THE COUNT OF VILLAMEDIANA
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Don Juan in the popular imagination. Since the middle of the nine–
teenth century the romantic legend of Don Juan has been a problem
of biology. In 1886 Hayen coined the word
donjuanism.
The legend
had been transformed from a literary myth into a form of human
love. Don Juan had forgotten the Comendador's statue. His nights
of love would no longer be punctuated with macabre invitations to
the dead. Nevertheless, this modern Don Juan whom contemporary
psychologists study is the same figure that Tirso de Molina's un–
suspecting genius created and adorned.
If
we eliminate all that is not essential to the personality of Don
Juan, we are left simply with the extraordinarily attractive man,
the perennial prototype of one form of human love. And what has
this to do with Spain? I can answer that categorically. Since Don
Juan represents an attitude toward love which is universal, he may
be found in the Iberian Peninsula as well as anywhere else. But I
insist that, far from being characteristically and originally Spanish,
Don juan's type of love is an exotic importation into Spain, without
national roots or tradition.
The form of love which is most typically Spanish is (and this
was true to an even greater extent in Tirso's era) that of the Cas–
tilian home: monogamous, austere to the point of mysticism. Usually
there are a large number of children, who were conceived almost
without
sin;
and the bedroom has the severe dignity of a cell.
The typical psychological pattern of the Spanish male is that
of the cult of honor, in which the concept of honor may be carried
to the point of violence, and is worth defending even at the cost of
one's life. And in which honor will always, if necessary, justify re–
venge and even crime. And this idea is so typically Spanish that
there is a considerable body of Spanish literature devoted to nothing
else, including part of the works of Lope de Vega, Calderon, and
the other dramatists of their period. This literature of the cult of
honor is national in the strictest sense, more so even than that of
the mystics. It could be nothing else but Spanish.
The typical Castilian male is not Don Juan but "the guardian
of his own honor"- in other words, the husband, lover, father or
brother who regards the virtue of his womenfolk as the depository
of his conjugal honor and that of his family, who will stick at nothing
to defend his honor, and who will avenge it not only when it suffers
injury but even when an injury is only suspected.
