has got that for which we prize and recommend culture; he has got
that which at the present moment we seek culture that it may give us.
This inward operation is the very life and essence of culture, as we
conceive it.

Nevertheless, it is not easy so to frame one's discourse concerning
the operation of culture, as to avoid giving frequent occasion to a
misunderstanding whereby the essential inwardness of the [x]
operation is lost sight of. We are supposed, when we criticise by
the help of culture some imperfect doing or other, to have in our eye
some well-known rival plan of doing, which we want to serve and
recommend. Thus, for instance, because I have freely pointed out the
dangers and inconveniences to which our literature is exposed in the
absence of any centre of taste and authority like the French Academy,
it is constantly said that I want to introduce here in England an
institution like the French Academy. I have indeed expressly
declared that I wanted no such thing; but let us notice how it is
just our worship of machinery, and of external doing, which leads to
this charge being brought; and how the inwardness of culture makes us
seize, for watching and cure, the faults to which our want of an
Academy inclines us, and yet prevents us from trusting to an arm of
flesh, as the Puritans say,--from blindly flying to this outward
machinery of an Academy, in order to help ourselves. For the very
same culture and free inward play of thought which shows us how the
Corinthian style, or the whimsies about the One Primeval Language,
are generated and strengthened in the absence of an [xi] Academy,
shows us, too, how little any Academy, such as we should be likely to
get, would cure them. Every one who knows the characteristics of our
national life, and the tendencies so fully discussed in the following
pages, knows exactly what an English Academy would be like. One can