Another marked feature of Dutch painting was to be color.  Besides the generally accepted reasons that in a country where there are no mountainous horizons, no varied prospects, no great coup d’oeil,—­no forms, in short, that lend themselves to design,—­the artist’s eye must inevitably be attracted by color; and that this might be peculiarly the case in Holland, where the uncertain light, the fog-veiled atmosphere, confuse and blend the outlines of all objects, so that the eye, unable to fix itself upon the form, flies to color as the principal attribute that nature presents to it,—­besides these reasons, there is the fact that in a country so flat, so uniform, and so gray as Holland, there is the same need of color as in southern lands there is need of shade.  The Dutch artists did but follow the imperious taste of their countrymen, who painted their houses in vivid colors, as well as their ships, and in some places the trunks of their trees and the palings and fences of their fields and gardens; whose dress was of the gayest, richest hues; who loved tulips and hyacinths even to madness.  And thus the Dutch painters were potent colorists, and Rembrandt was their chief.

Realism, natural to the calmness and slowness of the Dutch character, was to give to their art yet another distinctive feature,—­finish, which was carried to the very extreme of possibility.  It is truly said that the leading quality of the people may be found in their pictures; viz., patience.  Everything is represented with the minuteness of a daguerreotype; every vein in the wood of a piece of furniture, every fibre in a leaf, the threads of cloth, the stitches in a patch, every hair upon an animal’s coat, every wrinkle in a man’s face; everything finished with microscopic precision, as if done with a fairy pencil, or at the expense of the painter’s eyes and reason.  In reality a defect rather than an excellence, since the office of painting is to represent not what is, but what the eye sees, and the eye does not see everything; but a defect carried to such a pitch of perfection that one admires, and does not find fault.  In this respect the most famous prodigies of patience were Dow, Mieris, Potter, and Van der Heist, but more or less all the Dutch painters.

But realism, which gives to Dutch art so original a stamp and such admirable qualities, is yet the root of its most serious defects.  The artists, desirous only of representing material truths, gave to their figures no expression save that of their physical sentiments.  Grief, love, enthusiasm, and the thousand delicate shades of feeling that have no name, or take a different one with the different causes that give rise to them, they express rarely, or not at all.  For them the heart does not beat, the eyes do not weep, the lips do not quiver.  One whole side of the human soul, the noblest and highest, is wanting in their pictures.  More:  in their faithful reproduction of everything,