rse unrhymed; he
measured these lines out with exquisite cadences. The object of
our simple sentence includes all these, and this much beside:
that he wrote the total poem and made it what it is. Nor can that
object be fully understood--literature being, ever and always, so
personal a thing--until we understand the subject, John Milton--
what manner of man he was, and how on earth, being such a man, he
contrived to do it. We shall never _quite_ know that: but it is
important we should get as near as we can.

Of the Bible this is yet more evident, it being a translation.
Isaiah did not write the cadences of his prophecies, as we
ordinary men of this country know them: Christ did not speak the
cadences of the Parables or of the Sermon on the Mount, as we
know them. These have been supplied by the translators. By all
means let us study them and learn to delight in them; but Christ
did not suffer for his cadences, still less for the cadences
invented by Englishmen almost 1600 years later; and Englishmen
who went to the stake did not die for these cadences. They were
Lollards and Reformers who lived too soon to have heard them;
they were Catholics of the `old profession' who had either never
heard or, having heard, abhorred them. These men were cheerful to
die for the _meaning_ of the Word and for its _authorship_--
because it was spoken by Christ.

III

There is in fact, Gentlemen, no such thing as 'mere literature.'
Pedants have coined that contemptuous term to express a
figmentary concept of their own imagination or--to be more
accurate, an hallucination of wrath--having about as much
likeness to a _vera causa_ as had the doll which (if you
remember) Maggie Tulliver used to beat in the garret whenever,
poor child, the world went wrong with her somehow. The thoughts,
actions and passions of men became literature by the simple but
difficult process of being recorded in memorable speech; but in
that process neither the real thing recorded nor the author is
evacuated. _Belles lettres, Fine Art_ are odious terms, for which
no clean-thinking man has any use. There is no such thing in the
world as _belles lettres_; if there were, it would deserve the
name. As for _Fine Art,_ the late Professor Butcher bequeathed to
us a translation of Aristotle's "Poetics" with some admirable
appendixes--the whole entitled "Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and
Fine Art." Aristotle never in his life had a theory of Fine Art
as distinct from ot