pained:  “Yes, he’s written a very remarkable novel, but he doesn’t know how to eat an artichoke.”  They would be higher than the angels were it not for the fact that, in art, they are exquisitely and perfectly footling.  They cannot believe this, the public cannot believe it.  Nevertheless, every artist knows it to be true.  They have never done anything themselves except fuss around.

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As for us, we are their hobby.  And since unoriginality is their most striking characteristic, some of us are occasionally pretty nearly hobbied to extinction by them.  In every generation they select some artist, usually for reasons quite unconnected with art, and put him exceedingly high up in a niche by himself.  And when you name his name you must hush your voice, and discussion ends.  Thus in the present generation, in letters, they have selected Joseph Conrad, a great artist, but not the only artist on the island.  When Conrad is mentioned they say, “Ah, Conrad!” and bow the head.  And in the list, compiled presumably to represent what is finest in English literature at an epoch when the novel is admittedly paramount, there are half a dozen of everything except novelists.  There is only one practising novelist, and he is not an Englishman.  I said a moment ago that the most striking characteristic of the dilettanti is unoriginality.  But possibly a serene unhumorousness runs it close.

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The master-thought at the bottom of this scheme is not an Academy of British Letters for literary artists, but an Academy of British Letters for literary dilettanti.  A few genuine artists, if the scheme blossoms, will undoubtedly be found in it.  But that will be an accident.  Some of the more decorative dilettanti have had a vision of themselves as academicians.  Hence the proposal for an academy.  In the public mind dilettanti are apt to be confused with artists.  Indeed, the greater the artist, the more likely the excellent public is to regard him as a sort of inferior and unserious barbaric dilettante. (Fortunately posterity does not make these mistakes.) A genuine original artist is bound to make a sad spectacle of himself in an academy.  Knowing this, Anatole France, the greatest man in the Academie Francaise, never goes near the sittings.  He has got from the institution all that advantage of advertisement which he was legitimately entitled to get, and he has no further use for the Academie Francaise.  His contempt for it as an artist is not concealed.  What can academicians do except put on a uniform and make eulogistic discourses to each other under the eyes of fashionably-attired American female tourists?  The Authors’ Society does more practical good for the art of literature in a year than an Academy of Letters could do in forty years.

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