Of Human Bondage (84 page)

  Athelny got up from his chair, walked over to the
Spanish cabinet, let down the front with its great gilt hinges and
gorgeous lock, and displayed a series of little drawers. He took
out a bundle of photographs.

  "Do you know El Greco?" he asked.

  "Oh, I remember one of the men in Paris was awfully
impressed by him."

  "El Greco was the painter of Toledo. Betty couldn't
find the photograph I wanted to show you. It's a picture that El
Greco painted of the city he loved, and it's truer than any
photograph. Come and sit at the table."

  Philip dragged his chair forward, and Athelny set
the photograph before him. He looked at it curiously, for a long
time, in silence. He stretched out his hand for other photographs,
and Athelny passed them to him. He had never before seen the work
of that enigmatic master; and at the first glance he was bothered
by the arbitrary drawing: the figures were extraordinarily
elongated; the heads were very small; the attitudes were
extravagant. This was not realism, and yet, and yet even in the
photographs you had the impression of a troubling reality. Athelny
was describing eagerly, with vivid phrases, but Philip only heard
vaguely what he said. He was puzzled. He was curiously moved. These
pictures seemed to offer some meaning to him, but he did not know
what the meaning was. There were portraits of men with large,
melancholy eyes which seemed to say you knew not what; there were
long monks in the Franciscan habit or in the Dominican, with
distraught faces, making gestures whose sense escaped you; there
was an Assumption of the Virgin; there was a Crucifixion in which
the painter by some magic of feeling had been able to suggest that
the flesh of Christ's dead body was not human flesh only but
divine; and there was an Ascension in which the Saviour seemed to
surge up towards the empyrean and yet to stand upon the air as
steadily as though it were solid ground: the uplifted arms of the
Apostles, the sweep of their draperies, their ecstatic gestures,
gave an impression of exultation and of holy joy. The background of
nearly all was the sky by night, the dark night of the soul, with
wild clouds swept by strange winds of hell and lit luridly by an
uneasy moon.

  "I've seen that sky in Toledo over and over again,"
said Athelny. "I have an idea that when first El Greco came to the
city it was by such a night, and it made so vehement an impression
upon him that he could never get away from it."

  Philip remembered how Clutton had been affected by
this strange master, whose work he now saw for the first time. He
thought that Clutton was the most interesting of all the people he
had known in Paris. His sardonic manner, his hostile aloofness, had
made it difficult to know him; but it seemed to Philip, looking
back, that there had been in him a tragic force, which sought
vainly to express itself in painting. He was a man of unusual
character, mystical after the fashion of a time that had no leaning
to mysticism, who was impatient with life because he found himself
unable to say the things which the obscure impulses of his heart
suggested. His intellect was not fashioned to the uses of the
spirit. It was not surprising that he felt a deep sympathy with the
Greek who had devised a new technique to express the yearnings of
his soul. Philip looked again at the series of portraits of Spanish
gentlemen, with ruffles and pointed beards, their faces pale
against the sober black of their clothes and the darkness of the
background. El Greco was the painter of the soul; and these
gentlemen, wan and wasted, not by exhaustion but by restraint, with
their tortured minds, seem to walk unaware of the beauty of the
world; for their eyes look only in their hearts, and they are
dazzled by the glory of the unseen. No painter has shown more
pitilessly that the world is but a place of passage. The souls of
the men he painted speak their strange longings through their eyes:
their senses are miraculously acute, not for sounds and odours and
colour, but for the very subtle sensations of the soul. The noble
walks with the monkish heart within him, and his eyes see things
which saints in their cells see too, and he is unastounded. His
lips are not lips that smile.

  Philip, silent still, returned to the photograph of
Toledo, which seemed to him the most arresting picture of them all.
He could not take his eyes off it. He felt strangely that he was on
the threshold of some new discovery in life. He was tremulous with
a sense of adventure. He thought for an instant of the love that
had consumed him: love seemed very trivial beside the excitement
which now leaped in his heart. The picture he looked at was a long
one, with houses crowded upon a hill; in one corner a boy was
holding a large map of the town; in another was a classical figure
representing the river Tagus; and in the sky was the Virgin
surrounded by angels. It was a landscape alien to all Philip's
notion, for he had lived in circles that worshipped exact realism;
and yet here again, strangely to himself, he felt a reality greater
than any achieved by the masters in whose steps humbly he had
sought to walk. He heard Athelny say that the representation was so
precise that when the citizens of Toledo came to look at the
picture they recognised their houses. The painter had painted
exactly what he saw but he had seen with the eyes of the spirit.
There was something unearthly in that city of pale gray. It was a
city of the soul seen by a wan light that was neither that of night
nor day. It stood on a green hill, but of a green not of this
world, and it was surrounded by massive walls and bastions to be
stormed by no machines or engines of man's invention, but by prayer
and fasting, by contrite sighs and by mortifications of the flesh.
It was a stronghold of God. Those gray houses were made of no stone
known to masons, there was something terrifying in their aspect,
and you did not know what men might live in them. You might walk
through the streets and be unamazed to find them all deserted, and
yet not empty; for you felt a presence invisible and yet manifest
to every inner sense. It was a mystical city in which the
imagination faltered like one who steps out of the light into
darkness; the soul walked naked to and fro, knowing the unknowable,
and conscious strangely of experience, intimate but inexpressible,
of the absolute. And without surprise, in that blue sky, real with
a reality that not the eye but the soul confesses, with its rack of
light clouds driven by strange breezes, like the cries and the
sighs of lost souls, you saw the Blessed Virgin with a gown of red
and a cloak of blue, surrounded by winged angels. Philip felt that
the inhabitants of that city would have seen the apparition without
astonishment, reverent and thankful, and have gone their ways.

  Athelny spoke of the mystical writers of Spain, of
Teresa de Avila, San Juan de la Cruz, Fray Luis de Leon; in all of
them was that passion for the unseen which Philip felt in the
pictures of El Greco: they seemed to have the power to touch the
incorporeal and see the invisible. They were Spaniards of their
age, in whom were tremulous all the mighty exploits of a great
nation: their fancies were rich with the glories of America and the
green islands of the Caribbean Sea; in their veins was the power
that had come from age-long battling with the Moor; they were
proud, for they were masters of the world; and they felt in
themselves the wide distances, the tawny wastes, the snow-capped
mountains of Castile, the sunshine and the blue sky, and the
flowering plains of Andalusia. Life was passionate and manifold,
and because it offered so much they felt a restless yearning for
something more; because they were human they were unsatisfied; and
they threw this eager vitality of theirs into a vehement striving
after the ineffable. Athelny was not displeased to find someone to
whom he could read the translations with which for some time he had
amused his leisure; and in his fine, vibrating voice he recited the
canticle of the Soul and Christ her lover, the lovely poem which
begins with the words en una noche oscura, and the noche serena of
Fray Luis de Leon. He had translated them quite simply, not without
skill, and he had found words which at all events suggested the
rough-hewn grandeur of the original. The pictures of El Greco
explained them, and they explained the pictures.

  Philip had cultivated a certain disdain for
idealism. He had always had a passion for life, and the idealism he
had come across seemed to him for the most part a cowardly
shrinking from it. The idealist withdrew himself, because he could
not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength
to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since
his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled
himself with despising his fellows. For Philip his type was
Hayward, fair, languid, too fat now and rather bald, still
cherishing the remains of his good looks and still delicately
proposing to do exquisite things in the uncertain future; and at
the back of this were whiskey and vulgar amours of the street. It
was in reaction from what Hayward represented that Philip clamoured
for life as it stood; sordidness, vice, deformity, did not offend
him; he declared that he wanted man in his nakedness; and he rubbed
his hands when an instance came before him of meanness, cruelty,
selfishness, or lust: that was the real thing. In Paris he had
learned that there was neither ugliness nor beauty, but only truth:
the search after beauty was sentimental. Had he not painted an
advertisement of chocolat Menier in a landscape in order to escape
from the tyranny of prettiness?

  But here he seemed to divine something new. He had
been coming to it, all hesitating, for some time, but only now was
conscious of the fact; he felt himself on the brink of a discovery.
He felt vaguely that here was something better than the realism
which he had adored; but certainly it was not the bloodless
idealism which stepped aside from life in weakness; it was too
strong; it was virile; it accepted life in all its vivacity,
ugliness and beauty, squalor and heroism; it was realism still; but
it was realism carried to some higher pitch, in which facts were
transformed by the more vivid light in which they were seen. He
seemed to see things more profoundly through the grave eyes of
those dead noblemen of Castile; and the gestures of the saints,
which at first had seemed wild and distorted, appeared to have some
mysterious significance. But he could not tell what that
significance was. It was like a message which it was very important
for him to receive, but it was given him in an unknown tongue, and
he could not understand. He was always seeking for a meaning in
life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it
was obscure and vague. He was profoundly troubled. He saw what
looked like the truth as by flashes of lightning on a dark, stormy
night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man
need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful;
he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as
active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the
inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with
experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored
unknown lands.

  The conversation between Philip and Athelny was
broken into by a clatter up the stairs. Athelny opened the door for
the children coming back from Sunday school, and with laughter and
shouting they came in. Gaily he asked them what they had learned.
Sally appeared for a moment, with instructions from her mother that
father was to amuse the children while she got tea ready; and
Athelny began to tell them one of Hans Andersen's stories. They
were not shy children, and they quickly came to the conclusion that
Philip was not formidable. Jane came and stood by him and presently
settled herself on his knees. It was the first time that Philip in
his lonely life had been present in a family circle: his eyes
smiled as they rested on the fair children engrossed in the fairy
tale. The life of his new friend, eccentric as it appeared at first
glance, seemed now to have the beauty of perfect naturalness. Sally
came in once more.