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Surprisingly, then, the Dutch art invites the cultural historian to probe below the surface of appearances. By illuminating an interior world as much as illustrating an exterior one, it moves back and forth between morals and matter, between the durable and the ephemeral, the concrete and the imaginary, in a way that was peculiarly Netherlandish...Thoré thought nature morte absurdly inappropriate a term for the heaps of fruit, flowers, or fishh that in some Dutch pictures sat carefully on white linen, on others tumbled over silver and glass. Still life was a misnomer, he wrote, for these things still live; they respire. Life in death; animation in immobility; the illusion of vitality and the reality of inertia: all these polarities seemed deliberately made to rebound off each other. Even allowing for his Catholic bias in favor of the disintegration of the mortal world, Paul Claudel, who wrote with exceptional intelligence and sensitivity on Dutch painting eighty years after Thoré, also noticed this preoccupation with what he called désagrégation- a coming apart. Still lifes, he thought, were caught (in the Dutch) at their toppunt: the zenith before the fall; the moment of perfect ripeness before the decay. Militia pieces like The Night Watch represented the désagrégation of the group; both a setting-off and a coming-apart. So that the animate and inanimate world of the Dutch was seen in a state of organic flux, forever composing, decomposing and recomposing itself. This was what in a wonderful phrase, Claudel called its élasticité secrète; the essential kinetic quality for a country where the very elements of land and water seemed indeterminately separated, and where the immense space of sky was in a state of perpetual alteration. And it was this acute sense of the mutable world that he thought gave the lie to those who supposed the Dutch lived out their existences according to some sort of clodlike bourgeois adhesion to the concrete.