ach of illustrious
outsiders) includes most of the leading men of letters of France, and
its membership is still, theoretically, the greatest honour that a
French man of letters can receive. But its position is far more
ornamental than it was. It hardly pretends to be in any sense
legislative: it is an honorary assembly, not a working parliament. The
chief circumstance that keeps it before the public is the curious and
time-honoured custom which ordains that the academician appointed to
receive each new member shall, in the most polished and amiable manner,
give the most ironical description he can of the novice's achievements
and claims to recognition.

The exact change in literature which has partly caused, and has partly
coincided with this change in the relation of the Academy to letters,
will shortly be displayed, though in somewhat less detail than those
changes which are at a sufficient distance to be estimated by the aid of
what has been well called 'the firm perspective of the past.' For
cut-and-dried rules of criticism, carefully selected and limited models,
narrow range of subject, scanty vocabulary and its corollary
periphrasis, stock metaphor and ornament, stiff or fluidly insignificant
metre and rhythm, there have been substituted the exact opposites. The
gain in poetry is immense, and if it seems to be somewhat exhausted now,
it is fair to remember that fifty years is a long flowering time for any
special poetic plant, not often equalled in history, and still less
often exceeded. The gain in prose has been more dubious. Great prose
writers will have to be noticed, but it may perhaps be doubted whether
the average value of French prose as prose has not declined. There would
be nothing surprising in this, if it be the case; on the contrary, it
would be a mere repetition of the experience of the sixteenth century.
The language and literature have been flooded with new words, new forms
of speech, new ideas, new models. It takes a very long time before the
mixture thus produced can settle down (at least in the vessel of the
average prose writer) to clearness and brilliancy. It is otherwise in
poetry; in the first place because there is no such thing as an average
poet, and in the second, because the peculiar conditions of poetry
exercise of themselves a refining influence, which is not present in
prose. At present it may be said, and not without truth, that, putting
the work of the extraordinary writers aside,