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Nation 135Newman was stung by Arnold’s lectures, and by the end of the yearhe published a book-length reply that allowed him to develop morefully the translation rationale he sketched in his preface. At the outsethe made quite clear that his “sole object is, to bring Homer before theunlearned public” (Newman 1861:6). Newman questioned theauthority Arnold assigned to the academy in the formation of anational culture. He pointed out that England was multicultural, a siteof different values, and although an academic himself he sided withthe nonacademic:Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated butunlearned public is the only rightful judge; and to it I wish toappeal. Even scholars collectively have no right, and much less havesingle scholars, to pronounce a final sentence on questions of tastein their court.(ibid.:2)Because Newman translated for a different audience, he refused suchscholarly verse forms as the hexameters Arnold proposed:The unlearned look on all, even the best hexameters, whether fromSouthey, Lockhart or Longfellow, as odd and disagreeable prose. Mr.Arnold deprecates appeal to popular taste: well he may! Yet if theunlearned are to be our audience, we cannot defy them. I myself,before venturing to print, sought to ascertain how unlearnedwomen and children would accept my verses. I could boast howchildren and half-educated women have extolled them; howgreedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowingwho was the translator.(ibid.:12–13)Newman’s assessment of “popular taste” led him to write histranslation in the ballad form, which he described in terms thatobviously sought to challenge Arnold’s: “It is essentially a noble metre, apopular metre, a metre of great capacity. It is essentially the nationalballad metre” (ibid.:22). Newman’s reply emphasized the peculiarideological significance of his project. His aim to produce a translationthat was at once populist and nationalist was realized in an archaicliterary discourse that resisted any scholarly domestication of theforeign text, any assimilation of it to the regime of transparentdiscourse in English: