fifl m r^ WM :$^---:'-' Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2007 witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.arcliive.org/details/americanliteratuOOferguoft COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AMERICAN LITERATURE IN SPAIN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS SALES AGENTS NEW TOKK LEMCKE & BUECHNER 30-32 West 27th Street LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD Amen Corner, E.G. AMERICAN LITEEATURE IN SPAIN BY JOHN DE LANCEY FERGUSON, Ph.D. 505877 2\ 5 50 iReto gotk COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 1916 All rights reserved Copyright, 1916 By Columbia University Press Printed from type, December, 1916 J ,:-../ To MY MOTHER This Monograph has been approved by the Depart- ment of English and Comparative Literature in Columbia University as a contribution to knowledge worthy of publication, A. H. THORNDIKE, Executive Officer. PREFACE This study lays no claim to being the last word on its subject. It is the first word only. So long as a single volume of the innumerable short-lived Spanish periodicals remains unexamined, the conclusions of such a work as this are liable at any time to be impaired or even overthrown by the discovery of new material. And even though one understands all mysteries and all knowledge of the Spanish periodical, and removes the mountains of the Spanish news- papers, yet it will profit him nothing until such time as the corresponding French material on the same subject shall be made accessible to the student. At present it is im- possible to tell to what extent the critical opinions expressed in the articles herein discussed are original and to what extent they are mere echoes or copies of French opinion. The one exception to this rule is Poe, the early years of whose French reputation are so completely dominated by Baudelaire's study that there is no difficulty in tracing much of the Spanish criticism to its real source. Because of this necessary uncertainty and incompleteness of the material I have throughout the work refrained so far as possible from deductions and generalizations. The evidence requisite to make them conclusive is lacking, and no deductions at all are preferable to false ones. My purpose has been simply to present the facts as I have found them, leaving to future investigators the task of drawing from them the broader conclusions. I have not thought it necessary officiously to call attention to every aberration of judgment on the part of the Spanish critics; I prefer to let the reader decide for himself the soundness X PREFACE or unsoundness of the opinions quoted. They are rarely abstruse enough to require explanation; in the few cases where help seems to be needed notes are given. So far as I know none of the critical material here pre- sented has ever before appeared in English translation. The two chief sources of it have been the prefaces and in- troductions to the various translations, and periodicals. In so far as it is taken from the latter source it has been found for the most part in the library of the Hispanic Society of America, in the library of the British Museum, and in the Ticknor Collection in the Boston Pubhc Library. Additions to it of greater or less importance have also been made from the New York Public Library and from the li- braries of Harvard and Columbia Universities. Transla- tions also are to be found in all the collections named, and recourse to the services of dealers in new and second-hand books has been effective in supplementing the public col- lections, though not so fully as one could wish. It is very difficult to obtain copies of cheap editions of cheap trans- lations that have been out of print for half a century or more. Despite its unavoidable incompleteness, however, the bibliography is probably the most important part of the present work. I know of but three bibhographies of American authors that make any serious effort to list foreign translations. Of these, Ticknor's Prescott alone is complete for the period it covers. Miss Browne's Haw- thorne mentions no Spanish translations and is almost cer- tainly incomplete in its list of French versions. The Woodberry-Stedman Poe records numerous Spanish trans- lations, but even so its list is incomplete and also, in one or two cases, inaccurate. The present Ust is doubtless open to the same criticism. The subject of this investigation was suggested to me by Professor Erskine, to whom I cannot be sufficiently PREFACE XI grateful for his devotion in reading each chapter in its chaotic first draft. To Professor Trent also I owe gratitude for reading the manuscript and for a great deal of practical advice on the collection and preparation of my material. The thankless labor of reading the proofs has been shared by Professor Erskine, Professor Trent and Professor Loi- seaux. For the material itself I am first and chiefly in- debted to the Hispanic Society of America, in the persons of its Secretary, Dr. E. L. Stevenson, and its late Librarian, Winfred Robert Martin. Had it not been for Dr. Martin's kindness in procuring books not in the Hispanic Society library, it would have been impossible for me to carry my investigations to even their present imperfect completeness. To Professor PhiUp H. Churchman of Clark University I am indebted for the use of his bibliography of periodicals and for helpful advice; to William C. Lane, Librarian of Harvard, for verification of references; and to Professor George Edward Woodberry for information in regard to the bibUography of Poe. Finally, I owe especial thanks to Dr. Carlos Navarro Lamarca for his kindness in sending me a copy of his version of Hawthorne's Wonder Book, together with information concerning it; to D. Francisco Rodriguez Marin, Director of the Biblioteca Nacional, for biographical information about Victor Suarez Capalleja, the critic of Longfellow; and to D. Manuel Bezares of the same hbrary for copies of articles which are not to be found in the collections I have visited. J. DeL. F. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Introduction 1 II. Washington Irving 8 III. James Fenimore Cooper 32 IV. Edgar Allan Poe 55 V. Nathaniel Hawthorne 87 VI. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 109 VII. Prescott, Emerson, Whitman 148 1. William Hickling Prescott 148 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson 157 3. Walt Whitman 170 Bibliographies I. Bibliography of Translations and Criticisms 203 II. Bibliography of Periodicals 243 Index 261 AMEEICAN LITERATUKE IN SPAIN CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Systematic study of the European reputations of Ameri- can authors is a thing of recent date. The existence of foreign editions and translations has always been given more or less perfunctory notice in biographies and bibliographies, but the bibliographies have seldom aimed at — or at least have never attained — completeness, while foreign criti- cism has been almost wholly neglected. The first serious attempt at intensive study in this field was made by Dr. Morris in his dissertation ^ on Cooper and Poe in France, but the influence of our writers even in France, England and Germany is still imperfectly reahzed, and scarcely anything has been done towards ascertaining their fortunes in the other countries of Europe. Speaking generally, it may be said that no one of the major literatures of Europe has been so persistently neg- lected by EngHsh-speaking scholars as has that of Spain. The neglect is real and unquestionable, despite the exist- ence of a long fine of brilhant exceptions, from Thomas Shelton to Fitz-Maurice Kelly. And if Enghsh scholars have not given its due to the native hterature of Spain, still less have they considered the Peninsular adventures of their own writers. So omnilegent and omniscient a 1 Fenimore Cooper et Edgar Poe d'apres la critique frangaise du dix- neuvihme sibcle. Paris, 1912. 1 : li AMERICAN LITERATURE IN SPAIN scholar as Professor Saintsbury mentions, in his bibli- ography of Milton in The Cambridge History of English Literature, translations of Paradise Lost into French, Ger- man, Itahan, Latin and Hebrew, but seems unaware of the fact that there existed, at the time he wrote, no less than four different Spanish versions of the epic.^ This neglect may be due in part to the lack of adequate Spanish bibhographical dictionaries and to the almost complete absence of Spanish equivalents of works such as Poole's Index, The Dictionary of National Biography and Who^s Who, which are usually regarded as the elementary tools of Enghsh research; but even so the neglect is not alto- gether pardonable. There might, it is true, seem to be httle in the way of influence or imitation to reward the investigator of the Spanish careers of English and American authors. Artis- tically and intellectually Spain has always been one of the most independent and self-sufficient nations of Europe, and when of recent centuries she has yielded to foreign influence at all, that influence has usually been French. With the exception of Byron and Scott no Englishmen can be said to have made any deep or lasting impression on ^ The following are the Spanish versions of Paradise Lost 1. El paralso perdido, traducci6n de Benito Ram6n de Hermida. Madrid, 1814. 2 vols., 8vo. 2. The same, con las notas de Addison, Chateaubriand, Saint-Maur y otros. Traducido por Demetrio San Martin. Barcelona, 1873. 8vo. A 4to edition of this version was issued at Madrid in 1882. 3. The same, traducido en verso castellano por D. J. de Escolquiz. Madrid, 1882. An illustrated edition of this version appeared in 1883 and another new edition in 1905. 4. The same, nueva traducci6n por Dionisio Sanjuan. Barcelona, 1883. A fifth version, the work of D. Juan Mateos, has recently been published by Fernando Fe of Madrid.