Letters on England [53]
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