Nothing Could Have Been Fitter Than The Quiet Beauty Of The
Spectacle, Opening Through The Westward Colonnade To The Hills And Woods
Of The Royal Demesne, With Yellowing And Embrowning Trees That Billowed
From Distance To Distance.
Some day these groves and forests must be for
the people's pleasure, as all royal belongings seem finally to be; and
in the mean time I did not grudge the landscape to the young king and
queen who probably would not have grudged it to me.
Our guide valued
himself upon our admiration of it; without our special admiration he
valued himself upon the impressive buildings of the railway station in
the middle distance. I forget whether he followed us out of the
quadrangle into the roadway where we had the advantage of some
picturesque army wagons, and some wagoners in red-faced jackets and red
trousers, and top-boots with heavy fringes of leathern strings. Yet it
must have been he who made us aware of a high-walled inclosure where
soldiers found worthy of death by court martial could be conveniently
shot; though I think we discovered for ourselves the old woman curled up
out of the wind in a sentry-box, and sweetly asleep there while the boys
were playing marbles on the smooth ground before it. I must not omit the
peanut-boaster in front of the palace; it was in the figure of an ocean
steamer, nearly as large as the _Lusitania,_ and had smoke coming out
of the funnel, with rudder and screw complete and doll sailors climbing
over the rigging.
But it is impossible to speak adequately of the things in that wonderful
armory. If the reader has any pleasure in the harnesses of Spanish kings
and captains, from the great Charles the Fifth down through all the
Philips and the Charleses, he can glut it there. Their suits begin
almost with their steel baby clothes, and adapt themselves almost to
their senile decrepitude. There is the horse-litter in which the great
emperor was borne to battle, and there is the sword which Isabella the
great queen wore; and I liked looking at the lanterns and the flags of
the Turkish galleys from the mighty sea-fight cf Lepanto, and the many
other trophies won from the Turks. The pavilion of Francis I. taken at
Pavia was of no secondary interest, and everywhere was personal and
national history told in the weapons and the armor of those who made the
history. Perhaps some time the peoples will gather into museums the pens
and pencils and chisels of authors and artists, and the old caps and
gowns they wore, or the chairs they sat in at their work, or the pianos
and violoncellos of famous musicians, or the planes of surpassing
carpenters, or the hammers of eminent ironworkers; but these things will
never be so picturesque as the equipments with which the military heroes
saved their own lives or took others'. We who have never done either
must not be unreasonable or impatient. It will be many a long century
yet before we are appreciated at the value we now set upon ourselves. In
the mean while we do not have such a bad time, and we are not so easily
forgotten as some of those princes and warriors.
XI
One of the first errors of our search for the Archaeological Museum,
promoted by the mistaken kindness of people we asked the way, found us
in the Academy of Fine Arts, where in the company of a fat and flabby
Rubens (Susanna, of course, and those filthy Elders) we chanced on a
portrait of Goya by himself: a fine head most takingly shrewd. But there
was another portrait by him, of the ridiculous Godoy, Prince of the
Peace, a sort of handsome, foolish fleshy George Fourthish person
looking his character and history: one of the miost incredible parasites
who ever fattened on a nation. This impossible creature, hated more
than feared, and despised more than hated, who misruled a generous
people for twenty-five years, throughout the most heroic period of their
annals, the low-born paramour of their queen and the beloved friend of
the king her husband, who honored and trusted him with the most pathetic
single-hearted and simple-minded devotion, could not look all that he
was and was not; but in this portrait by Goya he suggested his
unutterable worthlessness: a worthlessness which you can only begin to
realize by successively excluding all the virtues, and contrasting it
with the sort of abandon of faith on the part of the king; this in the
common imbecility, the triune madness of the strange group, has its
sublimity. In the next room are two pieces of Goya's which recall in
their absolute realism another passage of Spanish history with
unparalleled effect. They represent, one the accused heretics receiving
sentence before a tribunal of the Inquisition, and the other the
execution of the sentence, where the victims are mocked by a sort of
fools' caps inscribed with the terms of their accusal. Their faces are
turned on the spectator, who may forget them if he can.
I had the help of a beautiful face there which Goya had also painted:
the face of Moratin, the historian of the Spanish drama whose book had
been one of the consolations of exile from Spain in my Ohio village.
That fine countenance rapt me far from where I stood, to the village,
with its long maple-shaded summer afternoons, and its long lamp-lit
winter nights when I was trying to find my way through Moratin's history
of the Spanish drama, and somehow not altogether failing, so that
fragments of the fact still hang about me. I wish now I could find the
way back through it, or even to it, but between me and it there are so
many forgotten passes that it would be hopeless trying. I can only
remember the pride and joy of finding my way alone through it, and
emerging from time to time into the light that glimmered before me.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 36 of 101
Words from 35994 to 37012
of 103320
