Last evening in Sever 5 Mr. C. H. C. Wright '91 read his Bowdoing Prize Dissertation on "The Influence of Contemporary French Literature upon that of England and America during the past Fifty Years." The last fifty years comprise two marked literary periods; the epoch of Realism in France and the flourishing Victorian era in England. Meanwhile the development of letters in America has been thorough. The characteristic of the three literatures during this time has been the reign of the novel and the divisions of literature assume the following order for the subject in hand: Historical Writing, Literary Criticism, and Imaginative Writing. The last subdivides into Drama, Poetry and Fiction. In all these branches, Realism, which in France began about 1840 as a revulsion from the violent romantic outburst which preceded it, has held sway and has spread to other lands. The growing tendency has been each year to subordinate the personal to the general, to reduce the importance of the individual, to enhance the value of all that is general and therefore, part of the exterior of life.

In Historical writing alone the French have failed to influence corresponding work in England and America. The modern philosophical treatment of customs and institutions has not flourished in France until comparatively lately.

In Criticism such names as Sante-Beuve and Taine are household words among English-speaking students. Yet the effect of criticism is less visible than might be expected, for criticism is, after all, a follower and not a predecessor of literary movements.

The Drama is a fruitful subject for investigation for its part in French literary history has always been important. If English-speaking nations have been influenced at all by the French, we might therefore suppose the drama to be an important point of contact. The answer is both yes and no. The number of French plays reproduced in England and America has indeed been prodigious, but so boldly have we copied that a mere translation or a slight recasting of the plays has been thought sufficient. The result has been plagiarism, not a gradual and subtle improvement.

Poetry is the form of literature least capable of translation. In recent years it has suffered from the expression of the realists. What has escaped has been a model for English writing minor poets, who, unable to bring over the impalpable essence of poetry, have with great perseverance devoted themselves to form. Hence their passionate love of the various French metros, new and old.

In fiction realism is the strongest. The movement has aimed to depict life by a minute description of objects. It soon became an art documentaries and degenerated into naturalism. The original desire of the French novelist was, by the description of exterior features to bring about in the reader the effect of the antecedents of which this feature is the consequent. But as two persons are unlikely to be affected in the same way by a phase of life, the novelist to retain a leadership was obliged to seek novelty, what is rare and curious. He soon turned to the abnormal and deformed and entrenched himself there. The process is a psychological one and English writers have followed it with the difference that instead of making the reader psychologist, they act before his eyes. But the tendency is the same, to manifest the invisible world of inward inclinations and dispositions by the visible world of outward words and actions. Meanwhile the romanticism though declining in vigour, is far from decrepitude and has too been an international influence.