The Beginning of American Hispanism, 1770-1830

Abstract

this indebtedness has continued up to the present, with Willa Cather, John dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and countless others,2 the motivations for its beginnings in the Revolutionary and National periods of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seem worthy of consideration. Nationalism and patriotism may well constitute a major psychological cause of early literary concern with the Spanish world. The national attitude or prejudice surely explains, for instance, the Columbus complex, which must have been pronounced, to judge by comments like the following from an issue in 1826 of the famed Review: It is a tribute, which every whatever language he may speak, owes to the great name of Columbus, to preserve and cherish everything that tends to impress more deeply on the memory the testimony of his great deeds and character, and to kindle the warmest veneration and gratitude, which, after all, are but feeble returns for the perils he encountered, and the sacrifices, sufferings, and mortifications he endured, in discovering a new world, and laying the foundation of future empires.3 Thus, as a pioneer charting new realms and as a political martyr, Columbus (Spanish by profession) attracted the sympathy, which results from mutual experience, of those Yankees also pioneering and suffering political indignities. Moreover, since he embodied qualities most esteemed in the New Worldheroism, optimism and farsightednesshe provided the perfect symbol of America for ardent young patriots like Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, in their bombastic graduation poem, The Rising Glory of America (1771); and Joel Barlow, in The Vision of Columbus (1787) and the even more mannered version, The Columbiad (1807). Later, during the National period, Columbus and his discovery offered native subject material needed by the proud new nation for creating its own literature. This urge to extol the indigenous impelled Washington Irving to concern himself with the theme, lending it, in the biography of 1828, its most artistic expression. The Spanish aborigines (somewhat in contrast to North American Indians) were regarded in just as favorable and kindly a light as Columbus. This interest in the noble savage likewise partly resulted from a patriotic feeling of sympathy for those who had suffered Old World aggression and from the national determination to fashion an literature out of local settings and characters. Barlow, William Gilmore Simms, Robert Charles Sands, James Gates Percival, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and a host of even more self-conscious poets; and those early dramatists and purveyors of Augustus von Kotzebue's Virgin of the Sun (1800) and Pizarro in Peru (1800), William Dunlap and Charles Smith, contrasted the heroic Spanish Indians, romping in a delightfully sylvan setting, with the villainous Spanish, whose advent interrupted all such commendably uninhibited sport and play. Thus the way was paved for the later, more artistically