were Vauvenargues, who died too early for the honour, and two men of genius but of dubious social position, Le Sage and the abbé Prévost d’Exiles. The approach of the Revolution affected gravely the personnel of the Academy. Montesquieu and Voltaire belonged to it, but not Rousseau or Beaumarchais. Of the Encyclopaedists, the French Academy opened its doors to D’Alembert, Condorcet, Volney, Marmontel and La Harpe, but not to Diderot, Rollin, Condillac, Helvétius or the Baron d’Holbach. Apparently the claims of Turgot and of Quesnay did not appear to the Academy sufficient, since neither was elected. In the transitional period, when the social life of Paris was distracted and the French Academy provisionally closed, neither André Chénier nor Benjamin Constant nor Joseph de Maistre became a member. In the early years of the 19th century considerations of various kinds excluded from the ranks of the forty the dissimilar names of Lamennais, Prudhon, Comte and Béranger. Critics of the French Academy are fond of pointing out that neither Stendhal, nor Balzac, nor Théophile Gautier, nor Flaubert, nor Zola penetrated into the Mazarine Palace. It is not so often remembered that writers so academic as Thierry and Michelet and Quinet suffered the same exclusion. In later times neither Alphonse Daudet nor Edmond de Goncourt, neither Guy de Maupassant nor Ferdinand Fabre, has been among the forty immortals. The non-election, after a long life of distinction, of the scholar Fustel de Coulanges is less easy to account for. Verlaine, although a poet of genius, was of the kind that no academy can ever be expected to recognize.
Concerning the influence of the French Academy on ' the language and literature, the most opposite opinions have been advanced. On the one hand, it has been asserted that it has corrected the judgment, purified the taste and formed the language of French writers, and that to it we owe the most striking characteristics of French literature, its purity, delicacy and flexibility. Thus Matthew Arnold, in his Essay on the Literary Influence of Academies, has pronounced a glowing panegyric on the French Academy as a high court of letters, and a rallying-point for educated opinion, as asserting the authority of a master in matters of tone and taste. To it he attributes in a great measure that thoroughness, that openness of mind, that absence of vulgarity which he finds everywhere in French literature; and to the want of a similar institution in England he traces that eccentricity, that provincial spirit, that coarseness which, as he thinks, are barely compensated by English genius. Thus, too, Renan, one of its most distinguished members, says that it is owing to the academy “qu’on peut tout dire sans appareil scholastique avec la langue des gens du monde.” “Ah ne dites,” he exclaims, “qu’ils n’ont rien fait, ces obscures beaux esprits dont la vie se passe à instruire le procès des mots, à peser les syllables. Ils ont fait un chef-d’œuvre—la langue française.” On the other hand, its inherent defects have been well summed up by P. Lanfrey in his Histoire de Napoléon: “This institution had never shown itself the enemy of despotism. Founded by the monarchy and for the monarchy, eminently favourable to the spirit of intrigue and favouritism, incapable of any sustained or combined labour, a stranger to those great works pursued in common which legitimize and glorify the existence of scientific bodies, occupied exclusively with learned trifles, fatal to emulation, which it pretends to stimulate, by the compromises and calculations to which it subjects it, directed in everything by petty considerations, and wasting all its energy in childish tournaments, in which the flatteries that it showers on others are only a foretaste of the compliments it expects in return for itself, the French Academy seems to have received from its founders the special mission to transform genius into bel esprit, and it would be hard to produce a man of talent whom it has not demoralized. Drawn in spite of itself towards politics, it alternately pursues and avoids them; but it is specially attracted by the gossip of politics, and whenever it has so far emancipated itself as to go into opposition, it does so as the champion of ancient prejudices. If we examine its influence on the national genius, we shall see that it has given it a flexibility, a brilliance, a polish, which it never possessed before; but it has done so at the expense of its masculine qualities, its originality, its spontaneity, its vigour, its natural grace. It has disciplined it, but it has emasculated, impoverished and rigidified it. It sees in taste, not a sense of the beautiful, but a certain type of correctness, an elegant form of mediocrity. It has substituted pomp for grandeur, school routine for individual inspiration, elaborateness for simplicity, fadeur and the monotony of literary orthodoxy for variety, the source and spring of intellectual life; and in the works produced under its auspices we discover the rhetorician and the writer, never the man. By all its traditions the academy was made to be the natural ornament of a monarchical society. Richelieu conceived and created it as a sort of superior centralization applied to intellect, as a high literary court to maintain intellectual unity and protest against innovation. Bonaparte, aware of all this, had thought of re-establishing its ancient privileges; but it had in his eyes one fatal defect—esprit. Kings of France could condone a witticism even against themselves, a parvenu could not.”
On the whole the influence of the French Academy has been conservative rather than creative. It has done much by its example for style, but its attempts to impose its laws on language have, from the nature of the case, failed. For, however perfectly a dictionary or a grammar may represent the existing language of a nation, an original genius is certain to arise—a Victor Hugo or an Alfred de Musset—who will set at defiance all dictionaries and academic rules.
Germany.—Of the German literary academies the most celebrated was Die Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (the Fruitful Society), established at Weimar in 1617. Five princes were among the original members. The object was to purify the mother tongue. The German academies copied those of Italy in their quaint titles and petty ceremonials, and exercised little permanent influence on the language or literature of the country.
Italy.—Italy in the 16th century was remarkable for the number of its literary academies. Tiraboschi, in his History of Italian Literature, has given a list of 171; and Jarkius, in his Specimen Historiae Academiarum Conditarum, enumerates nearly 700. Many of these, with a sort of Socratic irony, gave themselves ludicrous names, or names expressive of ignorance. Such were the Lunatici of Naples, the Estravaganti, the Fulminales, the Trapessati, the Drowsy, the Sleepers, the Anxious, the Confused, the Unstable, the Fantastic, the Transformed, the Ethereal. “The first academies of Italy chiefly directed their attention to classical literature; they compared manuscripts; they suggested new readings or new interpretations; they deciphered inscriptions or coins, they sat in judgment on a Latin ode or debated the propriety of a phrase. Their own poetry had, perhaps, never been neglected; but it was not till the writings of Bembo furnished a new code of criticism in the Italian language that they began to study it with the same minuteness as modern Latin.” “They were encouragers of a numismatic and lapidary erudition, elegant in itself, and throwing for ever little specks of light on the still ocean of the past, but not very favourable to comprehensive observation, and tending to bestow on an unprofitable pedantry the honours of real learning.”[1] The Italian nobility, excluded as they mostly were from politics, and living in cities, found in literature a consolation and a career. Such academies were oligarchical in their constitution; they encouraged culture, but tended to hamper genius and extinguish originality. Far the most celebrated was the Accademia della Crusca or Furfuratorum; that is, of bran, or of the sifted, founded in 1582. The title was borrowed from a previous society at Perugia, the Accademia degli Scossi, of the well-shaken. Its device was a sieve; its motto, “Il più bel fior ne coglie” (it collects the finest flower); its principal object the purification of the language. Its great work was the Vocabulario della Crusca, printed at Venice in 1612. It was composed avowedly on Tuscan principles, and regarded the 14th century as the Augustan period of the language. Paul Beni assailed it in his Anti-Crusca, and this exclusive Tuscan purism has disappeared in subsequent editions. The Accademia della Crusca is now incorporated with
- ↑ Hallam’s Int. to Lit. of Europe, vol. i. p. 654, and vol. ii. p. 502.
