Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/489

 Reviews and Notes 485 whatever regarding the type or aim of an organization from its use of the word academy or society, since there has apparently been no careful English usage to support the French idea of academy as given above. A real "academy" has never existed in England. "Even the actual incorporation of the British Academy in 1902, after suggestion and pressure from the Council of the Royal Society, though it aimed in part to represent philological scholarship in England at the meetings of the International Association of Academies, could do no more in this direction than to revive the acknowledgment that there never has been, and probably never can be, an authoritative academy of English language and let- ters" (p. 3). Efforts to found such an academy extend over a century of critical scholarship from Bolton to Swift. The uniform failure of these many efforts our author attributes in brief to a "lack of responsible native enthusiasm in such move- ments," of which the following statement may be taken as his explanation: "It is probably correct to say, in a general way, that the greater intellectual democracy of the English could not submit to such tyranny of trained taste; but more real reason for the failure of the academy idea in England is proba- bly to be found in the intellectual conditions which determined the particular nature of scholarly comity throughout this century, and which gave birth to the Royal Society itself. The Royal Society is as truly a coefficient of English intel- lectual interest in this period as the Academic Franchise is for France. Although at the first glance these two societies may seem to voice the same scholarly aims, no intellectual incentives could be more radically divergent than those which gave life to the two. The Academy owed its existence, under a nearly absolute political tyranny, to a demand for authority in matters of taste, the Royal Society responded to the growing outcry against everything savoring of scholastic authority, and stood as the expressed champion of the experimental philosophy of Bacon" (p. 41-2). As an explanation this seems not to go far enough, even granting the lack of space for real historical background due to the plan of the book. The English, given an outlet for their critical and creative energy, as they were, in the founding of new political institutions and in the development of individual freedom and responsibility activities which the Italian and Frenchman of the period could not possibly share were exhibiting a decidedly responsible enthusiasm for the establish- ment of canons of correctness in free political institutions. A deeper reason for the popular trend seems to the reviewer, however, to underlie the whole matter, a reason dealing not only with the experimental philosophy of Bacon but even