The soul of Spain / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The soul of Spain / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    impressive circumstances; the ruling Spanish monarch may here descend the dark marble staircase to the little vault below the high altar, to view in its own small niche the sarcophagus which was prepared for him centuries before he was born. Even in Spain there is nothing more impressive than this huge Escorial, the grey and sombre Palace of Death, which Philip built on this carefully chosen site, in the lonely village amid the grey and sombre mountains. And in the loftily magnificent pile there is nothing so impressive, and nothing so essentially Spanish, as the little suite of dark rooms with its plain furniture which the greatest and richest of kings built for himself, so that he might lie on his dying bed with its outlook on the high altar, fingering the same crucifix as his father, the still mightier monarch, Charles V., also held when he too lay dying, in the same Spanish way, gazing at the altar in the Convent of Yuste. Nowadays a disconcerting little stream of cosmopolitan tourists is for ever passing through the huge temple—gaily dressed ladies from every clime, the patient Yankee globe - trotter, the smug English curate, the irrepressibly cheerful little Frenchman who stands in the middle of the solemn vault of the dead kings and quietly sums up his impressions: “ C’est joli, ca!”— but it cannot wash away the deathly solemnity of this ferocious Escorial.
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