the dust--is their
mysterious gesture only the rhythm of the secret of Death?

Those chastened and winnowed spectators, with their withdrawn,
remote detachment--not sadness--are they the initiated sentinels of
the House of Corruption?

At what figured symbol points that epicene child?

Sumptuous is the raiment of the dead; and the droop of his limbs has
a regal finality; but look up! Stark naked, and in abandoned
weakness, the liberated soul shudders itself into the presence of God!

The El Greco House and Museum in Toledo contains amazing
things. Every one of those Apostles that gaze out from the wall upon
our casual devotion has his own furtive madness, his own
impossible dream! The St. John is a thing one can never forget. El
Greco has painted his hair as if it were literally live flame and the
exotic tints of his flesh have an emphasis laid upon them that makes
one think of the texture of certain wood orchids.

How irrelevant seem Monsieur Barres' water-colour sketches of
prancing Moors and learned Jews and picturesque Visi-Goths, as
soon as one gets a direct glimpse into these unique perversions! And
why cannot one go a step with this dreamer of dreams without
dragging in the Higher Reality? To regard work as mad and
beautiful as this as anything but individual Imagination, is to insult
the mystery of personality.

El Greco re-creates the world, in pure, lonely, fantastic arbitrariness.

His art does not represent the secret Truth of the Universe, or the
Everlasting Movement; it represents the humour of El Greco.

Every artist mesmerizes us into his personal vision.

A traveller, drinking wine in one of those cafes in the crowded
Zocodover, his head full of these amazing fantasies, might well let
the greater fantasy of the world slip by--a dream within a dream!

With El Greco for a companion, the gaunt waiter at the table takes
the form of some incarcerated Don Quixote and the beggars at the
window appear like gods in disguise.

This great painter, like the Russian Dostoivsky, has a mania for
abandoned weakness. The nearer to God his heroic Degenerates get,
the more feverishly enfeebled becomes their human will.

Their very faces--with those retreating chins, retrousse noses, loose
lips, quivering nostrils and sloping brows--seem to express the
abandonment of all human resolution or restraint, in the presence of
the Beatific Vision. Like the creatures of Dostoievsky, they seem to
plunge into the oce