Part 4 (1/2)
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 G.o.ds in disguise.
This great painter, like the Russian Dostoivsky, has a mania for abandoned weakness. The nearer to G.o.d his heroic Degenerates get, the more feverishly enfeebled becomes their human will.
Their very faces--with those retreating chins, retrousse 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sionate ”Movement of Life,” of which Mr. Bell, quoting Pater's famous quotation from Herac.l.i.tus, 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 ident.i.ty.
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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.s those magnificent t.i.tians crowded so close together--large and mellow s.p.a.ces, 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 G.o.d; 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 pa.s.sing 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, s.h.i.+mmering and unnaturally heavy, is like the crown a child might have made in play, out of sh.e.l.ls 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 Gla.s.s,_ 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 pa.s.sionate shadows, stretching out vain arms after the infinite and crying aloud for the rest they cannot win.