Part 3 (2/2)

Charming Idyllists may count the petals of the cuckoo-buds in the river-pastures; and untouched, we admire. But let old Falstaff, as he lies a' dying, ”babble o' green fields,” and all the long, long thoughts of youth steal over us, like a summer wind.

The modern critic, with a philosophic bias, is inclined to quarrel with the obvious human congruity of Shakespeare's utterances. What is the _use_ of this constant repet.i.tion of the obvious truism: ”When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools?”

No use, my friend! No earthly use! And yet it is not a premeditated reflection, put in ”for art's sake.” It is the poetry of the pinch of Fate; it is the human revenge we take upon the insulting irony of our lot.

But Shakespeare does not always strike back at the G.o.ds with bitter blows. In this queer world, where we have ”nor youth, nor age, but, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, dreaming on both,” there come moments when the spirit is too sore wounded even to rise in revolt.

Then, in a sort of ”cheerful despair,” we can only wait the event.

And Shakespeare has his word for this also.

Perhaps the worst of all ”the slings and arrows” are the intolerable partings we have to submit to, from the darlings of our soul. And here, while he offers us no false hope, his tone loses its bitterness, and grows gentle and solemn.

It is--”Forever and forever, farewell, Ca.s.sius. If we do meet again, why then 'tis well; if not, this parting was well made.” And for the Future:

”O that we knew The end of this day's business ere it comes!

But it suffices that the day will end; And then the end is known.”

EL GRECO

The emerging of a great genius into long r.e.t.a.r.ded 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 pa.s.sages, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sionate, 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 G.o.d!

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.

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