customs. A
nation that without greatness had done so many great things, as
Michelet says, required an heroic style of painting, if it may be so
called, destined to illustrate its men and achievements. But simply
because the nation was without greatness, or, to speak more
accurately, without the outward form of greatness--because it was
modest, and inclined to consider all alike equal in face of the
fatherland, because all had done their duty, yet each abhorred that
adulation and apotheosis which glorify in one person the virtues and
triumphs the mass,--this style of painting was needed, not to extol a
few eminent men or extraordinary events, but to represent all classes
of citizens by occurrences of the most ordinary and peaceful moments
of bourgeois life. Hence those large pictures representing groups of
five, ten, or even thirty persons, gunners, syndics, officials,
professors, magistrates, men of affairs, seated or standing round
tables, feasting or arguing, all life-size and faithful portraits,
with serious open countenances, from which shines the quiet expression
of a tranquil conscience, from which one divines, rather than sees,
the nobility of lives devoted to their country, the spirit of that
laborious and dauntless epoch, the manly virtues of that rare
generation. All this is relieved by the beautiful costumes of the
Renaissance, which so admirably combined grace with dignity,--those
ruffs, jerkins, black cloaks, silken scarfs, ribbons, arms, and
banners. Van der Helst, Hals, Govert, Flink, and Bol were masters in
this style of art.

To leave the consideration of the different branches of painting, and
to inquire into the particular methods which the Dutch artists adopted
and the means they employed to accomplish their results, one chief
feature at once presents itself as the distinctive trait of Dutch
painting--the light.

The light, because of the peculiar conditions under which it manifests
itself in Holland, has naturally given rise to a peculiar style of
painting. A pale light, undulating with marvellous changes, playing
through an atmosphere heavy with vapor, a misty veil which is
repeatedly and abruptly penetrated, a continual struggle between
sunshine and shadow,--these were the phenomena that necessarily
attracted the attention of artists. They began by observing and
reproducing all this restlessness of the sky, this struggle which
animates the nature of Holland with a varied and fantastic life, and