Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/195

 appas émérites, à faire courber toutes les têtes anglaises devant cette Dulcinée à quarante. Il est l'amant fougueux du bon sens, l'apôtre échauffé de la froide raison, l'avocat furibond du goût sain." This is not a fair or clear judgment; it is indigested and violent and deformed in expression; but it shows as in a cracked and blurred mirror the reflection thrown upon other minds by Mr. Arnold's act of homage in the outer courts of the Philistine temple: for thither he has unwittingly turned, and there has bent his knee, as no Frenchman could have done who was not a Philistine born and baptised and branded to the bone with the signet of the sons of Dagon. We may grant that the real office of an Academy should be—what the nominal office of this Academy is—culture and perfection of intelligence, elevation of the general standard of work, the average of mind and taste and sense which precludes absurdity or aberration and ensures something of care and conscience among the craftsmen of literature. Greater work an ideal Academy could hardly undertake, for greater work would require the vivid and personal advent of genius; and that, I presume, it could hardly undertake to supply. But has the actual Academy done this? Whom has it controlled, whom has it impelled, who but for such influence would either have gone wrong or failed to go right? whom at least among men really memorable and precious? Has it constantly done homage to the best? has it constantly rejected or rebuked the worst? Is it to the Academy that we owe the sound judgment, taste, temperance of the French prose classics whom Mr. Arnold eloquently extols? Did not the great Richelieu, its founder, set in motion