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, Helvetius 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 Andre Chenier 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 Beranger. Critics of the French
Academy are fond of pointing out that neither Stendhal, nor
Balzac, nor Theophile 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
a instruire le proces des mots, a peser les syllables.
Ils ont fait un chef-d'oeuvre--la langue francaise.'' On the
other hand, its inherent defects have been well summed up by
P. Lanfrey in his Histoire de Napoleon: ``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 introduce 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.'' s 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
piu 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 two older societies--the Accademia degli Apatici
(the Impartials) and the Accademia Florentina.
Among the numerous other literary academies of Italy we may
mention the academy of Naples, founded about 1440 by Alphonso,
the king; the Academy of Florence, founded 1540, to illustrate
and perfect the Tuscan tongue, especially by the close study of
Petrarch; the Intronati of Siena, 1525; the Infiammati of
Padua, 1534; the Rozzi of Siena, suppressed by Cosimo, 1568.
The Academy of Humorists arose from a casual meeting of
witty noblemen at the marriage of Lorenzo Marcini, a Roman
gentleman. It was carnival time, and to give the ladies some
diversion they recited verses, sonnets and speeches, first
impromptus and afterwards set compositions. This gave them
the name, Beni Humori, which, after they resolved to form
an academy of belles lettres, they changed to Humoristi.
In 1690 the Accademia degli Arcadi was founded at Rome, for
the purpose of reviving the study of poetry, by Crescimbeni,
the author of a history of Italian poetry. Among its members
were princes, cardinals and other ecclesiastics; and, to
avoid disputes about pre-eminence, all came to its meetings
masked and dressed like Arcadian shepherds. Within ten years
from its establishment the number of academicians was 600.
The Royal Academy of Savoy dates from 1719, and was made a royal
academy by Charles Albert in 1848. Its emblem is a gold orange
tree full of flowers and fruit; its motto ``Flores fructusque
oerennes,'' the same as that of the famous Florimentane Academy,
founded at Annecy by St Francis de Sales. It has published
valuable memoirs on the history and antiquities of Savoy.
Spain.--The Real Academia Espanola at Madrid held its
first meeting in July 1713, in the palace of its founder, the
duke d'Fscalona. 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 the middle of the
fire, with this motto, Limpia, fixa, y da esplendor--``It
purifies, fixes, and gives brightness.'' The number of its
members was limited to 24; the duke d'Escalona was chosen
director for life, but his successors were elected yearly, and
the secretary for life. Their object, as marked out by the
royal declaration, was to cultivate and improve the national
language. They were to begin with choosing carefully such
words and phrases as have been used by the best Spanish writers;
noting the low, barbarous or obsolete ones; and composing a
dictionary wherein these might be distinguished from the former.
Sweden.--The Svenska Akademien was founded in 1786, for the
purpose of purifying and perfecting the Swedish language. A medal
