of his material.  Manet went to him a beginner.  After studying the Maja desnuda at the Prado Museum he returned to France and painted the Olympe, once of the Luxembourg, now in the Louvre.  The balcony scenes of Goya, with their manolas—­old-fashioned grisettes—­must have stirred Manet; recall the Frenchman’s Balcony.  And the bull-fights?  Oh! what an iron-souled master was there—­Goya when he slashed a bull in the arena tormented by the human brutes!  None of his successors matches him.  The same is the case with that diverting, devilish, savoury, and obscene series he called Caprices.  It is worth remembering that Delacroix was one of the first artists in Paris who secured a set of these rare plates.  The witch’s sabbaths and the modern version of them, prostitution and its symbolism, filled the brain of Goya.  He always shocks any but robust nerves with his hybrid creatures red in claw and foaming at mouth as they fight in midair, hideous and unnamable phantoms of the dark.  His owls are theologians.  The females he often shows make us turn aside our head and shudder.  With implacable fidelity he displayed the reverse of war’s heroic shield.  It is something more than hell.

Sattler, Charlet, Raffet, James Ensor, Rethel, De Groux, Rops, Edvard Muench (did you ever see his woman wooed by a skeleton?), and the rest of these delineators of the morbid and macabre acknowledge Goya as their progenitor.  He must have been a devil-worshipper.  He pictures the goat devil, horns and hoofs.  Gautier compares him to E.T.W.  Hoffmann—­Poe not being known in Paris at that time—­but it is a rather laboured comparison, for there was a profoundly human side to the Spaniard.  His perception of reality was of the solidest.  He had lived and loved and knew before Flaubert that if the god of the Romantics was an upholsterer the god of eighteenth-century Spain was an executioner.  The professed lover of the Duchess of Alba, he painted her nude, and then, hearing that the Duke might not like the theme so handled, he painted her again, and clothed, but more insolently uncovered than before.  At the Spanish museum in New York you may see another portrait of this bold beauty with the name of Goya scratched in the earth at her feet.  Her attitude is characteristic of the intrigue, which all Madrid knew and approved.  At home sat Mrs. Goya with her twenty children.

Goya was a man of striking appearance.  Slender in youth, a graceful dancer, in middle life he had the wide shoulders and bull neck of an athlete.  He was the terror of Madrilenan husbands.  His voice had seductive charm.  He could twang the guitar and fence like ten devils.  A gamester, too.  In a word, a figure out of the Renaissance, when the deed trod hard on the heels of the word.  One of his self-portraits shows him in a Byronic collar, the brow finely proportioned, marked mobile features, sombre eyes—­the ideal Don Juan Tenorio to win the foolish heart of an Emma Bovary or a bored