Madrid is a capital with malice aforethought.
Usually the seat of government is established in some
important town from the force of circumstances.
Some cities have an attraction too powerful for the
court to resist. There is no capital of England
possible but London. Paris is the heart of France.
Rome is the predestined capital of Italy in spite
of the wandering flirtations its varying governments
in different centuries have carried on with Ravenna,
or Naples, or Florence. You can imagine no Residenz
for Austria but the Kaiserstadt,—the gemuthlich
Wien. But there are other capitals where men have
arranged things and consequently bungled them.
The great Czar Peter slapped his imperial court down
on the marshy shore of the Neva, where he could look
westward into civilization and watch with the jealous
eye of an intelligent barbarian the doings of his
betters. Washington is another specimen of the
cold-blooded handiwork of the capital builders.
We shall think nothing less of the clarum et venerabile
nomen of its founder if we admit he was human,
and his wishing the seat of government nearer to Mount
Vernon than Mount Washington sufficiently proves this.
But Madrid more plainly than any other capital shows
the traces of having been set down and properly brought
up by the strong hand of a paternal government; and
like children with whom the same regimen has been
followed, it presents in its maturity a curious mixture
of lawlessness and insipidity.
Its greatness was thrust upon it by Philip II.
Some premonitory symptoms of the dangerous honor that
awaited it had been seen in preceding reigns.
Ferdinand and Isabella occasionally set up their pilgrim
tabernacle on the declivity that overhangs the Manzanares.
Charles V.
found the thin, fine air comforting to
his gouty articulations. But Philip II. made
it his court. It seems hard to conceive how a
king who had his choice of Lisbon, with its glorious
harbor and unequalled communications; Seville, with
its delicious climate and natural beauty; and Salamanca
and Toledo, with their wealth of tradition, splendor
of architecture, and renown of learning, should have
chosen this barren mountain for his home, and the
seat of his empire. But when we know this monkish
king we wonder no longer. He chose Madrid simply
because it was cheerless and bare and of ophthalmic
ugliness. 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.
Copyrights
Castilian Days from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
