ses; who 'knew all
qualities with a learned spirit,' instead of judging of them by his own
predilections; and was rather 'a pipe for the Muse's finger to play what
stop she pleasd,' than anxious to set up any character or pretensions of
his own. His genius consisted in the faculty of transforming himself
at will into whatever he chose: his originality was the power of seeing
every object from the exact point of view in which others would see
it. He was the Proteus of human intellect. Genius in ordinary is a more
obstinate and less versatile thing. It is sufficiently exclusive and
self-willed, quaint and peculiar. It does some one thing by virtue of
doing nothing else: it excels in some one pursuit by being blind to all
excellence but its own. It is just the reverse of the cameleon; for
it does not borrow, but lends its colour to all about it; or like the
glow-worm, discloses a little circle of gorgeous light in the twilight
of obscurity, in the night of intellect that surrounds it. So did
Rembrandt. If ever there was a man of genius, he was one, in the proper
sense of the term. He lived in and revealed to otters a world of his
own, and might be said to have invented a new view of nature. He did
not discover things _out of_ nature, in fiction or fairy land, or make
a voyage to the moon 'to descry new lands, rivers or mountains in her
spotty globe,' but saw things _in_ nature that every one had missed
before him and gave others eyes to see them with. This is the test and
triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we
may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to
us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had
no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of
intuition, of determined grasp of mind, to seize and retain it.
Rembrandt's conquests were not over the _ideal_, but the real. He did
not contrive a new story or character, but we nearly owe to him a fifth
part of painting, the knowledge of _chiaroscuro_--a distinct power and
element in art and nature. He had a steadiness, a firm keeping of mind
and eye, that first stood the shock of 'fierce extremes' in light and
shade, or reconciled the greatest obscurity and the greatest brilliancy
into perfect harmony; and he therefore was the first to hazard this
appearance upon canvas, and give full effect to what he saw and
delighted in. He was led to adopt this style of broad and startling
contrast