“Come here,” he said. The whine had left his voice. He spoke the words as though now unconsciously he had slipped into the role of master, displaying to his pupil a great work of art.
He grasped me by the coat-sleeve, pulling me forward until I stood with my back against the portieres, and faced the shrouded canvas. Then abruptly he jerked down the cloth, and in the brilliant white glare from overhead the painting stood revealed.
I stared at the canvas. What I expected to see I do not know. What I saw left me gasping—first with amazement, then pity, then with an almost irrepressible desire to laugh. For upon the canvas was only a huge smear of many colored pigments—utterly formless, without meaning. I stared an instant, then turned and met the eyes of the little old man beside me. They gleamed into mine with triumph and pride, and in them I saw again—and this time plainly—the look of madness.
I held back the smile that struggled to my lips. “This—this painting—is it you who—”
“Is that not life, señor?” His thin, treble voice carried an exultant, masterful note. “Can you not see it there? Human life—painted in with pigments to make it immortal.”
“Was it you who painted that—that picture?” A great pity rose in my heart for this poor, deluded madman.
“I? Oh, señor, you do me great honor. It was painted, I have said, by Vasquez—Pedro Vasquez y Carbajál. A wonderful man, this Vasquez. They are children beside him, these others. Is it not so?”
I said nothing, but gazed again at the miserably grotesque daubs on the canvas.
“Look, señor! Is that not a soul you see in those eyes? A human soul?” He pointed a shaking finger at the smear of color before us, his eyes shining with pride. “You call them realists—these Goyas and these Zuloagas. You have seen the girls of Zuloaga, with their white faces and their lips of red. You have looked into their eves—these girls he paints—have you ever seen there the soul?
“‘Naturalism,’ they say; ‘a richness of tone!’ or ‘with a subtlety he paints.’ Or perhaps it is a ‘fuller impasto.’ Bah! They are but words—tricks of words for the critics to play with. They paint of life —these masters, as we call them—but their paintings are dead. They cannot capture the soul, señor—the soul that always struggles free—the human soul never can they hold imprisoned upon their canvas.