FRENCH STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

Trinity College, 1904-1920 / W.S. Rogers

Professor A.H. Young described the federation of Trinity College with the University of Toronto in 1904 as “the great event of the year,” a decision taken by “wiser heads at both Trinity and the University than in 1874 and 1886.” Unlike in those previous abortive attempts, he added: “Except for a single voice or two, none has raised against University College and the University of Toronto the old cry of ‘godless College’ which was so mischievously used some twenty years since. The more the cry is investigated the more groundless it proves to be.”¹⁶ There was obviously a genuine spirit of goodwill in the air, with plans for co-operation in curriculum, teaching, and examining. Trinity students sat for university examinations in May 1905 and graduated at the university convocation in June that year. It was recognized that a major, but not insuperable, impediment

to interchanges of lectures in Honour courses would be geographical: Trinity’s location on Queen Street West.

The removal of the college to its present site, recognized as inevitable and desirable in 1904, would be realized only two decades later in 1925, delayed partly by World War i and partly by financial considerations.

Federation brought about changes in the teaching of Modern Languages at Trinity. To replace R.S. Jenkins, who left in 1904, John William Gay Andras was appointed lecturer in Modern Languages, initially for one year, but as the Trinity University Year Book stated, “he acquitted himself so satisfactorily that he has been re-appointed for a term of five years. It is understood that he

is to be made professor of French.”¹⁷ At the same time Young became professor of German, remaining in that position till his retirement in 1931.

If University College can boast of the colourful memories of James Forneri and Victoria College of the impressive tales of Francis Haffkina Snow, Trinity can adduce the remarkable background of Dr Andras. He was born in England of a family originally from Hungary, driven out at the time of the division of Poland. Educated at Cambridge, then at the Inner Temple, he held a PhD degree from Tübingen. He was apparently a well-known athlete and coach and made many trips on European rivers in a “Rob Roy” canoe. He served as a captain in Garibaldi’s army and was injured, taken prisoner, and escaped during the Italian wars. He was also present at the siege of Paris in 1870. A quieter side of his career centred on teaching at Blackheath College in England and at Huron

College School in London, Ontario, where he was headmaster. He moved to Toronto around 1897 and taught at Upper Canada College and St Alban’s Cathedral School before his appointment to Trinity in 1904.¹⁸There is little on record about his teaching at Trinity, but it is clear from the final honours list of 1907 that his students did well: there were four first-class graduates in Modern Languages, two men and two women. At the college he organized the Cercle Français, which met every Monday evening, and established a reading prize. His latter years were plagued with ill health. The last record of him in the yearbook is in 1911, when he was listed as librarian and – mysteriously – lecturer in Latin and Greek to students in theology. He was in his early seventies when in 1912 he dropped dead of heart failure while waiting for a car to take him to Trinity College.

Henry Crawford Griffith, a graduate of Trinity, was appointed lecturer in French in 1907. He had been a senior house master at Ridley College in St Catharines, with an excellent academic and teaching record, as well as interests in music and sports. At Trinity he lived in college and took an active part in the Cercle Français, which he entertained in his “comfortable rooms.” Meetings were enlivened by “French songs through a gramophone and from the members’ throats.” Griffith left Trinity in 1911 to return as headmaster to Ridley College, where he served until 1949.

With the death of Andras and the departure of Griffith, it was clearly time for a new and senior appointment. The choice fell on Rupert Earle Loring Kittredge from Boston. He had been educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard. After lecturing at Dartmouth College from 1908 to 1910, he returned for further

graduate studies at Harvard. He was appointed lecturer in French at Trinity in 1911 and professor the following year. He also served as librarian from 1913. In addition to teaching undergraduate courses in the college, Kittredge was one of the half-dozen professors in the graduate Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, where he contributed courses on the History of Prose Fiction in France and Prose Fiction in Romance Countries and in England, particularly the novel of manners. We will meet him again in the next chapter.

For a period of five years, from 1912 to 1917, Kittredge was assisted in the work of the department by Angelo Lipari, a native of southern Italy, who had been educated in the United States. Lipari held an ma from Columbia University, where he had also been an instructor. His interest in Romance languages other than French is indicated in a paper he read before a meeting of the Modern

Language Association in Princeton in 1916 on the “‘Gracioso’ in the Works of Lope de Vega” and by the fact that, after leaving Trinity in 1917 to take up an appointment at the University of Wisconsin, he later became a member of the Italian Department at Yale.