which at all events suggested the rough-hewn grandeur of the original. The
pictures of El Greco explained them, and they explained the pictures.

Philip had cultivated a certain disdain for idealism. He had always had a
passion for life, and the idealism he had come across seemed to him for
the most part a cowardly shrinking from it. The idealist withdrew himself,
because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not
the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and
since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself
with despising his fellows. For Philip his type was Hayward, fair,
languid, too fat now and rather bald, still cherishing the remains of his
good looks and still delicately proposing to do exquisite things in the
uncertain future; and at the back of this were whiskey and vulgar amours
of the street. It was in reaction from what Hayward represented that
Philip clamoured for life as it stood; sordidness, vice, deformity, did
not offend him; he declared that he wanted man in his nakedness; and he
rubbed his hands when an instance came before him of meanness, cruelty,
selfishness, or lust: that was the real thing. In Paris he had learned
that there was neither ugliness nor beauty, but only truth: the search
after beauty was sentimental. Had he not painted an advertisement of
chocolat Menier in a landscape in order to escape from the tyranny of
prettiness?

But here he seemed to divine something new. He had been coming to it, all
hesitating, for some time, but only now was conscious of the fact; he felt
himself on the brink of a discovery. He felt vaguely that here was
something better than the realism which he had adored; but certainly it
was not the bloodless idealism which stepped aside from life in weakness;
it was too strong; it was virile; it accepted life in all its vivacity,
ugliness and beauty, squalor and heroism; it was realism still; but it was
realism carried to some higher pitch, in which facts were transformed by
the more vivid light in which they were seen. He seemed to see things more
profoundly through the grave eyes of those dead noblemen of Castile; and
the gestures of the saints, which at first had seemed wild and distorted,
appeared to have some mysterious significance. But he could not tell what
that significance was. It was like a message which it was very important
for him to receive, but it was given him in an unknown tongue