His religious frescoes, supposed to be ad majorem Dei gloriam, were really for the greater glory of Goya.  They are something more than secular, often little short of blasphemous.  That they were tolerated proves the cynical temper of his times.  When the fat old scoundrel of a Bourbon king ran away with all his court and the pusillanimous Joseph Bonaparte came upon the scene, Goya swerved and went through the motions of loyalty, a thing that rather disturbs the admirers of the supposedly sturdy republican.  But he was only marking time.  He left a terrific arraignment of war and its horrors.  Nor did he spare the French.  Callot, Hell-Breughel, are outdone in these swift, ghastly memoranda of misery, barbarity, rapine, and ruin.  The hypocrite Ferdinand VII was no sooner on the throne of his father than Goya, hat in hand but sneer on lip and twinkle in eye, approached him, and after some parleying was restored to royal favour.  Goya declared that as an artist he was not personally concerned in the pranks of the whirligig politic.  Nevertheless he was bitterly chagrined at the twist of events, and, an old man, he retired to his country house, where he etched and designed upon its walls startling fancies.  He died disillusioned, and though nursed by some noble countrymen, his career seemed to illustrate that terrifying picture of his invention—­a skeleton lifts its gravestone and grinningly traces with bony finger in the dust the word Nada—­Nothing!  Overtaxed by the violence of his life and labours—­he left a prodigious amount of work behind him—­soured by satiety, all spleen and rage, he was a broken-down Lucifer, who had trailed his wings in the mud.  But who shall pass judgment upon this unhappy man?  Perhaps, as he saw the “glimmering square” grow less, the lament of Cardinal Wolsey may have come to a brain teeming with memories.  Goya had always put his king before his God.  But in his heart he loved the old romantic faith—­the faith that hovered in the background of his art.  Goya is not the first son of his mother church who denied her from sheer perversity.  What a nation!  Cervantes and Lope da Vega, Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada—­most glorious of her sex, saint and genius—­and Goya!  Spain is the land of great and diverse personalities.  But with Calderon we must now say:  “Let us to our ship, for here all is shadowy and unsettled.”

Goya, as Baudelaire pointed out more than half a century ago, executed his etchings by combining aquatint and the use of the dry point.  A few years before his death he took up lithography, then a novelty.  His Caprices, Proverbs, and Horrors of War may outlive his paintings.  His colour scheme was not a wide one, blacks, reds, browns, and yellows often playing solo; but all modern impressionism may be seen on his canvases—­harsh dissonances, dots, dabs, spots, patches, heavy planes, strong rhythmic effects of lighting, heavy impasto, luminous atmosphere, air, sunshine, and vibrating movements; also the strangeness