how
piquant, lively, ingenious, abundant, and magnificent he would have
been. The idea conceived by Rembrandt then is one of the most ordinary,
and I would venture to say that the majority of his contemporaries
considered it poor in resources; some because its abstract line is
uncertain, scanty, symmetrical, meagre, and singularly incoherent;
others, the colourists, because this composition, so full of gaps and
ill-occupied spaces, did not lend itself to that broad and generous
employment of colours which is usual with able palettes....

Thus there is no truth and very little pictorial invention in the
general disposition. Is there more in the individual figures?

What immediately strikes us is that they are unreasonably
disproportioned and that many of them have shortcomings and so to speak
an embarrassment of characterization that nothing can justify. The
captain is too big and the lieutenant too small, not only by the side of
Captain Kock, whose stature crushes him, but also beside accessory
figures whose height or breadth gives this somewhat plain young man the
air of a youth who has grown a moustache too soon. Regarding the two as
portraits, they are scarcely successful ones of doubtful likeness and
thankless physiognomy, which is surprising in a portrait-painter who had
made his mark in 1642, and which affords some excuse for Captain Kock's
having a little later applied to the infallible Van der Helst. Is the
guard loading his musket rendered any better? Moreover, what do you
think of his right-hand neighbour, and of the drummer? One might say
that all these portraits lack hands, so vaguely are they sketched and so
insignificant is their action. It follows that what they hold is also
ill rendered: muskets, halberds, drum-sticks, canes, lances, and
flag-pole; and that the gesture of an arm is impotent when the hand that
ought to act does not do so clearly, quickly, or with energy, precision,
or intelligence. I will not speak of the feet, which, in most cases, are
lost in shadow. Such in reality are the necessities of the system of
envelopment adopted by Rembrandt, and such is the imperious foregone
conclusion of his method, that one general dark cloud invades the base
of the picture and that the forms float in it to the great detriment of
their points of support.

Must we add that the clothes are very similar to the likenesses,
sometimes uncouth and unnatural, sometimes rigid and rebellious to the
lines of the