Pains and patience have been wasted on the secret of Rembrandt's method of etching and printing; in trying to discover his tools and his manner of using them, so as to achieve with him those contrasts of soft shadow and radiant light. Vain quest of technical tricks where, really, there is no more than a style born of imagination, and, like it, inspired from above! It may be said that with Rembrandt, as with great musical composers, the harmonic system is so closely allied to the melodic idea, that analysis, if not impossible, is at least superfluous. It sometimes happens—before a Correggio, for instance—that the charm of the painting affects one in a manner abstract enough to produce a sort of musical sensation. Though it does not appear that the art of engraving could be endowed with a similar expansive force, yet Rembrandt's etchings may almost be said to possess it. They give the feeling of undefined aspirations rather than the limited likeness of things; the spectator is touched by the mysterious meaning of these passionate visions, rather than by the form in which they are conveyed. The impression received is so keen that it stifles any trivial wish to criticise, and certain details which would be painful elsewhere are here not even displeasing, inasmuch as no one would dream of requiring a mathematical explanation of the special conditions of the subject, or of the skill of workmanship which the artist has displayed Before the "Sacrifice of Abraham," the "Tobit," the "Lazarus," and all the other soul-speaking masterpieces who would pause to consider the strangeness or the vulgarity of the personages and their apparel? Only the critic, who, unwitting of the rest, would begin by examining with a magnifying glass the workmanship of the ray of light which illumines the "Hundred Guilder Piece," the "Annunciation," or the "Pilgrimage to Emmaus."
Fig. 65.—REMBRANDT.
Tobit's Blindness.
Fig. 66.—REMBRANDT.
Jan Lutma.
Rembrandt's method is, so to speak, supersensuous. At times he lightly touches his plate, and at times he attacks as at a venture; at others he skims the surface and caresses it with an exquisite refinement, a magical dexterity. In his lights he breaks the line of the contour, but only to resume and boldly accentuate it in his shadows; or he reverses the method, and in the one, as in the other case, succeeds infallibly in fixing, satisfying, and convincing the attention. He uses engraver's tools and methods as Bossuet uses words, subduing them to the needs of his thought, and constraining them to express it, careless of fine finish as of trivial subtlety. Like Bossuet, too, he composes out of the most incongruous elements, out of the trivial and the lofty, the commonplace and the heroic, a style invariably eloquent; and from the mingling of these heterogeneous elements there springs an admirable harmony of result.
Fig. 67.—REMBRANDT.