The existing British Academy of Learning may or may not be a dignified and serious institution.  I do not know.  But I see no reason why it should not be.  It has not interested the public, and it never will.  Advertisement does not enter into it to any appreciable extent.  Moreover, it is much more difficult to be a dilettante of learning than a dilettante of letters.  You are sooner found out.  Further, learning can be organized, and organized with advantage.  Creative art cannot.  All artistic academies are bad.  The one real use of an artistic academy is to advertise the art which it represents, to cause the excellent public to think and chatter about that art and to support it by buying specimens of it.  The Royal Academy has admirably succeeded in this business, as may be seen at Burlington Gardens any afternoon in the season.  But it has succeeded at the price of making itself grotesque and vicious; and it retards, though of course it cannot stop, the progress of graphic art.  Certain arts are in need of advertisement.  For example, sculpture.  An Academy of Sculpture might, just now, do some good and little harm.  But literature is in no need of advertisement in this country.  It is advertised more than all the others arts put together.  It includes the theatre.  It is advertised to death.  Be sure that if it really did stand in need of advertisement, no dilettante would have twice looked at it.  The one point which interests me about the proposed academy is whether uniforms are comprised in the scheme.

UNFINISHED PERUSALS

[25 Aug. ’10]

One of the moral advantages of not being a regular professional, labelled, literary critic is that when one has been unable to read a book to the end, one may admit the same cheerfully.  It often happens to the professional critic not to be able to finish a book, but of course he must hide the weakness, for it is his business to get to the end of books whether they weary him or not.  It is as much his living to finish reading a book as it is mine to finish writing a book.  Twice lately I have got ignominiously “stuck” in novels, and in each case I particularly regretted the sad breakdown.  Gabriele d’Annunzio’s “Forse che si forse che no” has been my undoing.  I began it in the French version by Donatella Cross (Calmann-Levy, 3 fr. 50), and I began it with joy and hope.  The translation, by the way, is very good.  Whatever mountebank tricks d’Annunzio may play as a human being, he has undoubtedly written some very great works.  He is an intensely original artist.  You may sometimes think him silly, foppish, extravagant, or even caddish (as in “Il Fuoco"), but you have to admit that the English notions of what constitutes extravagance or caddishness are by no means universally held.  And anyhow you have to admit that here is a man who really holds an attitude towards life, who is steeped in the sense of style, and who has a superb passion for beauty.  Some