“Everything it is so truthful, so to make fear, that everybody feel a relief, a joy of living, when he is gone from that parlor.”
“Now let’s go and play with the Venetians, as a reward of merit,” said Patsy. “I have not seen those lovely Titians for a week.” Patsy’s beloved Venetians can be studied better in the Prado than anywhere outside of Venice. The Don, filled with a sudden access of zeal for the Spanish school, would not let us go until we had given some time to the work of El Greco.
“Here are seven paintings of the lifes of saints by El Greco,” he said. “Every one so thin and transparent and of so greenish tones that they looks more than saints, like spirits who took the human form, notwithstanding they keep their impalpables. The intelligent people say that in this consist the worth of this painter, because he translated on the cloth the asceticismo of his epoca.”
“You will never convince me that Greco is one of the world’s great painters, however important he may have been to the development of the Spanish school,” said Patsy. “A man who paints people eight feet high, who makes his angels goblins, his saints lunatics, is not sane; and without sanity there can be no great art.”
“You must go to Toledo,” said Don Luis, who had joined us, “before you can judge El Greco. You see his sacred pictures at a great disadvantage in a museum. They need the dim religious light of the churches or monasteries, for which they were painted. Only the portraits look well here; those, you must admit, are among the great portraits of the world.”
Patsy was not quite ready to agree to this yet, Don Jaime meanwhile acknowledged that fashion in art is as capricious as it is in dress; perhaps the people who have made El Greco the fashion, not to say the rage of the moment, claimed too much for him. In spite of this, like Don Luis, Jaime considered El Greco among the first of portrait painters.
“Speaking of fashion in dress,” said Patsy, stopping before an anonymous portrait of a lady in a yellow turban, “at what period did they wear that extraordinary headgear?”
“It must have been in the time of King Wamba,” laughed Don Luis, as much as to say, “before the flood.”
The name of King Wamba was like the kiss of the faithful hound on the cheek of the enchanted prince. Patsy awoke from the enchantment of To-day and remembered Yesterday, remembered Wamba and Wamba’s capital, Toledo, remembered that all the records of that wonderful life of many yesterdays we call history was waiting for him to read, not three hours away from Madrid.
“I would not go to Toledo for the sake of El Greco,” Patsy declared, “but for King Wamba’s sake, and to buy a Toledo blade, I would go twice as far!”