complete sophistication. In place of adolescent
exultations and ebullient physical activities, we find in it the strange
sorceries of a guileful civilization. There are smiling women with
narrowed eyelids and powdered faces, old men practising dolorous
rejuvenations, laughter that conceals more than it expresses, motions
that are as calculated as those of the dance, serpentine forms, fervid
passions, and underneath the sophistries a violent primeval temper. In
spite of the flowerlike gaiety of the color in rich costumes, the glint
of silver, the sweet cool blues, the pale violets, in the painter's
versions of the typical toreador of Spain the types are bold, cruel, and
sullen. In spite of the fragility and elegance of the women on balconies
under soft laces the prevailing note is that of undisciplined ferocity
of emotion. This too is Spain, but not the Spain of the beach and sea
life.

The rather numerous examples of what Mr. Christian Brinton has called
Zuloaga's "growing diabolic tendency" make it clear that his art holds
no place for spontaneity and the innocence due to ignorance, but where
he keeps to Spanish subjects his work remains healthy. There is the
picture entitled "The Sorceresses of San Milan" in which three old
women are seen against a dramatic landscape. These haggard jests of
nature bring before us a Spain from which the American finds it
impossible not to shrink with horror, but they are rich in dramatic
quality and recall the power of Goya to endow the abnormal with
imaginative splendor while holding to essential truth. They are
diabolic, if you will, but not Mephistophelian. There is the abstract
horror in them which we associate with unknown powers of darkness, but
not the guile with which we endow a personal devil. In striking contrast
to this group are the balcony pictures in which women of ripe aggressive
beauty lounge gracefully in the open-air rooms with the same freedom of
pose as within doors, haughty yet frank, opulent, languid yet animated,
flowers that could have bloomed nowhere else than under a scorching sun.

[Illustration: Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America.

THE SORCERESSES OF SAN MILAN

_From a painting by Zuloaga_]

Then there is the group of dancers and actors and singers in each of
which we find the adroit mingling of the artificial with the real, and
the appreciation of the fact that with the people of the stage much that
is artificial to others becomes their realit