Page:The poetical works of Matthew Arnold, 1897.djvu/24

xiv Under all his serious views of life and the deep sense of responsibility which he felt over his task of inoculating the British public with intelligence, there was hidden largely from common sight but well known to his family and friends a fund of brightness, of radiant wit, of frank, boyish, totally inoffensive self-satisfaction. He liked sympathetic appreciation, especially of his poetry. One feels nearer to his humanity when one reads in a letter to his mother how he walked up Regent Street behind a man with a board on his back announcing his article on Marcus Aurelius. Such hearty acknowledgment of what many men would hypocritically pretend to ignore makes us love him. That it was not conceit is shown by many fearless passages in his home letters: "to be less personal in one's desires and workings is the great matter...for progress in the direction of the 'seeketh not her own' there is always room."

Severely as he attacked the faults of England, he loved her fondly, and it was no idle echo of Gilbert's Admiral when he declared that he would be "sorry to be a Frenchman, German, or American or anything but an Englishman." His respect for America rose higher after the tragic ending of the War of the Rebellion. He was at first inclined to sympathize with the South, not because he sympathized with slavery, but because, judging of the North from the utterances of compromise-seeking politicians, he drew the erroneous conclusion that the North had little character. He was by nature an aristocrat in the best sense of the word and believed in centralization and concentration of government. It was characteristic of him that he found a dramatic interest in the assassination of Lincoln, by reason of the fact that the assassin shouted in Latin as he leapt on the stage.

In 1861 he published three of his Oxford lectures, under the title, "On Translating Homer," in which he severely criticised various versions,—Chapman's, Pope's, Maginn's, Newman's, Wright's,—and showed how they failed—in rapidity, in plainness, directness, and simplicity of style and of ideas, or in nobleness of diction. He himself gave a few examples of what, in his opinion, should be the method of the translator: he chose the hexameter as best reproducing the qualities of Homeric verse, and he conclusively showed that if he had proceeded to translate the whole, it would have approached very near the highest possible ideal. But he left only a few fragments. His lectures gave rise to some controversy, and the following year he issued a fourth essay, entitled "Lost Words on Translating Homer," in which he good-humoredly replied to his critics.