Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

e. The Tomb

The ultimate Word of Castile....

A gray rectangle on the bleak Sierras. Behind, upon three sides, the immense mountains. Below, the rock and clay that join Madrid to Avila. Four stories of gray granite. A delicately arched slate mansard roof. Upon each corner a tower and three more tiers of windows tapering through the slender roof to a ball and a cross. Within, sixteen patios, making the design of a Gridiron: symbol of the gridiron upon which San Lorenzo, patron of the Escorial, was roasted. This Gridiron is cold. A mighty central patio, its walls of invariant granite broken by the church façade which rises within the building like a prayer wrung from the rigor of that stony life. Doric columns, gigantic and harsh figures of the Hebrew kings standing upon the pediment. Two towers at the corners, and within, a Dome lifting above the building like a Tomb and making death the dominant of this invulnerable music.

The Escorial stands on a stone platform whose inelastic might is emphasized by the severe cropped hedges. The green of the box, the green of window-sills and shutters chimes faintly against the silence. To the south, under the granite terrace, is a little pond. Its square surface mirrors only granite: that of the monastery walls or of the Guadarrama.

Within also silence. A monastery with its cloisters and chapter halls, a church, a college, a Palace ... in square stone rigor. Walls are thick like fortress walls; rooms are vaults; floors are bare. Below ground is an octagonal chamber of vermilion marble piled to the peaked ceiling with coffins of kings. And beyond, like the streets of some lugubrious town, are the vaults of the Infantas—a procession of marble mansions, body-large. This city of the dead holds the Escorial.

Eastward slopes a little park, and south from the artificial pool there is a lawn. It ends in a granite front flush with the grass. This brief pleasaunce is like a spot of verdure within desolation. Against it rises the Escorial, framed by the scoriant Sierras, based and topped by death—the profoundly stylized and essential form of the bleak Coronal of Castile.

It is the masterwork of Philip II. And Philip is a masterwork of Spain. The Spanish will to forge a unity from the warring elements of its life won no darker victory than his. He was the great grandson of the Most Catholic Kings. He was the true heir of their impossible purpose. His Empire spanned the world. Never has there been its like. Portugal, Holland, Franche-Comté, Austria, the Americas were bulwarks of his House. He strove to make of this delirious chaos a unitary Word to bespeak Christ. He gave his country’s blood and his life. He took at their full value the accoutered lists of his imperial titles. He was the Catholic King; let his land express God. He was Monarch; let him know his children. His personal correspondence immensely regarded every city, every hamlet, every estate in his realms. Each curate of each parish was invited by the King to send detailed reports of the persons of his flock. But the curate might err in perspective. Each report was tested and criticized by another. Philip lived in the scaffolding of a Dream. The Dream was good, for it was to create and rule a unitary world. But the scaffolding was warfare, intrigue, laborious documentation. For peace, he went to war: for light, he plowed the dark. He spent his years and his people: and at the end he felt death.

This was the hour when the Escorial shaped in his dark mind. The pretext was the desire of his father Carlos I, that the kings of Spain possess a worthy tomb; and was the victory over the French on San Lorenzo’s day. But the work that grew was strangely different from the plan, and far profounder.

The will to unity must come to this? Philip had dreamed of a monument of Life: a Spain that was to be the symphony of continents and seas, of a hundred peoples and a hundred tongues fused in the grace of Christ. Now, in the ardor of his maturity and in the glamour of his bloody conquests, Philip knows he has failed. Unity ... the health of Unity ... must be sought elsewhere. Not in the piling up of worlds but in their giving up; not in life but through death.

Many-mooded death. Death of the senses, death of the mind, death of glory, death of the will to live. From his imperial splendor and from the ranges of his kingly sway Philip steps forth an ascetic. He will have his Solution within the ken of his eye—this master upon whose realm the sun does not set. He is the lord of the earth; and lives with one last mastering desire: to build a tomb for his glory.