The emerging of a great genius into long retarded pre-eminence is
always attended by certain critical misunderstandings. To a cynical
observer, on the lookout for characteristic temperamental lapses,
two recent interpretations of El Greco may be especially
commended. I mean the _Secret of Toledo,_ by Maurice Barres, and
an article in the "Contemporary" of April, 1914, by Mr. Aubrey Bell.
Barres--Frenchman of Frenchmen--sets off, with captivating and
plausible logic, to generalize into reasonable harmlessness this
formidable madman. He interprets Toledo, appreciates Spain, and
patronizes Domenico Theotocopoulos.
The _Secret of Toledo_ is a charming book, with illuminating
passages, but it is too logical, too plausible, too full of the preciosity
of dainty generalization, to reach the dark and arbitrary soul, either
of Spain or of Spain's great painter.
Mr. Bell, on the contrary, far from turning El Greco into an
epicurean cult, drags him with a somewhat heavy hand before the
footlights of English Idealism.
He makes of him an excuse for disparaging Velasquez, and launches
into a discourse upon the Higher Reality and the Inner Truth which
leaves one with a very dreary feeling, and, by some ponderous
application of spiritual ropes and pulleys, seems to jerk into empty
space all that is most personal and arresting in the artist.
If it is insulting to the ghostly Toledoan to smooth him out into
picturesque harmony with Castillian dances, Gothic cloisters and
Moorish songs, it is still worse to transform him into a rampant
Idealist of the conventional kind. He belongs neither to the
Aesthetics nor to the Idealists. He belongs to every individual soul
whose taste is sufficiently purged, sufficiently perverse and
sufficiently passionate, to enter the enchanted circle of his tyrannical
spell.
When, in that dark Toledo Church, one presses one's face against the
iron bars that separate one from the Burial of Count Orguz, it is
neither as a Dilettante nor an Idealist that one holds one's breath.
Those youthful pontifical saints, so richly arrayed, offering with
slender royal hands that beautiful body to the dust--is their
mysterious gesture only the rhythm of the secret of Death?
Those chastened and winnowed spectators, with their withdrawn,
remote detachment--not sadness--are they the initiated sentinels of
the House of Corruption?
At what figured symbol points that epicene child?
Sumptuous is the raiment of the dead; and the droop of his limbs has
a regal finality; but look up! Stark naked, and in abandoned
weakness, the liberated soul shudders itself into the presence of God!
The El Greco House and Museum in Toledo contains amazing
things. Every one of those Apostles that gaze out from the wall upon
our casual devotion has his own furtive madness, his own
impossible dream! The St. John is a thing one can never forget. El
Greco has painted his hair as if it were literally live flame and the
exotic tints of his flesh have an emphasis laid upon them that makes
one think of the texture of certain wood orchids.
How irrelevant seem Monsieur Barres' water-colour sketches of
prancing Moors and learned Jews and picturesque Visi-Goths, as
soon as one gets a direct glimpse into these unique perversions! And
why cannot one go a step with this dreamer of dreams without
dragging in the Higher Reality? To regard work as mad and
beautiful as this as anything but individual Imagination, is to insult
the mystery of personality.
El Greco re-creates the world, in pure, lonely, fantastic arbitrariness.
His art does not represent the secret Truth of the Universe, or the
Everlasting Movement; it represents the humour of El Greco.
Every artist mesmerizes us into his personal vision.
A traveller, drinking wine in one of those cafes in the crowded
Zocodover, his head full of these amazing fantasies, might well let
the greater fantasy of the world slip by--a dream within a dream!
With El Greco for a companion, the gaunt waiter at the table takes
the form of some incarcerated Don Quixote and the beggars at the
window appear like gods in disguise.
This great painter, like the Russian Dostoivsky, has a mania for
abandoned weakness. The nearer to God his heroic Degenerates get,
the more feverishly enfeebled becomes their human will.
Their very faces--with those retreating chins, retroussé noses, loose
lips, quivering nostrils and sloping brows--seem to express the
abandonment of all human resolution or restraint, in the presence of
the Beatific Vision. Like the creatures of Dostoievsky, they seem to
plunge into the ocean of the Foolishness of God, so much wiser than
the wisdom of men!--as divers plunge into a bath.
There is not much attempt among these ecstatics to hold on to the
dignity of their reason or the reticence of their self-respect. Naked,
they fling themselves into the arms of Nothingness.
This passionate "Movement of Life," of which Mr. Bell, quoting
Pater's famous quotation from Heraclitus, makes so much, is, after
all, only the rush of the wind through the garments of the
World--Denier, as he plunges into Eternity.
Like St. John of the Cross, El Greco's visionaries pass from the
Night of the Reason to the Night of the Senses; from the Night of
the Senses to the Night of Soul; and if this final Night is nothing less
than God Himself, the divine submersion does not bring back any
mortal daylight.
Domenico's portraits have a character somewhat different from his
visions. Here, into these elongated, bearded hermits, into these grave,
intellectual maniacs, whose look is like the look of Workers in some
unlit Mine, he puts what he knows and feels of his own identity.
They are diverse masks and mirrors, these portraits, surfaces of deep
water in various lonely valleys, but from the depths of them rises up
the shadow of the same lost soul, and they are all ruffled by the
breath of the same midnight.
The Crucifixion in the Prado, and that other, which, by some freak
of Providence, has found its way to Philadelphia, have backgrounds
which carry our imagination very far. Is this primordial ice, with its
livid steel-blue shadows, the stuff out of which the gods make other
planets than ours--dead planets, without either sun or star? Are these
the sheer precipices of Chaos, against which the Redeemer hangs, or
the frozen edges of the grave of all life?
El Greco's magnificent contempt for material truth is a lesson to all
artists. We are reminded of William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley.
He seems to regard the human-frame as so much soft clay, upon
which he can trace his ecstatic hieroglyphs, in defiance both of
anatomy and nature.
El Greco is the true precursor of our present-day Matissists and
Futurists. He, as they, has the courage to strip his imagination of all
mechanical restrictions and let it go free to mould the world at its
fancy.
What stray visitor to Madrid would guess the vastness of the
intellectual sensation awaiting him in that quiet, rose-coloured
building?
As you enter the Museum and pass those magnificent Titians
crowded so close together--large and mellow spaces, from a more
opulent world than ours; greener branches, bluer skies and a more
luminous air; a world through which, naturally and at ease, the
divine Christ may move, grand, majestic, health-giving, a veritable
god; a world from whose grapes the blood of satyrs may be
quickened, from whose corn the hearts of heroes may be made
strong--and come bolt upon El Greco's glacial northern lights, you
feel that no fixed objective Truth and no traditional Ideal has a right
to put boundaries to the imagination of man.
Not less striking than any of these is the extraordinary portrait of
"Le Roi Ferdinand" in the great gallery at the Louvre.
The artist has painted the king as one grown weary of his difference
from other men. His moon-white armour and silvery crown show
like the ornaments of the dead. Misty and wavering, the long
shadows upon the high, strange brow seem thrown there by the
passing of all mortal Illusions.
Phantom-like in his gleaming ornaments, a king of Lost Atlantis, he
waits the hour of his release.
And not only is he the king of Shadows; he is also the king of
Players, the Player-King.
El Greco has painted him holding two sceptres, one of which,
resembling a Fool's Bauble, is tipped with the image of a naked
hand--a dead, false hand--symbol of the illusion of Power. The very
crown he wears, shimmering and unnaturally heavy, is like the
crown a child might have made in play, out of shells and sea-weed.
The disenchanted irony upon the face of this figure; that look as of
one who--as Plato would have us do with kings--has been dragged
back from Contemplation to the vulgarity of ruling men; has been
deliberately blent by a most delicate art with a queer sort of fantastic
whimsicality.
"Le Roi Ferdinand" might almost be an enlarged reproduction of
some little girl's Doll-King, dressed up in silver tinsel and left out of
doors, by mistake, some rainy evening.
Something about him, one fancies, would make an English child
think of the "White Knight" in _Alice Through the Looking Glass,_
so helpless and simple he looks, this poor "Revenant," propped up
by Youthful Imagination, and with the dews of night upon his
armour.
You may leave these pictures far behind you as you re-cross the
Channel, but you can never quite forget El Greco.
In the dreams of night the people of his queer realm will return and
surround you, ebbing and flowing, these passionate shadows,
stretching out vain arms after the infinite and crying aloud for the
rest they cannot win.
Yes, in the land of dreams we know him, this proud despiser of earth!
From our safe inland retreat we watch the passing of his Dance of
Death, and we know that what they seek, these wanderers upon the
wind, is not our Ideal nor our Real, not our Earth or our Heaven, but
a strange, fairy-like Nirvana, where, around the pools of
Nothingness, the children of twilight gambol and play.
The suggestive power of genius plays us, indeed, strange tricks. I
have sometimes fancied that the famished craving in the eyes and
nostrils of El Greco's saints was a queer survival of that tragic look
which that earlier Greek, Scopas the Sculptor, took such pains to
throw upon the eyelids of his half-human amphibiums.
It might even seem to us, dreaming over these pictures as the gusts
of an English autumn blow the fir branches against the window, as
though all that weird population of Domenico's brain were tossing
their wild, white arms out there and emitting thin, bat-like cries
under the drifting moon.
The moon--one must admit that, at least--rather than the sun, was
ever the mistress of El Greco's genius. He will come more and more
to represent for us those vague uneasy feelings that certain
inanimate and elemental objects have the power of rousing. It is of
him that one must think, when this or that rock-chasm cries aloud
for its Demon, or this or that deserted roadway mutters of its
unreturning dead.
There will always be certain great artists, and they are the most
original of all who refuse to submit to any of our logical categories,
whether scientific or ideal.
To give one's self up to them is to be led by the hand into the
country of Pure Imagination, into the Ultima Thule of impossible
dreams.
Like Edgar Allan Poe, this great painter can make splendid use of
the human probabilities of Religion and Science; but it is none of
these things that one finally thinks, as one comes to follow him, but
of things more subtle, more remote, more translunar, and far more
imaginative.
One may walk the streets of Toledo to seek the impress of El
Greco's going and coming; but the soul of Domenico Theotocopoulos
is not there.