one gallery, and facing it will be The Syndics, De Stallmeesters.  Better lighted than in its old quarters, The Night Watch now shows more clearly the tooth of time.  It is muddy and dark in the background, and the cracks of the canvas are ill-concealed by the heavy coating of varnish.  If all the faults of this magnificent work are more plainly revealed its excellences are magnified.  How there could have been any dispute as to the lighting is incredible.  The new catalogue, the appendices of which are brought down to 1908, frankly describes the picture thus: 

“The Night Watch, or the Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and of Lieutenant van Ruytenburg.  The corps is represented in broad daylight, leaving the Doele of the Arquebusiers.  At their head, standing in the foreground about the centre, are the Captain and his Lieutenant conversing.  The former wears a dark dress, the latter a yellow costume with a white sash, causing a brilliant effect of light.  Near the Captain, also standing out in full light, is a little girl, a dead white cock hanging from her waistband.”

Then follow the names of the other personages in this strange scene.

A commonplace happening is transfigured by the magic of a seer into a significant moment arrested in eternity.  Rembrandt is a window looking out upon eternity.  It was quite like the logical minded Frenchman, Eugene Fromentin, himself an admirable painter, to pick this canvas full of flaws.  The composition is, true enough, troubled and confused.  The draughtsmanship leaves much to be desired; hands are carelessly painted, the grouping haphazard, without symmetry, the general rhythm full of syncopations, cross accents, and perverse pauses—­empty spaces, transitions not accounted for.  And yet this painting without personal charm—­it is almost impersonal—­grips your soul.  It is not alone the emotional quality of the paint.  There are greater colourists than Rembrandt, who, strictly speaking, worked in monochrome, modelling with light.  No, not the paint alone, not the mystery of the envelope, not the magnetic gaze of the many eyes, but all combined makes an assault upon nerves and imagination.  You feel that Captain Cocq is a prosaic personage and is much too tall in proportion to the spry little dandy Lieutenant at his side.  Invested with some strange attribute by the genius of the painter, this Dutchman becomes the protagonist in a soundless symphony of light and shadow.  The waves that emanate from the canvas suffuse your senses but do not soothe or satisfy.  The modern nervous intensity, missing absolutely in Hals and his substantial humans, is present in Rembrandt.  We say “modern” as a sop to our vanity, but we are the “ancients,” and there is no mode of thought, no mood that has not been experienced and expressed by our ancestors.  Rembrandt is unlike any other Dutch painter—­Hals, Vermeer, Teniers, Van der Heist—­what have these in common with the miller’s son?  But he is as Dutch as any of them.  A genius is only attached to his age through his faults, said a wise man.  Rembrandt is as universal as Beethoven, a Dutchman by descent, as Bach, a Hungarian by descent, as Michael Angelo and Shakespeare.  But we must go to Leonardo da Vinci if we wish to find a brother soul to Rembrandt’s.