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photograph before him. He looked at it curiously, for a long
time, in silence. He stretched out his hand for other pho-
tographs, 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 impres-
sion 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 pic-
tures 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 ges-
tures 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 ec-
static 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

1 Of Human Bondage