f those models, and of the reward of diligent and
successful imitation by admission into the body, which in its turn
nursed and guided a new generation of imitators, was the reduction of
large and important departments of literature to a condition of
cut-and-driedness which has no parallel in history. The drama in
particular, which was artificial and limited at its best, was reduced
to something like the state of a game in which every possible move or
stroke is known and registered, and in which the sole novelty consists
in contriving some permutation of these moves or strokes which shall be,
if possible, not absolutely identical with any former combination. So in
a lesser degree, it was in poetry, in history, in prose tales, in verse
tales. If a man had a loose imagination, he tried to imitate La Fontaine
as well as he could in manner, and outbid him in matter; if he thought
himself an epigrammatist, he copied J. B. Rousseau; if he was disposed
to edification, the same poet supplied him with models; if the gods had
made him descriptive, he executed variations in the style of Delille, or
Saint Lambert, who had themselves copied others; if he wrote in any
other style, he had an eye to the work of Voltaire. Neologism in
vocabulary was carefully eschewed, and a natural consequence of this was
the resort (in the struggle not to repeat merely) to elaborate and
ingenious periphrases, such as those which have been quoted in the
chapter on eighteenth-century poetry. In short, literature had got into
a sort of treadmill in which all the effort expended was expended merely
in the repeated production of certain prescribed motions.

It was partly a natural result of this, and partly an effect of other
and accidental causes, that the actual composition of the Academy was in
the first quarter of the nineteenth century by no means such as to
inspire much respect. But it was all the less likely to initiate or to
head any movement of reform. The consequence was, that when the reform
came, it came from the outside, not from the inside, that it was
violently opposed, and that, though it prevailed, and its leaders
themselves quickly forced their way into the sacred precincts, it was as
victorious rebels, not as welcomed allies. The further consequence of
this, and of the changes of which account will be given briefly in the
following book, was the alteration to a great extent of the status of
the Academy. It still (though with the old repro