somewhat puzzling for the uninitiated. A set of bookish ideas of a rhetorical character more or less directly inherited from the classics, and in later years the restraining influence of the Inquisition on moral and intellectual issues, weave a kind of veil which spreads over the whole of Spanish art until relatively recent times. Yet, behind that veil, how freely conceived and how boldly expressed are characters and ideas ! And how truly, above all other aims more or less sincerely professed, the Spanish creative instinct pursues that freest and highest form of beauty which goes by the name of character!

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever

Keats once said. The young English poet did not live beyond the age which loves general statements, and he set one of them, perhaps a little flatly expressed and even conceived, at the end of one of his most beautiful poems :

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

Well. That is as it may be. But it is best for an artist qua artist not to know and not to inquire. When he sets out to feel it is best that he should forget that there is such a thing as truth or beauty, and whether they are the same, or opposite, or merely different. And it is well also that he should not limit his sensations even by means of such an earnest, if pleasurable, norm of selection as joy. For in such a limitation there is the risk of discriminating in life between things which have and things which have not the right to be interpreted by art, or in other words, a risk of reducing the true and deep meaning of beauty, making of it something akin to prettiness. Beauty is the ?esthetic radiance of life, and all that lives, if seen with the innocent eyes of the artist, is beautiful. Thus understood, beauty coincides with the idea expressed in the modern abstract use of the word character. And in

this task, the true task of all art, Spanish imagination allows no fetters.

It should, however, be noticed that such extreme liberty in the handling of reality does not imply cynicism. Montesquieu said that ' hypocrisy is the homage-,which vice pays to virtue ', and the same might be said, though more subtly, of cynicism, since the deliberate breach no less than the feigned observance is a recognition of the law. But in its creative capacity, the Spanish genius ignores virtue altogether and neither laments its absence not exults at it. It seems to work on the assumption that, though to the ethical faculty virtue as a norm is higher and purer ,than life, to the 2esthetical faculty it is but part of life, smaller than the whole and not entitled to any special treatment or consideration. The result strikes at once the student of Spanish, art and literature. No one can read Fielding without noticing that he prefers Tom Jones to Master Blifil. Dickens himself, whose heart was great, did not take kindly to Uriah Heep and frankly disliked old Nickleby. But to the author of La Celestina the old procuress is as dear as love-infatuated Calixto or sweet Melibea. For, in the pregnant Spanish phrase, they all are sons of God '. And this truly religious impartiality inspires all great works of Spanish art and literature. It shines in every page of Don Quixote; it inspires every picture of Velazquez ; it guides the brush of Goya and the pen of GaldOs. It is the feeling which makes Spanish art and literature as impressive as a spectacle of nature—for it is indeed nature since it is created in liberty and love.

In thus making man—the complete man of flesh and bones—the main subject of her art and thoughts, Spain runs counter to the predominant tendency of Europe. Under the austere discipline of reason, Europe endeavours to repress in man all that i8 not