ng is represented with the minuteness of a
daguerreotype; every vein in the wood of a piece of furniture, every
fibre in a leaf, the threads of cloth, the stitches in a patch, every
hair upon an animal's coat, every wrinkle in a man's face; everything
finished with microscopic precision, as if done with a fairy pencil, or
at the expense of the painter's eyes and reason. In reality a defect
rather than an excellence, since the office of painting is to represent
not what _is_, but what the eye sees, and the eye does not see
everything; but a defect carried to such a pitch of perfection that one
admires, and does not find fault. In this respect the most famous
prodigies of patience were Dow, Mieris, Potter, and Van der Heist, but
more or less all the Dutch painters.

But realism, which gives to Dutch art so original a stamp and such
admirable qualities, is yet the root of its most serious defects. The
artists, desirous only of representing material truths, gave to their
figures no expression save that of their physical sentiments. Grief,
love, enthusiasm, and the thousand delicate shades of feeling that have
no name, or take a different one with the different causes that give
rise to them, they express rarely, or not at all. For them the heart
does not beat, the eyes do not weep, the lips do not quiver. One whole
side of the human soul, the noblest and highest, is wanting in their
pictures. More: in their faithful reproduction of everything, even the
ugly, and especially the ugly, they end by exaggerating even that,
making defects into deformities and portraits into caricatures; they
calumniate the national type; they give a burlesque and graceless aspect
to the human countenance. In order to have the proper background for
such figures, they are constrained to choose trivial subjects: hence the
great number of pictures representing beer-shops, and drinkers with
grotesque, stupid faces, in absurd attitudes; ugly women and ridiculous
old men; scenes in which one can almost hear the brutal laughter and the
obscene words. Looking at these pictures, one would naturally conclude
that Holland was inhabited by the ugliest and most ill-mannered people
on the earth. We will not speak of greater and worse license. Steen,
Potter, and Brouwer, the great Rembrandt himself, have all painted
incidents that are scarcely to be mentioned to civilized ears, and
certainly should not be looked at. But even setting aside these
excesses, in the p