religious subjects, the originality of his mind and power of his imagination are also conspicuous. "He gives," says Ruskin, "pathetic or powerful fancies, founded on real Scripture reading, and on his interest in the picturesque character of the Jew." In all subjects alike, "he moves us by his profound sympathy with his kind, by his tragic power, by his deep pathos, by his humour, which is thoroughly human and seldom cynical." What he held up to nature--and herein is Rembrandt's individuality most marked--was the dark mirror. "He was," says Leighton, "the supreme painter who revealed to the world the poetry of twilight and all the magic mystery of gloom." "He was in the mystery," says Burton, "that underlies the surface of things." "He accosts with his dark lantern," says Fromentin, "the world of the marvellous, of conscience, and the ideal; he has no master in the art of painting, because he has no equal in the power of showing the invisible." "It was his function," says another critic, "to introduce mystery as an element of effect in the imitative arts." "As by a stroke of enchantment Rembrandt brought down a cloud over the face of nature, and beneath it, half-revealed, half-hidden, her shapes met the eye in aspects full of new suggestion."[77] In the technical method by which Rembrandt worked out his ideal he is the great master of the school of chiaroscuro--of those, that is, who strive at representing not so much the colours of objects, as the contrasts of light and shade upon them. "If it were possible for art to give all the truths of nature it ought to do it. But this is not possible. Choice must always be made of some facts which _can_ be represented from among others which must be passed by in silence, or even, in some respects, misrepresented.... Rembrandt always chooses to represent the exact force with which the light on the most illumined part of an object is opposed to its obscurer portions. In order to obtain this, in most cases, not very important truth, he sacrifices the light and colour of five-sixths of his picture; and the expression of every character of objects which depends on tenderness of shape or tint. But he obtains his single truth, and what picturesque and forcible expression is dependent upon it, with magnificent skill and subtlety."[78] Rembrandt "sacrifices the light and colour of five-sixths of his picture." This is inevitable. For both the light and the darkness of nature are inimitable by art. "The whole question, therefore, is simply whether you will be false at one end of the scale or at the other--that is, whether you will lose yourself in light or in darkness.... What Veronese does is to make his colours true to nature as far as he can. What