The first period of his art found Velasquez a realist heavy in colour and brush-work, and without much hint of the transcendental realism to be noted in his later style.  The dwarfs, buffoons, the AEsop and the Menippus are the result of an effortless art.  In the last manner the secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the stars, as Dostoievsky would put it.  The Topers, The Forge of Vulcan, are pictures that enthrall because of their robust simplicity and vast technical sweep though they do not possess the creative invention of the Mercury and Argus or The Anchorites.  This latter is an amazing performance.  Two hermits—­St. Antony the Abbot visiting St. Paul the Hermit—­are shown.  A flying raven, bread in beak, nears them.  You could swear that the wafer of flour is pasted on the canvas.  This picture breathes peace and sweetness.  The Christ of the Spaniard is a man, not a god, crucified.  His Madonnas, masterly as they are, do not reach out hands across the frame as do his flower-like royal children and delicate monsters.

The crinolined princess, Margarita, with her spangles and furbelows, is a companion to the Margarita at the Louvre and the one in Vienna.  She is the exquisite and lyric Velasquez.  On his key-board of imbricated tones there are grays that felicitously sing across alien strawberry tints, thence modulate into fretworks of dim golden fire.  As a landscapist Velasquez is at his best in the Prado.  The various backgrounds and those two views painted at Rome in the garden of the Villa Medici—­a liquid comminglement of Corot and Constable, as has been pointed out—­prove this man of protean gifts to have anticipated modern discoveries in vibrating atmospheric effects and colour-values.  But, then, Velasquez will always be “modern.”  And when time has obliterated his work he may become the legendary Parrhasius of a vanished epoch.  To see him in the Prado is to stand eye to eye with the most enchanting realities of art.

CODA

When a man begins to chatter of his promenades among the masterpieces it may be assumed that he has crossed the sill of middle-age.  Remy de Gourmont, gentle ironist, calls such a period l’heure insidieuse.  Yet, is it not something—­a vain virtue, perhaps—­to possess the courage of one’s windmills!  From the Paris of the days when I haunted the ateliers of Gerome, Bonnat, Meissonier, Couture, and spent my enthusiasms over the colour-schemes of Decamps and Fortuny, to the Paris of the revolutionists, Manet, Degas, Monet, now seems a life long.  But time fugues precipitately through the land of art.  In reality both periods overlap; the dichotomy is spiritual, not temporal.