I Am
Careful Not To Call It The Greatest Gallery In The World, For I Think Of
What The Louvre, The Pitti, And The National Gallery Are, And What Our
Own Metropolitan Is Going To Be; But Surely The Museo Del Prado Is
Incomparable For Its Peculiar Riches.
It is part of the autobiographical
associations with my Spanish travel that when John Hay, who was not yet,
By thirty or forty years, the great statesman he became, but only the
breeziest of young Secretaries of Legation, just two weeks from his post
in Madrid, blew surprisingly into my little carpenter's box in Cambridge
one day, he boasted almost the first thing that the best Titians in the
world were in the Prado galleries. I was too lately from Venice in 1867
not to have my inward question whether there could be anywhere a better
Titian than the "Assumption," but I loved Hay too much to deny him
openly. I said that I had no doubt of it, and when the other day I went
to the Prado it was with the wish of finding him perfectly right,
triumphantly right. I had been from the first a strong partisan of
Titian, and in many a heated argument with Ruskin, unaware of our
controversy, I had it out with that most prejudiced partisan of
Tintoretto. I always got the better of him, as one does in such
dramatizations, where one frames one's opponent's feeble replies for
him; but now in the Prado, sadly and strangely enough, I began to wonder
if Ruskin might not have tacitly had the better of me all the time.
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