This Is The Literary Quality
Which The Most Unteclmical May Feel, And Which Is Not Clearer To The
Connoisseur Than To The Least Unlearned.
After Velasquez in the Prado we wanted Goya, and more and more Goya, who
is as Spanish and as unlike Velasquez as can very well be.
There was not
enough Goya abovestairs to satisfy us, but in the Goya room in the
basement there was a series of scenes from Spanish life, mostly frolic
campestral things, which he did as patterns for tapestries and which
came near being enough in their way: the way of that reality which is so
far from the reality of Velasquez. There, striving with their
strangeness, we found a young American husband and wife who said they
were going to Egypt, and seemed so anxious to get out of Spain that they
all but asked us which turning to take. They had a Baedeker of 1901.
which they had been deceived in at New York as the latest edition, and
they were apparently making nothing of the Goyas and were as if lost
down there in the basement. They were in doubt about going further in a
country which had inveigled them from Gibraltar as far as its capital.
They advised with us about Burgos, of all places, and when we said the
hotels in Burgos were very cold, they answered, Well they had thought
so; and the husband asked, Spain was a pretty good place to cut out,
wasn't it?
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