French life in town and country

by Hannah Lynch

THE FRENCH ACADEMY

I was present at this extraordinary séance, and, although the Marquis Costa de Beauregard is an academician whom posterity may in all safety be reckoned on to ignore, it was impossible to withhold cordial recognition of the justice and good taste of his sharp retort to the inexcusable offender. Meilhac, whose empty chair M. Lavedan was elected to fill, may or may not have been as black as his appointed eulogist painted him, but the Academy was not the place to attack this character, and the occasion chosen by M. Lavedan was as indelicate as if he had selected a man’s open grave, with mourning relatives and friends around, for disrespectful usage of his name. Stupefied, as was everyone else by this singular proceeding, I questioned a friend whose privilege it is to wear the palm-embroidered coat and mother-of-pearl sword, and was told that this was M. Lavedan’s way of avenging the disapproval of the Academy of his Vieux Marcheur, played only after his election. These nervous elderly gentlemen, unacquainted with the literature of their new colleague, were desperately alarmed when they were made aware of the nature of this popular and shocking play. The sensations of the hen affrighted on the edge of a pool where her duckling is disporting were nothing to theirs; and so the author, at bay, took his revenge by endeavouring, with more talent than taste, to prove to them that, if they did not relish the Vieux Marcheur (something in the style of “sad old rake”) out of their doors, they could be extremely indulgent to the same type of gentleman within those sacred precincts. At a more recent election, that of M. Paul Hervieu, M. Brunetière, reversing the order of contumely, was nothing loath to poke blame at the newly received Immortal because of his social cynicism and the unkind pictures M. Hervieu has drawn of the world of men and women M. Brunetière delights to honour. But we need not penetrate beneath the surface to explain such an inhospitable fashion of receiving a candidate into this classical club. M. Brunetière, the discoverer of Bossuet, is a fervent reactionary. The Church, the Army, Society,—behold his gods!—with the result that, in the deadly conflict waged for two years round an unfortunate Jew, M. Brunetière went with the unjust majority, while M. Hervieu, the author of that dramatic and brilliant thesis on Feminism, La Loi de l’Homme, went with the just and liberal minority. It needed nothing more to give him over as a meal to the omnivorous editor of the Revue des deux Mondes, whose virtuous indignation against M. Hervieu’s generous cry for justice to women knew no bounds.

In the present divided state of France, with anti-Semitism raging and disaffection rife in all quarters, even a pacific academical reception approaches the verbal war waged in the arena of politics conducted with leisure and urbanity. The ceremonial is imposing and of a supreme dulness. If you have a centre seat, the wise thing to do is to go early and amuse yourself by watching the arrivals; or manage to arrive at the last moment, and you will have the best seat of all, in the very middle of the hall, literally at the feet of the Immortals. If you know all Paris, you will enjoy yourself, for you will see and be seen of all Paris, and the dresses are usually worth looking at. After that you have the mild excitement of watching the Immortals enter, to your surprise not in academical raiment, but in ordinary coats, wearing the air of ordinary men. Only the godfathers of the newly elected, the perpetual secretary, the chancellor, always the latest member, and the gentleman deputed to receive the new Immortal wear the sword and palm-embroidered coat. There are no arm-chairs, but wooden benches ill adapted to the ease of age. The classical hall is about as squalid and uncomfortable a vestibule of posterity as one could wish to see, and is so ill-ventilated that, when it is full, as it always is, to excess, the spectators are frequently threatened with apoplexy or syncope. Whenever I get away sound and alive from beneath the celebrated cupola, I always feel that I have escaped unharmed from actual peril.

Then the newly elected stands at a reading-desk and reads out the eulogy of his predecessor, which a committee has already been convened to consider, and when he terminates his “discourse,” his godfathers warmly shake his hand, and he sits down. The academician who receives him in the name of the august assembly replies, and reads his discourse sitting, placed between the chancellor and secretary, at the centre table, on a high daïs. When the speakers read their discourses as M. Brunetière reads his, it is a pleasure, whether you agree with them or not; but this is rare, for M. Brunetière was meant by nature to be a preacher or an actor. His elocution is magnificent, his voice arresting; whereas the average man is hard to follow and, in winter, is apt to have a cold in his head. After the ceremony, greetings during the exit, which is slow and precarious, and in the big courtyard proclaim you a fashionable person, and reveal to you the utter vanity of the whole affair. Then you understand why it is that women are supposed to be the pillars of the institution. There is something essentially wrong about fashionable women. They must, perforce, worship false gods. When they admire a writer, or a musician, or a dramatist, they are not happy until they see him in a false position. They must make a fool of him before they can consent to worship him. He administers to their vanity, and they administer to his. And so they go in a body to crown him; and not to be present at the crowning is a confession of social inferiority. Being more intelligent than the same class of women elsewhere, their folly takes this form of rendering interesting men ridiculous. If I thought them capable of humour and irony (which they are not), I might regard this as the supreme vengeance of their sex, excluded by national prejudice from all public honours. But, alas! no. They are in deadly earnest, and take their great men with rapture and gravity. They, at any rate, and the Immortals themselves, really believe in the Academy. They swallow each other, and piously give thanks for the meal. The fashionable woman hastens to invite the new Immortal to dinner for the exquisite satisfaction of giving him the place of honour and conferring distinction upon herself.

“However,” as Sainte-Beuve says, “we may jeer at the French Academy, but it has not ceased to be popular in Europe.” Foreigners and Parisians are equally eager for tickets, and French genius more eager than either for the prizes and renown it confers. It is one of the monarchical institutions restored by the Convention after its suppression in the Terror. Only, instead of the monarchical Institute it had been, it became a national Institute, existing by grace of the State and the people, and not by that of a minister like Richelieu, or a monarch like Louis XIV. It was thus composed of a hundred and forty-four members in Paris, and an equal number in the provinces, with power to associate twenty-four learned men with its corps. It was divided into three parts: Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Moral and Political Sciences, and Literature and the Fine Arts. This new national Institute was opened on the 4th of April, 1796, when Daunou pronounced the inaugural address. In those days there was no such thing as a perpetual secretary. The excellent republican spirit of the State was naturally modified under the Consulate, and completely demoralised under the Empire. Napoleon reinstituted the perpetual secretary of the ancien régime, suppressed the class of Political and Moral Sciences,—the least to be expected of a political dictator without any notion of morality,—and divided the two other classes into three, and thus restored the ancient Academy of Sciences, French Academy, Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, the Academies of Painting and Sculpture. Hence grew the ambition to connect, in unbroken continuity, the defunct institution of a vanished monarchy and the new institution of the Directory. In 1803, it began the reactionary period, and posed as Royalist in sentiments and opinions. Sainte-Beuve defines the Academy as that of the reigning perpetual secretary.

What the Academy really remains is the home of tradition. Here the main thing is not intellect, but distinction; not genius, but the consummate perfection of expression. Urbanity is its hall-mark, and what it most dreads in originality is the abuse of novelty. You may have little to say; only see that your way of saying it cannot be bettered. It has been blamed for excluding from its ranks so much real genius; and this blame would, of course, be earned by it if its object were so much the recognition of genius as the welcome to its midst of a congenial spirit. Gautier, with his long hair and red waistcoat, was not a congenial spirit, though if finish of style, charm, urbanity, and exquisite grace are accounted academical graces, there never was a writer to whom the term “born academician” was more applicable. But the Academy always sees that there is a bulldog on the threshold to show his teeth to the “masters” of to-morrow; a pedagogue to teach the aspirants to academical honours how they should write and think, and what small beer their literary pretensions are regarded by the Forty Immortals he speaks for so arrogantly. The bulldog of the hour is M. Brunetière. This unamiable pedant, the enemy of individualism and youth, the enemy of all things not hall-marked with his pontifical approval, has announced that Zola can enter the Academy only across his dead body. He has many hatreds to balance the immensity of his single love and admiration, the Eagle of Meaux, but none that can compare with his implacable hostility to Zola. And yet this academical pontiff, who disapproved of Daudet, wiped out the Naturalists, shot bilious blame at M. Jules Lemaître (that was before this amiable individual sought ridicule in the famous Ligue de la Patrie Française, a sentiment he, MM. Coppée, and Barrès were the first Frenchmen of their time to discover) and at Anatole France, whose shoe-strings he is not fit to tie, allows M. Henri Lavedan to sit beside him, and does not repudiate Le Vieux Marcheur.

While all France has been divided of late, it would be demanding a superhuman effort of urbanity and harmony from the Immortals to expect a concord of sweet sounds to be heard beneath the famed cupola. Politics have introduced their consequent animosity and bitterness here as elsewhere, and the academicians, like the rest of their compatriots, are ranged in two defiant and hostile camps. I am bound to say that the élite is with the splendid and disinterested minority. It is sad to witness the extraordinary capers, the passion for popularity in which an intelligent man like M. Lemaître indulges, and to see him brandishing a wild pen and shouting in every tone of anger; so little dignity and common sense are left a Frenchman when hate and rancour hold him and when race-fury rolls over the land like a tidal wave, Vive l’armée! This famous critic has betaken himself to a sort of politics invented for the hour—a feverish antagonism to foreigners and all foreign influences, and a passion for every form of sabred hero. He goes from the Clotilde to Notre Dame, from Notre Dame to the Madeleine, in the glorious attitude and humour of the Irishman at Donnybrook Fair, seeking for somebody in the crowd who will tread upon the tail of his coat. This offence may be committed by cheering the Republic or its President; then there is instant competition in pugilism. And so M. Lemaître, accompanied and admirably assisted by his no less heroic and patriotic fellow academician, M. Coppée, forgets academical urbanity in wild and incoherent abuse of living persons and respectable citizens who happen not to think as he does.

This state of affairs has given rise to countless rumours and jokes over the compilation of the eternal dictionary upon which the illustrious company is engaged. How is it possible for men who disagree upon the essentials of morality, justice, honour, and truth to agree upon the definition of a word? In olden days the occasional antagonisms of this renowned salon were rare or were revealed with a sympathetic vivacity and wit. Sainte-Beuve could say: “The Academy is the place where literature is the best discussed and where all the amenities are most rigorously observed.” Now all that is changed. Happily, as an interlude in internecine warfare, there is the yearly examination of books and prizes to award. These are many. It is a mistake to believe that a book crowned by the Academy is necessarily good. Noting one year that several absolutely bad, as well as many mediocre, books had been crowned, and sums of money awarded to the malefactors who had perpetrated them, I asked an academician how it was. His explanation was, that so much must be spent on prizes every year, whether there are books to crown or not, as it would excessively complicate the affairs of such a rich body if these sums were allowed to accumulate. Of course there are certain large prizes, such as the Jean Reynaud (£400), which are carefully and justly disposed of, but the multiple insignificant ones of £10, £20, and £40, are distributed as well as they can be in days when there is not a plethora of real talent in France. It is not only literary works that merit academical prizes. There is the Montyon prize, awarded to “the poor French man or woman who has done the most virtuous action during the year.” The sum spent on prizes under this head is £800, and it is divided between several poor persons whose lives are looked into, and of whom usually a touching and admirable picture is drawn. It would not be in the nature of things if the distribution of this prize did not provoke much humorous comment in France. Some satirists maintain that the candidates for the Montyon prize invariably go to the dogs after they have been rewarded. I was once present at the reading out of the numerous actions so recompensed by M. Brunetière, and I was never more deeply impressed by the splendid record of virtue, of unparalleled abnegation and generosity, among the French poor. The second Montyon prize is destined to reward the most useful moral book written during the year. There are also prizes destined to alleviate literary misfortunes, that is, unfortunate authors or their widows and families in trouble.