Newman’s assessment of “popular taste” led him to write his translation in the ballad form, which he described in terms that obviously sought to challenge Arnold’s: “It is essentially a noble metre, a popular metre, a metre of great capacity. It is essentially the national ballad metre” (ibid.:22). Newman’s reply emphasized the peculiar ideological significance of his project. His aim to produce a translation that was at once populist and nationalist was realized in an archaic literary discourse that resisted any scholarly domestication of the foreign text, any assimilation of it to the regime of transparent discourse in English:
{136} Classical scholars ought to set their faces against the double heresy, of trying to enforce, that foreign poetry, however various, shall all be rendered in one English dialect, and that this shall, in order of words and in diction, closely approximate to polished prose.
Newman’s reply showed that translation could permit other, popular literary discourses to emerge in English only if it was foreignizing, or, in the case of classical literature, historicizing, only if it abandoned fluency to signify “the archaic, the rugged, the boisterous element in Homer” (Newman 1861:22). Because Newman’s historiography was essentially Whiggish, assuming a teleological model of human development, a liberal concept of progress, he felt that Homer “not only was antiquated, relatively to Pericles, but is also absolutely antique, being a poet of a barbarian age” (ibid.:48).[11] Newman admitted that it was difficult to avoid judging past foreign cultures according to the cultural values—both academic and bourgeois—that distinguished Victorian elites from their social inferiors in England and elsewhere. He believed that
if the living Homer could sing his lines to us, they would at first move in us the same pleasing interest as an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast; but that, after hearing twenty lines, we should complain of meagreness, sameness, and loss of moral expression; and should judge the style to be as inferior to our own oratorical metres, as the music of Pindar to our third-rate modern music.
Yet Newman nonetheless insisted that such Anglocentric judgments must be minimized or avoided altogether: “to expect refinement and universal delicacy of expression in that stage of civilization is quite anachronistic and unreasonable” (ibid.:73). In arguing for a historicist approach to translation, Newman demonstrated that scholarly English critics like Arnold violated their own principle of universal reason by using it to justify an abridgement of the Greek text:
Homer never sees things in the same proportions as we see them. To omit his digressions, and what I may call his “impertinences,” in order to give his argument that which Mr Arnold is pleased to call {137} the proper “balance,” is to value our own logical minds, more than his picturesque but illogical mind.
As such statements suggest, the Whig historiography that informed Newman’s concept of classical culture inevitably privileged Victorian social elites as exemplars of the most advanced stage of human development. As a result, it implicitly drew an analogy among their inferiors—the “barbarian,” the “savage,” the colonized (“Gold Coast”), and the popular English audience—exposing a patronizing and potentially racist side to Newman’s translation populism (and edging his position closer to Arnold’s). Yet Newman’s Whig historiography also enabled him to refine his sense of literary history and develop a translation project that both preserved the cultural difference of the foreign text and acknowledged the diversity of English literary discourses: “Every sentence of Homer was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who could no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of the poetry, than an Englishman can help feeling the same in reading Burns’s poems” (Newman 1861:35–36). Newman’s skepticism toward dominant cultural values in English even made him criticize Arnold’s admitted “Bibliolatry,” his reliance on “the authority of the Bible” in developing a lexicon for Homeric translations (Arnold 1960:165–166). Newman didn’t want the Bible’s cultural authority to exclude other archaic literary discourses, which he considered equally “sacred”: “Words which have come to us in a sacred connection, no doubt, gain a sacred hue, but they must not be allowed to desecrate other old and excellent words” (Newman 1861:89).
The publication of Arnold’s lectures made Homeric translation an important topic of debate in Anglo-American culture, provoking not only a reply from Newman and a coda from Arnold, but many reviews and articles in a wide range of British and American periodicals. The reception was mixed. Reviewers were especially divided on the question of whether the ballad or the hexameter was the acceptable verse form for Homeric translation.[12] Yet Arnold was definitely favored over Newman, no matter what ideological standpoint the periodical may have established in previous reviewing. The Edinburgh-based North British Review, although “consistently Whiggish in politics,” possessed a religious and moral conservatism that led to an evangelical approach in literary reviews—and an endorsement of Arnold’s call for an academy with {138} national cultural authority (North British Review 1862:348; Sullivan 1984:276). In an article that discussed recent Homeric translations and the Arnold/Newman controversy, the reviewer accepted Arnold’s diagnosis of English culture as well as his dismissal of Newman’s archaism: “at present we have nothing but eccentricity, and arbitrary likings and dislikings. Our literature shows no regard for dignity, no reverence for law. […] The present ballad-mania is among the results of this licentiousness” (North British Review 1862:348).
Arnold’s case against Newman was persuasive even to The Westminster Review, which abandoned its characteristically militant liberalism to advocate a cultural elite (Sullivan 1983b:424–433). The reviewer remarked that lecturing in English instead of Latin gave Arnold “the further privilege and responsibility of addressing himself not to the few, but to the many, not to a select clique of scholars, but to the entire reading public” (Westminster Review 1862:151). Yet it was precisely the literary values of a select scholarly clique that the reviewer wanted to be imposed on the entire reading public, since he accepted Arnold’s “proposed test of a thoroughly good translation—that it ought to produce on the scholar the same effect as the original poem” (ibid.:151). Hence, Arnold’s academic reading of the Greek text was recommended over Newman’s populist “view that Homer can be rendered adequately into any form of ballad-metre. All ballad-metre alike is pitched in too low a key; it may be rapid, and direct, and spirit-stirring, but is incapable of sustained nobility” (ibid.:165).
Not every reviewer agreed with Arnold on the need for an academic elite to establish a national English culture. But most explicitly shared his academic reading of Homer and therefore his criticism of Newman’s archaic translation. The Saturday Review, advocate of a conservative liberalism opposed to democratic reform (the labor union movement, women’s suffrage, socialism), affected a condescending air of impartiality by criticizing both Arnold and Newman (Bevington 1941). Yet the criteria were mostly Arnoldian. The reviewer assumed the cultural superiority of the academy by chastising Arnold for violating scholarly decorum, for devoting Oxford lectures to a “bitterly contemptuous” attack on a contemporary writer like Newman, “who, whatever his aberrations in other ways, has certainly, as a scholar, a very much higher reputation than Mr Arnold himself” (Saturday Review 1861:95). Yet {139} Newman’s “aberrations” were the same ones that Arnold noticed, especially the archaism, which the reviewer described as “a consistent, though we think mistaken theory” (ibid.:96). The Saturday Review’s distaste for Newman’s translation was in turn consistent with its other literary judgments: it tended to ridicule literary experiments that deviated from transparent discourse, like Robert Browning’s “obscure” poetry, and to attack literary forms that were populist as well as popular, like Dickens’s novels (Bevington 1941:208–209, 155–167).
[11]
For liberal historiography, see Butterfield 1951, Burrow 1981, and Culler 1985. Newman’s other historical writings also reveal Whig assumptions. A liberal teleology shaped the lessons he drew from historical “contrasts” and frequently issued into a utopianism, both democratic and nationalistic:
We […] can look back upon changes which cannot be traced in antiquity: we see the serf and vassal emancipated from his lord, the towns obtaining, first independence, next coordinate authority with the lords of the land. When the element which
Newman treated capitalist economic practices with the same Whiggish optimism, asserting that because “all-reaching Commerce touches distant regions which are beyond the grasp of politics” geopolitical relations will eventually be characterized by “peace” (ibid.:33).
[12]
The divided reception of the controversy becomes evident in a brief survey of the reviews. Arnold’s recommendation of hexameters for Homeric translation was accepted in the