Madrid and gaze upon his
canvases, sumptuous and opulent, diffusing colour like a sunset,
indifferent to their story or meaning, happy and content with the flaming
feast outspread for our enjoyment. We stand before his _Entombment_ at the
Louvre, dumb before its superlative painting, with hardly a thought for the
tragedy that it represents. Titian accepts the literary motive, and the
artist in him straight forgets it. We walk from _The Entombment_ to the
little chamber where Rembrandt's _Christ at Emmaus_ hangs, and the heart of
Rembrandt is beating there. To Titian the glory of the world, to Rembrandt
all that man has felt and suffered, parting and sorrow, and the awakening
of joy. We do not compare the one painter with the other; we say: "This is
Titian, that is Rembrandt; each gives us his emotion." Foolish indeed it
seems in the face of these two pictures, and a thousand others, to say that
art should be this or that,--that a picture should or should not have a
literary or a philosophical motive. Painters give us themselves. We amuse
ourselves by placing them in schools, by analysing their achievement, by
scientific explanations of what they did just by instinct, as lambs
gambol--and behind all stands the Sphinx called Personality.

There are moods when the appeal of Velasquez is irresistible. Grave and
reticent, a craftsman miraculously equipped, detached, but not with the
Jovian detachment of Titian, this Spanish gentleman stalks silently across
the art stage. Hundreds of drawings of Rembrandt's exhibit evidence of the
infinite extent of his experiments after perfection. The drawings of
Velasquez can be counted on the fingers of one hand. He drew in paint upon
the canvas. From his portraits and pictures we gather not the faintest idea
of what he felt, what he thought, what he believed. One thing we know
absolutely--that he saw as keenly and as searchingly as any painter who has
ever lived. What he saw before him he could paint, and in the doing of it
he was unrivalled. His hand followed and obeyed his eye. When the object
was not before him, he falls short of his superlative standard. The figures
of Philip IV., of Olivares, and of Prince Baltazar Carlos in the three
great equestrian portraits are as finely drawn as man could make them.
Velasquez saw them; he did not see the prancing horses which they ride,
consequently our eyes dropping from the consummate figures are disappointed
at the conventional attitudes of th