Letter XXIV: On The Royal Society And Other Academies
The English had an Academy of Sciences many years before us, but then it is not under
such prudent regulations as ours, the only reason of which very possibly is, because it
was founded before the Academy of Paris; for had it been founded after, it would very
probably have adopted some of the sage laws of the former and improved upon others.
Two things, and those the most essential to man, are wanting in the Royal Society of
London, I mean rewards and laws. A seat in the Academy at Paris is a small but secure
fortune to a geometrician or a chemist; but this is so far from being the case at London,
that the several members of the Royal Society are at a continual, though indeed small
expense. Any man in England who declares himself a lover of the mathematics and natural
philosophy, and expresses an inclination to be a member of the Royal Society, is
immediately elected into it. But in France it is not enough that a man who aspires to the
honour of being a member of the Academy, and of receiving the royal stipend, has a love
for the sciences; he must at the same time be deeply skilled in them; and is obliged to
dispute the seat with competitors who are so much the more formidable as they are fired by
a principle of glory, by interest, by the difficulty itself, and by that inflexibility of
mind which is generally found in those who devote themselves to that pertinacious study,
the mathematics.
The Academy of Sciences is prudently confined to the study of Nature, and, indeed, this
is a field spacious enough for fifty or three-score persons to range in. That of London
mixes indiscriminately literature with physics; but methinks the founding an academy
merely for the polite arts is more judicious, as it prevents confusion, and the joining,
in some measure, of heterogeneals, such as a dissertation on the head-dresses of the Roman
ladies with a hundred or more new curves.
As there is very little order and regularity in the Royal Society, and not the least
encouragement; and that the Academy of Paris is on a quite different foot, it is no wonder
that our transactions are drawn up in a more just and beautiful manner than those of the
English. Soldiers who are under a regular discipline, and besides well paid, must
necessarily at last perform more glorious achievements than others who are mere
volunteers. It must indeed be confessed that the Royal Society boast their Newton, but
then he did not owe his knowledge and discoveries to that body; so far from it, that the
latter were intelligible to very few of his fellow members. A genius like that of Sir
Isaac belonged to all the academies in the world, because all had a thousand things to
learn of him.
The celebrated Dean Swift formed a design, in the latter end of the late Queen's reign,
to found an academy for the English tongue upon the model of that of the French. This
project was promoted by the late Earl of Oxford, Lord High Treasurer, and much more by the
Lord Bolingbroke, Secretary of State, who had the happy talent of speaking without
premeditation in the Parliament House with as much purity as Dean Swift wrote in his
closet, and who would have been the ornament and protector of that academy. Those only
would have been chosen members of it whose works will last as long as the English tongue,
such as Dean Swift, Mr. Prior, whom we saw here invested with a public character, and
whose fame in England is equal to that of La Fontaine in France; Mr. Pope, the English
Boileau, Mr. Congreve, who may be called their Moliere, and several other eminent persons
whose names I have forgot; all these would have raised the glory of that body to a great
height even in its infancy. But Queen Anne being snatched suddenly from the world, the
Whigs were resolved to ruin the protectors of the intended academy, a circumstance that
was of the most fatal consequence to polite literature. The members of this academy would
have had a very great advantage over those who first formed that of the French, for Swift,
Prior, Congreve, Dryden, Pope, Addison, &c. had fixed the English tongue by their
writings; whereas Chapelain, Colletet, Cassaigne, Faret, Perrin, Cotin, our first
academicians, were a disgrace to their country; and so much ridicule is now attached to
their very names, that if an author of some genius in this age had the misfortune to be
called Chapelain or Cotin, he would be under a necessity of changing his name.
One circumstance, to which the English Academy should especially have attended, is to
have prescribed to themselves occupations of a quite different kind from those with which
our academicians amuse themselves. A wit of this country asked me for the memoirs of the
French Academy. I answered, they have no memoirs, but have printed threescore or fourscore
volumes in quarto of compliments. The gentleman perused one or two of them, but without
being able to understand the style in which they were written; though he understood all
our good authors perfectly. "All," says he, "I see in these elegant
discourses is, that the member elect having assured the audience that his predecessor was
a great man, that Cardinal Richelieu was a very great man, that the Chancellor Seguier was
a pretty great man, that Louis XIV. was a more than great man, the director answers in the
very same strain, and adds, that the member elect may also be a sort of great man, and
that himself, in quality of director, must also have some share in this greatness."
The cause why all these academical discourses have unhappily done so little honour to
this body is evident enough. Vitium est temporis potius quam hominis (the fault is owing
to the age rather than to particular persons). It grew up insensibly into a custom for
every academician to repeat these eulogiums at his reception; it was laid down as a kind
of law that the public should be indulged from time to time in the sullen satisfaction of
yawning over these productions. If the reason should afterwards be sought, why the
greatest geniuses who have been incorporated into that body have sometimes made the worst
speeches, I answer, that it is wholly owing to a strong propension, the gentlemen in
question had to shine, and to display a thread-bare, worn-out subject in a new and
uncommon light. The necessity of saying something, the perplexity of having nothing to
say, and a desire of being witty, are three circumstances which alone are capable of
making even the greatest writer ridiculous. These gentlemen, not being able to strike out
any new thoughts, hunted after a new play of words, and delivered themselves without
thinking at all: in like manner as people who should seem to chew with great eagerness,
and make as though they were eating, at the same time that they were just starved.
It is a law in the French Academy, to publish all those discourses by which only they
are known, but they should rather make a law never to print any of them.
But the Academy of the Belles Lettres have a more prudent and more useful object, which
is, to present the public with a collection of transactions that abound with curious
researches and critiques. These transactions are already esteemed by foreigners; and it
were only to be wished that some subjects in them had been more thoroughly examined, and
that others had not been treated at all. As, for instance, we should have been very well
satisfied, had they omitted I know not what dissertation on the prerogative of the right
hand over the left; and some others, which, though not published under so ridiculous a
title, are yet written on subjects that are almost as frivolous and silly.
The Academy of Sciences, in such of their researches as are of a more difficult kind
and a more sensible use, embrace the knowledge of nature and the improvements of the arts.
We may presume that such profound, such uninterrupted pursuits as these, such exact
calculations, such refined discoveries, such extensive and exalted views, will, at last,
produce something that may prove of advantage to the universe. Hitherto, as we have
observed together, the most useful discoveries have been made in the most barbarous times.
One would conclude that the business of the most enlightened ages and the most learned
bodies, is, to argue and debate on things which were invented by ignorant people. We know
exactly the angle which the sail of a ship is to make with the keel in order to make its
sailing better; and yet Columbus discovered America without having the least idea of the
property of this angle: however, I am far from inferring from hence that we are to confine
ourselves merely to a blind practice, but happy it were, would naturalists and
geometricians unite, as much as possible, the practice with the theory.
Strange, but so it is, that those things which reflect the greatest honour on the human
mind are frequently of the least benefit to it! A man who understands the four fundamental
rules of arithmetic, aided by a little good sense, shall amass prodigious wealth in trade,
shall become a Sir Peter Delme, a Sir Richard Hopkins, a Sir Gilbert Heathcote, whilst a
poor algebraist spends his whole life in searching for astonishing properties and
relations in numbers, which at the same time are of no manner of use, and will not
acquaint him with the nature of exchanges. This is very nearly the case with most of the
arts: there is a certain point beyond which all researches serve to no other purpose than
merely to delight an inquisitive mind. Those ingenious and useless truths may be compared
to stars which, by being placed at too great a distance, cannot afford us the least light.
With regard to the French Academy, how great a service would they do to literature, to
the language, and the nation, if, instead of publishing a set of compliments annually,
they would give us new editions of the valuable works written in the age of Louis XIV.,
purged from the several errors of diction which are crept into them. There are many of
these errors in Corneille and Moliere, but those in La Fontaine are very numerous. Such as
could not be corrected might at least be pointed out. By this means, as all the Europeans
read those works, they would teach them our language in its utmost purity-which, by that
means, would be fixed to a lasting standard; and valuable French books being then printed
at the King's expense, would prove one of the most glorious monuments the nation could
boast. I have been told that Boileau formerly made this proposal, and that it has since
been revived by a gentleman eminent for his genius, his fine sense and just taste for
criticism; but this thought has met with the fate of many useful projects, of being
applauded and neglected.
