RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM] Statue of Liberty compare with the interpretation of the idea evolved by such a man as Lincoln? The idea thus logically and formally shaped in the Statue will not even bear comparison with that which is expressed by the spontaneous utterance of some poor emigrant, as he finds his foot at last planted on the free soil of his imaginings. In life, as in art, the real thing to us is what we feel about it; in Rembrandt’s art, what _he_ feels about his subject and makes _us_ feel. Then, again, we have discovered that often we are made to feel most deeply, not by detailed statement, but by suggestion: in the case of a speaker, perhaps by a momentary gesture, or play of features, by a sudden inflection of the voice, or a pause in speech, and the occasional accent of a word or sentence; in the case of a writer, often as much by what he leaves unsaid, by the thought that is veiled behind the statement, by the choice and emphasis of certain features of his record. Further, we may have learned to find occasional value even in uncertainty or indecision. We may sometimes tire of, and possibly distrust, the world’s tendency to “get things down fine.” The latter may seem to imply that the thing itself is small, or that there is smallness in the vision of the man who thus approaches life. We may be conscious of life itself as an aggregate of moments of brilliant realization and more frequent half-tones, enveloped in a sea of shadow; and may reach nearer to the heart and meaning of it by welcoming its mystery. Surely something of this sort was Rembrandt’s attitude toward life, and therefore his point of view toward art. He has been called unlearned, because he had small taste for Latin and no scholastic acquisitions. But in the wisdom of life, as drawn from life itself and distilled through the brain and temperament of one who searched life deeply and lived his own life ardently, he has had few equals, at least among artists. For the explanation of Rembrandt is that to him life presented itself as an _idea_. Thus he is without a rival in the sympathetic rendering of old age. He saw more than the exterior of it; he penetrated into its psychology. For--how shall I express it?--the fruit of living is experience, and experience tends more and more to lose sight of the concrete in the abstract, to replace the substance of the form with the higher reality of the idea. The young man, as he ceases to depend upon the ministrations of the mother, enshrines her in a personal idea of motherhood; the old lover rediscovers the bride of his youth in the idea with which time has enveloped the wife. The idea is the aureole or nimbus that gathers about the form and proclaims its sanctity. It is the idea, then, that Rembrandt, the artist of ideas, the searcher after the higher reality inherent in form, discovered in old age.