purpose it is, however, enough to point out that the Spanish Theatre constitutes an immense quarry of character-material, more or less elaborated at the hands of ever-hurried dramatists.

Nor need we limit our remarks to literature. What is Spanish painting but a unique gallery of portraits ? A monk by Zurbaran, a prince, a buffoon, a pagan god, a Christ, by Velazquez, an apostle, a magdalen by Ribera, a saint, a gentleman, a priest by El Greco, a lady, a general by Goya, what is it in them which, different in style as they are, makes them all members of the same family ? It is that beneath the different garbs of age and state, they all are definite men and women. Compare the Cid of Guillen de Castro to the Cid of Corneille, and you will perceive the difference between a man who is above all himself and, to use a significant Spanish saying, ' as God made him ', and on the other hand a hero endeavouring to live up to I

the theoretical standard of his class. Compare the Charles IV of Goya to the Louis XIV of Largilliere (a comparison in which the balance of artistic merit is reversed) and you reach the same conclusion ; the one is a man who happens to be a king ; the other is a king, every inch a king, and not in the least a man. The French have endeavoured to see the type through the man ; the Spaniards have tried to give us the man beneath the type. Thus the dominant feature of Spanish art is that it is not conceived from an artistic but from a vital point of view. The Spanish artist makes art the instrument of life and not life the raw matter of art. That is why he relies less on composition, style, relations to culture or intellectual associations, than on the direct appeal to the human heart of the public from the human heart of the subject. His aim is, therefore, that which is the supreme test of all art—the fixing and recreating of life.

Such an achievement requires a creative imagination singularly free. So often and so forcibly has political Spain stood for the limitation of the freedom of thought that to speak of liberty in connexion with the spirit of Spain may seem to the uninformed paradoxical if not altogether absurd. A discussion of Spanish limitations to free thought in relation to the standards of the age, and a parallel between Philip II, Calvin, and John Knox, to mention only three prominent Definers of Faith of the period, in their respective attitudes with regard to free thinking, would take us too far away from our subject. The fact remains that few nations can vie with Spain in freedom of creative imagination, that is, in liberty from those intellectual, moral, and even msthetical prejudices which hinder man's vision and interpretation of nature. True, it sometimes happens that a great Spanish creator sets to work with an avowed moral or intellectual purpose ; it may be to show up vice in all its hatefulness and to present virtue in all its desirability to the hardened hearts of his readers—thus, Juan Ruiz and most -of the authors of the picaresque novels ; it may be to stamp out the pest of chivalry books—thus, Cervantes ; it may be to prove a particular proposition with regard to faith and dogma, so Tirso or Calderon. But, with the exception perhaps of Calderon, whose work is too often fettered by his didactic proclivities, and still more by the tenets of a dogma too rigidly held and defined, it is curious how little all these distracting intentions and purposes seem to encumber the truly creative work of our artists. With some of them—and I would mention here the picaresque authors and the Archpriest of Hita—this is due to the fact that their moral protestations are mere pretence and a concession to the ecclesiastical authorities ; with others, as for instance, Cervantes, to the sheer strength of their creative instinct. The results are