Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

There are indeed permanent forms of spiritual incompleteness, and one of these exists in every energetic people. The Frenchman’s soul is part of a social soul. The Frenchman is organically incomplete, in so far as his mind and sense know themselves integral components of the nation. From this knowledge comes the automatic flow of individual energy into social channels: this is balanced by the impersonal character of the French nation which receives the energy it requires and discharges back into the individual life a transformed power: the protection and unity of the enveloping organism. This perpetual interplay between the Frenchman and his group is an equilibrium in incompleteness: it makes permanent the impermanent achievement of individual and nation, the need of each for the other, the flow of energy between them. The Jew possesses another form of permanized incompleteness. The Jewish soul yearns for Zion and for God. The Jew’s intelligence successfully places both Zion and God beyond his reach. His incompleteness is hence perpetual: and the Jewish energy has not ebbed.

But the Spaniard elected a form of achievement and a form of truth which he could reach: and as he reached it, he stopped moving. Truth became the Church of Rome: he attained that truth and rejected every other. His ideal of unity was homogeneity: the simple fusion in every Spaniard of thought and faith, according to a fixed ideal. To this end he impoverished the elements of his psychic world into sharp antitheses: these he balanced against each other: the result was indeed simplicity, homogeneity, a neutralization of energy summing to zero.

The Spaniard is not decadent: neither is he weak. There is as great force in him as in the days when his still unfused power conquered half Europe, discovered America and poured the vision of Cervantes, Rojas, Calderón and Velázquez upon the world. But now, all this energy is locked in its own willed equation. Its original dualisms are not dead; they are controlled and neutralized. The equilibrium is complete: and what energy is left from it the Spaniard must expend in holding the equation. There is no energy unemployed: and it is precisely the excess energy of man, the energy that is unable to find its goal within the organism, which creates intellect and which creates creation.

Had he been less heroic in his will, or more objective in his way to it, the Spaniard would not be this cripple: this giant shattered by his success, this giant imprisoned in the reality of his ideal.

The most willful of men, he appears will-less. For his power of will goes to dominate himself—and to hold his dominion. So that no power is left wherewith to dominate the world. The unity of Spain exists, subjectively and multiplied by millions. In consequence the Spaniard is not adhesive: he is too complete: the motive toward adhesiveness is the sense of incompletion. The most secret impulse of the Frenchman or the Jew has its social dimension. No Jew can people Zion in solitude. No French mystic or philosopher is an anchorite. Pascal and Descartes are Catholic: Paul Cézanne strives to create a new museum art. The rebel in France is a rebel against monarchs. But the Spaniard is an empire and a god unto himself. The perfected Spanish person makes permanent the social Spanish chaos.

The most intellectual of men, he appears unintelligent. He lives so wholly within his Idea, that no energy is left for further ideation. Creative intelligence is the birth of conflict between the personal will and life: it is born of the pause between impulse and response and of the excess energy which remains after the instinctive action. In the Spaniard, this excess energy is small: he is too self-sufficient to know richly the pauses between will and deed; and in the relativity of values which springs from a chaotic or incompleted conscience he is poor. Having achieved his Idea, he is weak in intellect: having created his imagined world, he is weak in imagination.

Therefore he understands vaguely the causes of his incompetence, and struggles weakly against them. His contemporary literature is strong in plaint: it is wanting in self-knowledge and constructiveness. It is weak, also, in creative imagination: even as it is strong in fantasy. The Spanish mind has become like the mind of a child. The child’s intellect is not inferior to the man’s: it is merely too preoccupied within itself to have achieved the power of association and of objective experience which comes with maturity and which begets analysis and imagination. The child is credulous, because its belief is subjective fantasy and finds no opponent in the real world. Also, the child is cruel because it cannot imagine pain in others, it is anti-social because it has not associated its life with the life around it. The Spaniard is still the victim of the infantile beliefs of medieval Europe. He accepts the literal Heaven and Hell, having no imagination strong enough to make them real, and in consequence to reject them. He is cruel. And his separatism, his want of the adhesive impulse make him a ready victim to tyranny in government. Unable to organize a social body, he accepts the simple body of the King or the alien body of the Church of Rome.

He has the virtues of his state. His personal development brings him a personal integrity, a true personal pride unknown in Europe. He has natural dignity. Whatever his rank, he is a caballero: a true microcosm of the Spanish nation. There is no artifice in him. He is clean, self-controlled and independent. In his veins lives the impulse of heroism; in his mind is the knowledge and the acceptance of heroism’s price. Cowardice, compromise, hypocrisy are traits more common in more social races. And cant requires no word in castellano. Even the Spanish thief is sincere: the tradition of the pícaro has not died. And the power of endurance, of sacrifice, of devotion is developed in the average Spaniard beyond the dream of the romantic north.

The once furious and unleashed elements of the Spanish soul have been woven into this counterpoint of rest: they make a quiet music. It is natural that the Spaniard’s love of music and gift for music should be supreme. This art of vigorous abstracted balance, so subjective, so ruthlessly legal, is the symbol of the Spanish nature. And as with his classic canto hondo, the effect in counterpoise and control is almost that of silence. By the same token he is a great dancer: his dance is a synthesis of movements equated to rest. And he loves the drama: where the torrential forces of mankind are fused into a unitary form.