an of the Foolishness of God, so much wiser than
the wisdom of men!--as divers plunge into a bath.

There is not much attempt among these ecstatics to hold on to the
dignity of their reason or the reticence of their self-respect. Naked,
they fling themselves into the arms of Nothingness.

This passionate "Movement of Life," of which Mr. Bell, quoting
Pater's famous quotation from Heraclitus, makes so much, is, after
all, only the rush of the wind through the garments of the
World--Denier, as he plunges into Eternity.

Like St. John of the Cross, El Greco's visionaries pass from the
Night of the Reason to the Night of the Senses; from the Night of
the Senses to the Night of Soul; and if this final Night is nothing less
than God Himself, the divine submersion does not bring back any
mortal daylight.

Domenico's portraits have a character somewhat different from his
visions. Here, into these elongated, bearded hermits, into these grave,
intellectual maniacs, whose look is like the look of Workers in some
unlit Mine, he puts what he knows and feels of his own identity.

They are diverse masks and mirrors, these portraits, surfaces of deep
water in various lonely valleys, but from the depths of them rises up
the shadow of the same lost soul, and they are all ruffled by the
breath of the same midnight.

The Crucifixion in the Prado, and that other, which, by some freak
of Providence, has found its way to Philadelphia, have backgrounds
which carry our imagination very far. Is this primordial ice, with its
livid steel-blue shadows, the stuff out of which the gods make other
planets than ours--dead planets, without either sun or star? Are these
the sheer precipices of Chaos, against which the Redeemer hangs, or
the frozen edges of the grave of all life?

El Greco's magnificent contempt for material truth is a lesson to all
artists. We are reminded of William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley.
He seems to regard the human-frame as so much soft clay, upon
which he can trace his ecstatic hieroglyphs, in defiance both of
anatomy and nature.

El Greco is the true precursor of our present-day Matissists and
Futurists. He, as they, has the courage to strip his imagination of all
mechanical restrictions and let it go free to mould the world at its
fancy.

What stray visitor to Madrid would guess the vastness of the
intellectual sensation awaiting him in that quiet, rose-coloured
building?

As you enter the Museum and pass those m