The drollness of these pictures did not spring from the characters, but from an effort to amuse the public at the expense of the painted figures. As a general rule a peasant is a serious, square-built, angular fellow. For his existence he does battle with the soil; his life is no pleasure to him, but hard toil. But in these pictures he appeared as a figure who had no aim or purport; in his brain the earnestness of life was transformed into a romping game. Painters laughed at the little world which they represented. They were not the friends of man, but parodied him and transformed life into a sort of Punch and Judy show. And even when they did not approach their figures with deliberate irony, they never dreamed of plunging with any sincere love of truth into the depths of modern life. They painted modern matter without taking part in it, like good children who know nothing of the bitter facts that take place in the world. When the old Dutch painters laughed, their laughter had its historical justification. In the pictures of Ostade and Dirk Hals there is seen all the primitive exuberance and wild joy of life belonging to a people who had just won their independence and abandoned themselves after long years of war with a sensuous transport to the gladness of existence. But the smile of these modern _genre_ painters is forced, conventional, and artificial; the smile of a later generation which only took the trouble to smile because the old Dutch had laughed before them. They put on rose-coloured glasses, and through these gaudy spectacles saw only a gay masque of life, a fair but hollow deception. They allowed their heroes to pass such a merry existence that the question of what they lived upon was never touched. When they painted their tavern pictures they anxiously suppressed the thought that people who drained their great mugs so carelessly possibly had sick children at home, hungry and perishing with cold in a room without a fire. Their peasants are the favoured sons of fortune: they sowed not, neither did they reap, nor gathered into barns, but their Heavenly Father fed them. Poverty and vice presented themselves merely as amiable weaknesses, not as great modern problems. Just at this time the way was being paved for the Revolution of 1848: the people fought and suffered, and for years before literature had taken part in this struggle. Before the Revolution the battle had been between the nobility and the middle class; but now that the latter had to some extent taken the place of the nobility of earlier days, there rose the mighty problem of strife between the unproductive and the productive, between rich and poor.