But this is not the place for the sad reflections which are awakened in
our minds on examining the records of him whose name the world now
glorifies and raises to the skies. Better to honour the great master
who, for so many centuries, has held the world in awed admiration. There
is no need to-day to drag Rembrandt forth from the obscurity of the past
to save him from oblivion; we were not obliged to cleanse his image from
the dust of ages before showing to the world this unequalled genius to
whom Holland proudly points as one of her own sons.
On the contrary, never was Rembrandt's art valued so highly as it is
now. Archives and documents are searched for details about his life and
works. We want to know all about his life, and are anxious to share his
inmost feelings in prosperity and adversity. The houses where he lived
are marked down and bought by art-lovers. At the present time Rembrandt
is in the zenith of his glory. Gold loses its value where his pictures
are concerned. Fortunes are spent to secure the most insignificant of
his works; people travel across continents to see them; and criticism,
which for long years did little more than snarl at Rembrandt, has for
nearly fifty years been dumb.
It is remarkable that none of the great painters have, in the course of
years, been subjected to so much criticism as Rembrandt. And
notwithstanding all the things which have been said about the
improbability of the scene, and the exaggeration of the dark background,
the "Night Patrol" is now, as it ever was and ever will be, the "World's
wonder," as our English neighbours say.
During his lifetime there were people who condemned Rembrandt because he
refused to follow in the footsteps of the old Italian painters, because
he persisted in painting nature as he saw it.
To us such a reproach seems strange, yet it is quite true. Even during
the last years of Rembrandt's life a growing dissatisfaction with the
existing ideas on art and literature had taken possession of the Dutch
mind. People developed a morbid taste for everything classical; and when
I read in the prose works and poems of these days the Latinised names
and the constant allusions to Greek gods and goddesses and mythological
personages, so strangely out of place under our northern sky, I am
filled with disgust.
It was fortunate, indeed, that Rembrandt always felt strong in his own
conviction and only followed his own views. For many years after his
death, even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of
art critics raised objections against the dangerous theories of which
his pictures were the expression. Again and again they attacked his
technical treatment; none of them ever grasped its deeper, fuller
meaning.
Happily those days are far behind us. A great number of books and
pamphlets have been published on Rembrandt during the last fifty years,
and they are almost unanimous in their praise and admiration of the
great master. The more liberal feelings of the modern world have
achieved some victories in the realms of art as well as elsewhere. We
moderns feel that the apparent shortcomings and exaggerations are
nothing but the inevitable peculiarities attendant upon genius. And we
even go so far that we would not have him be without a single one of
them, for fear of losing the slightest trait in the character of the
great man whose every movement roused our intellectual faculties.
So Rembrandt has been raised in our days to the pinnacle of fame which
is his by right; the festival of his tercentenary was acknowledged by
the whole civilised world as the natural utterance of joy and pride of
our small country in being able to count among its children the great
Rembrandt.
I finish,--"with the pen, but not with the heart!" For if I should go on
until the inclination to add more to what I have written here should
fail me, my readers would have tired of me long before I had tired of my
subject. I am thinking of that rare gem, the portrait of Jan Six--of the
Louvre, of Cassel, of Brunswick, of what not!
May these pages convey to the reader the fact that I have always looked
upon Rembrandt as the true type of an artist, free, untrammelled by
traditions, genial in all he did; in short, a figure in whom all the
great qualities of the old Republic of the United Provinces were
concentrated and reflected.