isible quality,
holds good also as to the imaginative value. Velasquez's Flagellation,
if indeed it be his, in our National Gallery, has a pathos, a something
that catches you by the throat, in that melancholy weary body, broken
with ignominy and pain, sinking down by the side of the column, which
is inseparable from the dreary grey light, the livid colour of the
flesh--there is no joy in the world where such things can be. But the
angel who has just entered has not come from heaven--such a creature is
fit only to roughly shake up the pillows of paupers, dying in the damp
dawn in the hospital wards.

It is, in a measure, different with Rembrandt, exactly because he is the
master, not of light, but of darkness, or of light that utterly dazzles.
His ugly women and dirty Jews of Rotterdam are either hidden in the gloom
or reduced to mere vague outlines, specks like gnats in the sunshine, in
the effulgence of light. Hence we can enjoy, almost without any disturbing
impressions, the marvellous imagination shown in his etchings of Bible
stories. Rembrandt is to Duerer as an archangel to a saint: where the
German draws, the Dutchman seems to bite his etching plate with elemental
darkness and glory. Of these etchings I would mention a few; the reader
may put these indications alongside of his remembrances of the Arena
Chapel, or of Angelico's cupboard panels in the Academy at Florence:
they show how intimately dramatic imagination depends in art upon mere
technical means, how hopelessly limited to mere indication were the
early artists, how forced along the path of dramatic realisation are the
men of modern times.

_The Annunciation to the Shepherds_: The heavens open in a circular
whirl among the storm darkness, cherubs whirling distantly like
innumerable motes in a sunbeam; the angel steps forward on a ray of
light, projecting into the ink-black night. The herds have perceived
the vision, and rush headlong in all directions, while the trees groan
beneath the blast of that opening of heaven. A horse, seen in profile,
with the light striking on his eyeball, seems paralysed by terror. The
shepherds have only just awakened. _The Nativity_: Darkness. A vague
crowd of country folk jostling each other noiselessly. A lantern, a
white speck in the centre, sheds a smoky, uncertain light on the corner
where the Child sleeps upon the pillows, the Virgin, wearied, resting
by its side, her face on her hand. Joseph is seated by, only his h