Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 127.djvu/628

616 of their long experiences of republican institutions, and their not unfrequent demonstrations against the aristocracy of birth and intellect. Few nations have changed so little in taste and character, in type of feature, and even in costume; and as it is with themselves, so it is with their country and their buildings. Go into the Trippenhuis at Amsterdam and study Van der Helst's great picture of the jovial arquebusiers celebrating the conclusion of the peace of Westphalia. There are said to be five-and-twenty life-sized portraits in it, and you can easily believe it; for in the streets of the capital at the present day you may meet any number of men with a striking family resemblance to its heroes. You can see that the great artist has treated his subject with equal force and truth. He has permitted himself no idealistic vagaries, but has seized and stereotyped, with an admirable nicety of perception, the manifold shades of the various idiosyncrasies which all preserve a distinctly national character. For that great work of his is the national painting, par excelletice. There are the representatives of those burgher worthies who thought, and toiled, and fought, playing out with patient courage a changing game, with the existence of their country for the stake, and the kings and great captains of Europe for partners, and opponents. Broad, solid faces, bearing the traces of cares and anxious thought, are expanding into jovial hilarity; and for once, in the satisfaction of a common success, small civic differences are forgotten, and good-fellowship is in the ascendant. The hands in the painting, as has often been remarked, are to the full as characteristic as the heads: in spite of the rich ruffles here and there, you could never mistake them for the property of courtiers of Versailles or St. James', or even of patrician merchants of Venice or Genoa. They are Dutch all over — Dutch of the well-to-do burgher class, who have lived well and worked hard. The chamber is simple, as becomes the town-hall of an unpretending nation of citizens and graziers, who were found to regulate their life and conduct by the tenets of an austere religion. Yet their riches would scarcely be worth the having did they not occasionally parade the outward and visible signs of them. Carved wardrobes and richly-chased iron-bound chests, containing handsome jewels and raiment, have always been handed down as heirlooms, even in peasant households; and it is not on so triumphant an occasion as the present that the chief magistrate of the wealthiest of the Dutch cities would be found wanting. Hence all that pomp and personal bravery — the ruffles, the rings, and the golden chains of office — the magnificent doublets, slashed in velvet and brocaded in gold. There are rich drinking-vessels, too; for solid plate as a sign of wealth in reserve is almost indispensable to good credit: besides, it is a mere locking-up of capital; for the precious metals will keep their value, although you may have to lie out of your interest on them. But the menu of the banquet is more substantial than refined: there are few of those entrees and entremets that would be served elsewhere in court rejoicings to tempt the sated palate. There are huge joints, in keeping with the massive beakers — joints that lay a good foundation for drinking and smoking, and to which active men of healthy appetite, celebrating a high occasion by some pardonable excess, might cut and come again.

If we leave the Amsterdam banquet-room — where perhaps we have already lingered too long — we shall find that the pictures in other styles are equally suggestive in the way of preparing us for a tour of Holland. Paul Potter's "Young Bull," with his slightly "raised" look, contrasting the placid rumination of the cow standing near him, may be met with any day now in any retired bit of meadow. Having found a strain of cattle that fatten and milk well in an existence that is necessarily amphibious, the Dutch seem to have made no attempt to change the breed by the importation of foreigners, who might take less kindly to the climate. It is true the milk is rather watery than creamy, but that, is to be expected; and then, as the diluted fluid is given in abundance, there is always a market for the surplus stock with those English dairymen who desire to defraud their customers conscientiously. And the man looking over the fence in Potter's picture is as true to existing nature as the fence itself or the cattle. Rembrandt, Hals, and a host of imitators, with their wonderful power of managing colour, multiply figures and faces that you recognize everywhere as famihar acquaintances. Buildings such as you may still see, with their long narrow windows and their high-pitched roofs are thrown in to form the backgrounds. Ruysdael and his inferiors are fertile in "bits" where the dense masses of deep green vegetation draw extraordinary vigour from the rains and the fogs; or else they give their talents scope on the broad meadows, 