For years I have been rather tickled by his manner of depicting Popes and Saints as if they were reflected in elongating mirrors labelled, "Before Dining at the Toreador Restaurant." But until quite lately I hardly ever met anyone who had even noticed him, so I felt quite bucked on the old chap's account when I heard that he was considered one of the most distinguished of the Spanish painters, past and present, who are on view just now at Burlington House.
And what surprises me is not that old Theotocopuli should attract so much attention in Piccadilly, but that such lots of people seem never to have known that he has been exhibiting himself all this time in Trafalgar Square.
I'm sure Mrs. Bletherwood didn't, for one, when she tackled me at the Chattertons' the other afternoon.
"Of course you've been to Burlington House?" she began, and she was in such a hurry to get first innings that she didn't give me time to say that I hadn't yet, but that I meant to go on my first free day that wasn't foggy.
"Don't you love those quaint 'El Grecos'?" she went on. "He's quite a discovery, don't you think? My daughter Muriel, who hopes to get into the Slade School soon now, says she doesn't see how anybody can see people differently from the way 'El Greco' saw people. And yet I don't know that I quite like the idea of Muriel seeing me like that, although she's so clever...."
I could not help thinking that in Mrs. Bletherwood's case the "El Greco" treatment would be an admirable corrective to a certain lateral expansion.
"Besides," she continued in a confidential tone, "I've heard or read somewhere that there's just a doubt whether he distorted people on purpose or because there was something wrong with his eyes. If I thought it was astigmatism I would insist on taking Muriel to an oculist. I wonder what you think."
I raised my teacup suggestively.
Mrs. Bletherwood gasped. "You don't mean that he——"
"Like a fish," I said.