, felt that it must tell its
greatness. Its faculties, which had been strengthened and stimulated
in the grand enterprise of creating a native land, a real world,--now
that this enterprise was achieved, expanded, and created an imaginary
world. The conditions of the people were favorable to a revival of
art. They had overcome the supreme perils which threatened them:
security, prosperity, a splendid future, were theirs: their heroes had
done their part; the time had come for artists. After so many
sacrifices and disasters Holland came forth victorious from the
strife, turned her face upon her people, and smiled, and that smile
was Art.

We could picture to ourselves what this art was even if no example of
it remained. A peaceable, industrious, practical people, who, to use
the words of a great German poet, were continually brought back to
dull realities by the conditions of a vulgar bourgeois life; who
cultivated their reason at the expense of their imagination, living in
consequence on manifest ideas rather than beautiful images; who fled
from the abstract, whose thoughts never rose beyond nature, with which
they waged continual warfare--a people that saw only what exists, that
enjoyed only what it possessed, whose happiness consisted in wealthy
ease and an honest indulgence of the senses, although without violent
passions or inordinate desires;--such a people would naturally be
phlegmatic in their art,--they would love a style that pleased but did
not arouse them, that spoke to the senses rather than to the
imagination--a school of art placid, precise, full of repose, and
thoroughly material like their life--an art, in a word, realistic and
self-satisfied, in which they could see themselves reflected as they
were and as they were content to remain.

The first Dutch artists began by depicting that which was continually
before their eyes--the home. The long winters, the stubborn rains, the
humidity, the continual changes in the climate, compel the Hollander
to spend a great part of the year and of the day in the house. He
loves his little home, his nutshell, much more than we love our
houses, because it is much more necessary to him, and he lives in it
much more; he provides it with every comfort, caresses it, adorns it;
he delights in looking at the falling snow and drenching rain from its
tight windows, and in being able to say, "Let the storms rage--I am
safe and warm." In his little nest, beside his good wife and