I hope that, in my enumeration of the qualities of intellect and craftsmanship that make for excellence in creative Literature and in pictorial Design, I have cut the ground from under the feet of those who advocate the work of craftsmen merely--those who consider that in _technique_ lies the end as well as the beginning of success. Even to the most casual of the students of the Arts--to the most superficial observer of the means whereby the several performers may produce their effects, in story, drawing, print--it can scarcely be necessary to say that a command of _technique_ must be demanded by the severe and accurate judge. But the genius of a man of the first order--a Goethe, Coleridge, Balzac, Rembrandt, Turner--is, as it seems to me, misunderstood altogether, if the flexibility and freshness of spirit and the originality of vision are not remembered and praised when we praise too the excellent command of technical means. And in the case of Rembrandt, the character and charm of whose three hundred etchings are the theme of my discourse, the first thing to take account of is that we have to deal not only with a conjurer of the brush and a magician of the needle, but with a deep soul. An _âme d’élite_--that is the true phrase for it: a being not above human faults, but above average human excellence; a reveller in pageantry, who yet had a tender eye for the large lines of simple landscape; an artist who, with masculine perception of the import of material things, was alive, constantly and keenly, also to the concerns of the spirit; a judge of character, who understood and who dissected all that he portrayed; a man of feeling, who rendered to the full the pathos of age, of suffering, and of Death--who somehow rendered also, as in the wistful portrait of the Prince of Orange, the incommunicable pathos of Youth. Over all Rembrandt’s work, from the beginning to the end of it, as much on canvas as in drawing, as much in drawing as in etching, there reigns an absolute sincerity. It was himself that he expressed. Warped by no prejudice, modified by no fashion, his art, during the generation and a half in which he did his joyful labour--in the midst of personal triumph, in the midst, too, of personal disaster--recorded his own unaffected perception of the outward world and his own profound vision of the souls and the experiences of men. To study his work, therefore, is, if we have the wit, to have the opportunity to glean from it that which it is open to us to glean always from the greatest Classics--the richer harvest of a familiarity not alone with technical achievement, but with the great, deep way of apprehending Life and the world.