For These The Sad And Silent
Cloister; For Us, The Crystalline Fountain And The Shady Grove; For
Them, The Rude
And unsocial life of dungeon-like strongholds; for us,
the charm of social life and culture; for them, intolerance and
Tyranny;
for us, a ruler who is our father; for them, the darkness of ignorance;
for us, letters and instruction as wide-spread as our creed; for them,
the wilderness, celibacy, and the doom of the false martyr; for us,
plenty, love, brotherhood, and eternal joy."
In spite of the somewhat vaunting spirit of his appeal, the wager of
battle decided against the Arab; it was the Crescent that fell, the
Cross that prevailed; in the very heart of Abderrahman's mosque a
Christian cathedral rises. Yet in the very heart of Philip's temple to
the spirit of the cloister, the desert, the martyrdom, one feels that a
great deal could be said on Abderrahman's side. This is a world which
will not be renounced, in fact, and even in Christian Spain it has
triumphed in the arts and sciences beyond its earlier victories in
Moslem Spain. One finds Philip himself, with his despatches in that high
nook, rather than among the bronze-gilt royalties at the high altar,
though his statue is duly there with those of his three wives. The group
does not include that poor Bloody Mary of England, who should have been
the fourth there, for surely she suffered enough for his faith and him
to be of his domestic circle forever.
IV
It is the distinct merit of the Escorial that it does not, and perhaps
cannot take long in doing; otherwise the doer could not bear it. A look
round the sumptuous burial chamber of the sovereigns below the high
altar of the church; a glance at the lesser sepulchral glories of the
infantes and infantas in their chapels and corridors, suffices for the
funereal third of the trinity of tomb and temple and palace; and though
there are gayer constituents of the last, especially the gallery of the
chapter-house, with its surprisingly lively frescoes and its sometimes
startling canvases, there is not much that need really keep you from the
royal apartments which seem the natural end of your visit. Of these
something better can be said than that they are no worse than most other
royal apartments; our guide led us to them through many granite courts
and corridors where we left groups of unguided Americans still maddening
over their Baedekers; and we found them hung with pleasing tapestries,
some after such designs of Goya's as one finds in the basement of the
Prado. The furniture was in certain rooms cheerily upholstered in
crimson and salmon without sense of color, but as if seeking relief from
the gray of the church; and there are battle-pieces on the walls, fights
between Moors and Christians, which interested me. The dignified
consideration of the custodian who showed us through the apartments
seemed to have adapted to our station a manner left over from the
infrequent presence of royalty; as I have said, the young king of Spain
does not like coming to the Escorial.
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