I have spoken of imagination; and I mean to imply a twofold exercise thereof: that Hals himself exhibited imagination and kindles it also in the spectator. To some people it may seem to be an abuse of the word to speak of imagination, in the case of an artist so content to be occupied with the objective traits of his subject as Hals was. But they overlook the fact that, while an artist may exercise no imagination in the choice of a subject, he may display a great deal in the rendering of it. He may not give reins to his imagination as Rembrandt did, peering below the surface of things, exploring the hidden recesses of the human soul; he may, on the contrary, be satisfied to be an able craftsman, handling the material presented to him, intent only on giving to it form and character; yet, even so, he will exhibit what one may call a technical imagination. And it is precisely this which characterizes the technique of Hals. It appears in the arrangement of his compositions, especially in the group-portraits, where it takes the form of a superior kind of inventiveness, which is but a phase of imagination. This gift abounds in the corporation pictures at Haarlem. The problem of disposing so many figures in such a way that each shall have its due share of individual emphasis, and yet that the whole group may have, on the one hand, a naturalness and spontaneity of suggestion, and, on the other, a reasonable amount of artistic unity, was one to try to its utmost capacity an artist’s inventiveness. Hals was the first to solve it; and, while other artists profited by his example, none could attain to the completeness of his success. You may be thinking of Rembrandt’s _Syndics of the Cloth Guild_; but the latter’s composition contains only six figures, whereas in Hals’s masterpiece, _The Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew_, there are fourteen. For a just comparison you should rather choose Van der Helst’s great composition in the Rijks Museum, _The Banquet of the Civic Guard_, an amazing example of inventiveness, but lacking in the suppleness, spontaneity, and gusto that Hals exhibits.