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.

[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