Perhaps this description is not very exact, but precision of statement
is not to be expected of a Welshman; and if Howell preferred to say
Philip built the place in fulfilment of that vow at the battle of St.
Quentin, doubtless he believed it; many others did; it has only of late
been discovered that Philip was not at St. Quentin, and did not “batter
a monastery of St. Lawrence friars” there. I like to think the rest is
all as Howell says down to the man and mule for every monk. If there are
no men and mules left, there are very few monks either, after the many
suppressions of convents. The gardens are there of an unquestionable
symmetry and beauty, and the “company of craggy hills” abides all round
the prodigious edifice, which is at once so prodigious, and grows larger
upon you in the retrospect.
Now that I am this good distance away, and cannot bring myself to book
by a second experience, I feel it safe to say that I had a feeling of
St. Peter’s-like immensity in the church of the Escorial, with more than
St. Peter’s-like bareness. The gray colorlessness of the architecture
somberly prevails in memory over the frescoes of the painters invited
to relieve it in the roof and the _retablo,_ and thought turns from the
red-and-yellow jasper of altar and pulpit, and the bronze-gilt effigies
of kneeling kings and queens to that niche near the oratory where the
little terrible man who imagined and realized it all used to steal in
from his palace, and worship next the small chamber where at last he
died. It is said he also read despatches and state papers in this nook,
but doubtless only in the intervals of devotion.
Every one to his taste, even in matters of religion; Philip reared
a temple to the life beyond this, and as if with the splendor of the
mausoleum which it enshrines he hoped to overcome the victorious grave;
the Caliph who built the mighty mosque at Cordova, which outlasts every
other glory of his capital, dedicated it to the joy of this life as
against the gloom of whose who would have put it under the feet of
death. “Let us build,” he said to his people, “the Kaaba of the West
upon the site of a Christian temple, which we will destroy, so that we
may set forth how the Cross shall fall and become abased before the True
Prophet. Allah will never place the world beneath the feet of those who
make themselves the slaves of drink and sensuality while they preach
penitence and the joys of chastity, and while extolling poverty enrich
themselves to the loss of their neighbors. 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.