Chapter LXXXVIII

by William Somerset Maugham

　　There was a knock at the door and a troop of children came in. They wereclean and tidy, now. their faces shone with soap, and their hair wasplastered down; they were going to Sunday school under Sally's charge.Athelny joked with them in his dramatic, exuberant fashion, and you couldsee that he was devoted to them all. His pride in their good health andtheir good looks was touching. Philip felt that they were a little shy inhis presence, and when their father sent them off they fled from the roomin evident relief. In a few minutes Mrs. Athelny appeared. She had takenher hair out of the curling pins and now wore an elaborate fringe. She hadon a plain black dress, a hat with cheap flowers, and was forcing herhands, red and coarse from much work, into black kid gloves."I'm going to church, Athelny," she said. "There's nothing you'll bewanting, is there?""Only your prayers, my Betty.""They won't do you much good, you're too far gone for that," she smiled.Then, turning to Philip, she drawled: "I can't get him to go to church.He's no better than an atheist.""Doesn't she look like Rubens' second wife?" cried Athelny. "Wouldn't shelook splendid in a seventeenth-century costume? That's the sort of wife tomarry, my boy. Look at her.""I believe you'd talk the hind leg off a donkey, Athelny," she answeredcalmly.She succeeded in buttoning her gloves, but before she went she turned toPhilip with a kindly, slightly embarrassed smile."You'll stay to tea, won't you? Athelny likes someone to talk to, and it'snot often he gets anybody who's clever enough.""Of course he'll stay to tea," said Athelny. Then when his wife had gone:"I make a point of the children going to Sunday school, and I like Bettyto go to church. I think women ought to be religious. I don't believemyself, but I like women and children to."Philip, strait-laced in matters of truth, was a little shocked by thisairy attitude."But how can you look on while your children are being taught things whichyou don't think are true?""If they're beautiful I don't much mind if they're not true. It's askinga great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as to yoursense of the aesthetic. I wanted Betty to become a Roman Catholic, Ishould have liked to see her converted in a crown of paper flowers, butshe's hopelessly Protestant. Besides, religion is a matter of temperament;you will believe anything if you have the religious turn of mind, and ifyou haven't it doesn't matter what beliefs were instilled into you, youwill grow out of them. Perhaps religion is the best school of morality. Itis like one of those drugs you gentlemen use in medicine which carriesanother in solution: it is of no efficacy in itself, but enables the otherto be absorbed. You take your morality because it is combined withreligion; you lose the religion and the morality stays behind. A man ismore likely to be a good man if he has learned goodness through the loveof God than through a perusal of Herbert Spencer."This was contrary to all Philip's ideas. He still looked upon Christianityas a degrading bondage that must be cast away at any cost; it wasconnected subconsciously in his mind with the dreary services in thecathedral at Tercanbury, and the long hours of boredom in the cold churchat Blackstable; and the morality of which Athelny spoke was to him no morethan a part of the religion which a halting intelligence preserved, whenit had laid aside the beliefs which alone made it reasonable. But while hewas meditating a reply Athelny, more interested in hearing himself speakthan in discussion, broke into a tirade upon Roman Catholicism. For him itwas an essential part of Spain; and Spain meant much to him, because hehad escaped to it from the conventionality which during his married lifehe had found so irksome. With large gestures and in the emphatic tonewhich made what he said so striking, Athelny described to Philip theSpanish cathedrals with their vast dark spaces, the massive gold of thealtar-pieces, and the sumptuous iron-work, gilt and faded, the air ladenwith incense, the silence: Philip almost saw the Canons in their shortsurplices of lawn, the acolytes in red, passing from the sacristy to thechoir; he almost heard the monotonous chanting of vespers. The names whichAthelny mentioned, Avila, Tarragona, Saragossa, Segovia, Cordova, werelike trumpets in his heart. He seemed to see the great gray piles ofgranite set in old Spanish towns amid a landscape tawny, wild, andwindswept."I've always thought I should love to go to Seville," he said casually,when Athelny, with one hand dramatically uplifted, paused for a moment."Seville!" cried Athelny. "No, no, don't go there. Seville: it brings tothe mind girls dancing with castanets, singing in gardens by theGuadalquivir, bull-fights, orange-blossom, mantillas, mantones deManila. It is the Spain of comic opera and Montmartre. Its facile charmcan offer permanent entertainment only to an intelligence which issuperficial. Theophile Gautier got out of Seville all that it has tooffer. We who come after him can only repeat his sensations. He put largefat hands on the obvious and there is nothing but the obvious there; andit is all finger-marked and frayed. Murillo is its painter."Athelny got up from his chair, walked over to the Spanish cabinet, letdown the front with its great gilt hinges and gorgeous lock, and displayeda series of little drawers. He took out a bundle of photographs."Do you know El Greco?" he asked."Oh, I remember one of the men in Paris was awfully impressed by him.""El Greco was the painter of Toledo. Betty couldn't find the photograph Iwanted to show you. It's a picture that El Greco painted of the city heloved, and it's truer than any photograph. Come and sit at the table."Philip dragged his chair forward, and Athelny set the photograph beforehim. He looked at it curiously, for a long time, in silence. He stretchedout his hand for other photographs, and Athelny passed them to him. He hadnever before seen the work of that enigmatic master; and at the firstglance he was bothered by the arbitrary drawing: the figures wereextraordinarily elongated; the heads were very small; the attitudes wereextravagant. This was not realism, and yet, and yet even in thephotographs you had the impression of a troubling reality. Athelny wasdescribing eagerly, with vivid phrases, but Philip only heard vaguely whathe said. He was puzzled. He was curiously moved. These pictures seemed tooffer some meaning to him, but he did not know what the meaning was. Therewere portraits of men with large, melancholy eyes which seemed to say youknew not what; there were long monks in the Franciscan habit or in theDominican, with distraught faces, making gestures whose sense escaped you;there was an Assumption of the Virgin; there was a Crucifixion in whichthe painter by some magic of feeling had been able to suggest that theflesh of Christ's dead body was not human flesh only but divine; and therewas an Ascension in which the Saviour seemed to surge up towards theempyrean and yet to stand upon the air as steadily as though it were solidground: 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 thesoul, with wild clouds swept by strange winds of hell and lit luridly byan uneasy moon."I've seen that sky in Toledo over and over again," said Athelny. "I havean 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 getaway 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 themost interesting of all the people he had known in Paris. His sardonicmanner, his hostile aloofness, had made it difficult to know him; but itseemed 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 unusualcharacter, mystical after the fashion of a time that had no leaning tomysticism, who was impatient with life because he found himself unable tosay the things which the obscure impulses of his heart suggested. Hisintellect was not fashioned to the uses of the spirit. It was notsurprising that he felt a deep sympathy with the Greek who had devised anew technique to express the yearnings of his soul. Philip looked again atthe series of portraits of Spanish gentlemen, with ruffles and pointedbeards, their faces pale against the sober black of their clothes and thedarkness of the background. El Greco was the painter of the soul; andthese gentlemen, wan and wasted, not by exhaustion but by restraint, withtheir tortured minds, seem to walk unaware of the beauty of the world; fortheir eyes look only in their hearts, and they are dazzled by the glory ofthe unseen. No painter has shown more pitilessly that the world is but aplace of passage. The souls of the men he painted speak their strangelongings through their eyes: their senses are miraculously acute, not forsounds and odours and colour, but for the very subtle sensations of thesoul. The noble walks with the monkish heart within him, and his eyes seethings which saints in their cells see too, and he is unastounded. Hislips are not lips that smile.Philip, silent still, returned to the photograph of Toledo, which seemedto him the most arresting picture of them all. He could not take his eyesoff it. He felt strangely that he was on the threshold of some newdiscovery in life. He was tremulous with a sense of adventure. He thoughtfor an instant of the love that had consumed him: love seemed very trivialbeside the excitement which now leaped in his heart. The picture he lookedat was a long one, with houses crowded upon a hill; in one corner a boywas holding a large map of the town; in another was a classical figurerepresenting the river Tagus; and in the sky was the Virgin surrounded byangels. It was a landscape alien to all Philip's notion, for he had livedin circles that worshipped exact realism; and yet here again, strangely tohimself, he felt a reality greater than any achieved by the masters inwhose steps humbly he had sought to walk. He heard Athelny say that therepresentation was so precise that when the citizens of Toledo came tolook at the picture they recognised their houses. The painter had paintedexactly what he saw but he had seen with the eyes of the spirit. There wassomething unearthly in that city of pale gray. It was a city of the soulseen by a wan light that was neither that of night nor day. It stood on agreen hill, but of a green not of this world, and it was surrounded bymassive walls and bastions to be stormed by no machines or engines ofman's invention, but by prayer and fasting, by contrite sighs and bymortifications of the flesh. It was a stronghold of God. Those gray houseswere made of no stone known to masons, there was something terrifying intheir aspect, and you did not know what men might live in them. You mightwalk through the streets and be unamazed to find them all deserted, andyet not empty; for you felt a presence invisible and yet manifest to everyinner sense. It was a mystical city in which the imagination faltered likeone who steps out of the light into darkness; the soul walked naked to andfro, knowing the unknowable, and conscious strangely of experience,intimate but inexpressible, of the absolute. And without surprise, in thatblue sky, real with a reality that not the eye but the soul confesses,with its rack of light clouds driven by strange breezes, like the criesand the sighs of lost souls, you saw the Blessed Virgin with a gown of redand a cloak of blue, surrounded by winged angels. Philip felt that theinhabitants of that city would have seen the apparition withoutastonishment, reverent and thankful, and have gone their ways.Athelny spoke of the mystical writers of Spain, of Teresa de Avila, SanJuan de la Cruz, Fray Luis de Leon; in all of them was that passion forthe unseen which Philip felt in the pictures of El Greco: they seemed tohave the power to touch the incorporeal and see the invisible. They wereSpaniards of their age, in whom were tremulous all the mighty exploits ofa great nation: their fancies were rich with the glories of America andthe green islands of the Caribbean Sea; in their veins was the power thathad come from age-long battling with the Moor; they were proud, for theywere masters of the world; and they felt in themselves the wide distances,the tawny wastes, the snow-capped mountains of Castile, the sunshine andthe blue sky, and the flowering plains of Andalusia. Life was passionateand manifold, and because it offered so much they felt a restless yearningfor something more; because they were human they were unsatisfied; andthey threw this eager vitality of theirs into a vehement striving afterthe ineffable. Athelny was not displeased to find someone to whom he couldread the translations with which for some time he had amused his leisure;and in his fine, vibrating voice he recited the canticle of the Soul andChrist her lover, the lovely poem which begins with the words en unanoche oscura, and the noche serena of Fray Luis de Leon. He hadtranslated them quite simply, not without skill, and he had found wordswhich at all events suggested the rough-hewn grandeur of the original. Thepictures of El Greco explained them, and they explained the pictures.Philip had cultivated a certain disdain for idealism. He had always had apassion for life, and the idealism he had come across seemed to him forthe most part a cowardly shrinking from it. The idealist withdrew himself,because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had notthe strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, andsince his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himselfwith despising his fellows. For Philip his type was Hayward, fair,languid, too fat now and rather bald, still cherishing the remains of hisgood looks and still delicately proposing to do exquisite things in theuncertain future; and at the back of this were whiskey and vulgar amoursof the street. It was in reaction from what Hayward represented thatPhilip clamoured for life as it stood; sordidness, vice, deformity, didnot offend him; he declared that he wanted man in his nakedness; and herubbed his hands when an instance came before him of meanness, cruelty,selfishness, or lust: that was the real thing. In Paris he had learnedthat there was neither ugliness nor beauty, but only truth: the searchafter beauty was sentimental. Had he not painted an advertisement ofchocolat Menier in a landscape in order to escape from the tyranny ofprettiness?But here he seemed to divine something new. He had been coming to it, allhesitating, for some time, but only now was conscious of the fact; he felthimself on the brink of a discovery. He felt vaguely that here wassomething better than the realism which he had adored; but certainly itwas 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 wasrealism carried to some higher pitch, in which facts were transformed bythe more vivid light in which they were seen. He seemed to see things moreprofoundly through the grave eyes of those dead noblemen of Castile; andthe gestures of the saints, which at first had seemed wild and distorted,appeared to have some mysterious significance. But he could not tell whatthat significance was. It was like a message which it was very importantfor him to receive, but it was given him in an unknown tongue, and hecould not understand. He was always seeking for a meaning in life, andhere it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure andvague. He was profoundly troubled. He saw what looked like the truth as byflashes of lightning on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountainrange. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, butthat his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be aspassionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to seethat the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich withexperience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknownlands.