The “literary centre” was fluent translation. In 1889, the Quarterly Review likewise attacked Morris’s Aeneid (1875) because of “the sense of {142} incongruity inspired by such Wardour-Street English as eyen and clepe” (Faulkner 1973:28, n. 81). Here the “centre” is also identified as standard English, the language of contemporary political insitutions, leading politicians. The Longman’s article on “Wardour-Street English” observed that
if the Lord Chancellor or Mr Speaker were to deliver one of these solemn pronouncements in any cockney or county dialect, he would leave upon his hearers the same sense of the grotesque and the undignified which a reader carries away from an author who, instead of using his own language in its richest and truest literary form, takes up a linguistic fad, and, in pursuit of it, makes his work provincial instead of literary.
Morris’s translations did no more than “pretend to be literature,” because literary texts were written in a dialect of English that was educated and official and thus excluded popular linguistic and literary forms.
“Wardour-Street English” eventually came to be used as a term of abuse for archaic diction in any kind of writing—applied to widely read historical novels, particularly imitations of Scott, but also to nonfiction prose, including an eccentric volume like The Gate of Remembrance (1918). Produced by the director of the excavations at Glastonbury Abbey, F.Bligh Bond, this was an attempt to enlist “psychical research” in the “work of architectural exploration” (Spectator 1918:422). Bligh’s volume presented the “automatic writing” of one “J.A.,” in which the historical associations of the abbey were personified and given voice in various languages: Latin (“William the Monk”), Anglo-Saxon (“Awfwold ye Saxon”), and a mixture of Middle and Early Modern English (“Johannes, Lapidator or Stone-Mason,” “defunctus anno 1533”). The reviewer for the Spectator judged this linguistic experiment favorably, but got more pleasure from the Latin, which, he felt, “is much to be preferred to the Wardour Street English” assigned to the stonemason (ibid.:422). Interestingly, the passage of automatic writing quoted by the reviewer links English archaism once again to the unlearned, the subordinate: it shows the stonemason resisting the use of Latin architectural terms imposed on him by monkish treatises: Ye names of builded things are very hard in Latin tongue— transome, fanne tracery, and the like. My son, thou canst not {143} understande. Wee wold speak in the Englyshe tongue. Ye saide that ye volte was multipartite yt was fannes olde style in ye este ende of ye choire and ye newe volt in Edgares chappel…. Glosterfannes (repeated). Fannes…(again) yclept fanne… Johannes lap…mason. (ibid.:422) To the reviewer, such language was “thoroughly bad,” and it marred even a “very curious and attractive passage” about “the tomb of Arthur” by suggesting popular literary forms: “there are obvious reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott and Ivanhoe in this piece of most unblushing but rather vivid Wardour Street” (ibid.).
The stigma attached to archaism involved an exclusion of the popular that is also evident in prescriptive stylistic manuals, like H.W.Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926). Fowler included an entry on archaism that treated it as dangerous except in the hands of an experienced writer who can trust his sense of congruity. Even when used to give colour to conversation in historical romances, what Stevenson called tushery is more likely to irritate the reader than to please him. (Fowler 1965:34) Fowler’s “experienced writer” was apparently not the author of popular historical romances. And the reader he had in mind obviously preferred transparent discourse.
In the academy, where Arnold the apologist for an academic elite was ensconced as a canonical writer, the historicizing translations of Newman and Morris have repeatedly been subjected to Arnoldian thrashings. T.S.Osmond’s 1912 study of the Arnold/Newman controversy agreed with Arnold’s “protests against the use of ridiculous or too uncommon words” in translations because they preempt the illusion of transparency: “One’s attention is held by the words, instead of by the thing that is being told” (Osmond 1912:82). In 1956, Basil Willey’s attempt to rehabilitate Newman’s reputation focused mainly on his religious treatises, particularly The Soul (1849), which Willey felt should be admitted to the Victorian canon, assigned “a much higher rank in devotional literature” (Willey 1956:45). Yet although Willey gave a generally balanced account of the translation controversy, he finally agreed with Arnold that Newman lacked the “individual personality” to render Homer’s “grand style”: “Newman, with all his great merits, was not a poet” {144} because “his spirit was not sufficiently ‘free, flexible and elastic’” (ibid.; see also Annan 1944:191).
In 1962, J.M.Cohen, the translator of canonical writers like Rabelais and Cervantes, published a history of English-language translation in which he approvingly described the dominant domesticating method and the “complete reversal of taste” that made Victorian archaism “unreadable” (although, as we have seen, it was definitely unreadable to many Victorians as well): “In contrast to the Victorians and Edwardians […] craftsmen in the last twenty years have aimed principally at interpretation in current language” (Cohen 1962:65). Cohen himself followed this dominant tendency toward transparent discourse, asserting that “the theory of Victorian translation appears from our point of view to have been founded on a fundamental error” and faulting Morris in particular for the density of his archaism: “Even the meaning has become obscure” (ibid.:24, 25). Cohen agreed with Arnold in attributing what he considered the defects of Victorian translation to its historicism. The experiments developed by translators like Newman, Morris, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edward Fitzgerald were misguided, Cohen felt, because the translators had “adapted their authors’ styles to their more or less erroneous pictures of the age in which these authors lived and worked” (ibid.:29). Yet Cohen was himself making the anachronistic assumption that the correct historical “pictures” were in “current language,” respectful of the modern canon of “plain prose uniformity” in translation (ibid.:33).
Finally, there is perhaps no clearer sign of Arnold’s continuing power in Anglo-American literary culture than Robert Fagles’ 1990 version of the Iliad, winner of the Harold Morton Landon Award for poetry translation from the Academy of American Poets. Fagles’ preface begins by acknowledging the oral quality of Homeric verse, but then reverts to Arnold’s reading of Homer:
Homer’s work is a performance, even in part a musical event. Perhaps that is the source of his speed, directness and simplicity that Matthew Arnold heard—and his nobility too, elusive yet undeniable, that Arnold chased but never really caught.
A classics translator who edited Pope’s Homer and is currently professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton, Fagles demonstrates {145} not just that Arnold’s reading still prevails today, but that it continues to be affiliated with the academy and with the dominant tradition of English-language translation, fluent domestication. Fagles aimed for a version that was “literate” in an academic (i.e., Arnoldian) sense, negotiating between the “literal” and the “literary” in a way that implemented Dryden’s notion of “paraphrase,” producing in the end a modernized Homer:
Not a line-for-line translation, my version of the Iliad is, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Homer’s language as to cramp and distort my own—though I want to convey as much of what he says as possible—nor so literary as to brake his energy, his forward drive—though I want my work to be literate, with any luck. For the more literal approach seems too little English, and the more literary seems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the two, a modern English Homer.