element in our literature debase and destroy the Puritan. The fervent and natural imagery of the Elizabethan poets degenerated into the far-fetched analogies and uncouth conceits of the so-called Metaphysical School. As Taine says: "With Carew, Suckling, and Herrick, prettiness takes the place of the beautiful," and "side by side with prettiness comes affectation; it is the second mark of decadence."

The remedy for these evils lay in literature itself. As the church was reformed by the northern earnestness which in its early days it had incorporated from the Teutonic heathen, so was our English literature to be purified by the revival of its ancient Saxon spirit of Truth. This showed itself, in its severest form, in the Puritanism of the second period, the Puritanism of Cromwell and his Ironsides. As in the strong arm and firm strokes with which Luther nailed his theses to the church door we see the spirit of old Thor, and hear the ringing of his hammer, Miölner the Mighty, so in those stern reformers whose surgery cut to the bone of our decaying literature, we see the earnestness of their Saxon ancestors, the spirit of King Alfred the Truth-teller, come to life again.

Of these reformers, the firmest, yet tenderest, was Milton. Like Spenser, both classic and Christian, both Pagan and Puritan, he was greater than Spenser in that he drew his classic inspiration directly from the Greek tragedians instead of through Italian romanticists, and greater, furthermore, in that his Puritanism was tempered in the white heat of civil debate and war. Literature would have derived untold benefits had the " organ voice of England" given to it only Paradise Lost, and who can reckon its added debts to those prose pamphlets, wherein, like trumpet tones, Milton champions the cause of civil, domestic, and religious liberty?

Then came Bunyan, sturdiest Puritan of them all! Almost Hebraic in his sublime simplicity, he has taught Hellenic culture the great lesson that, no matter how sim

ply arrayed, Truth is ever beautiful, ay, and often the grander for very lack of ornament. With such a belief as they possessed, men of Bunyan's stamp could not help rising to heroic greatness. So terribly in earnest about life and death and their souls' salvation, they have infused into our language and literature such a spirit of seriousness as, please God, shall never die.

The lineal descendant of Bunyan's faith is modern devotion to principle, and Carlyle sounds its watch-word in his

sentence

"Truth is our divinity."

This is the Puritanism which must form the basis of our American literature. It is devotion to moral principles that has made us a great nation; that has destroyed slavery; and that is, perhaps with wrong methods, but certainly with earnest intentions, striving to root out the evil of intoxication from our midst. These great questions have made in the past, and cannot help creating in the future, a vigorous American literature.

Speaking of the late Rebellion, Colonel Higginson says: "As 'the Puritan has triumphed' in this stern contest, so must the Puritan triumph in the more graceful emulations that are to come, but it must be the Puritanism of Milton, not of Cromwell only. The invigorating air of great moral principles must breathe through all our literature. It is the expanding spirit of the seventeenth century by which we must conquer now."

Well does the same author answer Matthew Arnold's criticism that "the Puritan spirit in America was essentially hostile to literature and art," by saying: "The Puritan life was only historically inconsistent with culture; there was no logical antagonism. Indeed, that life had in it much that was congenial to art in its enthusiasm and its truthfulness. Take these Puritan traits and employ them in a more genial sphere; add intellectual training and sunny faith, and you have a soil suited to art above all others."

This Puritanism is our defence against the schools of Arnold and Swinburne, the classic and the sensuous Pagans of the nineteenth century. If they speak of the delights of material beauty, we can turn to Spenser and his praises of the inner and spiritual. If they boast of their unbounded license, we can glory in the liberty of Milton, harmonious alike with God's laws and man's. If they tempt us to waste our lives in laughter and song, we can listen to Carlyle, thundering the warning of Scripture, "Know thou that for all these things, God will bring thee unto judgment!" And if they say, "Come with us, away from the common herd, out of this age of strife, back into the glorious days of old, to Grecian beauty of style and sweep of soul,” we can reply, "Bunyan's style is good enough for us, and we will cast our lot with his readers, with the plain, blunt men for whom the truest and most lovable orators and poets have ever spoken and sung. We will take Lincoln and Lowell and Whittier, and you may have Rossetti and Wilde and Whitman. When in future ages corruption shall have seized your fleshly beauty, and your sensuousness shall seem as loathsome to men as the licentiousness of the Restoration is to us, then shall the people remember, as they remember the incorruptible virtues of departed friends, the graces of spirituality, of earnestness, of liberty, of simplicity, and of moral purpose, the gifts which Puritanism has given to literature."

CULTURE AND CONSERVATISM.

BAIRD PRIZE ORATION, BY GEO. T. EDDY, '86.

THIS is an age of universal questioning. In nature, animate and inanimate, and in the sphere of human activity as well, men are seeking causes, reasons, and laws. All things are under challenge to give account of themselves. Suspicion is prevalent; doubt as to the reality of things,

the existence of mind, the possibility of knowledge. Modern criticism finds no holy ground, nothing too sacred for its closest scrutiny. It need occasion no surprise, then, that culture is forced to assume the attitude of defence. Men of fame and influence are its strenuous assailants. They allege that it fetters progress with the weight of antiquity; they term it "a safe and elegant imbecility," which is only too glad to avoid exposure by seclusion from the world. They say that, wrapped in the mantle of selfcomplacent pride, it averts the glance from the unpleasant spectacle of humanity belonging to an alien class forsaken and in anguish.

If this be the real outcome of our culture, judgment against it cannot be too swift or too severe. What answer do its advocates make to the accusation? What do they claim as its characteristics and results? First, it aims at a symmetrical and continuous development of all man's powers, moral as well as intellectual. It is eager for all knowledge, but values chiefly that which relates to human thought and endeavor. Information, it holds, to avail, must be crystallized into wisdom. It loves and cherishes in everything, the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Again, culture at least claims to be altruistic. In the words of Matthew Arnold, it is "possessed by a passion for doing good." The truths to which it attains, universal as they are in their application and value, must be proclaimed as far as possible to every individual, be he lowly or exalted. The cloistered monk is no longer the ideal scholar. That ideal finds its true expression in him who seeks the highest discipline and enlightenment, to the end that, in imitation of his Master, he may give sustenance and sympathy to some hungry, despairing soul.

But the main point at issue is still untouched; the question recurs: Is not culture conservative in its tendency? And the answer must be - Yes; but only in the highest sense of the term. To be stupidly tenacious of whatever

is old, to oppose every innovation, to prefer ease to progress, this is not true conservatism. That consists, says one of America's foremost scholars, in "holding together the things of the past which the experience of the ages has proved to be worth conserving. It discriminates between the permanent and the transient in human history, traces through the centuries the line of progress, and rejoices in every step that is forward toward the goal."

There are two ways in which this conservatism finds expression. Truths that have been discovered are fundamental and necessary to those that shall be discovered. Cut off the scientists, the philosophers, from all connection with the past and obligation to it, and they are involved in a maze of doubt and perplexity. Their largest, if not their only, task is to secure deductions from the facts, to combine into orderly structures the materials which others have gathered for them long before.

But if it were possible, the student is more indebted to his intellectual ancestors for their methods than for their direct attainments. It is his privilege and delight to join the hallowed company of the sages and philosophers, the prophets and poets of all ages and all climes, to listen to their admonitions for his guidance in the pursuit of knowledge, to follow out the course in which they were striving. They esteemed Truth above all else beside, ever sought it in nature and man, ever worshipped it in God. If their example and counsels be obeyed, the onward movement of mankind, far from being impeded, will take on a fuller volume and a stronger sweep.

The value of conservative culture is especially manifest in the spheres of philosophical and moral thought, and of national and individual life. With what computations will the science of sciences estimate its indebtedness to Socrates and Plato? Who shall weigh the influence of Aristotle and Bacon? The great truths they discovered sway with immortal potency the minds of thoughtful men; even