ENGLISH LITERATURE IN FRENCH UNIVERSITIES. 171 
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11. 
Let me now briefly sketch the educational progress which has been 
made in our universities toward a more thorough understanding of 
English writers. As I said before, the movement is recent and quite 
anknown abroad. The Englishman, who does not see the beam in his 
own eye more often than we do in ours, looks upon us as outrageously 
ignorant of anything besides ourselves. I remember, a few years ago, 
reading an article in the great English Philistine paper—the¢¢ Daily Tele- 
oraph ”—in which it was said that the great majority of French people 
thought that Shakespeare was a lieutenant of Wellington, who had 
helped him to win the battle of Waterloo. Now, this was unfortunate, 
as not less than four plays of Shakespeare had just been performed in 
Paris. But the prejudice under which the writer in the ¢“ Daily Telegraph 
was laboring is perfectly natural, when we notice that a nation never 
knows what its neighbor is, but what it was twenty years ago. Well, 
twenty or thirty years ago French boys and students wrote better Latin 
verse than they do now, but of English literature they knew nothing, ex- 
cept the names of Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron. Our great arch- 
aritic, Sarcey, says that they made fun of Taine at the Xcole Normale 
because he was reading English. Foreign literatures were, indeed, sup- 
posed to be taught ; but any man who had graduated in classics, whether 
he knew English or not, was supposed to be good enough for that kind 
of work. When he left the Ecole Normale, after a course of studies in 
Plato and Aristotle, he would receive notice that he was appointed pro- 
fessor of foreign literatures, and had to begin work at once. One of 
‘hese, I believe, it was who was complaining of the difficulties of his 
rask.  ¢¢ What a language,” he said, ‘“ English is to pronounce! They 
write Boz and they pronounce Dickens.” M. Ernest Lavisse, who has 
seen this generation of professors of English literature, was telling me, the 
other day, the following authentic and typical fact: When he was a 
student at Nancy, at the faculty of letters, he heard a lecture on the 
literature of England in the sixteenth century. After three-quarters of 
an hour the professor had exhausted his subject, but his time was not up. 
“ Gentlemen,” he said, pulling out his watch, “we have a quarter of an 
aour yet. We have time to do Shakespeare.” 
Let us now go into some technical details that will allow us to realize 
-he progress made in this department of literary studies. When a French 
jouth leaves the lycée, after having passed his B.A., or baccalaureat 
lettres, for which one foreign language at least is demanded, and goes to the 
aniversity, the first degree he has to face is that of licentiate, for which a 
course of two years is necessary. At once he begins to specialize ; that is 
to sav, that side by side with the classics he may take up English or Ger-