A parallel may be drawn between Heine's art and that of Rembrandt. There is nothing academic about either of them; both bear the distinct stamp of modernity. But when we call Heine a great realistic poet, we make an assertion of the same qualified truth as when we call Rembrandt the great colourist. Rembrandt cannot be said to be one of the greatest colour-realists, for the reason that several painters surpass him in the power of reproducing local colour and its exact value, and of showing the actual form and colour of an object seen in half darkness. It is not colour, but light, that is the main thing with Rembrandt.[9] To him light is life; the battle of life is the battle of light, and the tragedy of life is the tragedy of light, struggling and dying in damp and darkness. To indicate in what his real greatness as a painter lies, he ought rather to be called a luminist (an expression of Fromentin's) than a colourist, if by luminist we understand an artist whose specialty is the apprehension and treatment of light. He sometimes sacrifices drawing, even painting, in his eagerness to produce some effect of light. Think, for example, of the badly painted corpse in the _Lesson in Anatomy_. But it is exactly what makes him less successful than the realists in tasks requiring absolute truthfulness--the painting of hands, the exact reproduction of stuffs--that makes him so great when he causes light to express what it alone indicates to him, the inner life, the world of waking visions. [9] _Cf_. Fromentin: _Les maîtres d'autrefois_. Something similar to this is the case with Heine. How few real figures this great poet has bequeathed to us! Those who would measure his deserts by what he has done in this way find themselves obliged to fall back upon that crude, grotesque sketch of an old Jew servant, Hyacinth, as his best character. No, if Heine is to be judged by his pictures of real life, many an inferior poet surpasses him. But think of his visions, of the world of waking dreams in his poems and in his prose! As a rule he starts closer to earth than other poets, but presently, above the darkness of earth a gleaming vision appears--and disappears. This is felt even in such small poems as the one already referred to as containing the talk in the fisherman's cottage about the Ganges and Lapland. Think too of the way in which Heine calls up the image of Napoleon before his readers. In the _Two Grenadiers_ it has the effect of a vision. The words, "Dann reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab" ('Tis my Emperor riding, right over my grave), are like a revelation in the darkness of night, illuminated by the glitter of swords. In the equally admirable description in the _Reisebilder_, the vision is conjured up in the form of a recollection of childhood.