Gautier wrote that El Greco surpassed Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe in his pell-mell of horrors; “extravagant and bizarre” are the adjectives he employs (said of most painters whose style is unfamiliar or out of the beaten track).  In the Baptism of Christ he finds a depraved energy, a maleficent puissance; but the ardent colours, the tonal vivacity, and the large, free handling excite the Frenchman’s admiration.  Justi avers that Greco’s “craving for originality developed incredible mannerisms.  In his portraits he has delineated the peculiar dignity of the Castilian hidalgos and the beauty of Toledan dames with a success attained by few.”  R.A.  Stevenson devotes to him a paragraph in his Velasquez.  Referring to the influence of El Greco upon the greater painter, he wrote:  “While Greco certainly adopted a Spanish gravity of colouring, neither that nor his modelling was ever subtle or thoroughly natural...  Velasquez ripened with age and practice; Greco was rather inclined to get rotten with facility.”  Mr. Ricketts says that “his pictures might at times have been painted by torchlight in a cell of the Inquisition.”  Richard Ford in his handbook of Spain does not mince words:  “Greco was very unequal...  He was often more lengthy and extravagant than Fuseli, and as leaden as cholera morbus.”  Ritter speaks of his “symphonies in blue minor” (evidently imitating Gautier’s poem, Symphony in White-Major).  In Havelock Ellis’s suggestive The Soul of Spain there is mention of Greco—­see chapter Art of Spain.  Ellis says:  “In his more purely religious and supernatural scenes Greco was sometimes imaginative, but more often bizarre in design and disconcerting in his colouring with its insistence on chalky white, his violet shadows on pale faces, his love of green. [Mr. Ellis finds this ‘predilection for green’ significant as anticipating one of the characteristics of the Spanish palette.] His distorted fever of movement—­the lean, twisted bodies, the frenzied, gesticulating arms, the mannerism of large calves that taper down to pointed toes—­usually fails to convince us.  But in the audacities of his colouring he revealed the possibilities of new harmonies, of higher, brighter, cooler keys.”  The Count Orgaz burial scene at Toledo Mr. Ellis does not rank among the world’s great pictures.

There is often a depressing morbidity in Greco; Goya is sane and healthy by comparison.  Greco’s big church pieces are full of religious sentiment, but enveloped in the fumes of nightmare.  Curious it was that a stranger from Greece should have absorbed certain not particularly healthy, even sinister, Spanish traits and developed them to such a pitch of nervous intensity.  As Arthur Symons says, his portraits “have all the brooding Spanish soul with its proud self-repression.”  Senor Cossio sums up in effect by declaring that Venice educated Greco in his art; Titian taught him technique; Tintoretto gave him his sense of dramatic form; Angelo his virility.  But of the strong personality which assimilated these various influences there is no doubt when confronted with one of his canvases, every inch of which is signed El Greco.