ys a vessel and sails with his
wife and family, observing and making notes, follows the fleet into
battle and takes part in the fight; and in this way are made marine
painters like William Van der Velde the elder and William the younger,
like Backhuysen, Dubbels, and Stork.

Another kind of painting was to arise in Holland, as the expression of
the character of the people and of republican manners. A people which
without greatness had done so many great things, as Michelet says, must
have its heroic painters, if we call them so, destined to illustrate men
and events. But this school of painting,--precisely because the people
were without greatness, or to express it better, without the form of
greatness,--modest, inclined to consider all equal before the country,
because all had done their duty, abhorring adulation, and the
glorification in one only of the virtues and the triumph of many,--this
school has to illustrate not a few men who have excelled, and a few
extraordinary facts, but all classes of citizenship gathered among the
most ordinary and pacific of burgher life. From this come the great
pictures which represent five, ten, thirty persons together,
arquebusiers, mayors, officers, professors, magistrates, administrators;
seated or standing around a table, feasting and conversing; of life
size, most faithful likenesses; grave, open faces, expressing that
secure serenity of conscience by which may be divined rather than seen
the nobleness of a life consecrated to one's country, the character of
that strong, laborious epoch, the masculine virtues of that excellent
generation; all this set off by the fine costume of the time, so
admirably combining grace and dignity,--those gorgets, those doublets,
those black mantles, those silken scarves and ribbons, those arms and
banners. In this field stand pre-eminent Van der Helst, Hals, Govaert,
Flink, and Bol.

Descending from the consideration of the various kinds of painting, to
the special manner by means of which the artist excelled in treatment,
one leads all the rest as the distinctive feature of Dutch
painting--the light.

The light in Holland, by reason of the particular conditions of its
manifestation, could not fail to give rise to a special manner of
painting. A pale light, waving with marvelous mobility through an
atmosphere impregnated with vapor, a nebulous veil continually and
abruptly torn, a perpetual struggle between light and shadow,--such was
the spec