letting his characters speak for themselves, his worst when he stepped in himself, with his ' literary' prejudices, and set out to give the world samples of anthology Spanish. But it is not necessary to read Spanish in order to observe this curious phenomenon of Spanish psychology. There is in the National Gallery as good an instance of it as Don Quixote itself or the works of Calderon. I refer to the famous

Venus and the Mirror' of Velazquez. It is a nude, painted as only Velazquez could paint. So much for the genius. But Velazquez had also to show the Court of Philip IV that he had as good a talent as anybody for representing an allegorical subject, and, therefore, his delightful woman reclining on a ouch was transformed into a Venus by the addition of a naked boy, heavy, fat, and full of bread, provided with a pair of wings, obviously insufficient to lift up to Olympus such a solid, material little figure. The whole poised in the most conventional, artificial style that could be found in the studios and academies of Seville. Thus the trappings of misguided talent often overdress the effective simplicity of the Spanish genius.

Artists are seldom the best critics of their art. But nowhere is this principle more general than in Spain. The divorce between criticism and creation is with us almost complete. It affects equally the critic, to whom a certain dose of creative spirit is indispensable, and the creator, to whom the critical faculty is a necessary instrument for expression. Thus , the Marques de Santillana, an admirer of Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio, despised that poetry, popular in its inspiration and form, in which he left us the best of his genius ; Lope de Vega did not think so much of his theatre as of his imitations of Ariosto ; and Cervantes, who prided himself no less on being the author of Persiles y Sigismunda and of Galatea than the creator of Don Quixote, never saw the true great-

ness of the masterpiece which his race had created through him. We may generalize and say that the writers of the Spanish Golden Century valued themselves for reasons quite other than those which inspire our own admiration for that wonderful period. They saw themselves as self-conscious artists, and judged their works according to somewhat academic rules of art after classical and Italian models. We consider the academic side of the Golden Century literature as a kind of by-product of the age, interesting, certainly, but by no means essential, nor even necessary, to its glory ; while we admire in it that splendid wealth of creative impulse to which we owe the theatre, Don Quixote, the picaresque novels, and the literature of the mystics. So that, though the period was, in its own eyes, one of reading and scholarship, it has for us all the freshness of a self-ignorant primitive age.

It is a situation which, in varying degrees, occurs in all other periods of Spanish literary history, for in all of them the same divorce between the critical and the creative faculty is apparent. And this lack of balance between the genius and the intellect of the nation explains both the importance of the popular element in Spanish literature and the facility with which, in the course of history, Spain was overrun by waves of foreign influence.

The people are in all nations the most genuine representatives of the spontaneous tendencies of the race. When, therefore, as in Spain, these tendencies are predominant and constitute the main feature of the national character, the people are bound to play an important role in the development of the literature and art of the nation. That is what can be observed in the case of Spain. Time after time the taste of the cultivated class is led astray by foreign influences and fashions, or by scholarly prejudices. But the people's

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