The social function Arnold assigned translators like Newman was to “correct” English cultural values by bringing them in line with scholarly “opinion.” Translation for Arnold was a means to empower an academic elite, to endow it with national cultural authority, but this empowerment involved an imposition of scholarly values on other cultural constituencies—including the diverse English-reading audience that Newman hoped to reach. The elitism in Arnold’s concept of a national English culture assumed an unbridgeable social division: “These two impressions—that of the scholar, and that of the unlearned reader—can, practically, never be accurately compared” (ibid.:201). Translation bridges this division, but only by eliminating the nonscholarly.
Arnold’s attack on Newman’s translation was an academic repression of popular cultural forms that was grounded in a competing reading of Homer. Where Arnold’s Homer was elitist, possessing “nobility,” “a great master” of “the grand style,” New-man’s was populist and, to Arnold, “ignoble.” Hence, Arnold insisted that
the ballad-style and the ballad-measure are eminently inappropriate to render Homer. Homer’s manner and movement are always both noble and powerfuclass="underline" the ballad-manner and movement are often either jaunty and smart, so not noble; or jog-trot and humdrum, so not powerful.
Arnold rejected the use of the “ballad-manner” in various English translations—Chapman’s Homer, Dr William Maginn’s Homeric Ballads and Comedies of Lucian (1850), Newman’s Iliad—because he found it “over-familiar,” “commonplace,” “pitched sensibly lower than Homer’s” verse (ibid.:117, 124, 155). Newman’s archaism in {133} particular degraded the canonical Greek text by resorting to colloquial Shakespearean expressions, like “To grunt and sweat under a weary load”—a judgment that again revealed the strain of bourgeois squeamishness in Arnold’s academic elitism:
if the translator of Homer […] were to employ, when he has to speak of one of Homer’s heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of “grunting” and “sweating,” we should say, He Newmanises, and his diction would offend us. For he is to be noble; and no plea of wishing to be plain and natural can get him excused from being this.
Arnold’s notion of Homer’s “nobility” assimilated the Greek text to the scholarly while excluding the popular. He noted that for an American reader the ballad “has a disadvantage in being like the rhythm of the American national air Yankee Doodle, and thus provoking ludicrous associations” (ibid.:132). And although Arnold recommended the hexameter as the most suitable verse form for Homeric translation, he was careful to add that he didn’t have in mind the hexameters in Longfellow’s “pleasing and popular poem of Evangeline,” but rather those of “the accomplished Provost of Eton, Dr Hawtrey,” who was not only “one of the natural judges of a translation of Homer,” but the author of the 1847 volume English Hexameter Translations (ibid.:149, 151). Any translation was likely to be offensive to Arnold, given his scholarly adulation of the Greek text. Newman’s mixture of homely colloquialism, archaism, and close rendering proved positively alienating:
The end of the nineteenth book, the answer of Achilles to his horse Xanthus, Mr Newman gives thus:—
Here Mr Newman calls Xanthus Chestnut, indeed, as he calls Balius Spotted, and Podarga Spry-foot; which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale Mdlle. Rossignol, or MrBright {134} M.Clair. And several other expressions, too,—“yelling,” “held afront,” “single-hoofed,”—leave, to say the very least, much to be desired.
It is in fact Arnold’s habit of saying “the very least” that is most symptomatic of the anti-democratic tendency in his critique. Arnold refused to define his concept of “nobleness,” the one Homeric quality that distinguished the academic reading and justified his call for a national academy: “I do not attempt to lay down any rules for obtaining this effect of nobleness,—the effect, too, of all others the most impalpable, the most irreducible to rule, and which most depends on the individual personality of the artist” (Arnold 1960:159). Like Alexander Tytler, Arnold valued a public sphere of cultural consensus that would underwrite the “correct” translation discourse for Homer, but any democratic tendency in this national agenda foundered on an individualist aesthetics that was fundamentally impressionistic: “the presence or absence of the grand style can only be spiritually discerned” (ibid.:136). Unlike Tytler, Arnold could not easily accept a humanist assumption of universal “reason and good sense” because the English reading audience had become too culturally and socially diverse; hence Arnold’s turn to an academic elite to enforce its cultural agenda on the nation. As Terry Eagleton puts it, “Arnold’s academy is not the public sphere, but a means of defense against the actual Victorian public” (Eagleton 1984:64; see also Baldick 1983:29–31).
The “grand style” was so important to Arnold because it was active in the construction of human subjects, capable of imprinting other social groups with academic cultural values: “it can form the character, it is edifying. […] the few artists in the grand style […] can refine the raw natural man, they can transmute him” (Arnold 1960:138–139). Yet because Homeric nobleness depended on the individual personality of the writer or reader and could only be experienced, not described, it was autocratic and irrational. The individualism at the root of Arnold’s critique finally undermines the cultural authority he assigned to the academy by issuing into contradiction: he vaguely linked nobility to the individual personality, but he also faulted Newman’s translation precisely because of its individualism. For Arnold, Newman indulged “some individual fancy,” exemplifying a deplorable national trait, “the great defect of English intellect, the great blemish of English literature”—“eccentricity and arbitrariness” (ibid.:140).
{135} Newman was stung by Arnold’s lectures, and by the end of the year he published a book-length reply that allowed him to develop more fully the translation rationale he sketched in his preface. At the outset he made quite clear that his “sole object is, to bring Homer before the unlearned public” (Newman 1861:6). Newman questioned the authority Arnold assigned to the academy in the formation of a national culture. He pointed out that England was multicultural, a site of different values, and although an academic himself he sided with the nonacademic:
Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge; and to it I wish to appeal. Even scholars collectively have no right, and much less have single scholars, to pronounce a final sentence on questions of taste in their court.
Because Newman translated for a different audience, he refused such scholarly verse forms as the hexameters Arnold proposed:
The unlearned look on all, even the best hexameters, whether from Southey, Lockhart or Longfellow, as odd and disagreeable prose. Mr Arnold deprecates appeal to popular taste: well he may! Yet if the unlearned are to be our audience, we cannot defy them. I myself, before venturing to print, sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have extolled them; how greedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowing who was the translator.