In the Italian painters the subject
passed unperceived in a pomp of colour or a Pagan apotheosis of
humanity; in the Dutchmen it is dispensed with altogether. No longer
do we read of miracles or martyrdoms, but of the most ordinary
incidents of everyday life. Turning over the first catalogue to hand
of Dutch pictures, I read: "View of a Plain, with shepherd, cows, and
sheep in the foreground"; "The White Horse in the Riding School"; "A
Lady Playing the Virginal"; "Peasants Drinking Outside a Tavern";
"Peasants Drinking in a Tavern"; "Peasants Gambling Outside a Tavern";
"Brick-making in a Landscape"; "The Wind-mill"; "The Water-mill";
"Peasants Bringing Home the Hay". And so on, and so on. If we meet
with a military skirmish, we are not told where the skirmish took
place, nor what troops took part in the skirmish. "A Skirmish in a
Rocky Pass" is all the information that is vouchsafed to us. Italian
art is invention from end to end, in Dutch art no slightest trace of
invention is to be found; one art is purely imaginative, the other is
plainly realistic; and yet, at an essential point, the two arts
coincide; in neither does the subject prevail; and if Dutch art is
more truthful than Italian art, it is because they were unimaginative,
stay-at-home folk, whose feet did not burn for foreign travel, and
whose only resource was, therefore, to reproduce the life around them,
and into that no element of curiosity could come.
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