Page 714 - of-human-bondage-

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 im-
pression 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 af-
ter the fashion of a time that had no leaning to mysticism,
who was impatient with life because he found himself un-
able 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 sym-
pathy 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 tor-
tured 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

1