A bad wife rails at her tipsy husband in the tavern with all her might. In a scene of this kind we have only put before us, as I have already remarked, the bald facts that the man is a dissipated brute and the woman a rating wench. If we look at the Dutch masters in this light we shall no longer entertain the view that the art of painting should have said goodbye to such subjects altogether, and merely confined itself to depicting the gods of old, myths, and fables, or even Madonna pictures, crucifixions, martyrs, popes, and saints of both sexes. What is a vital ingredient of every work of art is inseparable also from painting, and this is the observance of what generally concerns our humanity, the spirit and characterization of man, in other words what man is and what _each_ individual is. This vital grasp of the conscious life of human nature and the external forms of its appearance, this naive delight and artistic freedom, this freshness and cheerfulness of imaginative sympathy, this absolute directness of execution is what constitutes the poetry that underlies the work of the majority of the Dutch painters of this period. In their paintings we may study and acquaint ourselves with human nature and mankind. Nowadays, however, our artist only too frequently will confront us with portraits and historical pictures, at which we have only to cast a bare glance, and we see that, while flatly contradicting the wildest dream of what is possible in mankind or anyone in particular, he neither knows aught at all about man or his natural colour, nor yet the modes of composition[375] in which we may justly express that humanity[376]. [Footnote 214: _Die gesammte Menschen-brust._] [Footnote 215: _Die in sich gediegene Individualität des Gottes._] [Footnote 216: _Betrachtung_, here implying thought rather than vision.] [Footnote 217: That is a unity which dissolves all difference.] [Footnote 218: _Als Inneres._] [Footnote 219: _Als Reflexion in sich._ Probably Hegel means simply the ultimate fact of self-conscious life--which is to find itself in Nature as the antithesis of the synthetic unity of the ego. This is developed in the latter half of the sentence.] [Footnote 220: Lit., "Is not an essentially persistent and stereotyped (_Erstarrtes_, stiffened) individual."] [Footnote 221: Less than sculpture.] [Footnote 222: He may mean type of art generally, but I think the reference here is simply to painting. The passage is an important one.] [Footnote 223: I presume Hegel uses the word _seeligkeit_ in the ordinary sense, not "soulfulness." The close relation with _Schmertz_ necessitates this. But the spelling suggests the other interpretation.] [Footnote 224: Which is absent in the classical treatment.] [Footnote 225: That is, the creative artist.]