nter 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 o