Mr. Ford Says It Is Spurious; Mr. Madoz Says It Is
Genuine.
The ladies with whom I had the happiness to visit the library
inclined to the latter opinion for two
Very good reasons, - the book is a
very pretty one, and Mr. Madoz's head is much balder than Mr. Ford's.
Wandering aimlessly through the frescoed cloisters and looking in at all
the open doors, over each of which a cunning little gridiron is inlaid
in the woodwork, we heard the startling and unexpected sound of boyish
voices and laughter. We approached the scene of such agreeable tumult,
and found the theatre of the monastery full of young students rehearsing
a play for the coming holidays. A clever-looking priest was directing
the drama, and one juvenile Thespis was denouncing tyrants and dying for
his country in hexameters of a shrill treble. His friends were
applauding more than was necessary or kind, and flourishing their wooden
swords with much ferocity of action. All that is left of the once
extensive establishment of the monastery is a boys' school, where some
two hundred youths are trained in the humanities, and a college where an
almost equal number are educated for the priesthood.
So depressing is the effect of the Escorial's gloom and its memories,
that when you issue at last from its massive doors, the trim and
terraced gardens seem gay and heartsome, and the bleak wild scene is
full of comfort. For here at least there is light and air and boundless
space. You have emerged from the twilight of the past into the present
day. The sky above you bends over Paris and Cheyenne. By this light
Darwin is writing, and the merchants are meeting in the Chicago Board of
Trade. Just below you winds the railway which will take you in two hours
to Madrid, - to the city of Philip II., where the nineteenth century has
arrived; where there are five Protestant churches and fifteen hundred
evangelical communicants. Our young crusader, Professor Knapp, holds
night schools and day schools and prayer meetings, with an active
devotion, a practical and American fervor, that is leavening a great
lump of apathy and death. These Anglo-Saxon missionaries have a larger
and more tolerant spirit of propaganda than has been hitherto seen. They
can differ about the best shape for the cup and the platter, but they
use what they find to their hand. They are giving a tangible direction
and purpose to the vague impulse of reform that was stirring, before
they came, in many devout hearts. A little while longer of this state of
freedom and inquiry, and the shock of controversy will come, and Spain
will be brought to life.
Already the signs are full of promise. The ancient barriers of
superstition have already given way in many places. A Protestant can not
only live in Spain, but, what was once a more important matter, he can
die and be buried there. This is one of the conquests of the revolution.
So delicate has been the susceptibility of the Spanish mind in regard to
the pollution of its soil by heretic corpses that even Charles I. of
England, when he came a-wooing to Spain, could hardly gain permission to
bury his page by night in the garden of the embassy; and in later days
the Prussian Minister was compelled to smuggle his dead child out of the
kingdom among his luggage to give it Christian burial. Even since the
days of September the clergy has fought manfully against giving
sepulture to Protestants; but Rivero, alcalde of Madrid and president of
the Cortes, was not inclined to waste time in dialectics, and sent a
police force to protect the heretic funerals and to arrest any priest
who disturbed them. There is freedom of speech and printing. The
humorous journals are full of blasphemous caricatures that would be
impossible out of a Catholic country, for superstition and blasphemy
always run in couples. It was the Duke de Guise, commanding the pope's
army at Civitella, who cried in his rage at a rain which favored Alva,
"God has turned Spaniard;" like Quashee, who burns his fetish when the
weather is foul. The liberal Spanish papers overflowed with wit at the
proclamation of infallibility. They announced that his holiness was now
going into the lottery business with brilliant prospects of success;
that he could now tell what Father Manterola had done with the thirty
thousand dollars' worth of bulls he sold last year and punctually
neglects to account for, and other levities of the sort, which seemed
greatly relished, and which would have burned the facetious author two
centuries before, and fined and imprisoned him before the fight at
Alcolea. The minister having charge of the public instruction has
promised to present a law for the prohibition of dogmatic doctrine in
the national schools. The law of civil registry and civil marriage,
after a desperate struggle in the Cortes, has gone into operation with
general assent. There is a large party which actively favors the entire
separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, making religion
voluntary, and free, and breaking its long concubinage with the crown.
The old superstition, it is true, still hangs like a malarial fog over
Spain. But it is invaded by flashes and rays of progress. It cannot
resist much longer the sunshine of this tolerant age.
Far up the mountain-side, in the shade of a cluster of chestnuts, is a
rude block of stone, called the "King's Chair," where Philip used to sit
in silent revery, watching as from an eyry the progress of the enormous
work below. If you go there, you will see the same scene upon which his
basilisk glance reposed, - in a changed world, the .same unchanging
scene, - the stricken waste, the shaggy horror of the mountains, the
fixed plain wrinkled like a frozen sea, and in the centre of the perfect
picture the vast chill bulk of that granite pile, rising cold,
colorless, and stupendous, as if carved from an iceberg by the hand of
Northern gnomes.
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