What the Academy really remains is the home of tradition. Here the main thing is not intellect, but distinction; not genius, but the consummate perfection of expression. Urbanity is its hall-mark, and what it most dreads in originality is the abuse of novelty. You may have little to say; only see that your way of saying it cannot be bettered. It has been blamed for excluding from its ranks so much real genius; and this blame would, of course, be earned by it if its object were so much the recognition of genius as the welcome to its midst of a congenial spirit. Gautier, with his long hair and red waistcoat, was not a congenial spirit, though if finish of style, charm, urbanity, and exquisite grace are accounted academical graces, there never was a writer to whom the term “born academician” was more applicable. But the Academy always sees that there is a bulldog on the threshold to show his teeth to the “masters” of to-morrow; a pedagogue to teach the aspirants to academical honours how they should write and think, and what small beer their literary pretensions are regarded by the Forty Immortals he speaks for so arrogantly. The bulldog of the hour is M. Brunetière. This unamiable pedant, the enemy of individualism and youth, the enemy of all things not hall-marked with his pontifical approval, has announced that Zola can enter the Academy only across his dead body. He has many hatreds to balance the immensity of his single love and admiration, the Eagle of Meaux, but none that can compare with his implacable hostility to Zola. And yet this academical pontiff, who disapproved of Daudet, wiped out the Naturalists, shot bilious blame at M. Jules Lemaître (that was before this amiable individual sought ridicule in the famous Ligue de la Patrie Française, a sentiment he, MM. Coppée, and Barrès were the first Frenchmen of their time to discover) and at Anatole France, whose shoe-strings he is not fit to tie, allows M. Henri Lavedan to sit beside him, and does not repudiate _Le Vieux Marcheur_.