final.

And yet M. Havard, who had a Frenchman's eye and therefore knew,
says that if Etna in full eruption were taken to Holland, at the end
of the week it would have ceased even to smoke, so destructive to
enthusiasm is the well-disciplined nature of the Dutch woman.

M. Havard referred rather to the women of the open country than the
dwellers in the town. I can understand the rural coolness, for Holland
is a land without mystery. Everything is plain and bare: a man in a
balloon would know the amours of the whole populace. What chance has
Cupid when there are no groves? But let Holland be afforested and her
daughters would keep Etna burning warmly enough; for I am persuaded
that it is not that they are cold but that the physical development
of the country is against them.

Chapter XI

Amsterdam's Pictures

Dutch art in the palmy days--The Renaissance--A miracle--What
Holland did for painting--The "Night Watch"--Rembrandt's
isolation--Captain Franz Banning Cocq--Elizabeth Bas--The
Staalmeesters--If one might choose one picture--Vermeer
of Delft again--Whistler--"Paternal Advice"--Terburg--The
romantic Frenchmen again--The Dutch painter's ideal--The two
Maris--Old Dutch rooms--The Six Collection--"Six's Bridge"
and the wager--The Fodor Museum.

The superlative excellence of Dutch painting in the seventeenth
century has never been explained, and probably never will be. The
ordinary story is that on settling down to a period of independence and
comparative peace and prosperity after the cessation of the Spanish
war, the Dutch people called for good art, and good art came. But
that is too simple. That a poet, a statesman or a novelist should be
produced in response to a national desire is not inconceivable; for
poets, statesmen and novelists find their material in the air, as we
say, in the ideas of the moment. They are for the most part products
of their time. But the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century
were expressing no real idea. Nor, even supposing they had done so,
is it to be understood how the demand for them should yield such a
supply of unsurpassed technical power: how a perfectly disciplined
hand should be instantly at the public service.

That Holland in an expansive mood of satisfaction at her success should
have wished to see groups of her gallant arquebusiers and portraits of
her eminent burghers is not to be wondered at, and we can understand
that re