“Gracious!  Don’t start the argument again!” entreated Connie, vivacious again, though her eyes were red.  “You’ll never convert Ford or George or Harry here.  They’ll always have some explanation.  Puritanism crushed the artistic sense out of the English, and they are only getting it back slowly by a judicious crossing with other peoples who weren’t Puritanised into Philistinism.  England has no national music.  She has no national painting.  She has no national sculpture.  She has to borrow and adapt everything from the Continent.  I nearly said she has no art at all.”

“Here, I say,” protested Ford.  “Aren’t you coming it a little too strong?  You’ve got the floor, Geisner.  I’ve heard you stand up for English Art.  Stand up now, won’t you?”

“Does it need standing up for?” asked Geisner.  “Why, Connie doesn’t forget that Puritanism with all its faults was in its day a religious movement, that is an emotional fervour, a veritable poem.  That the Puritan cut love-locks off, wore drab, smashed painted windows and suppressed instrumental music in churches, is no proof of their being utterly inartistic.  Their art-sense would simply find vent and expression in other directions if it existed strongly enough.  And what do we find?  This, that the Puritan period produced two of the masterpieces of English Art—­Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’  As an absolute master of English, of sentences rolling magnificently in great waves of melodious sound, trenchant in every syllable, not to be equalled even by Shakespeare himself, Milton stands out like a giant.  As for Bunyan, the Englishman who has never read ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ does not know his mother tongue.”

“Oh!  Of course, we all admit English letters,” interjected Connie.

“Do we?” answered Geisner, warming with his theme.  “I’m not so sure of that; else, why should English people themselves put forward claims to excellencies which their nation has not got, and why should others dub them inartistic because of certain things lacking in the national arts?  As far as music goes what has France got if you take away the Marseillaise?  It is Germany, the kin of the English, which has the modern music.  France has painting, England has literature and poetry—­in that she leads the whole world.”

“Still, to-day!  How about Russia?  How about France even—­Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Ohnet, a dozen more?”

“Still!  Ay, still and ever!  Will these men live as the English writers live, think you?  Look back a thousand years and see English growing, see how it comes to be the king of languages, destined, if civilisation lasts, to be the one language of the civilised world.  There, in the Viking age, the English sweep the seas, great burly brutes, as Taine shows them to us, gorging on half-raw meat, swilling huge draughts of ale, lounging naked by the sedgy brooks under the mist-softened sun that cannot brown their fair pink bodies, until hunger drives them forth to foray; drinking and fighting and feasting and shouting and loving as Odin loved Frega.  And the most honoured of all was the singer who sang in heroic verse of their battling and their love-making and their hunting.  English was conceived then, and it was worthy conceiving.”