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134 The Translator’s InvisibilityClair. And several other expressions, too,—“yelling,” “held afront,”“single-hoofed,”—leave, to say the very least, much to be desired.(ibid.:134)It is in fact Arnold’s habit of saying “the very least” that is mostsymptomatic of the anti-democratic tendency in his critique.Arnold refused to define his concept of “nobleness,” the oneHomeric quality that distinguished the academic reading andjustified his call for a national academy: “I do not attempt to laydown 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 theartist” (Arnold 1960:159). Like Alexander Tytler, Arnold valued apublic sphere of cultural consensus that would underwrite the“correct” translation discourse for Homer, but any democratictendency in this national agenda foundered on an individualistaesthetics that was fundamentally impressionistic: “the presence orabsence of the grand style can only be spiritually discerned”(ibid.:136). Unlike Tytler, Arnold could not easily accept a humanistassumption of universal “reason and good sense” because theEnglish reading audience had become too culturally and sociallydiverse; hence Arnold’s turn to an academic elite to enforce itscultural agenda on the nation. As Terry Eagleton puts it, “Arnold’sacademy is not the public sphere, but a means of defense againstthe actual Victorian public” (Eagleton 1984:64; see also Baldick1983:29–31).The “grand style” was so important to Arnold because it was activein the construction of human subjects, capable of imprinting othersocial groups with academic cultural values: “it can form the character,it is edifying. […] the few artists in the grand style […] can refine theraw natural man, they can transmute him” (Arnold 1960:138–139). Yetbecause Homeric nobleness depended on the individual personality ofthe writer or reader and could only be experienced, not described, itwas autocratic and irrational. The individualism at the root of Arnold’scritique finally undermines the cultural authority he assigned to theacademy by issuing into contradiction: he vaguely linked nobility tothe individual personality, but he also faulted Newman’s translationprecisely because of its individualism. For Arnold, Newman indulged“some individual fancy,” exemplifying a deplorable national trait, “thegreat defect of English intellect, the great blemish of Englishliterature”—“eccentricity and arbitrariness” (ibid.:140).