the picture, you enter the tiny room at the museum on the Prado in
which is hung Las Meninas--The Maids of Honour, painted by Velasquez
in 1656. My experience was a typical one. I went hastily through the
larger Velasquez gallery in not only a challenging but an irritable
mood. The holy of holies I was enraged to find, seemingly, crowded.
There was the picture, but a big easel stood in the foreground
blotting out the left side; some selfish artist copying, some fellow
thrusting himself between us and the floating illusion of art. In
despair I looked into the mirror that reflects the picture. I
suspected trickery. Surely that little princess with her wilful,
_distrait_ expression, surely the kneeling maid, the dwarfs, the
sprawling dog, the painter Velasquez--with his wig--the heads of the
king and queen in the oblong mirror, the figure of Señor Nieto in the
doorway, the light framing his silhouette--surely they are all real.
Here are the eternal simplicities. You realise that no one is in the
room but these painted effigies of the court and family of Philip IV;
that the canvas whose bare ribs deceived is in the picture, not on the
floor; that Velasquez and the others are _eidolons_, arrested in space
by the white magic of his art. For the moment all other artists and
their works are as forgotten as the secrets in the lost and sacred
books of the Magi. There is but one painter and his name is Velasquez.
This mood of ecstatic absorption is never outlived; the miracle
operates whenever a visit is made to the shrine. But you soon note
that the canvas has been deprived of its delicate glaze. There are
patches ominously eloquent of the years that have passed since the
birth of this magisterial composition. The tonal key is said to be
higher because of restorations; yet to the worshipper these
shortcomings are of minor importance. Even Giordano's exclamation:
"Sire, this is the theology of painting," falls flat. Essence of
painting, would have been a truer statement. There is no
other-worldliness here, but something more normal, a suggestion of
solid reality, a vision of life. The various figures breathe; so
potent is their vitality that my prime impression in entering the room
was a sense of the presence of others. Perhaps this is not as
consummate art as the voluptuous colour-symphonies of Titian, the
golden exuberance of Rubens, the abstract spacing of Raphael, the
mystic opium of Rembrandt; but it is an art more akin to nature, an
art that is a lens through which you may spy upon life. You recall
Ibsen and his "fourth wall." Velasquez has let us into the secret of
human existence. Not, however, in the realistic order of inanimate
objects copied so faithfully as to fool the eye. Presentation, not
representation, is the heart of this coloured imagery, and so moving,
so redolent of life is it that if the world were shattered and Las
Meninas shot to the coast of Mars, its inhabitants would be able to
reconstruct an idea of the creatures that once inhabited old Mother
Earth; men, women, children, their shapes, attitudes, gestures, and
attributes. The mystery of sentient beings lurks in this canvas, the
illusion of atmosphere has never been so contrived. In the upper part
of the picture space is indicated in a manner that recalls both
Rembrandt and Raphael. Velasquez, too, was a space-composer.
Velasquez, too, plucked at the heart of darkness. But his air is
luminous, the logic of his proportion faultless, his synthesis
absolute. Where other painters juxtapose he composes. Despite the
countless nuances of his thin, slippery brush strokes, the picture is
always a finely spun whole.
When Fragonard was starting for Rome, Boucher said to him: "If you
take those people over there seriously you are done for." Luckily
Frago did not, and, despite his two Italian journeys, Velasquez was
not seduced into taking "those people" seriously. His recorded opinion
of Raphael is corroborative of his attitude toward Italian art. Titian
was his sole god. For nearly a year he was in daily intercourse with
Rubens, but of Rubens's influence upon him there is little trace. Las
Meninas is the perfect flowering of the genius of the Spaniard. It has
been called impressionistic; Velasquez has been claimed as the father
of impressionism as Stendhal was hailed by Zola as the literary
progenitor of naturalism. But Velasquez is too universal to be
labelled in the interests of any school. His themes are of this earth,
his religious paintings are the least credible of his efforts. They
are Italianate as if the artist dared not desert the familiar
religious stencil. His art is not correlated to the other arts. One
does not dream of music or poetry or sculpture or drama in front of
his pictures. One thinks of life and then of the beauty of the paint.
Velasquez is never rhetorical, nor does he paint for the sake of
making beautiful surfaces as often does Titian. His practice is not
art for art as much as art for life. As a portraitist, Titian's is the
only name to be coupled with that of Velasquez. He neither flattered
his sitters, as did Van Dyck, nor mocked them like Goya. And consider
the mediocrities, the dull, ugly, royal persons he was forced to
paint! He has wrung the neck of banal eloquence, and his prose, sober,
rich, noble, sonorous, rhythmic, is to my taste preferable to the
exalted, versatile volubility and lofty poetic tumblings in the azure
of any school of painting. His palette is ever cool and fastidiously
restricted. It has been said that he lacks imagination, as if creation
or evocation of character is not the loftiest attribute of
imagination, even though it deals not with the stuff of which
mythologies are made.
We admire the enthusiasm of Mr. Ricketts for Velasquez, and his
analysis is second to none save R.A.M. Stevenson's. Yet we do protest
the painter was not the bundle of negations Mr. Ricketts has made of
him in his evident anxiety that some homage may be diverted from
Titian. Titian is incomparable. Velasquez is unique. But to describe
him as an artist who cautiously studied the work of other men, and
then avoided by a series of masterly omissions and evasions their
faults as well as their excellences, is a statement that robs
Velasquez of his originality. He is not an eclectic. He is a man of
affirmations, Velasquez. A student to his death, he worked slowly,
revised painfully, above all, made heroic sacrifices. Each new canvas
was a discovery. The things he left out of his pictures would fill a
second Prado Museum. And the things he painted in are the glories of
the world. Because of his simplicity, absence of fussiness, avoidance
of the mock-heroic, of the inflated "grand manner," critics have
pressed too heavily upon this same simplicity. There is nothing as
subtle as his simplicity, for it is a simplicity that conceals
subtlety. No matter the time of day or season of the year you visit
Velasquez, you never find him off his guard. Aristocratic in his ease,
he disarms you first. You may change your love, your politics, your
religion, but once a Velasquez worshipper, always one.
Mr. Ricketts, over-anxious at precisely placing him, writes of his
"distinction." He is the most "distinguished" painter in history. But
we contend that this phrase eludes precise definition. "Distinguished"
in what? we ask. Style, character, paint quality, vision of the
beautiful? Why not come out plumply with the truth: Velasquez is the
supreme harmonist in art. No one ever approached him in his handling
save Hals, and Hals hardly boasts the artistic inches of Velasquez.
Both possessed a daylight vision of the world. Reality came to them in
the sharpest guise; but the vision of Velasquez came in a more
beautiful envelope. And his psychology is profounder. He painted the
sparkle of the eyes and also the look in them, the challenging glance
that asks: "Are we, too, not humans?" Titian saw colour as a poet,
Velasquez as a charmer and a reflective temperament. Hals doesn't
think at all. He slashes out a figure for you and then he is done. The
graver, deeper Spaniard is not satisfied until he has kept his pact
with nature. So his vision of her is more rounded, concrete, and
truthful than the vision of other painters. The balance in his work of
the most disparate and complex relations of form, space, colour, and
rhythm has the unpremeditated quality of life; yet the massive
harmonic grandeurs of Las Meninas have been placed by certain critics
in the category of glorified genre.
Some prefer Las Hilanderas in the outer gallery. After the stately
equestrian series, the Philip, the Olivares, the Baltasar Carlos;
after the bust portraits of Philip in the Prado and in the National
Gallery, the hunting series; after the Crucifixion and its sombre
background, you return to The Spinners and wonder anew. Its subtitle
might be: Variations on the Theme of Sunshine. In it the painter
pursues the coloured adventures of a ray of light. Rhythmically more
involved and contrapuntal than The Maids, this canvas, with its
brilliant broken lights, its air that circulates, its tender yet
potent conducting of the eye from the rounded arm of the seductive
girl at the loom to the arched area with its leaning, old-time
bass-viol, its human figures melting dream-like into the tapestried
background, arouses within the spectator much more complicated _états
d'âme_ than does Las Meninas. The silvery sorceries of that picture
soothe the spirit and pose no riddles; The Spinners is a cathedral
crammed with implications. Is it not the last word of the art of
Velasquez--though it preceded The Maids? Will the eye ever tire of its
glorious gloom, its core of tonal richness, its virile exaltation of
everyday existence? Is it only a trick of the wrist, a deft blending
of colours by this artist, who has been called, wrongfully--the
"Shakespeare of the brush"? Is all this nothing more than
"distinguished"?
Mr. Ricketts justly calls Las Lanzas the unique historic picture.
Painted at the very flush of his genius, painted with sympathy for the
conquered and the conqueror--Velasquez accompanied the Marquis of
Spinola to Italy--this Surrender of Breda has received the homage of
many generations. Sir Joshua Reynolds asserted that the greatest
picture at Rome was the Velasquez head of Pope Innocent X in the Doria
Palace (a variant is in the Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg). What
would he have said in the presence of this captivating evocation of a
historic event? The battle pieces of Michael Angelo, Da Vinci, and
Titian are destroyed; Las Lanzas remains a testimony to the powers of
imaginative reconstruction and architectonic of Velasquez. It is the
most complete, the most natural picture in the world. The rhythms of
the bristling lances are syncopated by a simple device; they are
transposed to another plane of perspective, there in company with a
lowered battle standard. The acute rhythms of these spears has given
to the picture its title of The Lances, and never was title more
appropriate. The picture is at once a decorative arabesque, an
ensemble of tones, and a slice of history. Spinola receives from the
conquered Justin of Nassau the keys of the beleagured Breda. Velasquez
creates two armies out of eight figures, a horse and fourteen
heads--here is the recipe of Degas for making a multitude carried to
the height of the incredible. His own portrait, that of a grave,
handsome man, may be seen to the right of the big horse.
The first period of his art found Velasquez a realist heavy in colour
and brush-work, and without much hint of the transcendental realism to
be noted in his later style. The dwarfs, buffoons, the Æsop and the
Menippus are the result of an effortless art. In the last manner the
secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the stars, as
Dostoïevsky would put it. The Topers, The Forge of Vulcan, are
pictures that enthrall because of their robust simplicity and vast
technical sweep though they do not possess the creative invention of
the Mercury and Argus or The Anchorites. This latter is an amazing
performance. Two hermits--St. Antony the Abbot visiting St. Paul the
Hermit--are shown. A flying raven, bread in beak, nears them. You
could swear that the wafer of flour is pasted on the canvas. This
picture breathes peace and sweetness. The Christ of the Spaniard is a
man, not a god, crucified. His Madonnas, masterly as they are, do not
reach out hands across the frame as do his flower-like royal children
and delicate monsters.
The crinolined princess, Margarita, with her spangles and furbelows,
is a companion to the Margarita at the Louvre and the one in Vienna.
She is the exquisite and lyric Velasquez. On his key-board of
imbricated tones there are grays that felicitously sing across alien
strawberry tints, thence modulate into fretworks of dim golden fire.
As a landscapist Velasquez is at his best in the Prado. The various
backgrounds and those two views painted at Rome in the garden of the
Villa Medici--a liquid comminglement of Corot and Constable, as has
been pointed out--prove this man of protean gifts to have anticipated
modern discoveries in vibrating atmospheric effects and colour-values.
But, then, Velasquez will always be "modern." And when time has
obliterated his work he may become the legendary Parrhasius of a
vanished epoch. To see him in the Prado is to stand eye to eye with
the most enchanting realities of art.
_CODA_
When a man begins to chatter of his promenades among the masterpieces
it may be assumed that he has crossed the sill of middle-age. Remy de
Gourmont, gentle ironist, calls such a period _l'heure insidieuse_.
Yet, is it not something--a vain virtue, perhaps--to possess the
courage of one's windmills! From the Paris of the days when I haunted
the ateliers of Gérôme, Bonnat, Meissonier, Couture, and spent my
enthusiasms over the colour-schemes of Decamps and Fortuny, to the
Paris of the revolutionists, Manet, Degas, Monet, now seems a life
long. But time fugues precipitately through the land of art. In
reality both periods overlap; the dichotomy is spiritual, not
temporal.
The foregoing memoranda are frankly in the key of impressionism. They
are a record of some personal preferences, not attempts at critical
revaluations. Appearing first in the New York _Sun_, the project of
their publication in book form met with the approbation of its
proprietor, William Mackay Laffan, whose death in 1909 was an
international loss to the Fine Arts. If these opinions read like a
medley of hastily crystallised judgments jotted down after the manner
of a traveller pressed for time, they are none the less sincere. My
garden is only a straggling weedy plot, but I have traversed it with
delight; in it I have promenaded my dearest prejudices, my most absurd
illusions. And central in this garden may be found the image of the
supreme illusionist of art, Velasquez.
Since writing the preceding articles on El Greco and Velasquez the
museum of the Hispanic Society, New York, has been enabled, through
the munificent generosity of Mr. Archer M. Huntington, to exhibit his
newly acquired El Grecos and a Velasquez. The former comprise a
brilliantly coloured Holy Family, which exhales an atmosphere of
serenity; the St. Joseph is said to be a portrait of El Greco; and
there also is a large canvas showing Christ with several of his
disciples. Notable examples both. The Velasquez comes from the
collection of the late Edouard Kann and is a life-size bust portrait
of a sweetly grave little girl. Señor Beruete believes her to
represent the daughter of the painter Mazo and his wife, Francisca
Velasquez, therefore a granddaughter of Velasquez. The tonalities of
this picture are subtly beautiful, the modelling mysterious, the
expression vital and singularly child-like. It is a fitting companion
to a portrait hanging on the same wall, that of the aristocratic young
Cardinal Pamphili, a nephew of Pope Innocent X, also by the great
Spaniard.
* * * * *
BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC
BRAHMS, TSCHAÏKOWSKY, CHOPIN, RICHARD STRAUSS, LISZT AND WAGNER
12mo. $1.50
"Mr. Huneker is, in the best sense, a critic; he listens to the music
and gives you his impressions as rapidly and in as few words as
possible; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping
strokes with a magnificent disregard for unimportant details. And as
Mr. Huneker is, as I have said, a powerful personality, a man of quick
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string that vibrates and sings in response to music--we get in these
essays of his a distinctly original and very valuable contribution to
the world's tiny musical literature."--J. F. Runciman, in London
Saturday Review.
MELOMANIACS
12mo. 31.50
Contents: The Lord's Prayer in B--A Son of Liszt--A Chopin of the
Gutter--The Piper of Dreams--An Emotional Acrobat--Isolde's
Mother--The Rim of Finer Issues--An Ibsen Girl--Tannhäuser's
Choice--The Red-Headed Piano Player--Brynhüd's Immolation--The Quest
of the Elusive--An Involuntary Insurgent--Hunding's Wife--The Corridor
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intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is genius written over a large
portion of it, and to a musician the wealth of musical imagination is
a living spring of thought"--Harold E. Gorst, in _London Saturday
Review_ (Dec. 8, 1906).
BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
ICONOCLASTS:
A Book of Dramatists
12mo. $1.50 net
CONTENTS: Henrik Ibsen--August Strindberg--Henry Becque--Gerhart
Hauptmann--Paul Hervieu--The Quintessence of Shaw--Maxim Gorky's
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D'Annunzio--Villiers de l'lsle Adam--Maurice Maeterlinck.
"His style is a little jerky, but it is one of those rare styles in
which we are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every
sentence."--G.K. Chesterton, _in London Daily News._
"No other book in English has surveyed the whole field so
comprehensively."--The Outlook.
"A capital book, lively, informing, suggestive."--London Times
Saturday Review.
"Eye-opening and mind-clarifying is Mr. Huneker's criticism; ... no
one having read that opening essay in this volume will lay it down
until the final judgment upon Maurice Maeterlinck is reached."--Boston
Transcript.
OVERTONES:
A Book of Temperaments
_WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF RICHARD STRAUSS_
12mo. $1.25 net
CONTENTS: Richard Strauss--Parsifal: A Mystical Melodrama--Literary
Men who loved Music (Balzac, Turgenieff, Daudet, etc.)--The Eternal
Feminine--The Beethoven of French Prose--Nietzsche the
Rhapsodist--Anarchs of Art--After Wagner, What?--Verdi and Boito.
"The whole book is highly refreshing with its breadth of knowledge,
its catholicity of taste, and its inexhaustible energy."--_Saturday
Review, London._
"In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most brilliant of
all living writers on matters musical."--_Academy, London._
"No modern musical critic has shown greater ingenuity in the
attempt to correlate the literary and musical tendencies of the
nineteenth century."--_Spectator, London._
BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
EGOISTS
_A BOOK OF SUPERMEN_
Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès,
Hello, Blake, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Max Stirner.
With portrait of Stendhal, unpublished letter of Flaubert, and
original proof page of "Madame Bovary."
12mo. $1.50 net
"The best thing in the book happily comes first, the essay on
Stendhal. Closely and yet lightly written, full of facts yet as
amusing as a bit of discursive talk, penetrating, candid and very
shrewd, this study would be hard to beat in English, or, for that
matter, in French. It is, too, the best of the essays as regards
discrimination. There are no shades of Stendhal's genius, whether
making for good or for ill, that are missed by this analyst, and,
moreover, both the lights and shadows are justly distributed... He
seeks to show you the color of a man's mind, and it is evidence of his
validity as an essayist that straightway he interests you in the color
of his own. He is an impressionist in criticism... Such an essayist is
Mr. Huneker, a foe to dulness who is also a man of brains."--Royal
Cortissoz in _New York Tribune._
"JAMES HUNEKER: INDIVIDUALIST"
"As a critic, whether of music, the plastic arts, of poetry or fiction
or philosophy, he is of those who never attain finality; but he is
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quality, not invariably possessed by critics, he is entitled to a
distinctive place in American letters."
Edward Clark Marsh in _The Forum._
BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
VISIONARIES
12mo. $1.50 net
Contents: A Master of Cobwebs--The Eighth Deadly Sin--The Purse of
Aholibah--Rebels of the Moon--The Spiral Road--A Mock
Sun--Antichrist--The Eternal Duel--The Enchanted Yodler--The Third
Kingdom--The Haunted Harpsichord--The Tragic Wall--A Sentimental
Rebellion--Hall of the Missing Footsteps--The Cursory Light--An Iron
Fan--The Woman Who Loved Chopin--The Tune of Time--Nada--Pan.
"The author's style is sometimes grotesque in its desire both to
startle and to find true expression. He has not followed those great
novelists who write French a child may read and understand. He calls
the moon 'a spiritual gray wafer'; it faints in 'a red wind'; 'truth
beats at the bars of a man's bosom'; the sun is 'a sulphur-colored
cymbal'; a man moves with 'the jaunty grace of a young elephant.' But
even these oddities are significant and to be placed high above the
slipshod sequences of words that have done duty till they are as
meaningless as the imprint on a worn-out coin.
"Besides, in nearly every story the reader is arrested by the idea,
and only a little troubled now and then by an over-elaborate style. If
most of us are sane, the ideas cherished by these visionaries are
insane; but the imagination of the author so illuminates them that we
follow wondering and spellbound. In 'The Spiral Road' and in some of
the other stories both fantasy and narrative may be compared with
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Nietzsche and has cast off his heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's
Puritanism finds no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical,
wavering and unblessed. But Hawthorne's splendor of vision and his
power of sympathy with a tormented mind do live again in the best of
Mr. Huneker's stories."--London Academy (Feb. 3, 1906).
* * * * *
CHOPIN:
The Man and His Music
WITH ETCHED PORTRAIT
12mo. $2.00
"No pianist, amateur or professional, can rise from the perusal of his
pages without a deeper appreciation of the new forms of beauty which
Chopin has added, like so many species of orchids, to the musical
flora of the nineteenth century."--The Nation.
"I think it not too much to predict that Mr. Huneker's estimate of
Chopin and his works is destined to be the permanent one. He gives the
reader the cream of the cream of all noteworthy previous commentators,
besides much that is wholly his own. He speaks at once with modesty
and authority, always with personal charm."--Boston Transcript.
End of Project Gutenberg's Promenades of an Impressionist, by James Huneker