Goya incarnated the renaissance of old Spain and its art.  Spanish art has always come from without, for its foundations were northern and Flemish.  The Van Eycks and Van der Weyden were studied closely; Jan Van Eyck visited Madrid.  The Venetian influence was strong, and El Greco his life long, and a pupil of Titian as he was, this gloomy painter with the awkward name of Theotocopoulo endeavoured to forget his master and became more Spanish than the Spanish.  Ribera, emotional, dramatic, realistic, religious, could sound the chords of tenderness without the sentimentalism of Murillo.  Goya stems more from Caravaggio and Salvator Rosa than from any of his predecessors, except Velasquez.  The presence of Tiepolo, the last of the Venetians, in Spain may have influenced him.  Certainly Raphael Mengs, the “Saxon pedant,” did not—­Mengs associated with Tiepolo at Madrid.  It is in company with the bravos of the brush, Caravaggio and Rosa, that Goya is closely affiliated.  We must go to Gustave Courbet for a like violence of temperament; both men painted con furia; both were capable of debauches in work; Goya could have covered the walls of hell with diabolic frescoes.  In music three men are of a like ilk:  Berlioz, Paganini, Liszt.  Demoniacal, charged with electric energy, was this trinity, and Goya could have made it a quartet.

But if Spain was not a country of original artists—­as was Italy, for example—­she developed powerful and astounding individualities.  Character is her leit motiv in the symphony of the nations.  The rich virility and majestic seriousness of her men, their aptitudes for war, statesmanship, and drama, are borne out in her national history.  Perhaps the climate plays its part.  Havelock Ellis thinks so.  “The hard and violent effects, the sharp contrasts, the strong colours, the stained and dusky clouds, looking as if soaked in pigment, may well have affected the imagination of the artist,” he writes.  Certainly the landscapes of Velasquez could not be more Spanish than they are; and, disagreeing with those who say that he had no feeling for nature, the bits of countryside and mountain Goya shows are truly peninsular in their sternness.  It may be well to remark here that the softness of Tuscany is not to be found in the lean and often arid aspects of Spain.  Spain, too, is romantic—­but after its own fashion.  Goya revived the best traditions of his country’s art; he was the last of the great masters and the first of the moderns.  Something neurotic, modern, disquieting, threads his work with devilish irregularity.  He had not the massive temper of Velasquez, of those men who could paint day after day, year after year, until death knocked at their ateliers.  As vigorous as Rubens in his sketches, Goya had not the steady, slow nerves of that master.  He was very unequal.  His life was as disorderly as Hals’s or Steen’s, but their saving phlegm was missing.  In an eloquent passage—­somewhere in his English Literature—­Taine