ation of the Fine Arts. I suppose you
can express ideas in painting which you cannot express in sculpture; and
the more an artist is of a painter, the less he is likely to be of a
sculptor. The more he commits his genius to the methods and conditions of
his own art, the less he will be able to throw himself into the
circumstances of another. Is the genius of Fra Angelico, of Francia, or of
Raffaelle disparaged by the fact that he was able to do that in colours
which no man that ever lived, which no Angel, could achieve in wood? Each
of the Fine Arts has its own subject-matter; from the nature of the case
you can do in one what you cannot do in another; you can do in painting
what you cannot do in carving; you can do in oils what you cannot do in
fresco; you can do in marble what you cannot do in ivory; you can do in
wax what you cannot do in bronze. Then, I repeat, applying this to the
case of languages, why should not genius be able to do in Greek what it
cannot do in Latin? and why are its Greek and Latin works defective
because they will not turn into English? That genius, of which we are
speaking, did not make English; it did not make all languages, present,
past, and future; it did not make the laws of _any_ language: why is it to
be judged of by that in which it had no part, over which it has no
control?

8.

And now we are naturally brought on to our third point, which is on the
characteristics of Holy Scripture as compared with profane literature.
Hitherto we have been concerned with the doctrine of these writers, viz.,
that style is an _extra_, that it is a mere artifice, and that hence it
cannot be translated; now we come to their fact, viz., that Scripture has
no such artificial style, and that Scripture can easily be translated.
Surely their fact is as untenable as their doctrine.

Scripture easy of translation! then why have there been so few good
translators? why is it that there has been such great difficulty in
combining the two necessary qualities, fidelity to the original and purity
in the adopted vernacular? why is it that the authorized versions of the
Church are often so inferior to the original as compositions, except that
the Church is bound above all things to see that the version is
doctrinally correct, and in a difficult problem is obliged to put up with
defects in what is of secondary importance, provided she secure what is of
first? If it were so easy to transfer the beauty of the ori