Training teachers of Romance Languages
Thus we see that, with the addition here and there of an extra course (where the college is not up to the standard as we have outlined it), and an added stress on the advanced linguistics, the present curriculum in Romance apparently provides an excellent working basis. If properly carried out—and the success of all teaching depends of course ultimately on the teacher—it ought to fulfill all legitimate needs, so far as the strictly collegiate aims are concerned.
A word is now in order as to its fitness for those students who are planning to take Romance as a profession. Normally these students would coincide with those who are taking up "special honors" in Romance languages; and for the latter group most of our colleges now make special provision—in the form of "independent work done outside the regular courses in the major subject and at least one other department during the junior and senior year (Wisconsin)," or as Amherst states it, "special work involving collateral reading or investigation under special conditions." In general, this gives the candidate certain professional options among the courses listed (in cases where the college is part of the university) as "primarily for graduates." In this way the student is able to add to his "major" such subjects as Old French (Chicago), Introduction to Romance Philology (Columbia), Practical Phonetics (Chicago), a Teachers' Course (Wisconsin), etc. Personally I am of the opinion that the day has passed when any of our graduates who has not at least a Master's degree in Romance should be recommended to a teaching position. But evidently any such hard and fast rule is bound to be unfair, especially since a large percentage of our students is compelled to earn a living immediately upon graduation. Thus here again—as in the elementary courses as now given in the colleges—we are confronted with a makeshift which only time and continued effort can correct. In the meantime the value of such professional courses depends to a very marked degree upon the success with which they can be carried out where they are counted toward a higher degree (M.A. or Ph.D.) the difficulty is not so great, since their introductory nature is self-evident; but where they conclude, so to speak, the student's formal training the difficulty of making them "fit in" is often sadly apparent. At any rate, in this borderland between cultural and professional studies, where the college is merging with the university or professional school, the necessity for the able teacher is a paramount issue. If the transition is to be successful, the obligation rests upon the teacher so to develop his subject that the specializing will not drown out the general interest but will inform it with those values which only the specialist can impart.
Final contributions of Romance Languages to the American college student
And now as to our final consideration: What particular advantages have the Romance tongues to offer as a college subject? An obvious advantage is: an understanding of foreign peoples. The Romance languages are modern. They are spoken today over a large part of the habitable globe. We stand in direct relations with those who speak them and write them. Above all, a large share of the world's best thought is being expressed in them. The point requires no arguing, that translations cannot take the place of originals: traduttore traditore, says an excellent Italian proverb. If we are really to know what other nations think,—whether we accept or reject their thought makes little or no difference here,—we can do so only by knowing their language. And the better we know it, the greater our insight will be. To speak at least one foreign language is not only a parlor accomplishment: it is for whoever is to be a citizen-of-the-world a necessity. There is a Turkish proverb that he who knows two languages, his own and another, has two souls. Certainly there is no better way to approach a nation's soul than through its language. But, in the second place, the Romance tongues have certain artistic qualities which English in a great measure lacks. The student who has intelligently mastered one of them has a better sense of form, of delicate shades of expression, and—if the language be French—of clarity of phrase: what Pater termed netteté d'expression. He learns to respect language (as few Americans now do), to study its possibilities in a way which a mere knowledge of English might never have suggested, and to appreciate its moral as well as its social power: for French forces him to curb his thought, to weigh his contention, to be simple and clear in the most abstruse matters. In a famous essay on the Universality of French, Rivarol said: "Une traduction française est toujours une explication."
And lastly, in themselves and in the civilizations they stand for, the Romance tongues are the bridge between ourselves and antiquity. Since the decline in the study of Greek and Latin, this is a factor to be seriously considered. It is the fashion today to berate the past, to speak of the dead hand of tradition, and to flatter ourselves with the delusion of self-sufficiency. To be sure, the aim of education is never to pile up information but to "fit your mind for any sort of exertion, to make it keen and flexible." But the best way to encompass this is to feed the mind on ideas, and ideas are not produced every day, nor for that matter every year, and luckily all ideas have not the same value. There are the ideas of Taine, of Rousseau, of Voltaire, of Descartes, of Montaigne, of Ficino, of Petrarch, of Dante, of Cicero, of Aristotle, of Plato; and in a moment I have run the gamut of all the centuries of our Western civilization. Who will tell me which ideas we shall need most tomorrow? Evidently, we cannot know them all. But we can at least make the attempt to know the best. And incidentally let it be said that he who professes the Romance tongues can no more dispense with the Classics than the Classics can today afford to dispense with Romance: French, Italian, and Spanish are the Latin—and one might add the Greek—of today. But to return to our theme: to deny our interest in the past is to throw away our heritage, to sell our mess of pottage to the lowest bidder. If the Romance languages have one function in our American colleges, it is this: To keep alive the old humanistic lesson: nihil humani a me alienum puto; to the end that the modern college graduate may continue to say with Montaigne: "All moral philosophy is applied as well to a private life as to one of the greatest employment. Every man carries the entire form of the human condition. Authors have thitherto communicated themselves to the people by some particular and foreign mark; I ... by my universal being, not as a grammarian, a poet, or a lawyer." The college course in the Romance languages should prepare for a profession, but it must first help to prepare thinking men and women.
William A. Nitze
University of Chicago
Footnotes:
[[85]] The quotation is from Emerson, Nominalist and Realist.
[[86]] I make no attempt in this article, written before 1917, to treat actual teaching conditions: the premises are too uncertain.