We have already heard the censorious voice of Egerton Ryerson, in testimony before the select committee of 1860, deploring the illegitimate recognition by University College of modern languages as university subjects. His most withering sarcasm was directed at the way these modern languages were taught in “the Toronto University College, which is a mere Girl’s School for French or German,” where students learn the sounds of the letters, words, declensions, and conjugations. “Yet a learned Professor is employed to teach, and Honour University Students are engaged in this profound a, b, c, of French and German, and even Scholarships, Prizes, and Certificates of Honour are instituted to reward the successful Competitors!”²⁴

If Ryerson had taken the trouble to look up Professor Forneri’s programmes in




Modern Languages outlined in the annual calendar of University College, he would have found them more than respectable, as we do now. Looking first at the “Course of Study in Arts” (see Figure 1), in the earliest calendar published, that of 1857-58, we note that it was a four-year programme for “undergraduates,” that is, those persons who had passed a matriculation examination (the term “students” was being applied, until 1865, to those attending two or more courses of lectures; “occasional students” attended only one course). This document, in its fine print, illustrates the innovative range of options offered at Toronto, which provided undergraduates with an increasing selection of subjects. Some exemptions rewarded attainment of honours in a previous year; other options were general,

most significantly a choice in the third and fourth years between “Greek and Latin”




and “French and German.” At one extreme French could be dropped after the first year, while at the other an undergraduate might take, in addition to three years of required English, the full Honour programme in French (four years), German (three years), Italian (two years), and Spanish (one year). In this latter way, an undergraduate could obtain both honours in each subject and honours in what was already called “Modern Languages,” as William Mulock and his close running mates would in 1863.²⁵

Figure 2 outlines the “Subjects of Lectures” in the four languages taught by Professor Forneri. If we fix our attention on French, we note first that the items without asterisks constituted a minimum programme in all four years, presumably for “students” or “occasional students,” for “undergraduates” not seeking honours, or for candidates for honours in other departments. The language prescription




moved from Grammar in first year, through Translation into French in the second, to Composition in third and fourth years. In literature, besides lectures and readings in histories of literature, the texts were largely selections from La Fontaine, La Bruyère, Bossuet, and Fénelon, but complete plays by Corneille and Racine ere read in the last two years. The serious character of this work is indicated by the fact that it was also part of the basic programme of candidates for honours and scholarships. These latter, however, covered as well, and were examined in, the work bearing asterisks. In language the Honour programme involved more advanced translation, composition, and, in fourth year, conversation in French. In literature it provided study of two more plays by Racine, two by Molière, and one each by Rotrou and Voltaire, as well as Montesquieu’s Grandeur et décadence des Romains. It also included close





comparative study of the “Poetry of the Troubadours and Trouvères,” offering thus the only textual experience outside the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The single concession to modernity, beyond written and spoken French, was the prescription for all fourth-year undergraduates in French of a “History of French Literature, from the 18th Century to the present time (Chouquet’s).” This turns out to have been some forty-five pages of prose selections (Hugo, Vigny, Dumas, Balzac, Sainte-Beuve, Sand, Michelet, Sue, and Thiers) and a dozen pages of poetry (Hugo, Lamartine, Vigny, and Sainte-Beuve) added in the 1840s by Gustave Chouquet to Charles Pierre Chapsal’s Leçons et modèles de littérature française and acclaimed on the title-page as “un grand nombre de nouveaux extraits dus aux auteurs contemporains les plus illustres.” Unfortunately, the 1856 and 1867 examination “Questions on Chouquet” quoted by Squair called for no





more than the knowledge of Chouquet’s capsule notices preceding each selection.²⁶ The 1857 statutes of the University of Toronto add the information that candidates for honours and scholarships in “Department iii, Modern Languages” in the Faculty of Arts must pass a final “viva voce examination conducted in French.”²⁷

The evolution of the arts curriculum in the next few decades shows little significant change in the position of French. From 1865 to 1877 it held its place in all four years of both the “fixed” and “variable” courses, as a single subject or, for honours, in various modern language combinations. In 1877 came the first use in the calendar of the term “Pass” to describe the less-demanding work done by students not seeking a degree with honours. Hence the term “Pass Course” (we





shall use the capital C) in which variable four-year programmes of study are composed of individual “Pass courses” (for us, a small c) offered and examined by each teaching department. Similarly, candidates for honours are henceforth enrolled in an “Honour Course” and pursue the more strictly defined “Honour courses” offered by each teaching department.

Here, however – again the paucity of academic terminology sets a trap of ambiguity for the uninitiated – two or more teaching departments were grouped in “Honour Departments” to devise combined programmes and, once Senate approval was obtained, to administer them, ensuring that Honour standards were met and embodied in the public listing of comparative student standings after the May examinations. It should be noted that Honour students were still, for the next twenty years, expected to do the work of the basic Pass courses in their subject





as well as that of the more specialized and exhaustive Honour courses. Indeed, even after Pass and Honour courses became entirely distinct, Honour programmes in any one area of learning were regularly given greater breadth by the addition of a small number of Pass courses in other disciplines. In one of the five “Honour Departments” proclaimed in 1877, Modern Languages with History, the major components were English, French, and German. Italian was offered only in the third and fourth years, while Spanish suffered an eight-year eclipse until the beginning of John Squair’s insurrectional instruction in 1885, which lasted for two years until W.H. Fraser was appointed to teach Italian and Spanish.

In 1889-90 French was an elective for a student in the Pass Course in all four years: compulsory in the first two years unless German or Hebrew were elected instead and compulsory with German in the first two years if Greek was not taken. A student in the Honour Course entitled Modern Languages with History apparently studied, and was examined in, all the Pass and Honour courses of French, German, and English in all four years; in the courses in Italian (second,





third, and fourth years) and Spanish (third and fourth years), all given at the Honour level; in some courses in History, unspecified in the calendar; and in the following Pass subjects, squeezed in for general enrichment (and perhaps for relief): First year – Latin; Mathematics; Chemistry or Biology or Geology Second year – Latin, Mental Philosophy, or Logic; Elementary Physics Third year – Civil Polity

As we look back at significant changes in the teaching programme in French, we note that in 1860 the work in French conversation was doubled, from one year to two. A cautious step was taken toward the study of nineteenth-century literature with the introduction in fourth year of Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, première partie, to which was added five years later Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient. More difficult and more modern readings in French came in 1869, three years after Pernet succeeded Forneri: De l’Allemagne moved down to first year, with Vigny’s Cinq-Mars added, and was replaced in fourth year in the Honour programme by a “modern” play, Ponsard’s L’Honneur et l’argent. With the official recognition of the Honour Department of Modern Languages in 1877, just





in time to profit John Squair, enrolling two years later, came the introduction in first year of Balzac’s Scènes de la vie intime. Without sacrificing the classical content of the reading (five Molière plays, four by Racine, and two by Corneille, as well as texts by La Fontaine, Boileau, and La Bruyère), the programme of the later years found time for some Lamartine, Taine, Erckmann-Chatrian, and Scribe, as well as, most memorably, a volume of Victor Hugo’s poetry intriguingly mistitled in the 1877-78 calendar Les Chats du crépuscule. Here too began the prescribed study of Old French, although Squair found it irritating to be examined on what Ampère had written about etymology and philology without being given Old French texts to read, just as he resented being tested too much on theories and rules of modern grammar and too little on his ability to use the language. He found it equally frustrating to read about literature and, in the obligatory History courses, about historians and to be expected on examinations to reproduce





“descriptions and appreciations of books which he had no chance to read for himself.” These bad practices, he tells us in his Autobiography (73), had become a crying evil in the university, and he vowed to make reforms if he ever got the chance. We have seen how the chance came sooner than he expected.

In the calendar for 1885-86 the name of John Squair appears for the first time as the lecturer at the head of the French Department, and the force of his strong hand can be felt throughout the radically revised programme. For all students in French, prescriptions specified grammar, dictation, composition, and sight translation in all four years and clearly allowed for a more rigorous basic language training in the first two years, with the aid of readings in nineteenth-century prose (Scribe, Ponsard, About) and verse from Malherbe on. With this sound basis, students continuing in only the Pass work in French, now restored to the third and




fourth years, could progress, assisted by background lectures, through readings of Mérimée, Voltaire, and La Fontaine in third year to a final year devoted entirely to the study of texts by Corneille, Molière, Racine, and La Bruyère.

The third-year programme listed, along with Modern Grammar and French Conversation, Brachet’s introduction to the Etymological French Dictionary,





Bourguignon’s Grammaire de la langue d’oïl, the passages from the Chanson de Roland in Bartsch’s Chrestomathie, Saintsbury’s French Lyrics from Ronsard to Régnier, and for the central study of the year, fifteen plays by Molière. In the fourth year, besides French Conversation and French Grammar in all its stages, with the help of Littré, Histoire de la langue française, we find more Old French texts from the Serments de Strasbourg to the Roman de la Rose, Saintsbury’s French Lyrics up to and including Marot, and at the centre of this final year’s study, twelve works by Victor Hugo (three volumes of verse, five plays, and four novels) to be read with an eye to “their relations to the general and social history of his times.”

In his Autobiography (118-20) Squair writes with pride of the “long step forward” made in 1885-86, guiding students to their own more intimate





knowledge and surer understanding of concentrated areas of literature, with appropriate examinations to match. He goes on to quote, with understandable relish, the open hostility displayed by President Daniel Wilson toward what Wilson took to be the excessive scope of Squair’s new programmes in French, even to the point of “castigating the humble Lecturer from the Convocation platform” in October 1887 and again the following year. At the same time Squair probably realized that enthusiasm had led him a little too far. A glance at the “Subjects of Lectures” listed in the calendar for 1889-90 (Figure 3) reveals that the required plays by Molière in the third year have been prudently pared from fifteen to ten and the works by Hugo in the fourth year from twelve to nine.

There is no evidence of student criticism of the stiffer programmes in Modern Languages. In fact, the popularity of French and the other modern languages





remained relatively high among the growing numbers of students in the late 1880s. Thanks to a statistical tableau (Figure 4) provided by lecturers Van der Smissen, Squair, and William Dale in their memorial of January 1891 to the Senate, reproduced by Squair in his Autobiography (178), we can see at a glance the student enrolment in all subjects, Pass and Honour, from 1880 to 1890. French, with 170 in 1890, had the fifth largest number of Pass students, outstripped by Latin, History, German, and English, but well ahead of Mathematics and Physics and the eight other subjects; only English, with 116 students, and German, with 94, surpassed the enrolment of 91 students in Honour French. Furthermore, Honour students did both Pass and Honour work, so that in terms of students in attendance, taught and examined, the figure for Honour students should be added to that for Pass students, as well as being counted separately. For French this would mean Pass 170 + 91, Honour 91, for a total 352 students taught by Squair




and one part-time fellow.²⁸

None of these figures take note of the arrival of women students on the university scene, but we know that women had been permitted since 1877 to write examinations and win scholarships they would not be able to hold until they were regularly admitted as undergraduates in October 1884. In May of that year Squair was appointed examiner in French and had to stop coaching students not attending lectures, including two daughters of the Hon. George Brown, who were reading for their third-year Honour Moderns examination. He notes that of the first five women to receive the bachelor of arts degree in 1885, two were Brown sisters, the elder of whom won the gold medal in Modern Languages.²⁹ In 1890, the last year of the period under review, men still managed to hold their own in the final standings for fourth-year Honour French: