Look, for example, at the two pictures at The Hague which are reproduced opposite pages 74 and 80.  The first represents the Steen family.  The jolly Jan himself is smoking at the table; the old brewer and the elder Mrs. Steen are in the foreground.  I doubt if any picture exists in which the sense of innocent festivity is better expressed.  It is all perhaps rather a muddle:  Mrs. Steen has some hard work before her if the house is to be restored to a Dutch pitch of cleanliness and order; but how jolly every one is!  Jan himself looks just as we should expect.

The triumph of the “Oyster Feast,” on the opposite page, seems to me to be the girl kneeling in the corner.  Here is drawing indeed.  The charge brought by the mysterious painter in Balzac’s story against Pourbus, that one was unable to walk behind the figure in his picture, could never hold with Jan Steen.  His every figure stands out surrounded by atmosphere, and never more so than in the “Oyster Feast”.  Again, in the “Cat’s Dancing Lesson” (opposite page 158), what drawing there is in the girl playing the pipe, and what life in the whole scene!

It is odd that Jan Steen in Holland, and George Morland in England, both topers, should have had this secret of simple charm so highly developed:  one of nature’s curious ironies, very confusing to the moralist.  In the second Hague picture (opposite page 80) Leyden’s genial tosspot has achieved a farther triumph—­he has painted one of the most radiantly delicate figures in all art.  One must go to Italy and seek among the early Madonnas to find anything to set beside the sweet Wordsworthian character of this little Dutch girl who feeds the animals.

It was Jan Steen’s way to scamp much of every picture; but in every picture you will find one figure that could not be excelled.  Nothing probably could be more slovenly, more hideously unpainted, than, for example, the bed and the guitar-case in the “Sick Woman”—­No. 2246 at the Ryks Museum—­opposite page 22.  But I doubt if human skill has ever transcended the painting of the woman’s face, or the sheer drawing of her.  Look at her arm and hand—­Jan Steen never went wrong with arms and hands.  Look at the hands of the boy playing the pipe in the picture opposite page 74; look at the woman filling a pipe at the table.  To-day we are accustomed to pictures containing children:  they are as necessary as sunsets to picture buyers:  all our figure-painters lavish their talents upon them; but who had ever troubled to paint a real peasant child before Jan Steen?  It was this rough toper that showed the way, and no one since has ever excelled him.

Parallels have been drawn between Jan Steen and Hogarth, and there are critics who would make Jan a moralist too.  But I do not see how we can compare them.  Steen did what Hogarth could not, Hogarth did what Steen would not.  Hogarth is rarely charming, Steen is rarely otherwise.  It is not Hogarth with whom I should associate Jan, but Burns.  He is the Dutch Burns—­in colour.