[31] This statement, like all others in so short and general a summary
as alone can be here attempted, is of course only broadly true.
[32] It is interesting to note that this spirit of anti-religious
revolt is what fascinated Heine in Dutch pictures. "In the house I
lodged at in Leyden there once lived," he says, "the great Jan Steen,
whom I hold to be as great as Raphael. Even as a sacred painter Jan was
as great, and that will be clearly seen when the religion of sorrow
has passed away.... How often, during my stay, did I think myself back
for whole hours into the household scenes in which the excellent Jan
must have lived and suffered. Many a time I thought I saw him bodily,
sitting at his easel, now and then grasping the great jug, 'reflecting
and therewith drinking, and then again drinking without reflecting.' It
was no gloomy Catholic spectre that I saw, but a modern bright spirit
of joy, who after death still visited his old workroom to paint many
pictures and to drink" (Heine's _Prose Writings_, Camelot Series, p.
67).
[33] "The Dutch painters were not poets, nor the sons of poets, but
their fathers rescued a Republic from the slime and covered it with
such fair farms that I declare to this day I like Dutch cheese as
well as any, because it sends one in imagination to the many-uddered
meadows which Cuyp has embossed in gold and silver. What savoury
hares and rabbits they had in the low blunt sand-hills, and how the
Teniers boor snared them, and how the big-breech'd Gunn-Mann (I haven't
any knowledge of Dutch, but I am sure that must be the Dutch for
'sportsman') banged off his piece at them, and then how the shining
Vrow saw them in the Schopp and bargained for them. The Schopp had
often a window with a green curtain in it, and a basso-relievo of
Cupids and goats beneath, with a crack across the bas-relief, and iron
stains on the marble, and a bright brass bulging bottle on the sill,
and such pickling cabbage as makes the mouth water" (_Letters of James
Smetham_, p. 172).