Style, he will say, can transform anything into gold. Take a convenient example. Should Rembrandt in one of his pen-drawings have had a more interesting type of architecture before him for subject matter, in place of the country mills by the side of the Dutch canals, would this better form-content have made his drawings better drawings? You must answer to that: “No, it would not.” But a windmill is a rough and simple contrivance, and there is a sad difference between the rough beauty and fitness of such objects stuck up centuries ago in Holland, and similar rough and simple objects built to-day. One would do better to imagine a Rembrandt, working in the same way that he worked, doing similar drawings in an industrial country like England or Germany at the present time. Still you have to admit that as fine an artist as Rembrandt would, by the magic of his use of the medium he chose, by his line, by his tact of simplification and elimination, make a _New_ thing of anything, however poor the original. And so, in considering if it is worth while to change a single brick, even, or the most trifling ornament, however offensive, you would be compelled to admit that, as regards the production of the finest type of art you would be no better off. The best half-dozen artists of any country, as regards the actual beauty and significance of their work, do not depend on the objective world for their success or stimulus. As to all the thousands of artists, not amongst the most able or imaginative, but possibly able to do something, it is another story. _They_ depend on Nature, on the objective world, for their stimulus or their taste. Set a rather poor artist down in a roadway, ask him to draw a street of houses in front of him. If the houses were of a good and significant build, he would be more likely to do a good and significant painting than if they were such clumsy, and stupid, lineless, massless, things as we invariably find ourselves in the midst of to-day. If he has no particular invention or vision of his own, he depends on Nature a good deal. Nature must do half the work. But the fallacy in the contention about a good artist is this. That although he does not depend on Nature, he certainly depends on life, and is subject to its conditions. And this surely re-acts on his painting. If he starves, is disturbed in his work, or has to do some horrible type of present-day commercial painting or designing to make a living, then his independence of objective form and colour-content is of little use to him. _Where the Painter would Benefit_