philosophy of life. The realism of the Northern schools seems vulgar, puritanic, detestable. It is the artist's business, we cry, to paint sunshine, to lift us out of the commonplace into the ideal. And what ideal can there be in the everlasting painting of broomsticks with which Gerard Douw, Netscher, Ferburg, and Metzu busy themselves?
One says this in the Louvre or in Venice; and then one goes again to the galleries of the Hague and Amsterdam, and, brought face to face with Dutch art on Dutch soil, one modifies one's judgment with a new thought. This is democracy in art. The republic of Holland demanded the spirit of her people even in her pictures. All her art is national, secular, prosaic as democracy. Her painters were asked to photograph, before photographs were invented, the country and the people, the cattle, the houses, the landscape, all sand and sea and sky. No classic myths, no nudities, no raptures or visions, no angels or cherubs,—only plain men and women in stiff and ungraceful costumes, and an infinite number of cups, plates, kettles, pans, flower-pots, and broomsticks. They do not want big pictures, but tiny "cabinets" representing the life about them,—the village tavern, the peddler, the school, the cow-doctor, the rustic wedding, the interiors of their small, exquisitely-neat houses. It must be owned that often these pictures lack refinement, that they are wonderfully realistic representations of subjects the reverse of dignified,—that, in short, they are democratic. There is, of course, something of this in the art of all countries,—Murillo paints beggar-boys, and Velasquez water-sellers, and Caravaggio dice-players,—but nowhere else is democracy the key-note. Everywhere else it is in the background; here it is first.
A recent writer has pointed out that the gospel according to Rembrandt is distinctly the gospel of the poor, that, true to democracy, a stern realism marks his representations of the divine life, and that of the parables he chooses to illustrate the "Good Samaritan" and the "Hired Laborers" are the most noteworthy. In the latter especially the text receives a modern reading; and the haughty master, turning from his tired and downtrodden workmen with the scornful "Have I not power to do what I will with my own?" is the type of the aristocratic oppressor. Almost is there the leaven of communism in this arraignment of the rich before the poor.
One sees here, therefore, what democracy and realism can give us. The one must follow the other, for common things would have no æsthetic value if not accurately painted. Correggio's saints may straddle, and prophets and cherubs perched on clouds show sometimes arms and legs a trifle out of drawing, with no great loss to the general effect; but a kettle out of line in a Dutch interior would offend us. One sees perhaps more,—a prophecy of the new school of literature, which will not blink facts and demands photographic accuracy of the most vulgar details as the price of perfection. The greater part of these pictures are wanting in moral interest, for the school which has most occupied itself with the real world is the one which has most despised moral meanings. But is there not an echo of this disdain in the modern literary disciples of the same school? And is it not noteworthy that while modern art, taking these same democratic subjects, makes in Frère, in Bonheur, in Jules Breton, in Millet, a hymn to labor, touches them with poetry, and makes us feel their pathos, modern literature is inclined to follow the Dutch traditions, cares not for the soul but for the body, makes the technique everything, and declares that morals have no place in literary art? Is that the future of democracy? The best of Dutch art proves that it need not be.
One feels this best before those immense syndic pictures of which each Dutch museum has at least half a dozen. The work of the artist was not to paint individuals as such, not the simple burgher, but the citizen in some corporate capacity. Hence five, ten, twenty persons are painted together,—a civic guard, a company of arquebusiers, a
