ing, these passionate shadows,
stretching out vain arms after the infinite and crying aloud for the
rest they cannot win.

Yes, in the land of dreams we know him, this proud despiser of earth!

From our safe inland retreat we watch the passing of his Dance of
Death, and we know that what they seek, these wanderers upon the
wind, is not our Ideal nor our Real, not our Earth or our Heaven, but
a strange, fairy-like Nirvana, where, around the pools of
Nothingness, the children of twilight gambol and play.

The suggestive power of genius plays us, indeed, strange tricks. I
have sometimes fancied that the famished craving in the eyes and
nostrils of El Greco's saints was a queer survival of that tragic look
which that earlier Greek, Scopas the Sculptor, took such pains to
throw upon the eyelids of his half-human amphibiums.

It might even seem to us, dreaming over these pictures as the gusts
of an English autumn blow the fir branches against the window, as
though all that weird population of Domenico's brain were tossing
their wild, white arms out there and emitting thin, bat-like cries
under the drifting moon.

The moon--one must admit that, at least--rather than the sun, was
ever the mistress of El Greco's genius. He will come more and more
to represent for us those vague uneasy feelings that certain
inanimate and elemental objects have the power of rousing. It is of
him that one must think, when this or that rock-chasm cries aloud
for its Demon, or this or that deserted roadway mutters of its
unreturning dead.

There will always be certain great artists, and they are the most
original of all who refuse to submit to any of our logical categories,
whether scientific or ideal.

To give one's self up to them is to be led by the hand into the
country of Pure Imagination, into the Ultima Thule of impossible
dreams.

Like Edgar Allan Poe, this great painter can make splendid use of
the human probabilities of Religion and Science; but it is none of
these things that one finally thinks, as one comes to follow him, but
of things more subtle, more remote, more translunar, and far more
imaginative.

One may walk the streets of Toledo to seek the impress of El
Greco's going and coming; but the soul of Domenico Theotocopoulos
is not there.

It is with Faust, in the cave of the abysmal "Mothers."

MILTON

It is outrageous, the way we modern world-children play with words.
How we are betrayed by words! How we betray