But see how differently in 1910 our traveller will read the secret of Toledo! Now, as of old, the city on its sun-baked height, with the tawny semicircle of the Tagus at its feet, seems less a dwelling for men than a dreary highplace of the soul, a sanctuary set apart for spiritual exaltation. The dry orange tone of the soil and buildings; the town compact of convents, fortresses, and prisons; the barren sublimity of the prospect; the violent African heat of the sky; the vast scent of sun-dried lavender and sage and benjoin, seem proper to some Holy City of the desert rather than to a European town. And yet in all this sadness there is a secret pleasure. ‘J’y respire une volupté dont j’ignore le nom, et quelque chose comme un péché se mêle à tout un passé d’amour, d’honneur et de religion. C’est le mystère de Tolède, et nous voudrions le saisir. Mais que donc pourrait nous guider? Toute société a fui de cette ruine impériale.’ A painter, long dead, a foreigner--Il Greco--is the traveller’s guide. It sometimes happens that a foreigner surprises the fine evasive spirit of a place which escapes the native, staled by custom, until he catch it again through the fresh acuity of a stranger’s glance. It was the Fleming, Philippe de Champagne, newly disembarked from Brussels, who discerned the austere heroism of Port-Royal; and a Greek from Candy came from Venice to Toledo in his twentieth year to surprise the secret of Spain. He painted the souls of the men and women who breathed the same air as Saint Teresa and Cervantes. Through him we learn the secret of Toledo, and Barrès will no longer tell us that it is the dreary motto: _Pulvis, cinis, et Nihil_; nay, he assures us now that it is the mystical world beyond reality--the spiritual life. The Cretan painted the serious, narrow faces, the bizarre, aristocratic, and elongated persons of his sitters, but also the constant object of their secret thought: that wonderful, mysterious, illimitable Other-World, urging and surging just on the further side of appearances; a world to which they aspire, and ascend, which seems to suck them up into the eddying whirlpool of the glorious Unseen. He loves to paint a double vision: on the lower half of his canvas Il Greco sets the world he knows: the men of sad and sober visage, of neat features and pointed beards and ruffs, elegant, honourable gentlemen; scarcely, perhaps, men of a great capacity; and then above them, only just barely overhead, a mad world (if you choose to call it mad) a mystical world at any rate, of rushing spirits, of flooding light, of joy and fire (_Joie! Joie! Joie! Pleurs de joie!_), a world of adoration, bliss, eternal peace.