[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN OF EIGHTY-THREE
Is it fantastical to assume that his interest in Rembrandt dated from that little golf etching? Great events ofttimes spring from small causes. We will follow the Rembrandtish adventures of this citizen of London, and golfer. Suppose that on his homeward way from the Museum he stopped at a book shop and bought M. Auguste Bréal's small, accomplished book on Rembrandt. Having read it, and being a man of leisure, means, and grip, he naturally invested one guinea in the monumental tome of M. Émile Michel, Member of the Institute of France--that mine of learning about Rembrandt in which all modern writers on the master delve. Astonishment would be his companion while reading its packed pages, also while turning the leaves of _L'Oeuvre de Rembrandt_, décrit et commenté, par M. Charles Blanc, de l'Academie Française. This sumptuous folio he picked up second hand and conveyed home in a cab, because it was too heavy to carry. Now he is fairly started on his journey through the Rembrandt country, and as he pursues his way, what is the emotion that dominates him? Amazement, I think.
Let me illustrate the extent and character of his amazement by describing a little incident that happened to him during a day's golfing at a seaside course on the following Saturday.
The approach to the sixteenth green is undeniably sporting. Across the course hangs the shoulder of a hill, and from the fastnesses of the hill a brook gushes down to the sea through the boulders that bestrew its banks. Obliged to wait until the preceding couple had holed out, our citizen and golfer amused himself by upturning one of the great lichen-stained boulders. He gazed into the dank pit thus disclosed to his eyes, and half drew back dismayed at the extraordinary activity of insect life that was revealed. It was so sudden, so unexpected. Beneath that grey and solemn boulder that Time and man accepted as a freehold tenant of the world, that our citizen had seen and passed a hundred times, a population of experts were working, their deeds unseen by the wayfarer. Now what is the meaning of this little story? How did the discovery of that horde of capable experts strike the imagination of our golfer? The boulder was Rembrandt. The busy insects were the learned and patient students working quietly on his behalf--his discoverers and recoverers. He had passed that boulder a hundred times, his eyes had rested cursorily upon it as often as the name of Rembrandt in book or newspaper had met his indifferent gaze. Now he had raised the boulder, as he had lifted the Rembrandt curtain, and lo! behind the curtain, as beneath the boulder, he had discovered life miraculously active.