Velasquez belonged to that rare family of sane genius.  He was eminently the painter of daylight and not a nocturnal visionary, as was Rembrandt.  Shakespeare, who had all the strings to his lyre, had also many daylight moments.  Mozart always sang them, and how blithely!  No one, not Beethoven, not Raphael, not Goethe—­to name three widely disparate men of genius—­saw life as steadily as the Spaniard.  He is a magnificent refutation of the madhouse doctors who swear to you that genius is a disease.  Remember, too, that the limitations of Velasquez are clearly defined.  Imagination was denied to him, asserts Beruete; he had neither the turbulent temperament of Rubens nor possessed the strained, harsh mysticism of El Greco—­a painter of imagination and the only painter allowed by Beruete to have affected the Velasquez palette.  In a word, Velasquez was a puzzling comminglement of the classic and the realist.  He had the repose and the firm, virile line of the classics, while his vision of actuality has never been surpassed.  The Dutch Terburg, Vermeer, Van der Helst, Frans Hals saw as vividly the surfaces of things material; the last alone was the match of Velasquez in brushwork, but not Rembrandt recorded in his Anatomy Lesson the facts of the case as did Velasquez.

Senor Beruete wittily remarks that Los Borrachos (The Topers) of Velasquez is the truer anatomy lesson of the two.  A realist, an impressionist, as Stevenson has it, the Spaniard was; but he was also something more.  He had a magic hand to define, the rendering of the magical mystery of space and atmosphere.  Grant that he was not a colourist in the sense the Venetians were, or Rubens, yet how much more subtle, more noble, more intellectual, is his restricted tonal gamut.  Those silver-grays, resonant blacks, browns, blues, and reds sing in your memory long after you have forgotten the tumultuous golden waves breaking upon the decorative coasts of Rubens.  We are constrained to question the easy way Beruete and other critics deny the attributes of imagination and poetry to Velasquez.  There is, perhaps, a more sublimated poetry in his pictures than in the obvious religious and mythological and allegorical set pieces of Rubens, Murillo, and how many others.  His realism did not run to seed in the delineation of subject.  He was as natural as Cervantes—­the one great man of Spain who may be compared to him—­and he saw the larger patterns of life, while never forgetting that the chief function of a painter is to paint, not to “think,” not to rhapsodise, not to be “literary” on canvas.  His cool, measuring eye did more than record sordid facts.  He had a sort of enraptured vision of the earth as beautiful, the innocence of the eye we encounter in children only.  Stevenson rages at those who say that Velasquez was not a colourist—­and Beruete is of them, though he quotes with considerable satisfaction the critical pronouncement of Royal Cortissoz (in Harper’s Magazine, May, 1895) that Las Meninas is “the most perfect study of colour and values which exists.”