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WINS, 
ENGLISH LITERATURE IN FRENCH UNIVERSITIES. 169 
has not been forgotten, and perhaps in no other branch of the literary 
studies has such progress been achieved. 
The main function of the faculties of letters and sciences in our uni- 
sersities has been hitherto to prepare masters for the government lycées, 
50 that the courses of studies in these faculties. are shaped to meet the 
requirements of our secondary education. Now the tendency of our 
secondary education, that is to say, in those schools which form the minds 
nd intellects of hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen, is at present to 
Jevelop the study of foreign languages at the expense of the classical 
anguages. A new Bachelors degree * has just been created for which no 
Greek is required, whilst both English and German have been made neces- 
sary. In the usual public school courses either English or German must 
be selected by the pupils. The tendency so far in those schools has been 
0 select German, and among the men who have been through the lycées 
juring the last fifteen years, you will find two who can wade their way 
shrough Gerinan to one who can read English. This, T believe, seems now 
to have been a mistake ; and I think we may anticipate a reaction in favor 
of English, both in the public schools and in the universities. Indeed, in 
the universities the balance is already in favor of English ; in Paris and 
2t Lille the courses of English literature are now attended by a greater 
aumber of students than those of German, and I cannot help thinking 
that this is very fortunate. In the first place, the very process of think- 
‘ng is so different in a French and in a German mind, that for the French 
student too long a study of the German writers, too continuous an effort 
so adapt himself to the German habits of thought and of speech, may 
cosult—as in the famous case of Henri Frédéric Amiel—in a fatal twist of 
the thinking faculties. The mental differences of the two races are so great, 
‘hat a healthy intellectual cross between them is hardly possible. The 
old French art of writing and reasoning with method and accuracy, that 
of which a Pascal in his Provincial Letters, a Condillac in his Langue des 
Caleuls, a Taine in his Philosophy of Art, have been masters nearly as 
perfect as the Greck, will always remain the ideal towards which a 
French literary student is striving ; and this art is something so peculiar, 
so delicate, that a foreigner can hardly realize what it is, and that a 
French student who for years—as a candidate to the Agregation &’ Alle- 
mand has to do—lived in Germany, and has been attempting to 
reproduce in his own brains the German process of thinking, must give 
1p all hope of attaining this French ideal. To a Frenchman, however 
great his respect for the great geniuses of Germany, a German sentence 
«i11 alwavs be like a railroad tunnel : there is light at the beginning, and 
i —————————————— 
ach group consisting of a faculty of letters, faculty of science, faculty of medicine, and faculty of 
aw. The general council of the faculties is for each group the common bond between the four 
‘aculties. Each of these groups is really a university, though the word is not used in France. 
¥ The ** baccalaureat moderne.’