Of Human Bondage
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.
LXXXIX
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.
“Now then, children, tea’s ready,” she said.
Jane slipped off Philip’s knees, and they all went back to the kitchen.
Sally began to lay the cloth on the long Spanish table.
“Mother says, shall she come and have tea with you?” she asked. “I can
give the children their tea.”
“Tell your mother that we shall be proud and honoured if she will
favour us with her company,” said Athelny.
It seemed to Philip that he could never say anything without an
oratorical flourish.