But now secondly, as to the influence of moral purpose in art: we have been in the habit, as you will remember, of passing at the earliest possible moment from abstract discussion to the concrete instance; and if we now follow that course and inquire,--not whether moral purpose _may_ interfere with artistic creation,--but whether moral purpose _has_ interfered with artistic creation, as matter of fact, in the works of those whom the ages have set in the highest heaven of art, we get a verdict which seems to leave little room for question. At the beginning we are met with the fact that the greatest work has always gone hand in hand with the most fervent moral purpose. For example, the most poetical poetry of which we know anything is that of the author of Job, and of David and his fellow psalm-writers. I have used the expression "most poetical" here with design; for regarded as pure literature these poems in this particular of poeticalness, of pure spirituality, lift themselves into a plane not reached by any others. A single fact in proof of this exceeding poeticalness will suffice: it is the fact that these poems alone, of all ever written, bear translation from one language into another without hurt. Surely this can be said of no other poetic work. If we strike away all allowances of amateurishness and good fellowship and judge with the uncompromising truth of the pious artist; how pitiful is Homer as he appears in even Pope's English; or how subtly does the simplicity of Dante sink into childishness even with Mr. Longfellow interpreting; or how tedious and flat fall the cultured sentences of Goethe even in Taylor's version, which has by many been declared the most successful translation ever made, not only of _Faust_ but of any foreign poem; nay, how completely the charm of Chaucer exhales away even when redacted merely from an older dialect into a later one, by hands so skillful as those of Dryden and Wordsworth. Now, it is words and their associations which are untranslatable, not ideas; there is no _idea_, whether originating in a Hebrew, Greek or other mind, which cannot be adequately produced as idea in English words; the reason why Shakspeare and Dante are practically untranslatable is that recognizing how every word means more than itself to its native users,--how every word is like the bright head of a comet drawing behind it a less luminous train of vague associations which are associations only to those who have used such words from infancy,--Shakspeare and Dante, I say, have used this fact, and have constructed poems which necessarily mean more to native hearers than they can possibly mean to any foreign ear. But this Hebrew poetry which I have mentioned is so purely composed of ideas which are universal, essential, fundamental to the personality of man, instantly recognizable by every soul of every race,--that they remain absolutely great, absolutely artistic, in whatever language they are couched.