But had our golfer, brimming with the modern passion for efficiency, learned foreign tongues, and browsed in the musty archives, he would have discovered that there was much to unlearn.  The early scribes piled fancy upon invention, believing or pretending that Rembrandt was a miser, a profligate, a spendthrift, and so on.  “Houbraken’s facts,” we read, “are interwoven with a mass of those suspicious anecdotes which adorn the plain tale of so many artistic biographies.  Campo-Weyermann, Dargenville, Descamps, and others added further embellishments, boldly piling fable upon fable for the amusement of their readers, till legend gradually ousted truth.”

All this and much more he would have had to unlearn, discovering in the end the simple truth that Rembrandt lived for his art; that he loved and was kind to his wife and to the servant girl who, when Saskia died, filled her place; that he was neither saint nor sinner; that he was extravagant because beautiful things cost money; that being an artist he did not manage his affairs with the wisdom of a man of the world; that he was hot-headed, and played a hot-headed man’s part in the family quarrels; and that he was plucky and improvident, and probably untidy to the end, and that he did his best work when the buffets of fate were heaviest.

The new era in Rembrandt literature began with Kolloff’s Rembrandt’s Leben und Werke, published in 1854.  This contribution to truth was followed by the works of Messrs. Buerger and Vosmaer, by the lucubrations of other meritorious bookworms, by the studies of Messrs. Bode and Bredius, and finally by M. Emile Michel’s Life, which is the definitive and standard work on Rembrandt.  Our golfer, whose French is a little rusty, was delighted to find when he gave the order for this book that it had been translated into English under the editorship of Mr. Frederick Wedmore.  It was in the third edition.

He learned much from M. Emile Michel—­among other things the herculean labour that is necessary if one desires to write a standard and definitive book on a subject.  Not only did M. Michel visit and revisit all the galleries where Rembrandt’s pictures are displayed in Russia, France, England, Sweden, Denmark, and North Germany, but he lived for several years with Rembrandt, surrounded by reproductions of his pictures, drawings, and etchings, and by documents bearing on their history, his mind all the while intently fixed on the facts of Rembrandt’s life and the achievements of his genius.  Gradually the procession of dates and facts took on a new significance; the heterogeneous threads of information wove themselves into the fabric of a life.  M. Michel is the recoverer-in-chief of all that truly happened during the sixty-three years that Rembrandt passed upon this earth.

Every dead painter, poet, or writer of genius, has had his Recoverer.  A searchlight has flashed upon all that Charles Lamb said, did, or wrote.  Every forerunner who inspired Keats, from the day when he took the Faerie Queene like a fever, and went through it “as a young horse through a spring meadow, romping,” has been considered and analysed.  You could bury Keats and Lamb in the tomes that have been written about them.  With the books of his commentators you could raise a mighty monument of paper and bindings to Rembrandt.