these, when they are ugly, and he chooses to take pains
with them, he knows nothing else: the more pains he takes with even
familiar animals, the worse they are (witness the horse in that plate of
the Good Samaritan), and any attempts to finish the first scribbled
energy of his imaginary lions and tigers, end always only in the loss of
the fiendish power and rage which were all he could conceive in an
animal.

79. His landscape, and foreground vegetation, I mean afterwards to
examine in comparison with Duerer's; but the real caliber and nature of
the man are best to be understood by comparing the puny, ill-drawn,
terrorless, helpless, beggarly skeleton in his "Youth Surprised by
Death," with the figure behind the tree in Duerer's plate (though it is
quite one of Duerer's feeblest) of the same subject. Absolutely ignorant
of all natural phenomena and law; absolutely careless of all lovely
living form, or growth, or structure; able only to render with some
approach to veracity, what alone he had looked at with some approach to
attention,--the pawnbroker's festering heaps of old clothes, and caps,
and shoes--Rembrandt's execution is one grand evasion, and his temper
the grim contempt of a strong and sullen animal in its defiled den, for
the humanity with which it is at war, for the flowers which it tramples,
and the light which it fears.

80. Again, do not let it be thought that when I call his execution
evasive, I ignore the difference between his touch, on brow or lip, and
a common workman's; but the whole school of etching which he founded,
(and of painting, so far as it differs from Venetian work) is inherently
loose and experimental. Etching is the very refuge and mask of
sentimental uncertainty, and of vigorous ignorance. If you know anything
clearly, and have a firm hand, depend upon it, you will draw it clearly;
you will not care to hide it among scratches and burrs. And herein is
the first grand distinction between etching and engraving--that in the
etching needle you have an almost irresistible temptation to a wanton
speed. There is, however, no real necessity for such a distinction; an
etched line may have been just as steadily drawn, and seriously meant,
as an engraved one; and for the moment, waiving consideration of this
distinction, and opposing Rembrandt's work, considered merely as work of
the black line, to Holbein's and Duerer's, as work of the black line, I
assert Rembrandt's to be inherently _evasive