The schoolmaster decided that it was a hopeless case, and the miller went home to report to the boy’s mother.

Now, whenever a Dutchman is confronted by a problem too big to solve, or a task too unpleasant for him to undertake, he shows his good sense by turning it over to his wife.  “You are his mother, anyway,” said Harmen van Ryn, reproachfully.

The mother simply waived the taunt and asked, “Do you tell me the schoolmaster says he will not do anything but draw pictures?”

“Not a tap will he do but make pictures—­he can not multiply two by one.”

“Well,” said the mother, “if he will not do anything but draw pictures, I think we’d better let him draw pictures.”

* * * * *

At that early age I do not think Rembrandt was ambitious to be a painter.  Good healthy boys of fourteen are not hampered and harassed by ambition—­ambition, like love, camps hot upon our trail later.  Ambition is the concomitant of rivalry, and sex is its chief promoter—­it is a secondary sex manifestation.

The boy simply had a little intuitive skill in drawing, and the exercise of the talent was a gratification.  It pleased him to see the semblance of face or form unfold before him.  It was a kind of play, a working off of surplus energy.

Had the lad’s mind at that time been forcibly diverted to books or business, it is very probable that today the catalogs would be without the name of Rembrandt.

But mothers have ambitions, even if boys have not—­they wish to see their children do things that other women’s children can not do.  Among wild animals the mother kills, when she can, all offspring but her own.  Darwin refers to mother-love as, “that instinct in the mind of the female which causes her to exaggerate the importance of her offspring—­often protecting them to the death.”  Through this instinct of protection is the species preserved.  In human beings mother-love is well flavored with pride, prejudice, jealousy and ambition.  This is because the mother is a woman.  And this is well—­God made it all, and did He not look upon His work and pronounce it good?

The mother of Rembrandt knew that in Leyden there were men who painted beautiful pictures.  She had seen these pictures at the University, and in the Town Hall and in the churches; and she had overheard men discussing and criticizing the work.  She herself was poor and uneducated, her husband was only a miller, with no recreation beyond the beer-garden and a clicking reluctantly off to church in his wooden shoes on Sunday.  They had no influential friends, no learned patrons—­the men at the University never so much as nodded to millers.  Her lot was lowly, mean, obscure, and filled with drudgery and pettiness.  And now some one was saying her boy Rembrandt was lazy; he would neither work nor study.  The taunt stung her mother-pride—­“He will do nothing but make pictures!”