ART.
1.11/, SPANISH EXHIBITION AT BURLINGTON HOUSE.--GO.YA TRIUMPHANS.
As a rule painters should be criticized by those who know how to paint, or at any rate by virtuosos who have studied the tech- nique of the canvas. Nevertheless, it is sometimes worth while to hear how great pictures and great painters strike the plain man. The kindness of your Art Critic and your generous con, sideration have given me the delightful opportunity of speaking of the pictures at Burlington House, and above all of Goya. It must be out of a full heart.
I am in the arts the very plainest of plain men, utterly un- critical :— " Contented, if I may enjoy The things that others understand."
I love to shout wildly from the crowd as the great and glorious Procession of the Holy Order of God's Colours passes me, and to throw my hat in the air when a particular hero stays for a minute or two by the humble window in which I have my chair. For me that painter is Goya. I can still remember, though it Is forty years ago, the first time I saw a Goya. And to-day I have seen fifty. I am still reeling from the divine, or rather demoniac, intoxication. Goya as a rule reproduces well, especially of course the Caprichos, the Horrors of War, and the casual drawings. But how can one compare the thrill these give to the authentic inspiration that blows from the very canvas that the evil wizard touched with his own cruel hand ? I had felt even in a photograph the dread fascination of the little picture of the artist and the Duchess of Alba—a real woman pointing a real man the road to Hell. No less had I been arrested by the shameful degradation mixed with beauty and terror of the full-length Duchess. She stands repellent and attractive, with her crazy crop of blue-black hair, her passion-wasted body, her phthisical scarlet cheeks, and her virginal white tulle dress, her baby's cherry-coloured sash, her false lover's bow at the breast, and the red signal of lust flying on her head. But what Is one to say of the poignancy of the appeal made by the picture when it comes to one direct, and not through the deadening and the sterilization of a mechanical process ? Perhaps the only thing one can say is, "Row great must be the man whose debauched yet triumphant mind can pierce like the X-ray through any opacity of substance!" I verily believe that even the three-colour process could not tame or obliterate the genius of Goya. There is just one other thing I dare say on this matter, though it is metaphysical rather than emotional or sensuous. The horrible, the degenerate side of Goya's work, in spite of the crashing force of his blow, is far less predominant in the pictures than in the reproduction. Herein is the glory and blessing of great art. Just as the nobility and exquisite beauty of Racine's verse make Phedre tolerable, so Goya's handling of his brush and of his lights and shades sinks the moral squalor of the Duchess of Alba almost to zero. Art is the true solvent, the universal antiseptic, the purifier, the antidote of the deadliest poison. It can make Goya even at his worst endurable. At his best it makes him the magician of all time.
And here may I say how I envy the painters and the true scholars and virtuosos their enjoyment ef Goya ? Those who can really appreciate and so sympathize with, and feel with, every stroke of the brush or pencil or needle must feel a thrill of happiness washing away for ever all the foulness and all the evil. That is a joy "I never shall know here." The plain uninstructed man like me is well aware that there is something awful and glorious behind the veil ; but he cannot lift it or part it or see through it. He never learned the magic word. He can only wait in dumb and grateful patience outside the Holy of Holies, while the Lords of the Sanctuary gather their scarlet robes around them and pass by pitying or deriding the poor creature who has only a literary appreciation of the arts.
It is very difficult, as Goya found, to get away from the Duchess of Alba. She can hunt her quarry from the canvas
or the wall now as she did a hundred and thirty years ago. Whether she smiles sweetly as a diabolical angel from a spandrel In the Church of San Antonio de la Florida or glares with a maniac's intensity from a full-length canvas, or again is half- auggested in some drawing that pierces the heart like a rapier, she is always a siren.
Yet one would do a cruel wrong to Goya to write as if he could only paint one woman, or again paint only in one way
In truth, he was the most varied of painters. He had not one-. style but a hundred ; or rather, like Shakespeare and all the- greatest poets and artists, he had no style. His style depended upon and grew out of his subject, the work in hand. He did not keep a stock or standard set of moulds and pour his molten gold into them "as required." He made a new mould for every work, and then broke it for ever. That is why no one has ever . yet made a good general parody of Shakespeare or ever will. It is also why no painter will ever paint in the style of Goya. The great men of the second rank, Milton, Byron, Shelley, even Wordsworth, and again Van Dyck, Rubens, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, can be parodied or followed : not Leonardo, Bellini, Racine, or Balza*. As an example of what I mean and what overwhelms me by its almost uncanny certainty—a thing not easy to find in the arts—let anyone look at the red-bound picture of the Duchess of Alba and then at its -near neighbour in Burlington House, the Portrait of the Duchess of Abrantes. Both are sensual women. Yet as vast and turbulent an ocean lies between them in their painting as in their individual characters. It is absurd to say that this is due to the fact that onepicture is twenty years older than the other, which is alleged to be in Goya's fourth style ! A thousand times no ; it is the women who differ, not the way of painting.
I have left myself no room to speak of the other delightful things at the Spanish Exhibition, of the Primitives, of the Velazquez and Muaillos, of the examples of El Greco and the tapestries. For me, at any rate, Goya is enough for one after- noon, and a good bit over.
What a man ! what a painter and what an interpreter ! What a madman ! But he was not a noble kind of madman. He belonged to a dark, dreadful, degenerate, and decaying age and society. Though he trembled like Felix, he did nothing to lessen the smoke of the iniquities that went up to Heaven. Rather he increased them. With him it was a clear ease of corrompeur et corrompa He was alike the corrupter and the corrupted. He added fat pollutions of his own, to increase the streaming odours of the stage on which the Spanish aristocrats and Church played out their last tragi-comedy.
I care nothing for Goya's alleged humanitarianism. If a
man will not . help me out of the foul ditch into which I have fallen, what matter the rancid tears he sheds upon the bank ? As an artist he is great ; as a man Vile and contemptible. Some people, I believe, find the fact that he loved his wife—by whom, by the way, he had twenty children—an excuse for his endless infidelities. I only find him more of a human hog, and see the snout the clearer in his inferior work. But as an artist—and that is what matters here--he was superb, impregnable. Mr. Rothenstein, in a delightful study of Goya published some twenty years ago, calls him a Balza°. Agreed. Only Goya could have given us another Vautrin or another Gobseo. But Goya is more than Balzao. We must have recourse to the game of doubling the historical analogies of which Mirabeau was so fond. With immortal zest he called Lafayette Cromwell- Grandison. I will venture to call Goya Balzac-Blake; and with apologies to your readers for my imposture in pretending to be a guide to the Spanish Exhibition, I humbly crave to take my leave. After they have seen the Goyas they will excuse me if I have been a trifle overcome by the strength of this par- ticular Spanish vintage ! The fault is Goya's, not mine.
THE PLAIN MAN.
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