THE STUDY OF FRENCH IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES. $J ;, 



element be paramount. Historical studies in themselves are not 

 criticism, it is true, but they are the only high road leading to 

 critical competence and efficiency, and with the majority of us 

 they had better take its place. 



Even in France literary criticism has been for a considerable 

 length of time one of the side-lines of history. Sainte-Beuve, one 

 of its most illustrious representatives in the first half of the 19th 

 century, proceeds, when he studies a writer and his works, from 

 the man to the works. I mean to say, he tries to get an insight 

 into the personality and life of the author, and of the various 

 influences to which the author has been subject, and then traces 

 back the work under consideration through each successive process 

 of its genesis. This is the natural method. Taine, one of Sainte 

 Beuve's disciples, applies to literature the scientific and natura- 

 listic method, following which he regards all literary work as the 

 necessary outcome of certain causes, causae praedisponcntes as 

 well as causae proximac — capable of being traced by proper and 

 methodical investigation. These causes are: nationality, condi- 

 tion in general, such as climate and country; political and 

 historical circumstances, milieu, race, family ; and the psycho- 

 logical moment. Taine makes, so to say, a kind of mathematical 

 diagnosis (sit vcnia verbo\) of it. Paul Bourget, the originator 

 of psychologism in romantic literature as an anti-naturalistic 

 reaction, strives after defining the intimate relation and affinity 

 that exists between the author and the special group of readers 

 who fancy his books in preference to all others. However 

 different, these critics all agree in taking their starting-point from 

 the principle that objective historical analysis ought to have the 

 precedence over personal appreciation, and that there is more 

 genuine gratification and enjoyment to be derived from under- 

 standing a thing than from censuring it. This goes pretty far to 

 prove that a man ought to compel himself to the utmost caution 

 wherever, not being a master of criticism, he has to teach the 

 history of a foreign literature as a science. Everyone of us may 

 have happened to hear a person speak more or less disparagingly 

 of the classical dramatic works of Corneille and Racine, because 

 you know they are miles away from Shakespeare's plays, or 

 Schiller's or Goethe's ; they do not strike one at all as being so 

 exceptionally good and nice; they seem to be so bald, so little 

 amusing, there is so little lively action in them and so many inter- 

 minable monologues ! Or, that an Aristarchus ejusdem farinae> 

 in speaking of any one of the grand-masters of the French novel, 

 asserts, with a knowing wink, that in such-an-such a novel the 

 author goes decidedly off the metals or sadly overshoots the mark. 

 Well, instead of showing fight and entering upon a debate, which 

 probably will be only as aggravating as it is useless, the best 

 course to be taken is to say that, after all, those French authors 

 are free to write as they please, being their own masters in their 

 own country. While pursuing the study of French in a serious 

 and strictlv scientific manner, a teacher of this subiect can never 



