The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

138 The Translator’s Invisibility
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