s were
extraordinarily elongated; the heads were very small; the attitudes were
extravagant. This was not realism, and yet, and yet even 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