The house of Samuel Levy stands, gracious and simple, in its garden. (El Greco lived here.) The arched columns of Santa Maria are unhurt. The Tránsito still breathes, darkly, like a rose over-ripe. It is a rectangular building, higher than wide. Its walls are white under the cedar ceiling. Around runs a frieze, margined in Hebrew texts. Above are arches in relief, rejas that suggest the Arab, and a higher line from the Old Testament. But the base wall of the synagogue is its full glory. It is a façade wholly of Hebrew. (Two Castilian seals thrust in to mar it have no more effect than a spot on a sublime illumined page.) The letters of stone make a warm intricate music. The æsthetic inspiration is Arab. But how these Jews have deepened and dimensioned it! The arabesque is a delicate, wavering line; without denseness, without integration. It is like a silhouette, against a desert sky; it is like the trail of life on desert sands. The Hebrew letters are slower, less emphatic, more volumnear. They are far mellower in curves; they are far deeper. They build, in this façade of a Toledan synagogue, a poem that is history. They march on the stone surface of a wall, resolute, self-effacing: symbols of a world whose spirit seems by miracle to survive its body.
Color and aspirant light, throughout Toledo. How has it survived? Not alone the Cristo de la Luz: not alone the Judería. Athwart the Cathedral, in a little Square, is a building—the Ayuntamiento—bright, warm, almost fancifully gay with towers. (El Greco builded it.) There are Churches like San Vicente, Santo Tomé, in which a wall grows suddenly glorious in color and sings above the dolorous shadows. (Here, El Greco painted.) Even the Cathedral turns traitor to its stones! The cloisters are a perfumed close. The choir has rows of wood-carved stalls that shout their sensual delight against the heavy columns. And in the Sacristía hangs an altar piece—an Expolio—that is a sunny jewel. A genius—from across the sea—has infused this conventional matter with prophetic spirit: space moves, spirit grows manifest in flesh. A red-robed Christ becomes a ritual flame, transfiguring the human shapes about him.
And this, in Catholic Toledo, the stone grim city! Because there came a man to dwell here in whom dwelt the old Prophecies, and who resolved them into shapes which Catholic Toledo could not deny. Color against stone, fire against rigor—this had been the Argument in Toledo, until Isabel and Cisneros put a stop to it, by blotting out the one in favor of the other. A simple resolution. Moor and Jew go forth. Dogma and Conventual remain. The Cardinals of Toledo—Popes of Spain—espouse the iron purpose of Castile. And the long blank walls of the streets with their hidden monks and nuns—these seem the victors of Toledo.
Comes, now, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century a young Cretan painter to make his home in the town. His name is Doménico Theotocópuli. He has studied in Italy with Tintoretto. He is a wanderer. He learns that there is much gold to earn in Spain, and little talent to earn it. A handy place in which to make a fortune. He comes and stays: and although the fortune proves shy, Toledo becomes immortal.
The question of the actual blood which flowed in El Greco’s veins is of no consequence. Child of the Mediterranean Völkerchaos, there must have been echoes of many voices in his soul. Maurice Barrès[14] plays with the unestablished notion that he was a Jew. The certainty is the prophetic spirit of his work; the certainty is the vision of the East with which he dowered Spain. He came to Toledo, disciple of a realist in Florence; and he produced an art as opposed to the paganism of his master as it is close to Isaiah.
The spirit of Israel and Byzantium does not die in Spain, because a Catholic has come to make it flesh of the body. The Jew may go into his alien ghettos; the Arab may rot in the Levant. Here is a man to blaze their truth upon the walls of churches—and with a color so wise, that the walls crumble ere his word grows dim.
The work of El Greco was misunderstood by his own age and scouted by the criticism that came after. The wonder is, that it was tolerated—the invasion in it of a world condemned. Manuel Cossío[15] has explained this plausibly by the personal prestige of the man. His contemporaries, failing to grasp his apocalyptic and “inaccurate” art, were moved by the deep power of the man and by his own self-confidence. His work is the crowning plastic of the West. More and more, as the walls of his stiff world molder, El Greco is seen to express not alone Toledo, not Spain alone, but the Christian Synthesis of Europe at its highest luminous pitch.
His æsthetic is one of incarnation. He possesses an idea, dynamic, mystical. He makes his figures immediate forms of that idea. Not symbols, not representations—not even emanations in the separatistic sense of the Brahmins. The spirit informs these heads and torsos, much as the spirit informs the Substance of Spinoza. This is an æsthetic to be found in Egyptian sculpture. The archaic Greeks knew it and the classic Greeks, growing analytical, abandoned it. It has come closest to the West in the word of the Hebrews. Isaiah, Hosea, Job, the Song of Songs, the Psalms, and the Alexandrian Pseudepigraphia rose, all, from a like æsthetic law. Byzantium rewon it wanly in its painting. El Greco’s idiom is close to the Byzantine. In his essence, the fierce passion of its flaming, he is far closer to the Hebrews. This does not mean that Doménico Theotocópuli had Jewish blood. It proves rather that Christianity had Jewish blood, so that the Toledan ambiance of Semitic rhythm and Semitic thought could call forth for Rome a vision very close to the old vision of the Prophets.
El Greco must be regarded as a partaker, crucially, in the Toledan scene. Thus only can the mystical culmination of his work be understood. In Toledo, two antithetic Themes: a will of rigor and a flame of the East. What mystery shall fuse them? In El Greco, two dominant traits: volumnear color, movemented form. The mystery is at hand! Color creates plastic mass; mass, formed through configuration into bodies, creates a flow. But the flow is not of fluid; it is of fire. Fire flows and is steadfast; an essential object and an immutable circumambiance mold its motions to immobility. So now the flowing of El Greco’s forms. Massing colors, thrusting shapes, parabolas of expression round spherically into a balance with no outlet. Ecstasy lies within itself. Life aspires—to life. Here is the vision of a Mystery which like flame flows forth from God, is held to God and is a form, in its commotion, of God’s immutable, immobile essence. Here is a Mystery not transcendental, not neo-platonic. But Dante and Spinoza would have hailed it. And Toledo’s stones could be transfigured to express it, without loss of their own nature.
Thus did the essence of El Greco’s art resolve the two themes of his city. Once again, the God of the East upon the body of the West creates a masterpiece....