employed to render it and is so intimately connected with the tone that we may truthfully say that with them light and colour are one.  In the Night Watch there is nothing of the kind.  Tone disappears in light as it does in shade.  The shade is blackish, the light whitish.  Everything is brilliant or dull, radiant or obscure, by an alternative effacement of the colouring principle.  Here we have different values rather than contrasted tones.  And this is so true that a fine engraving, a good drawing, a Mouilleron lithograph, or a photograph will give an exact idea of the picture in its important effects, and a copy simply in gradations from light to dark would destroy none of its arabesque.

What is his execution in the picture before us?  Does he treat a stuff well?  No.  Does he express it ingeniously, or with liveliness, with its seams, folds, breaks, and tissue.  Assuredly not.  When he places a feather at the brim of a hat, does he give it the lightness and floating grace that we see in Van Dyck, or Hals, or Velasquez?  Does he indicate by a little gloss on a dead ground, in their form, or feeling of the body, the human physiognomy of a well adjusted coat, rubbed by a movement or worn with use?  Can he, with a few masterly touches and taking no more trouble than things are worth, indicate lace-work, or suggest jewellery, or rich embroidery?

In the Night Watch we have swords, muskets, partisans, polished casques, damascened cuirasses, high boots, tied shoes, a halberd with its fluttering blue silk, a drum, and lances.  Imagine with what ease, with what carelessness, and with what a nimble way of making us believe in things without insisting upon them, Rubens, Veronese, Van Dyck, Titian himself, and lastly Frans Hals, that matchless workman, would have summarily indicated and superbly carried off all these accessories.  Do you maintain in good faith that Rembrandt in the Night Watch excels in treating them thus?  I pray you, look at the halberd that the little lieutenant Ruijtenberg holds at the end of his stiff arm; look at the foreshortened steel, look especially at the floating silk, and tell me if an artist of that value has ever allowed himself more pitifully to express an object that ought to spring forth beneath his brush without his being aware of it.  Look at the slashed sleeves that have been so highly praised, the ruffles, the gloves; examine the hands!  Consider well how in their affected or unaffected negligence their form is accentuated and their foreshortening is expressed.  The touch is thick, embarrassed, awkward, and blundering.  We might truly say that it goes astray, and that applied crosswise when it should be applied lengthwise, made flat when any other than he would have rounded it, it confuses instead of determining the form....

At length I come to the incontestable interest of the picture, to Rembrandt’s great effort in a new field:  I am going to speak of the application on a large scale of that way of looking at things which is proper to him and which is called chiaroscuro.