Spain’s craft goes far, when Spain resolves to be “efficient.” Study _Las Hilanderas, Mercurio y Argos_, the portrait of Margarita de Austria. This grace is the ecstasy of cool and obvious metals. It suggests the modern æsthetic of the Machine. Modeling and texture are composed of immediate masses which are self-sufficient. Neither in part nor in whole are they transmuted into the subjective. Or take the portrait of Mariana de Austria, Philip’s second wife. Of the woman there is naught save the weak face and the flat hands. But the black and silver gown is volumnear. Its fringes and its lace hold power that appears almost to be a symbol of this Court--this Court of Spain striving to hold a world within its forces. The will of Velázquez, at least, does not falter. _Las_ _Meninas_ is forever a shut and earthly room. No glimpse here of the arcana of the soul, of the soul’s subtle modeling of arm and face. Think what El Greco would have done with that group: the royal family, the painter, the dwarf, the dog. How they would have flamed; how heaven and hell would have come in and metabolized these bodies! * * * * * In the palace of the king of Spain, there were simpletons and dwarfs. They formed part of the Court and Velázquez painted them. He painted them so well because they were part of himself. The forces which aspire beyond the body, beyond the domain of sense, died not in Velázquez. His æsthetic will allowed them no immediate word. This explains the cramped discomfort of his religious pictures. Here within him were these instincts, these intuitions, unable to speak, unable to die. And here were the twisted courtiers of the king. A good court painter could portray them; for they were of the palace. And since they were pitiful victims of Nature’s law, the despised and dispossessed, an artist’s soul could use them as a symbol. In the world there lives a spirit whose name is Christ and his saints. When the world denies, that spirit ceases to be Christ: it becomes a dwarf and a madman. Velázquez has discovered this: he sets down his dark confession after all. Here is a record of the grotesque and the pitiful world, born of his deep denials. What a page it is! _El Bobo de Coria_: the simplicity of the inane issuing from the breakdown of complex power: sweetness, candor, poetry and grace surviving in the death of idiocy. _El Primo_: a little man beside a gigantic book; pathos, tenderness, pride--the song of frustration. _Don Sebastián de Mora_: a huge body squats, the head empty, the outstretched legs short as a child’s--so eloquent, so helpless. And the _Niño de Vallecas_, most poignant of all, for he bespeaks fecundity without intelligence: he is the lush plasm of life, purposeless, spiritually bereft.