would plant on English soil an exotic as indigenous to Paris as it is unsuited to the atmosphere of English national life. Another critic—Macaulay, in his essay on the Royal Society of Literature,—takes a very different view of learned academies and their literary influences. It is in literary academies, he tells us, that "envy and faction exert the most extensive and pernicious influence." The history of the French Academy, in particular, has been "an uninterrupted record of servile compliances, paltry artifices, deadly quarrels, perfidious friendships." Governed by the court, the Sorbonne, the philosophers, "it was always equally powerful for evil and impotent for good"—sought to depress Corneille, long refused to notice Voltaire, and even under the superintendence of D'Alembert was the home of the basest intrigues. There is some exaggeration in this view; yet Macaulay expresses the national spirit of English literature. Local and individual independence from the control of any central corporation is the peculiar characteristic of English literature—an independence equally removed from the dictation of a tribunal like the French Academy, and that total absence of any literary centre which Schlegel and Calsabigi deplore.
Mr. Arnold's transference of the French centralism into the life of English literature is capable of its best defence from the standpoint of cosmopolitan culture. From this standpoint national centres like Paris and its Academy become the best substitute for a world-centre which differences of language and national character cannot permit. "Let us conceive the whole group of civilised nations," says Mr. Arnold,[1] "as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation bound to a joint action and working towards a
- ↑ Preface to Wordsworth’s Poems.
