or the celebration of fact
without mystery or magic. In other words, Dutch painting is painting
without poetry; and it is this absence of poetry which makes the
romantic Frenchmen appear to be such exotics when one finds them in
Holland, and why it is so pleasant in Holland now and then to taste
their quality, as one may at the Stedelijk Museum and in the Mesdag
Collection at The Hague.

We must not forget, however, that under the French influence certain
modern Dutch painters have been quickened to celebrate the fact _with_
poetry. In a little room adjoining the great French room at the
Stedelijk Museum will be found some perfect things by living or very
recent artists for whom Corot did not work in vain: a mere by James
Maris, with a man in a blue coat sitting in a boat; a marsh under
a white sky by Matthew Maris; a village scene by the same exquisite
craftsman. These three pictures, but especially the last two, are in
their way as notable and beautiful as anything by the great names in
Dutch art.

On the ground floor of the Stedelijk Museum is the series of rooms
named after the Suasso family which should on no account be missed, but
of which no notice is given by the Museum authorities. These rooms are
furnished exactly as they would have been by the best Dutch families,
their furniture and hangings having been brought from old houses in
the Keizersgracht and the Heerengracht. The kitchen is one of the
prettiest things in Holland--with its shining brass and copper, its
delicate and dainty tiles and its air of cheerful brightness. Some of
the carving in the other rooms is superb; the silver, the china, the
clocks are all of the choicest. The custodian has a childlike interest
in secret drawers and unexpected recesses, which he exhibits with a
gusto not habitual in the Dutch cicerone. For the run of these old
rooms a guelder is asked; one sees the three rooms on the other side
of the entrance hall for twenty-five cents, the church and museum unit
of Holland. But they are uninteresting beside the larger suite. They
consist of an old Dutch apothecary's shop and laboratory; a madhouse
cell; and the bedroom of a Dutch lady who has just presented her lord
with an infant. We see the mother in bed, a doctor at her side, and
in the foreground a nurse holding the baby. Except that the costumes
and accessories are authentic the tableau is in no way superior to
an ordinary waxwork.

At the beginning of the last chapter I sai