Promenades of an Impressionist Part 4

Gautier wrote that El Greco surpa.s.sed Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe in his pell-mell of horrors; "extravagant and bizarre" are the adjectives he employs (said of most painters whose style is unfamiliar or out of the beaten track). In the Baptism of Christ he finds a depraved energy, a maleficent puissance; but the ardent colours, the tonal vivacity, and the large, free handling excite the Frenchman's admiration. Justi avers that Greco's "craving for originality developed incredible mannerisms. In his portraits he has delineated the peculiar dignity of the Castilian hidalgos and the beauty of Toledan dames with a success attained by few." R.A. Stevenson devotes to him a paragraph in his Velasquez. Referring to the influence of El Greco upon the greater painter, he wrote: "While Greco certainly adopted a Spanish gravity of colouring, neither that nor his modelling was ever subtle or thoroughly natural... Velasquez ripened with age and practice; Greco was rather inclined to get rotten with facility."

Mr. Ricketts says that "his pictures might at times have been painted by torchlight in a cell of the Inquisition." Richard Ford in his handbook of Spain does not mince words: "Greco was very unequal... He was often more lengthy and extravagant than Fuseli, and as leaden as cholera morbus." Ritter speaks of his "symphonies in blue minor"

(evidently imitating Gautier's poem, Symphony in White-Major). In Havelock Ellis's suggestive The Soul of Spain there is mention of Greco--see chapter Art of Spain. Ellis says: "In his more purely religious and supernatural scenes Greco was sometimes imaginative, but more often bizarre in design and disconcerting in his colouring with its insistence on chalky white, his violet shadows on pale faces, his love of green. [Mr. Ellis finds this 'predilection for green'

significant as antic.i.p.ating one of the characteristics of the Spanish palette.] His distorted fever of movement--the lean, twisted bodies, the frenzied, gesticulating arms, the mannerism of large calves that taper down to pointed toes--usually fails to convince us. But in the audacities of his colouring he revealed the possibilities of new harmonies, of higher, brighter, cooler keys." The Count Orgaz burial scene at Toledo Mr. Ellis does not rank among the world's great pictures.

There is often a depressing morbidity in Greco; Goya is sane and healthy by comparison. Greco's big church pieces are full of religious sentiment, but enveloped in the fumes of nightmare. Curious it was that a stranger from Greece should have absorbed certain not particularly healthy, even sinister, Spanish traits and developed them to such a pitch of nervous intensity. As Arthur Symons says, his portraits "have all the brooding Spanish soul with its proud self-repression." Senor Cossio sums up in effect by declaring that Venice educated Greco in his art; t.i.tian taught him technique; Tintoretto gave him his sense of dramatic form; Angelo his virility.

But of the strong personality which a.s.similated these various influences there is no doubt when confronted with one of his canvases, every inch of which is signed El Greco.

"VELASQUEZ"

Why so well-known and authoritative a work as Velasquez, by Aureliano de Beruete, should have been so long in reaching America is a puzzle when you consider the velocity with which the Atlantic Ocean is traversed by so many mediocre books on art. The first Spanish edition of the Beruete monograph appeared about 1897; the same year saw it in French, and from the latter tongue it was translated into English by Hugh E. Poynter in 1906. Senor Beruete is considered with reason as the prime living authority on the great Spanish realist, though his study is not so voluminous as that of Carl Justi. The Bonn professor, however, took all Spain for his province. Velasquez and His Times is the t.i.tle of his work, the first edition of which came out in 1888, the second in 1903. Beruete (whose portrait by Sorolla was one of that master's most characteristic pictures at the recent Hispanic Society exhibition in New York) is not at odds on many points with Justi; but more sceptical he is, and to R.A.M. Stevenson's list of Velasquez pictures, two hundred and thirty-four, Beruete opposes the comparatively meagre number of eighty-nine. He reduces the number of sketches and waves away as spurious the Velasquez "originals" in Italy, several in the Prado, the very stronghold of the collection; and of the eleven in that famous cabinet of the Vienna Imperial Museum--to which we went as to a divine service of eye and soul--he allows only seven as authentic. The portrait of Innocent X in the Doria palace, Rome, is naturally a masterpiece, as is the bust portrait of the same subject at the Hermitage, St. Petersburg; but the Boston Museum full-length of Philip IV is discredited as a copy, only the Prince Don Baltasar Carlos Attended by a Dwarf being admitted in the company of the true Velasquezes.

Of the "supposed portrait of Cardinal Pamphili," a real Velasquez, now hanging in the Hispanic Society, 156th Street, Beruete writes: "In the winter of 1902 there appeared in Paris a bust portrait of a cardinal brought from Italy by Messrs. Trotty & Co., which had been alluded to by Professor A. Venturi of Rome in _L'Art_. It is life size, representing a person about thirty years of age in the dress of a cardinal, with smiling face and black hair, moustache and pointed beard, good carriage and a touch of levity not in keeping with the dignity and austerity of a prince of the Church. The beretta and cape, of a fine red colour, the latter painted in a uniform tone and without a crease, harmonise with the roseate hue of the features, and the plain gray background. Every detail reveals the hand of Velasquez, and it can be cla.s.sed without hesitation among the characteristic works of his second style. It is on that ground that I make mention of it here.

However, in Rome, at the house in which this picture was found, it was held to be the portrait of Cardinal Pamphili, nephew of Innocent X, who according to Palomino was painted in Rome by Velasquez at the same time as the Pontiff, that is in 1650."

Beruete believes Palomino was wrong in declaring that Velasquez painted the young cardinal in Rome; Madrid was the likelier city. The style proves an earlier date than 1650. The cardinal withdrew from the cardinalate after three years, 1644-47 > and married. The portrait was acquired by the American artist the late Francis Lathrop. Stevenson grants to the Metropolitan Museum a fruit-piece by Velasquez. Not so Beruete. J. H. McFadden of Philadelphia once owned the Dona Mariana of Austria, second wife of Philip IV, in a white-and-black dress, gold chain over her shoulder, hair adorned with red bows and red-and-white feather, from the Lyne-Stephens collection in the New Gallery, 1895--and is so quoted by Stevenson; but he sold the picture and Beruete has lost track of it.

Whereas Stevenson in his invaluable book studies his subject broadly in chapters devoted to the dignity of the Velasquez technique, his colour, modelling, brushwork, and his impressionism, Beruete follows a more detailed yet simpler method. Picture by picture, in each of the three styles--he adopts Justi's and Stevenson's cla.s.sification--he follows the painter, dealing less with the man than his work. Not that biographical data are missing--on the contrary, there are many pages of anecdotes as well as the usual facts--but Beruete is princ.i.p.ally concerned with the chronology and attribution of the pictures. He has dug up some fresh material concerning the miserable pay Velasquez received, rather fought for, at the court of Philip, where he was on a par with the dwarfs, barbers, comedians, servants, and other dependants of the royal household.

The painter has been criticised for his attachment to the king; but as he was not of a religious nature and did not paint religious pieces with the gusto of his contemporaries, the court was his only hope of existence; either court or church. He made his choice early, and while we must regret the enormous wasting of the hours consequent upon the fulfilment of his duties as a functionary, master of the revels, and what not, we should not forget how extremely precarious would have been his lot as a painter without royal favour in the Spain of those days. He had his bed, board, house, and though he died penniless--his good wife Juana only survived him seven days--he had the satisfaction of knowing that he owed no man, and that his daughter had married his pupil Mazo. Velasquez was born at Seville in 1599; died at Madrid, 1660. His real name was Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez. He was a Silva--for the "de" was acquired from the king after much pettifoggery on the part of that monarch with the prognathic jaw--and he was of Portuguese blood. He signed Velasquez--a magic grouping of letters for the lovers of art--though born as he was in Spain his forefathers came from Portugal. The mixed blood has led to furious disputes among hot-headed citizens of the two kingdoms. As if it much mattered.

Velasquez's son-in-law, by the way, Juan Mazo, was the author of a number of imitations and forgeries. He was a true friend of the picture-dealers.

Velasquez belonged to that rare family of sane genius. He was eminently the painter of daylight and not a nocturnal visionary, as was Rembrandt. Shakespeare, who had all the strings to his lyre, had also many daylight moments. Mozart always sang them, and how blithely!

No one, not Beethoven, not Raphael, not Goethe--to name three widely disparate men of genius--saw life as steadily as the Spaniard. He is a magnificent refutation of the madhouse doctors who swear to you that genius is a disease. Remember, too, that the limitations of Velasquez are clearly defined. Imagination was denied to him, a.s.serts Beruete; he had neither the turbulent temperament of Rubens nor possessed the strained, harsh mysticism of El Greco--a painter of imagination and the only painter allowed by Beruete to have affected the Velasquez palette. In a word, Velasquez was a puzzling comminglement of the cla.s.sic and the realist. He had the repose and the firm, virile line of the cla.s.sics, while his vision of actuality has never been surpa.s.sed. The Dutch Terburg, Vermeer, Van der Helst, Frans Hals saw as vividly the surfaces of things material; the last alone was the match of Velasquez in brushwork, but not Rembrandt recorded in his Anatomy Lesson the facts of the case as did Velasquez.

Senor Beruete wittily remarks that Los Borrachos (The Topers) of Velasquez is the truer anatomy lesson of the two. A realist, an impressionist, as Stevenson has it, the Spaniard was; but he was also something more. He had a magic hand to define, the rendering of the magical mystery of s.p.a.ce and atmosphere. Grant that he was not a colourist in the sense the Venetians were, or Rubens, yet how much more subtle, more n.o.ble, more intellectual, is his restricted tonal gamut. Those silver-grays, resonant blacks, browns, blues, and reds sing in your memory long after you have forgotten the tumultuous golden waves breaking upon the decorative coasts of Rubens. We are constrained to question the easy way Beruete and other critics deny the attributes of imagination and poetry to Velasquez. There is, perhaps, a more sublimated poetry in his pictures than in the obvious religious and mythological and allegorical set pieces of Rubens, Murillo, and how many others. His realism did not run to seed in the delineation of subject. He was as natural as Cervantes--the one great man of Spain who may be compared to him--and he saw the larger patterns of life, while never forgetting that the chief function of a painter is to paint, not to "think," not to rhapsodise, not to be "literary" on canvas. His cool, measuring eye did more than record sordid facts. He had a sort of enraptured vision of the earth as beautiful, the innocence of the eye we encounter in children only.

Stevenson rages at those who say that Velasquez was not a colourist--and Beruete is of them, though he quotes with considerable satisfaction the critical p.r.o.nouncement of Royal Cortissoz (in _Harper's Magazine_, May, 1895) that Las Meninas is "the most perfect study of colour and values which exists."

The truth is, Stevenson, Cortissoz, and Beruete are all three in the right. That Velasquez, when in Rome, studied the pictures there; that he didn't care for Raphael; that he had very much admired the Venetians, t.i.tian, Tintoretto; that he had admired Rubens, with whom he a.s.sociated daily on the occasion of the Flemish master's visit of nine months to Madrid--these are truths not to be denied. Beruete claims that the Rubens influence is not to be seen in Velasquez, only El Greco's. Every object, living or inanimate, that swam through the eyeb.a.l.l.s of the Spaniard--surely the most wonderful pair of eyes in history--was never forgotten. His powers of a.s.similation were unexcelled. He saw and made note of everything, but when he painted his spectators saw nothing of any other man, living or dead. Was not the spiritual impulse missing in this man? He couldn't paint angels, because he only painted what he saw; and as he never saw angels he only painted mankind. Life, not the "subject," appealed to him. He had little talent, less taste, for the florid decorative art of Rubens and the Venetians; but give him a simple, human theme (not pretty or sentimental) and he recreated it, not merely interpreted the scene; so that Las Meninas, The Spinners (Las Hilanderas), the hunting pictures, the various portraits of royalty, buffoons, beggars, outcasts, are the chronicles of his time, and he its master psychologist.

Beruete says that Ribera more than Zurbaran affected Velasquez; "El Greco taught him the use of delicate grays in the colouring of the flesh." Hot, hard, and dry in his first period (Borrachos), he becomes more fluid and atmospheric in the Breda composition (The Lances), and in the third period he has attained absolute mastery of his material.

His salary at the court was two and sixpence a day in 1628. Even Haydn and Mozart did better as menials. Yet some historians speak of the liberality of Philip IV. An "immortal employee" indeed, as Beruete names his idol. Luca Giordano called Las Meninas the "theology of painting." Wilkie declared that the Velasquez landscapes possessed "the real sun which lights us, the air which we breathe, and the soul and spirit of nature." "To see the Prado," exclaims Stevenson, "is to modify one's opinion of the novelty of recent art." To-day the impressionists and realists claim Velasquez as their patron saint as well as artistic progenitor. The profoundest master of harmonies and the possessor of a vision of the real world not second to Leonardo's, the place of the Spaniard in history will never be taken from him.

Velasquez is more modern than all the moderns; more modern than to-morrow. That sense of the liberation of the spirit which Mr.

Berenson is fond of adducing as the grandest attribute of the s.p.a.ce Composers, Raphael and the rest, may be discovered in Las Meninas, or in The Spinners, s.p.a.ce overhead, with mystery superadded. The brumous North was the home of mysticism, of Gothic architecture. The note of tragic mystery was seldom sounded by the Italians. Faith itself seems more real in the North. It remained for Rembrandt to give it out in his chords of _chiaroscuro_. And is there more n.o.ble, more virile music in all art than The Surrender of Breda?

Mr. Berenson refers only once to Velasquez and then as an "impersonal"

painter. As a counterblast to his theory of impersonality let us quote a few lines from R.A.M. Stevenson's Velasquez (that most inspiring of all art monographs): "Is it wonderful," he asks, "that you can apply Morelli's principles of criticism to the Pre-Raphaelite Italian schools; that you can point to the thumbs, fingers, poses of the head, ovals of the face and schemes of colour that the painters learned by heart, and can even say from whom they learned? The later Venetians broke away, and when you come to Velasquez the system holds good as little as it can in our own day." But this charge holds good for many painters of the Renaissance, painters of patterns. Velasquez, like the great prose-master of France, Gustave Flaubert, is always in modulation. No two canvases are rhythmically alike, except in the matter of masterfulness. He, too, was a master of magnificent prose painting, painting worth a wilderness of makers of frozen mediaeval patterns. Mr. Henry B. Fuller, the author of the Chevalier di Pensieri-Vani, once spoke of the "cosy sublimity" in Raphael's Vision of Ezekiel; one might paraphrase the epigram by describing the pictures of Velasquez as boxed-in eternities. Dostoevsky knew such a sensation when he wrote of "a species of eternity within the s.p.a.ce of a square foot." But there are many connoisseurs who find evidences of profounder and more nave faith in the angular loveliness of the Flemish Primitives than in all the religious art of Italy or Spain.

GOYA

I

Goya was a t.i.tan among artists. He once boasted that "Nature, Velasquez, and Rembrandt are my masters." It was an excellent self-criticism. He not only played the Velasquez gambit in his portraits, the gambit of Rembrandt in his sombre imaginative pieces, but he boldly annexed all Spain for his sinister and turbulent art. He was more truly Spanish in the range and variety of his performances than any Spanish-born painter since Velasquez. Without the sanity, solidity, n.o.bility of Velasquez, whose vision and voice he never possessed; without the luscious sweetness of Murillo, whose sweetness he lacked, he had something of El Greco's fierceness, and much of the vigour of Ribera. He added to these influences a temperament that was exuberant, fantastic, morose, and pessimistic yet humorous, sarcastic, sometimes melting, and ever masterful. He reminds one of an overwhelming force. The man dominates the painter. A dozen comparisons force themselves upon you when the name of Goya is p.r.o.nounced: comets, cataracts, whirlwinds, and wild animals. Anarch and courtier, atheist and decorator of churches, his "whole art seems like a bullfight,"

says Richard m.u.t.h.e.r. One might improve on this by calling him a subtle bull, a Hercules who had read Byron. "Nature, Velasquez, and Rembrandt!" cries MacColl in a too brief summary. "How inadequate the list! Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Legion had a hand in the teaching."

Goya incarnated the renaissance of old Spain and its art. Spanish art has always come from without, for its foundations were northern and Flemish. The Van Eycks and Van der Weyden were studied closely; Jan Van Eyck visited Madrid. The Venetian influence was strong, and El Greco his life long, and a pupil of t.i.tian as he was, this gloomy painter with the awkward name of Theotocopoulo endeavoured to forget his master and became more Spanish than the Spanish. Ribera, emotional, dramatic, realistic, religious, could sound the chords of tenderness without the sentimentalism of Murillo. Goya stems more from Caravaggio and Salvator Rosa than from any of his predecessors, except Velasquez. The presence of Tiepolo, the last of the Venetians, in Spain may have influenced him. Certainly Raphael Mengs, the "Saxon pedant," did not--Mengs a.s.sociated with Tiepolo at Madrid. It is in company with the bravos of the brush, Caravaggio and Rosa, that Goya is closely affiliated. We must go to Gustave Courbet for a like violence of temperament; both men painted _con furia_; both were capable of debauches in work; Goya could have covered the walls of h.e.l.l with diabolic frescoes. In music three men are of a like ilk: Berlioz, Paganini, Liszt. Demoniacal, charged with electric energy, was this trinity, and Goya could have made it a quartet.

But if Spain was not a country of original artists--as was Italy, for example--she developed powerful and astounding individualities.

Character is her _leit motv_ in the symphony of the nations. The rich virility and majestic seriousness of her men, their apt.i.tudes for war, statesmans.h.i.+p, and drama, are borne out in her national history.

Perhaps the climate plays its part. Havelock Ellis thinks so. "The hard and violent effects, the sharp contrasts, the strong colours, the stained and dusky clouds, looking as if soaked in pigment, may well have affected the imagination of the artist," he writes. Certainly the landscapes of Velasquez could not be more Spanish than they are; and, disagreeing with those who say that he had no feeling for nature, the bits of countryside and mountain Goya shows are truly peninsular in their sternness. It may be well to remark here that the softness of Tuscany is not to be found in the lean and often arid aspects of Spain. Spain, too, is romantic--but after its own fas.h.i.+on. Goya revived the best traditions of his country's art; he was the last of the great masters and the first of the moderns. Something neurotic, modern, disquieting, threads his work with devilish irregularity. He had not the ma.s.sive temper of Velasquez, of those men who could paint day after day, year after year, until death knocked at their ateliers.

As vigorous as Rubens in his sketches, Goya had not the steady, slow nerves of that master. He was very unequal. His life was as disorderly as Hals's or Steen's, but their saving phlegm was missing. In an eloquent pa.s.sage--somewhere in his English Literature--Taine speaks of the sanity of genius as instanced by Shakespeare. Genius narrowly escapes nowadays being a cerebral disorder, though there was Marlowe to set off Shakespeare's serene spirit, and even of Michael Angelo's mental health and morals his prime biographer, Parlagreco, does not speak in rea.s.suring terms. Goya was badly balanced, impulsive, easily angered, and not slow to obey the pull of his irritable motor centres when aroused. A knife was always within reach. He drove the Duke of Wellington from his presence because the inquisitive soldier asked too many questions while his portrait was being blocked out. A sword or a dagger did the business; but Wellington returned to the studio and, as Mr. Rothenstein tells us, the portrait was finished and is now at Strathfieldsaye. A sanguine is in the British Museum. His exploits in Rome may have been exaggerated, though he was quite capable of eloping with a nun from a convent, as is related, or going around the top of the Cecilia Metella tomb supported only by his thumbs. The agility and strength of Goya were notorious, though in a land where physical prowess is not the exception. He was picador, matador, banderillero by turns in the bull ring. After a stabbing affray he escaped in the disguise of a bull-fighter.

If he was a _dompteur_ of dames and cattle, he was the same before his canvas. Anything that came to hand served him as a brush, an old brown stick wrapped up in cloth, a spoon--with the latter he executed that thrilling Ma.s.sacre, May 2, 1808, in the Prado. He could have painted with a sabre or on all fours. Reckless to the degree of insanity, he never feared king or devil, man or the Inquisition. The latter reached out for him, but he had disappeared, after suffering a dagger-thrust in the back. When on the very roof of his prosperity, he often slipped downstairs to the company of varlets and wenches; this friend of the d.u.c.h.ess of Alba seemed happier dicing, drinking, dancing in the suburbs with base-born people and gipsies. A _genre_ painter, Goya delighted in depicting the volatile, joyous life of a now-vanished epoch. He was a historian of manner as well as of disordered souls, and an avowed foe of hypocrisy.

Not "poignantly genteel," to use a Borrovian phrase, was he. Yet he could play the silken courtier with success. The Arabs say that "one who has been stung by a snake s.h.i.+vers at a string," and perhaps the violence with which the painter attacked the religious may be set down to the score of his youthful fears and flights when the Inquisition was after him. He was a sort of Voltaire in black and white. The corruption of churchmen and court at this epoch seems almost incredible. Goya noted it with a boldness that meant but one thing--friends high in power. This was the case. He was admired by the king, Charles IV, and admired--who knows how much!--by his queen, Marie Louise of Parma, Goya painted their portraits; also painted the portraits of the royal favourite and prime minister and Prince de la Paz, Manuel G.o.doy--favourite of both king and queen. Him, Goya left in effigy for the scorn of generations to come. "A grocer's family who have won the big lottery prize," was the witty description of Theophile Gautier when he saw the picture of the royal family.

Curiously enough, this Goya, who from the first plucked success from its th.o.r.n.y setting, was soon forgotten, and until Gautier in 1840 recorded his impressions in his brilliant Voyage en Espagne, critical literature did not much concern itself with the versatile Spaniard.

And Gautier's sketch of a few pages still remains the most comprehensive estimate. From it all have been forced to borrow; Richard m.u.t.h.e.r in his briskly enthusiastic monograph and the section in his valuable History of Modern Painting; Charles Yriarte, Will Rothenstein, Lafond, Lefort, Conde de la Vinaza--all have read Gautier to advantage. Valerian von Loga has devoted a study to the etchings, and Don Juan de la Rada has made a study of the frescoes in the church of San Antonio de la Florida; Carl Justi, Stirling Maxwell, C.G.

Hartley should also be consulted. Yriarte is interesting, inasmuch as he deals with the apparition of Goya in Rome, an outlaw, but a blithe one, who, notebook in hand, went through the Trastevere district sketching with ferocious rapidity the att.i.tudes and gestures of the vivacious population. A man after Stendhal's heart, this Spaniard. And in view of his private life one is tempted to add--and after the heart, too, of Casanova. Notwithstanding, he was an unrivalled interpreter of child-life. Some of his painted children are of a dazzling sweetness.

GOYA

II

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was born March 30 (or 31), 1746, at Fuentetodos, near Saragossa, Aragon. He died at Bordeaux, France, where he had gone for his health, April 16, 1828--Calvert, possibly by a pen slip, makes him expire a month earlier. He saw the beginnings of French romanticism, as he was himself a witness of the decadence of Spanish art. But his spirit has lived on in Manet and Zuloaga.

Decadent he was; a romantic before French romanticism, he yet had borrowed from an earlier France. Some of his gay Fetes Champetres recall the influence of Watteau--a Watteau without the sweet elegiac strain. He has been called a Spanish Hogarth--not a happy simile.

Hogarth preaches; Goya never; satirists both, Goya never deepened by a pen stroke the didactic side. His youth was not extraordinary in promise; his father and mother were poor peasants. The story of his discovery by a monk of Saragosela--Father Felix Salvador of the Carthusian convent of Aula Dei--is not missing. He studied with Jose Martinez. He ran away in 1766. He remained, say some, in Italy from 1769 to 1774; but in 1771 he appeared in Saragossa again, and the year 1772 saw him competing for the painting about to be undertaken in the cathedral. He married Josefa Bayeu, the sister of the court painter.

He has told us what he thought of his jealous, intriguing brother-in-law in a portrait. In 1775 he was at Madrid. From 1776 he executed forty-six tapestry cartoons. In 1779 he presented to the king his etchings after Velasquez. His rise was rapid. He painted the queen, with her false teeth, false hair, and her infernal simper, and this portrait was acclaimed a masterpiece.

His religious frescoes, supposed to be _ad majorem Dei gloriam_, were really for the greater glory of Goya. They are something more than secular, often little short of blasphemous. That they were tolerated proves the cynical temper of his times. When the fat old scoundrel of a Bourbon king ran away with all his court and the pusillanimous Joseph Bonaparte came upon the scene, Goya swerved and went through the motions of loyalty, a thing that rather disturbs the admirers of the supposedly st.u.r.dy republican. But he was only marking time. He left a terrific arraignment of war and its horrors. Nor did he spare the French. Callot, h.e.l.l-Breughel, are outdone in these swift, ghastly memoranda of misery, barbarity, rapine, and ruin. The hypocrite Ferdinand VII was no sooner on the throne of his father than Goya, hat in hand but sneer on lip and twinkle in eye, approached him, and after some parleying was restored to royal favour. Goya declared that as an artist he was not personally concerned in the pranks of the whirligig politic. Nevertheless he was bitterly chagrined at the twist of events, and, an old man, he retired to his country house, where he etched and designed upon its walls startling fancies. He died disillusioned, and though nursed by some n.o.ble countrymen, his career seemed to ill.u.s.trate that terrifying picture of his invention--a skeleton lifts its gravestone and grinningly traces with bony finger in the dust the word _Nada_--Nothing! Overtaxed by the violence of his life and labours--he left a prodigious amount of work behind him--soured by satiety, all spleen and rage, he was a broken-down Lucifer, who had trailed his wings in the mud. But who shall pa.s.s judgment upon this unhappy man? Perhaps, as he saw the "glimmering square" grow less, the lament of Cardinal Wolsey may have come to a brain teeming with memories. Goya had always put his king before his G.o.d. But in his heart he loved the old romantic faith--the faith that hovered in the background of his art. Goya is not the first son of his mother church who denied her from sheer perversity. What a nation!

Cervantes and Lope da Vega, Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada--most glorious of her s.e.x, saint and genius--and Goya! Spain is the land of great and diverse personalities. But with Calderon we must now say: "Let us to our s.h.i.+p, for here all is shadowy and unsettled."

Goya, as Baudelaire pointed out more than half a century ago, executed his etchings by combining aquatint and the use of the dry point. A few years before his death he took up lithography, then a novelty. His Caprices, Proverbs, and Horrors of War may outlive his paintings. His colour scheme was not a wide one, blacks, reds, browns, and yellows often playing solo; but all modern impressionism may be seen on his canvases--harsh dissonances, dots, dabs, spots, patches, heavy planes, strong rhythmic effects of lighting, heavy impasto, luminous atmosphere, air, suns.h.i.+ne, and vibrating movements; also the strangeness of his material. Manet went to him a beginner. After studying the Maja desnuda at the Prado Museum he returned to France and painted the Olympe, once of the Luxembourg, now in the Louvre. The balcony scenes of Goya, with their manolas--old-fas.h.i.+oned grisettes--must have stirred Manet; recall the Frenchman's Balcony.

And the bull-fights? Oh! what an iron-souled master was there--Goya when he slashed a bull in the arena tormented by the human brutes!

None of his successors matches him. The same is the case with that diverting, devilish, savoury, and obscene series he called Caprices.

It is worth remembering that Delacroix was one of the first artists in Paris who secured a set of these rare plates. The witch's sabbaths and the modern version of them, prost.i.tution and its symbolism, filled the brain of Goya. He always shocks any but robust nerves with his hybrid creatures red in claw and foaming at mouth as they fight in midair, hideous and unnamable phantoms of the dark. His owls are theologians.

The females he often shows make us turn aside our head and shudder.

With implacable fidelity he displayed the reverse of war's heroic s.h.i.+eld. It is something more than h.e.l.l.

Sattler, Charlet, Raffet, James Ensor, Rethel, De Groux, Rops, Edvard Munch (did you ever see his woman wooed by a skeleton?), and the rest of these delineators of the morbid and macabre acknowledge Goya as their progenitor. He must have been a devil-wors.h.i.+pper. He pictures the goat devil, horns and hoofs. Gautier compares him to E.T.W.

Hoffmann--Poe not being known in Paris at that time--but it is a rather laboured comparison, for there was a profoundly human side to the Spaniard. His perception of reality was of the solidest. He had lived and loved and knew before Flaubert that if the G.o.d of the Romantics was an upholsterer the G.o.d of eighteenth-century Spain was an executioner. The professed lover of the d.u.c.h.ess of Alba, he painted her nude, and then, hearing that the Duke might not like the theme so handled, he painted her again, and clothed, but more insolently uncovered than before. At the Spanish museum in New York you may see another portrait of this bold beauty with the name of Goya scratched in the earth at her feet. Her att.i.tude is characteristic of the intrigue, which all Madrid knew and approved. At home sat Mrs. Goya with her twenty children.

Goya was a man of striking appearance. Slender in youth, a graceful dancer, in middle life he had the wide shoulders and bull neck of an athlete. He was the terror of Madrilenan husbands. His voice had seductive charm. He could tw.a.n.g the guitar and fence like ten devils.

A gamester, too. In a word, a figure out of the Renaissance, when the deed trod hard on the heels of the word. One of his self-portraits shows him in a Byronic collar, the brow finely proportioned, marked mobile features, sombre eyes--the ideal Don Juan Tenorio to win the foolish heart of an Emma Bovary or a bored n.o.blewoman. Another, with its savage eye--it is a profile--and big beaver head-covering, recalls Walt Whitman's "I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out." A giant egoist, and as human, all too human, a fellow as Spain ever begot, Goya is only hinted at in Baudelaire's searching quatrain beginning: "Goya, cauchemar plein de choses inconnues." _Fleurs du Mal_ would be a happy t.i.tle for the work of Francisco Goya if to "The Flowers of Evil" were added "and Wisdom." Goya is often cruel and lascivious and vulgar, but he is as great a philosopher as painter. And to offset his pa.s.sionate gloom there are his visions of a golden Spain no longer in existence; happy, gorgeous of costume, the Spain of sudden coquetries, of fans, masques, bull-fights, and fandangos, of a people dancing on the rim of a fire-filled mountain, pious, capricious, child-like, romantic, and patriotic--the Spain of the eighteenth century. Goya is its spokesman, as is Velasquez the mirror of Philip's more s.p.a.cious times. Velasquez--Goya! poles asunder, yet both born to the artistic purple. And the stately aristocrat who signed himself Velasquez is not more in tune with the twentieth-century _Zeitgeist_ than that coa.r.s.e-fibred democrat of genius, Francisco Goya.