t 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."

"Other nations have literature," maintained Connie.

"What other living nations?" demanded Geisner. "Look at English! An
endless list, such as surely before the world never saw. You cannot even
name them all. Spencer and Chaucer living still. Shakespeare, whoever he
was, immortal for all time, dimming like a noontide sun a galaxy of stars
that to other nations would be suns indeed! Take Marlow, Beaumont and
Fletcher, a dozen playwrights! The Bible, an imperishable monument of the
people's English! Milton, Bunyan and Baxter, Wycherly and his fellows!
Pope, Ben Johnson, Swift, Goldsmith, Junius, Burke, Sheridan! Scott and
Byron, De Quincey, Shelley, Lamb, Chatterton! Moors and Burns wrote in
English too! Look at Wordsworth, Dickens, George Eliott, Swinburne,
Tennyson, the Brontes! There are gems upon gems in the second class
writers, books that in other countries would make the writer immortal.
Over the sea, in America, Poe, Whittier, Bret Harte, Longfellow, Emerson,
Whitman. Here in Australia, the seed springing up! Even in South Africa,
that Olive Schreiner writing like one inspired. By heavens! There are
moments when I feel it must be a proud thing to be an