s that Spain as a country owes the
magnificence of its golden age: it was contact with them that gave the
Spaniards cultivation; it was the conflict of seven hundred years that
made them the best soldiers in Europe, and masters of half the world.
The long struggle caused that tension of spirit which led to the
adventurous descent upon America, teaching recklessness of life and the
fascination of unknown dangers; and it caused their downfall as it had
caused their rise, for the religious element in the racial war
occasioned the most cruel bigotry that has existed on the face of the
earth, so that the victors suffered as terribly as the vanquished. The
Moors, hounded out of Spain, took with them their arts and
handicrafts--as the Huguenots from France after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes--and though for a while the light of Spain burnt very
brightly, the light borrowed from Moordom, the oil jar was broken and
the lamp flickered out.

* * *

In most countries there is one person in particular who seems to typify
the race, whose works are the synthesis, as it were, of an entire
people. Bernini expressed in this manner a whole age of Italian society;
and even now his spirit haunts you as you read the gorgeous sins of
Roman noblemen in the pages of Gabriele d'Annunzio. And Murillo, though
the expert not unjustly from their special point of view, see in him but
a mediocre artist, in the same way is the very quintessence of Southern
Spain. Wielders of the brush, occupied chiefly with technique, are apt
to discern little in an old master, save the craftsman; yet art is no
more than a link in the chain of life and cannot be sharply sundered
from the civilisation of which it is an outcome: even Velasquez, sans
peer, sans parallel, throws a curious light on the world of his day, and
the cleverest painters would find their knowledge and understanding of
that great genius the fuller if they were acquainted with the plays of
Lope de la Vega and the satires of Quevedo. Notwithstanding Murillo's
obvious faults, as you walk through the museum at Seville all Andalusia
appears before you. Nothing could be more characteristic than the
religious feeling of the many pictures, than the exuberant fancy and
utter lack of idealisation: in the contrast between a Holy Family by
Murillo and one by Perugino is all the difference between Spain and
Italy. Murillo's Virgin is a peasant girl such as you may see in any
village round Seville on a