Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

. . . . . .

The world nurses two myths concerning Spain. The first, that she is decadent, Spain believes herself, and thereby proves, if other proof were lacking, her failure in self-knowledge. The other myth is that Spain is romantic.

The first myth rests upon ignorance of psychological mechanics. The second is a confusion of words. The philology of the term romance is clear. In the formative eras of modern Europe, the Latin dialects which were to become French, Italian, Castilian, Portuguese, Galician, Provençal, etc., were lumped as the romance to distinguish them from the pure tongue of Latin. They were popular vernaculars and despite the early instance of such men as Dante and Petrarca, or the Arcipreste de Hita, they were not deemed worthy vehicles of exalted thought. The writer whose ideas were holy or philosophic was supposed to clothe them in Latin. Only if he treated of such vulgar subjects as earthly love, might he employ the vulgar language. By association, romance was transferred from the tongue to the subject for which it was disposed: a story of profane love or profane adventure became romance; and becoming so, remained trivial and vulgar. The essential attitude of the Spaniard toward the subjects of romance was, however, the very contrary of what we mean by romantic.

Now came the hour of confusion. The knights of Portugal and Spain fought for God, for Mohammed, for the King: for anything but what we call romantic reasons. The Iberian north is Celt and is contiguous with the Celtic cultures of Britain and of France. The Iberian knight went northward out of Spain; and when he returned he had become what today we call a “nordic.” He was sentimental, tender, monogamous, and chaste. He was the very converse of the old Spanish knight, Arab or pagan-Christian whose canny materialism speaks so clear in the Poema del Cid. He was, indeed, Tristan, Arthur, Lancelot, or Amadís of Gaul. The books that were written about him were published in romance: so that the qualities of passionate devotion which in Spain has been confined to the religious—to subjects too high for romance—became romantic.

The romance, therefore, is of the south: the romantic is of the north; and they negate each other. It is the German metaphysicians who invented the romanticism of Calderón; it is Byron and the French æsthetes who created romantic Spain. But the best efforts of Schlegel, Goethe, Mérimée, Gautier, Byron have failed to make the Spanish man or woman in the least romantic.

. . . . . .

She is serene and she is incurious. Her Anglo-Saxon sister would call her inactive, even as the Parisienne would find her dull. Since sexual adventurousness is normally the result of intellectual curiosity—sensual stimulation by ideas—she is chaste and dispassionate. But if her lack of amorousness is due to her lack of thinking, her serenity and her external inactivity are due to her tremendous power. Women are most clamorous for “rights” in lands where culturally they have counted least. Witness England or the United States where for all her liberties woman is spiritually sterile. In contrast witness France whose women are the subtle partners of all deep events; or matriarchal Spain in which suffragists are as rare as they would be superfluous.[26]

The Spanish woman is a pragmatist in love. Love to her is the means of raising children in the grace of Christ. No less sensual, no less amorous woman exists in Europe. As a girl she is lovely: a crisp expectancy makes her flesh sweet and rounds her darkling eyes. She looks to marriage as the highest and most powerful career. Once she is mated, the natural coquetry of Spring falls from her like a season: she is instantly sedate, full-fleshed, maternal. She has no instinct for the game of love. Sexual virtuosity in woman is a slow process nurtured at the expense of the maternal passion. This diversion is rare in Spain. The French or American woman’s sexual science is an undeciphered, an irrelevant perversion to the woman of Spain who wears upon her head an invisible crown of matriarchal power.

For she is powerful: this discreet female in a land of furiously dreaming males! Events have sobered her and made her worldly-wise. Her man is the theater of opponent passions, ideals, hungers equating into nothing. She is the compensatory act. She is steady, unemotional, unmystical, canny. She distrusts excess—even of maternal service. Her man has made magic of such words as State, God, Honor. Hers the task to materialize these words which in his mouth bespeak inaction. The family, the garden, the morrow; these become her Word.

The woman of Spain leans on the Church of Rome. No small part this of her dominance in a land incapable of social institutions. Spain with her separatist nature, her inadhesiveness, could never have created Rome: but Rome has gone far toward giving Spain that minimum of organic body which the millions of individual “Spains”—her men—required. The Spanish woman by her massed support makes the Church Spanish.