t has been said, the
two pictures do not hurt each other. They oppose each other like day and
night, like the transfiguration of things and their literal imitation,
slightly vulgar and clever. Admit that they are as perfect as they are
celebrated and you will have before your eyes a unique antithesis, what
La Bruyere calls "opposition truths that illuminate one another."

I shall not astonish anyone in saying that the _Night Watch_ possesses
no charm, and the fact is without example among the fine works of
pictorial art. It is amazing, it is disconcerting, it is imposing, but
it absolutely lacks that insinuating quality that convinces us, and it
almost always fails to please us at first. In the first place, it shocks
our logical sense and that habitual visual rectitude that loves clear
forms, lucid ideas, and clearly formulated boldness; something warns us
that our imagination as well as our reason will be only half satisfied
and that even the mind that is most easily won over will not submit till
the last and will not surrender without dispute. This is due to various
causes that do not all arise from the picture,--the light is
detestable; the frame of dark wood in which the painting is drowned
spoils its middle values, and its bronze scale of colour, and its force,
and makes it look much more smoked than it is; and, lastly and above
all, the exigencies of the place prevent the picture from being hung at
the proper height, and, against all the laws of the most elementary
perspective, oblige you to look at it from the same level.

[Illustration: THE NIGHT WATCH.
_Rembrandt._]

You are aware that the _Night Watch_, rightly or wrongly, passes for an
almost incomprehensible work, and that constitutes its chief prestige.
Perhaps it would have made far less noise in the world, if for two
centuries people had not kept up the habit of trying to find out its
meaning instead of examining its merits, and persisted in the mania of
regarding it as a picture enigmatical above all.

Taking it literally, what we know of the subject seems to me sufficient.
In the first place, we know the names and quality of the personages,
thanks to the care with which the painter has inscribed them on a plate
at the bottom of the picture; which proves that if the painter's fancy
has transfigured many things, the chief idea at least deals with the
customs of local life. It is true that we cannot tell for what purpose
these men are going out