Meindert Hobbema

“ His works, which were neglected in his lifetime, now fetch much more than their weight in gold. Sums as large as four thousand pounds have been paid more than once for a Hobbema, yet his name was not found in any dictionary of art or artists for more than a century after his death. The English were the first to acknowledge Hobbema's merit, and nine-tenths of his works are in England, where he is the most popular Dutch landscape painter. But he is said by judges to have less invention and less poetic sensibility than his contemporary and friend Ruysdael. ”

“ Nature, gentle and friendly to man, which he saw with a simplicity and a clearness approached by no other painter, attracted and charmed him above all else, in contrast to his contemporary and friend, J. Ruysdael, who, led away by heart-breaking melancholy, would never see any side of her but the energetic and lugubrious, the sad and troubled.
In his forests, on the banks of his ponds and rivers, in the neighbourhood of his huts and mills, Hobbema wants to have company; so he has sown his landscapes with figures, and they are constantly animated with people and animals. ”

“ Pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael
When a man becomes famous many people claim his acquaintance, and often many places his birthplace. In Hobbema's case it has never been decided whether he was born in the little town of Koeverdam, or in the city of Haarlem or in Amsterdam. Nor is it quite certain when he was born; but what he did afterward, we are all acquainted with.
No one knows much about the life of this artist, but his master was doubtless his uncle, van Ruisdael. Hobbema was dead a hundred years before the world acknowledged his genius, thus he reaped no reward for hard work and ambition. ”

“ It may be that Hobbema's failure to get money and honours, or at the very least, kind recognition as a great artist, while he lived, influenced his painting, and made him see mostly the sad side of beauty, nor it is certain that his landscapes give one a strange feeling of sadness and desolation, even when he paints a scene of plenty and fulness. ”

“ This fine picture also is somewhat unusual in subject for Hobbema, who was ordinarily content with humble village scenes. It affords a good instance of his literal truth to nature. M. Michel, in his monograph on the painter, gives side by side a reproduction of it and a sketch from his own pen of the ruins as they exist to-day, which, with the exception of the addition of a modern barbaric bell-turret and some battlements, preserve almost the identical appearance which Hobbema portrayed upwards of two centuries ago. ”

“ The pervading tone of Ruysdael is dark and sombre; that of Hobbema is drowsy and still. A second characteristic of Hobbema is his fondness for oak foliage, and a certain "nigglingness" in his execution of it. See e.g. 832, 833. "They (Hobbema and Both) can paint oak leafage faithfully, but do not know where to stop, and by doing too much, lose the truth of all, lose the very truth of detail at which they aim, for all their minute work only gives two leaves to nature's twenty. They are evidently incapable of even thinking of a tree, much more of drawing it, except leaf by leaf ”

“ Nothing is more disappointing than to find that in Hobbema’s case chronology and signed pictures substantially contradict each other. According to the latter his practice lasted from 1650 to 1689; according to the former his birth occurred in 1638, his death as late as 1709. ”

“ Now, however, his canvases are highly valued, and a work which before went begging at thirty dollars would probably fetch a thousand times as much. Hobbema ranks next to Ruisdael as a landscape-painter. Most of his works are in England. ”

“ De Corpore, treating physical bodies; De Homine, treating man as a psychological individual; De Cive, treating man as the citizen of a State. Hobbes’s philosophy was therefore to be a universal philosophy, and he intended to bring his works out in logical order—first, the science of physics, then of human nature, and last of society. However, the growing disturbances in the political world at that time moved him to publish several treatises on politics first, and his physics and psychology more than fifteen years later. ”

“ Hobbes was one of those powerful, limited, and, as they are called, positive minds, so common in England, of the school of Swift and Bentham, efficacious and remorseless as an iron machine. Hence we find in him a method and style of surprising [Pg 147] dryness and vigor, most adapted to build up and pull down; hence a philosophy which, by the audacity of its teaching, has placed in an undying light one of the indestructible phases of the human mind. ”

“ Yet Hobbes, perhaps, never suspected the arms he was placing in the hands of wretched men, when he furnished them with such fundamental positions as, that “Man is naturally an evil being; that he does not love his equal; and only seeks the aid of society for his own particular purposes.” He would at least have disowned some of his diabolical disciples. One of them, so late as in 1774, vented his furious philosophy in “An Essay on the Depravity and Corruption of Human Nature, wherein the Opinions of Hobbes, Mandeville, Helvetius, &c. are supported against Shaftesbury, Hume, Sterne, &c. ”

“ Without the relentless logic of Hobbes, the acuteness of Hume, the moral insight of T.H. Green, he has a large part of the faculties of each. He brought to the political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity, such as no other statesman has ever possessed. His flashes of insight are things that go, as few men have ever gone, into the hidden deeps of political complexity. Unquestionably, his speculation is rather that of the orator in the tribune than of the thinker in his study. ”

“ Born in Birmingham, England. He came to the United States in 1840 and settled in Taunton, Mass. Until 1853 he followed the profession of ornamental painting, then studied in the life-class of the Pennsylvania Academy at Philadelphia. He removed to California and painted landscapes.
Minderhout Hobbema (1638-1709) .
Born at Coeverden, Holland, and resided at Amsterdam. He was a friend of Ruysdael and their styles are similar.
William Hogarth (1697-1764) .
Born at London. His father was a schoolmaster, who apprenticed him to an engraver, after which he entered the Academy of St. Martin's Lane. ”

“ He extended its application from the physical over upon the mental realm, and thereby reduced the mental world to physics. He stated this mechanical principle in two parts: all that exists is body; all that occurs is motion. Hobbes applies this assumption to the physical world and it gives him materialism;20 he applies it to knowledge and it gives him sensationalism;21 he applies it to the will and it gives him determinism;22 he applies it to morals and politics and it gives him naturalism.23 Body is nature; body is everything. Body is the first term leading through man up to the State. ”

“ Thus when Hobbes, with a true instinct, would have laid deep the foundations of atheism and despotism together, resolving all right into might, and not merely robbing men, if he could, of the power, but denying to them the duty, of obeying God rather than man, his sophisms could stand only so long as it was not perceived that 'compulsion' and 'obligation,' with which he juggled, conveyed two ideas perfectly distinct, indeed disparate, in kind. ”

“ The admirers of Hobbes are very zealous in defending him from the charge of being the apostle of infidelity, and acccuse the advocates of Christianity and man's spiritual nature of maligning him; but the bast proof is that the Encyclopéedists of France, the Illuminati and Strausians of Germany, claim him as their groat Goliath, and draw their strongest shafts out of his quiver and those of his disciples, Tindal and Hume. They are the English skeptics, who are, in fact, the fathers of French and German skepticism with all its consequences. ”

“ The character of Hobbes will, however, serve a higher moral design. The force of his intellect, the originality of his views, and the keenest sagacity of observation, place him in the first order of minds; but he has mortified, and then degraded man into a mere selfish animal. From a cause we shall discover, he never looked on human nature but in terror or in contempt. The inevitable consequence of that mode of thinking, or that system of philosophy, is to make the philosopher the abject creature he has himself imagined; and it is then he libels the species from his own individual experience. ”

“ Hobbes was the first great English writer who dealt with the science of government from the ground, not of tradition, but of reason. It was in his treatment of man in the stage of human developement which he supposed to precede that of society that he came most roughly into conflict with the accepted beliefs. Men, in his theory, were by nature equal, and their only natural relation was a state of war. It was no innate virtue of man himself which created human society out of this chaos of warring strengths. Hobbes in fact denied the existence of the more spiritual sides of man's nature. ”

“ I have read of few kings deprived of their power by their own subjects that have lived any long time after it, for reasons that every man is able to conjecture.”
He closes with a very odd image of the most cynical contempt:—
“Mr. Hobbes has been always far from provoking any man, though, when he is provoked, you find his pen as sharp as yours. All you have said is error and railing; that is, stinking wind, such as a jade lets fly when he is too hard girt upon a full belly. I have done. I have considered you now, but will not again, whatsoever preferment any of your friends shall procure you.” ”

“ Finally, Paul Elmer More, the American, taking the cue from Fouillée, finds the germs of many of Nietzsche's doctrines in Hobbes, and then proceeds to a somewhat elaborate discussion of the mutations of ethical theory during the past two centuries, showing how Hume superimposed the idea of sympathy as a motive upon Hobbes' idea of self-interest, and how this sympathy theory prevailed over that of self-interest, and degenerated into sentimentalism, and so opened the way for Socialism and other such delusions, and how Nietzsche instituted a sort of Hobbesian revival. ”

“ He saw how deeply the competitive instinct enters into man's intellectual and moral constitution; how much positive right depends on might; and he saw these truths so clearly that he ignored others which modify and complicate them. And Hobbes' style is the image of his thought, lucid, precise, ordered,—no prose of the century is more so,—but wanting in nuances and harmonies; not so complex ever as Descartes', but a little hard, and wearing after a time; never irradiated with poetry like Bacon's, though he has some of his command of felicitous figure and aphorism ”

“ Hobbes's philosophy of human nature is not amiss as a philosophy of Hobbes's own human nature. Without passions or imagination self, and steering bis own course through life by the mere calculations of an enlightened selfishness, one half of the broad mass of humanity was to him nothing better than a blank. ”

“ If, therefore, by our natural condition, Hobbes means our early and sensational condition, it appears to me that a good ground of defence may be obtained for his averment that the natural and primitive state of mankind is a bellum omnium contra omnes. Hobbes's error lay in his not paying sufficient regard to the provision I just mentioned. He does not allow due weight to the principles which man develops subsequently to his sensational manifestations. ”

“ Jeremiah Van Orton could always think better among his beautiful collection of paintings. He went to the drawing-room and drew up a chair before a Hobbema landscape. There he remained until he had planned all the details of his vengeance.
In the restaurant of the Hotel Lafayette, Michael Bonze sat across the table from his friend, Pierre Vanneau, and cursed the age in which they both were born.
"What does art mean in the Twentieth Century?" he asked rhetorically. "Nothing! People talk about the dynamic beauty of a new stream-lined toilet seat or the Empire State Building. ”

“ For the cynical emphasis with which he insists upon this truth, the name and reputation of the philosopher Hobbes have suffered much. Yet his doctrine, however hyperbolically expressed, is true in substance. Man is by nature a fighting animal, and force is the ultima ratio, not of kings alone, but of all mankind. Without “a common power to keep them all in awe,” it is impossible for men to cohere in any but the most primitive forms of society. ”

“ There seems to be one exception to the truth of this general remark: for there is one scheme or definition of liberty, in which many, if not most, of the advocates of necessity have concurred; that is, the definition of Hobbes. As the current of a river, says he, is free to flow down its channel, provided there be no obstruction in the way; so the human will, though compelled to act by causes over which it has no control, is free, provided there be no external impediment to prevent its volition from passing into effect. ”

“ I have spoken more than once of Fitzjames's respect for Hobbes. For Hobbes's theory of sovereignty, and even its application by the ultramontane De Maistre, had always an attraction for him. Hobbes, with his logical thoroughness, seems to carry the foundations of policy down to the solid rock-bed of fact. Life is a battle; it is the conflict of independent atoms; with differing aims and interests. The strongest, in one way or other, will always rule. ”