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 threescore
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 elogiums at his reception; it was laid down
as a kind of law that the public should be indulged from time to time 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
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 other useful projects, of being
applauded and neglected.