PURITANISM AND CULTURE.

Evening Post, Volume LXX, Issue 37, 12 August 1905, Page 13

PURITANISM AND CULTURE.

•♦ A -writer in the Chuich of England League Gazette says:-,"Those who assert that Puritanism and culture are opposed, have, if we except the Puritan hostility to the drama, very little evidence to offer. Indeed one might say with truth that the current notion of a Puritan as a sour and morose kill-joy who hated and distrusted the amenities and graces of the intellectual life amid •which culture moves so freely and joyously, is, to one who knows what the Puritans really were, an almost unrecognisable caricature. . . . Colonel Hutchinson was not an isolated instance of a cultured Puritan. Cromwell himself saved for the nation such pictuies as Raphael's cartoons and Mantegna's 1 .Triumph of Ceesar,' which Charles 11. was quite willing to sell. His chaplain, Peter Sterry, was a discriminating admirer of Titian and Vandyke. It was of a Puritan divine, Thomas Young, that Milton afterwards wrote: 'First under his guidance I explored the recesses of the Muses, and beheld tho sacred green spots of the cleft summits of Parnassus, and quaffed the Pierian cups, and, Clio favouring me, thrice sprinkled my joyous mouth with Castalian wine.' And yet in his latest volume, Mr. Sidney Lee tells us that Puritanism was, in fact, a reactionary niovement against the delights in things of tho sense which the study of ancient literature fostered. Let us, as the French say, distinguish. There was certainly an attitude towards the delights in things of the sense against which Puritanism protested good right. The orgio of vice which burst forth under the Restoration might have shown itself earlier had not the Puritan temper held it in check. And it is worth noticing that when tho graver spirits, those most imbued with high seriousness, abandoned the drama, it began to decay in spite of all the efforts of the Court party. The true explanation of the prevailing opinion that Puritanism is the enemy of culture seems to lie in the fact that mankind are unwilling to admit that those who have attained high eminence ;n; n one field of activity should have attained to high eminence in another. . . The truth is that many in the present age appear to imagine that culture consists in building a neat, intellectual hothouse where a few delicate and exotic literary blossoms may be carefully tended. Some strive to attain it by drilling themselves into an admiration of tho deondent school of French poets, others by a studious perusal of the intellectual contortions of Mr. George Bernard Shaw and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, others again by exclusive attention to literary form, and an ignoring of all that the writer wishes to express. But if culture is nothintj less than the developing in its highest capacity of the many sides uf man's nature — and its most enlightened advocates have understood it as nothing loss — then such persons could do better to seek it in the open air, amid those mighty and age-lasting trees which tako root and flourish in the soil of vigorous national life. How t>reat a part Puritanism plays in nourishinc; them, even in the nineteenth century, may be seen by trying to> imagine what would be left of Wordsworth, of Browning, of Scott, or of Girlyle, were the sense of duty and thirst after righteousness uhich they derived {rom Puritanism eliminated from their work. Even Matthew Arnold himself, hostile to Puritanism as he was, owed more than he knew fco the fact that Arnold of Rugby was his father."

Miss Skinpenny: "This 'ere cheap butler ain't fit to eat." Mrs. S. : "No, it ain't. Kuti into Mrs. Goodsoul's and borrow a pound. She always has good bulter — the highest priced in the market. Tell her we'll pay her back to-morrow." Miss S. : "Goin' to git fome now butter to-monow?" Mrs. S. ; "No; we'll pay her with thia "