The finer the art the more universal its qualities. And yet there is no poem and no picture that is absolutely without the marks of its master; and the marks of the master mean the marks of his race,--in fact, the racial indications are inversely in number to those of the individual; the deeper a man buries his personality in his work the stronger the indications of his race. Shakespeare so lost himself that his personal characteristics nowhere appear in his great plays, and a conception of the poet’s personality could not be formed from a reading of the lines--so universal was his genius; yet his poetry is essentially and everlastingly English,--far more conspicuously English than the poetry of lesser men who sing about England and things English. It is more English than Chaucer, more English than Spencer, more English than Browning, Tennyson, or Swinburne; it breathes more fully and more truly the spirit of the English people in their greatest days than any poetry ever uttered by the English tongue. * * * * * The greater the man, the more completely does he express his people. It takes a great race to produce a great man; and once produced, he is everlastingly linked with his tribe. But greatness implies the suppression of the petty, including all petty resemblances; therefore, a man by the universal qualities of his genius may seem to belong to the world, whereas in truth he is but the expression of the best there is in his countrymen. Rembrandt suppressed all provincialisms and seemed to etch and paint for mankind rather than for a limited public in Holland; and yet to the last he was simply the greatest of Dutch artists. And because he was so essentially and truly Dutch he is one of the world’s great artists; in the chorus of the world’s proud voices there is no mistaking his accent. Velasquez is at the same time the least Spanish of painters and the most Spanish of artists. Suppressing all eccentricities of time and place, he rose to universal heights, and the world claims him as its own; and yet his fame depends upon the fact that he was from first to last a Spaniard,--a Spaniard in precisely the sense that Cervantes was the expression of inarticulate forces behind him. Deriving more or less help from his contemporaries, and from this quarter and that, from the visit of Rubens and from his own journey to Italy, he, after all, was the achievement of the Spanish people in painting. He was not an Italian, he was not a Frenchman, he was not a Dutchman,--he was a Spaniard of the Spaniards, as Shakespeare was an Englishman of the English. * * * * *