sometimes one of them would come to me, with the air of doing me a favour (as indeed he was) and say:  “Look here.  Do you want to buy something good, at simply no price at all?” And I became the possessor of a beautiful sketch by Ospovat, while the intermediary went off with a look on his face as if saying:  “Consider yourself lucky, my boy!” I used even to get Ospovat’s opinions on my books, now and then very severe.  I wanted to meet him.  But I never could.  The youths used to murmur:  “Oh!  It’s no use you meeting him.”  They were afraid he was not spectacular enough.  Or they desired to keep him to themselves, like a precious pearl.  I pictured him as very frail, and very positive in a quiet way.  He was only about thirty when he died last week.

FRENCH AND BRITISH ACADEMIES

[21 Jan. ’09]

Although we know in our hearts that the French Academy is a foolish institution, designed and kept up for the encouragement of mediocrity, correct syntax, and the status quo, we still, also in our hearts, admire it and watch its mutations with the respect which we always give to foreign phenomena and usually withold from phenomena British.  The last elected member is M. Francis Charmes.  His sole title to be an Academician is that he directs La Revue des Deux Mondes, which pays good prices to Academic contributors.  And this is, of course, a very good title.  Even his official “welcomer,” M. Henry Houssaye, did not assert that M. Charmes had ever written anything more important or less mortal than leaders and paragraphs in the Journal des Debats.  M. Henry Houssaye was himself once a journalist.  But he thought better of that, and became a historian.  He has written one or two volumes which, without being unreadable, have achieved immense popularity.  Stevenson used to delve in them for matter suitable to his romances.  The French Academy now contains pretty nearly everything except first-class literary artists.  Anatole France is a first-class literary artist and an Academician; but he makes a point of never going near the Academy.  Perhaps the best writer among “devout” Academicians is Maurice Barres.  Unhappily his comic-opera politics prove that in attempting Parnassus he mistook his mountain.  Primrose Hill would have been more in his line.  Still, he wrote “Le Jardin de Berenice”:  a novel which I am afraid to read again lest I should fail to recapture the first fine careless rapture it gave me.

* * * * *

Personally, I think our British Academy is a far more brilliant affair than the French.  There is no nonsense about it.  At least very little, except Mr. Balfour.  I believe, from inductive processes of thought, that when Mr. Balfour gets into his room of a night he locks the door—­and smiles.  Not the urbane smile that fascinates and undoes even Radical journalists—­quite another smile.