The royal kill-joy
delighted in having the dreariest capital on earth. After a while there
seemed to him too much life and humanity about Madrid, and he built the
Escorial, the grandest ideal of majesty and ennui that the world has
ever seen. This vast mass of granite has somehow acted as an anchor that
has held the capital fast moored at Madrid through all succeeding years.
It was a dreary and somewhat shabby court for many reigns. The great
kings who started the Austrian dynasty were too busy in their world
conquest to pay much attention to beautifying Madrid, and their weak
successors, sunk in ignoble pleasures, had not energy enough to indulge
the royal folly of building. When the Bourbons came down from France
there was a little flurry of construction under Philip V., but he never
finished his palace in the Plaza del Oriente, and was soon absorbed in
constructing his castle in cloud-land on the heights of La Granja. The
only real ruler the Bourbons ever gave to Spain was Charles III., and to
him Madrid owes all that it has of architecture and civic improvement.
Seconded by his able and liberal minister, Count Aranda, who was
educated abroad, and so free from the trammels of Spanish ignorance and
superstition, he rapidly changed the ignoble town into something like a
city. The greater portion of the public buildings date from this active
and beneficent reign. It was he who laid out the walks and promenades
which give to Madrid almost its only outward attraction. The Picture
Gallery, which is the shrine of all pilgrims of taste, was built by him
for a Museum of Natural Science. In nearly all that a stranger cares to
see, Madrid is not an older city than Boston.
There is consequently no glory of tradition here. There are no
cathedrals. There are no ruins. There is none of that mysterious and
haunting memory that peoples the air with spectres in quiet towns like
Ravenna and Nuremberg. And there is little of that vast movement of
humanity that possesses and bewilders you in San Francisco and New York.
Madrid is larger than Chicago; but Chicago is a great city and Madrid a
great village. The pulsations of life in the two places resemble each
other no more than the beating of Dexter's heart on the home-stretch is
like the rising and falling of an oozy tide in a marshy inlet.
There is nothing indigenous in Madrid. There is no marked local color.
It is a city of Castile, but not a Castilian city, like Toledo, which
girds its graceful waist with the golden Tagus, or like Segovia,
fastened to its rock in hopeless shipwreck.
But it is not for this reason destitute of an interest of its own. By
reason of its exceptional history and character it is the best point in
Spain to study Spanish life.
