quarrels; and that he was plucky and improvident, and probably untidy to the end, and that he did his best work when the buffets of fate were heaviest.

The new era in Rembrandt literature began with Kolloff's Rembrandt's Leben und Werke, published in 1854. This contribution to truth was followed by the works of Messrs. Bürger and Vosmaer, by the lucubrations of other meritorious bookworms, by the studies of Messrs. Bode and Bredius, and finally by M. Émile Michel's Life, which is the definitive and standard work on Rembrandt. Our golfer, whose French is a little rusty, was delighted to find when he gave the order for this book that it had been translated into English under the editorship of Mr. Frederick Wedmore. It was in the third edition.

He learned much from M. Émile Michel—among other things the herculean labour that is necessary if one desires to write a standard and definitive book on a subject. Not only did M. Michel visit and revisit all the galleries where Rembrandt's pictures are displayed in Russia, France, England, Sweden, Denmark, and North Germany, but he lived for several years with Rembrandt, surrounded by reproductions of his pictures, drawings, and etchings, and by documents bearing on their history, his mind all the while intently fixed on the facts of Rembrandt's life and the achievements of his genius. Gradually the procession of dates and facts took on a new significance; the heterogeneous threads of information wove themselves into the fabric of a life. M. Michel is the recoverer-in-chief of all that truly happened during the sixty-three years that Rembrandt passed upon this earth.

Every dead painter, poet, or writer of genius, has had his Recoverer. A searchlight has flashed upon all that Charles Lamb said, did, or wrote. Every forerunner who inspired Keats, from the day when he took the Faerie Queene like a fever, and went through it "as a young horse through a spring meadow, romping," has been considered and analysed. You could bury Keats and Lamb in the tomes that have been written about them. With the books of his commentators you could raise a mighty monument of paper and bindings to Rembrandt.

All this is very right and most worthy of regard. We do not sing "For they are jolly good fellows" in their honour, but we offer them our profound respect and gratitude. And our golfer, in his amateurish way, belongs to the tribe. He has approached Rembrandt through books. His temperament enjoyed exploring the library hive marked Rembrandt. Now he feels that he must study the works of the master, and while he is cogitating whether he shall first examine the 35 pictures at St. Petersburg, or the 20 in the Louvre, or the 20 at Cassel, or the 17 at Berlin, or the 16 at Dresden, or the 12 in the National Gallery, or the etchings and drawings in the print room of the British Museum, or the frame of etchings at South Kensington, so accessible, I drop him. Yes: drop him in favour of another who did not care two pins about the history or the politics of art, or the rights or wrongs of Rembrandt's life, but went straight to his pictures and etchings, wondered at them, and was filled with an incommunicable joy.

CHAPTER II

THE APPEAL OF THE PAINTINGS

Suppose our citizen and golfer, deliberately dropped in the preceding chapter, had a child, a son, who by a freak of heredity was brooding and imaginative, fond, in a childish way, of pictures and books, but quite indifferent to scientific criticism and the methods of the analytic men. During his school holidays his mother would take him to the pantomime, and to the National Gallery. Dazed, he would scan the walls of pictures, wondering why so many of them dealt with Scriptural subjects, and why some were so coloured, and others so dim.

  PORTRAIT OF A SAVANT

1631. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

But after the third or fourth visit this child began to recognise favourites among the pictures, and being somewhat melancholy and mystical by nature, liking trees, beechwood glades, cathedral aisles, and the end of day, he would drag upon his mother's arm when they passed two pictures hanging together in the Dutch room. One was called The Woman taken in Adultery, the other, The Adoration of the Shepherds. These pictures by Rembrandt attracted him: they were so different from anything else in the gallery. He did not trouble to understand their meaning; he did not dwell upon the beauty of the still figure of Christ, or note that the illumination in The Adoration of the Shepherds proceeded from the supernatural light that shines from the Infant Jesus. What captivated him was the vastness contained in these small pictures, and the eerie way in which the light was separated from the dark. He had never seen anything like it before, but these pictures made him long to be grown up and able to seek such sights. He could see the lurking shadows alone in his bed at night, and held his breath when he thought of the great darkness that stretched out to the frames of the pictures. He wondered if temples were really as mysterious and dim as the great building that loomed above the small dazzling figure of the kneeling penitent and that horrid man who, his mother told him, was one of her accusers.

When she came into his bedroom to see that he was safely tucked up for the night, this child asked his mother why Rembrandt's pictures were so different from the pictures of other painters.

She explained that Rembrandt was a great master of chiaroscuro, making a valiant attempt to pronounce the uncomfortable word.

"What does that mean?" asked the little boy.

"It—er—means—One moment, dear; I think I hear your father calling."

She ran downstairs and consulted the dictionary.

"A chiaroscurist," she told her little boy when she returned to the bedroom, "is a painter who cares for and studies light and shade rather than colour. Now go to sleep. You're too young to bother about such things."

This child's mother was an ardent Ruskinian. Observing that her husband, the citizen and golfer, was asleep in his chair when she returned from her son's bedroom, she stepped into the library, picked Modern Painters from the shelf, and read the following passages, gravely shaking her head occasionally as she read.

"... Rembrandt always chooses to represent the exact force with which the light on the most illumined part of an object is opposed to its obscurer portions. In order to obtain this, in most cases, not very important truth, he sacrifices the light and colour of five-sixths of his picture; and the expression of every character of objects which depends on tenderness of shape or tint. But he obtains his single truth, and what picturesque and forcible expression is dependent upon it, with magnificent skill and subtlety.

"... His love of darkness led also to a loss of the spiritual element, and was itself the reflection of a sombre mind....

"... I cannot feel it an entirely glorious speciality to be distinguished, as Rembrandt was, from other great painters, chiefly by the liveliness of his darkness and the dulness of his light. Glorious or inglorious, the speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is