XI
One Of The First Errors Of Our Search For The Archaeological Museum,
Promoted By The Mistaken Kindness Of People
We asked the way, found us
in the Academy of Fine Arts, where in the company of a fat and
Flabby
Rubens (Susanna, of course, and those filthy Elders) we chanced on a
portrait of Goya by himself: a fine head most takingly shrewd. But there
was another portrait by him, of the ridiculous Godoy, Prince of the
Peace, a sort of handsome, foolish fleshy George Fourthish person
looking his character and history: one of the miost incredible parasites
who ever fattened on a nation. This impossible creature, hated more
than feared, and despised more than hated, who misruled a generous
people for twenty-five years, throughout the most heroic period of their
annals, the low-born paramour of their queen and the beloved friend of
the king her husband, who honored and trusted him with the most pathetic
single-hearted and simple-minded devotion, could not look all that he
was and was not; but in this portrait by Goya he suggested his
unutterable worthlessness: a worthlessness which you can only begin to
realize by successively excluding all the virtues, and contrasting it
with the sort of abandon of faith on the part of the king; this in the
common imbecility, the triune madness of the strange group, has its
sublimity. In the next room are two pieces of Goya's which recall in
their absolute realism another passage of Spanish history with
unparalleled effect. They represent, one the accused heretics receiving
sentence before a tribunal of the Inquisition, and the other the
execution of the sentence, where the victims are mocked by a sort of
fools' caps inscribed with the terms of their accusal. Their faces are
turned on the spectator, who may forget them if he can.
I had the help of a beautiful face there which Goya had also painted:
the face of Moratin, the historian of the Spanish drama whose book had
been one of the consolations of exile from Spain in my Ohio village.
That fine countenance rapt me far from where I stood, to the village,
with its long maple-shaded summer afternoons, and its long lamp-lit
winter nights when I was trying to find my way through Moratin's history
of the Spanish drama, and somehow not altogether failing, so that
fragments of the fact still hang about me. I wish now I could find the
way back through it, or even to it, but between me and it there are so
many forgotten passes that it would be hopeless trying. I can only
remember the pride and joy of finding my way alone through it, and
emerging from time to time into the light that glimmered before me. I
cannot at all remember whether it was before or after exploring this
history that I ventured upon the trackless waste of a volume of the
dramatists themselves, where I faithfully began with the earliest and
came down to those of the great age when Cervantes and Calderon and Lope
de Vega were writing the plays.
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