relude of the true Dutch art that was to be.

With the war of independence, liberty, reform, and painting also were
renewed. With religious traditions fell artistic traditions; the nude
nymphs, Madonnas, saints, allegory, mythology, the ideal--all the old
edifice fell to pieces. Holland, animated by a new life, felt the need
of manifesting and expanding it in a new way; the small country, become
all at once glorious and formidable, felt the desire for illustration;
the faculties which had been excited and strengthened in the grand
undertaking of creating a nation, now that the work was completed,
overflowed and ran into new channels. The conditions of the country were
favorable to the revival of art. The supreme dangers were conjured away;
there was security, prosperity, a splendid future; the heroes had done
their duty, and the artists were permitted to come to the front;
Holland, after many sacrifices, and much suffering, issued victoriously
from the struggle, lifted her face among her people and smiled. And that
smile is art.

What that art would necessarily be, might have been guessed even had no
monument of it remained. A pacific, laborious, practical people,
continually beaten down, to quote a great German poet, to prosaic
realities by the occupations of a vulgar burgher life; cultivating its
reason at the expense of its imagination; living, consequently, more in
clear ideas than in beautiful images; taking refuge from abstractions;
never darting its thoughts beyond that nature with which it is in
perpetual battle; seeing only that which is, enjoying only that which it
can possess, making its happiness consist in the tranquil ease and
honest sensuality of a life without violent passions or exorbitant
desires;--such a people must have tranquillity also in their art, they
must love an art that pleases without startling the mind, which
addresses the senses rather than the spirit; an art full of repose,
precision, and delicacy, though material like their lives: in one word,
a realistic art, in which they can see themselves as they are and as
they are content to be.

The artists began by tracing that which they saw before their eyes--the
house. The long winters, the persistent rains, the dampness, the
variableness of the climate, obliged the Hollander to stay within doors
the greater part of the year. He loved his little house, his shell, much
better than we love our abodes, for the reason that he had more need of
i