with the flaming feast outspread for our enjoyment.  We stand before his Entombment at the Louvre, dumb before its superlative painting, with hardly a thought for the tragedy that it represents.  Titian accepts the literary motive, and the artist in him straight forgets it.  We walk from The Entombment to the little chamber where Rembrandt’s Christ at Emmaus hangs, and the heart of Rembrandt is beating there.  To Titian the glory of the world, to Rembrandt all that man has felt and suffered, parting and sorrow, and the awakening of joy.  We do not compare the one painter with the other; we say:  “This is Titian, that is Rembrandt; each gives us his emotion.”  Foolish indeed it seems in the face of these two pictures, and a thousand others, to say that art should be this or that,—­that a picture should or should not have a literary or a philosophical motive.  Painters give us themselves.  We amuse ourselves by placing them in schools, by analysing their achievement, by scientific explanations of what they did just by instinct, as lambs gambol—­and behind all stands the Sphinx called Personality.

There are moods when the appeal of Velasquez is irresistible.  Grave and reticent, a craftsman miraculously equipped, detached, but not with the Jovian detachment of Titian, this Spanish gentleman stalks silently across the art stage.  Hundreds of drawings of Rembrandt’s exhibit evidence of the infinite extent of his experiments after perfection.  The drawings of Velasquez can be counted on the fingers of one hand.  He drew in paint upon the canvas.  From his portraits and pictures we gather not the faintest idea of what he felt, what he thought, what he believed.  One thing we know absolutely—­that he saw as keenly and as searchingly as any painter who has ever lived.  What he saw before him he could paint, and in the doing of it he was unrivalled.  His hand followed and obeyed his eye.  When the object was not before him, he falls short of his superlative standard.  The figures of Philip IV., of Olivares, and of Prince Baltazar Carlos in the three great equestrian portraits are as finely drawn as man could make them.  Velasquez saw them; he did not see the prancing horses which they ride, consequently our eyes dropping from the consummate figures are disappointed at the conventional attitudes of the steeds.  Velasquez, like Titian, moved from success to success; both were friends of kings, both basked in royal favour, neither had the disadvantage, or perhaps the great advantage, like Rembrandt, of the education of adversity.  Velasquez made two journeys into Italy; he knew what men had accomplished in painting, and if he was not largely influenced by Titian and Tintoretto, their work showed him what man had done, what man could do, and indicated to him his own dormant powers.

Rembrandt was sufficient unto himself.  There are moods when one is sure that he stands at the head of the painting hierarchy.  In spite of his greatness, we feel that he is very near to our comprehension.  What a picture of the old painter towards the end of his life that saying of Baldinucci presents.  We are told that near the close of his career, absorbed in his art, indifferent to the world, “when he was painting at his easel he had come to wipe his brushes on the hinder portions of his dress.”