agnificent Titians
crowded so close together--large and mellow spaces, from a more
opulent world than ours; greener branches, bluer skies and a more
luminous air; a world through which, naturally and at ease, the
divine Christ may move, grand, majestic, health-giving, a veritable
god; a world from whose grapes the blood of satyrs may be
quickened, from whose corn the hearts of heroes may be made
strong--and come bolt upon El Greco's glacial northern lights, you
feel that no fixed objective Truth and no traditional Ideal has a right
to put boundaries to the imagination of man.

Not less striking than any of these is the extraordinary portrait of
"Le Roi Ferdinand" in the great gallery at the Louvre.

The artist has painted the king as one grown weary of his difference
from other men. His moon-white armour and silvery crown show
like the ornaments of the dead. Misty and wavering, the long
shadows upon the high, strange brow seem thrown there by the
passing of all mortal Illusions.

Phantom-like in his gleaming ornaments, a king of Lost Atlantis, he
waits the hour of his release.

And not only is he the king of Shadows; he is also the king of
Players, the Player-King.

El Greco has painted him holding two sceptres, one of which,
resembling a Fool's Bauble, is tipped with the image of a naked
hand--a dead, false hand--symbol of the illusion of Power. The very
crown he wears, shimmering and unnaturally heavy, is like the
crown a child might have made in play, out of shells and sea-weed.

The disenchanted irony upon the face of this figure; that look as of
one who--as Plato would have us do with kings--has been dragged
back from Contemplation to the vulgarity of ruling men; has been
deliberately blent by a most delicate art with a queer sort of fantastic
whimsicality.

"Le Roi Ferdinand" might almost be an enlarged reproduction of
some little girl's Doll-King, dressed up in silver tinsel and left out of
doors, by mistake, some rainy evening.

Something about him, one fancies, would make an English child
think of the "White Knight" in _Alice Through the Looking Glass,_
so helpless and simple he looks, this poor "Revenant," propped up
by Youthful Imagination, and with the dews of night upon his
armour.

You may leave these pictures far behind you as you re-cross the
Channel, but you can never quite forget El Greco.

In the dreams of night the people of his queer realm will return and
surround you, ebbing and flow