out by the facts. Did he in truth, as they tell us, do more than any other ruler of England to shape its future, to fix the lines upon which developement was to take place? Mr. Morley answers in the negative, and warns us against the risk of straining history only to procure incense for retro'grade ideals.' Perhaps it was impossible for Cromwell to accomplish more than he did, for it is a common error to over-estimate the power even of the greatest leaders of men to give form and shape, according to their will, to the great movements of the age. Thirty years after Cromwell's death came another and more successful revolution, in times far more favourable to the influence of wise and tolerant and liberal statesmanship, and upon the foundations thus securely laid our later liberties have been built. It is useless to speculate on the might have beens' of history; most useless of all to speculate as to what would have happened if some great man had been other in character and gifts than he was. It is natural for Mr. Roosevelt to lament that Cromwell was not more like Washington, but if he had been he would not have been Cromwell. Another biographer regrets that his hero was so dictatorial,' but much of the work that he had to do, and did, was work for a dictator. Mr. Frederic Harrison suggests that to establish Cromwell's position as the first of our statesmen and the founder of a liberal and constitutional monarchy, it was life that was only wanting to his fame.' He died comparatively young, and had he lived to seventy-five he might have handed on ' a peaceful and reformed State to a constitutional monarchy 'without the debasing interlude of the Restoration.' Who knows but William of Orange might have married a daughter of the House of Cromwell, and the great chief of 'the Commonwealth might have peacefully handed over a 'new and grander England to the great founder of our 'constitutional monarchy.' Surely this is to overlook as important a factor in English history as the prolongation of any single life-viz. the way in which Englishmen in their own day regarded English affairs. But for our part we fail to see that Cromwell down to the day of his death was making any progress whatever towards a real settlement. Neither with the Rump nor Barebones's Parliament, nor with either of the Protectorate Parliaments, was he able to work. Yet England could not be permanently governed without a Parliament, and what reason is there to think that with future Parliaments he would have been more successful? We are forced to the conclusion that when VOL. CXCIII. NO. CCCXOV.

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Cromwell died his work had in truth been done, and that the salvation of the nation, if its salvation was to be worked out on parliamentary lines, would not have been accomplished by an indefinite prolongation of Cromwellian rule.

Of all men living Mr. Gardiner probably possesses the most extensive and intimate knowledge of the Cromwellian period; but he would be the last to urge that such a career as Cromwell's can only be competently judged by the laborious study of every manuscript which modern investigation has brought to light. It is because Mr. Morley is so much more than a student that his estimate of the Protector is especially valuable. What place in history does Mr. Gardiner assign to Cromwell? He has to harmonise, in his estimate of Cromwell, characteristics seemingly at variance with each other, the hesitations and long post'ponements of action' with the swift, decisive hammerstrokes which have caught the popular fancy; and as for his work, having regard to the two centuries that followed, he tells us that what was negative lasted, what was positive vanished away.

'His Constitutions perished with him; his Puritanism descended from the proud position to which he had raised it; his peace with the Dutch Republic was followed by two wars with the United Provinces; his alliance with the French Monarchy only led to a succession of wars lasting into the nineteenth century. All that lasted was the support given by him to maritime enterprise, and in that he followed the traditions of the governments that preceded him.'*

We are rightly asked not to think worse of the man because he failed in many of his attempts. In some respects his ideas were far in advance of his own age, and his non-success was due to the darkness of the time, not to deficiencies of his own. His character, no doubt, was full of incongruities, and how are we to reconcile them? By regarding him, answers Mr. Gardiner, as the typical Englishman of the modern world. The Scotchman may (but doesn't) harbour bitter memories of Dunbar; the Irishman will never forget Drogheda; but it is as an Englishman that Cromwell must be judged.' It is the very union of incongruities and contradictions in Cromwell that makes him the true type of the English people.

Many of us think it strange that the conduct of our nation should often appear to foreign observers in colours so different from those in which we see ourselves. By those who stand aloof from us we are

* Cromwell's Place in History,' by S. R. Gardiner.

represented as grasping at wealth and territory, incapable of imaginative sympathy with subject races, and decking our misconduct with moral sentiments intended to impose on the world. From our own point of view, the extension of our rule is a benefit to the world, and subject races have gained far more than they have lost by submission to a just and beneficent administration; whilst our counsels have always, or almost always, been given with a view to free the oppressed, and to put a bridle in the mouth of the oppressor.'

There is something of truth in both these views, the historian tells us. We are inclined to claim empire as our due, with little consideration for other people; but it is not true that English assertion of high moral intentions is little better than cant.

'With Cromwell's memory it has fared as with ourselves. Royalists painted him as a devil. Carlyle painted him as the masterful saint who suited his peculiar Valhalla. It is time for us to regard him as he really was, with all his physical and moral audacity, with all his tenderness and spiritual yearnings, in the world of action what Shakespeare was in the world of thought, the greatest because the most typical Englishman of all time. This, in the most enduring sense, is Cromwell's place in history. He stands there not to be explicitly followed as a model, but to hold up a mirror to ourselves, wherein we may see alike our weakness and our strength.'

It is only lately that a controversy arose as to whether with propriety a bust and a statue of Oliver Cromwell could be placed within the precincts and in the neighbourhood of the House of Commons. Amongst a section of Irish members only was there found any real objection to do honour to the memory of one of the greatest of Englishmen. The English and the Irish race have mutual wrongs to forgive; and shame to those on either side who strive to perpetuate the memory of the hatreds and injuries of a past age! In Great Britain, at all events, the controversies of generations of historians have cleared the air; and Oliver Cromwell now stands out by general consent as second to none of those who have served England and swayed the destinies of Englishmen.

ART. VI.-1. Diego Velazquez und sein Jahrhundert. By CARL JUSTI. Bonn: 1889.

2. Diego Velazquez and his Times. By CARL JUSTI. Translated by A. H. KEANE. London: H. Grevel & Co.,

1889.

3. Velazquez. By R. A. M. STEVENSON. 2nd edition. London: George Bell & Sons, 1899.

4. Velazquez: a Study of his Life and Art. By WALTER ARMSTRONG. London: Seeley & Co., 1897.

5. Velazquez. By A. DE BERUETE. Paris Librairie Renouard, 1898.

THE tercentenary of the birth of Velazquez in 1899 has found his name more highly appreciated and more widely known than it has ever been before. It is not easy to forgive eighteenth-century Spain for the neglect into which his memory had been suffered to fall. Had the Austrian dynasty continued we should not probably now be ignorant of the subject and doubtful of the genuineness of so many pictures. But the Bourbons cared little for the departed glories of an alien art, and the keepers of the royal pictures were Spanish enough to take the least possible trouble. Pacheco, the father-in-law and master of Velazquez, to whom we owe several interesting details about him, might have done a great service to posterity had it been possible for him to make an exact list of the pictures and their dates. He did not die till 1654, but he saw little of Velazquez after the latter moved to Madrid, and cannot have known much about his work. The earliest biography, Palomino's, in 1725, enthusiastic as it is, shows by its inaccuracies and omissions how uncertain the tradition about Velazquez had already become. The fire at the palace in 1734, in which some pictures were burnt and others damaged, threw the collection into great confusion, and it was then probably that the titles of many of the portraits were finally lost. Later in the century Ponz, whose voluminous 'Journey in Spain' began to appear in 1772, was informed on the best authority that the Surrender of Breda' represented the Marquis of Pescaro receiving the keys of some stronghold; so completely had the fame of Spinola passed into oblivion. In France the very name of Velazquez was barely known. In a book on art published at Paris in the eighteenth

century mention is made of 'un nommé Velasque, peintre 'espagnol.'

The Dictionary' of Ceán Bermudez, published in 1800, contained in the few pages devoted to Velazquez the first attempt to give an accurate list of the pictures in public collections. The work appeared at an unlucky time, for it served to guide Soult's agents to their plunder. King Joseph himself may have consulted it in selecting the pictures which were to accompany him on his flight. Ferdinand VII.'s gift of these pictures to the Duke of Wellington in 1816 was followed by increasing knowledge of Velazquez in England, much stimulated by Ford's Handbook and his article on Velazquez in the Penny 'Cyclopædia.' In 1848 appeared Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's Annals of the Artists in Spain'-a delightful work, in which, however, the bibliographical element is perhaps stronger than the art criticism. The chapter on Velazquez was afterwards published separately and translated into French, with short appreciations of the pictures by W. Bürger (T. Thoré). Up to 1855, incredible as it may appear, no book dealing separately with Velazquez had been published either in Spain or elsewhere. It was, after all, the painters and not the critics who first realised his preeminent greatness. He became the prophet of a new school of painting, which took truth of impression as its governing ideal.' Writing from Madrid in 1868 the ill-fated Henri Regnault is full of enthusiasm for the aspect nouveau et 'original' of Velazquez, the first painter in the world.' At Rome, at Paris it was felt that he alone painted reality. The teaching of Carolus-Duran supplied a strong stimulus to this new departure in modern art. Regnault, Courbet, Manet, Corot, Whistler, Sargent, to mention only a few names, may be regarded as belonging in varying degrees and from different points of view to the new school. After two centuries of neglect Velazquez now occupies a position which is, we should imagine, without parallel in the history of art. He is no longer merely an old master, he has become a living influence on modern painting; it is as if he had recently opened a studio. This is a profoundly interesting fact, for an explanation of which we must apply to the critics.

There are two ways of getting to know a great master. One is to stand in front of his pictures: that is the way in which painters get their knowledge. The other is to read about his life and times: that is how the historian learns. Neither of these methods, of course, excludes the other.