The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life, 1820-1880

In this book, Iván Jaksić has followed in the footsteps of other scholars, notably Stanley T. Williams and Richard L. Kagan, who have explored the impact of Spanish history and culture on the writings and worldview of prominent American intellectuals of the nineteenth century. With one exception, he focuses on individuals who have already received substantial attention in this context: Washington Irving, George Ticknor, Henry Wads worth Longfellow, and William Hickling Prescott. The exception is Mary Mann, known to Latin Americanists as the first translator of Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Facundo (1868) into English.All but Irving were New Englanders, and all flourished during the middle decades of the century. Irving, Prescott, and Ticknor produced the greatest volume of writings on the Hispanic world. Irving, already famous for his tales of New York, wrote romanticized works such as The Alhambra (1832) as well as a best-selling biography of Christopher Columbus (1828). Prescott received accolades for his History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837) and for his stirring narratives of the conquest of Mexico (1843) and Peru (1847). Ticknor, the first person to hold Harvard University’s Smith Professorship of the French and Spanish Languages, is remembered mainly for his three-volume History of Spanish Literature (1849). Longfellow, Ticknor’s successor in the Smith Professorship, was the most beloved American poet of his generation. He was less prolific than the others where Hispanic subjects were concerned, and Jaksić concentrates on the Spanish sections of OutreMer (1833), a travel narrative, and the verse play, The Spanish Student (1843).Jaksić identifies several common themes in the writings of his five subjects, who he claims “pioneered the serious study of Spain and Latin America in the early republic” (p. ix). First, they sought to define the Spanish national character, which they believed consisted of two central elements: chivalry and religion. After the Reconquista, however, chivalry “had degenerated into a cruel tendency to fight and conquer” (p. 2). Spanish Catholicism had degenerated, too, into corruption, intolerance, and fanaticism exemplified above all by the Inquisition. Jaksić also contends that Prescott and the others believed that the rise and decline of the Spanish Empire offered lessons to the United States, “a didactic reminder of what [it] should not become” (p. 3).Jaksić, well known as a historian of politics and intellectual life, especially in Chile, develops these themes in the one or two chapters he devotes to each subject. He has consulted not only their printed works but also numerous manuscript collections. While his analysis of each author’s writings, both public and private, is cogent and blessedly free of jargon, their relationship to American intellectual life as a whole is not sufficiently elucidated. In any event, Spanish decadence and the evils of Catholicism had been staples of Anglo-American discourse since the seventeenth century.Despite their commitment to Spanish studies, Jaksić’s subjects spent little or no time in Spain, with the exception of Irving. Irving lived there from 1826 to 1829 and spent approximately four years as U.S. minister in the 1840s. Ticknor and Longfellow visited Spain only once as young men and never returned, despite subsequent trips to Europe. Mann and Prescott never went to Spain at all, and Mann was the only one of the five to visit any part of Spanish America. In the mid-1830s, she spent 18 months on a coffee plantation in Cuba. Her experiences formed the basis of a novel, Juanita, published posthumously in 1887, in which she condemned Cuban slavery as well as the despotism of the government, the immorality of the clergy, and the frivolity and ignorance of the Spanish population.Despite their limited firsthand exposure to the Hispanic world, all five developed extensive connections with scholars and intellectuals in Spain and Spanish America, mainly through correspondence or contact during visits to the United States. Jaksić’s lengthy discussion of these contacts is arguably the most valuable contribution of his book. Spaniards sometimes found fault with the Americans’ facts or interpretations, a tendency less marked among Spanish Americans, though Lucas Alamán objected to Prescott’s use of the term “barbarous” to describe the Aztecs, and his treatment of the writings of Spanish missionaries. Longfellow’s poetry was received at an earlier date in Latin America than in Spain and “with more consistent enthusiasm” (p. 100), for it seemed to speak to the challenges facing the new nations. Jaksić also traces Mary Mann’s relationship with Sarmiento, whom she first met in 1847, and her difficulties in translating Facundo.In the conclusion, Jaksić observes that at century’s end the association of Spain with despotism and religious bigotry remained as strong as ever. Thus, even though his five subjects were fascinated by the Hispanic world, they failed to alter the negative stereotypes and indeed strengthened them. He also maintains that the five “assembled . . . the most enduring view of the Hispanic world’s relevance, indeed centrality, to the United States” (p. 186), a point that could have been developed more systematically

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