was appointed editor in chief. To remunerate him for his labours, he received from the cardinal a pension of 2000 francs. The first edition of this dictionary appeared in 1694, the last Complément in 1854.
Instead of following the history of the French Academy,—which, like its two younger sisters, the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Inscriptions, was suppressed in 1793, and reconstituted in 1795, as a class of the Institute,—a history which it would be impossible to treat adequately in the limit of an article, we will attempt briefly to estimate its influence on French literature and language, and point out its principal merits and defects. To begin with its merits, it may justly boast that there is hardly a single name of the first rank among French littérateurs that it has not enrolled among its members. Molière, it is true, was rejected as a player; but we can hardly blame the academy for a social prejudice which it shared with the age; and it is well known that it has, as far as was in its power, made the amende honorable. In the Salle des Séances is placed the bust of the greatest of modern comedians, with the inscription, "Rien ne manque à sa gloire; il manquait à la notre." Descartes was excluded from the fact of his residing in Holland. Scarron was confined by paralysis to his own house. Pascal is the only remaining exception, and Pascal was better known to his contemporaries as a mathematician than a writer. His Lettres Provinciates were published anonymously; and just when his fame was rising he retired to Port-Royal, where he lived the life of a recluse. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the fauteuils have often been occupied by men of no mark in literature. Nor is the academy wholly exonerated by M. Livet's ingenious defence, that there are but eight marshals in the French army, and yet the number has never appeared too restricted; for its most ardent admirers will not assert that it has, as a rule, chosen the forty most distinguished living authors. Court intrigue, rank, and finesse have too often prevailed over real merit and honesty. Though his facts are incorrect, there is much truth in Courier's caustic satire:—"Dans une compagnie de gens faisant profession d'esprit ou de savoir, nul ne veut près de soi un plus habile que soi, mais bien un plus noble, un plus riche: un duc et pair honore l'Académie Française, qui ne veut point de Boileau,[1] refuse la Bruyère, fait attendre Voltaire, mais reçoit tout d'abord Chapelain et Conrart."
We have next to consider the influence of the French Academy on the language and literature, a subject on which 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 Mr Matthew Arnold, in his well-known Essay on the Literary Influence of Academies, has pronounced a glowing panegyric on the French Academy as a high court of letters, and 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, is barely compensated by English genius. Thus, too, M. Renan, one of its most distinguished living 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 instraire 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 so well summed up by M. Lanfrey, that we cannot do better than quote from his recent History of Napoleon. "This institution," he says, speaking of the French Academy, "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 legitimise 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 the 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 demoralised. 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 brilliancy, 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 centralisation 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."
In conclusion, we would briefly state our own opinion. The influence of the French Academy has been conservative rather than creative. While it has raised the general standard of writing, it has tended to hamper and crush, originality. 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 de fiance all dictionaries and academic rules.
Spain.—The Royal Spanish Academy at Madrid held its first meeting in July 1713, in the palace of its founder, the Duke d'Escalona. It consisted at first of 8 academicians, including the duke; to which number 14 others were afterwards added, the founder being chosen president or director. In 1714 the king granted them the royal confirmation and protection. Their device is a crucible in
- ↑ Boileau was elected to the French Academy 1684, La Bruyère in 1693.
his pension, the cardinal remarked, "Well, Monsieur, you will not forget the word pension in your dictionary." "No, Monseigneur," replied Vaugelas, "and still less the word gratitude."
