noblewoman.  Another, with its savage eye—­it is a profile—­and big beaver head-covering, recalls Walt Whitman’s “I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out.”  A giant egoist, and as human, all too human, a fellow as Spain ever begot, Goya is only hinted at in Baudelaire’s searching quatrain beginning:  “Goya, cauchemar plein de choses inconnues.” Fleurs du Mal would be a happy title for the work of Francisco Goya if to “The Flowers of Evil” were added “and Wisdom.”  Goya is often cruel and lascivious and vulgar, but he is as great a philosopher as painter.  And to offset his passionate gloom there are his visions of a golden Spain no longer in existence; happy, gorgeous of costume, the Spain of sudden coquetries, of fans, masques, bull-fights, and fandangos, of a people dancing on the rim of a fire-filled mountain, pious, capricious, child-like, romantic, and patriotic—­the Spain of the eighteenth century.  Goya is its spokesman, as is Velasquez the mirror of Philip’s more spacious times.  Velasquez—­Goya! poles asunder, yet both born to the artistic purple.  And the stately aristocrat who signed himself Velasquez is not more in tune with the twentieth-century Zeitgeist than that coarse-fibred democrat of genius, Francisco Goya.

FORTUNY

Mariano Fortuny:  what a magic-breeding name!  The motto of this lucky Spanish painter might have been “Fortuny Fortunatus.”  Even his sudden death, at the early age of thirty-six, came after he had executed a number of masterpieces, an enormous quantity of water-colours, etchings, ceramics, damascene swords and chased ornaments; it followed on the heels of sudden glory.  His name was in the mouth of artistic Europe, and the sale of the contents of his studio at Rome in 1875 brought eight hundred thousand francs.  Yet so slippery is fame that Fortuny’s name to-day is seldom without a brace of epithets, such as “garish,” or “empty.”  His work is neither.  He is a virtuoso.  So was Tiepolo.  He is a Romantic; so the generation preceding him.  The Orientalist par excellence, he has somehow been confounded with Meissonier and Gerome, has been called glittering like the former, hard as was the latter.  It is true there are no emotional undertones in his temperament, the brilliant overtones predominating; but it is also true that when he died his manner was changing.  He had said that he was tired of the “gay rags” of the eighteenth century, and his Strand of Portici shows a new line of departure.  Edouard Manet made special appeal to Fortuny; Manet, who had derived from Goya, whose Spanish fond is undeniable.  Perhaps the thrice-brilliant Fortuny’s conscience smote him when he saw a Frenchman so successfully absorbing the traditions of Goya; but it was not to be.  He passed away at the very top of his renown, truly a favourite of the gods.  He was admired, imitated, above all parodied; though, jealously as are his pictures guarded, he has been put on the shelf like one of the amazing painted bibelots in his work.