n.

It is--"Forever and forever, farewell, Cassius. If we do meet again,
why then 'tis well; if not, this parting was well made." And for the
Future:

"O that we knew
The end of this day's business ere it comes!
But it suffices that the day will end;
And then the end is known."

EL GRECO

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