turies and a half. The Academy,
though it suffered some vicissitudes in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
period, has survived all changes, and is virtually one of the most
ancient existing institutions of France. But, though it from the
beginning enjoyed royal and ministerial favour, it was long before it
collected a really representative body of members, and it was subjected
at first to a good deal of raillery. One of Saint Evremond's early
works was a _Comedie des Academistes_; while one of the most polished
and severe of his later prose critical studies is a 'Dissertation on the
word "Vaste,"' in which the tendency of the Academy to trifling
discussions (the curse of all literary societies), the literary
indolence of its members, and the pedagogic limitations of its critical
standards, are bitterly, though most politely, ridiculed. It did itself
little good by lending its name to be the cover for Richelieu's jealousy
of the _Cid_, though there is more justice in its _examen_ of that
famous play than is sometimes supposed. But the institution was
thoroughly germane to the nature, tastes, and literary needs of the
French people, and it prospered. Conrart was a tower of strength to it;
and in the next generation the methodical and administrative talents of
Perrault were of great service, while it so obviously helped the design
of Louis XIV. to play the Augustus, that a tradition of royal patronage,
which was not afterwards broken, was established. The greatest blots on
the Academy were the almost unavoidable servility which rewarded this
patronage, and the private rivalries and cliques which have occasionally
kept some of the greatest names of French literature out of its lists.
Moliere and Diderot are the most shining examples among these, but many
others keep them company. Nevertheless, by the end of the seventeenth
century at least, it became the recognised aim of every Frenchman of
letters to belong to the 'forty geese that guard the Capitol' of French
literature, as Diderot, not quite a disinterested witness, called them.
Throughout the eighteenth century their power was supreme. Competition
for the various academic prizes was, in the infancy of periodicals, the
easiest and the commonest method by which a struggling man of letters
could make himself known; and literary heresy of any kind was an almost
certain cause of exclusion from the body when once the dictatorship of
Fontenelle (a benevolent autocrat who, being s