The Translator’s Invisibility

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).

The liberal British Quarterly Review, a nonconformist religious periodical edited by a Congregationalist minister, questioned Arnold’s desire “to imitate in England the French Academy” (British Quarterly Review 1865:292; Houghton et al. 1987:IV, 114–125). This was considered “an intellectual foppery” since the fundamental individualism of English culture resisted any notion of a national academy: “Mr Arnold seems determined to ignore the fact that an academic style is impossible among the English, who are by nature original” (British Quarterly Review 1865:292). Yet the reviewer agreed “that Homeric translation demands a noble simplicity,” adding that

unquestionably Mr Arnold is right in placing Homer in a very different class from the ballad-poets with whom he has frequently been compared. The ballad, in its most perfect form, belongs to a rude state of society—to a time when ideas were few. This cannot be said of Homer. His very existence is sufficient proof of a social development quite equal to that of Shakespeare’s time, though far simpler in its form.

(ibid.:293)