time. "It is a matter
worthy of remark," says a contemporary, "that
since the happy advent of the archdukes more new
establishments have arisen than in two hundred
years and before that"—Franciscans, reformed Carmelites,
friars of St. Francis de Paule, Carmelites,
annunciada, and especially the Jesuits; the latter in
fact bring with them a new Christianity, the most
appropriate to the state of the country, and which
seems manufactured purposely to contrast with that
of the Protestants. Be docile in mind and in heart,
and all the rest is tolerance and indulgence; in this
connection see the portraits of the day, and among
others, the gay fellow who was confessor to Rubens.
Casuistry is shaped to and serves for difficult cases;
under its empire there is scope enough for all current
peccadilloes. Worship, moreover, is exempt
from prudery, and winds up by being amusing. To
this epoch belongs the worldly and sensualistic
internal decoration of the grave and venerable
cathedral, the multiplied and contorted ornaments—
flames, lyres, trinkets and scrolls, the veneerings of
veined marbles, altars resembling theatre façades,
and the quaint diverting pulpits overlaid with a menagerie
of carved birds and brutes. As respects the
new churches, the outside suits the inside. That
of the Jesuits, built in Antwerp at the beginning of
the seventeenth century, is instructive, it being a
saloon filled with étagères. Its thirty-six ceilings
were executed by Rubens, and it is curious to see
here as elsewhere an ascetic and mystic faith accept
as edifying subjects the most blooming and the
most exposed nudities, buxom Magdalens, plump St.
Sebastians and Madonnas whom the negro magi are
devouring with all the lust of their eyes, a display
of flesh and fabrics unequalled by the Florentine
carnival in luxurious temptation and in triumphant
sensuality.

Meanwhile the altered political situation contributes
to the transformation of the intellectual world.
The old despotism becomes relaxed; to the rigors
of the Duke of Alva succeeds the liberal policy of
the Duke of Parma. After an amputation, a man
who has bled profusely must be restored by soothing
and strengthening treatment; hence it is that, after
the pacification of Ghent, the Spaniards let their terrible
edicts against heresy lie dormant. Executions
are at an end. The latest martyr is a poor sewing
woman, buried alive in 1597. In the following century
Jordaens, with his wife and her family, become
Protestants without being annoyed, and even without
losing any of his commissions. The archdukes
permit towns and corporations to govern themselves
according to ancient usages, to collect imposts and
attend to their own business; when they desire
to have Breughel de Velours relieved of military
duty or of exactions, they make their appeal to the
commune. The government becomes regular, semiliberal,
and almost national; Spanish extortions, razzias,
and brutalities disappear. At length, in order
to keep possession of the country, Philip II. is compelled

to let it remain Flemish, and exist as a separate
state. In 1599 he detaches it from Spain, and cedes
it in full possession to Albert and Isabella. "The
Spaniards never did a better thing," writes the
French ambassador; "it would be impossible to keep
the country without giving it this new system, as it
was ripe for revolution." The States-General meet
in 1600, and decide for reforms. We see in Guiccardini,
and other travellers, that the old constitution
arises almost intact out of the rubbish under
which it had been buried by military violence. "At
Bruges," M. de Monconys writes in 1653, "each trade
has a house in common, where those of the profession
meet to transact the business of the community,
or for recreation; and all the trades are distributed
into four divisions, under the control of four burgomasters,
who have charge of the keys of the city,
the Governor exercising no jurisdiction or power
over any but the military force." The archdukes
are wise and solicitous of the public welfare. In
1609 they make peace with Holland; in 1611 their
perpetual edict completes the restoration of the country.
They either are or render themselves powerful;
Isabella, with her own hand, strikes down, on
the Place de Sablon, the bird which sanctifies the
cross-bowman's pledge; Albert attends at Louvain
the lectures of Justus Lepsius. They love, cherish,
and attach themselves to famous artists—Otto Venius,
Rubens, Teniers, and Breughel de Velours.
The belle-lettre institutions flourish again, and the
universities are favored; in the Catholic world, under
the Jesuits and often by their side, is a kind of
intellectual renaissance; a number of theologians,
controversialists, casuists, erudites, geographers, physicians,
and even historians, arise—Mercator, Ortelius,
Van Helmont, Jansenius, Lepsius, all of whom
are Flemings of this epoch. The "Description of
Flanders," by Sander, a vast work completed after
so many trials, is a monument of national zeal and
patriotic pride. If, in turn, we wish to form an idea
of the state of the country, take one of the tranquil
and fallen cities to-day like Bruges. Sir Dudley
Carleton, passing through Antwerp in 1616, finds it
a handsome place, although nearly empty; he may
have seen no more than "forty persons in the entire
street," not a carriage, not a horseman, not a cus
tomer in the shops; but the houses are well maintained,
everything being clean and cared for: the
peasant has rebuilt his burnt cabin and is at work
in the field; the housewife is attending to her duties;
security has returned, and is about to be followed
by plenty; there are shooting matches, processions,
fairs and magnificent entries of princes; people are
getting back to old comforts beyond which they do
not aspire; religion is left to the Church, and government
to the princes: here, as at Venice, the
course of events has brought man down to the quest
of enjoyment—the effort to obtain it being the more
strenuous in proportion to the strong contrast with
their previous misery.

And, in truth, what a contrast! It is necessary
to have read the details of the war in order to appreciate
it. Fifty thousand martys had perished
under Charles V., eighteen thousand persons had
been executed by the Duke of Alva, and the revolted
country had maintained the war for thirteen
years. The Spaniards had reconquered the large
cities only by famine after protracted sieges. In
the beginning Antwerp was sacked for three days;

seven thousand of her citizens were slain, and five
hundred houses were burnt. The soldier lived on
the country, and we see him in the engravings of
the day plundering and robbing dwellings, torturing
the husband, violating the wife, and bearing away
chests and furniture in carts. When his pay was
withheld too long he took up his quarters in a town,
and this led to a republic of brigands; under an
eletto of their own choice they ravaged the environs
at their convenience. Karl Van Mander, the historian
of the painters, on returning one day to his
village, found his house pillaged along with the
rest; the soldiers had even taken the bed and bedclothes
of his old sick father. Karl was driven out
naked, and they were already fixing a rope to his
neck to hang him when he was saved by a cavalier
whom he had known in Italy. Another time, as he
was on the road with his wife and an infant child,
they took his money, baggage and clothes, his wife's
and those of the infant; the mother could only
secure a small petticoat, the infant a tattered net,
and Karl an old worn-out piece of cloth in which
he wrapped himself up, and in which guise he
reached Bruges. Under this regime a country
ceases to exist; soldiers themselves finally die of
starvation; the Duke of Parma writes to Philip II.
that if he fails to send relief the army is lost, "for
nobody can live without eating." On emerging
from such calamities, peace seems a paradise; it is
not merely the good at which man rejoices, but the
better, and here the better is stupendous. A man
can now sleep in his own bed, store up provisions,
enjoy the fruits of his labor, travel about and assemble
and converse with his fellows without fear;
he has a home, a country and a future. All the
ordinary occurrences of life get to be interesting
and attractive; he revives, and for the first time
seems to live. It is circumstances like these out of
which always springs a spontaneous literature and
an original art. The great crisis through which the
nation has passed serves to remove the monotonous
varnish with which tradition and custom have overspread
things. We find out what man is; we seize
on the fundamental points of his renewed and transformed
nature; we see its depth, its secret instincts,
the master forces which denote his race and are
about to control his history; half a century later
and we see them no more, because during a half
century they have been constantly visible. In the
meantime, however, the new order of things becomes
complete; the mind confronts it like Adam
on his first awakening; it is only later that conceptions
get to be over-refined and weakened; they
are now broad and simple. Man is qualified for this
through his birth in a crumbling society and an
education in the midst of veritable tragedies; like
Victor Hugo and George Sand, the child Rubens, in
exile, alongside of his imprisoned father, hears, in
his home and all around him, the roar of tempest
and of wreck. After an active generation which
has suffered and created, comes the poetic generation
which writes, paints or models. It expresses
and amplifies the energies and desires of a society
founded by its fathers. Hence it is that Flemish
art proceeds to glorify in heroic types the sensual
instincts, the grand and gross joyousness, the rude
energy of surrounding mortals, and to find in the
alehouse of Teniers the Olympus of Rubens.

Among these painters there is one who seems to

efface the rest; indeed no name in the history of art
is greater, and there are only three or four as great.
But Rubens is not an isolated genius, the number
as well as the resemblance of surrounding talents
showing that the efflorescence of which he is the
most beautiful emanation is the product of his
time and people. Before him there was Adam Van
Noort, his master,[24] and the master of Jordaens;
around him are his contemporaries, educated in other
studios, and whose invention is as spontaneous as his
own—Jordaens, Crayer, Gerard Zeghers, Rombouts,
Abraham Janssens, and Van Roose; after him come
his pupils—Van Thulden, Diepenbecke, Van den
Hoeck, Corneille Schut, Boyermans, Van Dyck, the
greatest of all, and Van Oost of Bruges; alongside
of him are the great animal, flower and still-life
painters—Snyders, John Fyt, the Jesuit Seghers, and
an entire school of famous engravers—Soutman, Vorsterman,
Bolswert, Pontius and Vischer; the same
sap fructifies all these branches, the lesser as well as
the greater, while we must add, again, the pervading
sympathies and the national admiration. It is
plain that an art like this is not the effect of one accidental
cause but of a general development, and of
this we have full assurance when, considering the
work itself, we remark the concordances which
assimilate it with its milieu.

On the one side it resumes or follows the traditions
of Italy, and is seen at a glance to be pagan
and Catholic. It is supported by churches and convents;
it represents Biblical and evangelical scenes;
the subject is edifying; and the engraver deliberately
places at the bottom of his engravings pious
maxims and moral problems. And yet, in fact,
there is nothing Christian about it but its name; all
mystic or ascetic sentiment is banished; its Madonnas,
martyrs and confessors, its Christs and apostles
are superb florid bodies restricted to the life of
the flesh; its paradise is an Olympus of well-fed
Flemish deities revelling in muscular activity; they
are large, vigorous, plump and content, and make a
jovial and magnificent display as in a national festi
val or at a princely entry. The Church, it is true,
ptizes this last flower of the old mythology with

becoming forms, but it is only baptism, and this
is frequently wanting. Apollos, Jupiters, Castors,
Pollux and Venus, all the ancient divinities, revive
under their veritable names in the palaces of the
kings and the great which they decorate. This is
owing to religion, here as in Italy, consisting of
rites. Rubens goes to mass every morning, and presents
a picture in order to obtain indulgences; after
which he falls back upon his own poetic feeling for
natural life and, in the same style, paints a lusty
Magdalen and a plump Siren; under the Catholic
varnish the heart and the intellect, all social ways
and observances are pagan. On the other side, this
art is truly Flemish; everything issues from and
centres on a mother idea which is new and national;
it is harmonious, spontaneous and original; in this
respect it contrasts with the foregoing which is only
a discordant imitation. From Greece to Florence,
from Florence to Venice, from Venice to Antwerp,
every step of the passage can be traced. The conception
of man and of life goes on decreasing in
nobleness and increasing in breadth. Rubens is to
Titian what Titian was to Raphael, and Raphael to
Phidias. Never did artistic sympathy clasp nature
in such an open and universal embrace. Ancient
boundaries, already often extended, seem removed
purposely to expose an infinite career. There is no
respect for historic proprieties; he groups together
allegoric with real figures, and cardinals with a
naked Mercury. There is no deference to the moral
order; he fills the ideal heaven of mythology and
of the gospel with coarse or mischievous characters;
a Magdalen resembling a nurse, and a Ceres
whispering some pleasant gossip in her neighbor's
ear. There is no dread of exciting physical sensibility;
he pushes the horrible to extremes, athwart
all the tortures for the punishment of the flesh and
all the contortions of howling agony. There is no
fear of offending moral delicacy; his Minerva is a
shrew who can fight, his Judith a butcher's wife
familiar with blood, and his Paris a jocose expert
and a dainty amateur. To translate into words the
ideas vociferously proclaimed by his Suzannas, his
Magdalens, his St. Sebastians, his Graces and his
Sirens, in all his kermesses, divine and human, ideal
or real, Christian or pagan, would require the terms
of Rabelais. Through him all the animal instincts
of human nature appear on the stage; those which
had been excluded as gross he reproduces as true,
and in him as in nature they encounter the others.
Nothing is wanting but the pure and the noble; the
whole of human nature is in his grasp, save the
loftiest heights. Hence it is that his creativeness
is the vastest we have seen, comprehending as it
does all types, Italian cardinals, Roman emperors,
contemporary citizens, peasants and cowherds, along
with the innumerable diversities stamped on humanity
by the play of natural forces and which more
than fifteen hundred pictures did not suffice to
exhaust.

For the same reason, in the representation of the
body, he comprehended more profoundly than any
one the essential characteristic of organic life; he
surpasses in this the Venetians, as they surpass the
Florentines; he feels still better than they that flesh
is a changeable substance in a constant state of
renewal; and such, more than any other, is the
Flemish body, lympathic, sanguine and voracious,
more fluid, more rapidly tending to accretion and

waste than those whose dry fibre and radical temper
ance preserve permanent tissues. Hence it is that
nobody has depicted its contrasts in stronger relief,
nor as visibly shown the decay and bloom of life—at
one time the dull flabby corpse, a genuine clinical
mass, empty of blood and substance, livid, blue and
mottled through suffering, a clot of blood on the
mouth, the eye glassy and the feet and hands clayish,
swollen and deformed because death seized them
first; at another the freshness of living carnations,
the handsome, blooming and smiling athlete, the
mellow suppleness of a yielding torso in the form of
a well-fed adolescent, the soft rosy cheeks and placid
candor of a girl whose blood was never quickened
or eyes bedimmed by thought, flocks of dimpled
cherubs and merry cupids, the delicacy, the folds,
the exquisite melting rosiness of infantile skin, seemingly
the petal of a flower moistened with dew and
impregnated with morning light. In like manner in
the representation of soul and action he appreciated
more keenly than any one the essential feature of
animal and moral life, that is to say the instantaneous
movement which it is the aim of the plastic arts to
seize on the wing. In this again he surpasses the Venetians
as they surpassed the Florentines. Nobody
has endowed figures with such spirit, with a gesture
so impulsive, with an impetuosity so abandoned and
furious, such an universal commotion and tempest
of swollen and writhing muscles in one single effort.
His personages speak; their repose itself is suspended
on the verge of action; we feel what they have
just accomplished and what they are about to do.
The present with them is impregnated with the past
and big with the future; not only the whole face but
the entire attitude conspires to manifest the flowing
stream of their thought, feeling and complete being;
we hear the inward utterance of their emotion; we
might repeat the words to which they give expression.
The most fleeting and most subtle shades of
sentiment belong to Rubens; in this respect he is a
treasure for novelist and psychologist; he took note
of the passing refinements of moral expression as well
as of the soft volume of sanguine flesh; no one has
gone beyond him in knowledge of the living organism
and of the animal man. Endowed with this sentiment
and skill he was capable, in conformity with
the aspirations and needs of his restored nation, of
amplifying the forces he found around and within
himself, all that underlie, preserve and manifest the
overflow and triumph of existence; on the one hand
gigantic joints, herculean shapes and shoulders, red
and colossal muscles, bearded and truculent heads,
over-nourished bodies teeming with succulence, the
luxurious display of white and rosy flesh; on the
other, the rude instincts which impel human nature
to seek food, drink, strife and pleasure, the savage
fury of the combatant, the enormity of the big-bellied
Silenus, the sensual joviality of the Faun, the
abandonment of that lovely creature without conscience
and "fat with sin," the boldness, the energy,
the broad joyousness, the native goodness, the organic
serenity of the national type. He heightens
these effects again through their composition and
the accessories with which he surrounds them—magnificence
of lustrous silks, embroidered simarres and
golden brocades, groups of naked figures, modern
costumes and antique draperies, an inexhaustible
accumulation of arms, standards, colonnades, Venetian
stairways, temples, canopies, ships, animals, and
ever novel and imposing scenery, as if outside of
ordinary nature he possessed the key of a thousand
times richer nature, whereon his magician's hand
could forever draw without the freedom of his imagination
ending in confusion, but on the contrary
with a jet so vigorous and a prodigality so national
that his most complicated productions seem like the
irresistible outflow of a surfeited brain. Like an
Indian deity at leisure he relieves his fecundity by
reating worlds, and from the matchless folds and
ues of his tossed simarres to the snowy whites of
his flesh, or the pale silkiness of his blonde tresses,
there is no tone in any of his canvasses which does
not appear there purposely to afford him delight.

There is only one Rubens in Flanders, as there
is only one Shakespeare in England. Great as the
others are, they are deficient in some one element of
his genius. Crayer has not his audacity nor his
excess; he paints beauty calm,[25] sympathetic and
content along with requisite effects of bright and
mellow color. Jordaens has not his regal grandeur

and his heroic poetic feeling; he paints with vinous
color stunted colossi, crowded groups and turbulent
plebeians. Van Dyck has not, like him, the love of
power and of life for life itself; more refined, more
chivalric, born with a sensitive and even melancholy
nature, elegiac in his sacred subjects, aristocratic
in his portraits, he depicts with less glowing
and more sympathetic color noble, tender and
charming figures whose generous and delicate souls
are filled with sweet and sad emotions unknown to
his master.[26] His works are the first indication of
the coming change. After 1660 he is already promment.
The generation whose energy and aspirations
had inspired the grand picturesque revery,
faded away man by man; Crayer and Jordaens
alone, by merely living, kept art up for twenty years.
The nation, reviving for a moment, falls backward;
its renaissance never perfects itself. The archducal
sovereigns, through whom it had become an independent
state, ended in 1633; it reverts back to a Spanish
province under a governor sent from Madrid. The
treaty of 1648 closes the Scheldt to it, and completes
the ruin of her commerce. Louis XIV. dismembers
her, and on three occasions deprives her of portions
of her territory. Four successive wars trample over
her for thirty years; friends and enemies, Spaniards,
French, English and Hollanders live upon her; the
treaties of 1715 convert the Dutch into her purveyors
and tax-gatherers. At this moment, become Austrian,
she refuses the subsidy; but the elders of the
states are imprisoned, and the chief one, Anneessens,
dies on the scaffold; this is the last and a feeble
echo of the mighty voice of Van Artevelde. Henceforth
the country subsides into a simple province in
which people keep soul and body together and only
care to live. At the same time, and through a reaction,
the national imagination declines. The school
of Rubens degenerates; with Beyermans, Van Herp,
John Erasmus Quellin, the second Van Oost, Deyster
and John Van Orley we see originality and
energy disappearing; coloring grows weak or becomes
affected; attenuated types incline to prettiness;
expression is either sentimental or mawkish;
the personages occupying the great canvas, instead of
filling it are dispersed, the intervals being supplied
with architecture; the vein is exhausted; painting
is mere routine or a mannered imitation of the
Italian school. Many betake themselves to foreign
countries. Philippe de Champagne is director of the
Academy of the Fine Arts at Paris and becomes
French in mind and country; still more, a spiritualist
and Jansenist, a conscientious and skilful painter of
grave and thoughtful spirit. Gerard de Lairesse
becomes a disciple of the Italians—a classic, academic
and erudite painter of costume and historic
and mythologic resemblances. The logical reason
assumes empire in the arts, having already obtained
it in social matters. Two pictures in the Musée of
Ghent equally display the change in painting and
the change in society. Both represent princely
entrêes, one in 1666 and the other in 1717. The
first, of a beautiful ruddy tone, shows the last of the
men of the grand epoch, their cavalier air, their
powerful frame, their capacity for physical endeavor,
their rich decorative costumes, their horses with
with flowing manes—here nobles related to Van
Dyck's seigniors, and there pikemen in buff and
cuirass kindred to the soldiers of Wallestein—in
short, the last remains of the heroic and picturesque
age. The second, cold and pale in tone, shows
highly refined, softened, Frenchified beings—gentlemen
clever at salutation, women of fashion conscious
of their appearance, in brief, the imported
drawing-room system and foreign modes of demeanor.
During the fifty years separating the
former from the latter both the national art and
the national spirit vanished.

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.