VII

I linger over these sordid details because I must needs shrink before

the mention of that incomparable gallery, the Museo del Prado. I am

careful not to call it the greatest gallery in the world, for I think of

what the Louvre, the Pitti, and the National Gallery are, and what

our own Metropolitan is going to be; but surely the Museo del Prado is

incomparable for its peculiar riches. It is part of the autobiographical

associations with my Spanish travel that when John Hay, who was not yet,

by thirty or forty years, the great statesman he became, but only the

breeziest of young Secretaries of Legation, just two weeks from his post

in Madrid, blew surprisingly into my little carpenter’s box in Cambridge

one day, he boasted almost the first thing that the best Titians in the

world were in the Prado galleries. I was too lately from Venice in 1867

not to have my inward question whether there could be anywhere a better

Titian than the “Assumption,” but I loved Hay too much to deny him

openly. I said that I had no doubt of it, and when the other day I

went to the Prado it was with the wish of finding him perfectly right,

triumphantly right. I had been from the first a strong partisan of

Titian, and in many a heated argument with Ruskin, unaware of our

controversy, I had it out with that most prejudiced partisan of

Tintoretto. I always got the better of him, as one does in such

dramatizations, where one frames one’s opponent’s feeble replies for

him; but now in the Prado, sadly and strangely enough, I began to wonder

if Ruskin might not have tacitly had the better of me all the time. If

Hay was right in holding that the best Titians in the world were in the

Prado, then I was wrong in having argued for Titian against Tintoretto

with Ruskin. I could only wish that I had the “Assumption” there, or

some of those senators whose portraits I remembered in the Academy

at Venice. The truth is that to my eye he seemed to weaken before the

Spanish masters, though I say this, who must confess that I failed to

see the room of his great portraits. The Italians who hold their own

with the Spaniards are Tintoretto and Veronese; even Murillo was more

than a match for Titian in such pictures of his as I saw (I must own

that I did not see the best, or nearly all), though properly speaking

Murillo is to be known at his greatest only in Seville.

But Velasquez, but Velasquez! In the Prado there is no one else present

when he is by, with his Philips and Charleses, and their “villainous

hanging of the nether lip,” with his hideous court dwarfs and his pretty

princes and princesses, his grandees and jesters, his allegories and

battles, his pastorals and chases, which fitly have a vast salon to

themselves, not only that the spectator may realize at once the rich

variety and abundance of the master, but that such lesser lights as

Rubens, Titian, Correggio, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rembrandt,

Zurbaran, El Greco, Murillo, may not be needlessly dimmed by his

surpassing splendor. I leave to those who know painting from the

painter’s art to appreciate the technical perfection of Velasquez; I

take my stand outside of that, and acclaim its supremacy in virtue of

that reality which all Spanish art has seemed always to strive for and

which in Velasquez it incomparably attains. This is the literary quality

which the most untechnical may feel, and which is not clearer to the

connoisseur than to the least unlearned.

After Velasquez in the Prado we wanted Goya, and more and more Goya, who

is as Spanish and as unlike Velasquez as can very well be. There was

not enough Goya abovestairs to satisfy us, but in the Goya room in the

basement there was a series of scenes from Spanish life, mostly frolic

campestral things, which he did as patterns for tapestries and which

came near being enough in their way: the way of that reality which is

so far from the reality of Velasquez. There, striving with their

strangeness, we found a young American husband and wife who said they

were going to Egypt, and seemed so anxious to get out of Spain that they

all but asked us which turning to take. They had a Baedeker of 1901.

which they had been deceived in at New York as the latest edition, and

they were apparently making nothing of the Goyas and were as if lost

down there in the basement. They were in doubt about going further in a

country which had inveigled them from Gibraltar as far as its capital.

They advised with us about Burgos, of all places, and when we said the

hotels in Burgos were very cold, they answered, Well they had thought

so; and the husband asked, Spain was a pretty good place to cut out,

wasn’t it? The wife expected that they would find some one in Egypt who

spoke English; she had expected they would speak French in Spain, but

had been disappointed. They had left their warm things at Gibraltar and

were almost frozen already. They were as good and sweet and nice as they

could be, and we were truly sorry to part with them and leave them to

what seemed to be a mistake which they were not to blame for.

I wish that all Europeans and all Europeanized Americans knew how to

value such incorruptible con-nationals, who would, I was sure, carry

into the deepest dark of Egypt and over the whole earth undimmed the

light of our American single-heartedness. I would have given something

to know from just which kind country town and companionable commonwealth

of our Union they had come, but I would not have given much, for I knew

that they could have come from almost any. In their modest satisfaction

with our own order of things, our language, our climate, our weather,

they would not rashly condemn those of other lands, but would give them

a fair chance; and, if when they got home again, they would have to

report unfavorably of the Old World to the Board of Trade or the Woman’s

Club, it would not be without intelligent reservations, even generous

reservations. They would know much more than they knew before they

came abroad, and if they had not seen Europe distinctly, but in a glass

darkly, still they would have seen it and would be the wiser and none

the worse for it. They would still be of their shrewd, pure American

ideals, and would judge their recollections as they judged their

experiences by them; and I wish we were all as confirmed in our fealty

to those ideals.

They were not, clearly enough, of that yet older fashion of Americans

who used to go through European galleries buying copies of the

masterpieces which the local painters were everywhere making. With this

pair the various postal-card reproductions must have long superseded the

desire or the knowledge of copies, and I doubt if many Americans of any

sort now support that honored tradition. Who, then, does support it? The

galleries of the Prado seem as full of copyists as they could have been

fifty years ago, and many of them were making very good copies. _I_ wish

I could say they were working as diligently as copyists used to work,

but copyists are now subject to frequent interruptions, not from the

tourists but from one another. They used to be all men, mostly grown

gray in their pursuit, but now they are both men and women, and younger

and the women are sometimes very pretty. In the Prado one saw several

pairs of such youth conversing together, forgetful of everything around

them, and on terms so very like flirtatious that they could not well be

distinguished from them. They were terms that other Spanish girls could

enjoy only with a wooden lattice and an iron grille between them and the

_novios_ outside their windows; and no tourist of the least heart could

help rejoicing with them. In the case of one who stood with her little

figure slanted and her little head tilted, looking up into the charmed

eyes of a tall _rubio,_ the tourist could not help rejoicing with the

young man too.

The day after our day in the Prado we found ourselves in the Museum of

Modern Art through the kind offices of our mistaken cabman when we were

looking for the Archaeological Museum. But we were not sorry, for some

of the new or newer pictures and sculptures were well worth seeing,

though we should never have tried for them. The force of the masters

which the ideals of the past held in restraint here raged in unbridled

excess: but if I like that force so much, why do I say excess? The new

or newer Spanish art likes an immense canvas, say as large as the side

of a barn, and it chooses mostly a tragical Spanish history in which it

riots with a young sense of power brave to see. There were a dozen of

those mighty dramas which I would have liked to bring away with me if

I had only had a town hall big enough to put them into after I got them

home. There were sculptures as masterful and as mighty as the pictures,

but among the paintings there was one that seemed to subdue all the

infuriate actions to the calm of its awful repose. This was Gisbert’s

“Execution of Torrejos and his Companions,” who were shot at Malaga in

1830 for a rising in favor of constitutional government. One does not,

if one is as wise as I, attempt to depict pictures, and I leave

this most heroic, most pathetic, most heart-breaking, most consoling

masterpiece for my reader to go and see for himself; it is almost worth

going as far as Madrid to see. Never in any picture do I remember the

like of those sad, brave, severe faces of the men standing up there to

be shot, where already their friends lay dead at their feet. A tumbled

top-hat in the foreground had an effect awfuller than a tumbled head

would have had.