The genuine village of Escorial lies mostly to the left of the station,
but the artificial town which grew up with the palace is to the right.
Both are called after the slag of the iron-smelting works which were and
are the vital industry of the first Escorial; but the road to the palace
takes you far from the slag, with a much-hoteled and garden-walled
dignity, to the plateau, apparently not altogether natural, where the
massive triune edifice stands in the keeping of a throng of American
women wondering how they are going to see it, and lunch, and get back to
their train in time. Many were trying, the day of our visit, to see the
place with no help but that of their bewildering Baedekers, and we had
constant reason to be glad of our guide as we met or passed them in the
measureless courts and endless corridors.
At this distance of time and place we seem to have hurried first to the
gorgeous burial vault where the kings and queens of Spain lie, each
one shut in a gilded marble sarcophagus in their several niches of the
circular chamber, where under the high altar of the church they have the
advantage of all the masses said above them. But on the way we must have
passed through the church, immense, bare, cold, and sullener far than
that sepulcher; and I am sure that we visited last of all the palace,
where it is said the present young king comes so seldom and unwillingly,
as if shrinking from the shelf appointed for him in that crypt shining
with gold and polished marble.
It is of death, not life, that the Escorial preaches, and it was to
eternal death, its pride and gloom, and not life everlasting, that the
dark piety of Philip voluntarily, or involuntarily, consecrated
the edifice. But it would be doing a wrong to one of the greatest
achievements of the human will, if one dwelt too much, or too wholly,
upon this gloomy ideal. The Escorial has been many times described; I
myself forbear with difficulty the attempt to describe it, and I satisfy
my longing to set it visibly before the reader by letting an earlier
visitor of my name describe it for me. I think he does it larger justice
than modern observers, because he escapes the cumulative obligation
which time has laid upon them to find the subjective rather than the
objective fulfilment of its founder’s intention in it. At any rate, in
March, 1623, James Howell, waiting as secretary of the romantic mission
the bursting of the iridescent love-dream which had brought Charles
Stuart, Prince of Wales, from England to woo the sister of the
Spanish king in Madrid, had leisure to write one of his most delightful
“familiar letters” concerning the Escorial to a friend in London.
[Illustration: 17 THE TOWN AND MONASTERY OF ESCORIAL]
“I was yesterday at the Escorial to see the monastery of St. Lawrence,
the eighth wonder of the world; and truly considering the site of the
place, the state of the thing, the symmetry of the structure, with
diverse other rareties, it may be called so; for what I have seen
in Italy and other places are but baubles to it. It is built among
a company of craggy hills, which makes the air the hungrier and
wholesomer; it is all built of freestone and marble, and that with
such solidity and moderate height that surely Philip the Second’s chief
design was to make a sacrifice of it to eternity, and to contest with
the meteors and time itself. It cost eight millions; it was twenty-four
years abuilding, and the founder himself saw it furnished and enjoyed it
twelve years after, and carried his bones himself thither to be buried.
The reason that moved King Philip to waste so much treasure was a vow he
had made at the battle of St. Quentin, where he was forced to batter
a monastery of St. Lawrence friars, and if he had the victory he would
erect such a monument to St. Lawrence that the world had not the like;
therefore the form of it is like a gridiron, the handle is a huge
royal palace, and the body a vast monastery or assembly of quadrangular
cloisters, for there are as many as there be months of the year. There
be a hundred monks, and every one hath his man and his mule, and a
multitude of officers; besides there are three libraries there full of
the choicest books for all sciences. It is beyond all expression what
grots, gardens, walks, and aqueducts there are there, and what curious
fountains in the upper cloisters, for there be two stages of cloisters.
In fine, there is nothing that is vulgar there. To take a view of every
room in the house one must make account to go ten miles; there is a
vault called the Pantheon under the high altar, which is all paved,
walled, and arched with marble; there be a number of huge silver
candlesticks taller than I am; lamps three yards compass, and diverse
chalices and crosses of massive gold; there is one choir made all
of burnished brass; pictures and statues like giants; and a world of
glorious things that purely ravished me. By this mighty monument it may
be inferred that Philip the Second, though he was a little man, yet
he had vast gigantic thoughts in him, to leave such a huge pile for
posterity to gaze upon and admire in his memory.”