only is the handwriting firm and the memory good right to the end, but the content shows that the man scarcely slackened his pace. This corroborates the impression of sustained vigour in the portrait painted by J.W.L. Forster in 1924-25, which hangs in University College and is reproduced in this volume.
From 1920 on, he appears in his “Memoirs” as a kind of grammairien malgré lui, bombarded with demands for revisions by his American publishers, D.C. Heath and Company, or by the Ontario minister of education (and a tiresome committee of teachers); then persuaded to agree to collaboration with a series of modernizing American university professors; finally consenting reluctantly to the use by Heath of the magic name “Fraser and Squair” to promote sales of a couple of new, and dubious, grammars in “the Fraser and Squair series.” Consolation came twice a year, with announcements of annual royalties, then the actual cheques, always
Ontario, but by June was reduced to the story of the teachers and teaching of French, with the main accent on his own experiences as student and teacher. President Sir Robert Falconer willingly granted him $1,000 to pay for its printing. Squair had taken corrected galley proof of the text and material for the illustrations to the University of Toronto Press a week before he died. The remaining work, including a valuable index, was done, with J.H. Cameron’s help, by Squair’s daughter, marion, who was lecturer in the department from 1927 to 1930.
Squair also kept a weather eye on the department, which, in the early twenties, he found generally too meek and mild. It was much in the mood of an academic “old warrior” that he entertained the French staff from time to time. After a dinner for them at the York Club in January 1920 he wrote: “They may organize themselves for propaganda. I hope they will.” A year later his postprandial comment reads: “I
Squair remained faithful to the Alliance Française de Toronto, whose executive met regularly at his house, and a few days before his death he was selecting slides for a lecture on church architecture that he was to give at an Alliance meeting. He was frequently back on campus for plays and occasionally for lectures. When the university celebrated its centennial in 1927, he stayed away from most of the events. He had to attend the special convocation on 7 October, however, since President Falconer had persuaded him to read in French the citation for the LLD awarded to Camille Roy, ex-recteur of Université Laval, distinguished in the field of French-Canadian literature as professor and critic.
It was eminently appropriate for Squair to be asked to do the honours on that occasion. Not only had he continued to be active in the organizations that succeeded the Bonne Entente (the Canadian National League, then the Unity
League), but in 1921 he had made the University of Toronto Library his second gift of $1,000, this time to be applied to building up a special collection of French-Canadian literature. No act of his was more far-reaching than this in its consequences. These were well expressed on 23 February that year by a Varsity reporter, whose assessment of the potentialities of the gift went beyond the obvious improvement of opportunities for English-speaking students to become better acquainted with French-Canadian literature. “It will also assist materially with the arousing of a keen sympathy between the two races of Canada, giving us a keener insight into their viewpoint, and also letting them see that English speaking people are not entirely neglecting their compatriots. In this way Professor Squair has done a deed worthy of note by those who have the interests of Canada at heart.” Twenty-five years later the seminal significance of the Squair endowment was highlighted as the University of Toronto Monthly in 1946 hailed
when he wrote of Cameron, “There could not be a more faithful colleague than he.” In the “Memoirs” he is more than once critical of Cameron’s lack of aggressiveness as his successor (for example, in 1918, for allowing the Faculty of Applied Science to drop French in favour of Spanish), but his sympathy and help when Cameron sorely needed it in 1925 shows that he had not lost the appreciation of the man he had expressed twenty years earlier when he was beginning to write his “Memoirs” in January 1905. “In the summer of 1885 I went to France again and this time had the company of my friend John Home Cameron, whose friendship has been one of the closest that I have enjoyed. His is a nature of a very exquisite type. He is a true man in every sense and I owe him much.”
Following Cameron’s death on 30 September 1944, it was F.C.A. Jeanneret, his student, colleague, and successor as head of the department, who presented a
accurately and naturally, both in his conversation classes and in occasional dramatic performances in the programme of the University College French Club. For a dozen years more he presided over the Alliance Française, frequented the Arts and Letters Club, and attended concerts, seldom without student guests. In the early thirties he received twin honours, being named chevalier de la Légion d’honneur by the government of France and honorary docteur ès lettres by the Université de Montréal. His beard grew grey but was none the less impressive. Increasing rheumatism (dating from digging trenches up to his knees in water in 1914-15) brought more and more eloquent facial contorsions and hand to hip, but without making him a less commanding figure. Another world war brought more agony, including the growing loneliness in remaining steadfast in his loyalty to his old hero Pétain. Happily, serenity had returned before his retirement, an event celebrated with a gala dinner in the spring of 1950 by more than fifty friends
representing a wide circle from college, university, and community. Happily, too, at this banquet de Champ heard his student and colleague Robert Finch read a tribute that perfectly epitomized the feelings of those present. The whole superbly evocative text will be found at the end of this chapter, but the closing lines belong here:
With deep regret, monsieur, we see you go,
Yet you have left us more than you can know
And far far more than we could ever tell,
Donc nous vous souhaitons tous en ribambelle,
Connaissances, amis, collègues et enfants,
Bon voyage, monsieur – papa – de Champ!
De Champ died in march 1959, and no obituary could have pleased him more than the memorial remarks in the report that year of President Claude Bissell, which concluded:
Professor de Champ was for decades a colourful and commanding figure on this campus. The children, and then the grandchildren, of his old students came to his classes, to fall in their turn under the spell of his proverbial charm and to delight in his eccentricities. His beard became a cause célèbre: when at one time it was reported that he decided to have it removed, letters appeared in The Varsity pleading for its retention, and his barber refused to commit the sacrilege of shaving him. He had a cultivated taste and a zestful appreciation for language and literature, music and painting, food and wine; he was the epitome of the culture and the courtesy of France.
The effervescence of J.S. Will was at its height in the early twenties. In may 1920 came an important achievement, his organization of the Romance Club, at which teachers and graduate students of Romance languages and
literatures could present and discuss papers. Shrewdly, Will won general confidence for the innovation by having Professor Emeritus John Squair give the first paper (on French adjectives in -isque and -isant). Squair’s comment on the new club in his “Memoirs” tempers optimism with apprehension. “It is hoped it may grow and develop. It has work to do. Will is a useful man in starting new things. Let him not be too erratic however.”
Possibly Squair was making an oblique reference to the fact that Will was already cutting himself off from the rest of the French Department, having established himself in the west wing of the college, with his office and his own classroom at the top of the stairs, attending no department meetings and having as little to do with his pedestrian colleagues as possible. In October 1921 Will’s claim to scholarship was given tangible demonstration with the publication by the
University of Toronto Press of his doctoral thesis, Protestantism in France, 1598-1629, which he had confidently labelled volume 2. On leave in France at the time, he saw to it that he would return with enhanced academic standing, a licence ès lettres (perhaps a delayed award for earlier work), for he was undoubtedly worried. marcel Moraud, a relative newcomer, had been promoted to the rank of associate professor, as had F.C.A. Jeanneret. In late November, when Squair invited de Champ to dinner at the York Club, he reported “the gossip of the department of French. Will, now absent in France, and Moraud are rivals for the headship when Cameron resigns. De Champ dislikes them both, and mourns for the good old days when we all lived in peace” (“Memoirs,” 265).
That peace was not to be is clear from the occasional comments that Squair continued to confide to his “Memoirs.” On 30 June 1925 (after lunch with
chair he had inherited in 1916 when he succeeded Squair as head of the Department of French, picked up the chair, carried it back to the cloisters, and presented it to his neighbour, Professor A.S.P. Woodhouse, head of English, charging him to protect it from desecration by any unworthy successor to the French headship. (This chair may be admired in the University College Archives, to which Woodhouse eventually entrusted it. There is a discreet absence of any plaque with the names of occupants.)
By November 1927, the barometer was steadying, and in January Squair commented: “I had lunch with J.S. Will at the York Club. He is more cordial.” But in the department it was only an armed truce. That autumn a former student, returning from France to take up his appointment to the teaching staff, ran into
Will on Wellesley Street, greeted him, and held out his hand. Will took it saying, “I didn’t think you’d speak to me after joining them!” “They” remained aliens for Will, except as he found them useful as puppets in the impish scenarios he would invent for his own delectation and that of some of his students. About one colleague he remarked: “It’s too bad Professor X is so late getting back from France. It’s not from lack of trying, but every time he thinks he has bought a ticket on the boat train for Cherbourg, he finds himself ending up in Strasbourg.”
It is fascinating to compare recollections of alumni who sat under Will. For example, former student a commented:
Professor Will was a nervous, highly strung, wiry bundle of animation. While he
And here is former student b:
Professor Will was an inspiring and provocative teacher, with a peculiar dynamism that kept his lectures singularly alive and vivid. Like his beloved Voltaire, untiring in his passion for assaulting and ridiculing old shibboleths, outworn systems and tyrannies, Will was a creative force, and much of his own restless inquiring mind’s penetration became a genuine force which passed into the minds of all those alert students fortunate enough to be members of his classes. His chief local targets seemed to be placidity and resigned acceptance of academic reach-me-downs. He was a most stimulating elucidator of the major thinkers of French literature who were his idols ... Will was unforgettable.
The evidence suggests that Will’s lectures in French history and literature, both undergraduate and graduate, were highly discursive but based on sound scholarship, and his students received good bibliographical training from him as well as intellectual stimulation, even when it was negatively charged. Some of them still speak of the inspiration they received, beyond the lectures and seminars, in conversation during later years of continuing friendship, from this man of wide learning, capable of objective analysis but normally preferring the more dynamic approach of the wilfully provocative, often ranging from ardent enthusiasm to the most caustic criticism. The reference to Voltaire is suggestive. Perhaps one trouble was that Will could not relax the war cry “Écrasez l’infâme” or be much more discriminating than was Voltaire in identifying “l’infâme” (although for Will it was certainly not the church, as he became an ardent Catholic convert). He might
otherwise have written the book he planned on Anatole France or the intended volumes 1 and 3 of his magnum opus and so have avoided the application to him by a colleague of a remark of J.K. Galbraith: “Friends of mine, through a long life, have gained high academic credit for the perception and scope of their unpublished works and the vividness with which they describe them.”
Will continued right up to his retirement in 1945 to enliven the graduate programme with his kaleidoscopic offerings: always the Renaissance; but also Traditional Elements in Contemporary French Literature; Problems of Form in the French Novel, 1830-1930; The French Novel after 1850; The Development of Egotism in Modern French Literature; and finally Contemporary Poetic Theory in French Literature. Always, too, he was buying books, so satisfying what was
perhaps his greatest passion and preparing the enviable immortality that followed the acquisition by the university library of his splendid collection of some 16,000 volumes, many of them rare and handsome items, pertaining in large part to the French Renaissance. All debate is resolved in its tangible assurance that “Will is unforgettable.”
In retrospect, F.C.A. Jeanneret, senior statesman of Senate, Faculty of Arts, and School of Graduate Studies, principal of University College, and chancellor of the university, tends to be considered a staunch champion of conservative tradition. He liked to tell of being the first owner of an automobile at the university, having bought in 1913 a Metz friction-drive car that his Swiss watchmaker father had found in Waltham, massachusetts, but could not run. He drove it for five years and sold it for the same $500 he had paid for it. Not only was Jeanneret a shrewd
and hard-headed pioneer, but, like the old Metz, he had seven speeds forward. By 1921, when he was starting his final year as registrar of University College, he was promoted to the rank of associate professor and was clearly Cameron’s right-hand man. Two honours came to Jeanneret in 1926, each a demanding challenge. The first was his appointment as acting head of the Department of French. (He was only thirty-five, and postponing for one year his appointment as head was no doubt in part of a concession to raised eyebrows and raised hackles.) The second honour and challenge was reported thus by Principal maurice Hutton in Falconer’s presidential report for 1926-27: “I ought to add that the Prime Minister and Minister of Education has wisely appointed Professor Jeanneret, chairman of the Department of French, to conduct a summer school in the Province of Quebec, for the furtherance of the bonne entente, started by one of his former chiefs, and for the encouragement of that bilingualism which is
essential to Canadian well-being.” It was a wise appointment because the project was Jeanneret’s dream, and he was already demonstrating an almost incandescent conviction that he often expressed in words such as these: “I have a great love for Quebec and its people. My primary objective has been the promotion of a mutual understanding between French Canada and English Canada because I think Canada’s future depends largely on unity between our two races, but a unity that permits of much diversity.” There was wisdom too in providing this first French summer school for teachers of Ontario, to improve radically the level of oral French taught in the province’s schools, where, Jeanneret believed, it should be studied from grade 6 on. For fifteen summers he painstakingly directed and taught in the summer school, which, with generous Quebec support and the co-operation of several colleagues, he organized at the Couvent de Jésus-marie at Sillery near Quebec City. More than a thousand Ontario teachers of French attended the
course in these years, and the results in terms of making French a living language in Ontario are incalculable. Certainly Jeanneret never regretted the time and energy he lavished on Sillery, though he had to pay the price of never finishing the graduate work he had begun at the University of Chicago. One of his rewards was a doctorat ès lettres (honoris causa) awarded him by Université Laval in 1937.
Jeanneret’s manifold contributions to the teaching of French in Ontario include his writing or editing, sometimes with collaborators, of nineteen language and literature textbooks. These appeared between 1932 and 1957, with numerous revisions, and the number of copies sold in Canada, the United States, and Britain up to 1959, when he retired as principal of University College, was calculated at a million and a half, a success only surpassed by the earlier tidal wave of “Fraser
and Squair.” Best known to countless Ontario students were probably Cours moyen de français, a fine Canadian remake of an already successful American textbook that Jeanneret prepared in 1939 with E.E. Hislop and madeline Lake and revised in 1955 and 1957; Cours primaire de français: An Oral Approach to French for Canadian Schools, in 1945 with Helen St John; and Le Français vivant, in 1957 with Dora and marie Stock. Less well known is the fact that Jeanneret served some twenty times as examiner-in-chief in French for grade 13, so maintaining a close relationship between high school and university and raising the standard of teaching in both.
In the university, while co-operating fully with the heads of the federated colleges, he was insistent upon maintaining a full programme of French language and literature in “the provincial college,” and he gave strong leadership in many ways.
He attached great importance to the use of the French language as the medium of instruction and communication in all Honour courses and later in concentration programmes in the General Course, as well as to rigorous training and examining in phonetics and oral French. He gave full support to Eugène Joliat’s pioneer speech laboratory and to its constant development. He provided departmental sponsorship to the presentation of French films, from marguerite macDonald’s pioneer series at the Hollywood Theatre to the later University College Ciné-Club and the creation by the French Department of a projection room at University College.
For thirty years Jeanneret encouraged, often with financial aid from his own pocket, the annual presentation of a French play by students of University College on this and other campuses. Among several French theatre troupes
that he was instrumental in bringing to Toronto for the first time were those of the Comédie Française and of Gratien Gélinas, Canada’s great francophone actor and metteur en scène, whom Jeanneret successfully nominated for an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto. He gave enthusiastic support to the introduction of graduate and undergraduate courses in French-Canadian literature and to inter-provincial programmes at the college, such as the series of lectures on “French Canada Today” by eminent French Canadians arranged by C.D. Rouillard in 1947 and the bilingual seminar with the same title that he himself organized eleven years later.
Jeanneret was named officier d’Académie by the French government in 1948 and in Canada received several honorary degrees, as well as the Médaille Pierre Chauveau of the Royal Society of Canada. From 1947 to 1951 he served as
chairman of Division i (then including Humanities and Social Sciences) of the School of Graduate Studies; in the latter year he was chosen principal of University College and held that position for eight years, while remaining head of the Department of French; in 1959 he was elected chancellor of the university, a post he occupied for two three-year terms to 1965. He was working on a life of Sir Robert Falconer when he died in January 1967. This writer is not the only person to deplore the lack of foresight in not trying to persuade F.C.A.J. to tell the story of the Department of French himself.
Of all his multiple activities, teaching was the one that brought Jeanneret the greatest satisfaction. “I wouldn’t trade teaching for any other career in life,” he often said. The author he loved best was the Swiss writer Ramuz, and he was happy that the book on Ramuz he never had time to write was done, and expertly
done, by a young colleague he had recruited for the department, Clarence R. Parsons. He was similarly happy to share French-Canadian literature with one of his own students who became a colleague, David M. Hayne, and then to relinquish it into his capable hands. Jeanneret’s favourite undergraduate course covered four centuries: French Literary Criticism. But his main interest lay in the seventeenth century, and for thirty-three years, between his assumption of the headship of the department and his retirement as professor and principal, he worked with one group of graduate students after another on Molière, alternating that seminar at first with pre-classical French drama, then with Racine. French classicism fitted Jeanneret: he appreciated the whole gamut of Molière’s comedy; he knew tragedy all too intimately; his career epitomized strength with moderation and highly intelligent form.
