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There are some adroit water-colours by modern Frenchmen, and there is a seeming attempt to make the collection contemporary in spirit, but it is all as dead as the allegorical dormouse, while over at the Prado there is a vitality manifested by the old fellows that bids fair to outlast the drums, tramplings, and conquests of many generations.
The old Countess of Montijo was so much given to open-handed hospitality, and it was so easy for any English person to obtain an introduction to her tertulia, that her daughter, the Empress Eugénie, used to call it the Prado cubierto "only the Prado with a roof on."
A lovely creature, better-looking when reclining than standing, as a glance at her full-length portrait in the New York Hispanic Museum proves. One of Goya's best portraits hangs in the Prado, the seated figure of his brother-in-law, the painter Bayeu.
We stand in that small room at the Prado Museum at Madrid and gaze upon his canvases, sumptuous and opulent, diffusing colour like a sunset, indifferent to their story or meaning, happy and content with the flaming feast outspread for our enjoyment. We stand before his Entombment at the Louvre, dumb before its superlative painting, with hardly a thought for the tragedy that it represents.
A similar head in the Uffizi is a copy, Sir Walter Armstrong to the contrary notwithstanding. The Flemish schools are to be seen in the basement, not altogether a favourable place, though in the afternoon there is an agreeable light. Like Rubens, Jan van Eyck visited Spain and left the impress of his style. But the Van Eycks at the Prado are now all queried, though several are noteworthy.
Are we to place here, as Crowe and Cavalcaselle do, the Venus and Cupid of the Tribuna and the Venus with the Organ Player of the Prado? The technical execution of these canvases, the treatment of landscape in the former, would lead the writer to place them some years farther on still in the oeuvre of the master.
Can the waters of the Danube have acquired the property of the river Lethe?" At the same time, to instruct King Joseph in the government of Spain, at the moment when that prince was about to visit his capital again, he thus wrote to him, at Prado: "General Belliard's movement is excellent; a score of worthless fellows ought to be hanged.
I have seen three of my brother nationals walk up and down the Prado of a Sunday, with sticks in their hands, cudgelling all the suspicious characters, and it is our common practice to scour the streets at night, and then if we meet any person who is obnoxious to us, we fall upon him, and with a knife or a bayonet generally leave him wallowing in his blood on the pavement: no one but a national would be permitted to do that.
So complicated were the internal affairs of the nations at this time that it would be impossible to follow them adequately without devoting various chapters to this purpose alone. One of the blackest events of the period was the assassination of the ex-President Prado, who had proved himself a high-minded and efficient leader.
A high functionary cares nothing if the whole Salon del Prado talks of his pilferings, but he will risk his life in an instant if you call him no gentleman. The word "honor" is still used in all legislative assemblies, even in England and America. But the idea has gone by the board in all democracies, and the word means no more than the chamberlain's sword or the speaker's mace.
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