Many, I suppose, will repudiate the notion that Hals was either commonplace or faulty as a constructor of form. He is so much a man of our own time, and in consequence has been so belauded, that to some it may sound like _lèse-majesté_ to dispute his position in modern estimation. On the other hand, if one tries to get beyond the barrier of approbation with which artists and the public have blocked the free view of Hals in relation to other portrait-painters of his own school, such as Rembrandt or Terborch, or of other schools or periods, the suspicion of his comparative commonness of feeling may grow into a conviction. Whether it does so or not is so purely a question of individual point of view and feeling that it would be futile to try to reason the matter out. I can scarcely explain my own conviction. Perhaps I have hinted at the basis of it in applying to Hals the term a raconteur, and in likening his style to that of a brilliant newspaper man. It is the function of both of these latter to make an immediate appeal, not necessarily flashy but certainly striking, to a mixed gathering of listeners or readers, whose first and sole demand is that the gist of the matter shall be hit off attractively. Each in a greater or less degree is addressing a crowd, and, since the latter’s aggregate of mentality and feeling is of a lower order than the mentality and taste of some, at least, of the individuals composing it, the speaker or writer, to prove attractive, must, consciously or unconsciously, adjust his thought and expression to this lower level. Such is the suggestion of Hals and his modern imitators, when their work is compared with that of the great portrait-painters, whose feeling and style are the products of their own high-bred aloofness and self-sustained individuality. The work of the former, by comparison, seems designed to attract, as directly as possible and in a way to make the least demand upon reflection. It skims the surfaces and summarizes the most obvious of their features in the raciest of ways.