And painters, under these conditions, they could not possibly become. For though it is often urged in older books on the history of art that modern _genre_ painting far outstripped the old Dutch _genre_ in incisiveness of characterisation, depth of psychological conception, and opulence of invention, these merits are bought at the expense of all pictorial harmony. In the days of Rembrandt the Dutch were painters to their fingers' ends, and they were able to be so because they appealed to a public whose taste was adequately trained to take a refined pleasure in the contemplation of works of art which had sterling merits of colour. Mieris painted the voluptuous ruffling of silken stuffs; Van der Meer, the mild light stealing through little windows into quiet chambers, and playing upon burnished vessels of copper and pewter, on majolica dishes and silver chattels, on chests and coverings; De Hoogh, the sunbeam streaming like a golden shaft of dust from some bright lateral space into a darker ante-chamber. Each one set before himself different problems, and each ran through an artistic course of development. [Illustration: WALLENDER. THE RETURN.] The more recent masters are mature from their first appearance; the Hungarians paint exactly like the Swedes and the Germans, and their pictures have ideas for the theme, but never such as are purely artistic. Like simple woodland birds, they sing melodies which are, in some ways, exceedingly pretty; but their plumage is not equal to their song. No man can be painter and _genre_ painter at the same time. The principal difference between them is this: a painter sees his picture, rather than what may be extracted from it by thought; the _genre_ painter, on the other hand, has an idea in his mind, an "invention," and plans out a picture for its expression. The painter does not trouble his head about the subject and the narrative contents; his poetry lies in the kingdom of colour. There reigns in his works--take Brouwer, for example--an authentic, uniformly plastic, and penetrative life welling from the artist's soul. But the leading motive for the _genre_ painter is the subject as such. For example, he will paint a children's festival precisely because it is a children's festival. But one must be a Jan Steen to accomplish such a task in a soundly artistic manner. The observation of these more recent painters meanwhile ventured no further than detail, and did not know what to do with the picture as a whole. They got over their difficulties because they "invented" the scene, made the children pose in the places required by the situation, and then composed these studies. The end was accomplished when the leading heroes of the piece had been characterised and the others well traced. The colouring was merely an unessential adjunct, and in a purely artistic sense not at all possible. For a picture which has come into being through a piecing together from separate copies of set models, and of