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 [Illustration: _Fig. 2.--Peasant with a Pointed Cap. By Ostade. B. 3._] 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.