The
Cabmen Of Madrid Are Great Readers, Much Greater, I Am Sorry To Say,
Than I Was, For Whenever I Bought A Spanish Paper I Found It Extremely
Well Written.
Now and then I expressed my political preferences in
buying _El Liberal_ which I thought very able; even _El Imparcial_ I
thought able, though it is less radical than _El Liberal,_ a paper which
is published simultaneously in Madrid, with local editions in several
provincial cities.
For all the street silence there seemed to be a great deal of noise,
which I suppose came from the click of boots on the sidewalks and of
hoofs in roadways and the grind and squeal of the trams, with the harsh
smiting of the unrubbered tires of the closed cabs on the rough granite
blocks of the streets. But there are asphalted streets in Madrid where
the sound of the hoofs and wheels is subdued, and the streets rough and
smooth are kept of a cleanliness which would put the streets of New York
to shame if anything could. Ordinarily you could get cabs anywhere, but
if you wanted one very badly, when remote from a stand, there was more
than one chance that a cab marked _Libre_ would pass you with lordly
indifference. As for motor taxi-cabs there are none in the city, and at
Cook's they would not take the responsibility of recommending any
automobiles for country excursions.
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 unteclmical 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.
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