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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The idea that Spanish literature is essentially national and popular is no longer so kindly received as it used to be. Dámaso Alonso has repeatedly attacked this interpretation, and in recent years several distinguished scholars, among them Ernst Robert Curtius, have joined him in demanding a complete re-evaluation of the Spanish literary tradition. The force of their attacks is itself the best indication of how deeply-rooted the older view had become.
1 See, e.g., his “Escila y Caribdis de la literatura española,” in Ensayos sobre poesía española (Buenos Aires, 1946).
2 See William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought 1810-1835 (Philadelphia, 1936).
3 George S. Hillard, Life, Letters and Journals of George Ticknor (Boston, 1876), ii, 253.
4 George Ticknor, Life of William Hickling Prescott (Boston, 1864), p. 75.
5 Hillard, Life, ii, 254.
6 George S. Hillard, The Christian Examiner (Jan. 1850), p. 122.
7 Northup, ed. George Ticknor's Travels in Spain, Univ. of Toronto Stud., Philol. Ser., No. 2 (Toronto, 1913), p. 7.
8 Ibid., p. 10.
9 Northup, p. 21.
10 Hillard, Life, i, 49.
11 Hillard, Life, i, 134.
12 Letter of 12 Aug. 1817 to Dr. Walter Channing (Hillard, Life, i, 150).
13 Lectures on the History and Criticism of French Literature, MS., now in the Harvard Archives. I shall refer to these as French Lectures.
14 George Ticknor, Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on the History and Criticism of French Literature, MS., now in the Harvard Archives.
15 Charvat, p. 19.
16 Hillard, Life, i, 327.
17 See the excellent chapter on Ticknor in Orie Long's Literary Pioneers (Cambridge, 1935), pp. 3-62; and two recent articles by Frank G. Ryder, “George Ticknor's Sorrows of Young Werter,” Comp. Lit., i (1949), 360-372, and “George Ticknor and Goethe—Boston and Göttingen,” PMLA, lxvii (1952), 960-972.
18 His class notes on the course, now in the Ticknor Collection at Dartmouth College, contain several brief references to Spanish literature. I shall give two examples: “Spanish theatre arose in this period—a remarkable appearance—perfectly national as if a theatre never had existed before.” “In Spain an entirely different kind of comedy developed itself naturally—The romantick Spaniards demanded a peculiar species of comedy—hence the national Spanish theatre from the old national farces.” The notes, however, are apparently no more than a faithful transcription of what Bouterwek had said. Ticknor makes no comments of his own.
19 For a fuller discussion of this point, see my article “Friedrich Bouterwek: A Pioneer Historian of Spanish Literature,” CL, v (1953), 351-361.
20 See Robert E. Streeter, “Association Psychology and Literary Nationalism in the North American Review, 1815-1825,” AL, xvii (Nov. 1945), 243-254.
21 Ticknor, Prescott, p. 61; William Charvat and Michael Kraus, William Hickling Prescott: Representative Selections (New York, 1943), p. xciii.
22 T. Parsons, “Life and Writings of Madame de Staël,” North Amer. Rev., xi (July 1820), 138-139.
23 Lewis E. Gates, Three Studies in Literature (New York, 1899), p. 34.
24 Portions of this paper were read to the MLA's Spanish II Group on 28 Dec. 1952.