ll the
Philips and the Charleses, he can glut it there. Their suits begin
almost with their steel baby clothes, and adapt themselves almost to
their senile decrepitude. There is the horse-litter in which the great
emperor was borne to battle, and there is the sword which Isabella the
great queen wore; and I liked looking at the lanterns and the flags of
the Turkish galleys from the mighty sea-fight cf Lepanto, and the many
other trophies won from the Turks. The pavilion of Francis I. taken
at Pavia was of no secondary interest, and everywhere was personal and
national history told in the weapons and the armor of those who made the
history. Perhaps some time the peoples will gather into museums the pens
and pencils and chisels of authors and artists, and the old caps and
gowns they wore, or the chairs they sat in at their work, or the pianos
and violoncellos of famous musicians, or the planes of surpassing
carpenters, or the hammers of eminent ironworkers; but these things will
never be so picturesque as the equipments with which the military heroes
saved their own lives or took others'. We who have never done either
must not be unreasonable or impatient. It will be many a long century
yet before we are appreciated at the value we now set upon ourselves. In
the mean while we do not have such a bad time, and we are not so easily
forgotten as some of those princes and warriors.
XI
One of the first errors of our search for the Archaeological Museum,
promoted by the mistaken kindness of people we asked the way, found us
in the Academy of Fine Arts, where in the company of a fat and flabby
Rubens (Susanna, of course, and those filthy Elders) we chanced on a
portrait of Goya by himself: a fine head most takingly shrewd. But there
was another portrait by him, of the ridiculous Godoy, Prince of the
Peace, a sort of handsome, foolish fleshy George Fourthish person
looking his character and history: one of the most incredible parasites
who ever fattened on a nation. This impossible creature, hated more than
feared, and despised more than hated, who misruled a generous people for
twenty-five years, throughout the most heroic period of their annals,
the low-born paramour of their queen and the beloved friend of the
king her husband, who honored and trusted him with the most pathetic
single-hearted and simple-minded devotion, could not look all that
he was and was not; but in this portrait by Goya he suggested his
unutterab
|