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I THE STORY OF THE NATION 3

II CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH PAINTING 25

V DOMENICO THEOTOCOPULI 66

VI VELASQUEZ 92

X MURILLO 148

A POSTSCRIPT 191

FACING PAGE

From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.

From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.

From a photograph by Anderson, Rome.

From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.

APOTHEOSIS OF S. THOMAS

From a photograph by Anderson, Rome.

From a photograph by Anderson, Rome.

THE STORY OF SPANISH PAINTING

THE STORY OF THE NATION

In 1492 the Catholic Sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, entered Granada in triumph. The last stronghold of Moorish dominion, undermined by the dissensions of Islam, fell before the united Christian kingdoms of L?on, Castile and Arag?n. Spain became a united country and, in virtue of her protracted struggle of nearly eight hundred years against the infidel, stood forth as the acknowledged and self-conscious Champion of Catholicism. In the same year Columbus, under the patronage of the Catholic Sovereigns discovered the New World. This date, therefore, presents an epoch that completes the past and forms the starting point of a new era. Intimately associated with the subsequent national development and decline is the story of Spanish painting, but it owes most of its peculiar characteristics to the conditions that preceded the country's complete union.

It is always interesting and usually illuminating to picture the historical background out of which the arts of a country have been gradually evolved. But in the case of Spanish painting it is essential. For the art of Spain was, bone and spirit, a part of the Spanish character, shaped and inspired as the latter had been by the racial, historical and geographical conditions out of which it was moulded. Without taking all this into account one cannot understand, much less appreciate sympathetically, the consistently individual character of this school of painting.

In the first place one must realise the meaning of the fact that Spain is a mountainous country; not only separated from the rest of Europe, but divided against itself by precipitous barriers. They run in a general way from West to East: abrupt colossal walls of volcanic origin, with a grand sweep of bulk, jagged in sky-line and frequently piled with the chaotic debris of glacial moraines. These are the watersheds of rivers that refuse services to navigation; foaming to flood in the rainy season, shrinking in the drought to sluggish pools amid the rocky bed. They intersect tracts of country that vary from narrow valleys, where cultivation huddles in cherished pockets of soil, to broadly stretching vegas, tablelands and plains, from which by unremitting toil generous harvests may be obtained. Here the vistas are of magnificent extent, circling round one in far reaching sweeps of boldly undulating country, rimmed by nobly designed stretches of smoothly beveled foothills that form advance-posts of the ultimate barrier of the sierras.

It is a little country, only three times the size of England, contracted within itself by natural restrictions, yet planned by nature on a big scale; one that affects the imagination, prompting even more than mountainous countries usually have done to independence, individualism and hardihood. It is a country that seems made for fighting; where a handful of resolute men could maintain themselves tenaciously against enormous odds. In the past they did it in actual warfare; to-day in the pacific fight which this hardy population perpetually keeps up against the extremes of climatic conditions. Though for the most part they still use the agricultural implements that Tubal Cain devised, they have inherited from the Roman and Moorish occupation a system of irrigation and of terracing that puts to shame the happy go lucky methods of farming in many countries which consider themselves superiorly enlightened. The necessary preoccupation with their immediate surroundings and the exclusion from outside influence, early made of this people a nation of individualists, realists and conservatives. So inbred did these qualities become that when the Spaniard mixed with the outer world, as he did particularly in his conquest of the Spanish Main and in his wars with Europe, it was but to become more fixed in his conservatism at home. When he borrowed from abroad, as in his art, it was but to shape and color the acquired impression to his own individualistic and realistic attitude toward life.

The earliest inhabitants of the Peninsula are known as Iberians; with whom about 500 B.C., a branch of the Celtic family became amalgamated. These Celtiberians remained in undisputed possession of the country, until they were drawn into the vortex that was stirred by the rivalry of Rome and Carthage. The latter had planted colonies along the south coast, and gradually extended her authority into the interior, dealing as was her wont in a spirit of suspicion and brutality with the natives. The Romans, hot on the trail of their traditional foe, at first suffered decisive reverses. Then it was that Scipio the Younger offered himself to the Senate and People of Rome as general of the war. His father and uncle had been slain in battle in Spain; he desired to avenge their deaths and to crush the enemies of Rome. Though only twenty-four years of age he had the genius of a military leader and of a statesman. While putting heart into the shattered ranks of the Roman veterans and leading them victoriously against the Carthaginians, he adopted towards the Spaniards a policy of confidence and conciliation which won them over to a loyal acceptance of the Roman rule. A similar policy was practised by Suetonius in later years, when Spain had become the battle ground of the rival factions with which Rome was torn. It was continued by Julius Caesar when he fought out his fight with Pompey on Spanish soil, and later by Augustus when, having become ruler of the Roman world, he completed pacifically the conquest of Spain.

Henceforth Spain was the most favored, loyal and prosperous province of the Empire. At first the Roman veterans, retiring from military service, married Spanish women and settled down as farmers, introducing gradually the order and scientific method for which the Romans are so justly celebrated. The settled conditions, fertility of the soil, and the beauty of the country in time attracted the wealth and culture of the Capital. Spain became, like "The Province" in the South of France, a field for capitalistic enterprise as well as a resort for those who leaned toward a life of refined leisure. She throve in the arts and sciences and became enriched with some of the finest evidences of the Roman genius for engineering. Her wheatfields fed the proletariat of the Capital and her sons reinforced the ranks of statesmen and men of letters. She became, in the finest sense of the word, more Roman than Italy herself. This period of splendid prosperity lasted for four hundred years, until it was submerged, like the rest of Roman civilization, by the flood of Gothic invasion.

The branch of the German family which overran Spain was that of the Visigoths, who maintained an ascendency and a line of kings for two hundred years. But, although the enervation caused by provincial luxury had rendered the Celtiberian-Roman an easy victim to the vigorous onslaught of the northern race, he was sufficiently tenacious of the original spirit of the mountaineer and of the acquired love of order to avoid the chaos and prostration that overtook the rest of the Empire, and reasserted his instinct for amalgamation. The blend, which ensued and became the Spanish race as it is known to later history, is characteristically represented in the language that was gradually evolved. For this, though overlaid with Northern forms, remains at root Roman. In this hybrid race the Spanish element proved itself to be the most pronounced and enduring. Its conservatism, a phase of the independence and exclusiveness that we have already noted, was conspicuously revealed in the great Arian Controversy which threatened the integrity of the Western Church. The Visigoths alone of all the Germanic family, renounced the "heresy." Reccared, their king, received in consequence the title of the first Catholic Sovereign of Spain. How resolutely subsequent sovereigns clung to this distinction and their subjects conformed to the political and religious obligations that it entailed is one of the most notable features of Spanish history. It seriously affected the national life, its attitude toward other nations and the development and character of Spanish art.

Meanwhile the mingling of blood could not save the Visigothic kingdom from the fate that attended all the Germanic governments which had been established on the ruins of the Empire. It proved no exception to the tendency to disintegrate and thus presented an easy prey to the onslaughts of united Islam.

In less than a hundred years after the death of Mohammed the Moslem faith had spread from Arabia through Syria and Asia Minor to Persia and India, while Westward it had overrun Egypt and penetrated along the northern shore of Africa to the Pillars of Hercules. Hence in 711 A.D. it crossed into Spain. While the leaders, under the generalship of Musa, viceroy of the Omayyad Caliphate of Damascus, were all Arabs, they had enlisted in their army the warlike tribes of Mauritania, the ancient kingdom now represented by Morocco and Algeria. Hence the name of Moors which distinguishes the invaders of Spain. Twenty years sufficed to make them masters of the Peninsula, the little northwestern country of Asturias alone retaining its independence. Twenty years later disintegration crept also into the ranks of the conquerors. Abd-er-Rahman established an independent caliphate in Cordova. His ambition was to raise it to a position in the Western world such as was held by Bagdad, Damascus and Delhi in the East; furthermore to make Cordova the Mecca of the faithful in the West. Thus was begun by this Caliph the Mesquita or chief Mosque, which under succeeding Caliphs was enlarged and beautified until it became a fitting monument of the ideals of Islam in its period of most splendid pride and noblest enlightenment. For nearly three hundred years Cordova was the center of an ordered government, which not only fostered the refinement of the arts and crafts in the cities and spread its network of highly organised agricultural labor throughout the country districts, but also a University of philosophy and science that made it the resort of scholars, not only Moslem but Christian. Cordova, in fact, played a conspicuously brilliant part in that phase of the Moslem ascendency which is apt to be overlooked; its share in perpetuating and advancing the Hellenic culture, which otherwise might have been lost in the Dark Ages succeeding the fall of the Roman Empire.

Then, for the space of two hundred and forty years, there was a comparative lull. Under the enlightened rule of the Nasride dynasty the province of Granada enjoyed a prosperity that invited friendly relations even with the Christians. The wealth derived from its mines, industries and agriculture exceeded that of the ancient Caliphate of Cordova. The period represented, in fact, the Golden Age of Moorish civilization in Spain, the flower and symbol of which remains to-day, though shorn of much of its magnificence, in the still exquisite palace of the Alhambra. So skilfully by treaty and otherwise did the rulers of Granada conciliate the Christians that their reign might have been continued indefinitely, but for two causes: internal dissensions and the fixed idea of Ferdinand and Isabella to fulfil their obligations as Catholic Kings. They lived for the purpose of expelling the infidel, and the rivalry between the two great Moorish tribes, the Zegri and the Abencerrages, gave them the opportunity. It had resulted in the throne being occupied by the youthful weakling, Boabdil. He fell into the hands of Ferdinand and Isabella at the battle of Lucena, and consented to remain neutral while they attacked the coast cities of Granada. Finally they appeared before Granada itself and Boabdil, after a frantic but futile effort to oppose them, was forced into a treaty of peace, by which the city was surrendered. Ten years later the last of the Moors had been expelled from Spain or compelled to be baptised.

It was, perhaps, Spain's misfortune that her victories over the Moors were not succeeded by a period of settled conditions. For already she had entered upon a career of brilliant enterprise in the arts of peace. Under the patronage of Queen Isabella and of prelates, such as Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo, whose power rivaled that of the Crown, great architectural works were inaugurated and sculptors and painters were drawn from Flanders and Germany to decorate them. Learning was still further encouraged by the founding of a new University at Alcal? de Henares to supplement the famous foundation of Salamanca, and men of letters and artists were welcomed and honored at Court. Among them stand out the names of Pulgar, the first historian of Castile; Cota, the first Spanish dramatist and Rincon, the earliest of the native painters. The sixteenth century, in fact, opened with a brilliant dawn, full of promise for the new nation, if only it might have had leisure to consolidate and develop naturally its resources. But it was drawn almost immediately into the whirl of foreign conquests.

On the one hand it became involved in the affairs of the kingdom of Naples, which was conquered by the Spanish general, Gonsalvo de Cordova; on the other hand, by the bull of the Spanish Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, it was put in possession of all the conquests it might make in the New World. In both cases the immediate results may possibly be considered a boon, but they were followed by consequences disastrous to the nation and the Spanish character. The occupation of Naples brought the country in touch with Italian civilization, then approaching its zenith, but flung it into the vortex of European intrigue and warfare. Wealth began to flow in from the Americas, but at the expense of national demoralization. The conquest of inferior nations, inferiorly equipped with arms of offense and defense, may easily result in cruelty and the general sapping of the truly soldier spirit, while the lust of gold which soon began to inspire it converted these champions of the Faith into brutal buccaneers and plunderers. Further, it sapped the energies of the nation at home. For, why laboriously develop the resources of the country, when a stream of wealth was flowing into it from abroad? National progress, therefore, was checked and in time stifled; while the incoming wealth soon began to go out in prodigal expenditure over useless European wars. It became a mad gamble in which the spiritual qualities of the Spanish character were overwhelmed with the intoxication of power, while its exclusiveness and pride blinded the nation to the inevitable catastrophe.

A fact antecedent to all these causes of national deterioration was that even before the conquest of Granada the Catholic Sovereigns had established the Inquisition. With this devilish engine, operated in the name of God and the Catholic Faith, the Spaniard attempted to check the progress of Europe and effectively crushed his own. In time he expelled from the Peninsula the Jews, who in Spain had been among the foremost in learning and industrial energy; the Moors and finally the Morescoes, the progeny of the Christianised Moors and Spaniards, who had perpetuated the crafts in which the Moors had been so skilled. Enterprise was thus banished and Spain deliberately committed herself to the part of a reactionary against progress. In time England and Holland wrested from her her resources in the New World. She shrank within the limits of her own Peninsula, which had been already drained of initiation and productivity. In time, all that became left to her of her proud possessions was the dogmatic form of the Catholic religion. It had ceased to be spiritual inspiration and passed into a phase of sentimentalism, whence it dwindled to a mere formalism, existing amid irreligion and moral degradation.

Among the names which gave a lustre to the Court were the veteran Lope de Vega; Calderon, author among other dramas of the "Comedies of Cape and Sword"; Velez de Guevara, playwright and novelist, whose "El Diablo Cojuelo" was the original of Le Sage's "Le Diable Boiteux"; Luis de Gongora, the poet; Quevedo, the satirist; Bartolom? Argensola, historian, and Antonio de Solis, poet, dramatist and author of "The History of the Conquest of Mexico." Philip himself posed, with considerable warrant, as a poet and musician, and even took part as an actor in the musical and dramatic entertainments which

Charles was scarcely four years old when the death of his father in 1665 made him king of a bankrupt country. It was the policy of the Queen Mother, whose regency was marked by political incompetence and personal amours, to keep her son as childish as possible. And, when he reached his majority at the age of fifteen and supplanted his mother's influence by that of Don Juan of Austria, the latter also schemed to keep his master in a condition of mental darkness and dependence. Thus Charles was the victim alike of racial degeneracy and of thwarted development. Complete incapacity to govern himself or others was the natural result. He shunned the affairs of state, mildly supported the arts as far as the beggared state of the treasury would permit, and sank into a religious mania that found satisfaction in attending auto-da-f?s and prostrating himself in acts of personal penance. Dying childless in 1700, he brought the Hapsburg line to an inglorious conclusion; and the succession passed to a branch of the Bourbon family.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH PAINTING

Spanish Painting, so far as it represents a school, is singularly limited in scope and rigidly circumscribed. This is due partly to the racial character, self-centered and conservative, out of which it grew: partly also, to the influences that immediately shaped its growth. For it developed under the patronage of the Crown and the Church. Nor were these, in theory or in practice, antagonistic to each other. The Church was the embodiment, the Crown the defender, of the Faith: the efforts of both being united to preserve the Faith against the inroads alike of Humanism and Protestantism. Hence the art of Spain, while it might be incidently concerned with portraiture, discovered its essential characteristics as the exponent of Bible story and Saintly lore and as an exhortation to faith and pious living. Its home was the sacred edifice, where it embellished walls, vaultings, and ceilings, or presided in the ceremonial altar-piece. Its language for the most part was that of the vernacular; the sacred imagery being translated into the idiom of common knowledge, its mysteries into expressions of common experience. It was in consequence a naturalistic art.

Had the artists of Spain painted for the general public or followed their own bent in the pursuit of beauty, they would doubtless have developed branches of genre and still life painting that might have emulated the work of the Holland artists; for they had a similar love of the intimate beauty of simple things around them. But since they had to reach the masses of the people through the intervention mostly of the Church, which not only commissioned the subject but prescribed its treatment, they achieved their self-expression through religious pictures which had the character of sacred genre. Yet this Spanish brand of genre is inferior to the secular genre of Holland or to the sacred genre of old Flemish religious paintings. It has a quality, perceptible in neither of the latter, of obviousness. Its motive is less surely an aesthetic delight in things of beauty; more evidently influenced by the practical intention of rounding out the story.

I doubt if the student of Spanish painting, particularly if he visits Spain, can escape the feeling that it exhibits a certain oppressive obviousness. How is this to be accounted for? In the first place, surely, by the influence of the Church, ever more intent on making art a handmaid of its own purposes than on developing its own inherent beauties. And, if this was true under the conditions in Italy, where the Church itself was penetrated with Humanism, how much more is it to be expected under those which existed in Spain! But there is another reason, incident to the Spanish character. The latter, as has been suggested in the previous chapter, was the product of a long and heroic struggle on behalf of nationality and the Christian Faith. Among its conspicuous traits, in consequence, were self-consciousness and inflated egoism; traits that, if you consider it, are those of the actor; the necessary groundwork on which he builds his better qualities as an artist.

The Spaniards are a race of actors. The arts in which they have most naturally expressed themselves are those of the drama and the novel of character and action. And this trait similarly affects their painting. It is dramatic, concerned frequently with action, always with characterisation. Meanwhile, self-consciousness and egoism readily yield to the temptation of exaggeration. Spanish literature evaded this weakness because it was left to go its own way and the artistic conscience of the author was permitted to discover for itself a sense of true values. But in the painter's case the Church intervened and being, so to say, interested in the box-office receipts, compelled him to play to the gallery. It favored sensationalism and encouraged melodrama. The meekness of the martyr must be represented so that the dullest spectator would not miss the moral; the executioner's hatred of virtue so portrayed that no one could fail to recognise him as a villain; love and devotion must be sentimentalised, and blood, pain and disease so vividly exhibited that the crudest sensibilities would be wrung. Imagination must not be counted upon and suggestion, the subtle road thereto, must be abandoned for the direct and detailed statement. Aim at the crude instincts and make the message obvious!

This Spanish tendency toward the related traits of exaggeration and obviousness is not confined to painting. It appears also in the architecture and sculpture. Foreign architects, for example, were employed in the erection of cathedrals in the Gothic style; but the latter's noble logic of plan and elevation was disturbed by the innovations which Spanish taste, or lack of it, dictated. Conspicuous among these was the erection of a Coro in the center of the nave; an inclosure walled around, carried to a great height and profusely adorned with sculpturesque ornament. This monstrous choir effectually blocks the view of the high-altar from any spot except the narrow space which separates the two, and also interrupts what should be one of the sublime features of a Gothic cathedral, its endless variety of stately vistas. In every direction the perspective of pillars, arches and vaultings is barred by the tasteless magnificence of the Coro. For the latter, like the Capilla Mayor with its high-altar, is overloaded with excess of ornament. In one case it may be in the "plateresque" style, a network of intricate and minute embellishments that vies with the dainty exuberance of the workers in silver-plate. Elsewhere, it is wantonly "grotesque" or pompously "baroque" or characterised by that orgy of material extravagance, called "Churrigueresque" after the name of the sculptor who introduced it. In this, sculpture has been degraded to the most blatant naturalism; Madonnas clothed like dolls in brocaded gowns; the tragedy of Calvary or the glory of Heaven, presented with figures, background and accessories, painted, posed and set like a theatrical tableau. It is not for a moment suggested that there is no beauty and grandeur in Spanish architecture and sculpture. Yet to one whose taste is attuned to the imaginative spaciousness, sublimity and mystery of pure Gothic or to the inventive refinement of choice Renaissance design, the net impression of a Spanish cathedral is likely to be one of oppression and distaste. And more so, as one analyses the psychological cause of this extravagant display. It seems to be the Spanish instinct to close himself round with interest in what is nearest to him, so that he abandons breadth or height of vision--imagination, in fact--in favor of the immediately present, which he invests with all the fervor of his pent up nature. This leads inevitably to a materialistic point of view and to the baldly naturalistic method; in a word, to the obviousness which we have noted.

Spain, in fact, with its large admixture of Germanic blood, exhibits in its art the trait that affects other races akin to the Teutonic: the German itself, the English and American. She, no more than they, has much sense of beauty in the abstract. The idea that beauty for its own sake is desirable may penetrate the imagination of some artists in all these countries, but is a principle of art in none of them, and by the general public of all is not understood. The usual idea is that painting is primarily the representation of some person, place or thing, and is to be judged by what it represents. The idea that it should contribute to the beauty of life, and that beauty is one of the qualities most needful and desirable in life; that, indeed, properly considered, it should be the ideal of life, is even to-day only slowly dawning upon our comprehension. We still make the ideal of our civilization material progress and the ideal of education the preparation to play a part in it. In a word, our ideal is materialistic; a contradiction of terms, confusing the high issues of life. For, if a man or a nation is to have an ideal it must be something above the necessary matter of life, correlating the spiritual sense to what it conceives of spirit in the universe. It was so that the Greek, learning of Egypt and the Orient, drawing inspiration, in fact, from the deep wells of human consciousness, established his ideal and interpreted it under the symbol of beauty.

For my own part, this difference between the older idea of art and our own, which was shared by Spain, is most illuminatively enforced by the contrast between two of the great architectural monuments of Spain: the Escori?l and the Alhambra. Both are palaces, memorials of the greatest epoch in the history of each race; but one is a palace of the dead and of preparation for death, the other a lordly pleasure house, redolent of the joy of living; the Escori?l is a monument of sternness; the Alhambra a miracle of beauty.

Yet for the student of humanity and of art in relation thereto what a poignant interest attaches to the Escori?l! True, it is the self-expression of one man; but the imagination may not be astray in discovering in it some expression also of the race and its time. For Philip II was so loyal a son of the Church or, if you will, so morbid a victim of the Church's influence, and that influence was then so rooted in the conscience of the

people, that he was in a large measure representative of them.

To-day as one wanders through this vast and silent edifice of the Escori?l it can well seem as if that sanctuary of death, buried beneath the church, is the dead heart, connected by the arteries of its nearly one hundred miles of corridors with the huge organs and spreading limbs of a prodigious leviathan. One has left behind the exhilaration of the air of the Sierras the glorious spaciousness of the outside prospect, and as the artificial vastness closes in about one, the spirit becomes numbed and chill. It is a stupendous Golgotha, a colossal Place of Skulls. Yet we shall be lacking in imagination if we cannot realise that the dead heart once beat and that the ponderous body once enshrined a soul. It may have been a mad soul; certainly it was a proud one, of high exaltation, white to its core with the flame of an intense ideal. None the less was it something of a craven soul, evading the problems of this life, and fearing the life to come; closing its eyes to the light and wrapping itself in the darkness of superstition. It is the soul of one man that was thus enshrined; but in many respects it is revealed as the soul of the Spanish people.

Seen at noonday in summer, the Escori?l stands, shadowless in the sunshine, at the foot of the bare Sierra, looking out over a vista of barren stubble, parched grass and dried up water-courses; an undulating sweep of pallid buff, interrupted sparsely by grey olive bushes; pitilessly inhospitable. But, in the slanting light of the afternoon, the Sierras near and far lose the bleakness of their pinkish buff beneath transparent tones of mauve and lavender, while the harsh nudity of the endless vega becomes clothed in tender veils of variously modulated greys. Even the inexorableness of the granite pile is assuaged, as the shadows creep about its base, the contours and surfaces of its facades melt into iridescent hues and the dome and towers rise up to meet the cooling sky with something of aerial suggestion. Slowly, as the light wanes the Escori?l and its vast setting become to the imagination spiritualised; but the spirit that hovers over them and enters into yours is, if I mistake not, for all its beauty impregnated with sadness, which, as the darkness blots out distance and buries the monastery beneath the gloom of the Sierras, dies into a sense of awe.

And now let us revisit the Alhambra, which enshrines the soul of another race. No colossal formality here, or precision of foot-rule and compass from which the free spirit of the artist's imagination has been dogmatically barred! On the contrary, the palace of the Moorish kings grew cell to cell by accretion, expressive of an accumulating sense of the power and joy of life, alive with the breath of artistic imagination. It dominates its own hill, looking across, on the one hand, to the protecting barrier of higher hills, and on the other, over a smiling hospitable vega, a far reaching garden of luxuriant fertility. The hill itself is a paradise of refreshment. Its slopes are richly clothed with shade trees and semi-tropical vegetation, embowered in flowers, fragrant with the scents of living growths, musical with the song of birds, the tinkle of tiny runnels, and the plash of fountains and cascades. Set above this scene of ordered wildness, where the license of nature is united to the task of man, stands what is left of the palace of the Arab Sovereigns of Granada.

There is no need to describe its plan of gardens, fountains, courts and corridors, halls of ceremony and suites of living rooms. It is the spirit of the whole that we may try to capture. Here, as in the Mosque of Cordova, the Arab's love of vistas is revealed; but while the former spreads over a large space, the perspectives of the Alhambra are actually restricted. In their case even more than in the other is created an illusion of distance. The triumph is one not of material emphasis but of artistic suggestion. It was the human imagination, finding its free expression in art, that gave form and fabric to this Oriental dream of beauty. It is a visualised symphony, whose theme is life; the joy of life and beauty that irradiates the joy. And the inspiration is drawn from nature. To those who know the Alhambra it will not sound like freakishness of speech to say, that the imagination of the artist has ensnared a portion of the spirit of beauty which roams at large in the desert and sky and lurks in the silences of woods and gardens; and, because he felt the phenomena of nature in relation to the supreme whole, has captured something of the infinity of the universal and enshrined it in his microcosm of beauty. Also more intimately he has fashioned his invention upon nature; studying her forms and methods and adapting them to the conventions of art. In the endless variety of decorative encrustration with which the wall-spaces, the soffits of the arches and the vaultings of the chambers are embroidered, the motives are drawn from the interlacing of boughs and vines, the rhythm of the brooklet meandering through luxuriant undergrowth of vines and flowers, from the facets of the crystal and the accumulated cells of bees. But they are not interpreted in a naturalistic vein. The Oriental imagination, at its best, rises above naturalistic representation; it accepts the fertilization of nature, but conventionalises the product to conform to the artist's idea of abstract beauty.

It may be that in the Alhambra he has carried this idealization too far and become too prodigal with its motives. The dainty fabric has little structural dignity; architectonic substance being sacrificed to vistas and surface decoration, while the last may easily be judged too profuse. Yet the Arab, when he chose, was a builder and engineer, continuing the Roman tradition of solid and scientific construction. Even at the Alhambra this fact is attested by the foundations that are rooted in the rock and carried down its precipitous flank, and by the aqueducts which convey water from the neighboring hills to supply the fountains and baths, the sudorific chambers and the system of heating. He faced the necessities and facts of life as they arose, but in the pleasure-house of his soul surrendered himself to the abstract, wrapping himself in contemplation of the beautiful. So he encouraged his artists until their imagination reached its zenith of profuse invention in the so-called "Room of the Two Sisters."

Above a dado of iridescent glass mosaic the walls are overlaid with a rich lace work as of carved ivory, the interstices of which are colored red and blue. Their surfaces are interrupted by niches, framed with columns and arches of surpassing delicacy. From the four corners, at considerable height project pendentives, converting the square of the room into an octagon from

which springs the domed ceiling. The pendentives are groups of stalactite forms, and the vaulting above is composed of innumerable concave cells. Each differing slightly from the others, they cling together in pendent masses, here projecting like a bunch of swarming bees, there receding into the mystery of a fairy grotto; all the while mounting up the curve of the ceiling, which undulates like a vine yielding to the weight of its grapes; climbing higher and higher in endless frolic of invention until they draw together at the ceiling's peak. Enough gold still adheres to the myriad facets to suggest to the imagination the mysterious lustre of the ceiling, when it was lighted by a suspended lantern with its clusters of crystal lights. This gem of the Alhambra jewel, the heart of the Harem chambers, opens, as you remember, on one side into an alcove. Through the windows of this appear the tops of cypress trees, which rise from the boskage of pomegranates, roses and oleanders in a little garden court. On the other side, the "Court of the Lions," once shaded with orange trees, still soothes the ear with the plash of its central fountain and the drip of the tiny jets that spring like rods of silver from the marble pavement of the arcades. A spot, indeed of exquisite sensations; where everything conspires to alternate moods of reverie and poignant stimulation; where the physical senses are rarified, exalted, till perception swims into a sea of subtleties that melts into a dreamy subconsciousness of infinity.

This you may say is a supreme achievement, tainted with weakness. Here the yearning after beauty for its own sake has created such a subtlety and luxuriance of beauty as to suggest that the motive was ornament for the sake of ornament; sense-gratification for indulgence sake; exquisiteness at the cost of living energy. For, while the maze of decoration is ordered with most refined sensibility, it is none the less expressive of inordinate and almost tortured sensuousness. If you adopt this view it is to admit that the Alhambra was a product of the decadence of the Oriental idea; and it is interesting to note how it bred a corresponding decadence in the artistic motives of the Christian conquerors. It was unquestionably from the Arabs that the Spaniard derived his taste for excess. But his racial instinct and his Catholic faith colored the result with a great difference. His sensuous and religious ecstasy found their expression not in abstract symbols but in concrete actualities. They prompted him to take delight in the actual representation of blood and torture and to render his conception of Heaven by means of sculptured figures reposing on marble clouds amid gilded spikes of glory. Gradually, in fact, he degraded his conception to the most obvious kind of perception. He expressed his spiritual ideas in terms of naturalism.

It may seem illogical to invite the reader to be interested in Spanish art and then discourage him by laying bare its weakness. But I believe that every one who visits Spain, where alone the inwardness of Spanish art can be reached, must feel at the outset more or less conscious of these limitations to his interest; that, in fact, he suffers a preliminary discouragement. If so, is it not better to admit it; to accustom oneself to the expectation of temporary disillusionment, in order that one may the sooner get over it and settle down to a just appreciation of the admirable qualities which actually exist in Spanish painting?

A PANORAMIC VIEW

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