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business is not to teach French culture or Spanish life, but French and Spanish? And as everybody knows, French and Spanish are not learned in a day, nor, indeed, if we judge by the average graduate of our colleges, in four years of classroom work. It is not my purpose to combat the contention that college French or Spanish or Italian could be taught better, and that from a utilitarian point of view the subject is capable of a great deal of improvement. As Professor Grandgent has trenchantly said: "I do not believe there is or ever was a language more difficult to acquire than French; most of us can name worthy persons who have been assiduously struggling with it from childhood to mature age, and who do not know it now: yet it is treated as something any one can pick up offhand. . . . French staggers under the fearful burden of apparent easiness. I do not think these words overstate the case. All the more reason, then, to bear in mind that the burden of this accomplishment should not fall on the college course alone, or, I should even say, on the college course at all. For the fact is that a thorough knowledge of the Romance tongues cannot be acquired in any college course, and to attack the problem from that angle alone is to attempt the impossible. It is on the school, and not on the college, that the obligation of the practical language problem rests. If our students are to become proficient in French the sense that they can not only read it but write and speak it with passable success - the language must be begun early, in the grade school (when memory and apperception are still fresh), and then carried forward systematically over a period of from six to seven years. But this will require on the part of our schools: (1) a longer time allotment to the subject than it now generally has, (2) a closer articulation between the grade-school, high-school, and college courses, and (3) the appointment of better and higher-paid teachers of the subject. An encouraging move is being made in many parts of the country to carry out this plan, though of course we are still a long way from its realization; and when it is realized we shall not yet have reached

- in

Limitations

of elementa

mediate

courses as

college

courses

the millennium. But at least we shall have given the practical teaching of the subject a chance, comparable to the opportunity it has in Europe; and the complaint against the French and Spanish teacher - if there still be a chronic complaint - will have other grounds than the one we so commonly hear at present.

In the meantime, let us remember that the college has ry and inter- other, and more pressing, things to do than to attempt to supply the shortcomings of the school. It is certainly essential that the college should continue and develop the practical work of the school in various ways, such as advanced exercises and lectures in the foreign idiom, special conversation classes, and the like—if only for the simple reason that a language that is not used soon falls into desuetude and is forgotten. But assuredly the so-called elementary, intermediate, and advanced courses in French and Spanish (as given in college) do not fall under that head. They exist in the college by tolerance rather than by sound pedagogical theory, and the effort now being made to force all such courses back into the school by reducing the college "credits" they give is worthy of undivided support. Not only are they out of place in the college program, but the burden of numerous and often large "sections in these courses has seriously impeded the college in its proper language work. The college in its true function is the clarifier of ideas, the correlator of facts, the molder of personalities; and the student of modern languages should enter college prepared to study his subject from the college point of view. Much of the apparent "silliness" of the French class which our more virile undergraduates object to would be obviated if a larger percentage of them could at once enter upon the more advanced phases of the subject. It is, then, to their interest, to the interest of the subject, and to the advantage of the college concerned, that this reform be brought about.

Aim of the

teaching of Romance languages in the college

In any case, the function of a college subject can be stated, as President Meiklejohn has stated it, in terms of two principles. He says: "The first is shared by both

liberal and technical teaching. The second applies to liberal education alone. The principles are these: (1) that activity guided by ideas is on the whole more successful than the same activity without the control of ideas, and (2) that in the activities common to all men the guidance of ideas is quite as essential as in the case of those which different groups of men carry on in differentiation from one another." As applied to the Romance languages, this means that while the college must of course give “technical" instruction in language, the emphasis of that instruction should be upon the "ideas which the language expresses, in itself and in its literature. It is not enough that the college student should gain fluency in French or Spanish, he must also and primarily be made conscious of the processes of language, its logical and æsthetic values, the civilization it expresses, and the thoughts it has to convey. While it may be said that all thorough language instruction accomplishes this incidentally, the college makes this the aim of its teaching. The college should furnish an objective appraisal of the fundamental elements of the foreign idiom, not merely a subjective (and often superficial) mastery of details. For the old statement remains true that when properly studied -" proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision than the wisest individual "; 1 and what shall we say when "literature" is added to this list?

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From these preliminary observations let us now turn to the present status of Romance languages in some of our representative colleges. One gratifying fact may be noted at once. Whereas a quarter of a century ago Greek and Latin were still considered the sine qua non of a liberal education, today French and German, and to a lesser extent Spanish and Italian, have their legitimate share in this distinction. Indeed, to judge merely by the

1 The quotation is from Emerson, Nominalist and Realist.

2 I make no attempt in this article, written before 1917, to treat actual teaching conditions: the premises are too uncertain.

number of students, they would seem to have replaced Latin and Greek. To be sure, several colleges, as for instance Amherst and Chicago, alarmed by this swing of the pendulum, have reserved the B.A. degree for the traditional classical discipline. But in the first case the entire curriculum includes "two years of Greek or Latin," and in the second the B.A. students comprise but a very small percentage of the college body; and while in both cases Latin and Greek are required subjects, Romance is admitted as an elective, in which to mention only Amherst - six consecutive semester courses, covering the main phases of modern French literature, can be chosen. As noted, the recognition of modern languages as cultural subjects is relatively recent. As late as 1884 a commission, appointed by the Modern Language Association, found that "few colleges have a modern language requirement for admission to the course in arts; . . of the fifty reported, three require French, two offer an election between French and German, and two require both French and German." And of these same colleges, 'eighteen require no foreign language, twenty-nine require either French or German, and eighteen require both French and German, for graduation in the arts."

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Obviously, few (at most seven) of the colleges examined admitted students prepared to take advanced courses in French; and only eighteen, or 36 per cent, allowed students to begin French in the freshman year, over one half of the entire number postponing the beginners' French until the sophomore, junior, or even senior year. It is clear, therefore, that as late as 1864, and in spite of such illustrious examples as that set by Harvard in the appointment of Ticknor to the Smith professorship in 1816, the Romance languages could hardly be classed as a recognized college subject. At best, they were taught on the principles that "it is never too late to learn," and although this teaching failed from the "practical" point of view, it yet had little or no opportunity to concern itself with the cultural aspects of the

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1

subject. No wonder the commission reported 1 that in the circumstances "a mastery of language, as well as a comprehensive study of the literature, is impossible." With the part played by our Greek and Latin colleagues in keeping the modern languages out of the curriculum we need not deal in detail here. It is enough, in order to explain their attitude, to observe that previous to 1884 the teaching of modern languages was generally poor: it was intrusted for the most part to foreigners, who, being usually ignorant of the finer shades of English and woefully ignorant of American students, could not have been expected to succeed, or to native Americans, who for various and often excellent reasons lacked the proper training, and therefore succeeded when in rare cases they did succeed in spite of their qualifications rather than because of them. Add to all this the conviction natural to every classicist, that Latin and Greek are the keys to all Western civilization and that without them Romance literatures (not to say "languages") are incomprehensible, and the situation up to the 90's is amply clear. Today, then, conditions are changed, and for better or worse the Romance tongues are on a par with other of Romance collegiate subjects. A glance at the latest statistics is in- Languages structive. In 1910, out of 340 colleges and universities curricula in the United States, 328 taught French; 112 (the universities) offered more than four years' instruction, 50 offered four years, 90 three years, 68 two years, and only 8 one year. The present status can easily be divined: the interest in Spanish has certainly not waned, while the interest in French has grown by leaps and bounds. Some curtailment there has been, owing to the adoption of the group system " of studies on the part of most of the colleges, and as the colleges are relieved of more and more of the elementary work there doubtless will be more. in any case, it is safe to say that French, Spanish, and

But,

1 The above statistics are from C. H. Handschin, The Teaching of Modern Languages in the United States, Washington, 1913, pages 40ff.

Contempo

rary status

in college