of all authority, prescription, and routine,—­the fullest room to expand as it will.  Therefore a nation whose chief spiritual characteristic is energy will not be very apt to set up, in intellectual matters, a fixed standard, an authority, like an academy.  By this it certainly escapes certain real inconveniences and dangers; and it can at the same time, as we have seen, reach undeniably splendid heights in poetry and science.

On the other hand, some of the requisites of intellectual work are specially the affair of quickness of mind and flexibility of intelligence.  The form, the method of evolution, the precision, the proportions, the relations of the parts to the whole, in an intellectual work, depend mainly upon them.  And these are the elements of an intellectual work which are really most communicable from it, which can most be learned and adopted from it, which have therefore the greatest effect upon the intellectual performance of others.  Even in poetry these requisites are very important; and the poetry of a nation not eminent for the gifts on which they depend, will more or less suffer by this shortcoming.  In poetry, however, they are after all secondary, and energy is the first thing; but in prose they are of first-rate importance.  In its prose literature, therefore, and in the routine of intellectual work generally, a nation with no particular gifts for these will not be so successful.  These are what, as I have said, can to a certain degree be learned and appropriated, while the free activity of genius cannot.  Academies consecrate and maintain them, and therefore a nation with an eminent turn for them naturally establishes academies.  So far as routine and authority tend to embarrass energy and inventive genius, academies may be said to be obstructive to energy and inventive genius, and to this extent to the human spirit’s general advance.  But then this evil is so much compensated by the propagation, on a large scale, of the mental aptitudes and demands which an open mind and a flexible intelligence naturally engender, genius itself in the long run so greatly finds its account in this propagation, and bodies like the French Academy have such power for promoting it, that the general advance of the human spirit is perhaps, on the whole, rather furthered than impeded by their existence.

How much greater is our nation in poetry than prose! how much better, in general, do the productions of its spirit show in the qualities of genius than in the qualities of intelligence!  One may constantly remark this in the work of individuals:  how much more striking, in general, does any Englishman—­of some vigor of mind, but by no means a poet—­seem in his verse than in his prose!  His verse partly suffers from his not being really a poet, partly no doubt from the very same defects which impair his prose, and he cannot express himself with thorough success in it, but how much more powerful a personage does he appear in it, by dint of feeling and of originality