The upheaval against optimism and conformity is pretty general to-day among the thinking classes in the United States. Protests, inquiries and criticisms appear on all sides. If we believe them, American citizens have been cheated of their rights to happiness as promised in the American Constitution. But the fight among them is not so much with the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as with the official scapegoat, Puritanism. As a collective and national state of mind, Puritanism can be traced far back in American traditions and literature. Before indicting it, we must not fail to see its good points, and it had many. Far from being in itself adverse to all æsthetics, as its American critics would have us believe, Puritanism was in the past a literary incentive of the first order. Its tragic conception of life is much more artistic than the dull optimism of the masses. No art is possible without pessimism. Art in its essence is a challenge to life. Puritanism was the only moral and religious system, outside Catholicism, which invented a mythology and a symbolism in the modern times. It inspired the immortal epic of Milton. It gave their quaint flavor even to Jonathan Edwards’ sermons and the “Magnalia” of Cotton Mather. No true road to salvation can ignore the pits of human wickedness. The fantastic elements in Hawthorne and Poe were largely borrowed from the demonology of the Puritan divines. Puritanism believed in the devil. It was a tremendous source of religious emotions. It fed the sense of the supernatural which is to-day practically extinct in the American churches. It favored the growth of mysticism and of the poetic faculties. It enhanced the love of solitude. It shunned comfort and emphasized the military and rugged aspects of life. It was friendly to nature and not adverse to the call of the wild. It pondered over the ominous problems of life, death, grace and responsibility. It inclined toward simple life, intimacy with the humble and familiar aspects of life. This Puritan type of mind has been illustrated by some of the most intellectual leaders of America, Emerson, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, William Vaughn Moody, Robert Frost, Robinson. Puritanism was a synonym for restraint, poverty, abnegation, depth of conscience and thought, qualities sorely needed in our present state of civilization. We owe to it the sense of the Infinite in the humblest objects and amidst the most trivial circumstances of our life, what Maeterlinck called, after Emerson, the sense of “the familiar sublime.” And let us not forget those forms of inhibited irony which gave birth to American humor.