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"If Rembrandt painted the 'Christ at Emmaus' and the 'Sortie of the Civic Guard, then Rembrandt had two souls," exclaims Professor Lautner. And the simple answer of Emerson would have been, "He had." That is just the difference between Rembrandt and Professor Lautner.
Professor Lautner averages fairly well, he labors hard to be consistent, but his thought gamut runs just from Bottom the weaver to Dogberry the judge. He is a cauliflower that is to say, a cabbage with a college education. Yes, I understand him, because for most of the time I myself am supremely dull, childishly dogmatic, beautifully self-complacent. I am Lautner.
All the universe you have is the universe you have within. Old Walt Whitman, when he saw the wounded soldier, exclaimed, "I am that man!" And two thousand years before this, Terence said, "I am a man, and nothing that is human is alien to me." I know just why Professor Lautner believes that Rembrandt never could have painted a picture with a deep, tender, subtle and spiritual significance.
His best efforts seem to spring out of a heart that forgot all precedent, and arose, Venus-like, perfect and complete, from the unfathomable Sea of Existence. Walter Pater One Professor Max Lautner has recently placed a small petard under the European world of Art, and given it a hoist to starboard, by asserting that Rembrandt did not paint Rembrandt's best pictures.
Lautner says that Rembrandt was "untaught," and Donnelly said the same of Shakespeare, and each critic gives this as a reason why the man could not have done a sublime performance. Yet since "Hamlet" was never equaled, who could have taught its author how? And since Rembrandt at his best was never surpassed, who could have instructed him?
Lautner has one flat, dead-level, unprofitable soul that neither soars high nor dives deep; and his mind reasons unobjectionable things out syllogistically, in a manner perfectly inconsequential. He is icily regular, splendidly null. Every man measures others by himself he has only one standard. When a man ridicules certain traits in other men, he ridicules himself.
My opinion is that this cryptogram is an infringement on that of our lamented countryman, Ignatius Donnelly. But letting that pass, the statement that Rembrandt could not have painted the pictures that are ascribed to him, "because the man was low, vulgar and untaught," commands respect on account of the extreme crudity of the thought involved. Lautner is so dull that he is entertaining.
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