ed 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.

[Illustration: 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 mea