It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in
many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source
of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous
homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my
fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic
suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from
cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an
old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner,
while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls
on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and
her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious
necessaries of life to her--or I turn to that village wedding, kept
between four brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance
with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged
friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and probably
with quart-pots in their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable
contentment and goodwill. "Foh!" says my idealistic friend, "what vulgar
details! What good is there in taking all these pains to give an exact
likeness of old women and clowns? What a low phase of life! What clumsy,
ugly people!"
But bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome, I
hope? I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have
not been ugly, and even among those "lords of their kind," the British,
squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions are not
startling exceptions.
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