GLENWAY WESCOTT
399
and nonrelation and antirelation to the rest, the poetical collec–
tivity. I cannot think of anything in literary history quite like it.
Do you remember, can you see in memory, Rembrandt's so–
called
The Night Watch,
which in fact is a day watch?
It
was left
under a cover of darkened varnish for a long time, and this,
added to the master's intentional chiaroscuro, misled even the art
historians. About thirty upper-middle-class Amsterdam gentle–
men constituting a guard of honor troop forward in most unmil–
itary order out of cavernous darkness into magical sunshine-all
types: one almost royal looking, one haunted, perhaps by
knowledge of a hopeless illness, and another corpulent and af–
fluent; one with an angelic face, thrusting a lance all the way
across the picture, as it were symbolically, and another who
might be Don Quixote; a clown, a boor, a hobo, and a fanatic,
and one conceivably a killer. In their midst, mystery of mysteries:
a little childlike woman or womanly child, very blond, as in a
dream, clad in numerous raiment of greenish gold; having, sus–
pended from her belt, a white chicken with feet of gold; wearing
also, on a ribbon, a rich purse or pouch.
Thus, to my imagination, Miss Moore had been, in the
midst of her fellow writers, the literary establishment of the cen–
tury. I often seem to myself deficient in humor, but when I first
thought of this a while ago, I laughed aloud; and it amuses me
still.
If
this were a lecture rather than an essay, and if I had a
lantern slide of
The Night Watch
and a professorial pointer,
perhaps I could attach twentieth-century literary names to all of
Rembrandt's forgotten burghers: those I have mentioned, of
course, depressive Robinson in the oriental headgear, the hobo
Bodenheim, and Frost, that late-flowering ambitious man of the
world, and Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Williams, Stevens, Cummings,
Wilson, Auden-whether or not it made you laugh, you would
easily perceive Miss Moore 's likeness to the fairylike small per–
sonage who incomprehensibly strayed into Rembrandt's ken and
captivated him while he was doing this vast commissioned work.
She had that same Titian blondness; it was silvery later; never–
theless, when she was not too tired, she looked more ageless than
she did as a young woman. But that is mere coincidence and su–
perficiality. My point, worth thinking about, is that she was in
the middle of the picture, a mystery in the middle of the picture–
how did it happen? We know where her bodily being originated
