Abstract

The Genius of Spain

The article presents an overview of Waldo Frank's book "Virgin Spain: The Drama of a Great People." "Virgin Spain" has appealed to Spaniards and their American cousins as no other book among the many written about Spain. Some of its meatier sections were published in Ortega's Revista de Occidente. "Virgin Spain" was intended for the people of the United States, and here the response has been disappointing. The awakening passion, the only really new section that Frank has added to the architecture of his book, stresses the thesis that Spain achieved a unity which locked its energies, immobilizing it for centuries, and that when in its somnolence it felt the impact of the successful West, the disturbance of equilibrium produced the bloodiest civil war on record.