University of Virginia Library

VI. School of Modern Languages

The course in modern languages was placed by Jefferson
on a footing of equal dignity with the course in
ancient. This was an innovation that demonstrated,
like so many of his educational convictions, his penetration
into the future and his uncommon modernity of

spirit. James Russell Lowell has recorded that, as late
as his own youth, the French and German tongues were
taught in so great an institution as Harvard by the professor
who gave contemporaneous lessons in dancing and
fiddling! Jefferson had a thorough relish for the beauty
of the Grecian classics, but it was in the literature of
Rome that he seems to have found the most unfailing
pleasure, if the constant presence of Latin books at his
elbow can be taken as a proof. And yet he early perceived
that a modern language might have a value lying
outside of its mere literary flavour. Being at bottom a
statesman, a political philosopher, a civic prophet, he
was clearly aware that all the powerful nations would,
in time, be drawn into more intimate relations with each
other than then existed; and that a knowledge of alien
tongues would thus come to have a practical importance
in its bearing upon the welfare of the American people.
As education in general was expected by him to promote
all the qualifications of true citizenship, so expertness in
the principal languages of Continental Europe was, in
his opinion, calculated to equip the American mind with
a more correct understanding of international dangers
and responsibilities. In other words, he was thinking,
not only of the cultural and literary advantages to the
individual of mastering those tongues, but also of the
broader gain of turning that knowledge to the international
profit of his countrymen.

Whatever may have been the personal defects of Professor
Blaettermann, his acquirements as a linguist were
indisputable. The School of Modern Languages, of
which he was the first head, embraced courses in French,
German, Spanish, Italian, and Anglo-Saxon; but he also
announced that he was prepared to give lessons in the
vernacular of Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and Portugal.

Like his colleague, Long, he was hampered by the necessity
of teaching numerous pupils who had to be instructed
in the lower grades, but his impatience, unlike Long's,
vented itself, not in veiled sarcasm, but in naked brusqueness.
On one occasion, he ridiculed so roughly the exercise
of a student who had just begun to learn the French
language, that the outraged young man rose angrily from
his seat and told him flatly to his face that he would refuse
to write another. The class in Spanish numbered as
many as forty members, and yet he attempted to teach
them all with three copies of a single grammar. It was
in protest against this sort of eccentricity, or else his
chronic rudeness, that many of his own pupils patronized
a private French school that was opened, in 1827, in the
vicinity of Charlottesville. Three years afterwards, at
the instance of Madison and Chapman Johnson, the addition
of a tutorship to his chair was debated by the
Board, either because the courses of instruction were too
extensive for one lecturer, or because the dissatisfaction
with him had grown too acute to be overlooked. The
latter explanation seems to be the most plausible, for the
proposal aroused his vigorous opposition,—it was said
that he was thrown into a "fidget," for, on the one
hand, he was threatened with degradation if he consented,
and on the other, with collisions with the tutor, should
the two have any difficulty in adjusting their respective
functions. The tutorship was established in the teeth of
his repugnance to the change; but he appears to have
been conciliated by the assignment of the junior to such
duties only as the senior should specify.

In 1832, it was concluded that the subjects of the
School of Modern Languages were too numerous to require
that graduation in all should be necessary for the
acquisition of a diploma. The course was, during this

year, divided into two classes; the Romance and the Teutonic.
There were, in the instance of each, a junior and
a senior year. The literatures of all the four nations
embraced were the topics of tri-weekly lectures, while
modern history, and the political relations of the principal
countries, were also fully discussed in a separate
course. The members of each class were furthermore
permitted to receive private instruction in any one, or
in all of the tongues taught in the school, on condition
that it should be given by a native Frenchman or Italian,
Spaniard, or German, who was willing to be governed by
the rules laid down for him by the Faculty.

Jefferson, when he provided for an English section in
the School of Modern Languages, seems to have had only
the Anglo-Saxon branch in view; and he acknowledged
that one of the main benefits which he expected to accrue
from its study was the information about the principles of
free government that was thus to be obtained. While,
it is true, that belles-lettres and rhetoric formed, after
1830, a part of the School of Moral Philosophy,—which
was in charge of Tucker, the most accomplished English
scholar among the professors,—nevertheless the English
language was the one great language which was
neglected in the University's round of instruction. Jefferson,
as we have already remarked, was well versed
in the classics, and his letters and state papers prove him
to have been an excellent writer in his native tongue;
but he seems to have given slim attention to English literature,
—a fact that has left a lasting impression upon
the University of Virginia, so far as it has had any influence
on the literary productiveness of the South.
The early professors,—such as Dunglison, Key, Long,
and Bonnycastle from England, and Emmet, Tucker, and
Lomax from the United States,—were men who put a

high value upon the study of the English language; and
they were disposed to criticize the deficiencies in that
study which lowered the institution in their day. "If
the means of the University were more independent than
they seem to be," Lomax wrote to Cocke, in 1828, "a
professorship might be established, which there is many
a clergyman well qualified to fill, if not in this country,
in England. I mean a professorship of English literature,
comprehending in it the study of the English language
in its origin, its history, its character, a critical
knowledge of its best writers, composition, and elocution.
Such a professorship would be of incalculable utility; and
would save the University from the disgrace which is reflected
upon it by the ignorance of English literature
which is to be discovered among some of our best
students."

Lomax voiced the conviction of his own, and of a later
time, too, in thus criticizing the absence of facilities for
the study of the English tongue in a seat of learning,
which had a right, in all other particulars, to claim the
broad self-designation of university. In July, 1839, the
Board of Visitors became aware,—apparently for the
first time,—that this neglect was seriously damaging the
reputation of the institution; and the Faculty were instructed
to appoint a committee to find out the means of
correcting it. The plan reported, in the following
November, recommended that all the students should be
divided into sections, and that each section should be
placed under the supervision of a professor. Every student
should be required to send in to the head of his
section a monthly composition at least two pages in
length. The compositions of each section, thus periodically
accumulated, were to be carefully examined by its
presiding professor, and those laid on one side as the

best were to be handed in to the Faculty. The students
who had failed to write, or had written with culpable
slovenliness, were to be reported at the same time to
the same body. As might have been predicted, this laborious
scheme of stimulating skill in English composition
was promptly tabled by the Faculty and was not
afterwards heard of. The members of that body, as a
whole, no doubt, thought that they were already sufficiently
burdened by the demands of their regular classes.

In 1840, the new University periodical, The Collegian,
—which was founded nominally to create for the
students a field in which to learn how to write their native
tongue with correctness and elegance,—complained that,
in consequence of the fact that no provision was made in
the courses of instruction for either composition or elocution,
the graduates left the precincts with the wide
province of English literature unexplored, and as ignorant
of its history as when they were admitted. "There
is a dearth of literary taste among them," it asserted,
"and they are lamentably deficient in some of the very
important parts of a liberal education." That this flaw
went as far as grammar and orthography, was annually
brought out in the failure of so many of the members of
the senior classes to pass the English examination, to
which they had to submit before they were permitted to
offer for graduation in any of the regular schools. During
many years, apart from lectures in Anglo-Saxon,
rhetoric, and belles-lettres,—which were, of necessity,
contracted in their scope, because they were simply the
by-play of already overburdened chairs,—the only training
in English composition which the major number of
the students enjoyed was obtained from translations in
the Schools of Ancient and Modern Languages; but they
had no means whatever in these schools of acquiring information

of English literature, although every facility
was offered for perfecting their knowledge of the literatures
of Spain and Italy, Germany and France, as well
as of Greece and Rome.