Hippolyte Taine

“ Hence it is that, free of all trammels and guided by the keen sensibility of his organs, he has succeeded in portraying in man not merely the general structure and the abstract type which answers for classic art, but again that which is peculiar and profound in the individual, the infinite and indefinable complications of the moral being, the whole of that changeable imprint which concentrates instantaneously on a face the entire history of a soul and which Shakespeare alone saw with an equally prodigious lucidity. ”

“ Nowhere are industrial pursuits and manufactures so perfect; cloths, mirrors, sugar-refineries, porcelain, pottery, rich stuffs of silk, satin and brocade, iron-ware and ship-rigging. They supply Europe with half of its luxuries and nearly all its transportation. A thousand vessels traverse the Baltic in quest of raw material. Eight hundred boats are engaged in the herring fishery. Vast companies monopolize trade with India, China and Japan; Batavia is the centre of a Dutch empire; at this moment, 1609, Holland on the sea and in the world is what England was in the time of Napoleon. ”

“ Talent survives only among painters of accessories and flowers - Jacques de Witt, Rachel Ruysch and Van Huysum - in a small way, which requires less invention and which still lasts a few years, similar to a tenacious clump of bushes on a dry soil whereon all the great trees have died. This dies in its turn, and the ground remains vacant. It is the last evidence of the dependence which attaches individual originality to social life, and proportions the inventive faculties of the artist to the active energies of the nation. ”

“ The Germanic race is chaster, and through this quality the mind is less inclined to appreciate classic art, as it was conceived of by the Italian renaissance. Life is more difficult, more laborious, and more economic; man, therefore, accustomed to effort, to forethought and to a methodical self-government, has more trouble in comprehending the fascinating dream of a sensuous and full-blown existence. We can imagine the Dutch citizen in his home after the day's toil at his business. ”

“ Heroes become citizens; Parival notices the thirst for gain among those of the highest class. And more, "they detest duels, contentions and quarrels, and commonly assert that well-off" people never fight." They want to enjoy themselves, and the houses of the Great, which the Venetian ambassadors early in the century find so bare and so simple, become luxurious; among the leading citizens there are found tapestries, high-priced pictures and "gold and silver-plate." ”

“ He found accordingly, in the inanimate world the completest and most expressive drama, all contrasts and all conflicts, whatever is overwhelming and painfully lugubrious in night, whatever is most fleeting and saddest in ambiguous shadow, whatever is most violent and most irresistible in the irruption of daylight. This done, all that remained was to impose the human drama on the natural drama: a stage thus fashioned indicates of itself its own characters. The Greeks and Italians had known of man and of life only the straightest and tallest stems, the healthy flower blooming in sunshine ”

“ On the Kaisergracht and the Heeregracht rise grand hotels in the style of Louis XIV., while the Flemish painter who founded the academic school, Gerard de Lairesse, comes to decorate them with his learned allegories and hybrid mythologies. The national art, it is true, does not at once surrender; it is prolonged by a succession of masterpieces up to the first years of the eighteenth century: at the same time the national sentiment, aroused by humiliation and danger, excites a popular revolution, heroic sacrifices, the inundation of the country, and all the successes which afterwards ensue. ”

“ Such is painting for the public; there now remains painting for private life, that which decorates the houses of individuals, and which, in its dimensions as well as subjects, conforms to the condition and character of its purchasers. "There is no bourgeois so poor," says Parival, "who does not liberally indulge his taste this way." A baker pays six hundred florins for a single figure by Van der Meer of Delft. This, alone; with a neat and agreeable interior, constitutes their luxury; "they do not grudge money in this direction, which they rather save on their stomachs." ”

“ The roads are safe day and night even for a man traveling alone. The master is not allowed to retain a domestic against his will. Nobody is troubled on account of his religion. One is free to say what he chooses, "even of the magistrates," and to denounce them. Equality is fundamental. "Those who hold office obtain consideration rather through fair dealing than advance themselves over others by a proud bearing." A nation like this cannot fail to be prosperous: when man is both just and energetic the rest comes to him as surplus. ”

“ He bears no resemblance to our painters, expert observers taught by esthetic and philosophic books and journals, who depict the peasant and the laborer the same as the Turk and the Arab, that is to say, as curious animals and interesting specimens; who charge their landscapes with the subtleties, refinements and emotions of poets and civilians in order to rid themselves of the mute and dreamy revery of life. ”

“ At the time when the War of Independence begins the painters of the North are laboring to convert themselves into Italians like the painters of the South. After the year 1600, however, there is a complete change in painting as in other things. The rising sap of the nation gives predominance to the national instincts. Nudities are no longer visible: the ideal figure, the beautiful human animal living; in full sunshine, the noble symmetry of limbs and attitude, the grand allegoric or mythological picture is no longer adapted to Germanic taste. ”

“ Internally their government is as good as their external position is exalted. For the first time in the world conscience is free and the rights of the citizens are respected. Their state consists of a community of provinces voluntarily united, which, each within its own borders, maintains with a degree of perfection unknown till then the security of the public and the liberty of the individual. "They all love liberty," says Parival in 1660; "no one among them is allowed to beat or abuse another, while the women servants have so many privileges their masters, even, dare not strike them." ”

“ There is not to-day a province in the world which enjoys so much liberty as Holland, with so just a harmony that the little cannot be imposed upon by the great, nor the poor by the rich and opulent ... ”

“ The more we demand of human nature the more she gives; her faculties are exalted in their exercise, while the limits to her power of doing and suffering are no longer perceptible. Finally, in 1609, after thirty years warfare, the cause is won. Spain recognizes their independence, and during the whole of the seventeenth century they are to play a most prominent part in the affairs of Europe. No power can make them yield, neither Spain during a second war of twenty-seven years, nor Cromwell, nor Charles II., nor England combined with France, nor the fresh and formidable power of Louis XIV. ”

“ She has a marine of one hundred thousand sailors; in war time she can man two thousand vessels; fifty years after she maintains herself against the combined fleets of France and England; year after year the great stream of her success and prosperity is seen to increase. But its source is yet more bountiful than the stream itself; that which sustains her is an excess of courage, reason, abnegation, will and genius; "this people," say the Venetian ambassadors, "are inclined to labor and industry to such a degree that no enterprise is too difficult for them to succeed in ... ”

“ The Frieslander does not hesitate to face death in behalf of liberty. This spirited people, used to arms, of large and robust frames, calm, and intrepid in disposition, glories in her freedom notwithstanding that Philip, Duke of Burgundy, proclaims himself lord of the country. ”

“ The army is so efficient that any of its soldiers might serve as captain in an Italian army, while no Italian captain would be admitted in it as a common soldier. In culture and instruction, as well as in the arts of organization and of government, the Dutch are two centuries ahead of the rest of Europe. Scarcely a man, woman or child can be found who does not know how to read and write (1609) . Every village has a public school. In a bourgeois family all the boys read Latin and all the girls French. Many people write and converse in several foreign languages. ”

“ We realize that his imagination does not go beyond. It seems as if he, like his personages, were satisfied with mere living. Nature appears to him excellent; all he cares for is to add some arrangement, some tone side by side with another, some effect of light, some choice of attitude. ”

“ Whilst the Southern provinces, henceforth subject and Catholic, followed the Italian road in art, and represented on their canvasses the mythological epos of the grand and heroic nude figure, the provinces of the North, becoming free and Protestant, developed their life and art in another direction. The climate is more rainy and colder, and for this reason the presence of the nude is a rarer and less sympathetic thing. ”

“ A small population of traders, lost on a mud-heap at the extremity of an empire more vast and more feared than that of Napoleon resisted, subsisted and increased under the weight of the colossus who tried to crush her. ”

“ The rich interiors of Terburg and Metzu show us the new-found elegance the light silk dresses, velvet bodices, the gems, the pearls, the hangings honey-combed with gold, and the lofty chimneys with marble columns. Ancient energy relaxes. ”

“ According to the Venetian ambassadors, "they are so moderate that, even with the richest, one sees no unusual pomp or luxury. ... They make no use of retainers or silken habits, very little silver-ware, and no tapestry in their houses; the household numbers a very few and is very limited. Outside and inside, in dress and in other matters, all maintain the true moderation of small fortunes, nothing superfluous being perceptible." ”

“ His work, on this account, healthier and less poignant, appeals to less cultivated natures, and pleases the greater number. Among all these painters, two only - Ruysdael, in spiritual finesse and marked superiority of education, and Rembrandt especially, in a peculiar structure of the eye and a wonderfully wild genius - developed, beyond their age and nation, up to the common instincts which bind the Germanic nations together and pave the way for modern sentiments. ”

“ The Venetian ambassadors reported that people swarmed in the streets every hour of the day as at a fair. The city increased two-thirds; a surface equal to the size of a man's foot was worth a gold ducat. The country is as good as the city. Nowhere is the peasant so rich and so able to derive advantage from the soil ”

“ He is of a more naïve order; he is not dislocated or over-excited by excessive cerebral activity; as compared to us he is an artizan; when he takes up painting he has none other than picturesque intentions; he is less affected by unforeseen and striking detail than by simple and leading general traits. ”

“ To this primacy of speculative intellect add that of practical genius: from Barnevelt to De Witt, from William the Taciturn to William III., from Heemskerck the admiral to Von Tromp and De Ruyter, a sequence of superior men are at the head of art and business matters. It is under these circumstances that the national art appears. ”

“ The opposite instincts, in effect, predominate. Relieved of the drawback of the Southern provinces, Holland, at the end of the sixteenth century, suddenly and with extraordinary energy turns in the direction of its natural proclivities. Primitive inclinations and faculties appear with the most striking results; they are not a new birth, but simply a revelation. Good observers had detected them a hundred and fifty years before. "Friesland is free," said Pope Æneas Sylvius, [2] "lives in her own fashion, will not endure foreign empire, and has no desire to dominate over others. ”

“ His inner forces, his fundamental aptitudes, his primitive and hereditary instincts drawn out and fortified by experience continue to operate after his experience, and, when they have formed a nation they form an art. ”

“ Thus understood, painting may represent the housekeeper spinning in her rural cot, the carpenter planing on his work-bench, the surgeon dressing a rustic's arm, the cook spitting a chicken, the rich dame washing herself ”

“ They detest military and feudal arrogance, and tolerate no man who seeks to raise his head above his fellows. Their magistrates are elected annually by themselves, and are obliged to administer public matters with equity. ... They severely punish licentiousness among women ... They scarcely admit an unmarried priest lest he should corrupt the wife of another, regarding continence as a difficult thing and beyond the natural powers." Every Germanic conception of state, marriage and religion are here visible in germ, and forecast the final flowering of the republic and of Protestantism. ”

“ It manifests through colors and forms all the instincts that have just appeared in actions and in works. So long as the seven provinces of the North and the ten provinces of the South formed but one nation they had but one school of art. Engelbrecht, Lucas of Leyden, John Schoreel, the elder Heemskerck, Corneille of Harlem, Bloemaert and Goltzius paint in the same style as their contemporaries of Bruges and Antwerp. There is not as yet a distinct Dutch school, because there is not as yet a distinct Belgian school. ”