In the same way, when he is tragic, it is not with thick clouds rent in the fury of their flight, or with the light from shaken torches cast and scattered like spume-flakes from the angry waves; nor is it with the accumulated night that gives intense significance to a single tranquil ray. Only by a Rembrandt, to whom these means are daily present, could a subject like the _Massacre of the Ten Thousand_ have been treated with dramatic propriety; unless, indeed, Michael Angelo, in a grey dawn, should have twisted and wrung with manifold pain a tribe of giants, stark, and herded in some leafless primeval valley. With Dürer the occasion was merely one on which to coldly invent variations, as though this human suffering was a motive for _an_ arabesque. Yet even from the days when he copied Andrea Mantegna's struggling sea-monsters, or when he drew the stern matured warrior angels of his Apocalypse fighting, with their historied faces like men hardened by deceptions practised upon them, like men who have forbidden salt tears and clenched their teeth and closed their hearts, who see, who hate; even from these early days, the energy of his line was capable of all this, and his spontaneous sense of arabesque could become menacing and explosive. There are two or three drawings of angry, crying cupids (Lipp., 153 and 446, see illustration opposite), prepared for some intended picture of the Crucifixion, where he has made the motive of the winged infants head, usually associated with bliss and scattered rose-leaves, become terrible and stormy. And the _Agony in the Garden_, etched on iron, contains a tree tortured by the wind (see illustration), as marvellous for rhythm, power, and invention as the blast-whipped brambles and naked bushes that crest a scarped brow above the jealous husband who stabs his wife, in Titian's fresco at Padua. Again, the unspeakable tragedy of the stooping figure of Jesus, who is being dragged by His hair up the steps to Annas' throne, in the _Little Passion_, is rendered by lines instinct with the highest dramatic power. These are a draughtsman's creations; though they are less abundant in Dürer's work than one could wish, still only the greatest produce such effects; only Michael Angelo, Titian, and Rembrandt can be said to have equalled or surpassed Dürer in this kind, rarely though it be that he competes with them. [Illustration: CHERUB FOR A CRUCIFIXION Black chalk drawing heightened with white on a blue-grey paper In the collection of Herr Doctor Blasius, Brunswick]