Woman Triumphant | Page 9

opening the least crack in
their marble walls. On all sides the same façade--noble, symmetrical,
calm, without the vagaries of caprice. It was reason--solid,
well-balanced, alien to enthusiasm and weakness, without feverish
haste. The other was as great as a mountain, with the fantastic disorder
of Nature, covered with tortuous inequalities. On one side the wild,
barren cliff; beyond, the glen, covered with blossoming heath; below,
the garden with its perfumes and birds; on the heights, the crown of
dark clouds, heavy with thunder and lightning. It was imagination in
unbridled career, with breathless halts and new flights--its brow in the
infinite and its feet implanted on earth.
The life of Don Diego was summed up in these words: "He had
painted." That was his whole biography. Never in his travels in Spain
and Italy did he feel curious to see anything but pictures. In the court of
the Poet-king, he had vegetated amid gallantries and masquerades, calm
as a monk of painting, always standing before his canvas and
model--to-day a jester, to-morrow a little Infanta--without any other
desire than to rise in rank among the members of the royal household,
to see a cross of red cloth sewed on his black jerkin. He was a lofty soul,
enclosed in a phlegmatic body that never tormented him with nervous
desires nor disturbed the calm of his work with violent passions. When
he died the good Dona Juana, his wife, died too, as though they sought
each other, unable to remain apart after their long, uneventful
pilgrimage through the world.
Goya "had lived." His life was that of the nobleman-artist--a stormy
novel, full of mysterious amours. His pupils, on parting the curtains of
his studio, saw the silk of royal skirts on their master's knees. The
dainty duchesses of the period resorted to that robust Aragonese of
rough, manly gallantry to have him paint their cheeks, laughing like
mad at these intimate touches. When he contemplated some divine
beauty on the tumbled bed, he transferred her form to the canvas by an
irresistible impulse, an imperious necessity of reproducing beauty; and
the legend that floated about the Spanish artist connected an illustrious

name with all the beauties whom his brush immortalized.
To paint without fear or prejudice, to take delight in reproducing on
canvas the glory of the nude, the lustrous amber of woman's flesh with
its pale roses like a sea-shell, was Renovales' desire and envy; to live
like the famous Don Francisco--a free bird with restless, shining
plumage in the midst of the monotony of the human barn-yard; in his
passions, in his diversions, in his tastes, to be different from the
majority of men, since he was already different from them in his way of
appreciating life.
But, ah! his existence was like that of Don Diego--unbroken,
monotonous, laid out by level in a straight line. He painted, but he did
not live. People praised his work for the accuracy with which he
reproduced Nature, for the gleam of light, for the indefinable color of
the atmosphere, and the exterior of things; but something was lacking,
something that stirred within him and fought in vain to leap the vulgar
barriers of daily existence.
The memory of the romantic life of Goya made him think of his own
life. People called him a master; they bought everything he painted at
good prices, especially if it was in accordance with some one else's
tastes and contrary to his artistic desire; he enjoyed a calm existence,
full of comforts; in his studio, almost as splendid as a palace, the façade
of which was reproduced in the illustrated magazines, he had a wife
who was convinced of his genius and a daughter who was almost a
woman and who made the troop of his intimate pupils stammer with
embarrassment. The only evidences of his Bohemian past that remained
were his soft felt hats, his long beard, his tangled hair and a certain
carelessness in his dress; but when his position as a "national celebrity"
demanded it, he took out of his wardrobe a dress suit with the lapel
covered with the insignia of honorary orders and played his part in
official receptions. He had thousands of dollars in the bank. In his
studio, palette in hand, he conferred with his broker, discussing what
sort of investments he ought to make with the year's profits. His name
awakened no surprise or aversion in high society, where it was
fashionable for ladies to have their portraits painted by him.

In the early days he had provoked scandal and protests by his boldness
in color and his revolutionary way of seeing Nature, but there was not
connected with his name the least offence against the conventions of
society. His women were women of the people, picturesque and