nd still slept in ignorance of
her, they gave all up for her and in darkness died. Only they knew that
there was no other way, that unless each man of himself dared to raise
the chant and march forward alone, if need be, Liberty could never be.

"Well," said Geisner, coming unconcernedly into the circle where they sat
in dead silence. "Don't you think the last rendering is the best, and
isn't it the best simply because it expresses the composer's idea in the
particular phase that we feel most at this present time?"

"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 no