Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

If the Church belongs to the woman, ruling Spain through her, she has remained outside the exhaustive activities of her husband. The Spanish woman has been untouched by metaphysics: her heroine, Santa Teresa de Jesús, is an ennobled house-cleaner, a glorified matron of Christ. The Spaniard’s wife has not, like him, been split into intricate traits of will and of expression: nor in the sequel need she spend herself to win back unity from an inner chaos. She is naturally whole: she is the foe of even the fairest anarchies of the spirit. There is in her an heroic amplitude that recalls the poised women of the Hebrews. She is the savior of Spain, for she is the Responder to Spain’s excesses of action and inaction.

The land has become a matriarchy—by default. The Spaniard has been too busy establishing theodicy on earth to rule Spain well: at last too involved in the equating of his embattled impulse to rule Spain at all. Imperceptibly, unofficially, woman has taken hold. She allows man many liberties—trivial liberties of the sort she would call romantic, if she knew the word. He may “govern,” vote, own; he may fight; he may drink, gamble, whore. He may act indeed the perfect child thinking himself the center of the world because of his exultant vices (of which politics and journalism are the most absurd). Meantime, she with her compass Christ, and her wheel, the priest, steers the slow ship of Spain. In her disposal are the education of her children, intellectual and moral, the molding of those customs which go deeper than statute. In her hands is the family, and the family is Spain. She is the true controller of finance. It is a common thing in Spain for the man to own the money of his wife, and for the wife to distribute the money of her husband. In the peasant classes, she is arbiter of culture and thought: in the middle classes she is economic judge: in the noble classes the lineage descends through her in equality with her husband.

The nature of Spain calls imperatively for the dominance of woman. Woman’s mind is individualistic, and Spain is a congeries of consonant parts rather than an organism. Woman builds her familial molecule from the Spanish atoms: she erects a great simplicity in which her man can dwell.

In Spain there are two kinds of women: the mother and the prostitute. And both are mothers. The land is sensuous in its air, its flowers. The Spaniard is not sensuous at all. In the nineteenth century, a group of romantic Spanish poets endeavored to sing of Spain as had the Germans and the English. No more frustrate coldness exists in all the literature of failure. “Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehen” could never have been written by a Spaniard about Spain. For the Spaniard is as abstract in his bodily lusts as he is concrete in his ideals. Of his wife, he seeks the haven of morale: of his prostitute, he seeks the peace of respite. The Spanish prostitute with her Cross lying within her breasts is the least mercenary, the most womanly of her class. She is mellow and maternal. She bears with her a great sense of sin: and the man who touches her lips touches pity. From man she receives two treasures, bread and shame: she is eager to give, in return, her humility and comfort. She has no delights of subtle sense to barter: but he who comes to her, weary and broken, will find her arms mysteriously soothing, as if her acceptance of sin were a Christian solace, as if her acceptance of shame were heartening to his pride.

And the Spanish wife knows of the prostitute and suffers her. She brings for the husband an escape from the chaste rigors of family and church into the anarchy of unorganized affection and of Christian pity. She makes the work of the wife less arduous.

. . . . . .

Human happiness is the full deep flow of human energy. It has many ways, nor is it rare. The madman is happy since all of his thought and sense falls into the pattern of his will. The lover is happy. Children are happy, eating or at play. Soldiers are happy in battle. And everyone is happy in dream.

There are happy nations: nations at war, nations in the madness of any enterprise, whether it be of growth or dissolution. But Spain is not happy. Her energy does not flow. It stands locked in a diapason of pause.

Nor is Spain unhappy. Unhappiness is the thwarted need of energy to flow. Spain’s energy is not thwarted. It does not flow: it does not need to flow. It is absorbed in its own perpetual balance.

Spain is a dark soul. Sun is a flame in her land, and her land is a storm of color. But the soul of Spain is neither sun nor storm. It is neither gayety nor grief. It is a dark contentment, midway held between ecstasy and sleep.