Spanish gentlemen, with ruffles and pointed
beards, their faces pale against the sober black of their clothes and the
darkness of the background. El Greco was the painter of the soul; and
these gentlemen, wan and wasted, not by exhaustion but by restraint, with
their tortured minds, seem to walk unaware of the beauty of the world; for
their eyes look only in their hearts, and they are dazzled by the glory of
the unseen. No painter has shown more pitilessly that the world is but a
place of passage. The souls of the men he painted speak their strange
longings through their eyes: their senses are miraculously acute, not for
sounds and odours and colour, but for the very subtle sensations of the
soul. The noble walks with the monkish heart within him, and his eyes see
things which saints in their cells see too, and he is unastounded. His
lips are not lips that smile.

Philip, silent still, returned to the photograph of Toledo, which seemed
to him the most arresting picture of them all. He could not take his eyes
off it. He felt strangely that he was on the threshold of some new
discovery in life. He was tremulous with a sense of adventure. He thought
for an instant of the love that had consumed him: love seemed very trivial
beside the excitement which now leaped in his heart. The picture he looked
at was a long one, with houses crowded upon a hill; in one corner a boy
was holding a large map of the town; in another was a classical figure
representing the river Tagus; and in the sky was the Virgin surrounded by
angels. It was a landscape alien to all Philip's notion, for he had lived
in circles that worshipped exact realism; and yet here again, strangely to
himself, he felt a reality greater than any achieved by the masters in
whose steps humbly he had sought to walk. He heard Athelny say that the
representation was so precise that when the citizens of Toledo came to
look at the picture they recognised their houses. The painter had painted
exactly what he saw but he had seen with the eyes of the spirit. There was
something unearthly in that city of pale gray. It was a city of the soul
seen by a wan light that was neither that of night nor day. It stood on a
green hill, but of a green not of this world, and it was surrounded by
massive walls and bastions to be stormed by no machines or engines of
man's invention, but by prayer and fasting, by contrite sighs and by
mortifications of the flesh. It was a stronghold of God. Those