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
