r possessed the
strained, harsh mysticism of El Greco--a painter of imagination and
the only painter allowed by Beruete to have affected the Velasquez
palette. In a word, Velasquez was a puzzling comminglement of the
classic and the realist. He had the repose and the firm, virile line
of the classics, while his vision of actuality has never been
surpassed. The Dutch Terburg, Vermeer, Van der Helst, Frans Hals saw
as vividly the surfaces of things material; the last alone was the
match of Velasquez in brushwork, but not Rembrandt recorded in his
Anatomy Lesson the facts of the case as did Velasquez.

Senor Beruete wittily remarks that Los Borrachos (The Topers) of
Velasquez is the truer anatomy lesson of the two. A realist, an
impressionist, as Stevenson has it, the Spaniard was; but he was also
something more. He had a magic hand to define, the rendering of the
magical mystery of space and atmosphere. Grant that he was not a
colourist in the sense the Venetians were, or Rubens, yet how much
more subtle, more noble, more intellectual, is his restricted tonal
gamut. Those silver-grays, resonant blacks, browns, blues, and reds
sing in your memory long after you have forgotten the tumultuous
golden waves breaking upon the decorative coasts of Rubens. We are
constrained to question the easy way Beruete and other critics deny
the attributes of imagination and poetry to Velasquez. There is,
perhaps, a more sublimated poetry in his pictures than in the obvious
religious and mythological and allegorical set pieces of Rubens,
Murillo, and how many others. His realism did not run to seed in the
delineation of subject. He was as natural as Cervantes--the one great
man of Spain who may be compared to him--and he saw the larger
patterns of life, while never forgetting that the chief function of a
painter is to paint, not to "think," not to rhapsodise, not to be
"literary" on canvas. His cool, measuring eye did more than record
sordid facts. He had a sort of enraptured vision of the earth as
beautiful, the innocence of the eye we encounter in children only.
Stevenson rages at those who say that Velasquez was not a
colourist--and Beruete is of them, though he quotes with considerable
satisfaction the critical pronouncement of Royal Cortissoz (in
_Harper's Magazine_, May, 1895) that Las Meninas is "the most perfect
study of colour and values which exists."

The truth is, Stevenson, Cortissoz, and Beruete are all three in the
right. T