himself in an academy. Knowing this, Anatole France, the
greatest man in the Academie Francaise, never goes near the sittings. He
has got from the institution all that advantage of advertisement which he
was legitimately entitled to get, and he has no further use for the
Academie Francaise. His contempt for it as an artist is not concealed.
What can academicians do except put on a uniform and make eulogistic
discourses to each other under the eyes of fashionably-attired American
female tourists? The Authors' Society does more practical good for the art
of literature in a year than an Academy of Letters could do in forty
years.

* * * * *

The existing British Academy of Learning may or may not be a dignified and
serious institution. I do not know. But I see no reason why it should not
be. It has not interested the public, and it never will. Advertisement
does not enter into it to any appreciable extent. Moreover, it is much
more difficult to be a dilettante of learning than a dilettante of
letters. You are sooner found out. Further, learning can be organized, and
organized with advantage. Creative art cannot. All artistic academies are
bad. The one real use of an artistic academy is to advertise the art which
it represents, to cause the excellent public to think and chatter about
that art and to support it by buying specimens of it. The Royal Academy
has admirably succeeded in this business, as may be seen at Burlington
Gardens any afternoon in the season. But it has succeeded at the price of
making itself grotesque and vicious; and it retards, though of course it
cannot stop, the progress of graphic art. Certain arts are in need of
advertisement. For example, sculpture. An Academy of Sculpture might, just
now, do some good and little harm. But literature is in no need of
advertisement in this country. It is advertised more than all the others
arts put together. It includes the theatre. It is advertised to death. Be
sure that if it really did stand in need of advertisement, no dilettante
would have twice looked at it. The one point which interests me about the
proposed academy is whether uniforms are comprised in the scheme.

UNFINISHED PERUSALS

[_25 Aug. '10_]

One of the moral advantages of not being a regular professional, labelled,
literary critic is that when one has been unable to read a book to the
end, one may admit the same cheerfully. It often happens to the
profess