ENGLISH LITERATURE IN FRENCH UNIVERSITIES. 175 
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wgrégation do not leave their English studies, but, taking up a particular 
point, write one of those careful, scholarly books which are the French 
theses for the doctor’s degree. These theses are not students’ work, nor 
wre they prepared at the university. They are.the works of scholars who 
spend years over them, and who are not satisfied until they have exhausted 
-heir subject. Thus it is that my colleague at Lille, M. Angelier, has just 
issued his thesis, a book of twelve hundred thick pages, on the work, life, 
and surroundings of Robert Burns. M. Jusserand’s book on English way- 
faring life in the fourteenth century is a thesis. So is Professor Beljame’s 
The Public and the Men of Letters in England in the Eighteenth Cen- 
bury.” In the second place, from this university teaching, as from a 
aigher source, the knowledge of and the taste for English literature will 
spread through the secondary schools over the great reading middle class. 
Nothing could be more fortunate. In these days, when the study of the 
olassics is threatened, what the study of German, upon which most of 
French boys have been thrown for the last twenty years, has failed to do, 
the knowledge of English literature will accomplish. It will open to them 
a vast field of interesting, often passionating, artistic literature, instinct 
with the loftiest ideals, with the deepest human sympathy ; full of pathos, 
of feeling, of life ; full of the sense of the good, of the righteous, of religious 
sarnestness, as ours is full with the sense of the true and of the beautiful— 
sne of the most powerful to instill into a young mind the germs that will 
Jevelop upwards. In France thousands of grown-up people of the 
average cast, who are neither poets nor scientists nor philologists, do not 
know what to do with what German they have painfully learned at school. 
They have an occasional look at their Faust, at their Schiller, at their 
Heine ; but the German novelists and essayists are not numerous or con- 
spicuous enough to tempt them to go on. But let the large public have a 
taste of the modern English novel, and through Dickens, through Charlotte 
Bronts, through Thackeray, through George Eliot, through Mrs. Gaskell, 
through Kingsley, through Mrs. II. Ward—through all these great artists 
and preachers, they will be enticed to read on. The demand for the English 
books of the Tauchnitz continental edition will become larger and larger. 
The modern novels of England, the pure, idealistic utterings of a Carlyle, 
of a Tennyson, of an Emerson, are among the greatest means of education 
of the present time. Of course, the first thing for a Frenchman—for every 
man—is to remain in contact with his own race ; to read those writers of the 
past that have molded the soul and mind of his own nation, and those 
writers of the present that discuss the problems which the people of 
ais own blood have to solve in order to live on and to transmit to their 
posterity the national inheritance. But when he has done that, let him 
turn to those foreign books in which he finds an ideal, a philosophy, an 
esthetics—views of life widely different from those that prevail in the 
French books of his own time. The national ideal will then cease to