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SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VL, No. 139. 



vincial or technical peculiarities in orthogra- 

 ph}^ pronunciation, and the skilful adaptation 

 of every word to its associates in the sentence, 

 — then he will think that the deliberate opinion 

 of a chosen body of literary men is far better 

 than the ipse dixit of any one scholar ; and he 

 will value the collective opinion of an academy 

 all the more highly because it is cautiously 

 uttered. 



We must not dwell too long upon this point, 

 or we shall fail to notice other services of the 

 academy. Its bestowal of prizes may be 

 passed by as quite a subordinate function. 

 Not so its election of members. To pronounce 

 upon the comparative merits of those who are 

 our neighbors and acquaintances, perhaps our 

 near friends, and perhaps our annoying and 

 troublesome rivals, is always a difficult task for 

 the limitations of human nature. To select 

 forty men from any great city who shall be re- 

 garded as the literary arbiters, the elect, the 

 immortal, would be difficult if all were to be 

 chosen at once : it may be even harder to make 

 a selection when many candidates offer them- 

 selves for one vacant arm-chair. Probably no 

 plan can be adopted which will work perfectly. 

 Certainly, in politics, no plan has ever been 

 devised for selecting invariabl}^ the best law- 

 givers ; in rehgion, the best ministers ; in edu- 

 cation, the best professors. Whatever the 

 ultimate judgment of the world may be, contem- 

 porary opinion is always questionable. It is 

 but the ordinary result of human action that 

 the French academ}^ has often withheld its rec- 

 ognition from those who seem to have been most 

 worthy to receive it, and bestowed its honors on 

 others of little worth. A recent writer quotes 

 Boileau as saj^ing, in a fit of bad humor, *' What 

 an admirable reunion of choice spirits that is, 

 when la Bruy^re, judging his illustrious col- 

 leagues as posterity^ wonders at finding him- 

 self seated with a Bossuet, a Fenelon, a Racine, 

 a Boileau, and a La Fontaine ! " 



Notwithstanding these imperfections in hu- 

 man nature, and the jealousies which they 

 evoke, there are not man}^ who will doubt that 

 the bestowal of academic distinctions, with a 

 reasonable amount of safeguards, tends to the 

 development of literary ambition. The very 

 highest genius undoubtedly rises above such 

 accessor}' impulses. We can hardly imagine 

 that Shakespeare, Goethe, or Tennyson 

 would have written more or better with any 

 hope of academic preferment ; but, upon men 

 of ordinar}^ mould, recognition, and the hope of 

 recognition, are stimulants whose tonic effect 

 can be clearly perceived. There are few intel- 

 lects so strong as to be indifferent to apprecia- 



tion, and not many who prefer the estimate of 

 posterity to the praise of their contempora- 

 ries. 



A French wit, Ars^ne Houssaye, has printed 

 a very bright satire on the academy elections, 

 under the title of a history of the forty-first 

 fauteuil. His keen and entertaining volume 

 is free from malice, and full of suggestions on 

 the actual working of an academ}^ The point 

 of it is, to show, that, during a period of nearly 

 two centuries and a half, there has been a suc- 

 cession of men of the highest talent, who, for 

 one reason or another, failed to be registered 

 among the 'immortals.' These overlooked 

 worthies are considered as occupying the forty- 

 first arm-chair. A series which begins with 

 Descartes, and includes Pascal, Moli^re, La 

 Rochefoucauld, Bayle, Rousseau, Diderot, 

 Mirabeau, Lammenais, Beranger, Michelet, 

 and George Sand, with twoscore more of the 

 non-elect, is a series which may well illustrate 

 either the failure of human purposes, or the 

 triumph of human weaknesses. No wonder, 

 with such a record, that the witt}^ writer sug- 

 gests for the frontal of the academy, Aux dieux 

 inconnus. But this is not fair : Corneille, Ra- 

 cine, Fenelon, Colbert, Massillon, Voltaire, 

 La Fontaine, Buffon, Laplace, Cuvier, Ville- 

 main, Guizot, Victor Hugo, St. Beuve, Thiers, 

 — all of whom are among the elected immor- 

 tals, — are not to be considered as unknown 

 deities. 



But, aside from all personal considerations, 

 there remains a question, whether an organiza- 

 tion, like the French academy, may not perform 

 an important service to the country, by giving 

 its collective authority to the encouragement 

 of excellence in the use of language. May not 

 its criticism of its own members, its judgment 

 of works presented to it, its bestowal of aca- 

 demic honors, its election of associates, its 

 public discourses, and its serious scrutiny of 

 the vocabulary and phraseology of the lan- 

 guage in their combined influence, be a very 

 powerful agency in the promotion of literary 

 excellence? May it not become a sort of 

 schoolmaster to the nation, incapable of mak- 

 ing good writers out of bad, but helpful in 

 discipline ? Who can tell what has been the 

 net gain to France from such a society? Is 

 the clearness, the precision, the symmetry, the 

 finish, of a good French style worth having? 

 What would the German language be to the 

 world if there had been a German academy at 

 work for two hundred and fifty years smooth- 

 ing its roughness, and insisting upon clear, 

 unencumbered, and pleasing forms of expres- 

 sion? 



