THESE two spots, products of men of small idea and nature, are happily so close together that they can fall under the same abuse. Coming from the north, to stop at the Escorial either from Avila with its grand walls of the eighty towers, or from the crag-set castle of Segovia, is such an abrupt transition from heroic times to the doctrinaire centuries that followed them that it is but too easy to be unfair to Philip II's huge pile. A better way is to go out to it from Madrid; then, somewhat accustomed to cold commonplace, the Escorial gives less of a jar.

We descended to it from Segovia. Knowing Herrera's lifeless architecture—"a syllogism in stone" it has wittily been called—on that side I did not expect much, but accounts of the setting of the Escorial, of its grand solitary position in the mountains, made me hope for some kind of effect. People see things in such different ways. I could discover no grandeur whatever in the position of the rectangular ashy-colored building. The lower slopes of the Guadarramas rise behind it, but at a little distance, and the town comes between it and the sierras. It was not solitary, it was not imposing. At close range, after we had walked up the leafy avenue from the station, even the appearance of unity was lost, and it seemed nothing but a big block of good town houses like many that fill the square between four city streets. Window after window, alike inadequately small and unadorned; just like any monotonous line of town houses. We stood aghast at the pretentious, ineffectual mass which they call the eighth wonder of Spain. For us to-day there is little wonder in spending fifty millions in one lifetime to put up myriads of doors, stair-cases, and courtyards, to use two thousand pounds of iron to make the door-keys; we are accustomed to the feat. The pity is that every tourist in Spain comes here, and one in a thousand goes to Poblet or LeÓn, those other pantheons that are proper burial places for sturdy old kings. I am not sure that the Hapsburgs in Spain merit anything worthier than an Escorial.

At first we thought it might be the side which we approached that gave so poor an effect, so we proceeded to encircle the building; on all four sides passing by window after window we saw not one inch of stone carved worthily, and to our astonishment we found it faced the mountains. Fancy a blank, rocky wall, a quarter of a mile away and fancy such a stupidity as choosing this to open on, instead of the wide horizon of the opposite side. Does this not give the key to the Escorial? It and its builder had no imagination. Since we were here we had to see it all, so we let ourselves be guided hither and thither, through courtyard after courtyard, down one dull corridor after another, in and out of rooms where little interested,—a dreary waste of a place. In the picture gallery overlooking the gardens we got our first introduction to that eccentric genius, El Greco, at his worst here, with sick color and elongated figures; we thought him quite mad. Nevertheless, the picture gallery was a respite; it was good to meet again Tintoret's rich visions of Venice, the full superb shoulders of his women, the gold brown of the robes. Ranged in cases there were also some embroidered vestments that were noticeable.

The church of the Escorial is so coldly formal and pretentious that it lay like a load on our spirits. There is something frightening in the way man unconsciously expresses his own nature in the material work of his hand; he may think himself very big, unless he really is he is certain to betray himself, if he paints or writes or builds. This correct, somber church exactly represents the religious ideal of a Philip II. Heaven, so close to one under the soul-feeding Romanesque vault of Santiago, in Seville or Toledo's Gothic aspiration, is very far away under this limited dome; the propriety here is that of a bigot, who would see heresy in the soar of Gothic, and backwardness in the bare solemnity of Romanesque.

We were shown the usual tourist-sights, the seat in the choir where Philip sat when news was brought of the Battle of Lepanto, which broke another inroad of the Mohammedan on Europe; also the life-size marble crucifix (spoiled by too long an upper lip) which Benvenuto Cellini made, and which was carried on men's backs from Barcelona to Madrid. Statues of Philip and his father, with the ladies of their households, kneel on either side of the altar, rich bronze-gilt work, but hardly in character with a church. Then we descended to that acme of dreariness and morbid misanthropy, the sunken chamber where are buried the royal family of Spain since Charles V; one somber coffin rose above another in the dark place. And art can make death so beautiful, art like the tombs at Miraflores and Avila! Happy beings to have escaped this dreadful hole of burial, we exclaimed. Could only a century separate Isabella in her Castle of Segovia, or in the white marble peace of her sepulcher at Granada, from her descendants' costly ideal of a palace and a mausoleum? As we stood shivering with the formality and melancholy of it all, with sympathy for the present happy young King and Queen who must lie here some day, a little touch of sentiment took away some of the oppression. We saw on the tomb of Alfonso XII a fresh wreath of chrysanthemums. Then, feeling that any more subterranean darkness was insupportable, we hurried up the steep staircase from the Pantheon, through the heavy-bound church, and out in the courtyard—dreary enough, too!—breathed the fresh air with relief.

In the library of the Escorial was the first place where I had seen the gilt edges of books, not their leather backs, presented to the reader, a rich, strange effect which later in the Seraglio at Stamboul I noticed again. We stopped long to examine the portraits that stand between the book-cases. Philip II was pale-eyed, anÆmic and white-visaged, with drooping, hypochondrical corners to his mouth. And I had pictured him scowling and black and forceful! The Escorial should have told me that not a forceful personality could have built it but rather a stubborn ability and dogged patience, a narrow consistency, all in character with his pale eyes. The swift degeneration of the Hapsburg line is easily to be read in these portraits. Charles V (in Spain Charles I), keen of face and energetic, has a great-great-grandson, Charles II, last of the line, so rickety and idiotic that no caricature of used-up royal blood could go further.

Weary of sight-seeing where so little roused the imagination, we descended to the gardens, stiffly restrained too, but pleasant to loiter in. So close was the monotonous mass of gray stone above us, one did not have to look at it, but could gaze out on the wide view toward Madrid. Then at sunset we went back to the church for an evening service, that hour of prayer, restful and beautiful all over Spain. The Pater Noster was recited, a litany was chanted, a meditation was read slowly with pauses while the people listened with bowed heads and closed eyes. Then followed the primitive, centuries-old Latin hymns, the glory of the church, in which is incorporated for all time the piercing piety of the Middle Ages. I too closed my eyes to shut out the formal church, and for some forgetful moments I could dream that those quavering voices of old and young, so simple, so sincere, were in some unspoiled mountain village, perhaps in that most soul-satisfying temple of all the world, the Lower Church of St. Francis:—Assisi and the Escorial,—the human mind is capable of wide deviations, from the religion of humble love to this haughty contortion of it.

The most fatal effect of the Escorial was to fix the capital in Madrid, a spot, as Ford observed, that had been passed over in contempt by Iberian, Roman, Goth, and Moor. Up to the building of the Escorial the choice of a capital had wavered, at times, in Valladolid, in Toledo, or in Seville. Philip's mountain palace caused to be the chief city one of the worst situated towns in Spain, on a waterless river, with no commercial prospects, roasting in summer, swept by icy winds the rest of the year. It too, like the Escorial, lacks all soul for the traveler. Not a church worth looking at, all of them seventeenth and eighteenth century abominations with fat cupids, prancing angels, and posing, self-glorifying saints, not a cathedral in the capital of a country which has the largest number and most heart-satisfying cathedrals of the world.

I daresay if one lived in Madrid and had a full active or social life one might like it; there must be some cause for the proverb "From Madrid to heaven, and in heaven a peep-hole to look down on Madrid." As a city it can never be anything but second-rate; the new residential part near the parks is like the good districts of any average town. The famous Puerta del Sol is filled at every hour of the day and night with such a rabble of loafers and vociferating peddlers that it takes courage to push one's way through. As the Court was absent we missed seeing the brilliant morning hour of guard mounting before the Royal Palace. Occasionally some local sight would remind us we still were in Spain, the original and untamed. Ladies in mantillas would pass on their way to the late Mass at midday, a brougham drawn by handsome mules would go by, or, if it were a holiday, a few girls of the people wore embroidered shawls. But taken as a whole, for the sightseer Madrid is just a weariness of the spirit.

Except, of course, the pictures, and I must add, the Armory. We hurried off to the Prado, up the steps past the bust of the vigorous saturnine Goya, along the far-stretching hall, with hardly a glance for the white monks of Zubaran, or El Greco's strange canvases, till midway, we turned to the left into the large hall that holds the Velasquez masterpieces. It is a sensation in one's life, this first meeting with Velasquez at the height of his powers. The wonderful Doria Pope in Rome, the few pictures in London and Vienna whet the appetite for the supreme feast in Madrid. It is an unprecedented collection of one master that no glow of enthusiasm can exaggerate. Canvas follows canvas, all the work of secure, triumphant genius, with brush handling so free that it seems impossible he painted more than two hundred years ago. Don Carlos stands dangling a glove in an absolutely natural moment of nonchalance, Philip IV and the pompous Duke of Olivares ride their proud steeds out of magnificent skies, the gallant little Don Baltasar Carlos dashes at us on his pot-bellied pony, or stands a baby hunter in the Guadarramas. Velasquez painted him later, a grave, dignified lad of about fourteen, always with a fearless, straight look, and he also painted his piquant Bourbon mother, Philip IV's first wife; his second a wooden-faced Austrian, mother of the doll-like, big-skirted infantas. Had Don Baltasar Carlos lived, surely the race had not ended in a Charles II.

You walk about the Velasquez room bewildered, sorry for the copyists who have set up their easels before work that tells so unflinchingly each slip of a talent what it is to be a master. Portraits and genre studies; the lovely bent neck of the weaving girl, the breathing livingness of the Maids of Honor, the displeasing dwarfs,—each canvas is an achieved success.

At the end of the hall hangs what swiftly became my favorite of all pictures seen, the "Surrender of Breda," called "Las Lanzas," from the soldiers' spears ranged against the sky. It is a canvas about the size of the "Night Watch" in Amsterdam. The two armies fill the background under a sky that is a glorious harmony of cold blue and rose. In the foreground the Fleming, Justin of Nassau, advances to surrender the keys of Breda to its conqueror, the Marquis SpÍnola, general of the Spanish forces, though by birth a Genoese. SpÍnola has dismounted, and bends to meet his enemy, vanquished now, hence in his knightly creed, his friend. With a subtle, delicate shrinking he has placed his hand on his opponent's shoulder, and in his face is an expression of such high chivalry, of such generous effacement of self, of all that is best in man of courtesy and noble-mindedness, that the tears spring to the eyes. You return to it again and again and come away refreshed and ennobled. Only a man loyal himself to the core could render such an emotion, only a technical genius of the first rank could fix so fleeting an instant; this truly is thinking in paint, and it places Velasquez side by side with Leonardo da Vinci as a master of the intellect. I think it is very pleasant to learn that Velasquez knew the General he has immortalized, and you feel he must have known, too, the superb Spanish hidalgos who stand in the group behind the Marquis. On his first trip to Italy, the painter sailed in the same vessel to Genoa with SpÍnola, and probably sketched him then. I like to imagine the meeting of two such spirits of chivalry.

Isabella of Portugal, by Titian. Prado Gallery, Madrid
Isabella of Portugal, by Titian. Prado Gallery, Madrid

Were the Prado only Velasquez and the Spanish artists, it would be among the first of galleries, but it is astonishingly rich in Italian masters as well. It has the best equestrian portrait in the world, Charles V at the Battle of MÜhlberg, a picture to be studied long and often. The Emperor has risen from illness, he has had to be lifted upon his horse, but he has pluckily girded himself to take command. The Venetian red of his plumes and scarf is splendid. Titian has another of the Emperor, standing with his Irish hound, near it a gem of woman portraiture, Charles' lovely wife, Isabella of Portugal. It seems a strange irony for such an exquisite creature to have been the mother of a Philip II. Philip was fortunate in his daughters, too, demure, formal little maidens, who stand with the sedate propriety of Spanish infantas, and in his sisters, whose long, aristocratic faces Antonio Moro has left us. Charles V sent Moro to England to paint Queen Mary for her young bridegroom, and here she sits in her rich crimson leather chair, erect and stiff and insignificant, her auburn hair and homely face not one to charm her future husband still in his twenties, she not far from the fatal forty. A deeply pathetic portrait this. Good woman she was personally, despite having been made the scape-goat for a system, yet one can read in the pinched shrewdness of her mouth that she lacked her grandmother's height of brain, nor was she capable of her mother's dignity of sorrow, whose grand insulted womanhood Shakespeare has rendered so magnificently.[22] There are many other notable portraits in the Prado; a stately matron and her three sons by Parmigianino; a rich pigment of color, Rembrandt's wife; Raphael's Cardinal,—the acute, keen, Italian face so different from the Spanish type; a striking Count de Berg by Van Dyke. Mantegna has a small canvas, the "TrÁnsito de la Virgen," with the apostles gathered round the couch, a graphic glimpse through the window behind of Mantua. Mantegna put thought into his work, and he compels thought from others; this "TrÁnsito" drew me to it in the same browsing study as that small triptych in the Uffizi.

Then upstairs are more Italians. The facile Veronese has here, curiously enough, a really impressive scene, Christ and the Centurion. There are many Rubens, and some peaceful Claude Lorraine sunsets and sunrises, offering the needed siesta of quiet in a full collection. And downstairs in the basement are the primitives, Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Memling, mystical enough to refresh the soul of a Huysmans. The gilded backgrounds of these celestial annunciations, these interiors of so intense and breathless a reverence, have always seemed to me a pure symbol of the uncomplicated perfection of their faith, the unquestioning mental background of the age.

After Velasquez it is not easy to feel much enthusiasm for the other Spanish painters. Murillo can only be really known in Seville, in whose gallery he predominates as does Velasquez here. It is a coincidence that both of Spain's first painters should have been born in the same Andalusian city, within twenty years of each other, and that the ashes of both should have been scattered to the wind in the French invasion. Zurbaran's white-robed monks,—he painted Carthusians as Murillo did Franciscans, and Roelas the Jesuits,—are always effective, but they miss being taken seriously by a dash of pose in them. As for Ribera's martyrdoms, (his portraits are very fine,) if chance led us into his room, one glance and we fled; it is not pleasant to see people disemboweled. The same shuddering horror you feel before some of Goya's, as for instance that awful but tremendously moving blood-red Dos de Mayo. Goya is almost too crabbedly individual to be liked unreservedly. He is in a way the Hogarth of the South, with a gruesome, fantastic imagination, quite pitiless to the vices or follies of his generation; witness the portrait of the Infanta MarÍa Josefa, or the appalling group surrounding Charles IV, "a grocer's family who have won the big lottery prize," Gautier cleverly said of it. At times you think Goya had no elevation of soul, then you come on a portrait that shows he could see something besides the weakness of human nature. He was a true Aragonese, stubborn, energetic, analytic. And it should never be forgotten that he painted in that desert of art, the eighteenth century, and swept aside the weak methods of generations to return to Velasquez's vigor of technique.

No visitor in Madrid can possibly miss the Prado gallery, but it is not difficult to omit the Armory; for, discouraged by going to see sights not worth the effort, you may think the ArmerÍa just the usual dull collection found in capitals, of interest only to the specialist. No greater mistake could be made. This Madrid museum is like nothing of its kind in Europe, it is an unrivaled show, one hour there and you learn volumes of Spanish history.

It consists of a large hall, down whose center is massed a splendid array of horsemen, caparisoned in historic armor. The manikins have been fitted out thoroughly. Their gauntleted hands hold the polished spears, and ostrich plumes wave from their helmets; they give an astonishing effect of life. Among the thirty-odd suits worn by Charles V, here is the identical one Titian painted in the equestrian portrait, decked with the similar doge-red scarf and plumes. There is the gallant little Baltasar Carlos' suit of mail; the armor of that Bayard of Spain, Garcilaso de la Vega; of the hero of Lepanto, Don John of Austria, and some of the banners and ship-prows of his victory; the suit of Charles' general, the Marquis of Pescara, Vittoria Colonna's husband; the tent of Francis I at the battle of Pavia; the arms of Juan de Padilla, who led the uprising of the independent cities against Charles. History is followed from earliest times in raw gold Visigothic crowns, the sword of Pelayo at Cavadonga, the sword of the great slayer of Moors, King Ferdinand el Santo of Castile, and the winged-dragon helmet of as mighty a battle leader, King Jaime el Conquistador of Aragon, down to the last stage of the seven hundred years' crusade, in Isabella's armor; that of the Gran CapitÁn; Boabdil's engraved with Moorish letters; and, finally, the surrendered keys of Granada. Spain's majestic hour lives again here.

As we left the Armoury, a present-day scene presented itself and it struck me as very characteristic of a country where the grandee, shopkeeper, and peasant live side by side in friendliness. Before us lay the big courtyard of the Royal Palace, the King's very doorstep as it were, and it overflowed with hundreds of children, nursemaids, families, and soldiers; the crowd being chiefly of a popular character. They tell of strict Spanish etiquette, but it appears to me as if the people here get nearer to their king than elsewhere. Rough boys and men were pouring into the Armoury to wander with pride among the plumed knights, and by their glance they showed they felt themselves part of the stirring past. Each knew himself a cristiano viejo[23] whose forebears had struck a blow for the Reconquista.