The new movement, for such it has grown to be, in France, Germany, Austria, and England, has come by way of the East. The harvest of a century of Eastern exploration, ripened during the last fifty years by an increasing intimacy with the art of Egypt, China, Korea, Japan, India, and Mesopotamia, is at length being stored. We are beginning to realize the Oriental conception of art as decoration, relying upon the abstract qualities of form and color, and using them, not as vehicles of natural representation, but as symbols, appealing freely, without concrete reference, to the imagination. To repeat, these pioneers of the new movement find themselves at the point where the Renaissance started in the thirteenth century. The latter broke away from the remnant of the Oriental ideal, left in Byzantine art, to conquer a new world of natural representation, and its evolution has been completed. The new movement has recovered the Oriental standpoint from which to attempt the conquest of a new ideal. It is a movement, at present, mainly of experiment, and necessarily so. For all of us, whether artists or laymen, are as yet too much under the influence of centuries of inherited tradition to be able to free ourselves from the consciousness of what it stands for. The artist of our own time whose intuition steered him first in the direction of this new conception and use of form and color is Whistler; and among the potent influences of his own life was Rembrandt. That the latter was habitually desirous of evading the concrete significance of form is contradicted by innumerable pictures; but that in some he did evade it, even as Whistler did in his _Nocturnes_, is undeniable. Moreover, Rembrandt showed less regard for the traditional use of form and color than any artist up to our own day. With all his sense of its significance, he used it with the complete freedom of personal expression; and so enveloped it in the half-lights and obscurities of an atmosphere of his own invention, that, while the picture represents an incident, it contradicts the idea of material representation. It is, to a more abstract degree than has been reached by any other Caucasian artist, the record of a spiritual impression, based on the symbolic use of form and color. It approaches the brink of that still further detachment from the necessities of natural representation that characterizes the New Thought in modern art. CHAPTER VI THE INFLUENCE OF HALS AND REMBRANDT Both Hals and Rembrandt, each in his different way, have influenced the art of modern times much in the same way in which they influenced their contemporaries. Hals was and still remains a great exemplar of technical method which may be practically adopted, while Rembrandt, with a technique that defies imitation, has influenced his own times and ours by inspiring principles not only of technique but of motive. The difference is inherent in their characters--Hals the raconteur; Rembrandt the thinker.