Chapter II

Treating, as it does, of so considerable a number of masters, the present monograph aims at indicating, as far as space would allow, something of the relations between them, and at tracing the interdependence of the various schools. To have taken the etchers separately and considered their work apart, would have meant the compilation of a tediously crowded catalogue.

But when once the masters are approached from the historical side, it is impossible to treat them simply as etchers. It is as painters that they influenced and were influenced. Consequently some account has had to be taken of them as painters. And since some who produced little, and that little not very remarkable, in etching, are yet of great significance as artists, it has been impossible to treat each man simply on his merits as an etcher. Hence, for instance, much more space has been devoted to Ruisdael than the quality or the amount of his work on copper strictly merits.

The lives of most of these artists have, till recently, rested on a somewhat shifting foundation. Dates of birth and death have fluctuated in various authors with easy rapidity. Of some, even now, nothing certain is known.

But the researches of Dr. van der Willigen, Dr. Bredius, Dr. Hofstede de Groot, and others in the archives of the Dutch cities have proved much, disproved more, and set the whole subject in a clearer light. To Dr. Bredius’ _Meisterwerke der königlichen Gemälde-Galerie im Haag_, and

still more to his _Meisterwerke des Rijks Museum zu Amsterdam_, the writer is under special obligation, which he desires most gratefully to acknowledge.

But in spite of many readjustments of chronology, materials for the lives of these artists are singularly meagre. Doubtless their lives were in most cases extremely simple. Many never left their native town, or exchanged it only for a home a few miles off: Haarlem for Amsterdam, or Amsterdam for the Hague. Others made the journey to Italy, or spent some years in France or Germany; but here the journey itself is sometimes only a matter of inference from the painter’s works. Birth, marriage, and death: there is little beyond these, and the dates of their principal productions, to record about many of these men.

Of the whole social life of the Holland of that day we know practically nothing but what its paintings tell us. Had those paintings not survived, what a blank would be left in our conceptions of this country and its history! Most countries that have left us great art have left us also great literature, and each is the complement of the other. The marbles of the Parthenon have not only the enchantment of their incomparable sculpture, but bring to our minds a thousand recollections, gathered in the fields of literature. In a less degree, it is the same with our enjoyment of Italian painting. It is one aspect of the flowering time of the Renaissance, but not the only aspect, nor the only material we have for investigating and realising that movement.

There was, no doubt, a certain amount of literature produced in seventeenth-century Holland; but it does not penetrate beyond Holland. Besides the names of Spinoza and of Grotius, who are great but not in literature proper, not a single author’s name is familiar, nor any book eminent enough to become a classic in translations. And it is certainly not for the sake of the literature that a foreigner learns Dutch. Hence a certain remoteness in our ideas about Holland, although it lies so near us: a remoteness emphasised in England by the general ignorance of the language.

When one looks at a picture by Watteau, one seems to be joining in the conversation of those adorable ladies and their gallants; half instinctively, one seems to divine the witty phrase, the happy compliment that is on the speaker’s lips. But the conversations of Ter Borch and of Metsu are mute and distant. We hear the jovial laughter of Hals, but we cannot divine his jests and oaths. And Van de Velde’s merry skating companies, and Ostade’s tavern-haunting peasants, and the family groups in their gravely furnished rooms, rich with a sober opulence, of De Hooch or of Jan Steen, all, in spite of their human touches and their gaiety, affect us with a kind of haunting silence.

Mr. Pater, in one of the most finished and charming of his Imaginary Portraits, _Sebastian van Storck_, called up a picture of the social life of these times, very suggestive and delightful; but it was noteworthy, how much of it was merely a reconstruction, in words, of impressions from the contemporary pictures.

After all, however, our ignorance may not cost us much. We judge the painters as painters, and by their works; we are not distracted by

other circumstances about them, and that is an advantage. They may have had theories about painting, but fortunately we do not know them, except by inference from their practice.

And if seventeenth-century Holland has only expressed herself in painting, she has known how to express herself with marvellous fulness. Never before, and never perhaps since, has pictorial art been so universally the speech of a nation; never has it been more various and abundant. Instead of being the handmaid of religion or the adornment of a court, it is now for the first time itself: full-blooded, active, exuberant, scorning nothing, attempting everything. Modern with all the added richness that the modern spirit allows in life and art, it reflects the just pride and joy of a great nation arrived, through incredible struggle and privation, at victory and peace.

Yet more wonderful even than this abundance is the fine tact, the instinctive judgment, which guided such profuse creation.

For in all the great painters of Holland there is the same sure choice of subjects proper to painting, the same sure avoidance of what does not lend itself so much to painting as to some other expression of art. Religious pictures in the old sense, pictures intended for churches, were forbidden by the Protestant spirit. No court existed to patronise the painters. Yet they seemed unconscious of being cut off from any province. In the life around them they found overflowing material, and their choice of subject was invariably simple, never a complex product like the engravings of Dürer, half literary in their interest; never anecdotic or moral. An excellent tradition was begun, which lasted through the century.

Nor was this tradition due to the creative impulse of one man. There was nothing in Holland parallel to the renovation, the re-creation rather, of Flemish art by Rubens. Rembrandt came near the beginning, but he did not start the period. One cannot say precisely how this great tradition began; it seems as if the flowering time came all at once throughout the country, with the mysterious suddenness of spring. Till the seventeenth century, it was Italy from which Dutch artists took their inspiration, but henceforward it is a native impulse. Only men of lesser importance went to paint at Rome, and even then they took there more than they brought away.