TO see Spanish art steadily and to see it as a whole is admittedly
difficult; success is achieved, as a rule, only by those who have
mastered, at least in outline, the rest of European art history. For
the art that has been proclaimed by a given generation as the last
word, and discarded by the next as obsolescent, has often been tardily
granted an asylum and a renewal of life in Spain. Spain appears to-day as the
Tower of Babel within which resound the many languages of art, the echoes of
culture after culture, alive, moribund and dead; tongues as dissimilar as the
Arab, the Gothic, the Italian and the Flemish, co-mingle and contend within
the four corners of the square Peninsula. Only the ear well accustomed to the
local vernaculars of the rest of Europe can readily distinguish between them
and the dialects native to Spain.

It is true that many have accomplished this feat, which, however, is or
should be, but a means to an end. No ambitious art student can be content with
a mere analysis of that kind. The first step, then, towards acquiring the materials
for a synthetic study of the art of Spain, must be taken outside her borders. The
next step consists in realizing that the multitude of towns and villages encom-
passed by Oviedo and Granada, Salamanca and Barcelona are, in terms of art
history, an enormous melting pot. The final step must be to envisage Spanish
art not only as a mere commentary on European culture, but as a special
product of the race.

This has never yet been done, or if it has been done, no one has so far
dared to translate such an experience into the written word. We must believe
that the wooing of Spain will one day be consummated, but the bell ringers may
still count on a term of slumber before they will be called to duty. In the
meantime those of us who aspire to a complete understanding of what we
instinctively feel to be a great and inspiring school, must, if we are quite frank,
confess to some degree of bewilderment, a bewilderment intensified by the
abundant evidence of how sharply the aloof Spanish temperament is marked
off from those of her neighbours. It is as if, by some obscure law in psychology,
the very individuality of her national character were compensated for by a
confirmed habit of steeping herself in turn in every form of culture happening to
come her way, with the result that, to the mind of the foreigner, Spanish art
appears to be at one moment idiosyncratic and at another elemental.

A veteran among observant students of Spain and Spanish art assures me
that to those who have the eyes to see, and the ears to hear, as well as a
sufficiency of patience, there inevitably comes a day when Spain is really seen
as an entity and when the whole complex of styles and schools represented,
often in strangely modified but still recognizable forms, within her shores, fuse
together in the mind as a delightful and unique experience. Accepting this,
the great thing should be to go on and on until the transformation occurs; then
and only then you may know Spanish art as George Borrow knew Spain.

It is our hope that the present book about Spanish art will help to accelerate
some such process. The object of the book is, then, to encourage a closer and
more intimate study of Spanish art, both on the part of those who know the
country at first hand, and on that of students who have not yet done so. The
plan on which it is built is a simple, but, we hope, an efficient one. It was
suggested by our first and less ambitious experiment in book production,
"Chinese Art," which is uniform with this volume.

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