You know the French;—­a little more Biblism, one may take leave to say, would do them no harm.  But an audience like this—­and here, as I said, is the advantage of an audience like this—­will have no difficulty in admitting the amount of truth which there is in the Frenchman’s picture.  It is the picture of a class which, driven by its sense for the power of conduct, in the beginning of the seventeenth century entered,—­as I have more than once said, and as I may more than once have occasion in future to say,—­entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned upon its spirit there for two hundred years.[471] They did not know, good and earnest people as they were, that to the building up of human life there belong all those other powers also,—­the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners.  And something, by what they became, they gained, and the whole nation with them; they deepened and fixed for this nation the sense of conduct.  But they created a type of life and manners, of which they themselves, indeed, are slow to recognize the faults, but which is fatally condemned by its hideousness, its immense ennui, and against which the instinct of self-preservation in humanity rebels.

Partisans fight against facts in vain.  Mr. Goldwin Smith,[472] a writer of eloquence and power, although too prone to acerbity, is a partisan of the Puritans, and of the nonconformists who are the special inheritors of the Puritan tradition.  He angrily resents the imputation upon that Puritan type of life, by which the life of our serious middle class has been formed, that it was doomed to hideousness, to immense ennui.  He protests that it had beauty, amenity, accomplishment.  Let us go to facts.  Charles the First, who, with all his faults, had the just idea that art and letters are great civilizers, made, as you know, a famous collection of pictures,—­our first National Gallery.  It was, I suppose, the best collection at that time north of the Alps.  It contained nine Raphaels, eleven Correggios, twenty-eight Titians.  What became of that collection?  The journals of the House of Commons will tell you.  There you may see the Puritan Parliament disposing of this Whitehall or York House collection as follows:  “Ordered, that all such pictures and statues there as are without any superstition, shall be forthwith sold....  Ordered, that all such pictures there as have the representation of the Second Person in the Trinity upon them, shall be forthwith burnt.  Ordered, that all such pictures there as have the representation of the Virgin Mary upon them, shall be forthwith burnt.”  There we have the weak side of our parliamentary government and our serious middle class.  We are incapable of sending Mr. Gladstone to be tried at the Old Bailey because he proclaims his antipathy to Lord Beaconsfield.  A majority in our House of Commons is incapable of hailing, with frantic laughter and applause, a string of indecent jests against Christianity and its Founder.  But we are not, or were not incapable of producing a Parliament which burns or sells the masterpieces of Italian art.  And one may surely say of such a Puritan Parliament, and of those who determine its line for it, that they had not the spirit of beauty.