No master outside Spain can recreate the pícaro entire. For the Spanish rogue is sterile without the aspirational afflatus of his race, in which he adventures, from which he reacts, and which he embodies in ironic contrast. That is why the greatest heirs of the pícaro of Spain are not his direct sons in eighteenth-century France and England. They are his collateral and remote descendants of a modern world in which once again energy has become aspirant and religious. They are the heroes of Stendhal. Above all, they appear in Russia--that other extreme of Europe which touches Spain in the domain of spirit: they are the hero of _Dead Souls_ of Gogol, the mystic criminals of Dostoievski.... _f. Velázquez_ Antithesis even within the personal will of Isabel and her king. Isabel looks to Africa and the west. Mysterious horizons claim her. Africa is the home of Origen and Augustine--Berber Christians and true Spanish minds. America casts a parabola of search alluring to her mystic appetite. But Isabel is wedded to a man who looks toward Europe. The Aragonese king comes from the most assimilated part of Spain. In him, as in his realm, lives the spirit of Catalan, of European Trader. His hungers strain toward Italy and France. And this dichotomy within the will of the monarchs--Europe and the south, politics in Europe and high adventures across the western sea--is stamped upon the classic will of Spain. The concept of the State which Isabel and Ferdinand adapt is Europe. Louis XI and Machiavelli would have hailed it. The purpose of that State would have been better pleasing to Mohammed or Saint Paul. The spirit is Isabel’s and is accepted by her husband. But the form is Ferdinand’s and here his wife is disciple. Now, of this division within the will of Spain, that term which is Europe finds a canon. Velázquez, better than the policy of the kings, better than the victories of their captains in Sicily and France, incarnates Spain’s desire to be Europe. But here, too, irony is at work. Velázquez is the favorite painter at the Court of Philip IV. He lives at the Palace; he is sent on diplomatic missions. His career corresponds almost literally with the reign of his king. And this reign marks the rapid ebb of Spain’s affairs in Europe. Her will toward Europe has flung her power high into the north and clear across the Latin Sea. Now, while Velázquez molds that will into organic form, his king loses Portugal, loses the Netherlands, loses the Roussillon, half the Pyrenees, and faces insurrection in Barcelona, Spain’s European port.