to one who looks for the first
time on some brilliant, early impressions of his famous plates. The ink
is still alive; the Chinese or Japanese paper which Rembrandt generally
used, has sometimes gone very yellow and spotted, but oftener it has the
fine mellowness of age. We treat it with respect, almost with reverence,
for we recall that these very sheets of paper were dampened and laid upon
the etched plate, already prepared by the hands of the great etcher
himself. Each impression he pulled was as carefully considered as the
biting of the copper plate. He varied the strength of the ink, the method
of wiping, the pressure used; knowing the possibilities of his plate, he
so manipulated it that it responded to his touch as a piano responds to
the touch of a musician. The poor impressions and very late states, of
which, unfortunately, many exist, are generally the work of those
mercenary ones into whose hands the plates fell after his death--sometimes
even before. Like a man with no music in his soul attempting to improve
upon a sonata by Beethoven, these people not only printed, haphazard, poor
impressions having the master's name, but sometimes even undertook to
rearrange the composition and often to rework the plate.

[No. 1. Rembrandt's Mother.]

_No. 1. Rembrandt's Mother._

A hundred years before Rembrandt's time acid had been used to help out the
graver. Durer, among others, used it, and he employed also, but in
hesitating manner, the dry-point with its accompanying burr. Rembrandt's
method of utilizing the roughness thrown up on the copper by the dry-point
needle was a development of its possibilities that no one else, even among
his own pupils, has ever equaled. It was much the same with everything
else: the burin of the professional engraver he handled so skilfully that
it is impossible to tell where the acid or the dry-point work stopped and
the reinforcing work of the graver began. When others tried to combine
these methods they failed. The hand of Rembrandt was the obedient servant
of his mastermind: so well trained was it that with a preliminary sketch
or without it, the needle produced on the smoked wax surface of the copper
the picture which floated before him, so correctly that the brain was not
diverted from the ideal picture by any crudity in the lines. If the
tools, methods, and effects which the great engravers had used suggested
anything to