El Greco

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Title:     El Greco
Author: John Cowper Powys [More Titles by Powys]

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Those chastened and winnowed spectators, with their withdrawn, remote detachment--not sadness--are they the initiated sentinels of the House of Corruption?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, 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 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.

It is with Faust, in the cave of the abysmal "Mothers."

[The end]
John Cowper Powys's essay: El Greco

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