George Ticknor Reads Spanish Literature by Taylor Carrington

Home , Alexander Hill Everett, Books in Spain, El Cid, George Ticknor, Hispanism, James Lyman Whitney

Leigh

American Cultural Anxiety and the Beginnings of Hispanism: George Ticknor Reads Spanish

Literature

Taylor Carrington Leigh

B.A., The University of Georgia, 2006

M.A., The University of Georgia, 2011

M.A., Brown University, 2013

M.L.I.S., University of Rhode Island, 2016

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the Degree of Philosophy in the

Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2018

Leigh

This dissertation by Taylor Carrington Leigh is accepted in its present form by the Department of Hispanic Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date______Mercedes Vaquero, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, Reader

Date______Laura Bass, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School

iii Leigh

CURRICULUM VITAE

Taylor Carrington Leigh was born in Richmond, Virginia and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia.

He graduated from the University of Georgia in 2006 with dual bachelor’s degrees in

History and Spanish. He subsequently lived in Argentina and returned to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in Spanish, which he earned from the University of Georgia in

2011. He also earned master’s degrees in Hispanic Studies (Brown University, 2013) and

Library and Information Science (University of Rhode Island, 2016). Taylor currently works as an academic librarian and lives in the San Francisco Bay area of California with his wife and two children.

iv Leigh

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following dissertation would not have been possible without the love, support, and assistance of a variety of people. First, I would like to thank Professor Mercedes

Vaquero for initiating this journey by suggesting that I pursue my interest in archives by exploring the Ticknor Library of Spanish and Portuguese Literature at the Boston Public

Library. She further tantalized me by hinting that George Ticknor may have once been in possession of the unique extant codex containing the Poema de Mio Cid (c. 1200), the now- canonical Spanish medieval epic poem currently housed at the Biblioteca Nacional de

España in Madrid. I had been interested in the PMC for years prior and in 2011 I completed a master’s thesis on the characterization of the Cid in the PMC, with specific regard to the medieval fortitudo-sapientia dynamic, as compared to his depictions in two earlier medieval Latin texts, the Carmen Campi Doctoris (c. 1083) and the Historia Roderici (c.

1160), and what those differing portrayals suggest about the PMC’s author’s, or authors’, ideology. I first visited the Boston Public Library with the intention of examining Ticknor’s materials relating to the PMC, however, after perusing the extensive collection of Spanish and Portuguese texts that Ticknor bequeathed to the library he co-founded in 1858, I began to more fully appreciate his significance within the realms of Hispanism and nineteenth- century American scholarship. Soon thereafter, I pored over Ticknor’s fascinating journals and collected correspondence and the rest, as they say, is history.

In addition to Professor Vaquero’s expert guidance, I would also like to acknowledge all of the teachers and mentors in my life who have had a hand in developing my intellect and helping me find my way through the nerve-fraying quagmire that is academia. To

Elizabeth Wright, I offer my most sincere thanks, not only for believing in me early on and

v Leigh encouraging me to dream bigger, but also for constituting such a consummate model of scholarly enterprise. To Noel Fallows, my utmost regards for initiating me into the wild world of Spanish medieval literature and serving as a thoughtful counselor during my master’s thesis. And to Catherine Jones, who introduced me to French medieval literature and to the theoretical intrigues of Hans Robert Jauss, thank you. My sincere gratitude also goes out to those professors at Brown University who prompted me to read and think more profoundly, especially Laura Bass, Stephanie Merrim, Julio Ortega, Aldo Mazzucchelli, Paul

Guyer, and the late Francisco Márquez Villanueva. During my tenure at Brown, I also had the good fortune of befriending Patricia Figueroa, Curator of Iberian and Latin American

Collections at Brown University Libraries. Patricia helped mitigate my professional doubts by talking with me at length about her work, encouraging me to pursue my library interests, and, ultimately, introducing me to the inspirational individuals who make up the

Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM).

I would also like to extend my most sincere thanks to all of the archivists and librarians who helped me navigate the collections of primary sources that form the basis of this dissertation. These individuals include the incredible staff at the Boston Public

Library’s Rare Books Department; the Rauner Library, Dartmouth College; the

Massachusetts Historical Society; and Harvard University Archives. Aside from patiently helping me track down crucial materials in their collections, and, in the case of the Rauner staff, providing me with excellent photographic equipment to capture and retain materials of particular value, all of these people displayed an earnest interest in my topic and warmly encouraged me in my study of Ticknor. Such encouragement is well placed given that these archivists and librarians are, in a very real sense, heirs of Ticknor, as he was one of the

vi Leigh earliest American intellectuals to so vehemently advocate for the collection of primary materials and the establishment of libraries in the United States as prerequisites for

America’s scholarly and cultural advancement. In any case, to those dedicated professionals

I would like to say thank you and keep fighting the good fight! I refer, of course, to the ever- endangered duty of preserving and advocating for the historical record.

To no one do I owe so great a debt, however, as I do to my steadfast and awe- inspiring wife, Mary Elizabeth Lacy Leigh. Due to my exceedingly active, ever-ranging intellectual curiosity, I admittedly wavered on more than one occasion in my devotion to seeing this project completed. In these worrisome moments of uncertainty, it was precisely

Mary Beth’s encouragement that grounded me and helped me see the value of this project.

Its eventual completion is, to a large extent, due to her recurring reassurances. In truth, my occasional oscillations were less the result of boredom in my subject matter as they were of extra-curricular goings-on. To repeat a refrain I have heard so often from academic types discussing the myriad unforeseen obstacles to their scholarly aspirations, life happens. Life has most exuberantly happened to me since the initial stages of this project. Soon after submitting the prospectus for this project, Mary Beth and I welcomed our first child, John

Lyle Leigh, into our lives. And a few years later, our second child, Francita Louise, joined the party. To my two wonderful children, then, I would also like to extend my heartfelt thanks, not so much for allowing me the requisite time to complete this project, which they most certainly did not do, but rather, for never ceasing to brighten my days, always helping me keep my priorities straight, and inspiring me on a daily basis to be the best possible version of myself. Thanks, guys.

vii Leigh

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1: 45 George Ticknor’s Reception of Spanish Literature

CHAPTER 2: 86 George Ticknor’s Mediation of Spanish Literature

CHAPTER 3: 133 The Poema de Mio Cid and the Advancement of American Culture

CONCLUSION 180

APPENDIX: Images 202

WORKS CITED 233

viii Leigh

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. George Ticknor as a young man. Oil painting by Thomas Sully. Hood 202 Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Figure 2. George Ticknor as an old man, with signature. 203 Figure 3. Bust of George Ticknor created by Martin Milmore at the Boston 204 Public Library. Figure 4. Statuette of Ticknor. Rauner Library, Dartmouth College. 205 Figure 5. Ticknor’s home on Park Street, Boston. 206 Figure 6. George Ticknor’s study and library. Park Street, Boston. Rauner 207 Library, Dartmouth College. Figure 7. Title page of Ticknor’s Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on the History 208 and Criticism of Spanish Literature, 1823. Figure 8. Title page of the first edition of Ticknor’s History of Spanish 209 Literature, 1849. Figure 9. The old building of the University of Göttingen and its library, 1815. 210 Figure 10. Harvard College in 1828, at the time Ticknor was Smith Professor of 211 French and Spanish Languages and Literatures. Figure 11. Madame de Staël (1766-1817). Print Collection, The New York Public 212 Library. Figure 12. Robert Southey (1774-1843). 213 Figure 13. Friedrich Bouterwek (1766-1828). 214 Figure 14. Simonde de Sismondi. Print Collection, The New York Public Library. 215 Figure 15. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). 216 Figure 16. Pascual de Gayangos (1809-1897) as a young man. Real Academia de 217 Historia. Figure 17. Pascual de Gayangos as an older man. 218 Figure 18. Invoice of books purchased for Mr. Ticknor by Obadiah Rich. 219 December, 1826. Massachusetts Historical Society. Figure 19. Letter from Fernando de Navarrete to Alexander H. Everett. August, 220 182?. Massachusetts Historical Society. Figure 20. Letter from Pascual de Gayangos to William H. Prescott. December, 221 1839. Massachusetts Historical Society. Figure 21. Title page from Pascual de Gayangos’s Historia de la literatura 222 española (1851), the Spanish translation of Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature. Figure 22. First page of the extant codex containing the Poema de Mio Cid, c. 223 1200. Figure 23. The original building of the Boston Public Library, co-founded by 224 Ticknor in 1858, on Boylston Street, Boston. Figure 24. José Amador de los Ríos (1816-1878). 225 Figure 25. Antonio Gil y Zárate (1793-1861). 226 Figure 26. Letter from William H. Prescott to William Howard Gardiner. 227 September 4, 1837. Massachusetts Historical Society. Figure 27. Letter from Ticknor to George Bancroft. March 24, 1828. 228 Massachusetts Historical Society.

ix Leigh

Figure 28. Chapter relating to Spain and Portugal of Alexander Everett’s 229 manuscript edition of Europe; or, A General Survey of the Present Situation of the Principal Powers; with Conjectures on Their Future Prospect. Massachusetts Historical Society. Figure 29. Letter from Ticknor to Charles Daveis. September 12, 1857. 230 Exemplar of Ticknor’s handwriting later in life. Massachusetts Historical Society. Figure 30. Two letters from Thomas Jefferson: one to Ticknor himself and one 231 to Ticknor's father, Elisha, through whom Jefferson often communicated with Ticknor. Massachusetts Historical Society. Figure 31. Letter from Ticknor to Thomas Jefferson. December 22, 1816. 232 Massachusetts Historical Society.

x Leigh

INTRODUCTION

In his 1837 speech, “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) calls for a literary awakening in America. The sentiments expressed and the vision described in this speech may well be considered the culmination of a widespread longing among American intellectuals of the time to establish their country as culturally and intellectually independent. In this project, books were important. As Emerson puts it, “each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this” (“The American Scholar” 56). And so it was with George Ticknor (1791-1871) and his decades-long project on Spanish literature. Previous works on that subject, written by foreigners and considered incomplete, simply would not do. The sense of urgency to produce domestic literature— understood here, as it was in the nineteenth century, as both imaginative and scholarly writing—was common among American intellectuals at the time, and it is no coincidence that Emerson, the young Transcendentalist, was once Ticknor’s student at Harvard College.

Though of a younger generation, Emerson no doubt harbored, by way of proximity and inheritance, many of the same preoccupations and prejudices as Ticknor and his distinguished group of peers. In fact, it would seem that the Transcendentalist movement emerged, partly, as a response to this perceived gap in American culture. The frustrated tone that is immediately apparent upon reading Emerson’s speech is not, however, without its share of optimism. Even though “we have listened too long to the Muses of Europe” and, as a result, American scholars are “decent, indolent, and complaisant,” (69) the day approaches when “we will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will

1 Leigh speak our own minds.” Emerson then adds: “The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence” (70). The new American scholar will forge a new path, distinguishing themself from their European counterparts and, in turn, distinguish the United States as a fully realized nation.

Indeed, the decades following Emerson’s plea to the Phi Beta Kappa society of

Cambridge saw an unprecedented period of cultural production in the United States.

Herman Melville (1819-1891), Walt Whitman (1819-1892), and Nathaniel Hawthorne

(1804-1864)—another one-time student of Ticknor—all contributed lasting works to the bourgeoning American literary corpus, while, closer to Ticknor’s scholarly sphere of influence, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), his friend and successor in the

Smith Professorship at Harvard, translated Jorge Manrique’s Coplas (1833) and selected

Spanish ballads (1835). Thus, the literary production so longed for by American intellectuals seemed to be bearing its first fruits. Ticknor and his cohort of well-to-do intellectuals, , a group that has been dubbed the Boston Brahmins, were not mere lookers- on to this florescence of American literature. To the contrary, the very same men that clamored for a distinct national literature in the pages of the influential Boston periodical, the North American Review (NAR), during the early decades of the nineteenth century were, in many cases, active participants in the project of building up America’s literary and scholarly stature. George Ticknor, for his part, sought to stimulate American literary interests while cautioning his countrymen against the excesses of a nation he considered antithetical to the United States: Spain. The nature of Ticknor’s contribution to this civic project and, specifically, his interpretation of Spanish literary history, will be the focus of this dissertation.

2 Leigh

George Ticknor has largely been forgotten by history. While a wealth of scholarship has been dedicated to his close friend and colleague, William H. Prescott (1796-1859),

Ticknor’s contributions to Hispanism and, more broadly, American scholarship during the nineteenth century are, at present, either entirely unknown or only acknowledged in passing. When he is acknowledged, it is most often disparagingly. This is unfortunate given that Ticknor is chiefly responsible for establishing the field of Hispanism as we know it today, especially its iteration within the United States. In addition to his groundbreaking

History of Spanish Literature (1849), the crowning achievement of decades of study, he also developed the first systematic plan for teaching Spanish literature at the university level in an early publication titled, Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on the History and Criticism of

Spanish Literature (1823). These joint contributions put the teaching and study of Spanish literature on firm methodological and philological ground, whereas previously there had been only scant commentary of individual authors or works. To be sure, Ticknor was only capable of this achievement by accumulating, internalizing, and synthesizing the commentary of his predecessors, but this does not detract from his value to the historian of ideas. His reception of Spanish literature, comprising, as it did, original materials as well as the scholarly commentary on them, was, as I will argue, overdetermined by his historical and social milieu. By that, I mean that his particular view of Spanish literature should be considered not only in terms of how it aligns or diverges from the predominant paradigms of nineteenth-century literary criticism. It must also be viewed against the backdrop of

American civic and cultural development, a process that was ongoing throughout Ticknor’s life. My intention in the following chapters is to more fully reveal the compelling ways in which Ticknor’s mediation of Spanish literature—namely, his History of Spanish

3 Leigh

Literatures—discloses his reception of that literary corpus and his role as an American scholar during the first half of the nineteenth century. I will show how Ticknor came to understand Spanish literature and Spanish literary history as corollaries of Spanish national character, and, additionally, how the narrative he articulates in his writings relates to the times in which he lived. I conclude that Ticknor’s work on Spanish literature was overdetermined by an aggregation of factors, such that the modern historian of ideas may regard Ticknor’s work as inextricably dialogic with the complex web of associations, assumptions, and biases with which Ticknor lived. My goal is emphatically not to celebrate nor denigrate my subject or his writings, which others have done to various degrees, but rather, to examine Ticknor’s ideas as a kind of window into the infancy of Hispanism, on one hand, and consider how those ideas relate and respond to the general sense of cultural inadequacy that was common among his countrymen during his lifetime.

For those who would study Ticknor there is happily a sufficient supply of primary materials with which to do so, and it is in these documents that I have labored to found the assertions made in the following chapters. For any kind of historical research, primary materials are of the utmost importance, and the case of Ticknor is no different. Without the documents that I will describe in the following paragraphs, this dissertation, and the suggestions put forth within it, would be entirely groundless. It is in reading Ticknor’s writings, both published and unpublished, that one becomes intimately familiar with the man and his worldview. Any consideration of the History of Spanish Literature, or any of his other published writings, for that matter, would be grossly lacking in causal rationale or any other deeper understanding of its broader context without taking into account the relative wealth of journals and correspondence maintained by Ticknor throughout his life.

4 Leigh

All of the primary documents related to Ticknor, when taken together, provide the modern researcher as complete an understanding of his motivations and prejudices as possible, both of which are but imperfectly glimpsed if sought exclusively in his published works. In this way, this dissertation differs from works on Ticknor that explicitly or implicitly ignore these kinds of unpublished documents in the interest of more fully revealing the Jaussian interaction between a reading subject and the read object. In other words, whereas others have disregarded unpublished documents, supposing that such materials play no role in the social construction of a text, I have opted, instead, to delve more deeply and intentionally into the subject of this dissertation, that is, Ticknor himself. That being said, the theoretical frameworks that most inform this study are Hans Robert Jauss’s (1921-

1997) brand of reception theory together with Stanley Fish’s (b. 1938) reader-response theory. The former establishes, in short, that readers never encounter texts in a vacuum, but rather, that they are always already influenced by a host of external factors, namely what they have read or heard about that text previous to their own reading. This kind of extrinsic input limits the reader’s perspective, creating a horizon of expectation that cannot be transcended. This, in turn, determines how that reader receives a given text and, subsequently, how that reader mediates that text to create new meanings (Aesthetic

Experience and Literary Hermeneutics xxix; Toward an Aesthetics of Reception 22-28). Fish, on the other hand, developed this theory further and eventually argued against the possibility of any kind of interpretation at all (Is There a Text in this Class? 11; “Literature in the Reader”). Fish also articulated the concept of “interpretive communities,” that is, communities that create meaning together and determine a collective horizon of expectations (Is There a Text in this Class? 14). The textual-social interplay described by

5 Leigh

Jauss and Fish is precisely what I perceive in Ticknor’s reception and mediation of Spanish literature, and without the unpublished primary materials to which I have been referring, the business of determining Ticknor’s role in the social construction of that literature would remain superficial, at best. I am furthermore aware of the apparent contradiction that this kind of dissertation poses in light of Jauss’s and Fish’s ideas, specifically those that argue against any possibility of interpreting authorial intentionality or determining, in any real way, the horizon of expectations of any subject. I do not pretend in this dissertation to definitively settle questions concerning Ticknor’s socio-intellectual development or his authorial intentionality; I have opted, instead, to synthesize the historical and aesthetic approaches Jauss describes in Toward an Aesthetics of Reception (18-19). By that I mean I take a middle road between absolute relativism, on the one hand, and dogmatic proclamations, on the other. I attempt to flesh out the existing scholarship on Ticknor by highlighting the engaging ways in which his actions relate to his historical and social circumstances. And to that end, his writings—both published and unpublished—as well as those of his contemporaries, have proven invaluable. In Jauss’s words, “a literary event can continue to have an effect only if those who come after it still or once again respond to it”

(22). It is in that spirit that I conjure Ticknor and his work in the following pages.

Unsurprisingly, Ticknor’s own writings represent the most important group of primary sources for the purposes of this dissertation. His magnum opus, the History of

Spanish Literature (1849), represents the culmination of his previous publications and intellectual interests. In this text, Ticknor narrates Spanish literary history at length by considering its most important writers and works. In the process of doing so, he essentially establishes a canon of Spanish literature. If we consider the publication date of the History

6 Leigh of Spanish Literature, 1849, in relation to the beginnings of Hispanism, it may seem like a rather tardy commentary to be considered foundational or groundbreaking, but a purely chronological consideration would be deceiving. In reality, Ticknor began his project on

Spanish literature many decades prior to the publication of the History. In 1823, in fact, he published his Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Spanish Literature, a prototypical text whose contents would eventually reappear, greatly expanded and amended, in the History.

As opposed to the History, which Ticknor explicitly wrote for a general audience, the

Syllabus was intended as a pragmatic guide to teaching Spanish literature in the college or university setting. As such, it represents a crucial step in the establishment of Hispanism as its own academic discipline, and it is to this pioneering document that modern-day departments of Spanish and Hispanic Studies in the United States, if not elsewhere, largely owe their existence. Though not nearly as commented as the History, the Syllabus was well received in its day. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), for one, recognized Ticknor’s pioneering initiative when he met the young Bostonian and, through personal correspondence, even attempted to wrest Ticknor away from Harvard and secure him as a professor at his newly established University of Virginia (Life, Letters, I 302-303).

Coming in between the Syllabus and the History, Ticknor’s “Lecture on the Best

Methods for Teaching the Living Languages” (1832), a speech delivered to members of the

American Institute when Ticknor still held his Smith Professorship, represents a merging of his interests in language acquisition pedagogy and the instructive potential of foreign literatures. In that speech, Ticknor ostensibly describes his views on the most appropriate methods for teaching foreign languages to a variety of learners, but it is more remarkable for his argument in favor of studying the great works of foreign literatures in their original

7 Leigh language. It is also notable for Ticknor’s attempt to situate himself among a group of distinguished European predecessors such as Francis Bacon (1561-1626), John Milton

(1608-1674), and John Locke (1632-1704) (31). It is upon the first point that Ticknor distinguishes himself from his most notable predecessors writing on Spanish literary history, and it represents an early argument for an idea academics largely take for granted today, that is, to optimally study foreign works of literature, one must read them in their original language. Until Ticknor, though, the only significant attempts at Spanish literary history had been written by men who had only read Spanish literature in translation and who, moreover, had never travelled to Spain. Ticknor rightly considered this problematic and, from an early stage in his career, proclaimed the novelty and unmatched authority of his consultation of original documents (Syllabus iii-iv). Ticknor’s inclusion of himself among a group of celebrated European intellectuals, on the other hand, is notable in the context of

American intellectual anxiety during the first half of the nineteenth century. As I will document in the following chapters, elite American intellectuals of Ticknor’s time increasingly felt that their young nation needed to distinguish itself among Old World nations as a thinking, reading, and culturally productive one, as opposed to a merely industrious, materialistic one. Ticknor’s conjuring of Bacon, Milton, and Locke in this context is telling, as it simultaneously reveals the authority he attributes to these cultural touchstones, while situating himself among them. Over the long course of American cultural development in the nineteenth century, comparisons with Europe were frequent, indeed, and Ticknor’s life work may be understood, in part, as an attempt to legitimize

American scholarship in the eyes of Europeans.

8 Leigh

Fortunately, many of Ticknor’s unpublished writings have been edited and published since his death in 1871. These writings fall into two main categories: journals and correspondence. The former provides the modern reader, as all journals do, an intimate look into their author’s interests, motivations, and prejudices. The most important collection of Ticknor’s journal entries are those penned while studying and traveling in

Europe between the years 1815 and 1819. In those entries, Ticknor reveals how he understands his raison d’être as an early-nineteenth-century American intellectual abroad, as well as how he understands literature in relation to national character, a dynamic that figures prominently in the portrayal of Spanish literary history he articulates in the History.

Ticknor’s journals, more so than his prolific correspondence, contain personal, sincere musings about his experiences as a university student in Göttingen, Germany, and his subsequent travels in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain. Ticknor’s correspondence, on the other hand, is a fascinating collection in which Ticknor and his correspondents exchange ideas and negotiate their positions vis-à-vis the most topical intellectual issues of their day, especially those related to literature. It can furthermore be considered an extension of Ticknor’s Boston Brahmin interpretive community, as it documents how a relatively small, but highly influential, group of thinking men understood their world. As such, Ticknor’s correspondence constitutes a key textual source for anyone wishing to understand this formative period in American, and, more broadly, Western intellectual history.

Ticknor’s letters and journals have been edited and appear in two separate volumes:

Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (1876), edited by George Hilliard and Anna

Ticknor; and George Ticknor: Letters to Pascual de Gayangos (1927), edited by Clara Louisa

9 Leigh

Penney. The former collection is remarkable for how soon it was published following

Ticknor’s death in 1871. As one may well expect from a volume edited by a close friend and family member, readers of this text will note certain biases in its narrative portions and its selection of documents; nevertheless, Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor provides crucial details about Ticknor as a person and intellectual. While not wholly sufficient for a comprehensive understanding of Ticknor, it admirably presents the man in his own words, save those biographical portions penned by the editors.

On the other hand, the edited volume of letters exchanged between Ticknor and his primary Spanish contact, Pascual de Gayangos (1809-1897), offers the reader an intimate look at their relationship and the pragmatic business of building what would become the most authoritative private collection of Spanish and Portuguese books in the world.

Gayangos, an accomplished poet and Arabist scholar, worked tirelessly as a book agent for both Ticknor and Prescott, supplying them with the original works in Spanish that proved so essential to their scholarly publications. Upon reading George Ticknor: Letters to Pascual de Gayangos, one is impressed by the degree of trust with which Ticknor imbues his

Spanish colleague in the selection of Spanish books, and many of Gayangos acquisitions would eventually figure into Ticknor’s History. Indeed, Ticknor regarded Gayangos as an authority in his own right and often consulted him concerning philological or historical uncertainties. For this reason, it may rightly be argued that Gayangos played almost as important a role in Ticknor’s scholarship as Ticknor himself!

There are also several archival collections that contain materials related to Ticknor.

The most substantial of these is housed at the Rauner Special Collections Library at

Dartmouth College, Ticknor’s alma mater. The George Ticknor papers, 1773-1870 (MS-983)

10 Leigh primarily consists of letters and journals from Ticknor’s European journeys, but it also contains an assortment of other writings, such as fragmentary notes Ticknor scribbled as a student at Göttingen and translations of works in foreign languages. The collection also includes an uncanny reconstruction of Ticknor’s home study, the original of which may be viewed in Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (I 388). The contents of this room are near complete, minus the enormous collection of Spanish and Portuguese books that

Ticknor ultimately donated to the Boston Public Library, which he helped establish.

The collection bequeathed to the Boston Public Library (BPL), known as the Ticknor

Library of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, is immense, running to around 10,000 volumes. The books that comprise this collection are the same ones Ticknor used to prepare the History of Spanish Literature, and some contain scattered marginalia by

Ticknor. Many of the books are exceedingly rare, often with no known duplicates. This important collection is housed in the Rare Books Department of the Boston Public Library and may be consulted by the public, in accordance with Ticknor’s wishes. Shortly after the

BPL took possession of this collection, a catalog was created by James Lyman Whitney entitled, Catalogue of the Spanish Library and the Portuguese Books Bequeathed by George

Ticknor to the Boston Public Library (1871).

There are smaller collections at Harvard University Archives (HUA) and the

Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS). The most valuable resource at HUA is a manuscript edition of Ticknor’s Syllabus with accompanying handwritten notes (Records of the Smith Professor, HUA, UAI 15.1038). The materials at MHS, on the other hand, relate directly to many of Ticknor’s closest friends and colleagues and, as a result, comprise many letters and essays that touch on topics of interest. These collections include the Alexander

11 Leigh

Hill Everett letters, 1819-1857 (Ms. N-2054), the Charles Deane correspondence, 1602-1889

(Ms. N-1209), the Charles Folsom papers, 1732-1871 (Ms. N-1229), the George Bancroft papers, 1815-1908 (Ms. N-1795), the George E. Ellis papers, 1769-1897 (Ms. N-1172), the

William Howard Gardiner papers, 1708-1893 (Ms. N-1269) and, most importantly, the

William Hickling Prescott papers, 1665-1959 (Ms. N-2180). There are many letters written to and from Ticknor scattered among these collections, though most are of a rather mundane nature and do not directly relate to Ticknor’s work on Spanish literature. In the

Prescott collection, however, there are fascinating invoices that document the book collecting enterprise in which Ticknor, Prescott, and Obadiah Rich (1777-1850) were involved. These materials convey the voracity of Ticknor and Prescott’s appetite for

European books, their selective acumen, and the logistical considerations of transatlantic book collecting at the time. In addition to these invoices from Obadiah Rich, there are also letters from Pascual de Gayangos, the other primary book agent employed by Ticknor and

Prescott, that supplement this book collecting documentation. There are a few other resources at MHS that are worth noting. The first is an extended handwritten essay by

Alexander Hill Everett (1792-1847) entitled Europe; or, A General Survey of the Present

Situation of the Principal Powers; with Conjectures on Their Future Prospects (Ms. N-1200), mostly remarkable for its pessimistic views of European nations, views that were common among Ticknor and his cohort. There is also a short printed memoriam of Ticknor, published just after his death, entitled, Memoir of George Ticknor (1871), valuable for biographical details more than anything else. The last is a small book called Yesterdays with

Authors (1883) by one James T. Fields, which oddly contains a handwritten letter to Robert

Southey from Ticknor, as well as a letter written by the English author, Mary Russell

12 Leigh

Mitford (1787-1855), to an unknown correspondent regarding the excitement in England surrounding the publication of Ticknor’s History.

The other primary materials referenced in this dissertation consist of articles published in the North American Review (NAR), an influential early American journal, as well as those attempts at Spanish literary history preceding Ticknor, primarily those by

Friedrich Bouterwek (1766-1828) and Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842). For their part, the NAR articles document the intellectual cohesion of the so-called Boston Brahmin group and their collective lamentations regarding the lack of literary culture in America. When reading these articles, one is struck by just how anxious these Americans—almost all of whom hailed from Boston and its environs—were about the literary reputation of the

United States, or lack thereof, when compared to European nations. The anxieties and critical preoccupations of these NAR contributors are very much reflected in Ticknor’s published work, but they are evident in his letters and journals well before he publishes his

Syllabus. Indeed, they remained with him throughout his career and they are still very apparent when he publishes the History at mid century. As such, these articles are crucial primary sources that document the intellectual energy that existed in and around Boston during the first half of the nineteenth century and they help the modern reader understand

Ticknor’s work in relation to that of his peers.

The literary histories by Bouterwek and Sismondi, on the other hand, serve to illustrate the state of Spanish literary historiography when Ticknor first happens upon it.

Ticknor became intimately familiar with both Bouterwek’s Geschichte der Poesie und

Beredsamkeit dem Ende des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts (1804), the third volume of which appeared in English translation as History of Spanish Literature (1823), and Sismondi’s

13 Leigh

Littérature du midi de l'Europe (1813), or Historical view of the Literature of the South of

Europe (1823), and he dutifully references these works in both the Syllabus and the History.

In fact, Ticknor frames his work as a corrective to that of his European counterparts, arguing that, since they did not enjoy access to original documents, nor did they experience

Spain and its people first-hand, they could not possibly speak with any real authority on

Spanish national character, much less understand Spanish literature as a manifestation of that character. Bouterwek may rightly be considered a “pioneer” of Spanish literary history, as Thomas Hart has called him (“Friedrich Bouterwek” 361), because, like Ticknor after him, his work on the subject was the most extensive to date at the time of his writing.

Furthermore, most of his ideas appear reproduced or only slightly altered in Sismondi’s subsequent work and, Ticknor, for his part, takes many of his cues from these two men.

Both Bouterwek and Sismondi’s works were but parts of larger, more expansive literary histories, and, perhaps as a result, neither covered the entirety of Spanish literary history, nor did they take into account as many authors and works that Ticknor would do. One of the most noteworthy differences between Ticknor’s commentary and that of his European counterparts is in his evaluation of the Poema de Mio Cid (PMC), the now canonical work of

Spanish epic poetry produced in or around the year 1200. Ticknor considers that work to be the true foundation of Spanish national literature, whereas Bouterwek and Sismondi, among others, regarded it as merely a philological curiosity. This break from critical tradition and its possible motives will be more fully explored in the following chapters.

Both Bouterwek and Sismondi’s histories have been edited and translated into English.

Thomasina Ross translated Bouterwek’s volume on Spanish literature into English in 1823, while Thomas Roscoe translated Sismondi’s book into English that same year.

14 Leigh

I have also had occasion to refer to works by other European writers, including the influential Germaine de Staël (1766-1817)—or Madame de Staël, as she is better known— and other writers responsible for the fervid interest in national literatures toward the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. The influence of Madame de

Staël upon the Boston Brahmin group can hardly be overstated. She was highly celebrated and commented in the pages of the NAR and Ticknor personally made a kind of pilgrimage to her French estate in 1817 while she lay on her deathbed. Her ideas on the relationship between national literature and social institutions, namely the Church and the State, became scripture for the Boston Brahmin circle, and they would appear re-articulated in many NAR articles as well as Ticknor’s own writings. De Staël, influential as she was among

Ticknor’s cohort, primarily served as a promulgator of the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder

(1744-1803), as did the renowned brothers, Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) and August

Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845). Finally, I also refer to works on Spanish literature written by Spaniards, specifically Martín Sarmiento’s (1695-1772) Memorias para la historia de la poesía y poetas españoles (1775), Tomás Antonio Sánchez’s (1723-1802) Poetas castellanos anteriores al siglo XV (1779), and Antonio Gil y Zárate’s Manual de literatura (1844). On the whole, and considered in relation to the scholarship on Spanish literature being produced outside of Spain during this time, these Spanish works illustrate the limited attention given to literary history within the Peninsula. While the works of Sánchez and Sarmiento were auspicious first steps, there emerged no definitive study of Spanish literature written by a

Spaniard until Gil y Zárate published his Manual in 1844, which was subsequently used as a school textbook in Spain for many decades.

15 Leigh

As opposed to the sufficient collection of primary materials related to Ticknor, scholarship on Ticknor is generally lacking. While it is true that some have studied Ticknor with great thoughtfulness and detail, those are exceptional cases, indeed. More often,

Ticknor is left out of the conversation altogether or relegated to a footnote. Scholars interested in Ticknor, then, will have relatively little trouble wrangling the previous scholarship on their subject. On the other hand, though, those same scholars may find it more difficult to gain a foothold from which to further grapple with Ticknor’s significance due to this dearth of scholarship. That being said, the present dissertation would have been unthinkable without the important contributions of those scholars who have written about

Ticknor, and it is to these secondary sources that we will now turn our attention.

Literary historians have heretofore presented Ticknor as a mostly unoriginal, if not unimportant, contributor to Hispanism. It is likely due to this reputation that he has not garnered more attention than he has from other scholars. I, however, would challenge that perception, not on the grounds of the supposed originality or brilliance of his ideas, but rather, by examining him in the context of Jauss’s aesthetics of reception. The application of the Jaussian concepts of reception and mediation proves particularly apt for a figure like

Ticknor, someone who literally and figuratively interpreted Spanish literature for generations of Americans and foreigners alike. And while his interpretation of Spanish literary history indisputably had a long-lived influence upon Hispanism, Ticknor’s entire premise and critical orientation was the product of his particular historical moment and social milieu. Ticknor’s novelty, then, consists not of his ideas, but rather of his unique deployment of themes common to literary discussions of his time. As Thomas Hart has noted (A History of Spanish Literary History; “New England Background”), Ticknor’s thesis

16 Leigh does, indeed, represent an amalgamation of previous criticism. The extent to which he consciously controls the narrative he articulates is not our concern here, as it is presumably futile to attempt to discern or define authorial intention, as Stanley Fish has argued (Is There a Text in this Class?). In lieu of that illusive goal, we can, instead, consider what Ticknor said and how it relates to his own time. This consideration will show that

Ticknor’s discussion of Spanish literature—and the PMC, specifically—respond to the prevalent American cultural anxiety of his time. My intention is to illustrate this phenomenon and, in doing so, salvage Ticknor from the relative disregard in which he has come down to us today.

First let us consider those works that have provided substantial contextual or biographical information on our subject. Nearly all of the books, book chapters, and articles that discuss Ticknor provide some account, of varying lengths and detail, of his life. And while one can easily grasp the general arch of that life by consulting a few of these sources, it seems every account provides new details that one must take into account to fully comprehend his life.

David Tyack’s book, George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (1967), represents the most comprehensive account of Ticknor’s life to date. With extensive citations from his correspondence, Tyack focuses on Ticknor’s personal life and his impressive social connections, and capably describes the scholar’s moralistic perspective in relation to the ever-changing world around him. In addition to chronicling the life of the Boston scholar,

Tyack acknowledges Ticknor as an instructive figure to understanding nineteenth-century

American scholarship, recognizing, as he does, his role as a cultural bridge, interpreting the

New and Old Worlds to each other through his writings, correspondence, and travels.

17 Leigh

Indeed, many writings have focused on Ticknor as a traveler. These sources tend to provide factual information about Ticknor’s travels—where he went and what he did— more than engage in any interpretive or speculative exercise regarding the import and significance of those travels. These writings include George Northup’s George Ticknor’s

Travels in Spain (1913), Edwin Zeydel’s “George Ticknor and Ludwig Tieck” (1929), Judson

Lyon’s “Wordsworth and Ticknor” (1951), Frank Ryder’s “George Ticknor and Goethe:

Europe and Harvard” (1953), Sally Hoople’s “George Ticknor” (2001), and, most recently,

Martín Ezpeleta’s “El viaje por España de George Ticknor y sus diarios, 1818” (2011). In

2009, Thomas Adam and Gisela Mettele co-edited a collection of George and Anna Ticknor’s journal entries from two of their European trips, entitled Two Boston Brahmins in Goethe’s

Germany. The selected journal entries, however, are meant to generally show how two nineteenth-century Bostonians experienced European society and, as such, their volume is of little use to someone interested in George Ticknor’s scholarship on Spanish literature.

That volume does serve, though, to document the snobbishness with which its subjects regarded European society, which is not wholly unrelated to Ticknor’s scholarship.

Other biographical accounts can be found in a variety of articles and book chapters.

Of this group, the lengthier pieces by Long (Literary Pioneers: Early American Explorers of

European Culture) and Williams (The Spanish Background of American Literature) are perhaps the most useful, as the former interlaces excerpts from Ticknor’s journals and correspondence into his account—not unlike the approach taken by George Hilliard in the previously mentioned Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (1876)—while the latter does, in fact, attempt to meaningfully connect Ticknor’s biography with the abstract significance of his work. Other accounts can be found in Soler y Arqués (“España en

18 Leigh

Massachusetts”), Romera-Navarro (El hispanismo en Norte-América: exposición y crítica de su aspecto literario), Cuthbertson (“George Ticknor’s Interest in Spanish American

Literature”), Doyle (George Ticknor”), Guillén ("George Ticknor, Lover of Culture"; Ticknor, defensor de la cultura), Mantero (“Viajeros y diplomáticos en el reinado de Fernando VII. El

Descubrimiento de España por los americanos”), Galván and Banús (El Poema del Cid en

Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX), and Jaksic (The Hispanic World and American

Intellectual Life, 1820-1880; “The Lessons of Spain: New England Intellectuals and the

History of the Hispanic World, 1820-1880”).

Others have examined the curious interest in Spanish matters exhibited by Ticknor and his peers during the first half of the nineteenth century, and what that interest, coming at the time that it did, suggests regarding American social, political, and cultural identity. In

1955, Stanley Williams published The Spanish Background of American Literature. This two-volume panorama of American cultural engagement with the Hispanic world considers both the larger historical trends at play as well as the individual “interpreters” who promoted the study of Spain in the United States. In his chapter on Ticknor, Williams gives a lengthy, if intervallic, sketch of the scholar’s life, punctuated by speculations about the reasons behind Ticknor’s initial attraction to Spanish literature. He also focuses on

Ticknor’s correspondence with Pascual de Gayangos and the reception of his History of

Spanish Literature. Williams’s book, perhaps more than any other, can be credited with opening up a field of inquiry into those nineteenth-century Americans who traveled to

Spain or wrote about Spain.

Previous to Williams’s book, Miguel Romera-Navarro, a Spanish professor at the

University of Pennsylvania, wrote about “Jorge” Ticknor’s work on Spanish literature in his

19 Leigh book, El hispanismo en Norte-América (1917). He frames his discussion of Ticknor, as does

Williams, amidst a larger discussion of several of his peers, including Washington Irving1,

William H. Prescott, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Romera-Navarro judges Ticknor rather negatively, arguing that he did not understand Spanish national character (44, 49)— implicitly suggesting there is such a character to be understood—and that his work is most notable as a supplement to Prescott (46). He also spends a considerable amount of time discussing two histories of Spanish literature that came after Ticknor’s, those of the

Spaniard José Amador de los Ríos (1818-1878) and the British James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

(1858-1923), and he concludes the chapter on Ticknor by mentioning an unnamed Spanish author’s forthcoming history that far surpasses the works of any Anglophone author (53).

That being said, Romera-Navarro does show genuine admiration for Ticknor’s erudition and scholarship and, more importantly, he does seem to grasp the importance of Ticknor’s

History as a cultural history, and not merely a literary one (48), a key point for the purposes of this dissertation.

In more recent times, Richard Kagan’s interest in the relationship between the

United States and Spain has produced a collection of sound scholarship that constitutes required reading for anyone wishing to study this topic seriously. He has explored this topic primarily through a handful of articles and his edited collection of essays entitled,

Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States (2002), which includes many stimulating pieces on Americans’ early engagement with Spain. In Kagan’s introduction to that volume, he displays an impressive knowledge of the intellectual landscape

1 Foreign minister to Spain (1842-1846) and famous author of short stories, including the collections, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819) and The Alhambra: a series of tales and sketches of the Moors and Spaniards (1832).

20 Leigh surrounding this topic and provides invaluable contextual information to frame the arguments made in the following essays. Therein he also has occasion to refer to his highly influential article, “Prescott’s Paradigm” (1996), which persuasively argues that Americans’ initial interest in Spain owed to its perception as America’s antithesis, a perception best exemplified by William H. Prescott’s History of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837). In that text,

Prescott traces the seeds of Spanish decay to “Catholicism” and “royal absolutism”

(“Prescott’s Paradigm” 429). As Kagan demonstrates, Prescott’s diagnosis of Spain’s misfortunes became ubiquitous in the United States and influenced generations of

Americans writing about Spain. American Romantic authors, like Irving and Longfellow, tempered this negative depiction somewhat by promoting the picturesque, exotic aspects of Spanish culture, but they never effectively usurped Prescott’s notion of Spain as the anti-

America, and that notion appears faithfully reproduced in Ticknor’s History.

Kagan’s other articles— “La imagen de España en el mundo norteamericano”

(2001), a published conference presentation; “From Noah to Moses” (2002); and “The

Spanish Craze in the United States” (2010)—further explore how Americans have understood and engaged with Spain. The first discusses the relationship, or lack thereof, between scholars of Spanish history in the United States, Spain, and elsewhere and suggests that Spanish historiography is currently at a low point due, primarily, to competition from other academic subject areas and a perceived inability of historians of

Spain to market themselves effectively (“La imagen” 144). “From Noah to Moses” frames

American interest in Spain as a byproduct of “American exceptionalism” (22), an outlook that originated in colonial-era America. According to this attitude, Americans enjoyed a sort of divine favor that justified them in their denigration of other nations as they eagerly

21 Leigh expanded their territory. Those nations perceived to represent the opposite of American ideals—namely, democratic government, industriousness, and technological innovation— were labeled inferior. In this way, even as interest in Spanish language and literature grew in the United States, Spain became a sort of whipping boy for American writers and served as a cultural cautionary tale to the young nation. Even the writers who mitigated these harsh depictions of Spain were, to varying degrees, complicit in the negative stereotypes that persisted through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Ticknor and Prescott, though, are intriguingly ambivalent in their treatment of Spain; they at once enthusiastically exalt Spain for its supposed virtues, and harshly vilify it for its supposed faults. Other American writers who did, in fact, write admiringly of Spain failed to achieve commercial success and, thus, failed to effectively promote their alternative view of Spain

(“From Noah to Moses” 44). Finally, Kagan focuses on the period from 1890-1930 in “The

Spanish Craze.” According to this article, all things Spanish were in vogue in America during that time, and Kagan contrasts this interest in Spanish art, architecture, and culture with the political tensions that existed between the United States and Spain leading up to the Spanish-American War (1898). He concludes that Americans were covetous of Spanish culture even as they depicted it as backward and that American interest was, in this sense, predatory; Americans perceived weakness in Spain and concluded themselves to be better stewards of Spanish culture than Spaniards themselves. Although this last article is less directly related to our topic than the others, Kagan’s work as a whole has served to more fully illuminate the many ways in which Spain served America antithetically in the nineteenth century and beyond, and his ideas continue to have influence among contemporary scholars like Joan Ramón Resina (Del hispanismo a los estudios ibéricos: Una

22 Leigh propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural; Iberian Modalities: A Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian Peninsula).

One contribution to Kagan’s Spain in America, James Fernández’s, “Longfellow’s

Law” (2002), continues the line of inquiry begun in “Prescott’s Paradigm” by positing that

“U.S. interest in Spain is and always has been largely mediated by U.S. interest in Latin

America” (124). Fernández convincingly argues his point by highlighting the important political events and writings that explain the United States’ interest in Latin America, but, as he focuses on the historical period coming just before World War I and ending shortly thereafter, rather than the nineteenth century, his article, like Kagan’s “The Spanish Craze,” is more relevant for those studying the generations influenced by Ticknor and his peers, as opposed to that group itself. Moreover, while Fernández’s piece is most certainly an important contribution to this topic, his central idea is not new. Miguel Romera-Navarro, for one, had previously indicated the political and economic interests that inspired

American interest in Spain and Latin America, as well as distinguish those interests from the scholarly and literary ones that Kagan outlines in “Prescott’s Paradigm” (El hispanismo en Norte-América 5).

Rolena Adorno’s contribution to Spain in America, “Washington Irving’s Romantic

Hispanism and its Columbian Legacies” (2002), and her earlier article, “Un caso de hispanismo anglonorteamericano temprano: el ‘encuentro colombino’ de Washington

Irving y Martín Fernández de Navarrete” (2001), are noteworthy for their transatlantic perspective and compelling ideas about historiography in nineteenth-century America.

Both articles explain how, twenty years before Ticknor published his History, another

American appropriated Spanish history for their own purposes, and her research may thus

23 Leigh be considered an important precedent for this dissertation. Adorno’s description of the interaction between two intellectuals—one Spanish, one American—parallels, to a certain extent, my own discussion of Ticknor’s relationship with Pascual de Gayangos in Chapter 2, although I would stop short of charging Ticknor with as flagrant an act of cultural appropriation as Adorno attributes to Irving. As Adorno explains, Irving’s A History of the

Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) effectively re-styled the Genoese mariner as a “self-made man” (“Un caso de hispanismo” 95; “Washington Irving’s Romantic

Hispanism” 72) and presented Columbus to the United States as an American hero.

Other writings have explored Boston’s role in the American cultural enlightenment that took place in the first half of the nineteenth century. Those that specifically discuss

Ticknor as a product of this environment include Helman (“Early Interest in Spanish in

New England, 1815-1835”); Hart (“George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature: The New

England Background”); Rathbun ("The Philosophical Setting of George Ticknor's History of

Spanish Literature"); Handlin (“Harvard and Göttingen, 1815”); Meregalli ("George Ticknor y España"); and Hurth ("Sowing the Seeds of Subversion: Harvard's Early Göttingen

Students"). Helman, after first granting that “it is inevitable in speaking about Spanish in

New England to think at once of George Ticknor” (339), proceeds to discuss seemingly every member of the Boston Brahmin group but Ticknor! This is, however, precisely

Helman’s intention, as she views Ticknor as the culmination of an interest in Spanish affairs that had been steadily growing in Boston since the turn of the nineteenth century. Her article is particularly valuable for documenting this interest among the pages of the North

American Review. Thomas Hart’s article, “George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature:

The New England Background,” on the other hand, compellingly argues that Ticknor’s

24 Leigh

History is less a work of individual genius than it is the product of a collective consciousness that existed in Boston during Ticknor’s time. The homogeneity of New

England intellectualism to which Hart refers is a phenomenon that I, borrowing a term from Stanley Fish (Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities), have referred to as Ticknor’s interpretive community, and there is no doubt that these men shared most of the same critical precepts and moral prejudices. Rathbun, for his part, continues this general line of inquiry focusing on even broader intellectual themes of the time—like national character, language, and the relation of literature to society—and their effect on Ticknor’s perspective. Lilian Handlin’s article on the connection between Boston and Gottingen is interesting if only for its questionable assertion that those first young

Americans who travelled to Göttingen returned generally unimpressed and undetermined to effect any change at home based on their experience abroad. The case of Ticknor provides a clear counterpoint to her argument, as he most certainly fell in love with

German libraries as well as the German university curriculum during his time in Göttingen, and he spent a significant part of his life fighting for curriculum reform at Harvard and establishing the Boston Public Library, the first substantial public library in America. While

Handlin misunderstands the effect Germany had on Ticknor, she rightly notes that those same Americans who travelled to Germany generally thought that German scholars were mere sophists and that their work lacked any solid social value. Franco Meregalli’s article proposes to discover why Ticknor became fascinated with Spanish literature in the first place, but instead reads like a very general overview of Ticknor’s life, and fails to seriously address the guiding question. The article suggests that the History was a practical exercise since there was no other comparable work at the time, and that its publication was

25 Leigh intended to garner Ticknor social favor among European intellectual circles. Lastly, the articles by Coester ("Francis Sales – A Forerunner") and Bernstein ("Las primeras relaciones entre New England y el mundo hispánico: 1700-1815") are notable for their documentation of American interest in Spanish language and literature in the eighteenth century and the period immediately preceding Ticknor and his peers.

Still other writings focus more generally on Spain as it has been imagined by

America over the centuries. María de Guzmán’s Spain’s Long Shadow (2005) claims, in a

Kaganesque manner, that America’s image of itself has been a result of different historical interpretations of Spain. Guzmán describes Spain as a “totemic presence” (xv) in America, and compares Americans’ ideas about Spain and Spaniards to their analogous conception of

Native Americans and the Old South as constitutive elements of American identity (xiii). A corollary of this looming presence of Spain in America is the idea of Spain as America’s alter ego. As Guzmán puts it:

The totemic function implies both generational remove and ambivalent consecration shadowed by an act of vanquishment. The alter ego/imago function entails rivalrous contest and possible equivalence in the present, that is, in the present of the designated time period. (xv-xvi)

This totemic dynamic, as I will argue, is very much present in Ticknor’s work on Spain, as well as that of Prescott. Strangely, though, Guzmán hardly mentions these two men who had such a profound influence on how Americans grappled with Spain in the nineteenth century. And, as Americans and Europeans generally portrayed Spain as irreparably backward—or, in more positive terms, a relic from a simpler time—nineteenth-century thinking about Spain paralleled its thinking about the so-called Middle Ages. Much has been written on European imaginations about Spain and the medieval period, and those wishing to study these themes further would do well to begin with Said (Orientalism), Patterson

26 Leigh

(Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature), Cantor

(Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the

Twentieth Century), Freedman and Spiegel (“Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies”), Gerli (“Inventing the Spanish Middle

Ages: Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Spanish Cultural History, and Ideology in Philology”),

Alvarez Junco (Mater Dolorosa: la idea de España en el siglo XIX), Altschul ("On the Shores of

Nationalism: Latin American Philology, Local Histories and Global Designs"), and

Fernández (Brevísima relación de la construcción de España y otros ensayos transatlánticos).

The quest to identify the origins of Ticknor’s critical thought has led some beyond the boundaries of New England and into the work of Ticknor’s two primary precedents:

Friedrich Bouterwek and Simonde de Sismondi. Thomas Hart’s 1952 dissertation, entitled,

“A History of Spanish Literary History, 1800-1850,” is an in-depth and invaluable comparison and contrast of Ticknor and these two men. Therein, Hart, who has also written about Ticknor in other publications (A History of Spanish Literary History; “George

Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature: The New England Background”; “George Ticknor’s

History of Spanish Literature”), examines the textual and intellectual lineage of the three critics, especially as it pertains to the theme of national character, so key to nineteenth- century literary criticism. He concludes, generally, that Ticknor’s History represents an unoriginal amalgamation of Bouterwek and Sismondi’s ideas infused with the religious and political morality of his Boston interpretive community. As Hart’s 1953 article demonstrates, he believes Bouterwek, not Ticknor or Sismondi, to be most deserving of praise for opening up the field of Spanish literary history. The extent to which Ticknor’s opinions differ in any significant way from those of his predecessors is debatable and has

27 Leigh been discussed further by Galván and Banús (El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX), who mostly agree with Hart’s position. While Hart may well be correct in attributing more intellectual originality to Bouterwek’s work, he does not, in doing so, fully account for the compelling context out of which Ticknor’s interest in Spanish literature and his History arose.

Comparisons of Ticknor, Bouterwek, and Sismondi naturally entail some discussion of how each deals with a text that has come down to us today as the foundation of Spanish national literature: the Poema de Mio Cid (PMC). First edited by Tomás Antonio Sánchez in

1779, the PMC slowly gained the attention of critics over the next half century. Despite

Bouterwek’s early, mostly negative commentary on the PMC, it became a touchstone for writers discussing Spanish national literature and its current canonical status—despite its notable alterity with regard to other Spanish medieval epics, as Mercedes Vaquero has shown (“The Poema de Mío Cid and the Canon of the Spanish Epic”)—is largely the result of these early Hispanists, Ticknor chief among them, in conjunction with the generations of influential scholars they inspired.

Of those who have written on the reception of the PMC inside and outside of Spain, the various accounts by Luis Galván and Enrique Banús (“Seco y latoso—viejo y venerable:

El Poema del Cid a principios del siglo xx, o Del cambio en la apreciación de la literatura”;

“De có mo Mio Cid y su Poema viajaron a Alemania y retornaron a Españ a; la recepció n de una recepció n”; El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX), and the solo work by Galván (El Poema del Cid en España, 1779-1936: Recepción, mediación, historia de la filología), are certainly the most thorough and authoritative. Perhaps the most insightful aspect of Galván and Banús’s monograph, El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del

28 Leigh siglo XIX (2004), is its suggestion that, when scholars outside of Spain did comment on the

PMC, they always did so with ulterior motives related to their own nationality and historical circumstance. In other words, Galván and Banús illustrate how foreigners have been using the PMC as a proxy ever since critical commentary on the poem began, and the same claim can be made of Spanish literature in general. As I suggest, Ticknor is complicit in this abstract engagement. For him, the PMC is an admirable sketch of Spain’s heroic age, when it was yet untouched by foreign influence, and, as such, a Romantic and truly inspiring model of national literature. Amidst Ticknor’s trajectory of Spanish literary decline, the PMC stands out as an untainted jewel, just the kind of text that America needed during Ticknor’s time. For this reason, Ticknor’s commentary on the PMC is remarkable and will be considered further in Chapter 3. Galván and Banús’s book is also valuable for its thoughtful theoretical framework that takes up the Jaussian concepts of reception and mediation and shows how our understanding and appreciationg of the PMC was forged through an iterative critical and dialogic process. Other notable accounts of the early appreciation of the PMC can be found in Buceta (“Opiniones de Southey y Coleridge acerca del Poema del Cid”), Bertrand (“Una gran página de la vida póstuma del Cid, El Cid de

Herder”), Pardo ("Los versos 1-9 del Poema de Mío Cid: ¿No comenzaba ahí el Poema?"),

Magnotta (Historia y bibliografía de la crítica sobre el Poema De Mío Cid, 1750-1971), Ramos

Ortega (“La fortuna del Cid en el romanticism francés”), López Estrada (Panorama crítico sobre el Poema Del Cid), Rodiek (La recepción internacional del Cid: Argumento recurrente, contexto, género), Zadarenko (Problemas de autoría, de estructura, y de fuentes en el Poema

De Mío Cid), Graver (“George Ticknor, Robert Southey, and The Poem of the Cid”), and Girón

Negrón (“George Ticknor y los Infantes de Lara”). Very often, this discussion ties in with

29 Leigh larger conversations about nineteenth-century literary historiography or related ideas about Spanish national character. Works devoted to these topics include García Isasti (La

España metafísica: Lectura crítica del pensamiento de Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 1891-1936),

Lloréns (El romanticismo español), Flitter (Spanish Romantic Literary Theory and Criticism),

Yvancos and Sánchez (Teoría del canon y literatura española), Tully (“How German

Romanticism Travelled to Spain: The Intellectual Journey of Johann Nikolas Böhl Faber”),

Resina (Del hispanismo a los estudios ibéricos: Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural; Iberian Modalities: A Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian

Peninsula), and Stavans and Jaksic (What Is La Hispanidad?: A Conversation).

Several writers before myself have proffered some explanation of Ticknor’s motives in writing about Spanish literature, a dubious goal in and of itself, but none have fully fleshed out the importance of Ticknor’s work within the context of nineteenth-century

American cultural anxiety. Ivan Jaksic’s The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life,

1820-1880 (2007), is the most substantial investigation of this topic to date. Jaksic’s book constitutes a groundbreaking examination of the ways in which nineteenth-century

American intellectuals approached the subject of Spain and the Spanish world. The author devotes separate chapters to many of Ticknor’s friends and colleagues, including

Washington Irving, William H. Prescott, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in addition to two chapters on Ticknor himself. The first of these chapters details Ticknor’s life with special attention to his first trip to Europe and his correspondence, while the second chapter on Ticknor discusses the content and reception of the History of Spanish Literature.

The present thesis is indebted to Jaksic not only for his well-written, succinct account of

Ticknor’s life and labors, but also for his general suggestion that nineteenth-century

30 Leigh

American scholars turned their attention to Spain with an aim to impress upon the

American public the reasons underlying a mighty empire’s downfall. Such a thesis depends upon the cultural anxiety among Americans that I document in Chapter 1. Whereas Jaksic takes a broader view in his excellent book, I focus exclusively on Ticknor, his life and his work. Perhaps there is more to be said on the other men Jaksic writes about, as well, but, relatively speaking, Ticknor has received by far the least scholarly attention, and it is that gap that this dissertation hopes to help fill.

Aside from Jaksic’s book, Richard Kagan’s work has, again, proved to be very helpful here. In all of his previously discussed writings (“Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical

Scholarship and the Decline of Spain”; “La imagen de España en el mundo angloamericano.

Reflexiones sobre su evolución histórica”; “From Noah to Moses: The Genesis of Historical

Scholarship on Spain in the United States”), he not only describes American interest in

Spain, he attempts to explain it. In “Prescott’s Paradigm,” for example, he writes:

When [Prescott] decided in January 1826 to write about the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabel, he was also writing about the young United States. In both countries, Prescott detected the enlightened leadership, the sound government, national will, and the dynamism necessary for monumental achievement. Prescott was undoubtedly thinking of the United States when, in a review of Irving’s Conquest of Granada, he described late fifteenth-century Spain: “It was the season of hope and youthful enterprise, when the nation seemed to be renewing its ancient energies, and to prepare like a giant to run its course.” (428)

As Kagan suggests, when writers of Ticknor’s generational cohort wrote about Spain, they were always writing about the United States as well. I would, however, subtly modify

Kagan’s argument in “Prescott’s Paradigm” to leave more room for the ambivalence concerning Spain that these writers display. In other words, Spain did not exclusively serve

America antithetically; it was also, during certain historical periods, a model of untarnished national character and imperial prowess. Ticknor certainly makes use of each of those

31 Leigh depictions of Spain in his work, and he deploys them according to his own agenda. Just as

Kagan notes of Prescott, Ticknor, too, attributed to Spain—specifically medieval Spain— those qualities he considered essential to a nation’s prosperity: “free institutions,” “liberal and equitable forms of government,” “independence of character,” and “lofty enthusiasm”

(“Prescott’s Paradigm” 429), and it is that idealistic vision of Spain that Ticknor eulogizes.

On the other hand, Spain’s decline is to be studied as result of an aberrant national character that allowed for both the terrors of the Inquisition and the political abuses of successive authoritarian regimes.

Ticknor, then, engages in what I would describe as prescriptive criticism, seeking to address the woes of the United States by using a foreign national literature as a proxy. In the process of doing so, he also responds to contemporary calls for literary and scholarly production. Ticknor himself figures prominently in this project, both as a learned cosmopolitan able to view American literature in relation to its European counterparts and as a scholar capable of producing sound scholarship. As an individual, he certainly puts into practice the ideas espoused by his intellectual mentor, Madame de Staël, when she states that new nations must “lay the foundation of new institutions, arouse interest, hope, enthusiasm,” and, to that end, “it is in the art of the spoken and written word that we find the only means to inspire such sentiments” (“Literature in its Relation to Social

Institutions” 148). Though not the epic poetry or popular song imagined by De Staël,

Ticknor’s work did help improve the scholarly reputation of the United States. His History enjoyed a long life, both in the United States and abroad, as the most authoritative volume on Spanish literary history. It was not until the publication of James Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s

History of Spanish Literature (1898) that Ticknor’s work encounters any sort of substantial

32 Leigh competition on this score from an Anglophone author. So, if Ticknor set out to bolster esteem for American scholarship, he most certainly succeeded. In any case, it is clear that

Ticknor did not altruistically write his book so that Spaniards could more fully comprehend their own literary history. Instead, he projects his own ideology onto an inert subject, and in this way he is no different than any critic who writes about foreign cultures. For more theoretical perspectives on foreigners’ uses of Hispanism, see Mariscal (“An Introduction to the Ideology of Hispanism in the U.S. and Britain”), Read ("Travelling South: Ideology and

Hispanism"), Round (“The Politics of Hispanism Reconstrued”), Resina ("Hispanism and Its

Discontents"), and Guillory ("Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines").

Ticknor’s motives were not limited to scholarly recognition, though. An important facet of his History, and one that has not received much critical attention, is his stated intention of writing it for a general audience. When Ticknor resigned his post at Harvard and set about preparing his History in earnest, he purportedly destroyed his Harvard lecture notes to be able to approach his subject from a fresh perspective and discuss it in terms that a popular audience could understand (History, I ix-x). While Hart (“George

Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature: The New England Background”) has reasonably suggested that Ticknor’s avowed objective was more symbolic than genuine, I would suggest that, at a time when the American population and its literacy rates were increasing dramatically, Ticknor saw that the effort to distinguish the Unites States among Old World nations would have to come from its general population, and not elite circles like the one in which he moved. In keeping with Romantic ideals that exalted the common man, as well as the democratic ideal of a well-educated populace, Ticknor seemed to believe that a literate, educated population was key to the United States’ success as a nation. And thus,

33 Leigh abandoning academic tradition, he writes his book for the general populace, the majority of which had little if any previous contact with academic stuff. And his message to his fellow

Americans: “Go forth and create authentic literature, but heed ye the example of Old Spain, whose noble literature was undone by her government and religion!” Such a message, of course, directly relates to the contemporary fervor of intellectuals regarding American cultural identity in the first half of the nineteenth century. By producing such a groundbreaking and comprehensive work of scholarship, Ticknor makes a substantial contribution to his nation’s ongoing quest to distinguish itself through cultural production.

This question is closely related to another part of Ticknor’s life that deserves more scholarly attention, that is, his role in founding the first premier public library in the United

States, the Boston Public Library (BPL). His instrumental leadership in the establishment of the BPL, and his eventual donation of his Spanish and Portuguese book collection to that library, attests, I believe, to his sense of civic duty and his genuine desire to improve the civic infrastructure of his country. Not everyone would agree, however. In one rather cynical article on Ticknor’s role in the foundation of the BPL, Harris and Spiegler ("Everett,

Ticknor, and the Common Man: The Fear of Societal Instability as the Motivation for the

Founding of the Boston Public Library") argue against what they call the “progressive interpretation” (249) of the founding of public libraries in America, by which they mean the idea that libraries were established by “an enlightened middle class led by a group of liberal and humanitarian intellectuals bent on making the institution as egalitarian and democratic as possible” (249). Jorge Guillén’s complimentary articles on Ticknor ("George

Ticknor, Lover of Culture"; Ticknor, defensor de la cultura) may be considered representative of this school. Harris and Spiegler differentiate the progressive school from

34 Leigh the “revisionist” school, which argues that “authoritarian-elitists” set up public libraries as a result of their anxieties about national security and distrust of the common man (249).

Such a distinction certainly represents a welcome rethinking of historical paradigms, and

Harris and Spiegler are right to question the simplicity with which some have sought to explain the rise of public libraries in America, but I think their argument falls victim to the same criticism they level at their predecessors, that is, it is too simplistic. Harris and

Spiegler cast Ticknor as a kind of devious mastermind who plotted the BPL as a social indoctrination station for Boston’s unruly lower classes. While the authors do, in fact, allow that Ticknor’s “scheme” (263) may have also been motivated to “uplift the masses,” their focus is on the BPL as a means of social control. A thorough review of Ticknor’s writings casts doubt on Harris and Spiegler’s admittedly compelling thesis. It is abundantly clear, in reading Ticknor’s journals and considering his efforts directed toward curriculum reform at Harvard, that he returned from his first European journey with firm convictions about the superiority of European educational institutions, especially libraries. He spent the remainder of his life attempting, with varying degrees of success, to change the American educational system for the better, and a large, public library was instrumental to that goal.

Moreover, Ticknor’s roles as Hispanist and promoter of civic enterprises are not unrelated.

His History contributed to the same goal of public education that he had in mind when he began planning for the BPL. In any case, the articles by Frantz (“A Re-Examination of the

Influence of Literary Nationalism on the Public Library”) and Story (“Class and Culture in

Boston: The Athenaeum, 1807-1860”) represent the work that has been done on this topic, as it relates to Ticknor, to date. Story’s article, similar to Harris and Spiegler’s piece, is a

Marxist-oriented interpretation of Ticknor’s motivations, while Frantz argues that the

35 Leigh public library movement in America began as a cosmopolitan project designed to heighten

America’s literary and intellectual status among Western nations. As will be appreciated, I am more sympathetic to Frantz’s arguments, but I admit that some of Harris and Spiegler and Story’s points are difficult to definitively reject. While I have not had occasion to fully delve into this very interesting facet of Ticknor’s life in the present dissertation, his role in the public library movement is very much connected to his decision to write the History for a general audience.

Like Harris and Spiegler and Story, many of those who have written about Ticknor have portrayed him rather cynically, or, in other cases, they seem to do so only begrudgingly. This is no doubt a result of the justifiable amount of attention garnered by the highly influential company he kept. When compared to the limited work that has been done on Ticknor, the copious critical attention devoted to Prescott is particularly striking, given how close he and Ticknor were both personally and professionally. It is probable that the lengthy gap spanning Ticknor’s first exposure to Spanish literature, around 1818, and the publication of his History in 1849, coupled with the comparatively prolific career of

Prescott in the intervening years, worked to create a sense that Prescott exercised more influence over Ticknor than vice versa. Stanley Williams, for example, describes Ticknor as a mere “supplement” to the work of Prescott (46), despite the fact that Prescott had no firsthand knowledge of Spain. Contradictorily, he goes on to refer to Prescott as “Ticknor’s

Spanish godchild” (61) and calls Ticknor the father of all our Spanish scholars (46). This is typical of the kind of remembrance Ticknor has had: sporadic and unenthusiastic elegies, most often in the shadow of Prescott. For his part, Richard Kagan (“Prescott’s Paradigm:

American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain”) stresses Prescott’s importance

36 Leigh in the creation of a long-lived critical paradigm in the United States, but spends little time discussing Ticknor’s role in that effort. Interestingly, Kagan cites an 1826 note by Prescott in which he gives his reasons for wanting to study Spain, and this note appeared years after

Ticknor had been teaching Spanish at Harvard and had published his Syllabus (“Prescott’s

Paradigm” 428). Kagan probably assumes that Ticknor was only one of many scholars influenced by Prescott’s paradigm, but it is more likely that the two worked out their ideas together, if Ticknor was not first. Kagan, for example, describes Ticknor’s History as

“replete with Prescottian language” (432) and pointedly claims that “Ticknor, like Prescott before him, saw Spain’s early cultural florescence as doomed to decay” (432; my emphasis).

This assertion can be understood as technically true if we only consider the chronology of the both men’s publications, but it does not meaningfully detail the mutual influence that occurred between these two men over the span of their long friendship, some of which is documented in their correspondence. Indeed, if we are to believe Ticknor, it is very clear that he inspired and encouraged Prescott in his study of Spanish matters, and not the other way around. In his Life of William Hickling Prescott (1863), he recounts how he nonchalantly suggested that Prescott read his Harvard lectures on Spanish literature at a time when Prescott was feeling depressed, and how Prescott thereafter made regular trips to Ticknor’s home, where Ticknor prepared a list of books for him to read and “encouraged him in [the study of Spanish] as much as I could without being too selfish” (67-68). Prescott recognized Ticknor’s authority in this arena and, after reviewing Bouterwek and

Sismondi’s histories, reflected, in a letter to Ticknor, upon the “injustice you are doing to yourself in secluding your own manuscript Lectures from the world. Neither of these writers has gone into the subject as thoroughly as you have” (69).

37 Leigh

Regarding the legacy of Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature, scholars have been similarly less than enthusiastic. This inattention no doubt stems, in part, from the ceaseless anxiety of the modern academic that drives them to disregard former critical approaches and methodologies in the interest of forging new and supposedly better ones. While I will not, in these pages, dispute this quixotic quest, I believe it to be imperative that we study the past and not reject it out of hand based on it’s being past. In the realm of Hispanism, at the very least, Ticknor’s story is an instructive one. Nevertheless, many scholars have overlooked the significance of the intellectual context of Ticknor’s History. The dismissive remarks of Thomas Hart are perhaps the most damning since he studied Ticknor in the same kind of depth that I attempt to do here, yet he emerges with quite a different estimation of Ticknor’s significance. In an article published in 1954, appearing soon after the completion of his dissertation on Ticknor’s relation to Bouterwek and Sismondi, Hart says the following:

Ticknor’s interpretation of Spanish literature is not a very personal one, nor is it particularly perceptive. His critical principles are those of the great majority of New England critics in this period. He accepted unquestioningly the standards of his class: the Federalist and Unitarian standards of the Boston aristocracy; accepted them, indeed, so easily that he probably was never fully aware of the role that they play in his writing about literature. This History of Spanish Literature, tailored to fit the standards of a relatively small group of New Englanders, became the standard reference on Spanish literature for at least half a century. One may hazard the guess that one reason for its acceptance abroad was the fact that the political and social bias implicit in Ticknor’s handling of his subject were largely unknown in Europe; had he been a Frenchman or a German, his bias would probably have been much more readily perceived, and the objectivity of his views would have been questioned. (“George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature: The New England Background” 88)

While I cannot claim that Ticknor’s current obscurity among academics can be traced to

Hart’s dismissive evaluation, I can say that this excerpt represents the general opinion of

Ticknor expressed by literary historians and historians of ideas since Hart’s time. I would

38 Leigh challenge this estimation of Ticknor not on the grounds of the supposed originality or brilliance of his ideas, about which I make no claim, but rather with an understanding of

Ticknor as an agent of cultural change. I propose that Ticknor be studied as a vehicle of the critical thought that pervaded New England at the time. Moreover, I suggest that he was one of the best equipped and well-rounded disseminators of this thought, having enjoyed the enriching experience of his European studies and travels. In other words, Ticknor deserves to be studied for having occupied such a prominent position within this influential group of early American critics, and he offers the researcher a much fuller idea of what it was like to operate within this interpretive community. According to Jauss,

the “verdict of the ages” on a literary work is more than merely “the accumulated judgment of other readers, critics, viewers, and even professors”; it is the successive unfolding of the potential for meaning that is embedded in a work and actualized in the stages of its historical reception as it discloses itself to understanding judgment, so long as this faculty achieves in a controlled fashion the “fusion of horizons” in the encounter with the tradition. (Toward an Aesthetics of Reception 30)

I think Hart unfairly judges Ticknor for having collated ideas from his predecessors and for his supposed ignorance of the influence that his class exercised upon him, but are any of us wholly blameless on this score? We are all constantly seeking out that information that supports our interests and rejecting that which refutes them; bias is an inherent feature of conscious experience. Hart claims the History was written for only a small group of Boston critics; my position is less absolute. While I certainly acknowledge that Ticknor’s work was decisively colored by the Boston Brahmins’ critical thought, and that he certainly sought validation for his efforts among his scholarly peers, I think a complete consideration of the primary sources suggests that Ticknor truly wrote for a wider audience, for America.

Despite these predominantly negative assessments of Ticknor, one notable defense of the Bostonian comes in 1960 in an article by John W. Rathbun who claims a more

39 Leigh respectable legacy for Ticknor. Rathbun is primarily interested in figuring out why Ticknor chose an historical, and not critical, examination of Spanish literature, a meditation that leads him to describe the History of Spanish Literature in positive terms as the first

“philosophical history” (41). The entire article, in fact, can be read as a response to Hart’s dismissiveness. In short, Rathbun gives Ticknor more credit for his History and judges it an worthy object of intellectual curiosity for its unique deployment of the predominant nineteenth-century intellectual paradigms, namely continuous change, cultural organicism, and spirit of the age (39). He defends Ticknor and his History despite their incongruity with twentieth-century literary theory before going on to directly respond to Hart:

It is possible to grant Hart’s assertion (in PMLA, p. 88) that Ticknor’s book was part of a “contemporary social need” created by “the Federalist and Unitarian standards of the Boston aristocracy” and yet read the book in the light of basic philosophical attitudes and a particular philosophical tradition. In this respect the ideas themselves assume a kind of intrinsic value independent of their social background. It then becomes a question of examining the care and precision with which they are articulated. (38)

Rathbun suggests that Ticknor’s understanding of history was, in a sense, Hegelian. Ticknor glimpsed in the unfolding of world history a deeper universal history that sprang from the mind of God; as such, his analysis of Spanish literature takes on even greater importance because it shows, concretely, what happens when literature is restricted or negatively affected by forces external to the creative genius of man—government, religion, foreign models, etc. (38). Essentially, Rathbun claims that the History is impressive due to Ticknor’s ability to apply “philosophically” a set of contemporary concepts to the study of Spanish literature and, secondly, for constituting one of the last examples of teleological history, as

Ticknor ultimately credits God with orchestrating universal history, which is played out in

40 Leigh world history (41-42). Rathbun’s positive appreciation of Ticknor is, however, very much an exception.

To illustrate the relative oblivion into which Ticknor has been relegated outside of those writings, I will briefly mention a few notable studies that have entirely ignored

Ticknor. These texts focus on Ticknor’s contemporaries and their important and well- known work. To those familiar with Ticknor’s accomplishments, however, his absence in these works is surprising. He makes no appearance, for example, in John de Lancey

Ferguson’s influential American Literature in Spain (1916), despite the fact that the author dedicates entire chapters to the other members of his cohort—Prescott, Emerson,

Longfellow, etc. Nor does William Charvat devote any attention to Ticknor in his Origins of

American Critical Thought (1936), let alone include him in his top ten list of important critics of the period (6). Amazingly, Charvat does not even mention Ticknor in his section devoted to the North American Review (178). María de Gúzman finds no occasion to refer to

Ticknor in her more recent book, Spain’s Long Shadow (2005), a work which otherwise represents an intriguing foray into American cultural interest in Spain over the centuries.

Ticknor’s absence in these works is characteristic of the general disregard with which scholars have treated him, an unfortunate situation that I hope this dissertation will rectify to some extent.

With the review of the scholarly literature on Ticknor complete, let us say a few words about Ticknor’s value to the modern investigator. To my mind, Ticknor provides a unique opportunity to explore the nineteenth-century hemispheric and transatlantic interactions that shaped the field of Hispanism as we know it today. This is something that

Stanley Williams, even as he discounts Ticknor’s work in favor of Prescott, readily

41 Leigh recognizes. Speaking of Ticknor and Prescott’s prolonged relationship with Pascual de

Gayangos—book agent and editor of the Spanish translation of Ticknor’s History—Williams considers it but one iteration of a much larger web of international connections, ranging from Washington Irving to the Catalan linguist, Mariano Cubí y Soler (1801-1875), concluding his remarks by saying:

Probably never before or since has there existed so closely knit a coterie of American men of letters of distinction absorbed cooperatively in Spanish themes. The need for books, for manuscripts, for access to public and private libraries, whether for fiction, poetry, epical histories, or literary criticism, formed bonds between Ticknor, Gayangos, Prescott, Motley, Irving, and a dozen others devoted to this rediscovery of Spain. (61-62)

If we accept Williams’ assertion, Ticknor then offers us a window into this foundational era of transatlantic Hispanism, one that has remained woefully understudied. And amidst this panorama of social connections, Ticknor looms large, indeed. As an early American traveler to Europe, Ticknor met with nearly all of the most important intellectuals of the day—Lord

Byron, François-René de Chateaubriand, William Wordsworth, Johann Wolfgang von

Goethe, Robert Southey, Sir Walter Scott, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Alexander von Humboldt, and Madame de Staël, to name a few—and, through his earnest zeal for learning and easy conversational demeanor, he mitigated the negative stereotypes of

American cultural illiteracy that were prevalent in Europe at the time and forged relationships with European counterparts that endured for many years. His experience studying at Göttingen was profoundly formative for the young scholar, and he returned to the United States eager to graft some of the more favorable elements of European learning onto the less developed American stock. For all his cosmopolitan flare, though, Ticknor never considered himself anything but American. Even as he fought to reform the curriculum at Harvard to more closely align with the superior German model he had

42 Leigh experienced and, later, as he worked to establish an American equivalent of the great libraries he visited in Europe, his focus was always on the development of his own nation’s intellectual infrastructure, a point that becomes all the more important upon reading his published work. Indeed, Ticknor readily conceded that Europe represented a “state of society, where, in many respects, the human mind is further advanced, than it is in our own country” (Remains of Nathaniel Appleton Haven xxi). With his History, Ticknor strove to produce a book that would meet the standards of European scholarship and, in doing so, raise esteem for American scholarship. The overwhelmingly positive reviews of that book in Europe and its long-lived authoritative status among Hispanists attests to the success of that endeavor. In short, George Ticknor provides a case study of how a nineteenth-century

American scholar internalized and responded to the contemporary call for American literature. And what is perhaps most interesting about Ticknor’s response is its dualistic nature: the History simultaneously represented an admirable model for future American scholarship and—in its narrative of Spanish literary decline—a prescriptive message for would-be American writers.

Moreover, Ticknor’s role as an international agent involved in the definition of literary criticism and history also speaks to more contemporary ideas, like those touched upon by José Luis Villacañas in the introduction to Joan Ramón Resina’s book, Del hispanismo a los estudios ibéricos (2009). Villacañas, like Kagan before him (“La imagen de

España en el mundo angloamericano. Reflexiones sobre su evolución histórica”), bemoans the current lack of intellectual exchange among academics in the United States and Spain and describes Resina’s thesis as an attempt to re-establish those connections in order to understand the synthetic and symbiotic nature that has characterized the development of

43 Leigh the Spanish literary canon and predominant critical paradigms that have been applied to it

(Del hispanismo a los estudios ibéricos 16-17). Ticknor constitutes an historical counterpoint to the isolationist tendencies Villacañas describes, as his ideas about Spanish literature, though strongly influenced early on by theorists like Madame de Staël, were greatly enriched by a continuous exchange of letters, books, and ideas across the Atlantic over the course of his life. Furthermore, Ticknor used Spanish literature as a tool with which to instruct and direct American culture and, in this way, he is exemplary of the kind of transatlantic collaboration Villacañas longs to see. Lastly, as we currently inhabit an era in which Latin American literature has secured the most prioritized position within departments of Spanish and Hispanic Studies in the United States, Ticknor’s life and work prompt the modern Hispanist to undertake the necessary task of re-engaging with, and thinking critically about, the historical, political, cultural, and ideological foundations of the field he helped create. As Villacañas rightly points out, the entire business of Hispanism, from its outset, was an exercise in “nacionalismo cultural posimperialismo” (29), and

Ticknor is useful as a case study of how this process played out in the nineteenth century.

As we continue to learn just how deeply the work of Ticknor and his cohort was determined by their socio-historical circumstance, we must necessarily re-evaluate our own biases and the ways in which we go about the business of Hispanism today.

44 Leigh

CHAPTER 1

GEORGE TICKNOR’S RECEPTION OF SPANISH LITERATURE

It has often enough been objected to books written and published in the United States, that they want a national air, tone, and temper. Unhappily, too, the complaint has not unfrequently (sic) been well founded. - George Ticknor, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Daniel Webster

George Ticknor’s reception of Spanish literature subsequently determined the way he would eventually mediate that literature in his History of Spanish Literature (1849). This work stood for many years as the only comprehensive history of Spanish literature and it charted the course for early Hispanist scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic

(Cuthbertson 117). As such, it is useful to examine how the Bostonian scholar first encountered Spanish literature in the early nineteenth century. This encounter was precipitated by his experiences as a youth and his association with Boston’s cultural and intellectual elite, a group referred to as the Boston Brahmins. In this chapter, I will first examine Ticknor’s education and upbringing among this particular caste of society, arguing that this group constituted what Stanley Fish has termed an “interpretive community”

(“Interpreting the Variorum” 483), that is, a community in which continued interaction among a group of individuals develops into a cohesive and, at times, limiting critical perspective. I will employ this concept both in its relation to the reception of literature, as well as, more broadly, its effect upon general thought. Central to this argument will be a consideration of the leading intellectual journal of the time, the North American Review

(NAR), a journal that may well be considered a storehouse of early-nineteenth-century

American critical thought, especially of the New England region. This examination will

45 Leigh document a growing interest in Spain and the Spanish language in the early issues of the

NAR, and, more importantly, show how American critics of this time, most of them

Ticknor’s friends and acquaintances, thought about Spain. We will then turn our attention to more substantial textual sources of Ticknor’s early exposure to literary theory, in general, and Spanish literature, specifically. These considerations will naturally tie into the final part of this chapter, which considers Ticknor’s first European journey, from May 1815 to May 1819. During this time, the young scholar studied at the University of Göttingen in

Germany, before embarking on a tour of Europe designed, in part, to prepare him for his appointment as first Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. The combination of all these events and relationships determined the way in which Ticknor both understood literature and sought to use it as an vehicle of cultural change. The ideas that congealed into Ticknor’s ultimate concept of literature, and its relation to society, can mostly be traced to this period, and Ticknor, in this respect, provides a window into not only the beginnings of Hispanism in the United States, but also, more generally, the process by which an individual internalizes the critical paradigms of a specific historical period and, in turn, applies them to a new academic discipline.

I will make extensive references to primary sources from Ticknor’s time period. NAR articles, contemporary literary histories, and personal correspondence will form the bulk of this documentation. The NAR articles serve to document the increasing interest in Spain of New England intellectuals during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, as well as the critical approach to Spain adopted by the journal’s contributors, Ticknor among them.

Then, we will devote some attention to two literary histories that preceded and directly influenced Ticknor’s interest in Spanish literature in order to more accurately trace his

46 Leigh own critical development. Lastly, the value of personal correspondence is obvious, in that it provides the historian with unique insight into her subject’s mindset, and often contains insightful reflections that do not appear in published form.

The Boston in which Ticknor grew up was overwhelmingly Federalist and

Protestant, and the values and beliefs of these groups would inform Ticknor’s critical and moral perspective for the rest of his life. It was a small, closely-knit community, one much different from the one Ticknor inhabited in 1849 when he described the Boston of his youth in the following way:

We were then, comparatively, a small people. We seemed to all know one another, as we met in the streets. […] We met more frequently than we had been wont to do, and felt involved in each other’s welfare and fate as it is impossible we should now. […] We were then a more compact, united, and kindly community than we have ever been since or ever can be again. (“Memoirs of the Buckminsters” 169-170)

Ticknor himself was raised a Calvinist, but soon thereafter became a Unitarian, then an emergent faith community in New England. Ticknor was never particularly zealous in matters of religion, but his faith was important to him, and in 1815, before leaving for his first European journey, we find Ticknor forwarding along a letter from none other than

John Adams (1735-1826)—incidentally the first Federalist president of the United States, and a proud son of Massachusetts—to a Dr. Morse regarding American Unitarianism. In this letter, Adams makes disparaging remarks about Catholicism and “Inquisitions,” blaming them for Napoleon’s restoration (Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, MS-983).

Ticknor certainly harbored anti-Catholic sentiments himself. In fact, it seems he was skeptical of most Old World religion, as many New Englanders were at the time (Jaksic 3).

While travelling through England, for instance, he concludes that the best Christians in that country are the “Methodistical,” or Evangelical, “not because I think their doctrines the

47 Leigh purest or their mode of inculcating them the most judicious, but because they have what the others want, an honest zeal without much bigotry and tolerably free from the spirit of persecution.” (Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, MS-983). Throughout his life, he would remain a staunch critic of what he perceived as religious bigotry and persecution and this would ultimately play a large part in the development of his thesis about Spanish literature.

Regarding Federalism, Thomas Hart has suggested that Ticknor and his entire circle believed government should be in the hands of the well-to-do and well-educated, namely their own class (“New England Background” 83). This position undoubtedly holds some truth, and Ticknor’s elitism can hardly be denied, but, as we will see in the following chapters, Ticknor’s scholarly efforts can be interpreted alternatively as essentially democratic in nature. Hart, on the other hand, perceives in Ticknor’s recurring insistence on fostering a literature that appeals to the masses an ulterior motive to prevent or delay a breakdown of the established social hierarchy (83). I contend that Ticknor, in fact, sought to educate the masses, as opposed to merely protecting his privileged position. His inherited belief in civil service, of providing some good to society, coupled with a strong work ethic, elucidates his entire career, including his History of Spanish Literature and his role in founding the Boston Public Library.

Indeed, the influential well-to-do men with whom Ticknor kept company felt a need to provide some form of service to the community. As his friend and biographer, George

Hilliard, notes, “it has always been deemed to be a sort of moral duty in New England for every one (sic) to study some profession or take up some calling” (Life, Letters, I 22).

Ticknor experienced this social pressure and, before departing for Europe, he writes to his friend, Charles Daveis:

48 Leigh

The truth is, dear Charles, that I have always considered this going to Europe a mere means of preparing myself for greater usefulness and happiness after I return,—as a great sacrifice of the present to the future; and the nearer I come to the time I am to make this sacrifice, the more heavy and extravagant it appears. (Life, Letters, I 24)

Ticknor repeats this idea in a letter to Thomas Jefferson—yet another presidential acquaintance—in 1818, saying, “all this time thus spent in Europe I consider a sacrifice of the present to the future and what I most desire is, to make the sacrifice useful to my country” (cited in Long, Literary Pioneers 36). Ticknor’s father, as well, was preoccupied with his son’s usefulness to society, at one point inquiring of President Wheelock of

Dartmouth College, Ticknor’s alma mater, whether the young man had the necessary foundations to be “really useful to himself and the public” (Life, Letters, I 5). And later, upon deliberating about whether to accept the offer to teach at Harvard, Ticknor inquires of his father: “Are you satisfied with the office and the occupation? For myself, I say freely, that the occupation would be pleasant to me, and I doubt not, in this office, I could, better than in any other, fulfill my duties to God and my neighbor…” (Introduction, Letters to Pascual de

Gayangos xxv). This concern for public service is present throughout Ticknor’s career and is a point we will discuss in more detail in the following chapters.

The Boston Brahmin group dominated the early American intellectual scene. These men, most often from white, wealthy, Protestant families, enjoyed a kind of cultural and intellectual authority over the rest of New England, and, by extension, the young United

States. Ticknor, at every stage of his life, kept company with the most prominent of citizens, and in Boston it was no different. Stanley Williams, writing about early Hispanists, describes Ticknor’s central position among this society in the following way: “Irving was his friend, Prescott his intimate, Longfellow his protégé, and Lowell his admirer” (47). He then adds, “among them all was a genuine corporate interest and a slightly exaggerated

49 Leigh sense of their own importance” (75). It is undeniable that Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins did feel a strong sense of self-importance. At the time, Boston was the leading intellectual hub of the United States, and the Brahmins understood themselves as both cultural and intellectual ambassadors to Europe, as well as intermediaries between foreign ideas and the American public. Through the pages of the NAR, the Brahmins spread their ideas to the rest of the country and, simultaneously, reinforced their own positions, both social and intellectual. In this way, they formed an interpretive community in which all ideas were processed through a similar critical mechanism. Of Ticknor’s History, for example, Thomas

Hart has argued, rightly, that it was merely “an attempt to fit the literature of Spain into a framework of ideas which was the common property of almost all the New England critics in the first quarter of the nineteenth century” (“New England Background” 76). This claim is certainly true, yet incomplete. Ticknor’s History represents a profound internalization and application of the critical thought of the Boston Brahmins, but he also incorporates foreign ideas extraneous to that group, most notably ideas from writers such as Madame de

Staël, Friedrich Bouterwek, and Simonde de Sismondi, all of whom will be discussed later in this chapter.

First, though, let us turn our attention to the North American Review. This periodical, edited and maintained by Ticknor and his group, was the first and most important

American literary publication of the time. Founded in Boston in 1815 by Nathan Hale, it was born out of the Boston Anthology Club and charged itself with fostering a genuine

American culture. In the first years of its existence, it mainly published fictional writing, but it soon incorporated more and more civic content for the betterment of American society.

For our purposes it is important as a repository of American critical thought in the early

50 Leigh nineteenth century, specifically that critical thought emanating from Boston. When reading early editions of the NAR, a common sense of identity and purpose is readily apparent.

Many articles, for instance, employ the inclusive term, “we,” explicitly signaling an implicit audience. This sense of community, albeit somewhat exclusive, conveyed authority and facilitated the diffusion of NAR ideas and judgments on history and literature. Other articles are signed, “A Citizen of the United States” or, “An American Lady,” thus broadening the implicit audience and emphasizing the role of the individual citizen in society. In both cases, however, it is clear that NAR contributors spoke to an audience of their peers, and this inclusive tone, in turn, fostered common perspectives and preoccupations.

One such preoccupation concerned American letters, or the lack thereof. In an article from the first year of the NAR’s publication, William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), a friend of Ticknor’s, lays out a theory of literature mostly consistent with contemporary

European literary theory. In this article, entitled, “Essay on American Language and

Literature,” Channing argues that literature is the result of local conditions, specifically climate, social institutions, and, finally, the moral, religious and political states that result from the former. These elements, as he argues, are necessarily unique to every nation. He then goes on to discuss language, which he considers fundamental to the cultivation of a genuinely national literature, and argues that America can never fully enjoy the fruits of a unique language due to its shared language with England (308). The question of language and its relation to authentic national literature will be discussed in more depth in the following chapters, but this early article by Channing serves to illustrate the widely held opinion among NAR contributors that America lacked a distinctive literary identity. These writers became increasingly anxious about this point, frequently voicing their

51 Leigh dissatisfaction with this sorry state of affairs and occasionally suggesting means of rectifying it. One such solution proposed the study of foreign literatures, not for imitation purposes, but merely as instructive examples of national literature. And for many, the medieval literature of Europe seemed to offer the most valuable lessons. Romantic theorists considered medieval literature, that is, the literature produced when nations and their respective languages were yet in their infancy, to be the earliest records of national character, a key concept in historical and literary scholarship of that time. Spain, in particular, proved especially suitable for American critical examination given its involvement in the “discovery” of the New World and the potential lessons to be learned from that nation’s imperial ascent, apogee, and decline.

Indeed, there is a definite interest, both positive and negative, in Spain and the

Spanish language in the early issues of the NAR. Ticknor, and many of his closest friends, published on Spanish matters with remarkable similarity in tone and content, though, initially, there were relatively few individuals familiar with the language. In 1826, a young

Jared Sparks, acting editor of the NAR from 1817-1818 and later president of Harvard

College, lamented that “hardly an editor in this country knows the Spanish language”

(unpublished letter, September 24, 1825, cited in Helman 345) and, a year earlier, he called attention to the need for sound instruction in the Spanish language in light of the recently emancipated nations of Latin America (Review of Mariano Cubí’s New Spanish Grammar

451). Sparks henceforth established reputable correspondents in the young nations of

Latin America, on whose accounts many NAR articles were based in the following decades.

As we can see from the following excerpt, Sparks’s encouragement to study Spanish was primarily motivated by the potential for economic gains for the United States:

52 Leigh

At the present time, and with the future political prospects of the western continent, few accomplishments are more desirable to the well-educated youth of our country, than a knowledge of the Spanish language. It is already spoken by half of the population of the western world, and its use and influence will rapidly increase. Our commercial intercourse and political relations with the Southern Republics will necessarily bring us into close and perpetual contact with them on innumerable points. And an acquaintance with their common vehicle of thought will be a not more effectual means of advancing our own interests, than of strengthening the bonds of union between nations, whose aim and destiny are nearly the same. (451)

Regarding the commercial interest in the Spanish language, James Fernández has written an insightful article entitled, “Longfellow’s Law” (2002), which argues that American interest in Spain during the nineteenth century was always guided by economic interest in

Latin America. The previous citation would certainly seem to support that interpretation, but, if we keep reading, a secondary motivation comes to light. Sparks continues:

We shall have the additional advantage, moreover, and it is not a small one, of the example and spirit of the best Spanish writers operating on our literature. In this country little is known of the elegant letters of Spain; it is a field unexplored, but it is wide and fertile, rich in the fruits of genius and of cultivated intellect. The language of Cervantes and Calderon, of Lope de Vega and Feijoo, may safely challenge a comparison with any other in high models of poetry and eloquence, brilliancy and imagination, or vigor or thought. (451)

When Sparks published this review, George Ticknor had already been lecturing on Spanish and French literature at Harvard for seven years and had published his Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on the History and Criticism of Spanish Literature three years prior, in 1823, the same year, coincidentally, in which the United States issued the Monroe Doctrine. The scant attention paid to Spanish literature in America to which Sparks refers is likely due to, and not in spite of, the attention already paid to it by figures such as Ticknor and his close friend, William Prescott2; nevertheless, Sparks’s article is interesting for its novel suggestion—at least in the American context—that Spanish literature may prove valuable

2 In Sparks’s review of Cubí’s A New Spanish Grammar, he explicitly presents the projects of Cubí and Ticknor, in his Syllabus, as complementary (451).

53 Leigh to American literature, and it certainly succeeds in spurring other NAR publications on

Spain in the following years. This growing interest in Spain follows a period in which that country was generally disparaged in America, largely due to its perceived slavish devotion to Catholicism, its absolutist government, and its reputation for cruelty propagated by the

Black Legend. By the 1820s, however, Spain’s resistance to Napoleon during the Peninsular

Wars and its moves toward an ostensibly democratic system “made America realize that there was another Spain, a liberal Spain, a Spain quite different from the one it had abhorred” (Helman 343). While old prejudices would certainly linger and reappear at times, as Richard Kagan has illustrated in his article, “From Noah to Moses,” this new attitude toward Spain prompted a novel and productive period of Hispanist scholarship in

America upon which that discipline is based today.

While we may observe a growing interest in Spain in early issues of the NAR, most of the admiration expressed by contributors continued to be tempered by a profound and lasting distrust of Spain’s religion and government. NAR writers revered Spain as a once- powerful empire and often cited the virtues of its people, while simultaneously bemoaning its inextricable ties to the Inquisition and autocratic rule. In the 1820s, American writers rejoiced that “the arm of Old Spain is paralysed” (Anonymous, “Alliance of the Southern

Republics” 168) and, in a celebratory article about the ongoing emancipation of the Latin

American nations in 1824, an NAR contributor compared the fate of those nations to the

United States and reckoned that Spain’s “tyranny” over her colonies “has been one of the most hateful, the most indefensible, whether on the ground of right or expediency, which the world has ever witnessed” (Anonymous, “South America” 159). An anonymous 1827 review of Martín Fernández de Navarrete’s history of Columbus—possibly penned by

54 Leigh

William Prescott—is noteworthy, among other reasons, for its Romantic exaltation of

Columbus as an individual and its reprobation of the Spanish historian for his defense of the Spanish rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella. The reviewer portrays Columbus as a decidedly

American hero—just as Washington Irving would do in his own biography of Columbus

(Adorno, “Un caso de hispanismo anglonorteamericano temprano: El encuentro colombino de Washington Irving y Martín Fernández de Navarrete”; “Washington Irving’s Romantic

Hispanism and Its Columbian Legacies”)3—who triumphantly rose to greatness in spite of, and not due to, the influence of the Spanish Crown. Columbus, according to our reviewer, overcame “the superstitions of the priesthood” and the “incredulity of the government,” making them both yield to the “force of truth” (Review of Navarrete’s Colección de viajes y descubrimientos 270-71). For their part, Ferdinand and Isabella “did no more than yield tardy assistance to the great undertaking” (288) and, in doing so, “acted like common persons, in the ordinary level of mediocrity in understanding, and of narrow-mindedness in policy” (289). Nor is the Spanish historian spared. For seemingly excusing the behavior of the Catholic Kings, the reviewer scathingly accuses Navarrete of “interested sophistry” and manipulating history by “making the worse to seem the better cause” (287). These remarks appear, characteristically, alongside positive references to the “prolific invention” of the Spanish people and their former “golden tide of poetry, of romance, of productions in every branch of letters.” Ultimately, however, “the influence of superstition fettered their genius” (266).

3 Interestingly, Irving’s work on Columbus was thought capable of building the foundations of an American national literature (Adorno, “Washington Irving’s Romantic Hispanism and Its Columbian Legacies” 66).

55 Leigh

NAR contributors often blamed the Inquisition and the State for the present ruin of

Spain, but, at other times, the Spanish people were similarly attacked. These instances illustrate a deep-rooted animosity toward Spaniards, an animosity that Ticknor and his colleagues would labor to mitigate over the course of their careers. As Ivan Jaksic has shown, Ticknor and early American Hispanists were indeed complicit in the negative stereotyping of Spain and Spaniards, but they also laid the groundwork for the appreciation of Hispanic culture that continues to guide our discipline today (6). One example of the kind of round condemnation of Spaniards referred to above can be found in one of the earliest issues of the NAR. In an article, entitled, “Character of Spain and Spaniards,” an anonymous contributor lashes out at Spain right from the beginning, focusing his attack on the Inquisition. But then he goes further and, regarding Spaniards, proclaims:

Are they thinking men? No. They are enveloped in voluptuousness and indifference. Are they active men? No. They enjoy the activity of others—amusements, frivolity, diversions, which delude the mind, without invigorating the body. They have talents, it is true; but they do not use them. They have minds, but they rust in idleness. (56)

To anchor this indictment, the commentator first cites a Spanish ecclesiastic’s condemnation of the Inquisition, supposedly delivered in a Catholic church in Philadelphia on a dare by Benjamin Franklin, and, secondly, the late Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’s criticisms of Spain. Essentially, then, this contributor bolsters his condemnation of Spain by citing criticisms of actual Spaniards. These public attacks on Spaniards were rare, though.

Most often, Spain is portrayed, rather, as an object of pity, a once-mighty colonial power deprived of its possessions and left politically and economically inept.

Over and against the censures and praises of Spain in the NAR, a special connection is recurrently traced between Spain and the Americas in these writings. The legacy of

Christopher Columbus provides one interesting example. In an article announcing

56 Leigh

Navarrete’s project, an NAR contributor considers it “peculiarly proper” that “these papers”—it is unclear whether he refers to Navarrete’s historical sources or his own writings—“should be translated and published in America,” adding that “we should be mortified…that we do less as a nation for the cause of letters, and our own history, than the government of Spain, whose liberality and literary propensities we are not in the habit of extolling” (“New Documents Relating to Columbus” 487). And, one year later, the previously cited 1827 review of Navarrete’s history of Columbus states:

Spain still appears to derive a melancholy gratification from contemplating the fortunes and elucidating the history of her lost America. Under the auspices of the proud and bigoted, but chivalrous and high-minded nation, it was the destiny of Columbus to discover the New World; and its history is therefore inseparably associated with her language and literature. (266)4

This connection between Spain and the Americas, specifically the United States, fixed upon by nineteenth-century American writers, has been explained by Richard Kagan in his well- known article, “Prescott’s Paradigm” (1996), and elsewhere (“From Noah to Moses” 22). In

“Prescott’s Paradigm,” Kagan persuasively argues that Spain served the United States antithetically, providing the young, up-and-coming nation with a counter-image of a former global power undone by religion and government, a thesis that has been further developed by Jaksic (The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life, 1820-1880), among others. In the NAR excerpt cited above, we may observe a casual transference of power from Spain to the United States. The latter is progressive, Protestant, and democratic, while the former is conservative, Catholic, and authoritarian. Or, as one-time president of Brown University,

Francis Wayland, would phrase it, America is a “government of law,” while Spain is a

4 On the contest for Columbus’s legacy between Washington Irving and Martín Fernández de Navarrete, see: Adorno, Rolena. “Washington Irving’s Romantic Hispanism and Its Columbian Legacies.” In Spain in America, edited by Richard Kagan. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 49-105.

57 Leigh

“government of will” (Anonymous, Review of “The Duties of an American Citizen” 362).

America is the future. Spain is the past. Such seems to be the message. Nevertheless, Spain is not only “proud and bigoted,” it is also “chivalrous and high-minded,” complicating a monolithic view of the country and its people. There are, it seems, lessons to be learned from Spain. Another NAR article from the same year expands upon the draw of Spain for

Americans:

To the people of the United States the language and literature of Spain are peculiarly interesting. If we are not attracted by the beauty of its dialect, one of the noblest extant; by the charms of its ancient poetry, distinguished for simplicity and force, for exquisite pathos and manly spirit, full of the strength of feeling and rugged independence which characterized a brave and hardy race, who dwelt in the fastness of the mountains, and did daily battle for their country and religion; by the richness and excellence of its drama, from whose stores the other nations of Europe have drawn a large part of the materials of their national theatres; by the knowledge, both of the language and the literature of Spain. We say the literature, because the books which are generally read among any people, the sources from which its noblest minds draw their elements of thought, hold an important place among the causes which determine its national character. (Wigglesworth 248)

This commentary from Edward Wigglesworth’s 1828 review of Francis Sales’s edition of

José Cadalso’s Cartas marruecas elaborates on the value of Spanish language and literature for Americans. In accordance with Sparks’s view, Wigglesworth sees in Spanish literature a valuable store of literary talent capable of inspiring American authors to greatness. As we shall see, Ticknor, too, employed Spanish literature in the American context, albeit with a slightly different agenda. In addition to simply highlighting the literary achievements of

Spain, Ticknor thought the trajectory of Spanish literature could be instructive as a cautionary tale to aspiring writers in his own country. In his younger years, Ticknor felt the growing anxiety expressed by NAR contributors at the paucity of American cultural production, and he sought to relieve those tensions in two ways, the first being his own unprecedented contribution to the study of Spanish literature, and, secondly, his

58 Leigh interpretation of the trajectory of that literary tradition. If Americans were to cultivate an autochthonous literature, it must be guided by lived experience and free from the impositions of external forces—namely, the Church and State—and free, also, from foreign influences.

From an early age, Ticknor was well versed in contemporary scholarship and

Romantic literary theory coming from Europe, despite the difficulties in securing books in

New England. Although he regretted the general lack of books to be found in Boston

(“Memoirs of the Buckminsters” 183), especially those in German, he was able to secure editions of some of the key literary figures of his time. These writers, in addition to his immediate social circle, colored the way he would think about literature for the rest of his life. Indeed, Ticknor’s primary beliefs about authentic literature stem from his early exposure to European theory, and these beliefs would play a decisive role in not only his criticism of Spanish literature but also his desire to foment—and his ideas about the rightful nature of—an autochthonous American literature.

Like all literary scholars of the early nineteenth century, Ticknor was influenced by the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)5, especially his hierarchical evaluation of literature, his distinction between Naturpoesie and Kunstpoesie, and his theory of historicism, which countered the universalist principles of Neoclassicism. Herder believed that national character could be sought and discovered in only the most authentic literature, and that meant folk compositions. Folk songs, then, occupied the most important

5 On Herder’s popularity, an anonymous NAR contributor wrote: The influence of Herder on his age was wide, and entirely beneficial to the best interests of our race; he has been extensively read and admired, and always with results beneficial to morals and sentiments of philanthropy. (“Writings of Herder” 144)

59 Leigh position in his scale of literary value. Derivative literature occupied the other extreme. This latter category comprised any work of imitation or foreign influence (Hart, “Bouterwek”

357). Herder’s evaluative paradigm was long-lived in the nineteenth century and Ticknor, along with Bouterwek and Sismondi, all subscribed to that theoretical framework.

A large amount of credit is also due to the influence of Madame de Staël and the

Schlegel bothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich, who may be considered members of a like- minded group that, according to one critic, “had the most to do with American interest in the historical and national study of literature” (Charvat 60). These figures helped spread and further develop Herder’s ideas within Europe, and Ticknor had already read their work in Boston before departing for Europe in 1816. Indeed, it has been repeatedly stated that

Ticknor’s initial desire to study in Göttingen was the direct influence of Madame de Staël’s widely read De l’Allemagne (Jaksic 30; Hart, “New England Background” 87; Long, Literary

Pioneers 5). In reality, De Staël dedicates very few paragraphs to German universities in this work, and her remarks contain a mix of praise and criticism. She only mentions

Göttingen once, and does not go into detail about its merits. Nevertheless, elsewhere, in his lectures on French literature, Ticknor calls De l’Allemagne “one of the most admirable sketches of national character—of all, I mean, that constitutes the essential nationality of a people that has ever been given to the world” (cited in Hart, “New England Background”

87-88). It is very likely, then, that Ticknor took from this work a general idea of how to write about national peculiarities, as many of De Staël’s comments on the Germans’ motivations, beliefs, and customs are mirrored in Ticknor’s remarks on the Spanish people.

De l’Allemagne, along with her De la littérature dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Influence of Literature on Society), appeared in English-language translation in

60 Leigh

1813, but it is likely that Ticknor originally read it in French. For their part, Friedrich

Schegel’s Geschichte der alten und neueren Literatur (Lectures on the History of Literature,

Ancient and Modern) was published in English translation in Philadelphia in 1818, while the most influential work of his brother, Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (Lectures on

Dramatic Art and Literature), appeared in translation in 1833. Despite these rather late translations, others were probably available earlier, as William Charvat has suggested, due to the prolific discussion of these works in the pages of the NAR (60). In any case, their influence was widely felt in Ticknor’s Boston.

Madame de Staël’s popularity in early nineteenth-century New England can hardly be overstated. In 1820, an anonymous contributor to the NAR wrote:

Few books in modern times, which were not practical, nor scientific, nor directly subservient to the comforts of man and the purposes of society, have been read so eagerly and universally, and known so far as hers. (“Life and Writings of Madame de Staël” 125)

This reviewer goes on to acknowledge her admirable analysis of the relationship between literature, society, religion, morality, and politics, topics that, according to the author,

“would indeed be an arduous task,—too much so, one would think, for any woman to undertake or for any man to execute” (130). Two years later, another anonymous writer claimed that:

taking into view the extent of the public to which she addressed herself, as well as her success in obtaining its favor, it would be difficult to find a name that can come in competition with hers, since the time of Voltaire and Rousseau. (“Posthumous Works of Madame de Staël” 102)

Her authority, especially among the NAR circle, was long-lived. Edward Everett cites her ideas about the relationship between literature and society as late as 1834 (Review of

Bouterwek’s Historia 158-159), and Ticknor, in an 1857 letter to William Prescott,

61 Leigh admiringly recalls her opinion of Rome as “le salon de l’Europe” (Life, Letters, II 342). The popular Scottish critic, Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850), of the Edinburgh Review, was instrumental in spreading De Staël’s ideas in America, and, after his visit to Boston in 1814,

Ticknor remarked that Jeffrey “exercised some influence over every one of us” (cited in

Hart, “New England Background” 88). According to Hart, De Staël was generally considered a spokeswoman for the Schlegel brothers in Ticknor’s time (“New England Background”

87); Ticknor, however, seemed to reserve his greatest admiration for the French author, and, so, let us briefly outline Madame de Staël’s principal ideas, as they have a direct connection to Ticknor’s conception of literature.

De Staël believed in a profound and reciprocal influence between literature and society. The main thrust of her argument has been succinctly summarized by Morroe

Berger in the following manner:

Literature, itself shaped by a nation’s character, is the measure of the learning of both the best minds and the ordinary ones. Literature in this broad sense in turn helps shape a nation’s government and political institutions. In their turn, political institutions, taken as the arrangement of social life in general rather than merely narrow governmental forms, shape the character of a nation. National character finally is both a determinant and a product of social institutions and thought. (30)

In other words, literature and society are always already exerting an influence on one another and it is through this interaction that one may discover national character. This

“genius” was always being formed. It was not, as certain others claimed, an inert, innate influence, against which other forces do battle or give way, but rather the ever-changing manifestation of the concert of society and cultural production. This concept of national character left room for, and, in fact, was predicated upon, an idea of progress, without its usual moral accompaniment. De Staël considered things matter-of-factly, arguing, for example, that the Germans were similar to the English in their systematic thought, but,

62 Leigh where the English might hope to influence events through their writings, the Germans, without a centralized seat of learning and government, turned to speculative and metaphysical studies (Berger 76)6. Such was one manifestation of national character. In reality, though, De Staël rarely sought to define individual national characters. Her compelling ideas about the interplay of disparate forces upon each other, however, would prove a fruitful area of investigation and speculation for generations of scholars, Ticknor among them. Finally, on the topic of foreign influences in national literature, De Staël disdained them as harmful to “natural genius,” arguing that, at one point, all of Europe, and

France in particular, risked squandering its own genius through imitation of Italian models.

6 Ticknor addressed this same issue in a letter to Edward T. Channing on June 16, 1816. It is obvious from his initial remarks that he defers to De Staël’s authority, but he questions the extent to which Germans and Englishmen differ, not seemingly willing to attribute it all to De Staël’s idea of national character: As to the peculiar character of these metaphysics, you will get all the information necessary from Mad. De Staël. They are undoubtedly very different from the metaphysics taught by Locke, Reid, and Stewart. The Germans reproach the English with treating such objects psychologically, or, in other words, not sufficiently distinguishing the difference between ideas and sensations; and the English reply that the Germans are unintelligible idealists. The difference between the two is very great, and, moreover, it is, I think, a natural and constitutional difference. (Life, Letters, I 98) As such, we might conclude that Ticknor takes some issue with De Staël’s definition of national character, but he continues and outs himself as an firm believer in her system: In England, from the character of the people and the nature of the government, which for a thousand years have been continually acting and reacting upon each other, many things must be made to serve some practical purpose, and nothing is valued which is not immediately useful. In Germany, on the contrary, the national character, from the first intimation of it in Tacitus, and the tendency of the government, from its first development to the present day, have always had an effect directly opposite. A man of science lives here entirely isolated from the world; and the very republic of letters, which is a more real body in Germany than it ever was in any other country, has no connection with the many little governments through which it is scattered without being broken or divided. From this separation of the practical affairs from science and letters to the extraordinary degree in which it is done in Germany, comes, I think, the theoretical nature of German literature in general, and of German metaphysics in particular. (Life, Letters, I 98)

63 Leigh

According to De Staël, “the beauties that make the Italian poets immortal depend upon language, climate, imagination, upon circumstances of all kinds that cannot be spread elsewhere, whereas their faults are highly contagious” (190). In short, national genius, or character, would certainly be perverted through foreign imitation, a point upon which

Ticknor would dwell in his own writings on Spanish literature.

We cannot conclude these comments on Madame de Staël without mentioning

Ticknor’s fateful visit to the dying woman in May of 1817. In typical Ticknor fashion, he was given an audience with the sickly De Staël at a time when she would admit no one else.

During this meeting, surely one of much excitement for Ticknor, she spoke to him of

America, saying: “You are the vanguard of the human race. You are the future of the world”

(Life, Letters, I 132-133), having previously said that, although the Americans did not yet have a well-defined literature of their own, they possessed all the necessary ingredients—

“liberty, political equality, and the customs consistent with its institutions”—to produce great literature (cited in Berger 23). These remarks must have deeply impressed Ticknor and his encounter with De Staël likely inspired him to contribute to the literary nation- building project so often discussed in the pages of the NAR. What is certain is that Ticknor’s magnum opus, the History of Spanish Literature, would echo many of De Staël’s teachings on literature and contribute in no small way to the growing body of scholarly literature in the

United States.

In addition to the determining effects of the Boston Brahmin interpretive community, Ticknor was deeply influenced by two previous examinations of Spanish literature. It was upon these studies that he based his own History, conceiving of it not as a mere supplement, but rather, as a corrective to the previous attempts. Ticknor encountered

64 Leigh these studies at an early age and, upon writing the introduction to his History, makes no effort to deny his reliance upon them. Indeed, as early as the publication of Ticknor’s

Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on the History and Criticism of Spanish Literature in 1823,

Ticknor states that the histories of Bouterwek and Sismondi are “the only works on

Spanish literature that need to be mentioned” (iii). Before publishing his History more than twenty years later, Ticknor would inevitably borrow ideas from other scholars, as well as develop his own ideas in more depth, but it is undeniable that the overall thrust of his

History can be traced to the works of these two European precedents.

The first was Friedrich Bouterwek’s Geschichte der neuren Poesie und Beredsamkeit

(1804), a series of literary histories published in installments between 1801 and 1819.

Bouterwek (1766-1828), a German, was primarily devoted to the field of philosophy, first as a disciple, then as a detractor of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). His interests, however, often led him to other disciplines, such as history and literature. The third volume of his series, Geschichte der spanischen Poesie (History of Spanish Literature), was soon translated into French, Spanish, and English, the latter translation completed by Thomasina Ross in

1823. According to various literary historians, this work quickly became “el más autorizado texto de referencia sobre literatura española en la primera mitad del siglo XIX” (Galván and

Banús, El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX 19; Hart, “Friedrich

Bouterwek” 351). It also stands out as one of the first attempts at a narrative history of a modern European literature (Hart, “Bouterwek” 351). Despite its popularity among academic audiences, however, Bouterwek’s History is not a very detailed or rigorous work.

In defense of Bouterwek’s limited review of Spanish literature, Thomas Hart has said that the German critic expressly intended to write a “pragmatic” history, and not a “philological”

65 Leigh one (History of Spanish Literary History 31), and this is probably true, especially considering that he never travelled to Spain and reviewed most Spanish works secondhand, either copies of originals or translations. While it is unclear from the sources whether or not Ticknor was familiar with Bouterwek’s work on Spanish literature while still in Boston, he certainly read parts of the series in German before travelling to Europe.

Then, while installed at Göttingen, he matriculated in Bouterwek’s class on aesthetics and reputedly lived in the German scholar’s house (Long, Literary Pioneers 11n29)! While it is similarly unclear, based on Ticknor’s journals and letters from this period, whether he and

Bouterwek exchanged ideas about literary history or Spanish literature, in particular, it seems unimaginable that the two would not have discussed such issues while living and working in such proximity. Jaksic has suggested that Ticknor enrolled in Bouterwek’s class on European literary history (31), which would be a compelling connection, but, unfortunately, the sources do not reflect this. Despite unsubstantiated speculation on the extent of Ticknor’s relationship with Bouterwek while in Germany, the latter’s influence on the former can be clearly delineated upon a brief examination of Bouterwek’s chief ideas, principally regarding the earliest Spanish literature.

Bouterwek’s ideas about Spain are, at times, ambiguous and contradictory. As is well known, the “case of Spain” was fodder for much intellectual discussion in nineteenth- century Europe. Both European and “other,” there was much debate regarding the extent of cultural miscegenation in medieval Spain and its subsequent influence on the development of “Spanish-ness,” or national character. Bouterwek’s position vis-à-vis the question of

Spain is paradoxical. On one hand, the German scholar emphasizes a profound cultural and

66 Leigh literary hybridity as the result of the continuous interactions between the Christian and

Muslim populations of early Spain:

During these five centuries of almost uninterrupted warfare between the race of Moorish Arabs and the Christians of ancient European descent, both parties, notwithstanding that their reciprocal hostility was influenced by fanaticism, had unconsciously approximated in mind and in manners. The intervals of repose, which formed short links in the chain of their sanguinary conflicts, afforded them some opportunities for the interchange of the arts of peace, and they were soon taught to feel for each other that involuntary respect which the brave can never withhold from brave adversaries. Love adventures, in which the Moorish knight and Christian lady, or the Christian knight and Moorish lady, respectively participated, could not be of rare occurrence. The Arab, who, in his native deserts, had not been accustomed to impose on women half the despotic restraints to which the sex is subject in the harems of Mahometan cities, was soon disposed to imitate the gallantry of the descendants of the Goths; and still more readily did the imagination of the Christian knight, in a climate which was far from being ungenial, even to African invaders, acquire an oriental loftiness. (I 2)

These prolonged contests between cultures led to a specific “spirit of Spanish knighthood,” distinct from other forms of European chivalry. In other words, the particular history of

Spain, conditioned by cultural hybridity, is the determining factor of its national character.

On the other hand, however, Bouterwek claims a “pure” development of early Spanish literature that occurred, implicitly, within Spain’s Christian community. On the origins of

Peninsular popular and national literature, he says the following:

The old Castilian, Portuguese, and Galician poetry was, under its own peculiar forms, still more popular and strictly national than was the Provencal, or than the Italian after it has ever been. It was not destined to be recited in courtly circles, before lords and ladies. It arose amidst the clang of arms, and was fostered by constantly reiterated relations of warlike feats and love adventures, transmitted from mouth to mouth; while almost every one who either witnessed or participated in those feats and adventures, wished to give them traditional circulation in the vehicle of easy verse. (I 18-19)

And he continues:

The poems called Romances took their name from the national language; and it is probable that the same name was at first given to all kinds of amatory and heroic

67 Leigh

ballads, the taste for which, however rapidly those productions increased and supplanted each other, appears to have been insatiable. (I 19)

Bouterwek declares the redondilla as the only truly national meter, that is, the primitive redondilla that is most likely a relic of Romanic verse, and he entirely disregards the influence of Arabic traditional verse, whereas, previously, he had emphasized the mutual influence of the Christian and Muslim cultures. Accompanying this exaltation of the redondilla is a disdain for the more polished foreign poetic forms, such as the sonnet and the alexandrine. These forms were unnaturally imported into Spain by “Provençal and

Limosin poets” and “monkish rhymesters,” and, being inauthentic vehicles of true national character, soon “sunk into disesteem” (I 25-26). In Bouterwek’s estimation, then, despite his insistence on the importance of cultural interaction in the formation of Spanish national character, the redondilla emerges as the only true national verse as it supposedly sprung from the very soil of Christian Spain and nurtured an autochthonous poetic composition.

The redondilla proved particularly apt for early Spanish composition given its simplicity that naturally lent itself to composition in the middle of the battlefield (I 20-21).

This distinguishes it from the elite, courtly versification of Provence and Italy. The Spanish- ness of early Spanish poetry, then, resided in its ability to be undertaken by all, its true popularity. The lax formality of the redondilla allowed any Spaniard to compose verses with the immediacy of lived experience, “without constraint, the expression flowing with careless freedom, as feeling gave it birth” (I 18-19; 20-21). Bouterwek illustrates his vision of poetic composition in early Spain in the following way:

When an impressive story of poetical character was found, the subject and the interest belonging to it were seized with so much truth and feeling, that the parts of the little piece, the brief labour of untutored art, linked themselves together, as it were, spontaneously; and the imagination of the bard had no higher office than to give to the situations a suitable colouring and effect. This he performed without

68 Leigh

study or effort, and painted them more or less successfully according to the inspiration, good or bad, of the moment. These antique, racy effusions of a pregnant poetic imagination, scarcely conscious of its own productive power, are nature's genuine offspring. (I 55-56)

Nature as the source of literature is a commonplace of Romantic literary theory, and it is one that will be restated by Sismondi and Ticknor. Implicit in the significance given to nature is a rejection of the rigidity and formality of Neoclassicist criticism and, in fact,

Bouterwek immediately proceeds to condemn criticism of early Spanish ballads according to Neoclassicist principles. The ballad form, given its inherent lack of ornament and learned style, was under-appreciated by Neoclassicism, which emphasized strict adherence to form.

On the other hand, Bouterwek believed the most valuable literature was that which develops in geographic isolation as the result of some unique impetus or need. It is this literature that accurately embodies national character, not the studied decorum of imported forms. To Bouterwek’s mind, such characteristics exempt the Spanish ballads from the strictness of Neoclassicist criticism, with its adherence to rigid Aristotelian constructs, and place them, instead, in the realm of Romantic literature, with emphasis given to nature and sentiment.7

Bouterwek’s steadfast exaltation of autochthonous literature somewhat complicates his evaluation of another piece of early Spanish poetry, the Poema de Mio Cid (PMC). The extant version of this poem dates to around the year 1200. Throughout the poem, a seemingly reckless form of alexandrine is utilized, and the alexandrine, of French extraction, is not native to Spain. On this account, Bouterwek denigrates the PMC, saying:

This chronicle can scarcely called a poem; and that it could not have been the result of a poetic essay made in the spirit of the national taste, is evident, from the nature of the verse, which is a kind of rude alexandrine. … it is not with this work that the

7 On Bouterwek’s disputed Romanticism, see Hart, History of Spanish Literary History.

69 Leigh

history of Spanish poetry ought to commence. As a philological curiosity, the rhymed chronicle is highly valuable; but any thing like poetry which it contains must be considered as a consequence of the poetic character of the nation to which the versifier belonged, and of the internal interest of the subject. The events are narrated in the order in which they succeed each other, and the whole work scarcely exhibits a single mark of invention. The small portion of poetical colouring with which the dryness of the relation is occasionally relieved, is the result of the chivalrous cordiality of the writer's tone, and of a few happy traits in the description of some of the situations. (I 29)

As Thomas Hart has pointed out, it is to Herder that we can trace the origin of the concept of national self-determination, that is, the idea that every nation has a duty to develop in its own, unique way. Any foreign influence, real or imagined, in national literature was cause for negative value judgments (Hart, “Bouterwek” 357). This is a critical topos in nineteenth- century criticism, and one that will reappear in the work of Sismondi and Ticknor.

Bouterwek’s negative opinion of the PMC, however, occurs over and against his favorable judgment of the historical personage, Rodrigo Díaz, who he considers crucial to the development of early Spanish literature:

The origin of Castilian poetry is lost in the obscurity of the middle ages. The poetic spirit which then awoke in the north of Spain, doubtless first manifested itself in romances and popular songs. Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, called El Campeador, (the Champion), and still better known by the Arabic title of the Cid, (the Lord or Leader), assisted in founding the kingdom of Castile for his prince, Ferdinand I, about the year 1036, and the name and the exploits of that favorite hero of the nation were probably celebrated during his own age in imperfect redondillas. That some of the many romances which record anecdotes of the life of the Cid may be the offspring of that period, is a conjecture which, to say the least of it, has never been disproved; and indeed the whole character impressed upon Spanish poetry from its rise, denotes that the era which gave birth to the first songs of chivalry must be very remote. In the form, however, in which these romances now exist, it does not appear that even the oldest can be referred to the twelfth, far less to the eleventh century. (I 27-28)

Interest in the PMC, and in Rodrigo Díaz, gradually increased among early-nineteenth- century literary circles, especially in Germany and England. Bouterwek, though, may be the first to so openly disparage the work as unworthy of serious literary criticism (Galván and

70 Leigh

Banús, El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX 19). The PMC, according to Bouterwek, exists as a mere “philological curiosity,” nothing more. It cannot be considered a truly representative vehicle of Spanish national character due to its rude form and foreign meter, nor is it commendable on artistic grounds. These judgments will be, at turns, repeated, elaborated, and altered by Bouterwek’s immediate follower, Simonde de

Sismondi, and, some years later, by Ticknor.

Bouterwek is more positive regarding Spain’s ballads, as he considers that tradition truly “indigenous” (I 47). In typical fashion, Bouterwek commends Spanish achievement in the creation of ballads, while, at the same time, condescending to claim that, unlike other nations, Spaniards did not distinguish between prose and verse, truth and fiction. He thus posits a direct correlation between the creation of Spanish ballads in verse and the historical chronicles in prose begun under the auspices of Alfonso X (1221-1284). As he puts it:

As the giving to an accredited fact a poetical dress in a song fit to be sung to a guitar, was not thought inconsistent with the spirit of genuine national history, still less could the relating of a fabricated story as a real event in history seem hostile to the spirit of poetry. Thus the historical romance in verse, and the chivalric romance in prose, derived their origin from the confounding of the limits of epic and historical composition. The history of Spanish poetical romance is therefore intimately interwoven with the history of the prose chivalric romance. (I 47-48)

Surprisingly, however, he goes on to claim that, in the early ages of Spanish literature, there existed a body of literary material common to both Spain and France that was “throughout its whole extent nearly the same to both countries” (I 52). This shared corpus was ingested and reworked, against the historical chronicles, into ballads before that form became widely adopted in Spain. To this concert of chronicle and ballad Bouterwek attributes the extant ballads in written form, while recognizing that “popular songs of every kind were

71 Leigh probably indigenous in the Peninsula” very early as a result of the decisive contests between Moors and Christians. Bouterwek likens Spain’s early balladeers to modern historians, endowing them with the skill, albeit unlearned, of accurately documenting history:

Neither the materials nor the interest of the situations owe any thing to the invention of these simple bards. They never ventured to embellish with fictitious circumstances, stories which were already in themselves interesting, lest they should deprive their ballads of historical credit. In the historical romances the story displays none of those entanglements and developments which distinguish some of the longer romances of chivalry. They are simple pictures of single situations only. The poetic representation of the details which give effect to the situation is almost the only merit which can be attributed to the narrators, and they employed no critical study to obtain it. In this way were thousands of these romances destined to be composed, and partly preserved, partly forgotten, without one of their authors acquiring the reputation of a great poet. It was regarded rather as an instance of good fortune than a proof of talent, when the author of a romance was particularly successful in painting an interesting situation. In general their efforts did not carry them beyond mediocrity, but mediocrity was not discouraged, for it depended entirely on accident, or perhaps some secondary causes, whether a romance became popular or sunk into oblivion. It would require a separate treatise to discuss in a satisfactory manner, the degree of merit which belongs to these national ballads, the immense number of which defies calculation. Many little, and upon the whole very unimportant specimens are still worthy of preservation, on account of some one single trait which each exhibits. Others, on the contrary, excite attention by the happy combination of a number of traits in themselves minute and of little value; again, a third class is distinguished by a sonorous rhythm not to be found in the rest. (I 59-61)

Consequently, the earliest literature of Spain possessed no other value for Bouterwek other than its varying and debatable degree of historicity. Despite his insistence on the inappropriateness of judging the Spanish ballads and epics according to Neoclassicist standards, the German scholar ultimately decides that these literary forms are largely unimportant and only achieve, at best, a “relative beauty,” never, however, attaining

“Classic perfection” (I 61). Thus concludes Bouterwek’s meditation on the PMC and the

72 Leigh

Spanish ballads, leaving the reader not a little confused regarding his true feelings about the foundations of Spanish literature.

Ticknor’s other predecessor in writing at length about Spanish literature was the

Swiss intellectual, Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842). Chiefly a historian and political economist, Sismondi, too, was attracted to the study of literature and in 1813 he published his De la Littérature du Midi de l’Europe, translated into English in

1823 as Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe. This study mostly follows the critical approach laid out by Bouterwek, who he acknowledges in the preface, and he repeats many of his counterpart’s judgments. Somewhat surprisingly, however, given the much-delayed adoption of Romanticism in France, the francophone scholar’s conception of literature stands out as more Romantic than that of his German predecessor. He gives special attention to locality as a determinant of literary production and dismisses what he considers the unjust application of universalist criteria in literary criticism as incapable of leading to a true appreciation of beauty (12-13). At the same time, he distances himself from Madame de Staël’s notion of climatic determinism, which she, of course, inherited from Herder (Hart, A History of Spanish Literary History 86). Furthermore, Sismondi pays special attention to Arabic culture, history, and literature, which he considers fundamental to an understanding of Spanish national character. Spain itself, on the other hand, he describes as “decidedly Oriental,” and claims that “its spirit, its pomp, its object, all belong to another sphere of ideas—to another world” (Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe 58). This is a clear example of the rampant exoticism of Spain present in so many nineteenth-century writings. Again, the origin of this perception may be traced to Herder, who once called Spaniards the “asiáticos de Europa” (cited in Bertrand 5). Notwithstanding

73 Leigh his complicity in this critical paradigm, Sismondi argues throughout his study for the importance of incorporating a variety of critical perspectives and, indeed, it is this openness that most distinguishes him from Bouterwek, his German contemporary.

Sismondi’s understanding of the Spanish ballads closely mirrors that of Bouterwek, but the Swiss goes farther to extend these judgments to the PMC. Whereas Bouterwek openly disparages the PMC for its crude, corrupt meter, and generally disregards its literary value, Sismondi argues that it is precisely this lack of formality and refinement that allows the modern scholar to approach the work and seek therein the seed of Spanish national character. Just as Bouterwek argues for the purity of the ballad form, based on its unlearned composition, Sismondi considers the PMC a historical document rich in sentiment that can attest to the state of Spanish society at the time of its composition.

While certainly “barbarous” in almost every respect, the feelings expressed by the characters and the details included in the PMC provide a valuable window into the customs and behavior of the twelfth-century warrior, thus revisiting the idea of its supposed historicity.

Sismondi, like Bouterwek, considers the early literature of every nation to be inspired by nature, as opposed to art. Thus, the value of the PMC is not to be found in its language, which “does not rise above that of a barbarous chronicler,” or the rude versification, but, rather, in the “great fidelity” with which the events are related (Historical

View of the Literature of the South of Europe 68). Language and versification may well be excused because, after all, “this was the infancy of versification, of poetry, and of language in Spain,” but, at the same time, “it was the manhood of national spirit and of heroism” (86).

74 Leigh

The following excerpt succinctly captures Sismondi’s view of the PMC, and these comments may also apply to his evaluation of the ballads:

It is without pretension and without art, but full of the finest nature, and gives an excellent idea of the people of that age, so different from those of our own. We live among them, as it were, and our minds are the more completely captivated, because we know that the author had no de sign to paint a brilliant picture. Just as he found them, the poet has exposed them to our view, without the least desire to make an exhibition of them. The incidents which strike us, bore no extraordinary character in his eyes. There was to him no distinction between the manners of his heroes and of his readers, and the simplicity of the representation, which supplies the place of talent, produces a more powerful effect…With regard to the versification, I scarcely know any production more completely barbarous. (86)

The perceived importance of “organic” literature, that is, literature thought to arise from the very soil of early nations, cannot be overstated for nineteenth-century historians and literary critics. In that kind of literature, one may seek the constitutive elements of each particular national character, which is why so many nineteenth-century scholars turned to the medieval period in their quest to identify national character. Opposing the notion of organic literature is that literature influenced by foreign tastes and forms. Sismondi, even more than Bouterwek, takes issue with inter-national literary pollution and claims that

“literature...must be at a low ebb in a nation, when it is necessary, even in its popular songs, to make use of a foreign language” (22). These cross-cultural influences interfere with the task of identifying the supposed inherent traits of national character and impede authentic literary expression. Ultimately, Sismondi evaluates the PMC much more favorably than

Bouterwek; both, however, retain certain Neoclassicist prejudices that prevent a full appreciation of the poem. It would fall to Ticknor to situate the PMC at the beginning of

Spanish literature, a position that it continues to enjoy today.

Aside from the formal and thematic similarities between these scholars and Ticknor, which will be discussed in more depth in the following chapters, it is noteworthy that

75 Leigh

Bouterwek, for one, expressly conceived of his work as a tool to engender a rebirth of

German literature (Hart, A History of Spanish Literary History 48). While direct imitation must be avoided at all costs, there is value, according to Bouterwek, of studying the masterpieces of a foreign literature and their respective historical trajectories (Hart,

“Bouterwek” 356). Bouterwek may have inherited from A. W. Schlegel—who, in turn, inherited it from Herder—the idea that the study of foreign literatures, both ancient and modern, is worthy in its own right, but his notion to use that study in order to foment literary activity in one’s own country is novel and is one that will be employed by Ticknor in an analogous fashion. Both critics use Spanish literature as a proxy, a means of addressing the perceived woes of their own nations. While Germany had, in Bouterwek’s view, sunk into a period of literary obsolescence, Ticknor, along with his American peers, bemoaned the inexistent state of American letters. Bouterwek sought to remedy the situation through a survey of European literatures, and Ticknor, in his own way, followed suit.

In the fall of 1816, while studying at Göttingen, Ticknor received an unexpected offer to occupy the recently established Smith Professorship of French and Spanish

Languages and Literatures at Harvard College. Ticknor did not immediately accept the offer, but rather, he debated the advantages and disadvantages of the post for some time before finally accepting it a full year later. Before he could return to Boston and take up his position, he saw fit to familiarize himself with the people and literature to which he was to devote his career. While Ticknor’s time at the University of Göttingen, “a place which subsists entirely upon literature” (Life, Letters, I 74), undoubtedly exercised a profound

76 Leigh influence on the young scholar,8 it was his impromptu visit to Spain in 1818 that provided him the deeply impressive lived experience that determined the way in which he thought about Spain for the rest of his life. As has been noted, the condition in which Ticknor found

Spain at that time was unfortunate (Hart, “New England Background” 79; Northup 7;

Romera-Navarro 43). The Peninsular Wars had devastated the country and the economy was in ruins; in short, Ticknor encountered Spain in a “depressed and unnatural state”

(History, I v). The images Ticknor beheld in this downtrodden country remained with him and informed his ideas about Spanish society throughout his life.

Prior to his stay in Spain, Ticknor had little experience with either the Spanish language or Spanish literature. He reportedly studied the language with Francis Sales, a language teacher and translator in Boston, but never in an intensive way (Long, Literary

Pioneers 4n3; Jaksic 30). Regarding Spanish literature, he was mostly ignorant. He had read

Don Quijote, most likely in translation, while still in Boston. Aside from Cervantes’s masterpiece, which was a popular read among literary aficionados across the Anglo world at that time, Ticknor shows little other knowledge of the Spanish literary corpus, and, while studying in Germany, literary history was merely an “amusement” (Life, Letters, I 95).

When he arrived at Göttingen, he planned on devoting himself to Classical literature, which he did, among other disciplines, until he received the offer from Harvard. At that point he modified his extracurricular travel itinerary to include Spain and Portugal, and exclude

Greece. This marks a symbolic moment in Ticknor’s life—the turn from the Classical world to that of modern languages. He made the decision to go to Spain unwillingly, though, for it would mean, on the one hand, less time to travel around England and Scotland, and on the

8 Indeed, Ticknor periodically recalled his time at Göttingen in his letters as late as 1866, five years before his death (Life, Letters, II 474).

77 Leigh other hand, even more time away from his dear family and friends in Boston. Ultimately, however, he made up his mind to make the trip, giving his reasons for this change of plans in a letter to his father on November 9, 1816:

Here is at once a new subject of study proposed to me, to which I have paid no attention since I have been here, and which I have not taken into the plan of my studies and travels in Europe. If I am to be a professor in this literature, I must go to Spain; and this I cannot think of doing without your full and free consent… If I go there as soon as the spring will make it proper, in 1818, and establish myself at the University of Salamanca, and stay there for six months, which is the shortest time in which I could possibly get a suitable knowledge of Spanish literature, my whole time will be absorbed… (Life, Letters, I 117)

Ticknor, always the apt pupil, did indeed pick up the language quickly and, in fact, on his journey from Barcelona to Madrid, after being in the country less than a month, we find him reciting Don Quijote to a carriage-full of travel companions, which included the Spanish court painter, José Madrazo (1781-1859). As Ticknor recounts:

I brought some books with me, and among them was Don Quixote. This I read aloud to them; and I assure you it was a pleasure to me, such as I have seldom enjoyed, to witness the effect this extraordinary book produces on the people from whose very blood and character it is drawn. My painter in particular was alternately holding his sides with laughter at Sancho and his master, and weeping at the touching stories with which it is interspersed. All of them used to beg me to read it to them every time we got into our cart,—like children for toys or sugar-plums,—while I willingly yielded, as every reading was to me a lesson. (Life, Letters, I 186)

At this point of his journey, Ticknor seems happy and optimistic about his trip to Spain. His first impressions upon entering and traveling through the country, however, gave him little hope for the rest of his stay. He describes his first experiences to his father in a letter from

May 23, 1818:

Imagine a country so deserted and desolate, and with so little travelling and communication, as to have no taverns; for I do not call the miserable hovels where we stopped by that name, because it is not even expected of them to furnish anything but a place to cover you from the weather. And, in the last place, imagine a country so destitute of the means of subsistence, that, even by seeking every opportunity to purchase provisions, you cannot keep so provided that you will not

78 Leigh

sometimes want a meal. Since I left Barcelona I have not been in a single inn where the lower story was not a stable, and of course the upper one as full of fleas as if it were under an Egyptian curse twice I have dined in the very place with the mules; and it is but twice that I have slept on a bedstead, and the rest of the time on their stone floors, (which are not so even or so comfortable as our sidewalks), and there only with straw and my blanket. (Life, Letters, I 185)

Yet, even after these bleak first impressions, Ticknor, writing in praise of his traveling companions, is willing to attribute to Spaniards a “genuine, unpretending courtesy and hearty, dignified kindness,” characteristics “for which their nation has always been famous”

(186). Ticknor would not always be so complimentary of the upper classes in Spain, but he quickly developed a deep respect and admiration for the lower classes, a group that, for

Ticknor, embodied “more national character...more force without barbarism, and civilization without corruption” than any place he had previously been in Europe (189), referring to them shortly thereafter as “the finest materiel I have met in Europe” (205). He was impressed by Spaniards’ “instinctive uprightness, which prevents them from servility” and claims to have seen

the lowest class of people, such as gardeners, bricklayers, etc., who had never seen the king, perhaps, in their lives, suddenly spoken to by him; but I never saw one of them hesitate or blush, or seem confounded in any way by a sense of the royal superiority. (Life, Letters, I 205)

In short, Ticknor’s experiences led him to view Spanish society as backwards—the lowest classes are the most noble, the middling classes are weak, while the upper classes are

“deplorable,” adding, about the latter, “I can conceive of nothing more monotonous, gross, and disgraceful than their manner of passing their day and their life…” (205-6).

The supposed backwardness of Spain was, of course, a widely discussed topic among European intellectuals at the time, and one that Ticknor mostly accepts as true. As was commonly held, Spain had long ago stalled in her progress and, hence, life played out

79 Leigh in Spain the same way it had for centuries beforehand. Spain was a time capsule, for better and worse. In certain passages, Ticknor actually considers Spain a representation in modern times of ancient society, for instance in his, perhaps exaggerated, description of

Spanish farming life:

Their threshing I have seen done, at the gates of Madrid, on just such a threshing- floor as is described in the Old Testament, and by the identical process of driving horses over the grain; their plough, which is of a construction singularly clumsy and inefficient, is the same the Romans used when they were here, for I have it on a coin of Caesar Augustus; and their mode of drawing water by a horse or mule, and a wheel, is the very one which, for its antiquity, is in Egypt attributed to Joseph. (Life, Letters, I 198)

This backwardness simultaneously renders Spain an object of pity and admiration.

Romantic intellectuals often celebrated those cultures perceived to be stuck in the past for their supposed simplicity and purity, uncorrupted by the modern world. On the other hand, these same characteristics left Spain inept in the face of the rapid progress being made in the world around them. Ticknor indulges in this Romantic conception of Spain when he recounts his arrival to the country:

What seems mere fiction and romance in other countries is matter of observation here, and, in all that relates to manners, Cervantes and Le Sage are historians. For, when you have crossed the Pyrenees, you have not only passed from one country and climate to another, but you have gone back a couple of centuries in your chronology, and find the people still in that kind of poetical existence which we have not only long since lost, but which we have long since ceased to credit on the reports of our ancestors. […] The pastoral life…is still found everywhere in the country. (Life, Letters, I 189)

These sorts of judgments were not restricted to rural life. Even Madrid, Spain’s most cosmopolitan center, left Ticknor cold. He calls it “far from handsome” and “the least interesting capital I have visited” (190-191).

Of everything Ticknor experienced in Spain, though, its government and religious life impressed him the most. While the common man stood out as the true embodiment of

80 Leigh unpolluted national character, the Church and the State occupied the opposite side of the moral spectrum, representing corruption and oppression that degraded Spanish society.

The Inquisition, in particular, is often the focus of Ticknor’s critiques of Spain’s Catholicism, but he finds that it operates more by means of tacit intimidation than overt force. Speaking on his experience with the Inquisition while in Madrid, he remarks:

The Inquisition, which is so much talked about, is more a bugbear than anything else, except in its influences on public instruction and the freedom of the press. As a part of the civil government it is hardly felt in individual instances, though still it is not to be denied that persons have sometimes disappeared and never been heard of afterwards; as one since I have been here, who is believed by everybody to be in the Inquisition, and another, who certainly was there before, and escaped to England about the time of my arrival. (Life, Letters, I 193)

The situation was different in Andalusia, though:

The Inquisition, however, I have since found more powerful in the South. At Granada I saw a printed decree posted up, condemning anew the heresy of Martin Luther, and, as it was then imagined to be making some progress there, calling on servants to denounce their masters, children their parents, wives their husbands, etc., in so many words. I could not get a copy of it by ordinary means, and did not like to use any others, on account of the archbishop. Just before I was at Cadiz, the Inquisition entered the apartments of a young German and took away his private books, deemed dangerous; and at Seville some of my ecclesiastical friends cautioned me about my conversation in general society, on account of the power and vigilance of the holy office there. (Life, Letters, I 193)

This description is representative of the tone Ticknor would take up in his later remarks on

Spain’s religiosity and the insidious nature of the Inquisition. Indeed, it is this sort of

Inquisitorial influence that is responsible, in part, for the sorry state of contemporary

Spanish literature. Elsewhere, he complains of the “religious slavery” he observes as he walks through the streets of Gerona and says he “found every fourth or fifth person I met a solemn ecclesiastick (sic) in a long black cloak and a portentous hat,” which led to the realization that he had “never been in a Catholick (sic) country before” (cited in Northup

10-11).

81 Leigh

Of Spain’s government, Ticknor is nothing but critical. Just as Catholicism offended

Ticknor’s Protestant notions of righteous religiosity, the Spanish monarchy represented the opposite of the young Federalist’s idea of respectable government. While it is true that

Ticknor, in his History, identifies government and religion as the joint forces responsible for the decline in Spanish letters, in his journals from this period he directs the brunt of his critical remarks to the government. He describes the king as a “vulgar blackguard,” and of his government, Ticknor declares:

Certainly such a confusion of abuses never existed before since society was organized, and never, I should hope, can exist again. In the first place, its very principle—I mean in practice—is that the king’s decree, which in theory is the highest power in the land, may be resisted and disobeyed, and that the only remedy is to make more decrees… There is thus a kind of tacit compromise between the government and its agents, that the king shall issue decrees, and that the people shall be tolerated in disobedience; and in this way disturbances are of course avoided. If, however, on the contrary, the king should attempt to execute even one half of the decrees that are nominally in force, he would, I am persuaded, raise a rebellion in a fortnight. (Life, Letters, I 191-192)

It is not so much the autocracy of the Spanish monarchy that upsets Ticknor, it is its inefficacy. Interestingly, Ticknor’s remarks in his journal provide a strikingly similar critical account of Madrid and Spanish society as those that appear in the writings of his Spanish contemporary, Mariano José de Larra (1809-1837). For example, Ticknor bemoans the corruption present at every level of government, declaring, “there is nothing that cannot be done without bribery,” before launching into an attack on the endless chain of political functionaries that impede every kind of progress (192). Speaking of the rampant practice of bribery, Ticknor says:

The very first principles of the social compact, all the political morality that keeps society together, seem to be put up at auction by it, and in any other country a revolution would follow; but here this may be avoided by a tolerated disobedience. So notorious, indeed, and so impudent has corruption become, that it even dresses

82 Leigh

itself in the livery of the law and justice, and thus passes on respected through all the divisions of society. (Life, Letters, I 192-193)

Not only, then, is Spain undemocratic, but it has actually institutionalized corruption. One may well wonder whether Ticknor would have thought more highly of Spanish government if it operated more efficiently. As it was, however, what Ticknor saw in Spain’s government was a glaring lesson of precisely what to avoid in government.

Despite these pointed criticisms of Spain’s political system, Ticknor adroitly manages to salvage Spain’s greatest treasure—the common man—while incriminating his least favorite group, the upper classes. Reflecting on Spain’s fate in his journal, Ticknor paints a simultaneously hopeful and apocalyptic picture of Spain’s political situation:

Yet, with all these gross and portentous defects,—without a police and with an Inquisition, without an administration of justice and with legalized, systematic corruption in all its branches,—the Spanish government (if it deserves the name) still seems to fulfill the great object a government should always propose to itself; for a more quiet, orderly people, a people more obedient and loyal, I have not seen in Europe. The reason is that this corruption is still mainly in the higher classes, and in the agents of the government, and that this strange contest between the ministers and king on one side, and the persons they employ on the other, is still unknown to the classes below; so that, though the surface of the ocean be everywhere vexed and agitated, its depths still remain tranquil and undisturbed. But the moment it becomes the interest of those who stand between the highest and the lowest classes to open the flood-gates, and let in the crimes and corruptions of the government upon the people, and thus excite them to disturbances and opposition,—that moment the government must come to an end. (Life, Letters, I 194)

Spain, for the moment, is not irreparably lost, though it occupies a precarious position. If the upper classes continue to spread their loathsome practices, eventually the good portion of society will also be contaminated and Spain will fall into eternal ruin. As Ticknor will argue, and as we will see in the next chapter, the hope of Spain resides in its untainted national character, represented in society by the lower classes, and represented in

83 Leigh literature by her earliest compositions. It is upon these bases that Spain may yet regain its one-time splendor and authenticity.

While in Spain, Ticknor rarely socialized, preferring, instead, to tour libraries and study Spanish literature with the celebrated Arabist and former royal librarian, José

Antonio Conde. The young Bostonian regularly spent hours under the instruction of Conde, and it was he who provided Ticknor his first instruction in Spanish literature by an actual

Spaniard, leading Jorge Guillén to describe Conde as “el iniciador de Ticknor en la literatura española” (Ticknor, defensor de la cultura 11). Ticknor highly valued his time with Conde and he describes him to his father in the following way:

His name is Joseph Antonio Conde; and among all the men of letters I have met in Spain,—and I believe I have seen the most considerable in my department,—he has the most learning by far, and the most taste and talent. He was formerly librarian to the king… He is about fifty years old, extremely ignorant of the world, timid in disposition, awkward in manners, and of childlike simplicity and openness in his feelings… He comes and reads Spanish poetry with me two or three hours every day. The pleasure he takes in it is evidently great; for he has no less enthusiasm than learning, and nothing gives him so much delight as to see that I share his feelings for his favorite authors, which I truly do; while, on the other hand, the information I get from him is such as I could get, probably, from nobody else, and certainly in no other way. (Life, Letters, I 187)

With Conde’s guidance, Ticknor poured through the collections of the important libraries in

Spain, seeking an adequate base in Spanish letters upon which to build his career. He was repeatedly frustrated in these attempts, however, by the disorganized nature of Spanish libraries. The Biblioteca Nacional, for one, was “so ill arranged, and has so bad a catalogue, and is so abominably administered, that all that is known of its curiosities and rarities is by accident” (197). And at the Escorial, “there is neither order nor catalogue” by which to locate important works (215). Nevertheless, Ticknor recognizes that these collections constitute “a great mine which is yet but imperfectly explored” (215). Years later, through

84 Leigh his chief book agent, Pascual de Gayangos, he would have the opportunity to more fully inspect these collections. While in Spain, Conde was his steadfast aid. Reflecting on his time in Madrid in the prologue to his History of Spanish Literature, Ticknor laments the scarcity of books then to be found in Spain (v), but gives due credit to “Don José,” who “knew the lurking places where such books and their owners were to be sought.” He continues, “to him I am indebted for the foundation of a collection in Spanish literature, which, without help like his, I should have failed to make” (vii). Unfortunately, considering Ticknor’s substantial debt to Conde, he provides no other indication of the lessons learned from his

Spanish master, so it is difficult to definitively pinpoint Conde’s influence in Ticknor’s

History.

What is certain, though, is that Ticknor returned to Boston with the beginnings of what would become the best collection of Spanish literature in the world, private or public.

With this library in place, he was prepared to begin lecturing at Harvard, which he would do from 1819 until 1835, thereafter devoting his days to his History of Spanish Literature. In his lectures and Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on the History and Criticism of Spanish

Literature, published in 1823, Ticknor analyzed Spanish literature according to the paradigms of the Boston interpretive community, his European instruction, and his time in

Spain. Although the History would not be published until 1849, the young scholar was already well on his way to becoming the most respected authority on Spanish literature in the world.

85 Leigh

CHAPTER 2

GEORGE TICKNOR’S MEDIATION OF SPANISH LITERATURE

In this chapter we will examine the nature of Ticknor’s mediation of Spanish literature. We will begin by considering his early publication, Syllabus of a Course of

Lectures on the History and Criticism of Spanish Literature (1823). This is a fundamental document for Hispanism as it lays out for the first time a systematic and comprehensive way of studying Spanish literature. It also sheds much light on Ticknor’s early understanding of the Spanish literary corpus, an understanding that is, in many ways, faithfully reproduced in his similarly groundbreaking History of Spanish Literature (1849) many years later. Despite the span of twenty-six years that separates the publication of these two texts, Ticknor’s ideas about Spain and its literature over that period remain largely the same, a fact that confirms Ticknor’s steadfast adherence to his earliest impressions and intellectual influences discussed in the previous chapter. Moving on from the Syllabus, we will delve into the History of Spanish Literature to examine its content and guiding thesis with an aim to illustrate Ticknor’s perception of Spanish literature, its historical trajectory, and its lessons for an American audience.

In 1820, one year after Ticknor’s return from his European journey, he began to compile what he considered a definitive list of important texts in the history of Spanish literature, a kind of proto-canon that marks the Syllabus as a pioneering endeavor. While it is true that others had previously published works commenting on Spanish literature over the ages, the most significant of these being the histories of Friedrich Bouterwek (1766-

1828) and Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1843), in the Syllabus, Ticknor establishes a

86 Leigh systematic way of teaching Spanish literature and, in that respect, his efforts were truly novel. Ticknor was conscious of his trailblazing initiative and speaks to this issue in the

“Advertisement” to his Syllabus:

The subject to which [the lectures] are devoted is, in many respects, new in Europe; and, in this country, is quite untouched. The Spaniards themselves have no work of history or criticism, embracing the whole of their literature, or even its best portions; and in England, and in Italy, nothing has been done to assist them. (iii)

The latter portion of this citation is perhaps unfair as it ignores the efforts of writers such as Tomás Antonio Sánchez (1723-1802), Martín de Navarrete (1765-1844), and, later,

Antonio Gil y Zárate (1793-1861) in Spain, and Robert Southey (1774-1843) in England, but those figures, while they did provide a valuable framework for Bouterwek, Sismondi, and Ticknor, they did not engage in the same kind of methodical and comprehensive endeavor as the latter.9 Moreover, Ticknor’s impulse to structure the study of Spanish literature can be seen as the first real step toward the incorporation of Hispanism into the bourgeoning separation of academic disciplines that took place over the course of the nineteenth century within the Western academy. The Syllabus would subsequently serve as a model and point of departure for Ticknor’s contemporaries and successors in the field of

Hispanism, and it is to Ticknor that we owe the general establishment of a Spanish literary canon, first sketched in the Syllabus and greatly amplified in the History.

Ticknor believed that the principal fault of the histories of his predecessors,

Bouterwek and Sismondi, was their lack of access to primary sources, that is, Spanish books. Bouterwek, for one, never travelled to Spain and thus had very limited access to

Spanish books, and Sismondi, for his part, largely echoed Bouterwek in his judgments

9 Indeed, an English reviewer of the History, which was published in 1849, remarked that there were not six men in Europe able to review it (Life, Letters, II 254).

87 Leigh without personally consulting primary sources. “This want,” Ticknor writes in the preface to the Syllabus, “I have not felt,” and in referring to his primary objective of creating a history of Spanish literature, he describes his personal library as “nearly complete for such purposes” (iv). Indeed, thanks to his diligent book collecting while in Spain and the rest of

Europe, Ticknor early on amassed an impressive collection of Spanish and Portuguese literature, one that would eventually become the most comprehensive private collection in the world.10 Thanks to his library, Ticknor is capable of establishing himself as the first to compose a history of Spanish literature based on primary sources, although, admittedly, to call the Syllabus a history is quite a stretch. Nevertheless, the list of texts and authors that appeared in the Syllabus, as well as his personal library, would thereafter never cease to expand. The emphasis Ticknor placed upon the consultation of primary, original sources is, of course, one that survives until the present day. It was in Ticknor’s time, though, that this practice first became commonplace, and Ticknor was one of the first critics to enthusiastically promote an idea we now consider fundamental to sound literary and historical scholarship.

In the prefatory note to the Syllabus, Ticknor states that the purpose of the list is to support his course lectures at Harvard, and, based on the form and level of detail provided in each entry of that document, one can readily appreciate it as just such a collection of guiding notes. Divided into thirty-four, one-hour lectures, each entry is brief, often just a

10 In 1818, while in Madrid, we find Ticknor reaching out to two Portuguese intellectuals— “J. Barbosa de Figueredo” and “Dom Miguel de Forjas”—for assistance in establishing a catalogue of Portuguese literature (Barbosa de Figueredo, J. Letter to George Ticknor. 3 November 1818. George Ticknor Papers, 1773-1870. MS-983. Rauner Library, Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH; Miguel de Forjas, Dom. Letter to George Ticknor. 2 November 1818. George Ticknor Papers, 1773-1870. MS-983. Rauner Library, Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH).

88 Leigh few lines consisting of fragmentary sentences. The inclusion of critical commentary is rare.

Even so, the Syllabus does provide the reader an idea of how Ticknor understood and evaluated Spanish literature in the early part of his career. Firstly, he divides the literary corpus into three “epochs.” The first of these runs “from about 1155 to about 1555”

(Syllabus 2); the second spans the period between the death of Carlos V and the accession of the Bourbon family, “from about 1555 to about 1700” (30); the third proceeds “from about 1700 to the present time” (74), that is, the early decades of the nineteenth century.

The “Epoch First” entails two subdivisions: literature that was “essentially untouched by the influence of any foreign literature” (3), and, then, that literature that resulted from foreign influence, namely the Provençal and Italian schools (16). The “Epoch Second” is divided somewhat differently, beginning with a section on the “principal authors, who gave the leading impulse to this epoch” (33), and followed by a section devoted to “the contemporaries and successors of these leading masters” (50). The first section of the

“Epoch Second” is arranged chronologically, while the second section is arranged by genre.

Finally, the “Epoch Third” is arranged according to Spain’s rulers during this period. To the first epoch, he dedicates twenty-eight pages, to the second, forty-four pages, and to the third, a paltry eleven pages.

Even from this brief overview of the arrangement of the Syllabus, we can deduce some of Ticknor’s early opinions about Spanish literature, especially if we consider it in relation to the primary tenets of contemporary literary criticism. As we saw in the first chapter, influential figures in Europe, such as the Schlegel brothers and Madame de Staël, repeatedly emphasized the importance of literature in the expression of national character.

According to this model, when one national literature came under the sway of another or

89 Leigh imitated foreign models, the result was an unnatural manifestation of national character.

The purest national literature was to be found at the beginning of a nation’s history, when national character is allowed to develop and express itself unencumbered by foreign influence. As discussed in the previous chapter, Madame de Staël, in particular, exercised a profound influence on Ticknor and his peers in Boston, and, especially in light of his own comments in the History, we can be certain that Ticknor regarded the earliest Spanish literature as the purest and most exemplary of Spanish national character. But even the earliest period of Spanish literature was not without its own deviations from true national character. According to Ticknor’s trajectory of Spanish literature, as laid out in the Syllabus, the Provençal and “Italianate” traditions, occurring in the medieval period, constitute the first of many subsequent divergences from the ideal of a pure national literature. It is, then, a perplexing, though intriguing, mystery why Ticknor then claims that the “Epoch Second” manifests the “best literature of the country” (Syllabus 32). This assertion would, at least initially, lead us to question his strict adherence to the ideas of his European teachers, as the Early Modern period in Spain was undoubtedly marked by various literary influences from abroad. On closer examination, though, it appears that Ticknor bases this judgment not on the degree to which this period of literature faithfully expresses national character, but rather, on the impressive consolidation and proliferation of the Spanish empire during this time, which resulted in a “new impulse given to the Spanish character” (33). Given his acceptance of the Herderian notion of pure national literature, this position is somewhat puzzling and may be an example of Ticknor’s still-developing critical acumen. It is certainly true that the so-called “Golden Age” of Spanish literature was celebrated as such in

Ticknor’s time as well as our own, and it is possible, therefore, to speculate that Ticknor

90 Leigh considers it “best” and dedicates more pages to it than any other period simply due to its general renown and extensive list of extant works. Indeed, the prolific production of

Spanish literature during the Early Modern period cannot be denied, and it is almost certain, based on the quantity of authors and works mentioned in this section of the

Syllabus, that Golden Age texts dominated Ticknor’s own collection, an idea that is borne out by a review of his donation of Spanish and Portuguese books to the Boston Public

Library upon his death.11 A more compelling explanation is that Ticknor conceived of

Spanish Golden Age literature as the happy result of earlier, more purely national, literature, thus implying that such a “golden age” may only occur after an initial foundation of pure national literature has been laid. This theory is supported by William H. Prescott’s description of that era as one “in which the Spanish nation displayed the fullness of its moral and physical energies, when, escaping from the license of a youthful age, it seems to have reached the full prime of manhood” (Biographical and Critical Miscellanies 307-308).

It is also supported by Ticknor’s introductory remarks at the beginning of the “Epoch First,” where he categorizes Spain’s medieval period in the following way:

The literature that existed in Spain between the first appearance of the present written language, and the close of the reign of the emperor Charles V; or the period that contains the elements from which the best literature of the country was afterwards produced. (Syllabus 2)

This makes it clear that, on the one hand, Ticknor believes medieval literature contains the fundamental elements of Spanish literary greatness, and, on the other hand, that he believes the “Golden Age” does, in fact, manifest genuine national character. Further

11 See: Whitney, James Lyman. Catalogue of the Spanish Library and of the Portuguese Books Bequeathed by George Ticknor to the Boston Public Library, Together with the Collection of Spanish and Portuguese Literature in the General Library. Boston: Boston Public Library, Printed by Order of the Trustees, 1879.

91 Leigh complicating this issue is the fact that, as Ticknor points out, the time spanning the end of

“Epoch First” and the “Epoch Second” saw the introduction and proliferation of the

Inquisition, an institution that Ticknor would ultimately consider the most destructive force operating upon Spanish literature. Add to this the increasingly authoritarian government of the Spanish Crown during that time and we are confronted with the two most damaging forces acting upon Spanish literary genius, according to Ticknor, operating simultaneously with the creation of Spain’s “best” literature. Ticknor was not unaware of this coincidence. He acknowledges the increasingly negative effects of the Inquisition and the Crown upon literature in his final subdivision of the “Epoch Second,” entitled: “Effects produced on [literature] by the state of religion—the ecclesiastical powers—the

Inquisition—and the government. Causes of its gradual decay” (Syllabus 73). We will return to this question of the damaging effects of the Church and State upon Spain’s literature later in this chapter when we look more closely at Ticknor’s comments in the History. For our present consideration, though, it is clear from the number of pages Ticknor dedicates to the “Epoch Third,” and his accompanying comments to that period, that he considered this period the weakest in Spanish literary history, and he explains this sufficiently in his first note of this section, where he writes:

Change in the character of Spanish literature. It comes more under the influence of the court, and its success depends, in a considerable degree, on the character of the sovereigns, who, at different times, fill the throne. (Syllabus 77)

He refers to the “troubles” on literature produced by the confusion of succession in 1713

(77), Philip V’s attempt and ultimate failure to patronize letters (77-78), Feijoó’s “efforts to enlighten his countrymen in physical and moral science,” leading to his denunciation to the

Inquisition (79), and the “deplorable fall of Spanish poetry” in a note on Eugenio Gerardo

92 Leigh

Lobo (79). Thus, Ticknor draws an explicit correlation between the fall of Spanish literary greatness and the rise of the House of Bourbon, whose reign in Spain began with Philip V (r.

1700-1746) and has continued, not without interruption, to the present day. Ticknor notes that the few noteworthy literary figures in Spain’s most recent history, such as Feijoó,

Moratín, Cadalso, Yriarte, and Jovellanos, either produce but “small effect” (81) or are stifled by “intrigues of the Inquisition” (82). And, since Ferdinand VII’s reign, “the great excitement of the national revolution begun in 1808 has turned all the talent of the country into political affairs. Literature almost disappears from that time” (84). Such is the depressing state of affairs when Ticknor first visits Spain in 1818, and his experiences there directly inform the thesis that underlies the Syllabus and becomes more explicit in the

History of Spanish Literature.

As concerns national character, one of the most discussed themes in literary criticism of his time, and one that will play a central role in his History, Ticknor is largely silent in the Syllabus. He does not, however, ignore it altogether. It is clear from several comments that he evaluates literature in relation to national character, but, given the fragmentary nature of the Syllabus, it is hard to establish a hard and fast thesis from these scant notes regarding his conception of Spanish national character. At one point he describes the process by which “Spanish character” was preserved in the mountains of

“Biscay and the Asturias” during the height of Muslim rule in Spain (Syllabus 3), and, of the

“beauty of the Spanish ballads,” he writes: “a part of the national character—and filled with the poetical spirit of the times and country that produced them” (9), adding that they are

“probably as old as any Spanish poetry” (7). He later alludes to the “new impulse given to the Spanish character” during the reign of Charles V, but refrains from specifying its nature

93 Leigh

(33). He again cites Spanish character in three short notes, one on Cervantes’s exemplary novel, “La gitanilla” (39), another on the “purely national character of the Spanish Drama”

(63), and yet another on the “romances in the gusto picaresco” (68), but, in all three cases, he does not elaborate on what that character may be. One of the final mentions of national character in the Syllabus is in regards to the “popular” writings of Ramón de la Cruz y Cano

(1731-1794) (82), and this is significant because it shows that Ticknor already drew a correlation between national character and the masses, a point made abundantly clear in his journal entries while in Spain, wherein he refers to the lower classes as “the finest materiel I have met in Europe” (Life, Letters, I 205). Elsewhere in the Syllabus, he alludes to the ultimate failure of early forms of Spanish theater due to their essential lack of popularity, being written and performed for courtly audiences (Syllabus 14). Previous to this comment, following a note on the “monkish” poetry of figures such as Juan Ruiz and

Berceo, Ticknor writes: “But there was, besides this, more popular forms of literature in the

Peninsula, which began during these two centuries, and extended below them, viz. Ballads,

Chronicles, Romances of Chivalry, and the Drama” (6). Speaking of ballads specifically, he points out that the bulk of the earlier, anonymous ones were “gradually taken from the memories of the lower orders” (7) and, indeed, “still are read and enjoyed by the lower classes” (8), a fact that surely suggested to Ticknor a kind of immutable permanence and affinity with Spanish national character. In this and other cases in the Syllabus, and bearing in mind Ticknor’s comments in his journals, we can see that Ticknor conflates the notions of “popular” literature and “national character,” a critical viewpoint inherited from Herder and his European successors, and one that would be central to his thesis in the History.

94 Leigh

It is similarly clear that, at the time of writing the Syllabus, Ticknor already had a distaste for foreign influence in national literatures. This aversion is yet another inheritance from Ticknor’s European counterparts and it figures prominently into his thesis in the History. As in the previous case regarding national character, the Syllabus’s fragmentary nature renders Ticknor’s comments on foreign influence limited and vague.

We can, however, still understand his basic judgments on this issue. For example, of the

“Italian School” in the “Epoch First,” he writes: “A school chiefly formed of conceited poetry, imitated, generally, from the worst poetry of the age following that of Petrarca and

Boccaccio” (Syllabus 20), adding a note about the “small value of all this metaphysical and conceited poetry of the XV century, the taste for which was formed from the bad Italian poets, and the fashion for which prevailed chiefly at court” (26). Ticknor clearly associates foreign influence in Spanish literature with the aristocratic class, and blames that class for the detrimental effects upon literature that resulted from their taste for foreign models.

However, toward the end of the “Epoch First,” he notes a “change in the character of the

Spanish imitations of Italian poetry” (26), distinguishing the “conceited” Italian school during the reigns of John II, Henry IV, and Ferdinand and Isabella, from the “more liberal and enlightened” Italian school under Charles V (29). The basis for this distinction is unclear, but it undoubtedly relates to Ticknor’s dubious exaltation of Golden Age literature as a whole. In any case, the last note of the “Epoch First” succinctly describes Ticknor’s general evaluation of Spanish medieval literature: “General remarks on the whole epoch, on the rich and abundant materials it affords as the foundation for an independent, original literature” (29). Even at this early stage in his career, Ticknor is convinced that Spain’s

95 Leigh medieval literature contains the nucleus around which subsequent national literature will be formed.

The Syllabus remains a noteworthy document due to its novelty, ambition, and combination of forms, consisting of brief critical remarks, historical and biographical notes, and, of course, a proto-canon of Spanish literature. It also serves as a window into the young Ticknor’s understanding of literature, an understanding founded upon the predominant ideas of the Boston interpretive community, the writings of influential thinkers from abroad, and, of course, his formative experiences in Europe. Noting the similarities between the Syllabus and the History of Spanish Literature, Thomas Hart has gone so far as to claim that the History is, in fact, a product of the first quarter of the nineteenth century and not, as one might expect, a gradual evolution of ideas over the course of thirty years (“New England Background” 78). Given its shorter form, the Syllabus contains little of the outright moralizing that Ticknor would ultimately include in his

History, but the two works are, indeed, mostly consistent in their foci and critical judgments. Unlike the History, though, the Syllabus was developed exclusively for academic audiences, principally as a model for other university instructors of Spanish literature. On the other hand, Ticknor consciously wrote his History for a popular audience, saying in the introduction to that work:

In the interval between my two residences in Europe I delivered lectures upon its principal topics to successive classes in Harvard College; and, on my return home from the second, I endeavored to arrange these lectures for publication. But when I had already employed much labor and time on them, I found—or thought I found— that the tone of discussion which I had adopted for my academical audiences was not suited to the purposes of a regular history. Destroying, therefore, what I had written, I began afresh my never unwelcome task, and so have prepared the present work, as little connected with all I had previously done as it, perhaps, can be, and yet cover so much of the same ground. (History, I ix-x)

96 Leigh

Ticknor’s claim that the History was “as little connected with all I had previously done as it, perhaps, can be” is a blatant exaggeration. The History is, of course, dedicated to the same subject as the Syllabus, and, moreover, it maintains and further develops the often- nebulous theses found in the earlier work. Nevertheless, his stated intention of writing the

History specifically for a lay audience is an important point that we will return to in Chapter

3. Suffice it to say, for now, that the Syllabus not only serves as an indication of Ticknor’s early critical judgments regarding literature, but also as a pioneering document of

Hispanism. In the Syllabus, Ticknor provides a relatively clear plan for teaching Spanish literature, including which authors and works to study, notwithstanding the general lack of detail and intelligibility that resulted from its skeletal form. It appears, though, that Ticknor was aware of the preliminary nature of the Syllabus and, perhaps to curtail undue criticism, writes at the end of the preface to that work: “Any deficiency [in this work] may, I hope, be partly supplied by the labour of future years, which I shall cheerfully bestow on a subject so new, so important, and so interesting” (iv). Later, in his groundbreaking History, he makes good on this promise, supplementing the Syllabus with enough additional information to warrant three hearty volumes.

To fully understand Ticknor’s chief mediation of Spanish literature, we must pay special attention to what he says in the preface to the History of Spanish Literature. This is an important text, as it allows Ticknor to explain the development of the project since the publication of his Syllabus and his own evolution as a scholar. It also provides a space for

Ticknor to reflect on his experiences, explain the slow progression of the field, as well as the related shortcomings of the Syllabus. The main difficulty he faced early on in his career, he tells us, was a lack of books (History, I v). This was, of course, a relative scarcity because,

97 Leigh at the time of his return from Europe in 1819, Ticknor had already amassed a world-class collection of Spanish and Portuguese literature, one that imbued him with the confidence to consider himself a pioneer in the nascent field of Hispanism and a scholarly corrective to the more speculative histories of his predecessors, Bouterwek and Sismondi, neither of whom had experience working with primary sources or travelling in Spain. Nevertheless, it was not easy for Ticknor to find Spanish books even at that time, and he describes his initial difficulties in the following way:

Such books as I wanted were then, it is true, less valued in Spain than they are now, but it was chiefly because the country was in a depressed and unnatural state; and, if its men of letters were more than commonly at leisure to gratify the curiosity of a stranger, their number had been materially diminished by political persecution, and intercourse with them was difficult because they had so little connection with each other, and were so much shut out from the world around them. (v)

Thus, Ticknor reveals early on one of the theses that will guide his History, namely, that the protracted and systematic persecution of writers and intellectuals perpetrated by the

Spanish government profoundly degraded Spanish literature. Those intellectuals that might have helped Ticknor secure books at that time were mostly in prison or exile for their alleged opposition to the restoration of the Bourbon king, Ferdinand VII (1784-1833).

Thankfully, though, Ticknor was able to artfully circumvent the obstacles to collecting Spanish books, achieving this only through the help of others. In fact, both

Ticknor’s unrivaled collection of Spanish and Portuguese books and his deep knowledge of the field were only made possible through sustained collaboration with a small group of teachers, scholars, and book agents, most of whom he acknowledges in the preface to the

History. The first of these noteworthy aids is José Antonio Conde (1766-1820), whose impression on Ticknor we discussed in Chapter 1. During his time in Madrid, Ticknor led a largely solitary existence, mostly eschewing social gatherings due to his scholarly habits

98 Leigh and distaste for Spanish high society. He was, furthermore, repeatedly frustrated in his quest for Spanish books, a task that, in addition to learning the Spanish language, was of the highest priority. After all, he was scheduled to begin lecturing on Spain and its literature at

Harvard upon his return to Boston and Ticknor placed unprecedented emphasis upon the consultation of original documents.12 In both of these respects, Conde was a vital boon to the young Bostonian and Ticknor plainly states his debt to Conde in the preface to the

History (History, I vii).13 Thereafter, he acknowledges the help of other acquaintances that helped him secure Spanish books for over forty years: Alexander Hill Everett (1792-

1847)14 and his brother, Edward Everett (1794-1865)15; Washington Irving (1783-1859); and then, most importantly, Obadiah Rich (1777-1850)16 and Pascual de Gayangos (1809-

1897) (viii). Both of these latter men worked tirelessly for Ticknor, at times in tandem, tracking down Spanish books in Spain and other parts of Europe and shipping them to

12 In a letter to Sir Edmund Head in 1851, Ticknor praises the young Dutch scholar, Reinhardt Dozy (1820-1883), whose Recherches sur l’Histoire politique et littéraire de l’Espagne, pendant le moyen age was first published in 1849, the same year that Ticknor’s History was published. Ticknor specifically lauds Dozy’s use of “original materials” and “contemporary documents” (Life, Letters, II 270-71). Interestingly, though, Dozy’s portrayal of the Cid as an indifferent and murderous marauder differs drastically from Ticknor’s portrayal of him as a noble embodiment of Spanish national character. 13 The importance of Ticknor relationship with Conde has been noted by other writers, most notable Jorge Guillén (Ticknor, defensor de la cultura 11) and Clara Louise Penney (xxviii), editor of George Ticknor, Letters to Pascual de Gayangos, and author of the introduction to that work. It is, furthermore, interesting to note that Ticknor befriended Conde, former librarian of the king of Spain, when he himself was serving as unofficial librarian for President Thomas Jefferson. On Ticknor’s relationship with Jefferson, see Long’s Thomas Jefferson and George Ticknor: A Chapter in American Scholarship. 14 Foreign minister to Spain (1825-1829) and regular contributor to the North American Review. 15 Foreign minister to Great Britain, United States Congressman, Governor of Massachusetts, and United States Secretary of State. 16 American diplomat and bibliophile.

99 Leigh

Ticknor in Boston.17 Of these book dealings, there is ample documentation in the archives at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, including detailed invoices from Rich that list books purchased for Ticknor and William H. Prescott, the celebrated historian and close friend of Ticknor.18 Pascual de Gayangos worked with both Ticknor and Prescott for many years and, indeed, it was his work that made their most important scholarly publications possible. As Ticknor describes Gayangos’ assistance, “the muniment rooms of the great families in Spain…were thrown open; the Public Archives, the National Library, in short whatever could be used as a resource, were all visited and examined” (Life of William

Hickling Prescott 269). Ticknor first met Gayangos at a social gathering in London in June,

1838. At the time, Ticknor was eager to talk with Gayangos, as he was soon to review

Prescott’s recent book on the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. To Ticknor’s delight, he found the young Spaniard “talking English like a native” and “full of pleasant knowledge in Spanish and Arabic” (Life, Letters, I 182), and at that time he undoubtedly considered how Gayangos might aid his own work. The edited volume of correspondence maintained by Gayangos and Ticknor over the next thirty years, George Ticknor, Letters to

Pascual de Gayangos (1927), is a fascinating testimony of the professional and personal

17 Ticknor, from his side of the Atlantic, made the necessary arrangements to satisfy his voracious appetite for Spanish books. Obadiah Rich and Pascual de Gayangos often coordinated their book collecting efforts, and, in a letter from 1842, we find Ticknor instructing Washington Irving, already “growing old” and less of a specialist in bibliography, to meet with Gayangos in London to obtain a list of books to be purchased in Madrid, where Irving was destined (Life, Letters, II 246). Aside from those men mentioned here, Ticknor reached out to other European contacts, such as Nicolaus Julius, future translator of the History into German and colleague of Ludwig Tieck—in an effort to increase his holdings (Life, Letters, II 250). Many of these acquisitions came after the death of someone prominent in the field of Spanish studies. For example, Ticknor acquired some important titles at an auction of the late Robert Southey’s books in 1844 (Life, Letters, II 248). 18 These documents are found, primarily, in the William H. Prescott Papers, Ms. N-2180, at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

100 Leigh relationship between these two men as well as the transatlantic enterprise in which they were involved. As the letters in that collection reveal, Ticknor and Gayangos were in constant communication about interesting books to purchase, with Ticknor seeking the advice of Gayangos as often, if not more often, than he requests materials directly. In other words, as with Obadiah Rich, Ticknor frequently left the matter of which books to purchase entirely up to Gayangos and, in doing so, tethered his own career to the selective acumen of his two primary book agents. To efficiently achieve his goals, Ticknor at times requested that they coordinate their efforts. For example, in a letter from Ticknor to Rich in 1846,

Ticknor writes:

I wish to give you carte blanche, and feel sure that with my letter of January 27, and this list of my books, you cannot mistake my wants; which, you know, have always been confined to Spanish belles-lettres, and whatever is necessary to understand the history of Spanish elegant literature. From time to time I pray you to send Mr. Gayangos a note of your purchases, as he has a similar carte blanche from me, and I will desire him to do the same with you. (Life, Letters, II 249)

When dealing with original historical documents, Gayangos—who, for a time, was sole caretaker of the only extant codex containing the Poema de Mio Cid (PMC)—most often had copies made in Spain and sent to Ticknor in Boston, but he sometimes sent Ticknor original documents directly to be copied in Boston and returned.19 Despite some suggestive references (Notebook in Northern Spain 86), it remains unclear whether Gayangos actually sent Ticknor the unique extant codex of the PMC to be copied and returned. To take this action with such an invaluable document, now housed under maximum security in the

Biblioteca Nacional de España, would, of course, be unthinkable today. Ticknor never mentions such an exchange in his letters to Gayangos, yet it is nonetheless intriguing to

19 According to a note from a certain “Sparks,” Gayangos refused compensation for the book collecting he undertook for Ticknor and Prescott (Letters to Pascual de Gayangos 537n21).

101 Leigh imagine the codex of the PMC in the hands of Ticknor on American soil. Huntington claims

Ticknor had it in his possession “for some time” and that “Señor Pidal,” assured him of this

(544-5).20 The following request by Ticknor is typical of their business relations. When looking for the correspondence of a Spanish historian, Juan Bautista Muñoz (1745-1799), regarding the original manuscripts of Bernal Díaz’s famous account of the conquest of

Mexico, Ticknor gives Gayangos instructions on where to find the documents within the

Royal Society of History in Madrid, and then adds:

I shall be glad to have it soon, and, if you cannot send it through the Minister of the United States, or some other diplomatic channel which you think quite safe, please to have it so copied that it can come by mail. (Letters to Pascual de Gayangos 314)

In an earlier letter, Ticknor reports having sent Gayangos copies of the History “through

Don Angel Calderón, your minister at Washington,” (236) thus confirming that Ticknor and

Gayangos often sent delicate materials through diplomatic networks. In any case, the services lent by Gayangos and Rich, as well as Ticknor’s other book agents, were invaluable.

Without their assistance, it would have been impossible for Ticknor to build his collection of Spanish and Portuguese literature and, consequently, to produce the History of Spanish

Literature, the first history of Spanish literature based on primary documents.21

20 It is unclear which “Pidal” Huntington refers to, but it is either Luis Pidal y Mon (1842- 1913), second Marquis of Pidal, or, more probably, his brother, Alejandro Pidal y Mon (1846-1913). 21 About the service rendered to Ticknor by these men and the subsequent growth of his personal library, Ticknor’s daughter, Anna, says the following: The growth of the History is intimately connected with the growth of his Spanish library, for his books were his necessary tools, and the library took its character from the literary purpose for which it was collected. His correspondence with Don Pascual de Gayangos, his constant orders to Mr. Rich, and to others, for Spanish books, and for all the accessory materials, became, as the years went on, more and more marked by indications of the absorbing subject he had in hand. (Life, Letters, II 245) On the death of Obadiah Rich, Ticknor paid tribute in a letter to Gayangos:

102 Leigh

Published in 1849, the History of Spanish Literature stands as Ticknor’s most prominent mediation of Spanish literature and a trailblazing document in the history of

Hispanism. It took him more than a decade to write—Anna Ticknor, George’s daughter, says her father began the project in earnest upon his return from his second European journey, in 1838 (Life, Letters, II 243)—and it faithfully conveys Ticknor’s long-held conception of Spanish literature, one that remained essentially unchanged since his experience travelling through Spain as a young adult. In the History, Ticknor elaborates on many of the themes he mentions in the Syllabus, while he also introduces new ones to support his thesis. Let us, therefore, examine the cornerstones of this thesis and consider how they relate to previous and contemporary critical commentary. The picture that emerges from such a consideration is interesting not only for what Ticknor says about

Spanish literature, but also for what it intimates about his hopes for his young country.

Let us first examine the format of the History. As we saw in the case of the Syllabus, the format alone of a literary history conveys a sense of how the author conceives of their subject, and there are some noteworthy differences between the format of the Syllabus and that of the History. While we will only briefly describe the divisions of the History as they relate to those of the Syllabus, the issues raised here, such as the emphasis given to

“national character,” will be examined further in the following paragraphs. In the History,

Ticknor again divides Spanish literature into three periods. The “First Period” comprises

that literature that existed in Spain between the first appearance of the present written language and the early part of the reign of the emperor Charles the Fifth, or from the end of the twelfth century to the beginning of the sixteenth. (History, I 1)

He was an excellent man, who has rendered me many kind services, and I shall miss him much. I was glad to know that my acknowledgment of the obligations I have owes to him, reached him in the Preface to my History a little time before his death. (Letters to Pascual Gayangos 194).

103 Leigh

The “Second Period” includes

the literature that existed in Spain from the accession of the Austrian family to its extinction; or from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth. (455)

And finally, the “Third Period” consists of

the literature that existed in Spain between the accession of the Bourbon family and the invasion of Bonaparte; or from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the early part of the nineteenth. (History, III ix)

It is clear from this preliminary sketch of the History that Ticknor has toned down the overtly moralistic elements present in the descriptive subtitles of the Syllabus. He no longer refers to the “Second Period” as “best,” for example, and he no longer openly condemns the

“Third Period” in its accompanying subtitle. Nor does he describe the “First Period” as the foundation of Spanish literature, although he undoubtedly still considered it as such.

Superficially, then, Ticknor wished to project a more neutral tone in the History, and this change in tone resulted from the differing natures of the two projects, the one academic, the other “regular” (History, I x). Though it may seem somewhat backwards today, Ticknor, as a college professor, allowed himself a higher degree of partiality when presenting a subjective historical trajectory, but, as a writer for a general audience, as Ticknor professedly was when he wrote the History, he thought it best to minimize any apparent sign of moralistic preconception in the interest of projecting a more objective assessment.

In any case, if we look more closely at the subdivisions within each period, a clearer picture emerges of Ticknor’s conception of Spanish literature. For example, in the “First

Period,” we encounter subdivisions like “Earliest National Poetry,” “Appearance of the

Castilian,” “Popular Literature,” “National and Indigenous,” and “Character of the Old

Ballads” (xiii-xv). In nearly every chapter of the “First Period,” in fact, we encounter some

104 Leigh variation of the words, “national,” “popular,” and “character.” This, taken alone, should not be surprising given the predominant critical paradigms and the historical scholarly ambit in which Ticknor moved, but it is noteworthy that readers of the History cannot readily deduce from the chapter titles and subtitles exactly what position Ticknor will adopt vis-à- vis his topic. He clearly distinguishes between the literature he considers “national,”

“Castilian,” or “popular,” and other literature that is, in contrast, “courtly”, “Provençal,” or

“Italian,” but we must delve into the content of the History to learn Ticknor’s beliefs about these disparate currents. The one telling inclusion in the table of contents is the title of the last chapter of the “First Period:” “Discouragements of Spanish Culture at the End of this

Period, and its General Condition;” and its subdivisions, “Spanish Intolerance,” “Inquisition, its Origin,” and then, at the very end of the “First Period,” “Past Literature in Spain” and the

“Promise for the Future” (xix). At the end of the medieval period, Ticknor looks forward to the great literature that the next period will produce while he simultaneously laments the introduction of one of the most destructive forces on Spanish literary genius. In doing so, he reveals his own underlying beliefs about Spanish literature, the same beliefs that emerge from reading the Syllabus, namely, that a pure, national literature emerged from

Spain’s early medieval period only to be increasingly degraded by the Inquisition and authoritarian government, beginning in the Early Modern period and continuing through the present time.

The subdivisions of the “Second Period” are similarly ambivalent about Spanish literature’s course and merit. There are encouraging sections entitled “Period of Glory in

Spain” and “Hopes of Universal Empire,” but more ominous-sounding titles predominate, like “Learned Men Persecuted,” “Degradation of Loyalty,” and “Moral Contradictions” (xix-

105 Leigh xx). Then, in the “Third Period,” there are more explicitly negative sections titled “Low

State of Spanish Culture,” “Intolerance,” and “Effects of the Times on Letters” (History, III ix- xi). We can, thus, readily perceive how Ticknor superficially tones down his negative moralistic interpretation of Spanish literature in the History’s chapter titles while hinting at his true beliefs in the titles of their subdivisions. In order to really understand his argument, however, let us now turn to the History’s content.

Simply put, all of Ticknor’s opinions about Spanish literature revolve around the notion of national character. This is hardly surprising given the emphasis placed upon this issue by Herder and, more importantly, Madame de Staël, a figure who exercised no small influence over Ticknor and his Boston cohort. In Ticknor’s time, national character was believed to be a sort of Rosetta stone for deciphering the history and destiny of nations, and Ticknor’s goal in writing the History is, essentially, to correctly identify “Spanish-ness,” as his predecessors had failed to do, to then be able to explain the perceived decline of

Spanish letters. To do so, Ticknor had to pinpoint the beginning of Spanish national character and trace its development through literature. According to this process, Ticknor, having concluded this examination, would then be able to account for the deplorable fall of

Spanish letters as the result of some quality of Spanish national character. Indeed, in

Ticknor’s conception, the course of Spanish literature was charted by national character, not against it. In other words, if Spanish literature had reached a low point in Ticknor’s time, as he certainly believed it had22, it must needs be the result of some inherent flaw of

Spanish national character and not any external force acting upon it.

22 Ticknor remarks in a letter to Nicolaus Julius from 1844 that his work on the History “is now approaching 1700, after which there is not much, as you well know… (Life, Letters, II 251).

106 Leigh

Ticknor’s notion of exactly what constitutes Spanish national character is comprehended only by appreciating the frequency with which he repeats phrases about loyalty and religiosity. He never defines Spanish character, per se, but he hints at its constitutive elements. For example, in one passage, Ticknor rejects the theory put forward by his mentor, Antonio Conde, regarding a supposed Arabic influence in the Spanish ballads by citing the perceived originality of that genre:

[The ballads] have not at all the characteristics of an imitated literature…On the contrary, their freedom, their energy, their Christian tone and chivalrous loyalty, announce an originality and independence of character. (History, I 110)

Later on, also in reference to the ballads, he adds: “the most striking peculiarity of the whole mass is, perhaps, to be found in the degree in which it expresses the national character. Loyalty is constantly prominent” (146). The ballads themselves, according to

Ticknor, constitute the earliest examples of Spanish poetry and originate directly from the battles of the Reconquista, a contest in which Christian Spaniards were “ennobled by a sense of religion and loyalty” (153). When speaking of the chronicles, Ticknor esteems them precisely for the degree to which they emanate “the old Spanish loyalty, the old

Spanish religious faith” (215-16). And, interestingly, much like his anonymous contemporary had done years before in an article for the North American Review23, Ticknor proffers his own assessment of Christopher Columbus’s true spirit, claiming him not for

America, but for Spain:

Columbus was not born a Spaniard. But his spirit was eminently Spanish. His loyalty, his religious faith and enthusiasm, his love of great and extraordinary adventure, were all Spanish rather than Italian, and were all in harmony with the Spanish national character, when he became part of its glory. (History, I 206-07)

23 See: Anonymous. Review of Navarrete’s Colección de viajes y descubrimientos. North American Review 24.55 (1827): 265-294.

107 Leigh

Indeed, Ticknor considers Spain, as a result of their long struggle with the Moors, the most pious nation of the Old World:

The Spaniards always felt their warfare to be peculiarly that of soldiers of the Cross; they always felt themselves, beyond every thing else and above every thing else, to be Christian men contending against misbelief. Their religious sympathies were, therefore, constantly apparent, and often predominated over all others; so that, while they were little connected with the Church of Rome by those political ties that were bringing half of Europe into bondage; they were more connected with its religious spirit than any other people of modern times. (History, I 347)

And then, in perhaps Ticknor’s most direct attempt at defining Spanish national character, he says the following:

There are two traits of the earliest Spanish literature which are so separate and peculiar, that they must be noticed from the outset,—religious faith and knightly loyalty […] Nor should we be surprised at this. The Spanish national character, as it has existed from its first development down to our own days, was mainly formed in the earlier part of that solemn contest which began the moment the Moors landed beneath the Rock of Gibraltar, and which cannot be said to have ended, until, in the time of Philip the Third, the last remnants of their unhappy race were cruelly driven from the shores which their fathers, nine centuries before, had so unjustifiably invaded. During this contest, and especially during the two or three dark centuries when the earliest Spanish poetry appeared, nothing but an invincible religious faith, and a no less invincible loyalty to the own princes, could have sustained the Christian Spaniards in their disheartening struggle against their infidel oppressors. It was, therefore, a stern necessity which made these two high qualities elements of the Spanish national character,—a character all whose energies were for ages devoted to the one grand object of their prayers as Christians and their hopes as patriots, the expulsion of their hated invaders. (History, I 103-104)

From these comments, then, we understand that, for Ticknor, loyalty and religiosity are the two most important traits of Spanish national character. In his discussion of these traits as they are manifest in early Spanish literature, Ticknor is highly complimentary. He considers these traits to be admirable, even if they are inevitable, given their organic development based on particular circumstances. His regard for Spanish loyalty and piety is, however, mostly limited to the medieval period, or, Ticknor’s “First Period,” a time in which he imagines Spain to be unencumbered by the oppressive influences of the Church and the

108 Leigh

State, as well as foreign influence. Ultimately, though, Ticknor alleges that the same elements of national character that so distinguished Spain from other nations early on, would eventually lead to its literary undoing, arguing that Spaniards’ inherent deference to authority and religious fervor, favorably described at the beginning of Spanish nationhood as loyalty and piety, would lead to an increasingly intrusive government and religion.

Spaniards, then, become complicit in the destruction of their own literature. This destruction did not happen all at once, of course. It happened over the course of several centuries, and it depended on the extent to which the Church and the State exercised their power over the national intellect. Let us, then, examine how Ticknor evaluates his three periods of Spanish literature.

Ticknor believes that the circumstances for truly national literature are optimal at the beginning of Spain’s history, that is, during the “First Period,” and it is in this section that Ticknor provides the most hints of his conception of Spanish national character.

According to Ticknor, national character is formed at the beginning of each nation’s history and is the result of “local situation and of circumstances seemingly accidental” (History, I 3).

In the case of Spain, that national character was forged out of the protracted, hard-fought battles of the Reconquest (5, 9-10). As one may deduce from such a theory, Ticknor’s notion of Spanish national character expressly discounts Muslim and Judaic elements and, instead, attributes its formation exclusively to the beleaguered Christian population who, long ago, sought refuge in the mountains of northern Spain, a site from which they would develop a distinct national character and launch their efforts to retake the Peninsula (9-

10). This view is consistent with Ticknor’s ideas about the origins of genuine national literatures, about which he says:

109 Leigh

In the earliest ages of every literature that has vindicated for itself a permanent character in modern Europe, much of what constituted its foundations was the result of local situation and of circumstances seemingly accidental. (History, I 3)

Of all European nations, he asserts that Spain was particularly situated to realize literary greatness:

Favored by a happy climate and soil, by the remains of Roman culture, which had lingered long in its mountains, and by the earnest and passionate spirit which has marked its people through their many revolutions down to the present day, the first signs of a revived poetical feeling are perceptible in the Spanish peninsula even before they are to be found, with their distinctive characteristics, in that of Italy. (History, I 4)

Before that literary greatness could be realized, or, as Ticknor puts it, before “peace had given opportunity for the ornaments of life,” Spain’s Christians would wage a centuries- long war with the “Arab invaders” (5). Due to this protracted contest, Italy, instead of Spain, emerged as the “head of the elegant literature of the world” (5). In any case, amidst the din of battle, Spanish national character was forged, and with it, Spanish literature:

It is precisely in this century of confusion and violence, when the Christian population of the country may be said, with the old chronicle, to have been kept constantly in battle array, that we hear the first notes of their wild, national poetry, which come to us mingled with their war-shouts, and breathing the very spirit of their victories. (History, I 9-10)

The earliest poetry, then, most faithfully conveyed national character due to its chronological proximity to the inception of Spanish national character. And that national character began to congeal during the early battles of the Reconquista, a fact which distinguished Spain from other European nations where,

…if the inspirations of poetry came at all, they came in some fortunate period of comparative quietness and security, when the minds of men were less engrossed than they were wont to be by the necessity of providing for their personal safety and for their most pressing physical wants. (History, I 6)

110 Leigh

This was not the case of Spain. Spanish national character formed as the result of

“confusion and violence.” Furthermore, Ticknor believes that national character, once formed, is immutable and, hence, the particular national character that would forever govern Spaniards’ social, cultural, and political behavior was definitively set in the earliest years of Christian resistance to the Muslim hegemony in the Peninsula.24 Those times called for strong leadership, loyalty, and faith, characteristics that factor into the nebulous definition of Spanish national character that Ticknor outlines in his writings.

Ticknor believes that, although national character is immutable, it is most pure during the beginnings of a given nation, and thus, the earliest years of nationhood are the most illustrative because they are freest from foreign influence. Based on this evaluative framework, the very earliest Spanish literature must, by definition, be the best, for it is that literature that is essentially untainted, produced during a period in which Spaniards were allowed to develop in accordance with their distinct character, a character determined by their particular geographical, cultural, and historical situation. Indeed, foreign influence of any kind is anathema to Ticknor’s conception of national literature, and he repeatedly discusses harmful foreign influences exerted upon Spanish literature throughout its development. The earliest of these influences are from Italy and France, and Ticknor thus divides his “First Period” between “genuinely national poetry and prose” and “that portion which, by imitating the refinement of Provence or of Italy, was, during the same interval, more or less separated from the popular spirit and genius” (History, I 5), expressly reinforcing the idea that foreign influences, especially when manifest among elite groups,

24 Ticknor actually specifies the period that saw “the first notes of their wild, national poetry” as occurring “between the capture of Saragossa […] and their great victory on the plains of Tolosa” (History, I 9-10).

111 Leigh cannot be reconciled with an immutable national character. This division also clearly shows that Ticknor conceived of what we would now call the medieval period as one that exemplified true national literature, regardless of foreign distractions.25

In Ticknor’s discussion of early national literature, he emphasizes certain themes that, along with loyalty and piety, may be understood as constitutive of Spanish national character. One of those themes is linguistic in nature. In Ticknor’s conception, language, although subordinate to national character, develops side by side with national character, and the two even depend upon one another in their development. Interestingly, this conception is not divorced from external, ethnic implications. Ticknor attempts a difficult conciliation of, on the one hand, claiming early Spanish vernacular’s derivation and subsequent independence from Latin, while, on the other hand, maintaining a transcendent continuity with the Visigoth spirit:

…the purity of the Latin tongue, which they had spoken for so many ages, was finally lost, through that neglect of its cultivation which was a necessary consequence of the miseries that oppressed them. But with the spirit which so long sustained their forefathers against the power of Rome, and which has carried their descendants through a hardly less fierce contest against the power of France, they maintained, to a remarkable degree, their ancient manners and feelings, their religion, their laws, and their institutions; and, separating themselves by an implacable hatred from their Moorish invaders, they there, in those rude mountains, laid deep the

25 Ticknor’s ideas are, at times, seemingly contradictory. For example, after defining Spanish character specifically as that character forged by Spanish Christians in their struggle against the Moors, Ticknor claims that early Spanish popular literature—ballads, chronicles, romances of chivalry, and theater—was inspired by Moorish traditions (History, I 107-108), only to refute a theory by Antonio Conde alleging an Arabic influence in the early Spanish ballads (108). He goes further and says: These four classes compose what was generally most valued in Spanish literature during the latter part of the fourteenth century, the whole of the fifteenth, and much of the sixteenth. They rested on the deep foundation of the national character, and therefore, by their very nature, were opposed to the Provencal, the Italian, and the courtly schools, which flourished during the same period. (History, I 108) This evaluation conflicts with his praise of sixteenth century writers like Garcilaso de la Vega, among others, who imitated Italian and other foreign forms.

112 Leigh

foundations of a national character, — of that character which has subsisted to our own times. (History, I 7)

Here Ticknor links Spaniards, that is, Christian Spaniards, with their non-Muslim forefathers, to distinguish between two cultural legacies, which, in turn, allows for the sort of Manichean positions that so often accompanied nineteenth-century literary and historical scholarship. In contrast to those tendencies, though, Ticknor’s move is less straightforward. In the quoted passage, Ticknor portrays Spanish culture as “pure” on a linguistic basis, but he subsequently ignores the Visigoths’ Arianism, an uncomfortable heritage for a Roman Catholic nation, choosing instead to highlight their rugged steadfastness in the face of adversity. He likewise emphasizes the purity of the Latin language while portraying Romans as oppressors and ignoring the fact that the peninsular

Visigoths were themselves a hybrid culture. In this way, he is able to posit a dual cultural heritage for Christian Spaniards, one that emphasizes the desirable elements of both

Visigoth and Roman culture and excludes the negative ones. Spaniards become inheritors of the noble Latin language and are, likewise, supposed to be benefactors of the sophisticated Roman culture while, at the same time, they are cast as descendants of the battle-hardened Visigoths whose spirit endures Ticknor’s notion of “Spanish-ness.”

In Ticknor’s conception, early Spaniards boldly, albeit gradually, crafted a new language out of the ruins of Latin, and this new vernacular thereafter served as the only legitimate vehicle for the expression of Spanish national character. His emphasis on language and its close association with the beginnings of national literature was not new.

Both Herder, in his “Treatise Upon the Origin of Language” (1772), and Rousseau, in his

Essay on the Origin of Languages (1781), had announced this connection in the previous century, and their arguments about the organic, emotive origin of language held sway

113 Leigh among intellectuals for the better part of the nineteenth century, as M. H. Abrams makes clear in his classic study on Romanticism, The Mirror and the Lamp (82). In that work,

Abrams asserts that Romantic critics, the inheritors of Herder and Rousseau’s notions of language, differed in their individual estimations of “primitive” poetry, but most accepted that it originated from instinctual utterance instead of the Aristotelian idea of an instinct for imitation (101). Within this theoretical framework, “the earliest documents […] of the most disparate cultures […] were frequently said to exhibit the uniform attributes of the primitive mind,” and, as Abrams puts it, “the defining character of all these poets was that they composed from nature, hence spontaneously, artlessly, and without forethought either of their design or their audience” (82). The supposed spontaneity of early language was an important concept for Ticknor and his contemporaries. Based on this theory, they could more easily make the case that particular forms of language developed in concert with distinct national characters and, moreover, that those forms expressed national character.

Another influential figure on this subject, and one that Ticknor met in person during his stay in England, was William Wordsworth (1770-1850). In the famous preface to his

Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth outlines his concept of language, one that largely concords with those of Herder and Rousseau. He considers poetry to be language’s premier organized manifestation, and describes it as “the expression of overflow of feeling” that originated in “primitive utterances of passion which, through organic causes, were naturally rhythmic and figurative” (101). Elsewhere, Wordsworth writes: “The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring, and figurative” (102). This was precisely how Ticknor would describe what he considered the

114 Leigh most impressive and foundational work of Spanish literature, the Poema de Mio Cid, as well as the early ballads. For Ticknor, the development of the Spanish vernacular and Spanish national character were closely intertwined. The medieval period, Ticknor’s “First Period,” constituted the most important period in Spanish literary history because it exhibits the earliest, and, thus, purest, manifestation of the Spanish language and Spanish national character.

It is also noteworthy that Ticknor draws a correlation between Spanish national literature and “popular feeling” (History, I 6). For Ticknor, the two are inseparable. True national literature can never be elitist; it must emanate from and concord with popular sentiment. And this is how Ticknor evaluates each work within the Spanish literary corpus: the degree to which it achieves harmony with, and faithfully represents, the immutable

Spanish national character. In fact, after Ticknor identifies Spanish national character as a combination of loyalty and piety, he declares that “Castilian poetry was, from the first, to an extraordinary degree, an outpouring of the popular feeling and character,” such that, we should not be surprised that the previously mentioned attributes, loyalty and piety,

“constantly break through the mass of Spanish literature, and breathe their spirit from nearly every portion of it” (105). The early poets, untrained minstrels and soldiers, mostly, could not help but express popular sentiment in their poetry due to their humble origins.

Only later, when courtly and “conceited” influences predominate, is Spanish literature contaminated by foreign tastes (117-118). Ticknor’s last commentary on the “First Period” reads:

It extends through nearly four complete centuries, from the first breathings of the poetical enthusiasm of the mass of the people down to the decay of the courtly literature in the latter part of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella; and it is filled with materials destined, at last, to produce such a school of poetry and elegant prose as,

115 Leigh

in the sober judgment of the nation itself, still constitutes the proper body of the national literature. (History, I 452)

Thus, it is clear that Ticknor appreciated the literature of the “First Period” as the bedrock for all subsequent Spanish literature. At the same time, however, he perceives within this initial flourishing of national literature the seeds of its undoing. Over the course of the

“First Period,” the early “poetical enthusiasm of the mass of the people” gradually gives way to the “decay” of “courtly literature,” and this sentiment is largely representative of his general view of Spanish literary history.

Regarding the “Second Period,” Ticknor is ambivalent. On one hand, he maintains the supremacy of Golden Age literature, basing his evaluation, seemingly, on the confluence of Spain’s increasing riches stemming from the New World, and her status as an imperial power under Carlos V. In his introductory remarks to the “Second Period,” he writes:

In every country that has yet obtained a rank among those nations whose intellectual cultivation is the highest, the period in which it has produced the permanent body of its literature has been that of its glory as a state. The reason is obvious. There is then a spirit and activity abroad among the elements that constitute the national character, which naturally express themselves in such poetry and eloquence as, being the result of the excited condition of the people and bearing its impress, become for all future exertions a model and standard that can be approached only when the popular character is again stirred by a similar enthusiasm. (History, I 457)

Ticknor clearly considers the sixteenth century to be the apogee of Spain’s political, and, thus, literary, importance. It is similarly clear, though, that Ticknor is aware of the incongruity of that opinion with his previous comments regarding genuine national literature, and, at various points in the “Second Period,” he is at pains to reconcile those disparate notions. More specifically, the “Second Period” saw the proliferation of the

Inquisition and an autocratic government that often worked together to further their own agendas over and against the will of the masses. Such is Ticknor’s view, at least.

116 Leigh

The “Second Period” also saw the proliferation of foreign influences in Spanish literature. This influence actually began in the “First Period,” but it culminates in the second. Before discussing Juan Boscán, for example, Ticknor points to certain fifteenth- century writers like Iñigo López de Mendoza, the Marquis of Santillana (1398-1458), and

Juan de Mena (1411-1456), portraying the first as a kind of link between genuine national literature and foreign influence. Since Mendoza was educated in Castile, he “belonged to the genuinely indigenous school of Spanish poetry,” but, due to his association with the

Marquis of Villena, he was introduced to the troubadour Provençal tradition, as well as

Italian forms (History, I 370). Therefore, he adds, we should not be surprised that part of his writings belong to the Provençal and Italian schools, while the other part is “genuinely

Spanish” (370). Ticknor actually considers the Marquis of Santillana capable of transforming foreign forms, specifically the serranilla, of Provencal extraction, into something truly Spanish (372). At the same time, however, he questions the validity of the

Marquis’s introduction of the sonnet into Spain and concludes his remarks by saying:

He was the founder of an Italian and courtly school in Spanish poetry; one, on the whole, adverse to the national spirit, and finally overcome by it, and yet one that long exercised a considerable sway, and at last contributed something to the materials which, in the sixteenth century, went to build up and constitute the proper literature of the country. (History, I 379)

This evaluation of the Marquis of Santillana is instructive to our discussion because it shows how Ticknor awkwardly reconciles the opposite notions of, on the one hand, courtly and foreign literature, and, on the other, genuine national literature. He must, it seems, allow himself room to sufficiently praise the literature of the siglo de oro, despite the uncomfortable manifestation of various foreign currents in the literature of that time, currents that are at odds with his own definition of national literature.

117 Leigh

The Castilian language, that organic manifestation and unique authentic vehicle for

Spanish national character, was also changing around the turn of the “Second Period,” and

Ticknor identifies Juan de Mena as an early agent of this change. He admits that Mena

“contributed to the development of the Castilian language” by “boldly” employing new words as he saw fit, but he laments that “he exercised no proper skill in the selection”

(History, I 390), and he blames him for Gómez Manrique’s “Latinisms,” which he considers

“quite ridiculous” (405). Nevertheless, Ticknor again excuses behavior that should rightly be censured according to his theory of national literature, saying:

There is no doubt that the language of Spanish poetry was strengthened and its versification ennobled by his efforts, and that the example he set, followed, as it was, by Lucena, Diego de San Pedro, Garci Sanchez de Badajos (sic), the Manriques, and others, laid the true foundations for the greater and more judicious enlargement of the whole Castilian vocabulary in the age that followed. (History, I 390-91)

Effectively, then, Ticknor is prepared to allow for changes to Spanish literature and language that he considers necessary precursors to the undisputed glory of the “Second

Period.” All of this makes clear that Ticknor believes the “First Period” to represent a firm foundation of genuine national literature, a time of untainted national character, whereas the “Second Period” is the happy consequence of such a sound base, even if that national character had already begun to decay.

Ticknor’s ambivalent attitude about the “Second Period” is illustrated further in his remarks on Hernando de Castillo’s Cancionero general. The Cancionero, first printed in

1511, was a compendium of songs allegedly taken from the popular oral stock of the

Spanish masses. In reality, however, most of the songs included in that collection were written by aristocrats affecting a popular style. Ticknor, as may be expected, does not approve. He derides the Cancionero general for its exclusion of the earliest poetry of the

118 Leigh country, its “conceited” imitations of Provençal and Italian styles, as well as its patrician authors and intended audience, concluding his remarks by saying, “the mass is wearisome and monotonous. […] It is of the court, courtly; overstrained, formal, and cold” (History, I

444). The “courtly classes,” after all, “placed small value on what was old and national in their poetical literature,” (125) a clear sign of their divergence from the national character.

This denunciation of the Cancionero general is, however, set against a backdrop of a prevailing optimism. Ticknor goes on to say that, despite the poverty of those collections of inauthentic songs, it was impossible to impede the progress of Spanish poetry at that time, given the ongoing realization of Spain’s “golden age,” despite the fact that “the taste of the court in whatever regarded Spanish literature continued low and false” (History, I 444-45).

After all, at the end of the fifteenth century, Spain was on a course for greatness following the annexation of Granada and the discovery of the New World. These momentous achievements, accompanied by the propagation and proliferation of the Castilian language throughout the Peninsula, rekindled the “old ballad spirit,” (445) which originated from similarly heroic accomplishments at the beginning of Spain’s history. And this renewed ballad spirit was manifest in another, more genuine collection popular songs, the Silva de romances, compiled by “Stevan G. de Nagera,” (Zaragoza 1550) a collection that constituted, for Ticknor, “the most curious and important of them all,” as it was “obviously taken from the traditions of the country” (126).

Throughout the History, Ticknor dutifully includes every Spanish writer of note, but he clearly believed some to be better than others, and his judgments are, again, based on the degree to which those writers did or did not achieve harmony with his conception of

Spanish national character. At times, though, it appears that Ticknor feels the need to

119 Leigh conciliate contemporary critical opinion of particular authors with his own theory of literature, and this conflict is especially apparent in the “Second Period.” For example, it is impossible for Ticknor to subvert tradition and entirely disregard the important literary contributions to Spanish literature made by Juan Boscán (1492-1552) and Garcilaso de la

Vega (1498-1536) in the early part of the sixteenth century, despite the fact that these authors, perhaps more so than any others in Spanish literary history, consciously injected foreign forms into Spanish literature, an act amounting to treason in Ticknor’s strict conceptual framework. To diplomatically maneuver this awkward situation, then, Ticknor must first pay due respect to each writer. Boscán, though he wrote in Italian forms, did so

“with boldness and success” and introduced a “new school” into Spanish poetry that has exercised a lasting influence (History, I 479). He reports, too, that, according to Garcilaso,

Boscán’s translation of Il Cortegiano, by the Italian author, Baldassare Castiglione, “reads like an original work” (482), thus attributing praise of that problematic act to Boscán’s friend and contemporary, instead of himself. Garcilaso, on the other hand, was “a poet of no common genius” who gave an “air of freshness and even originality” to the pastoral genre and whose poems are “remarkable for their gentleness and melancholy” (490-91). And, even when Garcilaso writes in Italian forms, his “genius” shines through and he “writes only like a Spaniard, warm with the peculiar national spirit of his country” (491). Ticknor subsequently acknowledges that Garcilaso’s poetry “sunk deep into the hearts of his countrymen” and, thus, he has “come down to us enjoying a general national admiration”

(495). Despite these dubious accolades, Ticknor includes other commentary that more clearly reflects his own beliefs about national literature. Of Boscán’s early poetry in the

“Castilian manner,” for example, he says, “their merit is not great; but, amidst their

120 Leigh ingenious conceits, there is sometimes a happiness and grace of expression rarely granted to the poets of the same school in that of the preceding century” (483). The rest of Boscán’s poems, though, “have nothing to do with the elder national Castilian poetry” (481); even still, “in most of these poems, however, and amidst a good deal of hardness of manner, a

Spanish tone and spirit are perceptible, which rescue them, in a great degree, from the imputation of being copies” (483). Of Garcilaso’s imitation of foreign writers—such as

Petrarch, Ariosto, Virgil, and Theocritus—Ticknor remarks, “where the Italian tone most prevails, something of the poetical spirit which should sustain him is lost” (490-91). It seems, then, that Ticknor is at pains to make allowances for some of the most influential figures in Spanish literary history in spite of their transgressions against purely national traditions. In Ticknor’s final note on Boscán, he diplomatically navigates these contradictory opinions:

Boscán might, probably, have done more for the literature of his country than he did. His poetical talents were not, indeed, of the highest order; but he perceived the degradation into which Spanish poetry had fallen, and was persuaded that the way to raise it again was to give it an ideal character and classical forms such as it had not yet known. But to accomplish this, he adopted a standard not formed on the intimations of the national genius. He took for his models foreign masters, who, were yet entitled to supremacy in no literature but their own, and could never constitute a safe foundation whereon to build a great and permanent school of Spanish poetry. Entire success, therefore, was impossible to him. (History, I 485)

And he voices a similar position vis-à-vis Garcilaso:

That it would have been better for himself and for the literature of his country, if he had drawn more from the elements of the earlier national character, and imitated less the great Italian masters he justly admired, can hardly be doubted. It would have given a freer and more generous movement to his poetical genius, and opened to him a range of subjects and forms of composition, from which, by rejecting the example of the national poets that had gone before him, he excluded himself. But he deliberately decided otherwise; and his great success, added to that of Boscán, introduced into Spain an Italian school of poetry which has been an important part of Spanish literature ever since. (History, I 495)

121 Leigh

Ticknor, perhaps against his better instincts, did not feel capable of roundly rejecting authors of such prominence and general esteem as Boscán and Garcilaso. Despite his refusal to disavow these figures, however, he does faithfully articulate his position concerning their influence on Spanish national literature. And such is his position on other

Spanish authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Some, like Miguel de Cervantes

(1547-1616) and Lope de Vega (1562-1635), at times manifest true national character, but, in general, the entire “Second Period” is marked with an undeniable foreign influence, which, for Ticknor, can only signify decay.

“Decay” is precisely the word Ticknor employs to describe the seventeenth century, saying at the outset of his comments on that century: “It is impossible to study with care the Spanish literature of the seventeenth century, and not feel that we are in the presence of a general decay of the national character” (History, III 198). Whatever national character was manifest in Spain’s sixteenth-century literature had all but disappeared by the seventeenth century, and, for Ticknor, this was symptomatic of the dramatic cultural decline from which Spain, at the time of his writing, had not recovered. The seventeenth century was a century that saw the utter perversion of the two constitutive traits of

Spanish national character: loyalty and piety. Both had been corrupted and, as a consequence, the Inquisition and the government were free to perpetrate their dreadful crimes against the Spanish intellect with impunity. Ticknor understood Spain’s low cultural condition in the seventeenth century to be a direct result of its mismanagement of the political power it enjoyed during the previous century. Even previous to the seventeenth century, during that period when Ticknor, in another section of the History, imagined Spain to be destined for greatness due to its ever-growing political importance, he says that

122 Leigh

Charles V (1500-1558) had already “crushed nearly all political liberty” and given “a false direction to the character of [Spaniards]”, which entirely eroded the spirit of progress that such an age should have manifested (199). By the seventeenth century, it was clear that

Spain had wantonly wasted its previous political power and prestige within the span of less than a century:

It was a new lesson to the world in the vicissitudes of empire. No country in Christendom had, from such a height of power as that which Spain occupied in the time of Charles the Fifth, fallen into such an abyss of degradation as that in which every proud Spaniard felt Spain to be sunk. (History, III 204)

Everything in the seventeenth century, it seemed, was corrupt, and it is to this century that

Ticknor devotes the bulk of his criticisms. The combined influence of the Church and State had, by that point, irrevocably crippled the Spanish intellect, and Ticknor attributed this unfortunate state of affairs to the same inherent qualities of Spanish national character— loyalty and piety—that merited so much praise in previous eras. Ever since the end of the

“First Period,” and increasingly so throughout the “Second Period,” Spanish national character, the “real strength” (199) of the nation, had been assaulted by two primary forces—the Church and the State—and both of these institutions were, in a sense, endorsed by all Spaniards, or, as Ticknor puts it, the damage done to Spain:

was not done, and could not be done, without the assent of the great body of the people, or without such an active cooperation on the part of the government and the higher classes as brought degradation and ruin to all who shared its spirit. (History, III 205)

Such were the consequences of a misguided national character. Whereas, in earlier circumstances, Spanish loyalty and piety served as the cultural anchors that allowed

Spain’s Christians to finally overcome the Moors, in the seventeenth century:

the old religion of the country…was now so perverted from its true character by the enormous growth of the intolerance which sprang up originally almost as a virtue,

123 Leigh

that it had become a means of oppression such as Europe had never before witnessed. (History, III 204)

Nor does Spanish loyalty escape Ticknor’s harsh assessment. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spaniards never failed to support the “cold severity” of Philip the

Second, the “weak bigotry” of Philip the Third, the “luxurious selfishness” of Philip the

Fourth, or the “miserable imbecility” of Charles the Second (207). Spaniards had, in effect, lost any former ability they may have had to critically assess their leaders, preferring, instead, to continually insist that the monarch, whomever it may be, should be regarded with an almost religious reverence. Venerable loyalty had given way to “unhesitating submission” (208). Ticknor concludes his remarks on the seventeenth century with a concise condemnation:

Whatever Spanish literature survived at the end of this period found its nourishment in such feelings of religion and loyalty as still sustained the forms of the monarchy,—an imperfect and unhealthy life, wasting away in an atmosphere of death. At last, as we approach the conclusion of the [seventeenth] century, the Inquisition and the despotism seem to be everywhere present, and to have cast their blight over every thing. (History, III 209)

Ticknor’s outlook for Spain at the end of the “Second Period” is dismal, to say the least, and the following period does little to change his opinions.

The “Third Period” saw the continued corruption of Spanish national character. In addition to the usual atrocities perpetrated by the Inquisition, the State increasingly looked to foreign institutions, specifically France, as models during this time. Spaniards, given the low condition of their culture, were particularly prone to foreign influence as they sought to regain some air of importance and relevancy, and this only exacerbated the misalignment of national character that began centuries ago. Ticknor blames Philip V

(1683-1746), a Frenchman, of being unable to resuscitate old Spanish character, instead

124 Leigh attempting, unsuccessfully, to cultivate the arts under academies, like in France (History, III

215). The neoclassical author, Ignacio de Luzán (1702-1754), comes under similar criticism for trying to impose French forms and rules on Spanish literature (233). Indeed, according to Ticknor, “French influence was everywhere. French even began being spoken at the

Spanish court” (232). If Italy had been the primary point of cultural comparison for Spain in first two periods, France emerged as the main threat to genuine Spanish character in the third. Moreover, France was a leading promoter of what would become known as

Neoclassicism, and that school of thought gradually permeated the critical landscape in the

Peninsula, as well. This line of criticism had occurred, to a limited extent, previously, most notably in the writings of Spanish commentators on Aristotle, Alonso López, El Pinciano

(1547-1627), principal among them26; but in the “Third Period” Neoclassical ideas were even more widespread and literature became more subject to extraneous rules and, consequently, even less connected to the national character. Needless to say, Ticknor considered French Neoclassical theater nothing less than a travesty, and Spanish imitations of that style, or, in other words, imitations of an imitation, were doubly abhorrent (312).

There were, of course, a few bright lights amidst the darkness of the “Third Period,” but the atmosphere in which those writers lived was so adverse to their teachings that they accomplished but little. Such was the circumstance of figures like Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y

Montenegro (1676-1764), Manuel José Quintana (1772-1857), Leandro Fernández de

Moratín (1760-1828), José Cadalso (1741-1782), Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1744-

1811), and Juan Meléndez Valdés (1754-1817), promising men of letters born into “evil

26 Ticknor obviously harbors some resentment towards El Pinciano for the strict formalities he propagated, saying: “Ancient rhetoric can be applied, in all its strictness, to no modern poetry, and least of all to the poetry of Spain” (History, III 237).

125 Leigh times” (295). The latter of these men, in fact, produced a book of poetry “more worthy of the country than any that had been produced in Spain since the disappearance of the great lights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” and it was received enthusiastically as the “long-looked-for dawn of a brighter day” (288). Such accomplishments, however, were few and far between. Unable to enact any real cultural rejuvenation or return to genuine national literature, these writers either existed on the margins of Spanish society, became functionaries of the government, languished in exile or prison, or, most often, some unhappy combination of the three.27 Ticknor summarizes and concludes his section on the

“Third Period” in the following manner:

It seemed as if the faculties of thinking and reasoning, in the better sense of these words, were either about to be entirely lost in Spain, or to be partly preserved only in a few scattered individuals, who, by the civil and ecclesiastical tyranny that oppressed them, would be prevented from diffusing even the imperfect light which they themselves enjoyed. (History, III 241)

It seems that Ticknor thought it nearly impossible that Spanish intellectual culture should ever recover from the damage inflicted upon her by successive stages of religious and political oppression. The question of the relationship between forms of government and literature was a common one during this time. In 1834, Ticknor’s friend, Edward Everett, wrote an article in the North American Review that touched on this point, concluding that:

The principles that regulate this connexion (sic) between the condition of literature and that of government, are among the most interesting subjects of general inquiry, and have not yet been settled in a satisfactory way. The question has been considered, but not exhausted by Madame de Staël, in her work on the Influence of Literature. (Review of Bouterwek’s Historia de la literatura española 159)

27 Through “an old weakness in the Castilian character,” “disguised by the loyalty of public service,” Meléndez Valdés ultimately appealed to the court for a position of influence, and ended up becoming a judge.

126 Leigh

Thus, is seems reasonable to frame Ticknor’s work as an attempt to remedy this deficiency, an idea that appears all the more sensible if we consider Ticknor as a disciple of Madame de Staël.

However critical Ticknor is of Spain’s monarchs, though, he is doubly critical of the influence of the Church, and he reserves his most marked criticism for the Inquisition, an institution he considers anathema to the cultivation of Spain’s intellect. He presages the negative influence of the Inquisition at its earliest appearance in the Peninsula, toward the end of the “First Period,” remarking that it was clearly “destined soon to discourage and check that intellectual freedom without which there can be no wise and generous advancement in any people” (History, I 446). Once introduced in the Peninsula, the

Inquisition gradually consolidated its grip over the national psyche with devastating effects.

The effect was appalling. The imaginations of men were filled with horror at the idea of a power so vast and so noiseless; one which was constantly, but invisibly, around them; whose blow was death, but whose steps could neither be heard nor followed amidst the gloom into which it retreated farther and farther as efforts were made to pursue it. From its first establishment, therefore, while the great body of the Spanish Christians rejoiced in the purity and orthodoxy of their faith, and not unwillingly saw its enemies called to expiate their unbelief by the most terrible of mortal punishments, the intellectual and cultivated portions of society felt the sense of their personal security gradually shaken, until, at last, it became an anxious object of their lives to avoid the suspicions of a tribunal which infused into their minds a terror deeper and more effectual in proportion as it was accompanied by a misgiving how far they might conscientiously oppose its authority. (History, I 450)

It is the Church, then, and more specifically the Inquisition, that Ticknor blames for stifling the national intellect and, thereby, repressing the national character. That being said,

Ticknor believes that the Inquisition could only achieve such distressing results with the tacit endorsement of the Spanish masses, citing an inherent flaw in the national character.

It is, once again, a case of an aberrant national character. That religiosity that once

127 Leigh sustained Spain’s Christians in the deep recesses of the Asturian mountains had devolved into crass and pervasive bigotry. Ticknor repeatedly refers to a propensity to religious feeling among Spaniards from the earliest times and claims this propensity was largely an autochthonous phenomenon (347). Over and against the guidance of Rome, Spanish religious sentiment evolved naturally, out of the immediacy and urgency that colored the prolonged contest between Christians and Muslims. As a result, Spanish religiosity both allowed for greater successes and, ultimately, more precipitous pitfalls. Moreover, he claims that the ugly side of religious fanaticism was evident among Spaniards from an early time. Spanish Christians had been “intolerant” of Muslims and Jews since an early period, which subsequently allowed the Inquisition to establish itself in Spain with so little resistance (446), a negative postulation that is at odds with his previous laudatory comments of early Spanish Christians.

The most destructive effects of the Inquisition began to manifest in the “Second

Period.” During that time, the Inquisition solidified its hold on the Spanish intellect and created a pervasive atmosphere of fear and distrust, in which:

the great body of the Spanish people rejoiced alike in their loyalty and their orthodoxy; and the few who differed in faith from the mass of their fellow-subjects were either held in silence by their fears, or else sunk away from the surface of society the moment their disaffection was suspected. (History, I 467-68)

The feeling that the nation was under constant threat from unspoken enemies, and the tacit complicity of the Spanish masses, further emboldened the Inquisition in its actions. In a

Ticknor’s view, such a situation was inevitable, or, rather, it was inevitable that the

“implacable hatred” that early Christian Spaniards harbored in their hearts against their infidel occupiers would not convert their descendants into “earnest allies” of an institution

128 Leigh hell-bent on purging Spain of the same threat, though more covert, that their ancestors faced (465).

Even more pernicious was the increasingly close association between the Church and the State. Working in tandem, these two institutions had “effectually broken down all that remained, from earlier days, of intellectual independence and manly freedom”

(History, I 205). The effect on intellectual activity, and, thus, literature, was profound.

According to Ticknor, the association between the Church and the State was, from an early period, supported by the masses. Over time, though, both institutions took more liberties in their means of control and, thus, increasingly restricted the liberties of the Spanish people:

The powers of the government and the Church, united in measures which were sustained by the passions and religion of the lower classes of society, became irresistible. The fires of the Inquisition were gradually lighted over the whole country, and the people everywhere thronged to witness its sacrifices, as acts of faith and devotion. From this moment, Spanish intolerance, which through the Moorish wars had accompanied the contest and shared its chivalrous spirit, took that air of somber fanaticism which it never afterwards lost. Soon, its warfare was turned against the opinions and thoughts of men, even more than against their external conduct or their crimes. The Inquisition, which was its true exponent and appropriate instrument, gradually enlarged its own jurisdiction by means of crafty abuses, as well as by the regular forms of law, until non found himself too humble to escape its notice, or too high to be reached by its power. The whole land bent under its influence, and the few who comprehended the mischief that must follow bowed, like the rest, to its authority, or were subjected to its punishments. (History, I 450- 51)

That writers could produce worthy national literature under these restrictive circumstances was nearly impossible. Again, it is necessary to stress that Ticknor understands the rise of the Inquisition and authoritative government as the result of a degenerative and impoverished national character. The same noble spirit that imbued early

Spanish Christians with the courage to repel foreign invaders had, by the “Second Period,” devolved into poisonous bigotry and idolatry, or, in Ticknor’s words:

129 Leigh

The ancient loyalty, which had once been so generous an element in the Spanish character and cultivation, was now infected with the ambition of universal empire, and was lavished upon princes and nobles who, like the later Philips and their ministers, were unworthy of its homage; so that, [in the writers of this period], we find a vainglorious admiration of their country, and a poor flattery of royalty and rank, that remind us of the old Castilian pride and deference only by showing how both had lost their dignity. And so it is with the ancient religious feeling that was so nearly akin to this loyalty. The Christian spirit…was now fallen away into a low and anxious bigotry, fierce and intolerant towards every thing that differed from its sharply defined faith, and yet so pervading and so popular, that the romances and tales of the time are full of it, and the national theatre, in more than one form, becomes its strange and grotesque monument. (History, I 468)

Ticknor maintains that it could not have played out any other way, given the “implacable hatred” inherent in Spanish national character (465). In the same passage, he says that the

Inquisition might easily have been thwarted in their oppressive agenda if the Spanish people, as well as Spanish leaders, had shown any resistance to it. That they did not is evidence of a perverted national character, which is why he describes Spanish national character during this time as “diseased” (469). Another symptom of Spain’s depravity was the quality of epic poetry produced in the “Second Period.” This genre constituted, for

Ticknor, an authentic vehicle for Spanish national character in the “First Period” and he exuberantly praises the Poema de Mio Cid and early Spanish ballads. The “Second Period,” following the discovery of the New World and the victory at Granada, should have been an impetus for even more genuine national epic poetry, but, instead, epic poetry in the

“Second Period” became “strangely perverted and misdirected,” while contemporary ballads were “exuberant and lawless” (469).

It is clear, then, that, for Ticknor, the “Second Period” was both the culmination of national literary trends that began in the “First Period,” as well as the death knell of that same spirit. The promising future presaged at the turn of the sixteenth century would not

130 Leigh be realized. Instead, Spain increasingly came under the sway of the Inquisition and the

State, which had a devastating effect on both the national character and national literature:

The crude and gross wealth poured in from their American possessions sustained, indeed, for yet another century the forms of a miserable political existence in their government; but the earnest faith, the loyalty, the dignity of the Spanish people were gone; and little remained in their place, but a weak subserviency to the unworthy masters of the state, and a low, timid bigotry in whatever related to religion…The poetry of the country, which had always depended more on the state of the popular feeling than any other poetry of modern times, faded and failed with it. (History, I 471-72)

Spain, understood as Spanish national character, proved to be her own worst enemy.

Despite Ticknor’s gloomy evaluation of Spanish literature and culture is not without its share of optimism. His hopes rest with the common people. Among his musings at the end of the History, he imagines a future in which the “spirit of the North” continues to

“divert [Spanish literature] from its true course,” but he immediately follows that prospect with a hopeful thought:

Or perhaps the national genius, springing forward through all that oppose its instincts, and shaking off whatever encumbers it with ill-considered help, may press directly onward, and complete the canon of a literature whose forms, often only sketched by the great masters of its age of glory, remain yet to be filled out and finished in the grandeur and grace of their proper proportions. (History, III 349)

The likelihood of the scenario he describes, however, depends chiefly on the potential of the noble Spanish people to redirect their misguided national character. Ticknor’s overall diagnosis of Spanish literature is undoubtedly bleak and he acknowledges that Spain cannot return to the untainted glory of her earliest literature, but he also holds out hope for a people whose beginnings were so auspicious and distinct among European nations, saying, at the end of the History:

The mass of her inhabitants, and especially her peasantry, has been less changed, and in many ways less corrupted, by the revolutions of the last century, than any of the nations who have pressed her borders, or contended with her power. […] They

131 Leigh

are not a ruined people. And, while they preserve the sense of honor, the sincerity, and the contempt for what is sordid and base, that have so long distinguished their national character, they cannot be ruined. Nor, I trust, will such a people…fail to create a literature appropriate to a character in its nature so poetical. […] The Spanish people—that old Castilian race, that came from the mountains and filled the whole land with their spirit—have, I trust, a future before them not unworthy of their ancient fortunes and fame; […] happy if they have been taught, by the experience of the past, that, while reverence for whatever is noble and worthy is of the essence of poetical inspiration, and, while religious faith and feeling constitute its true and sure foundations, there is yet a loyalty to mere rank and place, which degrades alike its possessor and him it would honor, and a blind submission to priestly authority, which narrows and debases the nobler faculties of the soul more than any other, because it sends its poison deeper. But, if they have failed to learn this solemn lesson, […] then is their honorable history, both in civilization and letters, closed forever. (History, III 350-51)

There is no doubt that Ticknor, like every critic, is biased in his assessments. His biases, as may be expected, reflect his nationality, religious sensibilities, and historical moment. In

Ticknor’s time, the United States of America was still a young nation that had, not long ago, fought a war against monarchical tyranny. It was also a nation imbued with a profound sense of religious liberty and settled by Protestant refugees. All of this colored Ticknor’s understanding of Spanish literature. Spain’s error, in Ticknor’s view, was its devolution into religious fanaticism and tacit acceptance of authoritative government. His interpretation of

Spanish literary history responds to contemporary anxieties plaguing the young United

States and he attempts to illustrate a misguided national character so as to prevent his own country from making the same mistakes. Ticknor, then, understood Spain and its literary history as a cautionary tale. As we will see in the following chapter, with the publication of his History, he simultaneously sought to warn his fellow Americans of the dangers of religious and political influences on literature, contribute to a literary nation-building project already underway, and suggest a course for genuinely national American literature.

132 Leigh

CHAPTER 3

THE POEMA DE MIO CID AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF AMERICAN CULTURE

It is necessary to be perpetually comparing ourselves with others, because we are ourselves always the objects of comparison; it is necessary to learn what is known, not merely for the sake of imitation, but of preserving our own position. - Simonde de Sismondi, Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe

As discussed in the first chapter, the early decades of the nineteenth century saw a documented interest on the part of influential contributors to the North American Review

(NAR) in fomenting autochthonous cultural production in the United States. These initial calls for a cultural nation-building project were repeated and amplified in the decades leading up to the publication of Ticknor’s famous History of Spanish Literature (1849), and this work contributed to that project in fundamental ways. Firstly, it successfully improved the reputation of American scholarship abroad; secondly, its suggestive thesis warned against the negative impacts of government and religion upon literature; thirdly, it proposed exemplary models of national literature to would-be American writers; and lastly, it was explicitly intended for a general, as opposed to academic, audience. The novelty of Ticknor’s work consists not in the originality of his ideas, but rather, in his unique rendering of Spanish literary history and the accompanying implicit, prescriptive message of his argument, a message directed not at a small circle of scholars of Spanish literature abroad, but rather, at his own compatriots. Ticknor’s particular mediation of

Spanish literary history responded to specific wants that existed in the United States at the

133 Leigh time, such that the entirety of his efforts, when reflected upon today, seem overdetermined.

In this chapter, I hope to show how his interpretation of Spanish literature responded to contemporary American anxiety regarding cultural identity.

To that end, I will spend considerable time discussing Ticknor’s commentary on the

Poema de Mio Cid (PMC), as it represents a particularly apt illustration of the totality of his efforts in literary historical scholarship. In other words, his interpretation of the PMC reflects how an American scholar of his time could effectively repurpose their own field of interest to serve the larger nation-building project in which he and his peers were involved.

Ticknor’s comments on the PMC elevated critical commentary of that work to a new level.

They furthermore reveal the importance he ascribed to the interaction between national character and literature, and show how he implicitly proposes that work as an exemplary model of genuine national literature. For these reasons, then, we will treat Ticknor’s commentary on the PMC as a kind of case study. In the first part of this chapter we will review the scholarship on the PMC previous to Ticknor’s History. Thereafter, we will discuss Ticknor’s own interpretation of that work. Lastly, we will spend some time considering how that interpretation related to American cultural anxiety of that time.

Essentially, Ticknor’s treatment of the PMC can be understood as a proxy, a foreign subject matter with which he might instruct, and admonish, his own countrymen in the ways of national literature.

The PMC, composed—or transcribed, as the case may be—around the year 1200, and its larger-than-life hero, Rodrigo Díaz, have been, since Ticknor’s time, adopted as national symbols of Spain. This is due in no small part to Ticknor’s favorable assessment of the poem in his History of Spanish Literature, although, admittedly, Spanish scholars who

134 Leigh came after him, Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869-1968) principal among them, bore more responsibility for the subsequent widespread nationalistic appreciation of this work within the Peninsula.28 Ticknor’s History, though, due to its sheer size and coverage, was instrumental in fomenting wider appreciation of the PMC, and it is to him that much of the later attention paid to that work—both within the Peninsula, and elsewhere—may be attributed. As we will see, however, while Ticknor’s book, and the reactions it elicited, may have ultimately bolstered Spanish nationalistic sentiment, there was a more domestic application for the young United States.

The PMC was first edited and published by the Spanish cleric, Tomás Antonio

Sánchez, in 1779, and his edition gradually garnered attention from scholars over the next half-century. Sánchez’s edition of the poem was, in fact, the first edition of a European medieval epic text, coming well before the edition of the more numerous French chansons de geste. Despite the importance of Sánchez’s edition, it left much to be desired in terms of critical analysis and apparatus, and it fell to scholars in the following decades to evaluate the poem and theorize about its significance within Spanish literary history. Galván and

Banús have masterfully detailed these earliest receptions and mediations of Sánchez’s edition by figures outside of Spain, such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and

Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), in their book, El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX (2004), and I will not replicate their work here. Suffice it to say, for our purposes, that the first scholars who became interested in the Cid—Germans and British, mostly—took more of an interest in the symbolic, heroic character of the Cid than they did

28 For a more extensive discussion of Menéndez Pidal’s interpretation of Spain’s medieval period, see Michael Gerli’s “Inventing the Spanish Middle Ages: Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Spanish Cultural History, and Ideology in Philology.”

135 Leigh in the PMC as a work of literature (Galván and Banús 14). This initial interest in the Cid was part of a growing interest among European intellectuals in Spain and the Middle Ages, the former understood as a window into the latter. When literary scholars in Europe did begin to examine the PMC more thoroughly and thoughtfully, they were virtually unanimous in their disregard of the PMC as nothing more than an historical curiosity, undeserving of serious literary critical attention. We can attribute this general lack of enthusiasm, in part, to Neoclassical critical precepts that judged harshly any work of literature that failed to comply with Aristotelian notions of form and content. Such were the preconceptions from which Romantic critics attempted to distance themselves around the turn of the nineteenth century. Interestingly, though, it appears that Romantic scholars, even as Romanticism spread outside of Germany and England, were slow to embrace the PMC, a work that one might easily regard as an exemplary Romantic tale, featuring an emotional hero at odds with forces larger than himself. When early-nineteenth-century critics did comment on the

PMC, their commentaries were colored by distinct Neoclassical prejudices, even those writers that might otherwise be considered Romantic.

Such is the case of the two most important critics of the PMC before Ticknor,

Friedrich Bouterwek (1766-1828) and Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842), whose respective works on Spanish literary history were discussed in the first two chapters.

Ticknor cites both of these authors’ works as “the only works on Spanish literature, that need to be mentioned” in the “Advertisement” of his Syllabus (iii). While it is undeniable that Ticknor took many cues from these predecessors, his own work is in many ways intended as a corrective of their efforts. Ticknor believes that neither Bouterwek nor

Sismondi correctly understood Spanish literature, as neither had had the kind of hands-on

136 Leigh access to original documents that he enjoyed. Consequently, neither Bouterwek nor

Sismondi correctly identified Spanish national character. They mostly consulted Spanish literature in translation and neither ever traveled to Spain. Ticknor perceived a critical lacuna that only a man such as he, a man with extensive literary training and one that had had the good fortune of visiting Spain, was capable of addressing. Ticknor most fully distinguishes himself from Bouterwek and Sismondi in his appreciation of the PMC, and it is to that commentary, considered here as a kind of case study, that we will now turn our attention.

Bouterwek maintains in the third volume of his series, Geschichte der neuern Poesie und Beredsamkei (1804), a text that Galván and Banús have called “el más autorizado texto de referencia sobre literatura española en la primera mitad sel siglo XIX” (El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX 19), that the PMC “can scarcely be called a poem,”

(History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, I 29) basing his assessment on its crude rendering of a foreign meter, the French alexandrine, and the perceived lack of poetic ornament in its language and narration. Bouterwek, like Ticknor, promoted the idea that true national literature cannot be produced under any kind of foreign influence, syntactic, lexical, or otherwise. For that reason he dismisses the PMC as a mere “philological curiosity” and not the “work [with which] the history of Spanish poetry ought to commence” (29). He is more forgiving in the case of the ballads, saying that, even though they suffered a long and gradual decline in quality over the centuries, they have retained an

“oral currency among the common people” who delight in such “simple and natural” poetry

(52-53). He derides Spanish critics for failing to give adequate attention to this homegrown genre and envisions a day in which the ballads will garner the rightful praise they so

137 Leigh deserve (53). With these brief comments on the PMC and the ballads concluded, Bouterwek devotes the bulk of his commentary to works and authors more worthy of critical attention, in his opinion.

Sismondi, on the other hand, has more to say about the PMC, though he falls short of celebrating it as the foundation of Spanish literature. Going further than Bouterwek, to whom he is deeply indebted for the ideas expressed in, and the structure of, his history,

Sismondi lauds the PMC primarily as a historical relic capable of transporting the reader to the time in which it was written: “It is without pretension and without art, but full of the finest nature, and gives an excellent idea of the people of that age, so different from those of our own” (Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe 86). The Swiss scholar believes the PMC is capable of achieving such a feat thanks to the unlearned style and design of its composer, claiming that the “simplicity of representation” found therein is a worthy substitute for “talent” (86). In Sismondi’s judgment, the author of the PMC worked from nature, not imitation, including all manner of content without a thought given to its extraordinary nature, and this lack of authorial intent, or poetic talent, as it were, constitutes the chief point of praise for Sismondi, believing, as was common in Romantic criticism, that true national literature springs from the untrained genius of the common man. He extends this line of praise to the ballads, which also had their birth among “the people,” a people whose “infantine imagination” allowed for a profound permeability between the traditionally opposed strata of fiction and reality (120). This sort of fluidity with regard to the real and unreal, even as it came under increasing attack throughout the so-called Age of Reason and into the nineteenth century, was still longed for by those thinkers who opposed such binary visions of the world, namely poets and men of religion.

138 Leigh

According to Romantic notions, societies in which persons of such Dionysian persuasions predominate must be healthier than those in which cold, hard facts lull mankind into a false sense of epistemological security. This latter characterization is precisely how many

Romantic intellectuals in the nineteenth century viewed their historical moment, which goes lengths in explaining the fervent interest in the Middle Ages and less-developed societies during that time. Sismondi writes: “The most poetical ages are those in which credit is given to the most incoherent fictions. Among the Spaniards, the credulous imagination of the earlier ages has been preserved in greater purity than among us” (120).

This comment is, perhaps, what we would now consider a backhanded compliment.

Implicit in this statement is a genuine admiration for the credulity and feeling among early

Spaniards, as evidenced in the PMC and the ballads, combined with the belief that Spain is underdeveloped, perhaps inherently backward, and ill-suited to the present historical moment. Such was the paradox of so many Romantic intellectuals interested in Spain: at once celebrating that nation as one that has remained relatively pure from the corrupting influences of modern society, while simultaneously acknowledging its ineptitude in the face of social and technological progress. The PMC, for Sismondi, is emblematic of a bygone chivalrous era in a nation that, at the time of his writing, had yet to reach modernity. In

Sismondi’s estimation, Rodrigo Díaz represents a personification of the spirit of Spain, past and present:

Never was a reputation more completely national, and never in the estimation of men, has there been a hero in Spain who has equalled Don Rodrigo. He occupies the debateable (sic) ground between history and romance, and the historian and the poet both assert their claims to him. (Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe 102)

139 Leigh

This comment can be understood as emblematic of the intellectual thinking about the PMC at this historical moment. Sismondi, unlike Bouterwek, points out that Rodrigo Díaz, and by extension the PMC, frustrates modern critics in their attempts at simple categorization precisely because, in Sismondi’s words, “he occupies the debateable (sic) ground between history and romance” (102). This power to frustrate modern attempts at classification, or, more generally, to rebel against prevailing epistemology, is exemplary of the quintessential

Romantic hero, which explains why Rodrigo Díaz eventually came to interest all manner of

Western literary and historical scholars in the first half of the nineteenth century and, beyond that, why he continued to be celebrated long thereafter in Spain, a country to which

Romantic ideas arrived late and one widely perceived to similarly frustrate diagnostic and classificatory attempts made by outsiders. For all those reasons, then, Sismondi celebrates the PMC and its hero.

Sismondi’s positive comments about the PMC and Spain’s ballads are not without their negative counterparts, though. His criticisms are generally of the same variety as

Bouterwek’s, namely that the versification and meter of the PMC, and by extension, the ballads, are “barbarous” (86). While it is important to realize that the descriptor

“barbarous” was no more flattering in Sismondi’s age than it is in our own, it is equally important to recognize that it is precisely that characteristic that paradoxically accounts for the commendable aspects of the PMC and the ballads. In other words, the lack of premeditation and learned style in these works naturally lends itself to the kind of poetic description that so captivated the Swiss scholar. In one passage, Sismondi describes how the author of the PMC rhymes the same vowel until he has exhausted all possible options, at which point he guilelessly switches to a new rhyme. Sismondi notes thereafter, in a sort of

140 Leigh conciliatory manner, “this was the infancy of versification, of poetry, and of language in

Spain, but it was the manhood of national spirit and of heroism” (86). From such comments we can see that Sismondi, though concurring with Bouterwek on the poem’s rude nature, reserves hearty praise for the poem’s historicity and the poet’s ability to so naturally represent the age in which he lived. It would fall to Ticknor, however, to fully celebrate the

PMC as the foundation of Spanish national literature.

Aside from the histories of Bouterwek and Sismondi, there were relatively few substantial commentaries on Spanish literature produced in Europe or the United States until the publication of Ticknor’s History in 1849. At the same time, however, interest in the

PMC had grown steadily over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, primarily as a result of the interest expressed in Cidian documents by figures like Herder and Schegel in Germany (Bertrand 6), and Robert Southey in England (Buceta 53). These figures espoused relatively favorable, if limited, estimations of the Cid and the PMC, and their opinions contrast with the predominantly negative views of the PMC in early- nineteenth-century Europe. Southey published his important Chronicle of the Cid in 1804, which comprised a collation of the Crónica particular and Sánchez’s edition of the PMC. In that work, the Romantic poet speaks favorably, albeit in passing, of the PMC, and calls its author the “Homer of Spain” (Galván and Banús, El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX 54). The widely-read British historian, Henry Hallam (1779-1859), whom Ticknor knew personally and visited while in England, echoed Southey’s Homeric commentary on the poem and, going further, claimed it was the finest European poem of the Middle Ages before Dante’s Divina Commedia. Hallam also introduces the idea of the poem’s untainted national character, being written before the corrupting introduction of

141 Leigh

French troubadours in Spain (Galván and Banús, El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX 55). Given the close ties that existed between Ticknor and these men, his repetition of these same themes in his History almost certainly stems from their comments, as Galván and Banús rightly assume (65). Andrés Bello (1781-1865), the celebrated

Venezuelan educator and philologist, also contributed to discussions of the PMC in the

Anglophone sphere through his 1823 review of Sismondi’s literary history, which appeared in the London-based journal, Biblioteca Americana. This publication represented the most extensive commentary in Spanish on the PMC to date. In that review, Bello avoids classifying the content of the PMC as either historical fact or fiction, focusing instead on philological issues, such as the date of composition, linguistic details, and the possibility of reconstructing the missing folios of the extant codex with help from the Crónica general

(Oroz 439). All of his research leads him to suspect a French influence on the poem, which was at odds with the claims of Southey and Hallam. It is apparent that Bello’s analysis responds not only to the commentaries that came before him, but also a desire to shape the conversation on early medieval Spanish literature, which he believes is capable of “esparcir alguna luz sobre los oríjenes de nuestra lengua i poesía” (cited in Oroz 439). Despite, or perhaps due to, the fact that he published his Spanish-language commentary in an

Anglophone country, Bello seems to have had but little lasting influence on either British or

Spanish critics with respect to the PMC. Interestingly, his ideas were received favorably by the francophone critics, Reinhardt Dozy (1820-1883) and Damas-Hinard (1805-1870).

Unfortunately, Bello’s ideas did not garner more widespread appreciation when they were initially published. It was not until the appearance of his edition of the poem, published posthumously in1881, that Bello’s theories began to be appreciated more generally.

142 Leigh

Friedrich Schlegel’s evaluation of the PMC in the second decade of the nineteenth century, along with Ferdinand Wolf’s (1796-1866) 1831 discussion of the poem’s artistic merits, may well be considered influential turning points, subtle as they may be, in critical reception of that work. Schlegel is the first to speak favorably of the PMC based on the perception of that work as a vehicle for the transmission of untarnished Spanish national character, considering it an exemplary work of “poesía natural” (Galván and Banús, El

Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX 22), and Wolf, for his part, disputes the predominant Neoclassicist charges against the poem, arguing, instead, that the poem represents a significant literary achievement, although, interestingly, Wolf divorces the

PMC from any supposed popular national character, assigning it to the realm of

Kunstpoesie, instead (31-32). This distinction is significant, as it represents a break with the prevalent critical opinion of the time, which held that the PMC was nothing more than a historical relic with no proper literary value. Both Schlegel and Wolf’s favorable view of the

PMC will be reflected and drawn out further by Ticknor in his History.

The ballads drew a similar amount of critical attention as scholars began to mine the depths of national literatures in their attempts to identify respective national characters in the early literary creations of each nation. Such sources, created during the infancy of nationhood, were thought most elucidating to the diagnostic attempts made by intellectuals in their effort to identify national character, and it is, thus, no surprise that

Friedrich Schegel, in this comments on the Spanish ballads, identifies the same elements of national character that he perceived in the PMC (Galván and Banús, El Poema del Cid en

Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX 24). Indeed, the divergent opinions on the Spanish romances and the PMC by European scholars in the first half of the nineteenth century is

143 Leigh indicative of the larger Romantic push to distinguish popular from elite literature. It was generally held that works designated as Kunstpoesie, literature of the elite, were unable to convey true national character; only popular literature, Naturpoesie, could do that. Though the PMC’s elements of national character had been called out by important commentators in the first half of the nineteenth century, it suffered a subsequent prolonged classification as Kunstpoesie, largely thanks to the influence of Ferdinand Wolf. The ballads, on the other hand, never ceased to be considered pure Naturpoesie, “la poesía popular española por excelencia” (Galván and Banús, El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX

71). European scholars became interested in the Spanish ballads starting in the eighteenth century, as interest in oral traditions and primitive cultures grew. The PMC, which did not garner a similar level of interest until the second decade of the nineteenth century, briefly coexisted with the ballads in the critical imagination, but, as scholars increasingly dismissed that work as derivative Kunstpoesie, interest in the PMC declined during the

1820s and 1830s, and was not fully revived until Ticknor’s History.

French scholars, for their part, highlighted the dubious correlation between El Cid, as presented in texts like the PMC, and the historical personage, Rodrigo Díaz. The Dutch

Arabist, Reinhardt Dozy, who wrote in French, savaged the reputation of the Cid as a heroic,

Christian warrior, as well as the reputation of the PMC as an historical document, arguing instead that, in reality, Rodrigo Díaz was a violent, reckless marauder, just as he is portrayed in Arabic historical documents. Dozy goes so far as to posit single authorship of the poem, and, consequently, he disputes any suggestion that the PMC is a national or

144 Leigh popular work.29 Another important francophone commentator, Jean Joseph Stanislas Albert

Damas-Hinard, bolstered Dozy’s claim of single authorship and similarly denied that the

PMC was an essentially Spanish work, citing extensive French influences on the poem (xx- xxi). It would fall to Ticknor to challenge and reconcile the divergent opinions on the PMC as a work of popular literature—one that naturally lent itself to discussions of Spanish national character—and explicitly uphold the PMC as an important work of literature, not merely an historical document.

Indeed, the relatively brief commentaries on the PMC by Bouterwek and Sismondi were the most authoritative to date; both, though, were written by persons outside of

Spain. Despite scattered attempts by Spanish intellectuals and writers to evaluate national literary history, there had yet to emerge an authoritative account capable of galvanizing national sentiment on the matter. The case of the PMC is, thus, an instructive example of the budding awareness and appreciation of Spanish literature within Spain in the nineteenth century. On this precise topic, the Spanish scholar, Luis Galván, has published an excellent monograph, El Poema del Cid en España (2001), detailing the treatment of the PMC in Spain since its first edition by Sánchez in 1779. Galván continued this line of questioning, along with Enrique Banús, in a later monograph, El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX (2004). Both efforts are instrumental to understanding the early recognition of the

PMC both within Spain and abroad. As they show, in the half-century following the first edition of the epic poem, there was very little appreciation of the PMC in Spain. Even as he prepared to publish his History seventy years after the appearance of Sánchez’s edition,

29 It against the influential arguments of Dozy, primarily, that Ramón Menéndez Pidal bases his nationalistic interpretation of the poem.

145 Leigh

Ticknor could still find reason to agree with Robert Southey, who, in an 1814 issue of the

Quarterly Review, stated rather matter-of-factly:

The Spaniards have not yet discovered the high value of their metrical history of the Cid, as a poem; they will never produce any thing great in the higher branches of art, till they have cast off the false taste which prevents them from perceiving it. (“The Works of the English Poets” 64)

Ticknor cites this comment in a footnote to his History, and, in doing so, unequivocally rejects contemporary Spanish literary tastes, tastes that have, in his view, increasingly deviated from the heroic, popular forms of the medieval period and gravitated toward foreign imitation and elitism. Such “false tastes,” in conjunction with the omnipresent oppression perpetrated by the Inquisition and authoritarian government only serve to stifle true national literature, and the lack of appreciation among Spaniards of a work

Ticknor considered their foundational literary achievement amounted to a serious misstep in Spanish literary history. For Ticknor, though, this unfortunate progression proved instructive, and it would determine the thesis he articulates in his History.

While several notable Spaniards had previously written about the PMC, none had fully grasped its importance. To do so required an appreciation not only of its historical, but also its literary importance, and critical judgments of this sort were uncommon before

Ticknor. Martín Sarmiento (1695-1772), for example, in his Memorias para la historia de la poesía y poetas españoles (1775, published posthumously), discusses the Cid and the body of literature related to him, but focuses solely on chronology, eschewing any appraisal of its literary worth (170-173). In his 1779 work, Poetas castellanos anteriores al siglo XV, Tomás

Antonio Sánchez (1723-1802), the first to publish the PMC in the modern era, places the

“poema histórico” at the beginning of his literary history of Spain, but focuses almost

146 Leigh exclusively on the poem’s philological and historical importance.30 Somewhat surprisingly,

Sánchez points out the supposed French influence in the poem, specifically in its meter and lexicon, leading him to conclude that “no sólo que el autor no era tan poeta como Berceo, sino que la poesía no estaba entonces tan cultivada” (xvi), implicitly signaling a rejection of

Romantic esteem for the common man. He goes on to say that the poem would not present much real interest if not for its “venerables prendas de rusticidad” that so vividly capture the essence of those times that “no parece sino que los estamos viendo y escuchando”

(xviii). As we have seen, this line of praise would be repeated by foreigners like Bouterwek,

Sismondi, and Ticknor, but, in most of these cases, the sort of proto-realism exhibited in the

PMC constituted the extent of their critical commendation. Sánchez does, however, grant the poem a degree of literariness, albeit passingly. He concedes that the poem contains

“ironías finas, dichos agudos, refranes y sentencias proverbiales,” but such jewels were limited to the select few able to understand such ancient wordplay (xviii). He concludes his evaluation optimistically by admitting the possibility that the poem might one day

“graduarse de poema épico,” given its heroic themes and congruity with the Horatian maxim: Res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia bella quo scribi possent numero, monstravit

Homerus (“In what measure the exploits of kings and captains and the sorrows of war may be written, Homer has shown”)( xviii). The fact that the PMC was not then considered an epic poem, but rather a rhymed chronicle, goes lengths in explaining the early under- appreciation of its literary and national importance. In general, Spanish scholars of

Ticknor’s time did not look to the medieval period for evidence of national literary

30 For a more detailed consideration of Sánchez’s innovative work on Spanish literature, see Alan Deyermond’s “Sánchez’s Colección and Percy’s Reliques: The Editing of Medieval Poetry in the Dawn of Romanticism.”

147 Leigh achievement; they considered that period an unpolished, embarrassing precursor to the glory of the so-called Golden Age. In fact, when Sánchez’s work was re-issued in 1864 and included in the important publication series, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, Florencio

Janer (1831-1877) warned in his introduction of the possible disappointment of contemporary readers upon reading about medieval literature:

Difícil será, por cierto, dejar en el presente tomo satisfecho el buen gusto literario de los suscritores á esta Biblioteca. Saboreadas, en volúmenes anteriores, las dulcísimas poesías de Garcilaso, Ercilla, Rioja, Mendoza, Alcázar, Fray Luis de León, Argensola y otros, que cultivaron el Parnaso español en no ménos felices y abundosas rimas, la sequedad y rudeza de los orígenes de la poesía castellana ha de formar desagradable contraste con la fluidez y galanura de los poetas que alcanzaron nota de mejores. (v)

In short, Janer believed Spanish medieval literature deserved attention but not praise. Its primary merit was its chronological situation, coming just before the “best” period in

Spanish literature. Therefore, one must include it in a review of Spanish literature because

“solo de este modo podrá apreciarse mejor la marcha progresiva, el admirable desarrollo de nuestra literatura en su edad de oro” (v).

The humanist priest, Juan Andrés (1740-1817), published a groundbreaking series on comparative literature in the last decades of the eighteenth century entitled, Origen, progresos, y estado actual de toda literatura, in which he employs universalist principles to elucidate common characteristics of literature across world cultures. As admirable as this project is in terms of establishing a foundation for the discipline of comparative literature, as well as highlighting Arabic influences on European literature, it did little to galvanize nationalistic literary sentiment in Spain or call attention to the recently edited PMC. This oversight was unfortunate for the PMC, as Andrés’s volumes were quickly translated into every European language and enjoyed a long life as authoritative literary histories. Despite

148 Leigh this setback, the PMC slowly became popular among elite, intellectual circles and, interestingly enough, the first critics to study it seriously often formed opposite opinions to those of Andrés. In lieu of the Spanish cleric’s universalist approach, Romantic scholars emphasized local determinants in the development of national literatures. This approach, in and of itself, lends itself to theories of national character, and it is therefore no coincidence that this theme dominated Romantic literary criticism.

Despite a few exceptions, other Spanish critics of the first half of the nineteenth century regarded the PMC as unworthy of critical attention, if they considered it at all.31

There was, however, one notable Spanish commentary on the PMC before the publication of Ticknor’s History, that of Antonio Gil y Zárate (1793-1861). In his Manual de literatura, published in 1844, just five years prior to Ticknor’s History, Gil y Zárate discusses many of the same issues that Ticknor would in his forthcoming work. Surprisingly, literary historians have largely overlooked the Manual, once a mandatory textbook in Spain for instruction in national literary history. Its reputation in its own time, however, was impressive, and it can be understood as a precursor to the important works of national literary history undertaken in the following decades by writers like Manuel Milá y

Fontanals (1818-1884), José Amador de los Ríos (1818-1878), and Marcelino Menéndez y

Pelayo (1856-1912). The first part of this two-part work comprises a general manual for writing, and, the second part is a more intensive examination of Spanish literature. Gil y

Zárate—who was also a playwright, and one who had his work expurgated by the

31 See Galván and Banús’s discussion of the paucity of Spanish appreciation of the poem in the first half of the nineteenth century (El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX 40-44). The few Spaniards who did speak favorably of the poem—Juan Florán and Juan María Maury, for example—took their cues from foreign-born writers, like Bouterwek and Sismondi.

149 Leigh

Inquisition—took special interest in the history and current state of Spanish letters and, in the Manual, he promises to unite “la práctica á la teoría” in an effort to enable young

Spaniards to “perfeccionar su educación literaria” and provide them with “modelos que pueden seguir” (3-4). Clearly influenced by Romantic ideas—which, given the delayed importation of Romanticism into Spain, he most likely learned about while exiled in

France—he, too, describes two opposite literary currents throughout time, “la una sabia

[…], la otra vulgar” (7). To the latter, “el ídolo del pueblo,” he attributes the same enduring qualities and authenticity as did his predecessors, while, on the other hand, he claims that erudite literature “siguió apartando sus ojos del pueblo y de su época, quiso ser el reflejo de una civilización ya muerta,” and, worst of all, “renunció a ser original” (8-9). In contrast, popular literature expressed popular sentiment and was “llena de vida y de esperanzas”

(8). However, perhaps to curtail criticism of his work on the grounds that it subscribes too wholeheartedly to Romantic philosophy, he clarifies that:

no somos de aquellos que hacen al vulgo único juez en materias literarias y artísticas: conocemos lo errado de sus faltos, y sabemos muy bien que hay en las creaciones del ingenio algo de especial y sublime que no está al alcance de todos. Para apreciar ciertas bellezas artísticas se necesita una educación conveniente, un gusto formado al afecto, y el vulgo no puede tenerlo. (Manual de literatura 9)

In this way, Gil y Zárate, a man whose professional interests and social status paralleled those of Ticknor in many ways, aptly praises popular literature for its authenticity while simultaneously denying the uneducated masses the ability to fully appreciate it, a position that would not seem out of place in Ticknor’s own writings. Despite this questionable outlook, Gil y Zárate represents in other ways a refreshing take on Spanish literature. A full century before the appearance of Américo Castro’s España en su historia (1948), Gil y

Zárate admits the important contributions to Spanish culture and literature made by

150 Leigh

Jewish and Muslim populations and, as the result of the latter, identifies in Spanish culture

“un tinte oriental indeleble” (13), which manifested itself in literature as “una gran tendencia á lo maravilloso, á las metáforas, á las imágenes atrevidas, á la pompa del lenguaje” (14). This assertion stands in contradistinction to positions that would emerge from Spanish literary histories in the coming decades. The nationalistic current of literary criticism, led by figures such as Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and Ramón Menéndez Pidal, would soon come to dominate the critical landscape in Spain, eventually culminating in the now-famous polemic within Hispanism between Américo Castro (1885-1972) and Claudio

Sánchez-Albornoz (1883-1984). It appears, however, that the battle over the ser de España began much earlier than previously thought, and Gil y Zárate may well be considered one of the first Spanish intellectuals to address this issue, albeit in passing.

As regards our subject, though, Gil y Zárate’s opinions about national character and its manifestation in literature come quite close to those expressed by Ticknor and his contemporaries. For example, musing about Spanish national character, Gil y Zárate determines that all Spaniards have an inherent deference to authority, which, in turn, determined, and continues to determine, their preference for a monarchical political structure. He furthermore identifies the beginning of monarchical government in Spain as the impulse behind the divergent literary traditions in the country, one popular, one elitist

(8-9). He argues that reverence for authority inevitably shows through in literary works, too, and he concludes that only literature that can artfully incorporate and express this social trait can be considered truly popular “y de ser, cual debe toda literatura verdaderamente nacional, original y espontánea” (15). As we have seen, originality and

151 Leigh spontaneity are two of the most common characteristics cited by nineteenth-century literary historians, Ticknor among them, as requirements of national literature.

On the other hand, Gil y Zárate’s opinions of the PMC, and medieval Spanish literature, in general, are far less favorable than those of Ticknor. He discusses the PMC passingly and disparagingly, and his comments may be compared to those made previously by Bouterwek, who insisted that the PMC “can scarcely be called a poem” (29). Even after some European literary scholars began to more fully appreciate the PMC in the 1830s and

1840s, Gil y Zárate, in 1844, still insists that “no merece el nombre de poema, no siendo más que una historia ó crónica rimada de cierta parte de los hechos de aquel célebre guerrero” (17). To be fair, this opinion was not uncommon among literary scholars at the time. Important commentators such as Friedrich Bouterwek (Geschichte der neuren Poesie und Beredsamkeit), Rafael de Floranes (1743-1801) (Dos opúsculos inéditos de Rafael

Floranes y de D. Tomás Antonio Sánchez sobre los orígenes de la poesía castellana, published posthumously), and Andrés Bello (Poema del Cid; “Noticia sobre la obra de Sismondi sobre la Literatura del Mediodía de Europa,” both works published posthumously), all considered the unique extant codex of the PMC to merely contain a “crónica versificada,” not an original work of literature (Pardo 273). Gil y Zárate shared that opinion and makes no attempt to situate the PMC at the head of Spanish national literature. Instead, he focuses on the poem’s literary defects, including the unimaginative chronological progression of events, the perceived lack of any poetic adornment, and the primitive nature of the language, concluding that it should be regarded as nothing more than a “curiosidad literaria” (17).

152 Leigh

Despite his general disregard of the PMC on literary grounds, Gil y Zárate’s critical discussion of that work at times resembles that of Ticknor. He does, for example, proffer some form of compliment to the poem before discussing more general thoughts about national literature, noting a certain “sencillez homérica” in its rustic verses and admiring its

“cuadros que interesan y que á lo pintoresco reúnen el mérito de retratar al vivo las costumbres de aquella época” (18-19). These particular comments make comparisons with

Ticknor inevitable, as the Boston scholar would, just five years later, declare a Homeric affinity for the PMC and praise its ability to so vividly conjure up scenes from such a distant historical moment (History, I 17). Comments like these, in which Gil y Zárate criticizes while simultaneously offering faint praise are, interestingly enough, repeated in his general discussion of medieval Spanish literature, about which he concurs with Antonio de

Capmany32 that, in the Spanish literary corpus, “no hallaremos gran elegancia, corrección, armonía, ni sublimidad” (Manual 46). Directly afterwards, though, he adds that “tampoco nos mortifican la falsa brillantez, los antítisis (sic) simétricos, las espresiones (sic) esforzadas, los pensamientos poco naturales, y todas las afectaciones de esta naturaleza” that plague the writings of later authors (46)33. And aside from the PMC, Gil y Zárate and

Ticknor share similar theses on, and evaluative frameworks for, literature. Both, for example, insist on originality and popularity in truly national literature, and, similarly, both describe the process by which Spanish literature was led astray as authors began to cater to elite circles and disregard the vulgo (77-78). Speaking of the 15th century, for example,

32 Antonio de Capmany (1742-1813) was a Spanish intellectual of the Enlightenment who wrote extensively about the Spanish language, among other things. 33 Gil y Zárate later posits culteranismo as the “hijo bastardo” of erudite literature, a trend that, by the end of the 16th century, had turned nearly every Spanish writer into “una especie de delirante” (352).

153 Leigh

Gil y Zárate wonders why, during a period of intense political turmoil and warfare, no writers expressed those events authentically in lasting works:

Natural parecía que empuñasen la trompa guerrera, é inflamando con sus bélicos sonidos el valor de sus conciudadanos, los llamasen á las armas para marchar al último triunfo sobre los sarracenos: justo era que hubiesen celebrado la batalla de las Navas, la toma de Sevilla, el heroísmo de Guzmán y mil proezas y virtudes que mas que el lenguaje frio de las crónicas, merecían los entusiasmados acentos de la mas sublime poesía: también debieran las glorias del pendón cristiano y el triunfo de la fé dar aliento á su espíritu religioso, y arrancarles himnos en loor del Dios que los guiaba al combate y les aseguraba la victoria. Pues bien, nada de esto se encuentra en los poetas de aquel siglo…Entre tantas poesías amontonadas en los cancioneros, no se halla ninguna que se eleve á la altura de las circunstancias; los pensamientos patrióticos se ven totalmente desterrados de ellas; las poesías religiosas se reducen á cantar las excelencias de la Virgen ó de algún santo, á meros juguetes sobre las letras del nombre de María, ó á glosas del Ave y del Padrenuestro; mas no hay ningún rasgo verdaderamente poético sobre tan sublime asunto, etc., etc. (Manual de literatura 76-77)

And the reason for this embarrassing missed opportunity in Spanish literary history?

No es otra que haberse apartado los poetas de la verdadera senda; el renunciar á ser populares para convertirse en imitadores…solo escribían para príncipes y cortesanos…todos trataron de ser cultos, elegantes, y discretos mas bien que naturales, sencillos y populares. (Manual de literatura 77-78)

Interestingly, Gil y Zárate goes on to extoll the virtues of the following century, the “Golden

Age” of Spanish literature, a period when “no solamente sintió toda Europa el poder de nuestras armas, sino que se elevó nuestra literatura al mayor grado de esplendor posible”

(100), a position Ticknor would echo a few years later. From Ticknor’s point of view, however, the national, authentic, popular literature that Gil y Zárate so longs for in the previous citation is to be found centuries beforehand precisely in the PMC, composed, as it was supposed to be, at the turn of the thirteenth century, another period of political turmoil and warfare. The fact that Gil y Zárate does not even consider the PMC as a work of authentic, national literature highlights its prevalent reputation as a rhymed chronicle, as opposed to an original literary work, before and during his lifetime. This classification also

154 Leigh explains why nearly every commentator previous to Ticknor bases their evaluation of the

PMC solely on its supposed historicity, as chronicles were, at that time, widely considered to be nothing more than historical documents, solely capable of factually relating chronological occurrences.

Despite his general denigration of the PMC in the Manual, Gil y Zárate does imagine a hypothetical, reconstructed epic of the Cid’s life, composed of various extant ballads, to be the most authentic work in Spanish literary history, first saying: “esta epopeya tiene la ventaja, sobre todas las conocidas, de no ser composición de un solo poeta, sino la obra de todo un pueblo; y es por consiguiente más nacional que ninguna” (393); and later:

Una colección completa y bien hecha de todos los buenos romances del Cid, será siempre el verdadero poema épico de la nación española, superior con mucho á todos los que entre nosotros han tomado este nombre, y tanto más grato á esta nación, cuanto que, como ya hemos dicho, debe ella misma considerarse como el autor de tan sublime obra. Este lauro que no pudo alcanzar en España la poesía erudita, le estaba reservado con justicia á la poesía popular. (Manual de literatura 395)

Given these musings, it is perhaps unfortunate that Gil y Zárate did not consider the PMC to be the foundational literary masterpiece of Spain, an estimation that, since the appearance of Ticknor’s History, it has continued to enjoy among scholarly and popular audiences alike.

Nonetheless, the case of Gil y Zárate’s Manual de literatura española is an intriguing piece on Spanish literary history immediately preceding that of Ticknor. There is little indication that Ticknor knew of the Manual, but he certainly shares with Gil y Zárate some of the same preoccupations and hypotheses regarding Spanish literature and literature in general.34

34 In an interesting appendix to the collection, George Ticknor, Letters to Pascual de Gayangos, Ticknor requests that Gayangos purchase him “just what you may think worth having” by several Spanish writers, and Gil y Zárate is one of them. He does not, however mention the Manual by name, here or elsewhere. (Letters to Pascual Gayangos, Appendix III 386)

155 Leigh

Despite his likely ignorance of the Manual, Ticknor’s History can be figuratively understood as a prompt and apropos response to Gil y Zárate’s work: whereas Gil y Zárate bemoans the absence of a worthy cornerstone of Spanish national literature in the medieval period,

Ticknor posits one.35 The Manual is remarkable not only for its intriguing convergences and divergences from Ticknor’s thesis, but also for its liberal, inclusive tone regarding

“Spanish-ness.” Gil y Zárate—along with Antonio Conde (1766-1820), Ticknor’s tutor during his stay in Spain and a noted Arabist scholar, as discussed in Chapter 2—stands out as an anachronistic promoter of the idea that Spanish national character was forged not by one culture, but many. This inclusive tone would eventually be repeated in Hispanist criticism, but not before a prolonged period of nationalistic, Castile-centric scholarship in

Spain.

In Chapter 2, we saw how Ticknor conceived of Spanish medieval literature as a bedrock of authentic, national literature, a foundation necessary for the flowering of the

“Golden Age” in later centuries. Within this conceptual framework, Ticknor especially reveres the PMC, which he considers an embodiment of Spanish-ness. Ticknor, in fact, is

35 a. In his discussion of Spanish ballads, Gil y Zárate remarks that “el Poema del Cid…no es á nuestros ojos más que un romance escrito como lo estarían los romances primitivos” (365), an assertion that is at odds with his previous disparaging description of the PMC as a “crónica rimada” (17). b. Given the time at which he wrote, the clairvoyance of Gil y Zárate’s notion of oral tradition is impressive. Long before the work of figures such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, he describes the process by which illiterate peoples passed down stories through generations in the following way: Estos poetas, ignorantes de cuanto se había escrito en la antigüedad, ajenos tal vez á toda especie de cultura, confundidos entre el pueblo, componían sólo para el pueblo, conservando y repitiendo de memoria sus toscas composiciones, porque ni la escritura les sería conocida…improvisaban sus toscos y breves poemas que aprendían de memoria sus contemporáneos, que estos trasmitían del propio modo a sus hijos, y estos a los suyos, variando el texto primitivo de unos en otros, ya por defecto de la memoria, ya por las alteraciones que sufría el habla, ya por deseo de mejorarlo” (Manual de literatura 356)

156 Leigh one of the first scholars of Spanish literature to fully celebrate the Poema de Mio Cid as the literary incarnation of Spanish national character. He places this work at the beginning of his History and at the head of Spanish literature, calling it “first in importance” among the literary “monuments” of Spain (History, I 12). Its value, for Ticknor, consists in its early date of composition and the heroic adventures it relates. Its composition date, around the year

1200, automatically imbues the poem with the roughness of the burgeoning Spanish vernacular, and, for that reason, Ticknor considers it an invaluable historical resource, one that conveys the unadulterated national character of Spain’s “chivalrous age” (12). Ticknor notes that the contests between Christians and Moors depicted in the poem were actually taking place as the poem was composed, and this lends the poem the kind of immediacy necessary to freely convey national character. Indeed, because of the proximity of the poem’s composition and the historical events it relates, Ticknor judges it to have “a national bearing and a national character throughout” (12).

That national character is defined expressly as a result of the prolonged battles between Christians and Muslims in the Peninsula. Ticknor’s notion of Spanish national character really amounts to Christian and Castilian national character, discounting, as he does, the importance of other peninsular literary traditions—i.e. Galician, Basque, Catalan,

Arabic, Jewish, etc.—in the development of Spanish national character. In his high esteem for Christian and “Castilian spirit” (History, I 22), Ticknor figures as an early exponent of what would become a controversial topos in later scholarship about Spain, one that conflates Spain with Castile and Christianity, to the great neglect of the many other cultural factions that shaped the nation. In fact, certain Spanish writers who reacted to Ticknor’s

History perpetuated this simplification, which, in turn, gave rise to a long-lived current of

157 Leigh nationalistic scholarship. In the case of the PMC, Ticknor portrays Rodrigo Díaz as the quintessential Castilian, Christian, and “popular” hero (12), one who may be considered

“the great defender of his nation against its Moorish invaders” (14-15). In doing so, he largely ignores the historical Díaz’s ties to Muslim rulers, from whose service he derived the honorific Arabic title, “Cid,” or, “lord,” taken from the Arabic, “sayyid.” Ticknor chooses, instead, to cast the hero as an indefatigable combatant against the “oppressors of his country” (14), setting in motion a chain of increasingly nationalistic interpretations of the

Cid that culminated in Francisco Franco’s propagandistic appropriation of the hero and the

1961 Hollywood film, El Cid, starring Charlton Heston as Rodrigo Díaz and Sophia Loren as his wife, Ximena. In any case, it is fair to say that Ticknor viewed the PMC the same way he viewed authentic Spanish national character: devoid of foreign—that is, non-Castilian— influence. In the History, he denies any significant Arabic “impurity” in the poem, while contradictorily admitting a certain amount of “Arabic influence” in its language (22). Given his notions regarding the connection between a nation’s early literature and national character, it is surprising that Ticknor would concede the poem even this minimal “foreign” influence, but, seeing as how the Cid’s own title is taken from Arabic, it appears that, in this instance, his hand was forced.

The supposedly insignificant Arabic linguistic influence aside, the poem’s language exhibits an unpolished simplicity characteristic of the early stages of any vernacular, and for Ticknor, this is extremely significant. It constitutes historical documentation of the young Spanish language, still untarnished by foreign influence. The language with which the poet crafts his epic, given the early stage of that language, could not but exude unadulterated national spirit, a fact that Ticknor and his like-minded contemporaries

158 Leigh would point to as evidence of its historical and cultural importance. The poem complies, in so many ways, with Wordsworth and Herder’s notions of organic language and poetry, springing, as it was supposed to do, from the very soil of Castile. Add to this the fact that

Ticknor believes the poem was written when battles between Christians and Muslims, in which El Cid took part, were “still going on with undiminished violence” (History, I 12). The temporal and geographical proximity of the author to the events he relates, and the consequent immediacy lent to the poem on this account, affords this document an immense historical and literary importance, one only matched by texts like the Nibelungenlied in

Germany, and the many extant chansons de geste in France. But Ticknor goes even further:

The very language in which [the poem] is told is the language [the Cid] himself spoke, still only half developed; disencumbering itself with difficulty from the characteristics of the Latin; its new constructions by no means established; imperfect in its forms, and ill furnished with the connecting particles in which resides so much of the power and grace of all languages; but still breathing the bold, sincere, and original spirit of its times, and showing plainly that it is struggling with success for a place among the other wild elements of the national genius. (History, I 17)

Ticknor effectively strengthens the case for the poem’s historical importance by claiming it as evidence of the way the hero actually spoke. More importantly, however, it is precisely the imperfection of the Spanish language in the poem that leads Ticknor to regard it as instrumental. In essence, the PMC constitutes the materia prima of the Spanish literary canon, the unmediated substance out of which all later national literature would be crafted.

And it is this characteristic that places the poem among the masterpieces of Western literature. Later on, drawing a comparison with the most widely recognized foundational poet of the Western tradition, Ticknor describes the poet’s language in the PMC as

“Homeric” (17), echoing a comment previously made by his mentor, Robert Southey, in his

1808 Chronicle of the Cid (Graver 152). For a trained Classicist like Ticknor, referring to a

159 Leigh poem’s language as “Homeric” was a high compliment, indeed. In doing so, he not only favorably compares the poet’s ability to that of the founder of Western literature, he likewise makes the case that the PMC is a foundational text, like the Iliad or the Odyssey. In

Ticknor’s view, the PMC represents not only the earliest, but also the best of early literature in Spain, and it provides a sound basis upon which to build a national literature.36

The poem’s value extends beyond that of language to form. Ticknor gives equally high praise to the rough, unpolished meter in which the poem is composed. In his view, and this is indeed a highly controversial position, one that most Cidian scholars disavow today, the poem’s meter is original to Spain. Neglecting to trace its origins in the French epic tradition, Ticknor describes the meter as “rude and unsettled,” pointing out the irregular verse length and caesural pauses (History, I 17). This irregularity does not detract from the poem’s worth; to the contrary, like Ticknor’s conception of language, it is the imperfection of the poem that marks it as a masterpiece and cornerstone of national literature. In spite of any perceived imperfection, the meter and rhyme “[always bear] the impress of a free and fearless spirit” (18). For Ticknor, the capacity of early literature to convey national character is enhanced by its unstudied nature and seemingly accidental confluence of elements. Ticknor says that the meter, unpolished as it is:

36 While this sort of exaltation of primitive language was commonplace among Romantic critics, not all of Ticknor’s contemporaries shared this view. Henry Wordsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), for example, described the language of the PMC as “the Castilian language in its rudest state, uncouth in structure, harsh in termination, and unpolished by the uses of song and literary composition” (“Spanish Language and Literature” 323). He goes on to say that Berceo’s poetic language shows some improvement, but remains “uncouth and barbarous,” qualifying that statement by claiming that Berceo would surely consider the present state of Spanish language barbarous (326). In any case, it is clear that Longfellow does not wholeheartedly subscribe to the idea that the earliest forms of language are necessarily the most pure, arguing instead that the Spanish language reached its zenith in the Golden Age (335).

160 Leigh

harmonizes alike with the poet's language, subject, and age, and so gives to the story a stir and interest, which, though we are separated from it by so many centuries, bring some of its scenes before us like those of a drama. (History, I 17-18)

The greatest national literature, then, is the result of a confluence of “wild elements” (17), language and form being two of them, that conspire, wherever they are allowed to develop authentically and uninhibited, to faithfully express national character.

Despite the importance Ticknor grants the PMC on a historical and linguistic grounds, he considers it fundamentally a work of imaginative literature and this judgment represents a break with previous commentators. Those critics, Bouterwek and Sismondi principal among them, were only willing to describe the PMC as a historical curiosity, not a masterpiece of imaginative literature. Ticknor, on the other hand, believes that the PMC should serve as the beginning and basis of all Spanish literature, and he is the first to so convincingly propose the PMC, and its hero, as national symbols of Spain. In the History, he outlines why the poem cannot only be valued for its historicity, citing the fictional elements of the story and the occasional flourish of the author’s pen. He concludes, however, by saying: “This, however, does not at all touch the proper value of the work, which is simple, heroic, and national” (History, I 15-16). This stance represents, I believe, an early attempt at divorcing literary history from history proper, and, in doing so, legitimizing the former.

Indeed, Ticknor wrote at time when literary criticism was only just beginning to gain respect among scholars, having struggled for generations to establish its own place among the rapidly branching academic disciplines. To be sure, many intellectuals had written critically on literature previous to Ticknor, but most of those who did so were from other fields, like philosophy, economics, or history—Bouterwek, for example, was primarily a philosopher, and Sismondi was an economist. Ticknor, on the other hand, while he

161 Leigh buttressed his work with what he supposed to be an impeccable knowledge of the historical record, chose to write about the historical development of literature, and, in doing so, may be considered not only a forefather of Hispanism, but also of literary history.

Ticknor’s claim for the PMC’s literary merits represents an extrication of that work from the annals of History, where it was not regarded very favorably, and its relocation to the realm of Literature, where it could begin to be appreciated based on its literary qualities, those being not wholly separated from its historical importance, of course.

Indeed, Ticknor does not entirely dismiss the historicity of the PMC. He does think it has historical worth, but not the kind upon which its reputation can be established. What the poet does accomplish, according to Ticknor, is to give an accurate idea of what daily life was like in the times it relates, or, as the Bostonian puts it:

We do not read it at all for its mere facts, which are often detailed with the minuteness and formality of a monkish chronicle; but for its living pictures of the age it represents, and for the vivacity with which it brings up manners and interests so remote from our own experience, that, where they are attempted in formal history, they come to us as cold as the fables of mythology. We read it because it is a contemporary and spirited exhibition of the chivalrous times of Spain, given occasionally with an Homeric simplicity altogether admirable. For the story it tells is not only that of the most romantic achievements, attributed to the most romantic hero of Spanish tradition, but it is mingled continually with domestic and personal details, that bring the character of the Cid and his age near to our own sympathies and interests. (History, I 17)

The PMC represents for Ticknor a sort of micro-historical account of a bygone age in

Spanish history, one that could convey some of the more elusive, mundane parts of daily life. The PMC, unlike the fanciful libros de caballería of later centuries, for example, provides a veritable window onto the times in which it was composed, an invaluable tool for any student of history. Finally, of equal or greater importance for Romantic literary critics, is the capacity of the PMC to highlight shared “sympathies and interests” of mankind across

162 Leigh great expanses of time, an assertion that leads him to suggest, albeit implicitly, that not only can modern man relate to early national literature, he can, moreover, learn lessons from it that may be applied in the present time.

In his final endorsement of the PMC, we can begin to understand the symbolic importance of this poem and its hero to nineteenth-century America. Speaking of the poem,

Ticknor proclaims:

It is throughout striking and original. It is, too, no less national, Christian, and loyal. It breathes everywhere the true Castilian spirit, such as the old chronicles represent it amidst the achievements and disasters of the Moorish wars; and has very few traces of an Arabic influence in its language, and none at all in its imagery or fancies. The whole of it, there fore, deserves to be read, and to be read in the original; for it is there only that we can obtain the fresh impressions it is fitted to give us of the rude but heroic period it represents: of the simplicity of the governments, and the loyalty and true-heartedness of the people; of the wide force of a primitive religious enthusiasm; of the picturesque state of manners and daily life in an age of trouble and confusion; and of the bold outlines of the national genius, which are often struck out where we should least think to find them. It is, indeed, a work which, as we read it, stirs us with the spirit of the times it describes; and as we lay it down and recollect the intellectual condition of Europe when it was written, and for a long period before, it seems certain, that, during the thousand years which elapsed from the time of the decay of Greek and Roman culture, down to the appearance of the "Divina Commedia," no poetry was produced so original in its tone, or so full of natural feeling, picturesqueness, and energy. (History, I 22-23)

Such unabashed enthusiasm for the PMC was heretofore unknown. Most critics had judged the poem to have intrinsic historical value, but little literary merit, and, for that matter, no value as a foundational piece of national literature.37 Ticknor breaks with this critical paradigm, enthusiastically proclaiming the PMC’s literary beauty and arguing for its position at the head of Spanish literary history. With regard to Spain’s ballads, Ticknor is similarly exuberant. He considered the extant ballads to be supreme manifestations of

37 In a footnote, Ticknor does point out that other scholars had recently expressed a “strong admiration” for the Poema (History, I 23n18), following Friedrich Schlegel, but none did so in such a public declaration as the History of Spanish Literature and it is this work that most widely affected appreciation of the poem thereafter.

163 Leigh national character, claiming they represented “to the mass of the Spanish people, the same relations that a single ballad bears to the character of the individual author who produced it” (134). As I suggest in previous chapters, Ticknor’s conception of language and literature was formed early in his career, and is evidenced in a speech he delivered in 1832 entitled,

“Lecture on the Best Method of Teaching the Living Languages.” Therein, he states that the best literature is written by those:

in whom the peculiar genius of their respective languages stands forth in the boldest relief; those in whom the distinctive features of the national temper and character are most prominent; those, in short, who come to us fresh from the feelings and attributes of the mass of the people they represent and full of the peculiarities of thought, idiom, and expression which separate that people from all others, and constitute them with a distinct portion of mankind. (“Lecture on the Best Method of Teaching the Living Languages” 29-30)

When we consider these things together—Ticknor’s thesis on the degeneration of Spanish literature, his high regard for the PMC, and the sense of cultural inadequacy among

American intellectuals of the time—it becomes clear that Ticknor’s efforts in this realm were overdetermined. The implicit thrust of his work and his intentions—those made explicit in his writings—respond to a variety of circumstances specific to the United States, which we will now consider more fully.

First of all, Ticknor argued that the study of foreign literatures could inspire the kind of domestic literary production so desired by his fellow North American Review contributors, and, according to Ticknor’s conception of literature, there could be no better example of national literature than the PMC. According to Ticknor, foreign literatures were not to be used as models, imitation being anathema to the creation of national literature, but rather as examples of literary beauty and, thus, sources of creative inspiration. In this respect, Ticknor and his contemporaries followed the lead of Herder, the Schlegel brothers,

164 Leigh as well as Madame de Staël, who, in the introduction to her famous essay, “Literature

Considered in Its Relation to Social Institutions,” claims that “masterpieces of literature, apart from the models they present, produce a kind of intellectual and physical shock, a quiver of admiration that inspires us to generous deeds,” going on to claim that literature rarely produces virtue in modern times because we are numbed to the lessons of the known masterpieces of literature (143). Even closer to Ticknor’s sphere, Josiah Quincy

(1802-1882), a student of Ticknor and future mayor of Boston, proclaimed at Harvard’s commencement in 1821:

We have here a new world to cultivate, and to elevate…When we Americans go forth into the elder world…let us seek to transplant, not merely what is new, or merely striking, but what is wanting, and what is useful. To us, Europe, and all its arts, and all its accomplishments, are nothing, except by way of example. (cited in Tyack 129)

Eschewing the well-known Anglophone literature of his day, Ticknor sought in Spanish literature, especially early Spanish literature, new masterpieces with which to inspire and guide the nascent United States to greatness, and the PMC represented just such a masterpiece.

Ticknor believed the PMC and the ballads to be the most genuine—understood here as “popular”—products of early Spanish literature, a solid foundation upon which subsequent Spanish literature established itself. Regardless of how we might judge

Ticknor’s conclusions today, it is clear that he believed that no truly national literature could flourish without such a foundational piece of literature. This belief, immediately apparent upon reading the preface to his History, is, as we have discussed, part of a general longing among American intellectuals of his time for the United States to establish a name for itself as a fully-realized nation, one that, having concluded the hard work of taming the land and building infrastructure, could now devote a portion of its energy to the creation of

165 Leigh cultural touchstones capable of conveying American national character and perpetuating it by creating a shared identity.

Just as the PMC, and the ballads, by extension, accurately relate the “rude but heroic” age in Spain’s history, Ticknor no doubt considered America to be living out, or to have already lived out, its own period of uncultivated heroism. Yet, it still had not produced a worthy literary monument upon which to construct a national literary tradition. Perhaps

Ticknor imagined the most suitable time to have produced this kind of foundational literature as already having passed, the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the early years of the republic already more than a half-century in the past. Nonetheless, no genuine national literature would be able to flourish without some autochthonous equivalent to the PMC. In the early 1820s, the German critic, Friedrich Diez (1794-1876), applying universalist principles in his evaluation of the PMC, floated the idea that the poem’s essence was common to all mankind and that its application could, therefore, extend beyond its nation of origin; Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), for his part, would repeat that basic idea in his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik in 1835 (Galván and Banús, El

Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX 25-26). Ticknor certainly agreed.

He understood the edifying and inspiring promise of the PMC for Americans and longed for a similarly “national, Christian, and loyal” (History, I 22) work for his country and an equally rugged, individualistic hero like El Cid upon whom to found a national literature. To

Ticknor’s mind, this sort of work was essential to any genuine national literature, and it is not surprising that he favorably compares the author of the PMC with Dante, a poet widely considered the inaugural light of Italian national literature. Essentially, then, Ticknor,

166 Leigh whilst singing the praises of the uncultivated author and hero of the PMC, is, in fact, yearning for an American Homer or Dante.

Galván and Banús allude to Ticknor’s role in shaping this particular, abstract appreciation of the PMC in the United States, arguing that its importance for American audiences consisted in its “capacity to express and give shape to the feelings of a collective”

(El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX 73). I would modify that claim somewhat to suggest that Ticknor did not merely reflect on the PMC in the abstract, which he most certainly did, but that he also understood how other aspects of that work marked it as particularly appealing to audiences in the United States. His perspective was both wide and narrow. He certainly appreciated the PMC for its chronological place within Spanish national literature, an emblem of an untainted historical moment in the early years of nationhood. Yet, he also saw the poem’s hero as a palatable and instructive archetype for

American audiences, a rugged individualist who, somewhat paradoxically, oozes a collective, immutable national character. Thus, the introduction of such a character, couched, as he was, amidst a larger discussion of the trajectory of Spanish national literature, clearly indicates how Ticknor wanted his fellow Americans to understand literature, both its value and its vulnerability. The picture Ticknor paints of Spanish literature’s course not only provides a cautionary tale to his compatriots against tyrannical government and unchecked religiosity precisely as they entered a new era of intellectual and cultural pursuits, it also singles out the earliest national literature as necessarily the best, and the PMC, both for its rude language, vigorous hero, and its expression of national character, represents a high-water mark of national literature, something Americans should strive to produce themselves.

167 Leigh

In the introduction to his History, Ticknor dramatically breaks with academic tradition and states his intention of writing for a general audience (History, I ix-x). In a letter to his friend, Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), he further expounds on his reasons for doing so:

You know our reading public in the United States, how large it is, as well as how craving and increasing; so that you will be less surprised than others, that I have prepared my book as much for general readers as for scholars…Indeed, for a great many years I have been persuaded that literary history ought not to be confined, as it has been from the way in which it has been written, to persons of tasteful scholarship, but should be made, like civil history, to give a knowledge of the character of the people to which it relates. I have endeavored, therefore, to so to write my account of the Spanish literature as the make the literature itself the exponent of the peculiar culture and civilization of the Spanish people. Whether I have succeeded or no remains to be seen. But, if I have, my book, I think, will be read by my countryman, whose advance in a taste for reading on grave and thoughtful subjects increases so perceptibly that there is a plain difference since you were here. (Life, Letters, II 253-254)

His acknowledgement of the differences between academic and popular writing, and his decision to frame his History as a work of the latter sort—not to mention the dramatic destruction of his notes that he describes—is remarkable and it is a point that has been overlooked by others writing about Ticknor. It implies that the Bostonian understood the potential of the largely untapped resource of the United States’ general population, a group outside of his own elite sphere of influence, and suggests that his belief in the dignity and authenticity of the common man was not limited to abstract Romantic literary notions, but that, in fact, it informed his socio-political beliefs about the relationship between the masses and national literature.

As we have seen, according to tenets of Romantic literary theory, popularity was considered equivalent to authenticity, and a prerequisite for the production of authentic literature. Ticknor’s stated intention of writing his magnum opus for a popular audience

168 Leigh signals a desire to inspire not only a small group of well-to-do New England intellectuals, but, more specifically, the growing literate masses of the United States. The phenomenon of increasing literacy was understood as part of a natural progression from a rural, undeveloped nation to a modernized, intellectual one. It was this same sense of progress that prompted the earliest calls for American literary production in early issues of the

North American Review. Simply put, Americans were increasingly educated, or at least literate, and had more leisure time to devote to intellectual endeavors. Ticknor saw an analogous progression in Spain’s medieval period:

We feel that we are called to witness the first efforts of a generous people to emancipate themselves from the cold restraints of a merely material existence, and watch with confidence and sympathy the movement of their secret feelings and prevalent energies, as then are struggling upwards into the poetry of a native and earnest enthusiasm; persuaded that they must, at last, work out for themselves a literature, bold, fervent, and original, marked with the features and impulses of the national character, and able to vindicate for itself a place among the permanent monuments of modern civilization. (History, I 452-53)

In the American context, Ticknor views his work on Spanish literature as part of this cultural transition from base materiality to more noble intellectual pursuits; moreover, his explicit intention of writing the History for a popular audience represents an attempt to bridge the disconnect between two sectors of contemporary American society: the elite, educated upper class, on the one hand, and the increasingly literate middle and lower classes, on the other. In this project, the PMC, a work thought to be emblematic of truly popular literature, served as an apt proxy for Ticknor’s own political beliefs. That the PMC was Spanish was far less important than its essential popularity.

Writing for the masses, though, implied an abdication of cultural, social, and political power for people like Ticknor and his cohort. Precisely for this reason, Thomas Hart has questioned the sincerity of Ticknor’s desire to alter the rigidly hierarchical society in which

169 Leigh men of his ilk enjoyed so much power and prominence (“New England Background” 78).

Hart contends that, despite Ticknor’s alleged motivation to write for a popular audience, he does not, in fact, significantly alter the substance of his Harvard lectures to make the material more palatable to the common man.38 To do so would have endangered the

Federalists’ control of government by creating a potentially subversive sense of solidarity among the classes (83-84). Hart’s suggestion may seem bolstered by a consideration of

Ticknor’s memoir of Daniel Webster, in which he writes advocates for a national bank to ensure the “security of private property” (Remarks on the Life and Writings of Daniel

Webster, of Massachusetts 15), but, in that same piece of writing, he impassionedly conjures

Webster’s legacy as inspiration to his countrymen to “address themselves plainly, fearlessly, calmly, directly to the intelligence and honesty of the whole nation, ‘and ask no omen but their country’s cause’” (48; italics original to text). It is clear, too, that Ticknor, while surely cognizant of his elevated status within the American context, considered himself and his peers as occupying a different social stratus from their counterparts in the more rigidly hierarchical European nobility (Review of Mémoires pour server à la Vie de

Général Lafayette 151). While it is unlikely that Ticknor or his peers would have vociferously promoted any sort of revolutionary alteration of class structure that would jeopardize their own privileged position, it is no less certain that he writes the History expressly for a general audience with a view to educate those who would normally fall outside the realm of scholarly studies. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume, along with

William Charvat, that, beginning in the 1850s, as class boundaries in the United States

38 Jaksic, on the other hand, supposes that the negligible alterations in content between the lecture notes, as presented in the Syllabus, and the History are due to Ticknor’s efforts, in the decade leading up to the publication of the latter, to provide evidence for the conclusions he had already reached early in his career (49).

170 Leigh increasingly blurred, writers and intellectuals who would have once jealously guarded their own positions within society, fearful of the masses, gradually developed “faith in the safety of democracy” (6). Such faith implied not only a confidence that the French

Revolution would not play out on American soil, an ever-present concern among elites, but, also, that the education and incorporation of the masses in a shared cultural enterprise was essential to the American project. Contributors to the North American Review repeatedly pointed out the dearth of American cultural enterprise in the early nineteenth century, and while all of those contributors belonged to a demographically homogenous group of well- to-do white men, their call for an autochthonous literature did not exclude, at least overtly, literature emanating from, or celebrating, the lower classes. In fact, as most of those men were, like Ticknor, deeply steeped in Romantic theory, they likely would have welcomed that sort of literary production as a more genuine vehicle of national character, realizing, as they did, their own privileged, and thus compromised, status. In any case, by the time

Ticknor publishes the first edition of the History of Spanish Literature in 1849, six years after William H. Prescott’s groundbreaking Conquest of Mexico (1843), writing on academic topics for a general audience had become, to borrow a phrase from David Tyack, “a mode of ethical discourse” (130) that Ticknor and Prescott employed adroitly, and I contend that this was no arbitrary phenomenon, but rather, that it occurred within, and indeed, due to, their particular context. If Ticknor’s diagnosis of Spain’s decay was to have any real effect on his own country’s destiny, he must write for the broadest possible audience of his countrymen.

Ticknor’s History also ties into the related American cultural anxiety regarding its scholarly reputation. Whereas his decision to write for a general audience can be framed as

171 Leigh a stimulus for the creation of national literature, the impressive scholarly apparatus provided in his History, and remarkable erudition exhibited therein, signals an attempt to legitimize American scholarship in the eyes of European academics. His commentary on the

PMC, again, is emblematic of the totality of his efforts, marking, as it did, the most extensive critical commentary on that work until that time.

The connection between literature—both imaginative and scholarly—and national self-realization had been emphasized previously. Ticknor’s beloved Madame de Staël, to cite an early influential voice, wrote that new nations must “lay the foundation of new institutions, arouse interest, hope, enthusiasm,” by producing new and original literature as a cultural foundation upon which to further develop (“Literature in its Relation to Social

Institutions” 148). Among these types of pursuits, she identifies “philosophical literature— eloquence and reason,” as opposed to imaginative literature—as “the true guarantee of liberty” (148). And, closer to Ticknor’s direct sphere of influence, William Ellery Channing

(1780-1842), in two North American Review articles (“Essay on American Language and

Literature”; “Reflections on the Literary Delinquency of America”), charges the United

States with “literary delinquency”:

The title of this paper contains a serious charge. It charges Americans with delinquency in that, to which every other civilized nation chiefly owes its character. It implies that this country wants literary distinction. That we have not entered the service of literature. That we want the results of intellectual labor. That were we to cease from a distinct national existence, the great events of our history would stand alone on the blank of our national character, unsupported by their causes, unsanctioned by their effects. (“Reflections on the Literary Delinquency of America” 33)

Channing principally laments the United States’ bad reputation among the academic circles of Europe. This is a serious charge, one that, over the course of the next few decades, elicited many responses in the form of imaginative and academic literature. In this context,

172 Leigh

Ticknor’s weighty contribution to Hispanism can be viewed as a signifier of America’s ongoing cultural progress and a touchstone of its scholarly enterprise.

Channing and others pointed specifically to the influence of English literature upon

American writers as the chief impediment to a truly national literature (“Reflections on the

Literary Delinquency of America” 33). They bemoaned the fact that, due to a shared language, Americans could hardly distinguish themselves from their former colonial masters, and some, like Channing, lamented that the United States did not create its own language in the times of the Revolution, hypothesizing that, if such a thing had happened,

“we might to this day have wanted a grammar, and a dictionary; but our descendants would have made for themselves a literature” (“Essay on American Language and

Literature” 309).39 Ticknor surely felt the same cultural anxiety and his decision to throw himself wholeheartedly into Spanish literary scholarship can be interpreted as an attempt to steer literary conversation in the United States away from the fraught corpus of English literature to another, relatively unstudied, national literature. This move represents a liberation from the anxiety of influence of a former colonial power as well as an opportunity for America to create its own literary culture precisely by studying an

39 In lieu of a newly created language, Channing suggests that America does, indeed, have its own language, that of the native populations (“Essay on American Language and Literature” 313). Such language happily satisfied Romantic notions of primitive language, and Channing’s description of it is notable for its similarity to Ticknor’s description of language in the PMC: [The language of the Indian] was made to express his emotions during his observance of nature, and these emotions were taught him at school, in which the master was nature, and a most unsophisticated heart the scholar. Hence it is bold as his own unshackled conceptions, and as rapid as his own step. It is now rich as the soil on which he was nurtured, and ornamented with every blossom that blows in his path. It is now elevated and soaring, for him image is the eagle, and now precipitous and hoarse as the cataract among whose mists he is descanting. (“Essay on American Language and Literature” 313)

173 Leigh alternative national literature. Ticknor, as will be remembered, had been an avid student of the classics of Western literature during his youth. Upon receiving Harvard’s offer of the

Smith Professorship, however, he enthusiastically turned his attention to Spanish literature. Over the course of his long career, he would elucidate Spanish literary history in ways that had not been done previously, while simultaneously crafting and propagating his own interpretation of that national literature as a means to both inspire and caution his countrymen. The Spanish literary corpus proved such a compelling platform on which to propagate his views on literature and its relation to society because it was neither wholly laudable nor devoid of merit; or, cast in positive terms, it was both inspirational and admonitory. It could never, unlike English literature, pretend to exert an undue influence upon the American national character given the stark contrast that existed between the two nations’ political structures and religious foundations. On the other hand, Spanish literature at its best, as in the case of the PMC, expressed an unadulterated national character, and, for that reason, was worthy of consideration by a country that was still struggling to convey its own national character in literary form.

Ticknor’s History long remained the definitive study on Spanish literature, both in the United States and abroad. It was soon translated into German, Spanish, and French and subsequently went through three revised American editions before his death in 1871.

Happily for Ticknor, Pascual de Gayangos’s formidable translation of the History into

Spanish (4 volumes, 1851-1856), which included a multitude of additional notes and corrections, served to increase awareness of the book in Spain and Latin America.40

40 Magnanimously, Gayangos personally paid for the printing of the first two volumes of his translation, explaining this in a letter to William H. Prescott:

174 Leigh

Reviews of the History document a predominantly positive reception, especially among his

American peers, although they are not without their negative counterparts.41 It is obvious from reading the reviews that Ticknor’s contemporaries mostly accept his account of

Spanish literary history, its former greatness, its ultimate decay, and the immutable national character that Ticknor points to as their cause (De Bow 66, 84; G.S.H. 126;

Anonymous, “Ticknor’s Spanish Literature” 293-294, 324). An 1850 review published in the Christian Examiner repeats many of Ticknor’s ideas and then proceeds to condemn the present state of Spanish culture in terms much harsher than Ticknor:

In her present weakness, Spain is reaping the harvest of wrong-doing. If her ships, colonies, and commerce are gone, if agriculture and manufactures are neglects, if she has no railroads, no active press, no generally diffused education, it is because her rulers have been tyrants, her ministers of religion iron-hearted and narrow- minded bigots, and her nobles indolent and profligate courtiers. In her desolate estate insulted humanity is avenged, and the retributive justice which has overtaken her speaks in a voice of warning to the oppressor and of consolation to his victim. (G.S.H. 168)

From comments like these, it is obvious that, not only was Ticknor’s moralistic narrative of

Spanish decline readily accepted by his peers, but that it may have even spawned a stronger current of anti-Spanish sentiment in America, a critical tradition that Richard

Kagan has detailed in several writings (“From Noah to Moses”; “La imagen de España en el mundo anglonorteamericano”; “Prescott’s Paradigm”; “The Spanish Craze”). In any case,

Had not the author been Ticknor, who I love and esteem, and had I not been persuaded that I do a service to the literature of my country by publishing in Spanish a work that I consider so very good, I would have abandoned the project already. (cited in Jaksic 55-56) 41 In one review published in the Southern Quarterly Review, the author attacks Ticknor for his polemic with the Spanish scholar, Alfonso de Castro, regarding an apocryphal version of the Quevedo’s Buscapié, saying “we…prefer to pin our faith to the judgment of the Spanish critics, rather than share the credulity of a foreigner’s incredulity” (T.C.R., Review of George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature 313).

175 Leigh

American reviewers of the History (Anonymous, “Ticknor’s Spanish Literature”;

Anonymous, “Translations of Ticknor’s Spanish Literature”; Anonymous, Review of George

Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature; De Bow; G.S.H.; Prescott, Review of George

Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature; T.C.R.) wholeheartedly accepted Ticknor’s thesis of national character and its supposed relation to national decline. Moreover, reviewers grasped the warning that Ticknor’s work sounded. Of Spain’s decline, as portrayed by

Ticknor, one reviewer remarks: “The admonition is a solemn one, which it becomes us all to heed in the day of our pride, our arrogance and our power” (De Bow 66). Another reviewer simply states: “The example [of Spanish literature] at once instructs, warns, and purifies” (Anonymous, “Ticknor’s Spanish Literature” 324). Ticknor’s message, it would seem, had not fallen on deaf ears.

It is similarly apparent that reviewers understood the History as a boon to the much- maligned American literary reputation. De Bow calls it “a credit to American literature” citing the work of Ticknor, Irving and Prescott as “an epoch in its history” (67). An anonymous reviewer in the Methodist Quarterly expressed patriotic pride in Ticknor’s work and considers it “undoubtedly one of the most important contributions to the literature of the present age” (Anonymous, “Ticknor’s Spanish Literature” 296). Unsurprisingly, William

H. Prescott’s 1850 review is particularly laudatory. Prescott, Ticknor’s close friend, views the History as proof that American culture had reached new heights, claiming literary history is “necessarily the product of an advanced state of civilization and mental culture”

(1). Prescott concludes his remarks by exalting Ticknor’s contribution to American letters—which he confusingly refers to as “English literature”—and predicting its subsequent translation into various languages and its general regard as the “standard work

176 Leigh on Spanish literature” for Spaniards and foreigners alike (56). A later review of the first translations of the History into Spanish and German, published in the North American

Review, matter-of-factly states: “No literary production of the United States has brought more honor to the American name, among the scholars of Europe, than the History of

Spanish Literature” (Anonymous, “Translations of Ticknor’s Spanish Literature” 260). And, then, as late as 1863, on the occasion of the publication of the third American edition, another review in the NAR proclaims that, since its original publication, “is has been everywhere recognized as one of the noblest monuments of American scholarship”

(Anonymous, Review of George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature 559). Such comments typify the way the History was received by Ticknor’s countrymen and, taken together, make clear that it was seen as a great step forward in American scholarship.

Reviewers also took note of Ticknor’s intention of writing for a popular audience.

One reviewer praises Ticknor for addressing the book not to “those who are learned or even curious in Spanish literature, but to all classes of intelligent and cultivated men,” aiming to “produce a book which shall be something more than a work for reference and consultation—which shall be found in the drawing-room as well as the study” (G.S.H. 122).

Richard Ford (1796-1858), the famous British author of A Handbook for Travellers in Spain, was less enthusiastic about Ticknor’s intended audience, writing: “Where the cursory reader may be satiated with facts, the thoughtful one, who hungers for causes, may be sent away” (179). This attitude, no doubt, represents a backlash to the novelty of writing on academic topics for a general audience, and it is not surprising that such an estimation, albeit couched amidst an otherwise positive review, comes from an Oxford-educated

British writer from the upper echelons of society. Such a reaction only confirms the idea

177 Leigh that writing for a general audience on academic topics at this time was a novel and controversial issue.

Thomas Hart has noted that, up until the publication of James Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s

(1858-1923) History of Spanish Literature in 1898, if one wished to study Spanish literature it was a case of “Ticknor or nothing” (“New England Background” 76). This is a questionable assertion, as it undeniably ignores the relative proliferation of literary histories published in Spain during the second half of the nineteenth century, works that, implicitly or explicitly, responded to Ticknor’s book. In any case, Ticknor’s scholarly efforts are significant contributions to the general spirit of cultural and intellectual progress in the

United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Ticknor’s comments on the PMC, and the amount of attention he dedicates to that work in his History of Spanish Literature, serves as an instructive illustration of how he understood literature and its relation to society. Though his discussion of the PMC may seem scarce by today’s standards,42 for his time, it was truly groundbreaking, representing the most extensive commentary on that work up until that point. The relationship between the attention he dedicates to the PMC and the cultural anxiety among American intellectuals at the time are very much interconnected. In response to that anxiety, which amounted to a profound cultural insecurity, Ticknor spends years laboring on his History in an attempt to add a substantive tome to the American scholarly repertoire and raise the esteem of American scholarship among European academic circles in the process.

Furthermore, his overarching thesis regarding the gradual devolution of Spanish national literature, understood as a manifestation of national character, over its long history serves

42 See Alberto Montaner’s most recent edition of the PMC (Cantar de Mio Cid), which runs over 1,000 pages.

178 Leigh as a solemn admonition to his young nation of the potentially crippling influences of religion and government on literature at a time when Americans were developing beyond a merely material existence and beginning to wade into the waters of literary and, more broadly, cultural production. Finally, his interpretation and exaltation of the PMC as a foundational piece of national literature serves as a similarly prescriptive message to his countrymen as they entered this new era of cultural production. Ticknor implicitly suggests that America needs its own PMC, a work free from extra-national influences that faithfully represents the American national character.

179 Leigh

CONCLUSION

He devoted much of the time…to public objects; and especially showed himself always willing to make exertions in favor of any thing which he thought would tend to raise the religious, moral, and intellectual condition of the whole mass of society in which his life was to be passed. - George Ticknor, Remains of Nathaniel Appleton Haven

My contention in this dissertation is that George Ticknor’s History of Spanish

Literature, a truly foundational work of Hispanism, was the product of a very specific

American context and, as such, says as much about the contemporaneous United States as it does about Spain. Ticknor’s book stands, along with William H. Prescott’s History of

Ferdinand and Isabella (1837), as a benchmark of nineteenth-century American scholarship on Spain, and both works are deeply rooted in their historical moment. In the History,

Ticknor processes Spain and her literature through a filter of shared ideas common among his Boston Brahmin cohort regarding notions of national character and its supposed relation to literature. In the course of that process, he speaks favorably of those aspects of

Spanish literature and culture that he endorses and decries those aspects that offend his

Bostonian sensibilities. He buttresses his moralistic narrative of Spain’s political and cultural decline with the depressing historical trajectory he envisages in her literature.

Moreover, the seemingly exhaustive range of writers and texts he covers, along with the other superficial trappings of an academic text, lend an added air of authority to Ticknor’s thesis, even though, as we have discussed, he claims to write for a general audience. In doing so, Ticknor mines an ostensibly arcane historical topic in the hopes of extracting some broad lesson that might be applied in his own time. The History can be appreciated,

180 Leigh then, as an embodiment of the “philosophical history” John Rathbun refers to in his 1960 article, though I think a more accurate description for Ticknor’s book would be a moralistic history. Like Prescott, Ticknor moralized history into easily comprehendible lessons. The cause of Spain’s downfall, in Ticknor’s view, was not to be found in her failing commercial endeavors or some other kind of fiscal mismanagement, but rather in the Spanish national character itself. All Spaniards, according to such a view, are complicit in Spain’s decline.

The Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown, the two institutions most responsible for oppressing the Spanish intellect over the centuries, are rendered but mere symptoms of a flawed and perverted national character.

Given this dubious theoretical foundation, the History may well strike the modern reader as little more than a regrettable tome of a bygone era plagued by cultural bigotry, which it most certainly is in many respects. It undeniably indulges in the kind of denigrating and racist discourse about Spain that had become common in European intellectual circles by the turn of the nineteenth century. Many of Ticknor’s most prominent

European forebears—Madame de Staël, the Schlegel brothers, Robert Southey, as well as

Friedrich Bouterwek and Simonde de Sismondi—share responsibility for propagating a perception of Spain as an inherently backwards nation, and Ticknor ultimately does little to challenge that idea. Over and against those negative views of Spain, Ticknor’s own

American identity, marked as it was by an unflagging Protestantism and democratic idealism, rendered him doubly incapable of impartially evaluating a Catholic and monarchical nation. Ticknor readily accepted the notion of Spain as America’s antithesis early in his career and, by way of his influential History, he propagated that view to

181 Leigh subsequent generations of Americans. For that aspect of Ticknor’s work, there can be no apology.

But Ticknor’s position in the History confounds a simplistic reading. Therein he not only laments Spain’s backwardness, he also participates in the kind of Romantic celebration of Spain popularized by his friends, Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow. Indeed, Ticknor’s simultaneous celebration and denigration of Spain constitute the two vertices of his critical venture. In her current state, Ticknor saw Spain as the inverse of America, a nation whose long traditions of treacherous religion and autocratic government had left her in a sad and seemingly hopeless situation. But, at the other chronological extreme of Spain’s literary history, Ticknor imagines a rich and pure national genius, one unencumbered by foreign influence, religious oppression, or political tyranny.

For Ticknor, it is Spain’s medieval period that shines forth as the proverbial diamond in the rough of her literary history, and he writes about that period in suitably glowing terms in the History. These contrasting views constitute the primary intrigue of Ticknor’s thinking about Spain. For Ticknor, Spain represented both the heights of human achievement and the depths of human depravity. Accordingly, Ticknor attacks Spain as he celebrates her.

And when we reflect on that dualistic depiction in light of his contemporaneous American context, it allows for a much more enriched and instructive reading of the History and his other writings.

As interest in the medieval period spread among Western intellectuals around the turn of the nineteenth century, the early stages of nationhood came to be idealized as periods of crystallized national character, a concept that led scholars on quixotic quests to correctly identify and define the distinguishable traits of each nation. Such was the guiding

182 Leigh objective of figures like Friedrich Bouterwek and Simonde de Sismondi, Ticknor’s two primary predecessors in writing on Spanish literature. Coming some time later, Ticknor inserts himself into the conversation about Spanish national character precisely by rejecting the assessments of his forebears. Their conclusions were unacceptable because neither had read Spanish works in their original language nor had they had the lived experience of residing in Spain. Despite Ticknor’s proclaimed dissatisfaction with

Bouterwek and Sismondi’s assessments, however, Ticknor’s own conception of Spanish national character—rooted in chivalry, religiosity, and deference to authority—does not significantly differ from theirs, even though he does provide a much more thorough scholarly apparatus to support his claims. What is interesting, though, is the relationship between how Ticknor discusses Spain’s national literature, whose origins he traces to the medieval period, and the ongoing conversations in the United States regarding the lack of a distinctive national literary voice. In light of this, Ticknor’s remarks on Spanish literature become much more suggestive. The ideals that Ticknor celebrates in Spain’s medieval period, for example, are the very same ones that he hopes to see take root in the United

States. And he sees those exemplary qualities most clearly in the Poema de Mio Cid, a text that he comes to celebrate as the foundation of Spanish literature, a reputation it retains even to this day.

As we have seen, however, Ticknor was preconditioned to receive Spanish literature, and literature in general, in a very specific way. He grew up among a close-knit society of cultural elites in and around the Boston area at the beginning of the nineteenth

183 Leigh century43. These men—as they were almost exclusively men—formed a remarkably homogenous socioeconomic group of wealthy white men who distinguished themselves from Boston’s growing mercantile class by virtue of their family reputation and the nature of their professional endeavors. These men shared a set of ideas and ideals shaped largely by their Protestant and Federalist background, and this outlook determined how they understood the world around them. This interpretive community and the scholarly, literary, and civic initiatives that emerged from it were products of an iterative, reflective, and dialogic exercise in which its members filtered the world through a common critical lens. Despite their geographically specific New England ideology, they published prolifically in a variety of journals—the North American Review foremost among them—and therein purported to speak for America as a whole, diagnosing its ills and, less often, prescribing viable paths for its future success. In the early issues of the NAR, amidst dreary discussions of international economics and foreign literature, NAR contributors began to increasingly bemoan the conspicuous absence of a truly national literature in the United States, a phenomenon that I detail in Chapter 1. Ticknor came of age amidst these increasingly anxious pleas for an American literature that could distinguish the young nation from its

European cultural inheritance—most notably that of England, with whom the United States shared a common language—and, even before he had an inkling of how he might contribute to that goal, he was already determined to do so. In Ticknor’s Boston, as George

Hilliard describes it, everyone felt a “moral duty” (Life, Letters, I 22) to take up some profession and prove themselves useful to the community, and we can be sure that Ticknor retained that sense of civic duty throughout his experience as a student and traveler in

43 George Hilliard reports that, at the time of Ticknor’s birth in 1791, Boston had only around 18,000 residents.

184 Leigh

Europe between 1815 and 1819. Of his desire to undertake such a trip at all, he explains, “I have always considered this going to Europe a mere means of preparing myself for greater usefulness and happiness after I return,—as a great sacrifice of the present to the future”

(22). When he unexpectedly receives Harvard College’s offer to fill the newly established

Smith Professorship of French and Spanish Languages and Literatures, Ticknor understood it as a portentous event. Precisely as the young Ticknor was looking for a way to contribute to his country’s ongoing cultural development, an opportunity to do so fell right into his lap! Ticknor had previously shown no real interest in Spanish language or literature but, upon receiving and accepting Harvard’s offer, he threw himself wholeheartedly into learning as much about both as he could, modifying his European travel itinerary in order to travel to Spain and Portugal, while cancelling his plans to visit Greece and shortening his stay in Italy, two nations that had hitherto loomed large in the imagination of the young student of classical literature. Ticknor’s seemingly instinctive knowledge of how to go about the business of literary scholarship, skills that were no doubt refined during his formative tenure at Göttingen, prompted him to begin amassing what would become the finest private collection of Spanish and Portuguese books in the world. His return to the

United States did nothing to slow this endeavor and, with the help of some notable book agents, Ticknor continued to collect Spanish and Portuguese books for the rest of his life.

It was precisely Ticknor’s impressive collection of Spanish books that allowed him to position himself as a pioneer in the study of Spanish literature. As he embarked upon his journey into this new and mostly unstudied subject area, he was fortunate to be able to measure his efforts against those of Friedrich Bouterwek and Simonde de Sismondi. Both had authored influential tracts on Spanish literary history and Bouterwek, more so than

185 Leigh

Sismondi, was regarded in his time as the foremost European scholar on Spanish literature.

Ticknor, having dutifully studied the works of these two men, ultimately judged their efforts inadequate. Thanks to his collection of Spanish books and his unflaggingly devoted book agents in Europe, Ticknor, on the other hand, was well-positioned to cast himself as uniquely suited to understanding Spanish national character as manifested in its literature.

The end result of his efforts in this arena was the long-awaited History of Spanish Literature

(1849), which we consider in Chapter 2. In that work, Ticknor touches upon many of the same themes that Bouterwek and Sismondi had considered previously, and he mostly discusses those themes using similar language and according to the same critical paradigms. Precisely for that reason, it is understandable why Thomas Hart, among others, has portrayed Ticknor as an unoriginal thinker (Hart, A History of Spanish Literary History;

“Friedrich Bouterwek”; “New England Background”). While I do not deign to defend

Ticknor’s intellectual integrity, I think it is more interesting, and more fruitful, to examine his work in the context of American history. Ticknor’s History, and to a lesser degree his

Syllabus and “Lecture,” amounted to a weighty contribution to the literary nation-building project that was well underway during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Ticknor’s contribution was two-fold: on the one hand, he contributed an authoritative and long-lived scholarly tome to Western academia, in effect establishing the field of Hispanism as we now know it today; on the other hand, the History itself represented a contribution to

American literature, understood more broadly as American cultural production. With the publication of the History, Ticknor thus simultaneously raised esteem for American scholarship abroad and provided a stimulating intellectual model to his compatriots.

186 Leigh

One particular aspect of Ticknor’s History that stands out against the American historical backdrop of his time is his exaltation of the Spanish medieval epic poem, the

Poema de Mio Cid. Despite his repetition of some of Bouterwek and Sismondi’s points,

Ticknor writes of the PMC in exceptionally favorable terms when compared to his predecessors. As with Spanish literature in general, Ticknor’s appreciation of the PMC only becomes noteworthy when we consider its relation to his own historical moment.

Essentially, Ticknor praises the poem for its unpolished, heroic qualities and the spirit they convey, at the same time that the United States was taking its first timid steps into literary expression. Ticknor views the PMC as one of the only truly Spanish pieces of literature partly due to its date of composition. Generally dated around 1200, the PMC was created during the infancy of Spanish nationhood when extra-national influences were still supposedly unknown within the Peninsula and literature—meaning, of course, popular literature—flowed freely from the font of the immutable Spanish national character. More recent scholarship on the social and political construction of nationhood has, since

Ticknor’s time, challenged the notion of distinctive national characters and revealed the various processes by which individuals are made to understand themselves in relation to the State, but the notion of national character as a causal agent is surprisingly insidious and still appears in scholarly and popular writing today. During Ticknor’s time, the idea of national character as a determining factor of individual and collective action—and destiny—was readily accepted, and it is from such a theoretical stance that Ticknor attempts to explain the rise and fall of Spanish literature. His evaluation of Spanish literature parallels his view of Spain’s chronological progression, meaning, essentially, that the earliest literature is the best and the most recent literature is the worst. Even during

187 Leigh

Spain’s medieval period, though, Ticknor describes contrasting popular and erudite traditions. Only the popular tradition truly conveyed Spanish national character and, within that tradition, the PMC represented, for Ticknor, the obvious foundation of Spanish national literature. He is the first, then, to champion the PMC as the important text that it is considered to be today, not only on historical grounds—Bouterwek, Sismondi, and others conceded its philological interest—but also on literary grounds. The degree to which that work harmonized with the illusory Spanish national character was impressive to Ticknor, and he no doubt harbored hopes of seeing a similar work produced in his own nation.

The PMC was particularly apt for Ticknor’s purposes due to its popularity, that is, the fact that it was the product of a popular, oral tradition, despite the written form in which it has come down to us. That popular quality naturally lent itself to Herderian celebrations of the common man as the only genuine vehicle of Naturpoesie and it explains why Spain’s old ballads—which had been collected in various anthologies and song books since the fifteenth century—were known and appreciated among European critics well before the PMC, which remained unedited and unavailable until 1779. The Cid himself proved a particularly instructive hero to American audiences, not only because he was a popular cultural hero, but also because of his more individualistic qualities. Here was a hero who, in Ticknor’s view, exuded loyalty and patriotism while, at the same time, refusing to submit to political injustice. Here was a hero who boldly entered new lands and conquered foreign kingdoms. He exuded pure individuality, yet he was also supposedly emblematic of the collectivity. This was precisely the kind of hero America needed when

Ticknor was writing, and, in addition to the weight of his own scholarly reception of the

PMC, the concurrent exploration of the American West likely informed his mediation of it.

188 Leigh

Ticknor essentially rendered Rodrigo Díaz an American hero in an analogous way to how

Washington Irving rendered Christopher Columbus one in his History of the Life and

Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), as Rolena Adorno has shown (“Un caso de hispanismo anglonorteamericano temprano”; “Washington Irving’s Romantic Hispanism and Its Columbian Legacies”). Irving’s work on Columbus and Ticknor’s subsequent work on Spanish literature are, in fact, two corollaries of the same phenomenon of cultural appropriation for the purposes of American nation building. Following the initial materialistic decades of nationhood, Americans began to question their cultural identity, and, in doing so, they naturally measured themselves against the Old World nations, criticizing what they did not like—French foppery, German sophism, etc.—and praising what they did. In the case of Spain, despite her state of contemporary distress, Americans, who were prolifically expanding their own geographic territory at the time, could not but admire the imperial heights to which she had risen. Ticknor’s History, then, as opposed to an unequivocal attack on Spain’s cultural and political decline, can also be appreciated as a genuine lamentation of how low Spain had sunk from her former glory and, as such, as a warning to his countrymen as they sought to define their own national character.

As Ticknor is such a dynamic historical figure, there are inevitably some aspects of his life that we could not cover in the present dissertation, and these topics remain ripe for future research. Foremost among these aspects is his relation to the public library movement in the nineteenth century and his pivotal role in founding the Boston Public

Library, a project that dominated his later years. His work to establish the BPL, similar to his History, was conceived as a civic duty. Ticknor returned from his first European journey with many lasting impressions of European intellectual life, but none quite as

189 Leigh consequential as the advantage of European libraries. After seeing the impressive library at

Göttingen, for example, the library at Harvard College seemed little more than a “closetful of books” (Life ,Letters, I 72 ). In Ticknor’s Remains of Nathaniel Appleton Haven (1827), a memoir of one of his peers, he identifies the chief benefit of his subject’s European adventure as the “valuable library and much interesting and useful knowledge of the modes of living, thinking, and conduct, in countries so different from our own” (xxvii).

Indeed, it is in Europe’s libraries that Ticknor sees its principal intellectual advantage and, after his return to the United States, and many years before beginning plans for the BPL, he remarks in an 1825 letter to his friend, the historian, George Bancroft: “It would be a great thing, in this country, to get one good and ample publick anywhere—it would compel other places to follow the same example” (Letter to George Bancroft, Massachusetts Historical

Society). In fact, even before taking up his post at Harvard, Ticknor matter-of-factly attributed the ills of American intellectual enterprise to its lack of libraries:

We are mortified and exasperated because we have no learned men, and yet make it physically impossible for our scholars to become such and that to escape from this reproach we appoint a multitude of professors; but give them a library from which hardly one and probably not one of them can qualify himself to execute the duties of his office. (Letter to Thomas Higginson, Boston Public Library; underlining original to text)

Ticknor similarly laments the lack of libraries in America in his previously mentioned memoir of Haven, where he states that “large public libraries” are “among the most immediate and pressing wants of the country” (xxxiv). He had, of course, already begun to assemble his own impressive collection of books for the purposes of his personal research.

His private efforts became public when, upon his death, he bequeathed his enormous collection of Spanish and Portuguese books to the BPL, a collection that can still be consulted today in that library’s Rare Books Department. While his activities as a private

190 Leigh collector may be cast as a mere project of vanity, his donation to the BPL, I think, testifies to his earnest desire to foment a broader literary public in America, which, of course, is interconnected with his dedication of the History to all manner of readers, not exclusively academics. In his Life of William Hickling Prescott (1863), Ticknor alludes to the early

American library model provided by the Boston Athenaeum, but also discounts that institution as inaccessible to the mass of men (9). Ticknor dreamed, rather, of a public institution that could enhance the intellectual agency of all of his countrymen, not just the elites, and that dream was realized in the founding of the Boston Public Library in 1858.

Ticknor also returned from Europe with a clear sense of the superiority of the

German academic curriculum. For years after assuming his post as Smith Professor of

French and Spanish Languages and Literatures, he stridently attempted to reform the curriculum at Harvard College to more closely resemble the German system, which allowed students more freedom in their course selection. He worked to effect these changes for more than a decade before ultimately becoming disheartened with Harvard’s conservatism and resigning his post in 1835. Some, like Ford (“George Ticknor”) and Waxman (“George

Ticknor, a Pioneer Teacher of Modern Languages”), have shown interest in these aspects of

Ticknor’s life, but they remain understudied and further examination would help document just how profoundly Ticknor was influenced by his early experiences in Europe.

Another fascinating chapter in Ticknor’s life, and one that is not unrelated to his attempts at curriculum reform, is his friendship with the third president of the United

States of America, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). These men were on familiar terms even before Ticknor first traveled to Europe. In fact, Ticknor visited Jefferson at Monticello in

1815 prior to his departure, at which point Jefferson presented him with letters of

191 Leigh introduction to some of the most important political and literary men of Europe, and, in return, Ticknor offered to act as book agent for Jefferson while in Europe, an offer Jefferson eagerly accepted (Long, Thomas Jefferson and George Ticknor 10). Jefferson was so taken with Ticknor—who he referred to as “the best bibliographer I have ever met” (9)— that he ultimately attempted to wrest the young scholar away from the confines of Harvard College and install him in his newly established University of Virginia (Life, Letters, I 302-303). As records at the Massachusetts Historical Society show, Jefferson personally corresponded with both Ticknor’s mother, Elizabeth (Letter to Thomas Jefferson, September 10, 1816,

Massachusetts Historical Society, P-10), and his father, Elisha (Letter to Elisha Ticknor,

February 9, 1816, Massachusetts Historical Society, P-10), with whom he often communicated with George while he was in Europe, to congratulate them on their son’s accomplishments and initiative. Indeed, Jefferson foresaw a bright future for the young academic. Speaking of Ticknor’s European adventure in the letter to Elisha Ticknor,

Jefferson writes:

He will return fraught with treasures of science which he could not have found in a country so exposed by industrious pursuits as ours, but he will be a sample to our youth of what they ought to be, and a model for imitation in pursuits so honorable, so improving and so friendly to good morals. (Letter to Elisha Ticknor, February 9, 1816, Massachusetts Historical Society, P-10)

Ticknor visited Jefferson at Monticello again in 1824 and the two men maintained an affectionate correspondence until Jefferson’s death in 1826. Those wishing to study this relationship further would do well to begin with the works of Long (Thomas Jefferson and

George Ticknor) and Cox (“Thomas Jefferson and Spanish”).

A final aspect that we have not had the opportunity to discuss here in any real detail is the reception of Ticknor’s History outside of the United States and the subsequent era of

192 Leigh

Hispanism he inspired. We can comfortably say that Ticknor’s book was generally well received both domestically and abroad and it continued to be regarded as the authoritative text on Spanish literature for many subsequent decades after its publication in 1849. It went through five American editions before the end of the nineteenth century and was translated into all of the principal European languages. Moreover, it is apparent upon reading contemporary reviews of the History that it was regarded as a truly important contribution to American literature. One reviewer describes it as “undoubtedly one of the most important contributions to the literature of the present age” (“Ticknor’s Spanish

Literature” 296), while another lists the accomplishments of Ticknor, Irving, and Prescott as an “epoch” in American literary history (De Bow 67). Yet another reviewer proclaims

“no literary production of the United States has brought more honor to the American name, among the scholars of Europe, than the History of Spanish Literature” (“Translations of

Ticknor’s Spanish Literature” 260). It is furthermore apparent from these reviews that many Americans readily accepted Ticknor’s thesis of Spanish degradation, on the one hand, and appreciated his intention of producing a book “which shall be something more than a work for reference and consultation—which shall be found in the drawing-room as well as the study” (G.S.H. 122), on the other. On the lesson of Spain, one reviewer remarks: “The admonition is a solemn one, which it becomes us all to heed in the day of our pride, our arrogance and our power” (De Bow 66). Another states rather dourly: “The example of

[Spanish literature] at once instructs, warns, and purifies” (“Ticknor’s Spanish Literature”

324). Another reviewer proves a particularly zealous adherent of Ticknor’s argument, and goes further than Ticknor himself in his denunciation of Spain’s contemporary situation, portraying it as a kind of karmic retribution:

193 Leigh

History is ever justifying the ways of god to man, and never more forcibly than in the fortunes of Spain. If the power has been taken from her, it is because it was abused; if the scepter has been wrested from her grasp, it is because it was converted into a scourge. To no men it is permitted to do wrong with impunity; least of all to the rulers of the earth. The selfishness of tyranny is punished by the weakness to which it leads, and bigotry extinguishes in time the religious principle from which its power to do mischief is derived. (G.S.H. 168)

Such commentary speaks to the degree to which Spain’s reputation as an antithetical

America had taken root among Ticknor’s audience in the United States. Having long abandoned the path of righteousness, Spain was now the deserving recipient of a kind of divine punishment. William H. Prescott needed no convincing on this point, having propagated that interpretation through his own works. In his review, he suggests that

Ticknor’s History is, indeed, evidence of America’s intellectual coming-of-age, saying:

Literary history must come late in the intellectual development of a nation. […] It presupposes, moreover, a critical knowledge, an acquaintance with the principles of taste, which can only come from a wide study and comparison of models. It is, therefore, necessarily the product of an advanced state of civilization and mental culture. (Review of George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature 1)

Meanwhile, the British Hispanist, Richard Ford, offered a more reserved appreciation for

Ticknor’s work. He begins his review by condescendingly critiquing American scholarship:

Young in the literary race, and timid, perhaps, from fancied insecurity of position, they scarcely venture to descend from the dignified propriety of the chair, and prefer instructing like Don Manuel, to enlivening like Boccaccio. (Review of George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature 179)

Ultimately, though, he reluctantly concedes that Ticknor “has produced a record which may be read with general satisfaction, and will be lastingly valued for reference” (179). These reviews, taken together, are representative of the predominantly positive reception the

History enjoyed both domestically and abroad and they suggest that Ticknor achieved what

I suggest he set out to do: enhance and contribute to America’s literary reputation while cautioning the United States against the missteps of Spain.

194 Leigh

Leaving aside the kind words dedicated to Ticknor and his History, it is perhaps more interesting to consider Ticknor’s detractors, specifically his Spanish detractors.

Unsurprisingly, several Spanish intellectuals baulked at the presumption of an American writing about their national literature. In an 1851 review, the noted Spanish literary historian, José Amador de los Ríos (1818-1878), for example, calls Ticknor’s History “una verdadera novedad literaria” (Review of Gayangos’s Translation of History of Spanish

Literature 280) before descending into a virulent attack that ends with him calling the same work “una obra lastimosamente acéfala” (282). According to Amador de los Ríos, foreigners simply cannot understand Spanish literature (281), a defensive assertion that future

Spanish critics would repeat. Amador de los Ríos, in a blatant display of rivalry, concludes his review by plugging his own forthcoming book, Estudios históricos, políticos y literarios sobre los judíos de España (304), thereby advertising himself as a homegrown corrective to this foreign interloper. The impact of Ticknor’s History among European scholars of

Spanish literature is further revealed by the prefatory remarks to Amador de los Ríos’s review of that work in El eco literario de Europa, a compendium of articles published in the mid-nineteenth-century Spanish journal, Revista Universal. The editor of El eco literario,

Ramón Rodríguez de Rivera, proclaims the importance of Amador’s review in the following manner:

Creemos hacer un gran servicio á nuestra literatura, al público en general, y en particular á nuestros suscritores, reproduciendo en El Eco Literario estos eruditos é interesantes artículos, que han traducido los principales periódicos ingleses y franceses, y han contribuido poderosamente á variar la opinión que se había formado en Europa de nuestra literatura, por la obra de Ticknor. (280)

The fact that Rivera feels compelled to defend Spanish literature against Ticknor’s opinions was surely motivated, in part, by the particularly grim narrative of decline that Ticknor

195 Leigh promotes in his book. But it also likely represents a more general dismay of the state of

Spanish scholarship on its own literature at that point in time. As we have seen, there was no comprehensive work on Spanish literature written by a Spaniard in general circulation until the appearance of Gil y Zárate’s Manual de la literatura (1844). The Spaniards, then, were late to participate in the intellectual discussions that had coalesced around their own literary corpus, a point Ticknor notes in his Syllabus (iii) and again in his History (I v-vi).

Ticknor’s History, a widely read work that claimed to be the first comprehensive history of

Spanish literature, acted as a catalyst of the subsequent nationalistic era of Spanish literary criticism.

Appearing in 1855, after the publication of Pascual de Gayangos’s Spanish translation of the third volume of Ticknor’s History, Francisco de Paula Canalejas offers a similarly negative review. His main point of contention is Ticknor’s presumption in considering himself an authority on Spanish literature. Following some moderate criticisms of Ticknor’s critical methodology, Canalejas concludes his prefatory remarks by saying:

No tacharíamos la obra de Mr. Ticknor si reconociendo las cualidades inherentes al título que escribió al frente de su libro, hubiera limitado sus conatos á estender el conocimiento de las letras españolas por las comarcas Americanas, sin hacer vanos alardes de historia y sin anunciarse en España como historiador de nuestras glorias literarias; pero no fue así, y precisa vindicar los derechos de la historia literaria de nuestra patria… (668)

Ticknor’s error, according to Canalejas, consists of presuming to be an authority on Spanish literature to Spanish audiences, and the Spanish critic, like Amador de los Ríos before him, reacts territorially. Incidentally, Canalejas concludes his lengthy review by dedicating several paragraphs to the forthcoming literary history by Amador de los Ríos, first conceding that Spanish scholarship had experienced a prolonged “oscura noche” extending from the Gothic period up until the present moment, before then heralding Amador de los

196 Leigh

Ríos’s efforts as the salvation of Spanish scholarship. Being Spanish, Amador de los Ríos is, unlike Ticknor, capable of producing a book in which “el ingenio español y el arte patrio brillan con luz tan nueva, que no parece sino que se despierta de profundísimo letargo”

(686).

The Spanish critic, Adolfo de Castro (1823-1898), was similarly unimpressed by, and resentful of, Ticknor’s efforts. The two engaged in a polemic that began when Ticknor called into doubt the authenticity of the manuscript used by Castro in his edition of

Cervantes’s El Buscapié (History of Spanish Literature, III 404). Without being able to produce the evidence necessary to prove his case, Castro ultimately extricates himself from the dispute by dismissively remarking: “Forgive me, Mr. Ticknor, but I do not recognize in a foreigner, however great his erudition might be, sufficient authority to judge as authentic or apocryphal any of our books” (cited in Jaksic 57). Pedro José Pidal (1799-1865), in a separate episode, claimed that “no foreigner, however enlightened, is the best judge” of

Spanish philological issues (278). And, lastly, none other than the distinguished Marcelino

Menéndez y Pelayo (1856-1912), finds occasion to comment on Ticknor’s work in his prologue to the Spanish translation of James Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s History of Spanish

Literature (1902). Therein, he first acknowledges that literary history is, by and large, “una creación del siglo XIX” (viii) and that Ticknor’s work, in particular, was “una obra en gran parte nueva” (xii). Moreover, he credits Ticknor with popularizing Spanish letters throughout the world, thereby paving the way for future research in the field (xiv). Of the

History’s lasting scholarly value, however, Menéndez y Pelayo is less effusive. While retaining its value as a bibliographic manual, he considers Ticknor’s critical treatment of

Spanish literature superficial at best, not least in his discussion of Spain’s medieval period

197 Leigh

(xiii), and he laments that “nadie, y menos un lector extranjero, pueda, sin otro guía que

Ticknor, distinguir…las verdaderas cumbres de nuestra literatura” (xiii). He concludes his remarks by proffering the faint praise that:

Aunque la obra de Ticknor no hubiera tenido en España más resultado que suscitar indirectamente la aparición de la Historia crítica de Amador de los Ríos, primera de su género escrita por pluma nacional, deberíamos estar agradecidos al laborioso y erudito cuidadano de Boston. (Prologue to the Spanish Translation of James Fitzmaurice Kelly’s History of Spanish Literature xiv)

The comments of these Spanish detractors constitute an intriguing glimpse into the push and pull involved in the transatlantic conversations that defined the field of Hispanism from its outset.

Domestically, Ticknor suffered few harsh words on account of his History, but one notable American reviewer did take Ticknor to task for presuming to know more about

Spanish literature than Spaniards themselves (T.C.R. 312). Regarding Ticknor’s feud with

Adolfo de Castro, this reviewer emphatically sides with the Spanish critic before remarking:

We hope Mr. Ticknor, like the best of the New-England writers, is imbued with a catholic spirit foreign to that narrow Puritan-like provincialism, which perverts the philanthropy, taints the ethics, corrupts the taste, narrows the patriotism, and warps, in all things, the judgment of so large a portion of the Boston public. (T.C.R. 312)

This reviewer appears to have been motivated more by political and regional prejudice as opposed to legitimate scholarly misgivings. Published in the Charleston, South Carolina based Southern Quarterly Review in 1850, it appears at a time when tensions between the

North and the South were already ramping up in the United States preceding the American

Civil War (1861-1865). The pointedly harsh language used by this reviewer suggests an animosity that runs deeper than mere scholarly dissatisfaction. Though this review is not representative of the general reception of Ticknor’s History in the United States, it is

198 Leigh remarkable, among other things, for its recognition and depiction of the Boston interpretive community as it existed in the mid-nineteenth century. It illustrates the perceived presumptuousness of Boston’s cultural elite by Americans outside of New

England and, consequently, serves to more squarely circumscribe Ticknor’s arguments within the parameters of that particular group of intellectuals. More generally, this review hints at the regional and cultural disputes among intellectuals in the United States at the time, a fascinating topic for future research, especially in light of the identity crisis experienced by American intellectuals that we have described in this dissertation.

Such are some of the promising avenues of future research on Ticknor, but there are surely others equally deserving of scholarly attention. George Ticknor was a truly determined, cosmopolitan, and well-connected figure who would merit our attention even without having penned the foundational text of Hispanism. His work to establish that discipline, and the implications of that undertaking, has been the subject of this dissertation. I hope to have illustrated, with greater detail and evidence than has been done previously, the nature of Ticknor’s reception of the Spanish literary corpus as well as his subsequent mediation of it. Reflecting on Ticknor’s story a century and a half after his death, we do so with the perceived clarity that comes with hindsight, and we are thus able to confidently point to the influential factors that shaped Ticknor’s understanding of Spain and her literature. My hope, however, is that this study will serve as a reminder to present- day scholars to be perpetually mindful, to the extent possible, of their own inherent and inherited biases—be they cultural, historical, social, or political—as they go about the business of criticism. Too often, I think, do we initiate research with preconceived notions that we then labor to confirm by selectively assembling those sources that support our

199 Leigh thesis and disregarding those that complicate it. Superseding this dilemma is, of course, no easy task, if it is, indeed, possible at all. Though I am keenly aware of the vexing philosophical predicament of objectivity, I no doubt fall short in the preceding pages of overcoming my own limited perspective. But, while the notion of truly objective research may well be a proverbial red herring, it is no less incumbent upon critics to expose themselves, at every turn, to each and every contrasting argument related to their subject of inquiry and, furthermore, to grapple with the uncomfortable obstacles to their pre- formed hypotheses whenever and wherever they encounter them. The process of doing so—assuming it does not lead to absolute relativism—will, at the very least, promote an awareness of cultural relativism and contextual authority. It will have the additional benefit of forcing us to view our own work against a varied tapestry of contrasting scholarship, humbling us as we frame ourselves amidst myriad perspectives. Such considerations should not deter or discourage our scholarly ambitions; to the contrary, they should inspire a continuous re-thinking of entrenched paradigms and encourage us to proffer our own corrective contributions, so long as they refrain from pretensions of definitive authority and remain open to countless unforeseen criticisms.

George Ticknor, for his part, remained a steady adherent of his own convictions throughout his professional career, which may be why the modern reader so readily discounts his work. Nevertheless, his story remains an instructive one. His own intellectual development paralleled that of American scholarship and literature in general, in such a way that Ticknor and the United States can be said to have experienced their coming-of-age simultaneously. Looking back on the state of literary activity in the Boston of his youth,

Ticknor remarks: “Men felt anxious in those dark days, and literary indulgences, which

200 Leigh have now become almost as necessary to us as our daily food, were luxuries enjoyed by few” (Life of William Hickling Prescott 8). Ticknor, then, is a fascinating case study of the development of American intellectual activity in the first half of the nineteenth century and, more specifically, of the beginnings of Hispanism as an academic discipline. The contextualization of his work that I have provided here will, I hope, inspire others to re- examine the historical foundations of their own fields, a practice that ought never be abandoned, lest we risk losing sight of the progress that has been made and the work that remains to be done.

201 Leigh

APPENDIX: Images

Figure 1. George Ticknor as a young man. Oil painting by Thomas Sully (1783- 1871). Source: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.

202 Leigh

Figure 2. George Ticknor as an old man, with signature. Source: Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor.

203 Leigh

Figure 3. Bust of George Ticknor by Martin Milmore (1844-1883). Source: Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

204 Leigh

Figure 4. Statuette of Ticknor. Source: Rauner Library, Dartmouth College. Photo by author.

205 Leigh

Figure 5. Ticknor’s home on Park Street, Boston. Source: George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins.

206 Leigh

Figure 6. George Ticknor’s study and library. Park Street, Boston. Source: Rauner Library, Dartmouth College.

207 Leigh

SYLLABUS

A COURSE OF LECTURES

HISTORY AND CRITICISM

BY GEORGE TICKNOR, "2" Sm ith Professor of French and Spanish Literature in Harvard University, and Corresponding Member of the Royal Spanish Academ y.

CAMBRIDGE . PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS,

BY HLLLIARD AND METCALF. 1823.

Figure 7. Title page of Ticknor’s Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on the History and Criticism of Spanish Literature, 1823. Image courtesy of babel.hathitrust.org.

208 Leigh

Figure 8. Title page of the first edition of Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature, 1849. Image courtesy of google.books.com.

209 Leigh

Figure 9. The old building of the University of Göttingen and its library, 1815. Image courtesy of wikipedia.org.

210 Leigh

Figure 10. Harvard College in 1828, at the time Ticknor was Smith Professor of French and Spanish Languages and Literatures. Source: George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins.

211 Leigh

Figure 11. Madame de Staël (1766-1817). Source: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Anna Luigia Necker Baronessa Di Staël." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1839-11-30.

212 Leigh

Figure 12. Robert Southey (1774-1843). Source: Yesterdays with Authors.

213 Leigh

Figure 13. Friedrich Bouterwek (1766-1828). Image courtesy of wikipedia.org.

214 Leigh

Figure 14. Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842). Source: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi." The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

215 Leigh

Figure 15. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Image courtesy of wikipedia.org.

216 Leigh

Figure 16. Pascual de Gayangos (1809-1897). Image courtesy of Real Academia de Historia (rah.es).

217 Leigh

Figure 17. Pascual de Gayangos (1809-1897). Image originally appeared in La Ilustración Española y Americana 41.38 (1897): 232. Image courtesy of wikisource.org.

218 Leigh

Figure 18. Invoice of books purchased for Mr. Ticknor by Obadiah Rich. December, 1826. William Hickling Prescott papers. Ms. N-2180. Massachusetts Historical Society. Photo by author.

219 Leigh

Figure 19. Letter from Fernando de Navarrete to Alexander H. Everett. August, 182?. Everett-Peabody Family papers. Ms. N-1206. Massachusetts Historical Society. Photo by author.

220 Leigh

Figure 20. Letter from Pascual de Gayangos to William H. Prescott. December, 1839. William H. Prescott Papers. Ms. N-2180. Massachusetts Historical Society. Photo by author.

221 Leigh

Figure 21. Title page from Pascual de Gayangos’s Historia de la literatura española (1851), the Spanish translation of Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature. Image coutesy of books.google.com.

222 Leigh

Figure 22. First page of the extant codex containing the Poema de Mio Cid, c. 1200. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid. Image courtesy of World Digital Library (wdl.org).

223 Leigh

Figure 23. The original building of the Boston Public Library, which Ticknor co-founded in 1858, located on Boylston Street, Boston. Image courtesy of wikipedia.org.

224 Leigh

Figure 24. José Amador de los Ríos (1816-1878). Image courtesy of wikipedia.org.

225 Leigh

Figure 25. Antonio Gil y Zárate (1793-1861). Image courtesy of wikipedia.org.

226 Leigh

Figure 26. Letter from William H. Prescott to William Howard Gardiner, in which he discusses his intentions and source material for his forthcoming History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1838). At another point in the letter, he refers to the “superior merit” of the “number and rarity” of Ticknor’s collection of Spanish literature. Letter dated September 4, 1837. William Howard Gardiner Papers, Ms. N-1269. Massachusetts Historical Society. Photo by author.

227 Leigh

Figure 27. Letter from Ticknor to George Bancroft dated March 24, 1828. George Bancroft papers. Ms. N-1795. Massachusetts Historical Society.

228 Leigh

Figure 28. Chapter relating to Spain and Portugal of Alexander Everett’s manuscript edition of Europe; or, A General Survey of the Present Situation of the Principal Powers; with Conjectures on Their Future Prospect. Ms. N-1200. Massachusetts Historical Society.

229 Leigh

Figure 29. Exemplar of Ticknor’s handwriting later in life. Letter to Charles Davies. September 12, 1857. Letters to Charles S. Davies, 1809-1864. Ms. S-230. Massachusetts Historical Society.

230 Leigh

Figure 30. Two letters from Thomas Jefferson: one to Ticknor himself (above; Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson papers. Microfilm edition. P-40. Massachusetts Historical Society) while he was in Paris in 1816, in which Jefferson amends a previous book order; and one to Ticknor's father (below; Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson papers. Microfilm edition. P-40. Massachusetts Historical Society), Elisha, through whom Jefferson often communicated with Ticknor, congratulating him on his son’s accomplishments.

231 Leigh

Figure 31. Letter from Ticknor to Thomas Jefferson, dated December 22, 1816, while Ticknor was in Göttingen. Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson papers. Microfilm edition. P-40. Massachusetts Historical Society.

232 Leigh

WORKS CITED

For the purposes of this bibliography, I have considered all texts pertaining to the nineteenth century, or earlier, to be primary sources, as they constitute the textual evidence of the intellectual era that I detail in this dissertation. They are also the texts that

Ticknor responds to or, in other cases, that respond to Ticknor. I have also listed all of the archival sources as primary sources. Secondary sources, on the other hand, comprise twentieth and twenty-first century texts. Despite the seeming arbitrary nature of this division, it is my hope that it more clearly indicates to the reader those texts that existed contemporaneously with Ticknor’s and those of his peers.

Primary Sources

Adams, John. Letter to Dr. Morse. May 15, 1815. George Ticknor Papers, 1773 – 1870. MS-

983. Rauner Library. Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH.

Alexander Hill Everett historical manuscript, ca. 1822. Ms. N-1200. Massachusetts Historical

Society. Boston, MA.

Alexander Hill Everett Letters, 1819-1957. Ms. N-2054. Massachusetts Historical Society.

Boston, MA.

Amador de los Riós, José. Estudios históricos, políticos y literarios sobre los judíos de España.

Madrid: D.M. Díaz, 1848.

---. Historia crítica de la literatura española. 7 vols. Madrid: José Fernández Cancela,

1861-1865.

233 Leigh

---. Review of Gayangos’s Translation of History of Spanish Literature. Eco Literario

de Europa: Primera sección, Revista Universal 2 (1851): 280-304.

Andrés, Juan. Origen, progresos, y estado actual de toda literatura. 6 vols. Madrid: Imprenta

de Sancha,1784-1806.

Anonymous. “Alliance of Southern Republics.” North American Review 22.50 (1826): 162-

176.

Anonymous. “Character of Spain, and the Spaniards.” North American Review 7 (1816): 54-

58.

Anonymous. “Life and Writings of Madame de Staël.” North American Review 28 (1820):

124-140.

Anonymous. “New Documents Relating to Columbus.” North American Review 23.53

(1826): 484-489.

Anonymous. “Posthumous Works of Madame de Staël.” North American Review 14.34

(1822): 101-128.

Anonymous. Review of “The Duties of an American Citizen; Two Discourses Delivered in

the First Baptist Meeting House in Boston, on Thursday, April 7, 1825, the Day of

Public Fast by Francis Wayland Jr.” North American Review 21.49 (1825): 360–368.

Anonymous. Review of Navarrete’s Colección de viajes y descubrimientos. North American

Review 24.55 (1827): 265-294.

Anonymous. Review of George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature, Third American

Edition. North American Review 97.201 (1863): 559-561.

Anonymous. “South America.” North American Review 19:44 (1824): 158-208.

234 Leigh

Anonymous. “Ticknor’s Spanish Literature.” The Methodist Quarterly Review 2 (1850): 292-

324.

Anonymous. “Translations of Ticknor’s Spanish Literature.” North American Review 76.158

(1853): 256-260.

Anonymous. “Writing of Herder.” North American Review 20.46 (1825): 138-147.

Barbosa de Figueredo, J. Letter to George Ticknor. 3 November 1818. George Ticknor

Papers, 1773-1870. MS-983. Rauner Library, Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH.

Bello, Andrés. “Noticia sobre la obra de Sismondi sobre la Literatura del Mediodía de

Europa.” In Opúsculos literarios y críticos. Santiago del Chile: Nascimiento, 1935.

331-346.

---. Poema del Cid. In Obras completas de don Andrés Bello. Vol. 2. Santiago de Chile:

Peter G. Ramírez, 1881.

Bouterwek, Friedrich. Geschichte der neuren Poesie und Beredsamkeit. Vol. 3. Göttingen,

Germany: J. F. Röwer, 1804.

---. History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature. 2 volumes. Translated by

Thomasina Ross. London: Boosey and Sons, 1823.

Canalejas, Francisco de Paula. “Historia de la literatura española, por M. G. Ticknor.” Revista

Española de Ambos Mundos 4 (1855): 667-686.

Capmany, Antonio de. Teatro histórico-crítico de la eloquencia española. Madrid: Antonio de

Sancha, 1786.

Castro, Adolfo de, editor. El Buscapié by Miguel de Cervantes with the illustrative notes of

Don Alfonso de Castro. Translated from the Spanish by Thomasina Ross. London:

Richard Bentley, 1849.

235 Leigh

Channing, William Ellery. “Essay on American Language and Literature.” North American

Review 1 (1815a): 307-314.

---. “Reflections on the Literary Delinquency of America.” North American Review 2.4

(1815b): 33-43.

Charles Deane correspondence, 1602-1889. Ms. N-1209. Massachusetts Historical Society.

Boston, MA.

Charles Folsom papers, 1732-1871. Ms. N-1229. Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston,

MA.

Conde, José Antonio. Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España, sacada de varios

manuscritos y memorias arábigas. 3 vols. Madrid: Imprenta que fue de García, 1820.

Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson papers. Microfilm edition. P-40. Massachusetts

Historical Society, Boston, MA.

Cubí y Soler, Mariano. A New Spanish Grammar, Adapted to Every Class of Learners.

Baltimore: Published by Fielding Lucas, 1822.

Damas-Hinard, Jean Joseph Stanislas Albert. Poëme du Cid. Paris: Perrotin, Imprimerie

Impériale, 1858.

De Bow, J. D. B. “Literature of Spain.” Review of History of Spanish Literature, by George

Ticknor. De Bow’s Review of the Southern and Western States 9.1 (1850): 66-85.

Diez, Friedrich, editor and translator. Altspanische Romanzen, besonders vom Cid und Kaiser

Karl’s Paladinen. Berlin: Georg Keimer, 1821.

Dozy, Reinhart. Recherches sur l’histoire politique et littéraire de l’Espagne pendant le Moyen

Age. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1849.

236 Leigh

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” In The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo

Emerson. Volume 1: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, edited by Robert E. Spiller.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. 49-70.

Everett, Alexander Hill. Europe; or, A General Survey of the Present Situation of the Principal

Powers; with Conjectures on Their Future Prospects. Alexander Hill Everett Letters,

1819-1857. Ms. N-1200. Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston, MA.

Everett, Edward. Review of Bouterwek’s Historia de la literatura española. “Early Literature

of Modern Europe.” North American Review 38.82 (1834): 158-177.

---. Review of Irving’s Alhamabra. North American Review 77 (1832): 265-282.

Everett-Peabody family papers, 1778-1908. Ms. N-1206. Massachusetts Historical Society.

Boston, MA.

Fields, James Thomas. Yesterdays with Authors. 4 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,

1883.

Fitzmaurice-Kelly, James. A History of Spanish Literature. New York: Appleton, 1898.

Floranes, Rafael de. Dos opúsculos inéditos de Rafael Floranes y de D. Tomás Antonio Sánchez

sobre los orígenes de la poesía castellana. Excerpt from Revue Hispanique 18. New

York: 1908.

Ford, Richard. Review of George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature. The London

Quarterly Review 87 (1850): 157-179.

George Bancroft papers, 1815-1908. Ms. N-1795. Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston,

MA.

George E. Ellis papers, 1769-1897. Ms. N-1172. Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston,

MA.

237 Leigh

George Ticknor papers, 1773 – 1870. MS-983. Rauner Library. Dartmouth College. Hanover,

NH.

Gil y Zárate, Antonio. Manual de literatura. Madrid: I. Boix, 1844.

G.S.H. “Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature.” Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany

48.1 (1850): 121-168.

Hart, Charles Henry. Memoir of George Ticknor, Historian of Spanish Literature.

Philadelphia: Collins Printer, 1871.

Hegel, Georg. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. 1835. Translated as T.M. Knox as Aesthetics.

Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Treatise on the Origin of Language.” In Philosophical Writings,

edited by Michael N. Forster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Hilliard, George, editor. Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor. 2 vols. 1876. New York:

Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.

Huntington, Archer. A Notebook in Northern Spain. New York: Putnam, 1898.

Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Burlington Arcade: 1819 .

---. The Alhambra: A Series of Tales and Sketches of the Moors and Spaniards. Carey &

Lea, 1832.

Janer, Florencio, editor. Poetas castellanos anteriores al siglo XV. Colección hecha por Tomás

Antonio Sánchez, continuada por Pedro José Pidal y aumentada e ilustrada por

Florencio Janer, In Biblioteca de autores españoles 58. Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1864.

Janer, Florencio. “Discurso preliminar.” In Biblioteca de autores españoles 58. Edited by

Florencio Janer. Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1864. 3-11.

238 Leigh

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to Elisha Ticknor. February 9, 1816. Coolidge Collection of Thomas

Jefferson papers. Microfilm edition. P-40. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston,

MA.

---. Letter to George Ticknor. January 31, 1816. Coolidge Collection of Thomas

Jefferson papers. Microfilm edition. P-40. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston,

MA.

Letters to Charles S. Daveis, 1809-1864. Ms. S-230. Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston,

MA.

Longfellow, Henry W. Coplas De Don Jorge Manrique. Translated from the Spanish. With an

Introductory Essay on the Moral and Devotional Poetry of Spain. Boston: Allen and

Ticknor, 1833.

---. Outre-mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea. New York: Harper & Bros, 1835.

---. Review of Sánchez’s Colección. “Spanish Language and Literature.” North

American Review 36.79 (1833): 316-344.

Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino. Historia de las ideas estéticas en España. 1883-1889.

Santander, Spain: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1943.

---. Historia de los heterodoxos españoles. 1880-1882. Barcelona : Linkgua Ediciones,

2009.

---. Prologue to the Spanish Translation of James Fitzmaurice Kelly’s History of

Spanish Literature. Translated as Historia de la literatura española by Adolfo Bonilla

y San Martín. Seventh edition. Madrid: La España Moderna, 1901. v-xli.

Miguel de Forjas, Dom. Letter to George Ticknor. 2 November 1818. George Ticknor Papers,

1773-1870. MS-983. Rauner Library, Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH.

239 Leigh

Milá y Fontanals, Manuel. Obras Completas. 8 vols. Edited by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo.

Barcelona: Librería de Álvaro Verdaguer, 1888-1896.

Papers of George Ticknor, 1817-1825. HUG1835.xx. Harvard University Archives.

Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Pidal, Pedro José. “Sobre la legitimidad del Centón Epistolario del Bachiller Fernán Gómez

de Cibdareal.” Revista Española de Ambos Mundos 2 (1854): 257-280.

Prescott, William H. Biographical and Critical Miscellanies. 1852. Philadelphia: Lippincott,

1904.

---. History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. New York: A. L. Burt, 1838.

---. Review of George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature. North American Review

70.146 (1850) 1-56.

Records of the Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures kept by

George Ticknor, 1816-1835 and undated. UAI 15.1038. Harvard University Archives.

Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rodríguez de Rivera, Ramón, editor. El eco literario de Europa. Primera Sección. Vol. I.

Madrid: 1851.

Rousseau, Jean-Jaques. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music,

edited by John T. Scott. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998.

Sánchez, Tomás Antonio. Poetas castellanas anteriores al siglo XV. In Biblioteca de autores

españoles, edited by Florencio Janer. Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1864.

Sarmiento, Martín. Memorias para la historia de la poesía y poetas españoles. 1775. Buenos

Aires: Emecé, 1942.

240 Leigh

Schlegel, Friedrich. Lectures on the History or Literature, Ancient and Modern. Translated by

J. G. Lockhart. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1818.

Sismondi, Jean Claude Léonard Simonde de. Histoire de la littérature du Midi de l’Europe.

Vol. 3. Paris: Treuttel et Wurtz, 1813.

---. Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe. Translated by Thomas

Roscoe, Esq. New York: Harper, 1827.

Soler y Arqués, C. “España en Massachusetts.” Revista Contemporánea 45 (1883): 154-175.

Southey, Robert. The Chronicle of the Cid. 1808. New York: Heritage Press, 1958.

---.“The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper; including the Series

edited, with Prefaces Biographical and Critical, by Dr. Samuel Johnson; and the most

approved Translations. The additional lives by Alexander Chalmers.” Quarterly

Review, 12 (1814): 60-90.

Sparks, Jared. Unpublished letter. September 24, 1825. Cited in Helman, Edith. “Early

Interest in Spanish in New England (1815-1835).” Hispania 29.3 (1946): 339-351.

---. Review of Mariano Cubí’s A New Spanish Grammar. North American Review 20.47

(1825): 450-452.

---. Review of Mariano Cubí’s El Traductor Español. North American Review

22.51(1826): 451-452.

Staël, Madame de. “Literature in its Relation to Social Institutions.” 1800. In Madame de

Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character. Translated and edited by

Morroe Berger. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964. 139-256.

T.C.R. Review of George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature. The Southern Quarterly

Review 2.3 (1850a): 85-124.

241 Leigh

---. Review of George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature. The Southern Quarterly

Review 2.4 (1850b): 273-313.

Ticknor, Elizabeth. Letter to Thomas Jefferson. September 10, 1816. Coolidge Collection of

Thomas Jefferson papers. Microfilm edition. P-40. Massachusetts Historical Society,

Boston, MA.

Ticknor, George. George Ticknor; Letters to Pascual de Gayangos from the Originals in the

Collection of the Hispanic Society of America, edited by Clara Louisa Penney. New

York: Printed by Order of the Trustees, 1927.

---. Historia de la literatura española. 4 volumes. Edited by Pascual de Gayangos y

Enrique de Vedia. Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1851-1856.

---. History of Spanish Literature. 3 volumes. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849.

---. “Joshua Bates.” American Journal of Education 7:18 (1859): 270-272.

---. “Lecture on the Best Methods of Teaching the Living Languages.” The Modern

Language Journal 22.1 (1937): 19-31.

---. Letter to George Bancroft. December 1825. George Bancroft Papers, 1815-1908.

Ms. N-1795. Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston, MA.

---. Letter to Thomas Higginson. 1816. Ticknor Library of Spanish and Portuguese

Literature. Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library.

---. Letter to Thomas Jefferson. December 22, 1816. Coolidge Collection of Thomas

Jefferson papers. Microfilm edition. P-40. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston,

MA.

---. Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor. 2 volumes. Edited by George Hilliard.

5th edition. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.

242 Leigh

---. Life of William Hickling Prescott. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1863.

---. “Memoirs of the Buckminsters.” Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany 47.2

(1849): 169-195.

---. Remains of Nathaniel Appleton Haven with a Memoir of his Life. Cambridge, MA:

Hilliard, Metcalf, & Company, 1827.

---. Remarks on the Life and Writings of Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts.

Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1831.

---. Review of Mémoires pour server à la Vie de Général Lafayette et à l’Histoire de

l’Assemblée constituante (Memoirs of the Life of Gilbert Motier Lafayette) by M.

Regnault-Warin and H. L. Villaume Ducoudray Holstein. North American Review

20.46 (1825): 147-180.

---. “Sermons by the late Rev. Samuel C. Thacher.” Christian Examiner and

Theological Review 1:2 (1824): 136-143.

---. Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on the History and Criticism of Spanish Literature.

Cambridge: Printed at the University Press, by Hilliard and Metcalf, 1823.

---. Transcriptions by Ticknor of the first volume of his 1815-1819 travel journals.

MS-983. Series 5. Box 7. Folder 1. Rauner Library. Dartmouth College.

Ticknor Library of Spanish and Portuguese Literature. Rare Books Department. Boston

Public Library. Boston, MA.

Whitney, James Lyman. Catalogue of the Spanish Library and of the Portuguese Books

Bequeathed by George Ticknor to the Boston Public Library, Together with the

Collection of Spanish and Portuguese Literature in the General Library. Boston:

Boston Public Library, Printed by Order of the Trustees, 1879

243 Leigh

Wigglesworth, Edward. Review of Francis Sales’s edition of José Cadalso’s Cartas

Marruecas. North American Review 26.58 (1828) 248-258.

William Howard Gardiner papers, 1708-1893. Ms. N-1269. Massachusetts Historical Society.

Boston, MA.

William Hickling Prescott papers. Ms. N-2180. Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston, MA.

Wolf, Ferdinand. “Historia de la literatura española, escrita en Alemán por Bouterwek,

traducida al Castellano y adicionado por D. José Gómez de la Cortina y D. Nicolás

Hugalde y Mollinedo.” Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur 55 (1831): 243-264; 56

(1831): 239-266.

Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems. 1800. Edited by James Butler and

Karen Green. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

244 Leigh

Secondary Sources

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1953.

Adorno, Rolena. “Un caso de hispanismo anglonorteamericano temprano: El encuentro

colombino de Washington Irving y Martín Fernández de Navarrete.” In El

hispanismo anglonorteamericano: Aportaciones, problemas, y perspectivas sobre

historia, arte, y literature españolas (siglos XVI-XVIII). Actas de la I Conferencia

Internacional “Hacia un Nuevo Humanismo. Córdoba, Spain, September 9-14, 1997.

Córdoba, Spain: Publicaciones Obra Social y Cultural Cajasur, 2001. 87-106.

---. “Washington Irving’s Romantic Hispanism and Its Columbian Legacies.” In Spain

in America, edited by Richard Kagan. Chicago: Univerisity of Illinois Press, 2002. 49-

105.

Altschul, Nadia. "On the Shores of Nationalism: Latin American Philology, Local Histories

and Global Designs." La Corónica 35.2 (2007): 59-172.

Alvarez Junco, José. Mater Dolorosa: la idea de España en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Taurus, 2001.

Amner, F. Dewey. “Some Influences of George Ticknor upon the Study of Spanish in the

United States.” Hispania 11.5 (1928): 377–395.

Ares, José Manuel de Bernardo, editor. El hispanismo norteamericano: aportaciones,

problemas y perspectivas sobre la historia, arte y literatura españolas, siglos XVI-XVIII.

Actas de la I Conferencia Internacional “Hacia un Nuevo Humanismo”, C.I.N.HU.,

Córdoba, 9-14 de septiembre de 1997. Córdoba: Publicaciones Obra Social y Cultural

CajaSur, 2001.

245 Leigh

Berger, Morroe, editor. Madame de Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character. New

York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1964.

Bernstein, Harry. "Las primeras relaciones entre New England y el mundo hispánico: 1700-

1815." Revista Hispánica Moderna 5 (1939): 1-17.

Bertrand, J. J. A. “Una gran página de la vida póstuma del Cid, El Cid de Herder.” In Estudios

dedicados a Menéndez Pidal. Volume 1. Madrid: CSIC, 1950. 1-28.

Buceta, Erasmo. “Opiniones de Southey y Coleridge acerca del Poema del Cid.” Revista de

Filología Española 9 (1922): 52-57.

Cantor, Norman F. Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great

Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. New York: W. Morrow, 1991.

Castro, Américo. España en su historia. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1948.

---. La realidad histórica de España. Mexico City: Biblioteca Porrúa, 1954.

Charvat, William. The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936.

Coester, Alfred. "Francis Sales – A Forerunner." Hispania 19.2 (1936): 283-302.

Cox, R. Merritt. “Thomas Jefferson and Spanish: “To Every Inhabitant, Who Means to Look

Beyond the Limits of his Farm.” Romance Notes 14.1 (1972): 116-121.

Cuthbertson, Stuart. “George Ticknor’s Interest in Spanish American Literature.” Hispania

16.2 (May 1933): 117-226.

Delicado Puerto, Gemma. "Breve estudio sobre la influencia de la History of Spanish

Literature de George Ticknor en manuales posteriores: Aparición y desaparición de

las mujeres en el canon literario." Tejuelo: Didáctica de la lengua y la literatura.

Educación 3:1 (2008): 77-88.

246 Leigh

Deyermond, Alan. “Sánchez’s Colección and Percy’s Reliques: The Editing of Medieval Poetry

in the Dawn of Romanticism.” In Spain and Its Literature: Essays in Memory of E.

Allison Peers, edited by Ann L. Mackenzie. Hispanic Studies TRAC (Textual Research

and Criticism), 15 (1997): 171-209.

Doyle, Henry Grattan. “George Ticknor.” The Modern Language Journal 22.1 (1937): 3–18.

El Cid. Directed by Anthony Mann. Allied Artists, 2017.

Ferguson, John de Lancey. American Literature in Spain. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1916.

Fernández, James. Brevísima relación de la construcción de España y otros ensayos

transatlánticos (1991-2011). Madrid: Polifemo, 2013.

---. “Longfellow’s Law: The Place of Latin America and Spain in U.S. Hispanism, circa

1915.” In Spain in America: the Origins of Hispanism in the United States. Edited by

Richard Kagan. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 122-141.

Fish, Stanley. “Interpreting the Variorum.” Critical Inquiry 2.3(1976): 465-485.

---. Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. 9th

edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1995.

---. “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics.” New Literary History 2.1 (1970):

123–162.

Flitter, Derek. Spanish Romantic Literary Theory and Criticism. New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1992.

Ford, J. D. M. “George Ticknor.” Hispania 32.4 (1949): 423–425.

Frantz Jr., Ray W. “A Re-Examination of the Influence of Literary Nationalism on the Public

Library.” The Journal of Library History (1966-1972) 1.3 (1966): 182-186.

247 Leigh

Freedman, Paul, and Gabrielle M. Spiegel. “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of

Alterity in North American Medieval Studies.” The American Historical Review 103.3

(1998): 677–704.

Galván, Luis. El Poema del Cid en España, 1779-1936: Recepción, mediación, historia de la

filología. Pamplona, Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, S.A., 2001.

Galván, Luis and Enrique Banús. “De có mo Mio Cid y su Poema viajaron a Alemania y

retornaron a Españ a; la recepció n de una recepció n.” La Corónica 28.2 (2000): 21-

49.

---. El Poema del Cid en Europa: la primera mitad del siglo XIX. London: Department

of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, 2004.

---. “Seco y latoso—viejo y venerable: El Poema del Cid a principios del siglo xx, o Del

cambio en la apreciación de la literatura.” Rilce 15.1 (1999): 115-140.

García Castañeda, Salvador. Las ideas literarias en España entre 1840 y 1850. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1971.

García Isasti, Prudencio. La España metafísica: Lectura crítica del pensamiento de Ramón

Menéndez Pidal (1891-1936). Euskaltzaindia: Iker-16, 2004.

Gerli, Michael. “Inventing the Spanish Middle Ages: Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Spanish

Cultural History, and Ideology in Philology.” La Corónica 30.1 (2001): 111-126.

Girón Negrón, Luis M. “George Ticknor y los Infantes de Lara.” Cahiers d’Études Hispaniques

Médiévales 36 (2013): 27-33.

Grases, Pedro. La épica española y los estudios de Andrés Bello sobre el Poema del Cid.

Caracas: 1954.

248 Leigh

Graver, Bruce. “George Ticknor, Robert Southey, and The Poem of the Cid.” Wordsworth

Circle 32.3 (Summer 2001), 151-154.

Guillén, Jorge. "George Ticknor, Lover of Culture." Bulletin of the Boston Public Library 17

(1942): 359-375.

---. Ticknor, defensor de la cultura. Habana: P. Fernández & Cfa., 1944.

Guillory, John. "Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines." In Disciplinarity

at the Fin De Siècle, edited by Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2002. 19-43.

Guzmán, María de. Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-

American Empire. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Handlin, Lilian. “Harvard and Göttingen, 1815.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical

Society 95 (1983): 67–87.

Harris, Michael H. and Gerard Spiegler. "Everett, Ticknor, and the Common Man: The Fear

of Societal Instability as the Motivation for the Founding of the Boston Public

Library." Libri: International Library Review 24 (1974): 249-276.

Hart, Thomas. A History of Spanish Literary History. Diss. Yale University, 1952.

---. “Friedrich Bouterwek, a Pioneer Historian of Spanish Literature.” Comparative

Literature 5.4 (Fall 1953): 351-361.

---. “George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature.” In Spain in America. Edited by

Richard Kagan. Chicago: Univerisity of Illinois Press, 2002. 106-121.

---. “George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature: The New England Background.”

PMLA 69.1(1954): 76-88.

249 Leigh

Helman, Edith. “Early Interest in Spanish in New England (1815-1835).” Hispania

29.3(1946): 339-351.

Hoffmeister, Gerhart. España y Alemania: Historia y documentación de sus relaciones

literarias. Translated by Isidoro Gómez Romero. Biblioteca Románica Hispánica

2.302. Madrid: Gredos, 1980.

Hoople, Sally C. "George Ticknor." The American Renaissance in New England: Third Series.

Edited by Wesley T. Mott. Thomson Gale: 2001. 395-402.

Hurth, Elisabeth. "Sowing the Seeds of Subversion: Harvard's Early Göttingen Students."

Studies in the American Renaissance (1992): 91-106.

Jaksic, Iván. Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin

America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

---. The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life, 1820-1880. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

---. “The Lessons of Spain: New England Intellectuals and the History of the Hispanic

World, 1820-1880.” Massachusetts Historical Review 18 (2016): 213–232.

Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

---. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota

Press, 2010.

Kagan, Richard, editor. Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States.

Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

250 Leigh

Kagan, Richard. “From Noah to Moses: The Genesis of Historical Scholarship on Spain in the

United States.” In Spain in America, edited by Richard Kagan. Chicago: Univerisity of

Illinois Press, 2002. 21-48.

---. “La imagen de España en el mundo angloamericano. Reflexiones sobre su

evolución histórica.” In El hispanismo norteamericano: aportaciones, problemas y

perspectivas sobre la historia, arte y literatura españolas, siglos XVI-XVIII. Actas de la I

Conferencia Internacional “Hacia un Nuevo Humanismo”, C.I.N.HU., Córdoba, 9-14

de septiembre de 1997. Córdoba: Publicaciones Obra Social y Cultural CajaSur,

2001. 141-148.

---. “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain.”

The American Historical Review 101.2 (1996): 423-446.

---. “The Spanish Craze in the United States: Cultural Entitlement and the

Appropriation of Spain’s Cultural Patrimony, ca. 1890-ca. 1930.” Revista

Complutense de Historia de América 36 (2010): 37-58.

Lloréns, Vicente. El romanticismo español. 2nd edition. Madrid: Castalia, 1989.

Long, Orie W. Literary Pioneers: Early American Explorers of European Culture. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1935.

---. Thomas Jefferson and George Ticknor: A Chapter in American Scholarship.

Williamstown, MA: The McClelland Press, 1933.

López, Estrada F. Panorama crítico sobre el Poema Del Cid. Madrid: Castalia, 1982.

Lord, Albert. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Lyon, Judson Stanley. “Wordsworth and Ticknor.” PMLA 66.4 (1951): 432-440.

251 Leigh

Magnotta, Miguel. Historia y bibliografía de la crítica sobre el Poema De Mío Cid (1750-1971).

Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1976.

Mantero, Rafael Sánchez. “Viajeros y diplomáticos en el reinado de Fernando VII. El

Descubrimiento de España por los americanos.” Ayer 41 (2001): 141–160.

Mariscal, George. “An Introduction to the Ideology of Hispanism in the U.S. and Britain.” In

Conflicts of Discourse: Spanish Literature in the Golden Age. Edited by Peter W. Evans.

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Martín Ezpeleta, Antonio. El viaje por España de George Ticknor y sus Diarios. 1616 :

Anuario de Literatura Comparada 1 (2011): 25-47.

Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. Cantar de Mio Cid: texto, gramática, y vocabulario. 3 vols. Madrid:

Bailly-Bailliere y Hijos, 1908-1912.

---. Flor nueva de romances viejos. Madrid: Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas, y

Museos, 1928.

---. La epopeya castellana a través de la literatura española. 1910. Madrid: Espasa-

Calpe 1959.

Meregalli, Franco. "George Ticknor y España." In Homenaje Al Profesor Antonio Vilanova. 2

vols. Edited by Adolfo Sotelo Vázquez and Marta Cristina Carbonell. Barcelona:

Departamento de Filología Española, Universidad de Barcelona, 1989. 413-426.

Mettele, Gisela and Thomas Adam Mettele. Two Boston Brahmins in Goethe's Germany: The

Travel Journals of Anna and George Ticknor. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009.

Montaner, Alberto Frutos. Cantar de Mio Cid. Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores, 2016.

Northup, George Tyler. George Ticknor’s Travels in Spain. Toronto: The University Library,

Published by the Librarian, 1913.

252 Leigh

Oroz, Rodolfo. “Andrés Bello y el Poema del Cid.” Revista de Filología Española 47 (1964):

437-443.

Pardo, Aristóbulo. "Los versos 1-9 del Poema de Mío Cid: ¿No comenzaba ahí el Poema?"

Thesaurus: Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo 27 (1972): 261-292.

Parry, Milman. Serbocroatian Heroic Songs. Translated by Albert Lord. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1953.

Patterson, Lee. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature.

Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

Penney, Clara Louisa, editor. George Ticknor. Letters to Pascual de Gayangos. New York:

Printed by Order of the Trustees, 1927.

Pozuelo, Yvancos J. M. Teoría del canon y literatura española. Madrid: Cátedra, 2000.

Ramos Ortega, Francisco. “La fortuna del Cid en el romanticism francés.” Revista de

Literatura 43.85 (1981): 37-58.

Rathbun, John W. "The Philosophical Setting of George Ticknor's History of Spanish

Literature." Hispania 43.1 (1960): 37-42.

Read, Malcolm K. "Travelling South: Ideology and Hispanism." Journal of Hispanic Philology

15.3 (1991): 193-207.

Resina, Joan R. Del hispanismo a los estudios ibéricos: Una propuesta federativa para el

ámbito cultural. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009.

---. "Hispanism and Its Discontents." Siglo XX/20th Century 14.1-2 (1996): 85-135.

---. Iberian Modalities: A Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian

Peninsula. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.

253 Leigh

Rodiek, Christoph. La recepción internacional del Cid: Argumento recurrente, contexto,

género. Madrid: Gredos, 1995.

Romera-Navarro, Miguel. El hispanismo en Norte-América: exposición y crítica de su aspecto

literario. Madrid: Renacimiento, 1917.

Round, Nicholas. “The Politics of Hispanism Reconstrued.” Journal of Hispanic Research 1

(1992): 134-147.

Ryder, Frank G. “George Ticknor and Goethe. Europe and Harvard.” Modern Language

Quarterly 14 (1953): 413-424.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Sánchez Albornoz, Claudio. España, un enigma histórico. Buenos Aires: Editorial

Sudamericana, 1956.

Stavans, Ilan, and Iván Jaksic. What Is La Hispanidad?: A Conversation Austin, TX: University

of Texas Press, 2011.

Story, Ronald. “Class and Culture in Boston: The Athenaeum, 1807-1860.” American

Quarterly 27.2 (1975): 178-199.

Tully, Carol Lisa. “How German Romanticism Travelled to Spain: The Intellectual Journey of

Johann Nikolas Böhl Faber.” The Publications of the English Goethe Society (New

Series) LXXI (2001): 78-90

Tyack, David B. George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard

University Press, 1967.

Vaquero, Mercedes. “The Poema de Mío Cid and the Canon of the Spanish Epic.” La Corónica

33.2 (2005): 209-230.

254 Leigh

Waxman, Samuel M. “George Ticknor, a Pioneer Teacher of Modern Languages.” Hispania

32.4 (1949): 426-432.

Williams, Stanley. The Spanish Background of American Literature. 2 volumes. New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 1955.

Yvancos, José María Pozuelo and Rosa María Aradra Sánchez. Teoría del canon y literatura

española. Madrid: Cátedra, 2000.

Zaderenko, Irene. Problemas de autoría, de estructura, y de fuentes en el Poema De Mío Cid.

Alcalá de Henares, Spain: Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 1998.

Zeydel. Edwin. H. “George Ticknor and Ludwig Tieck.” PMLA 44.3 (1929): 879-891.

255