Arthur Hugh Clough

ONE of the peculiarities of the civilization of the present day seems to be its great dependence on the work of other times and of other people. This is not so much a period of productiveness as one of examination, of criticism. No one of the arts can be said to be in a flourishing condition; flourishing, that is, in comparison with those great periods for which we feel so warm an admiration. To examine them one by one, sculpture certainly has but a lingering existence; in painting there are perpetual efforts to breathe life into imitations of the past, with hardly a single school following its own course forward; in architecture there are thousands of reminiscences of foreign and old buildings rather than satisfactory novelties; of music it is better to forbear making mention, lest he who is not an ardent admirer of what is certainly novelty should be marked for derision as one who would have denounced Beethoven when he began to compose. It would moreover be impertinent to speak prematurely of music, which recognizes only our posterity as fair judges of its merits. Now this statement is not meant for a wail at the emptiness of all things, nor yet for contemptuous depreciation of the present day; it is rather the mention of what is the natural consequence of our position in the nineteenth century, with our tolerably complete knowledge of other civilizations weighing us down and serving as a standard of comparison for everything we try to accomplish. The richness of our information produces in us a feeling not unlike that which we have in an enormous library, that we cannot recall a single book we care to read; or in a large exhibition, that it is impossible to decide what to look at. The abundance of attractions is apt to produce a state of mental equilibrium by means of the many counter-temptations of equal force which paralyze the will. Concentrated effort is rendered difficult; every one is conscious of a thousand distractions which have the charm of presenting real and tempting interest. Even an ordinary education implies some knowledge of many subjects of almost equal fascination. Delicacy of taste is cultivated, rather than depth of knowledge. We acquire refinement rather than strength. At present we are living extravagantly on all the best of all the fine arts. Suddenly, we know all the masterpieces a groaning world has been for many ages slowly producing. We go, for instance, to a picture gallery, and there we see nothing but the finest paintings; all the second-rate pictures are excluded or overlooked. We learn to judge the past by the smooth results, we forget the tedious processes, we no longer remember by what arduous toil success has been achieved. We have a good knowledge of antiquity. We talk of old cities, and some one goes and digs them up; we find ancient statues; we collect the masters’ paintings; we have photographs of those few corners of the world we cannot ourselves visit; we accumulate Persian, Indian, and Japanese curiosities. This is indeed a time for great enjoyment.

Now all of these advantages are not to be decried, nor certainly is this country, where such things are rarer, to be placed above Europe in any respect in which these things count; but it would seem as if in this plethora of luxuries we ran the risk of forgetting the method of furnishing our share to the gratification of posterity. It certainly will never be by turning our backs upon our advantages and returning to the good old times, because that is impossible, and, if it were practicable, would be as wise as it would be for a grown man who yields to the temptations of maturity to go back to the pinafore and innocent sports of childhood. Nor is it by travestying the honest work of the past that the tasks of the present are to be accomplished. A Gothic cathedral nowadays can hardly be more than a success of cleverness. No painter can with sincerity paint pictures like those painted by men who preceded Raphael, without doing injustice to himself by excluding from his work the countless influences which have grown to be part of his nature. One might as well, in order to acquire simplicity, try to talk in the language of Chaucer. And yet there are poets who do try to talk in the language of Chaucer. Those older men accomplished what they did by doing their best, by working with all the force they had, and not by willfully excluding the largest part of their education and feeling. But we go on perpetually repeating the familiar mistake of taking some conditions for the essential inspiration, imagining, for instance, that if we can put a contemporary into a suit of armor, we have a mediæval knight before us, — as if they masqueraded in that dress, — and forgetting that the nearest approach to the knight is the blue or red coated soldier. It would be hard to see why what has once pleased should not please again, if it were not that what we liked lies elsewhere than in the mere costume, that the dress is nothing without the human heart beneath. Shall it be left to future historians of these times to satisfy curiosity about our doings by the statement that in the last part of the nineteenth century nothing was accomplished, that we built museums and stored them with curiosities, and filled picture-galleries with old pictures, and gave concerts, and wrote imitations of older poets, and enjoyed ourselves greatly, and that was all?

It is not that this fervor is to be wholly condemned; it is in many ways admirable. The only thing to be guarded against is fancying that when we know things we are cultivated, have attained culture, and can rest there. That is the rock on which we are in peril of splitting. We must not make culture an idol, as is the fashion, but regard it as merely one of the forces that goes to keep the world in motion. It is a means, not an end. It is no more to be worshiped for itself than is the knowledge of the multiplication-table. We should not let ourselves be swamped in our luxuries. The man should always be better than his surroundings; he should absorb what is good in them, and stand above them. It is to the credit of a man to rise purified by his experience, however bitter it may be, and certainly he should not fall into joyous self-content because he has knowledge of bric-à-brac. That is no better than the strength of the giant who forever lolls upon the sofa. The collection of curiosities, the ransacking of the globe after singularities, and the consequent selfish thrilling with enjoyment, are not enough. Indeed, the mere enjoyment is in itself idle, unproductive, and, if it interferes with work, harmful, however delightful it may be. That it is delightful no one can deny, but just as fear of starvation is, however disguised, one of the strongest inspirations of toil known to man, the evident danger of comfort, pleasantly won distinction, and elegance is, that they produce sloth, or passive content with things as they are.

This spirit of the times finds its expression in the poetry of the day. Just as in the last century the poets followed Pope’s well-worn track and imitated a species of classicism, so nowadays, since the time of Keats and Shelley, we find traces of these poets jutting up everywhere. Tennyson has acquired, partly from them, a peculiar and well-known form of expression; other poets have caught this from him, until there are almost as many pseudo - Tennysons as in the last century there were smoothtongued imitators of Pope. Tennyson gratifies a good part of the cultivated taste of the present day. His facile elegance, the deliciousness of his single lines, please the ear, but there are those who fail to find beneath this lusciousness the solid strength which makes poetry, which alone is poetry. Do we not admire most in him the grace of his expression? Is he not possibly an excellent specimen of dilettanteism ? To a certain extent, then, he is a representative of this period, but of its less active side. While Tennyson puts his art into prettinesses, occasionally rising into grace, and other modern poets, like Rossetti and Swinburne, content themselves with praise of what they consider immortal loveliness, assuming the innocence of the ancients in the most sophisticated way, devoting themselves to singing boldly the charms of beautiful objects, the age is not without poetry appropriate to its delicacy, its enjoyment of curiosities and antiquities, and its bitterness. The saddest wail of this poetry is that of having no new things to look at and get pleasure from. The writers of it chant graceful imitations of what was once real poetry, just as avowed mechanics have factories for the making of what is known as Eastlake furniture. One of these modern poets, “ an idle singer,” presumes to call this “an empty day.” But the emptiness is not in the day. The worship of mere beauty ends in satiety; it is as unsatisfying as any paganism, and the melancholy tone of much of our modern poetry is its natural result. Mere enjoyment is not the normal condition of man, and now that we have acquired so much, it is our duty to work with these new conditions, to assimilate what we have collected, seen, and admired, and to recognize what is the true life of the time, not merely what are its most charming pastimes. Some of the old problems of life are still unsettled, and it is not by arraying ourselves in the cast-off robes of our grandfathers that we shall do our part towards finding a solution of them. For their part, scientific men are busily plunging into their work, eagerly investigating, and—for their only relaxation — fighting savagely with those who hold different opinions, while we stand outside and counsel moderation and calm and think of the violence of the Spanish Inquisition, forgetting that their exaggeration is a good sign of their earnestness.

But it is unfair that scientific men should monopolize all the intellectual energy. They do not get intoxicated at their success, nor do they give themselves up to the idle contemplation of newly discovered truths; they work incessantly. They are the most noticeably active men of the present time, and there would be some justice in calling this the scientific age, in which no poetry can be looked for, were it not that no amount of science can replace poetry, nor deaden the heart of man to its charm. The real poet of the present day would seem to be the one who avoids imitating the past, and who sees in what new form the old questions are disguised, who recognizes the peril that culture brings, and who does not avoid the difficulties with which new scientific knowledge has enveloped what many have thought the truth. Such a poet was Clough. Even if he did not always write cheerfully, he treated human nature with dignity, never fancying that it was enough for a poet to have an outfit of smooth lines, ingenious expressions, and familiar images, with which to reëcho the popular interest in antiquity or the fashionable melancholy.

What is most noticeable in Clough is his earnestness, he wrote but little, yet in almost every line he left the mark of a serious nature. The form of some of his verses is crude and rugged; in others, however, he seems to have had no difficulty in finding suitable expression for his thoughts. In what he had to say he more nearly expressed the thought of the present age than do those bards who display merely the refinements or perversities of its taste. However it may seem to contradict the fact of his earnestness, it was to doubt and hesitation and shrinking from bold assertion that he gave expression. But it is not such a contradiction as it may seem, for doubt with him is not a state of vainglorious flippancy, nor one of prompt acceptance of enjoyment in the place of faith, but one, rather, of very earnest intellectual struggle. If Clough’s doubts had led him to put into verse nothing but questions of biblical exegesis, he could of course be fairly condemned for mistaking the functions of poetry; but as it is, he represents the reaction after the awakening of the early years of the century, as fairly as Shelley does this awakening itself ; but it is not that alone which makes itself felt in his poetry. He was a student at Oxford when that great university was shaken by the Tractarian movement. In his Life and Letters, edited by his wife, we have many proofs given us of the ardent way in which a sensitive and serious nature like Clough’s felt itself greatly influenced by one of the most remarkable religious excitements of modern times. He once said, speaking of two years of his life at this period, with regard to which we have only very vague information, that in that time he had been like a straw drawn up the draught of a chimney. This was but a natural result of the influence to which he was exposed. In time, however, came reaction, and he found himself not only looking coldly on the excitement which had carried so many to the Church of Rome, but also with only a vague reverence for any form of ecclesiastical authority. Before long, he became so convinced of his religious uncertainty that he felt it his duty to resign both his tutorship and his fellowship. This he did in 1848. Although fond of teaching, he could not reconcile it with his conscience that he should hold a position which implied religious beliefs that he was unable to avow. It was a case of an artificial system shackling a very conscientious man. Had he been a trifle more worldly or less sensitively careful, he would have thought it enough to make merely a formal acknowledgment of the excellence of the religious system of the university; but he was too strictly upright for that, and made himself a victim of formality. In Germany or in this country, such a result would not have followed. There is a certain latitude of opinion possible, which seldom calls forth any noisy license, and certainly never would from men as thoughtful as Clough. His state of mind, even when he was in the greatest doubt, is one that ought to command respect. He was perfectly sincere, and he never gave expression to, nor felt, anything like a scoffing spirit. One of the most noticeable of the poems in which he gives expression to his doubts is that entitled A Shadow, but in this as well as in Easter Day, Naples, 1849, there is no touch of derision. The author expresses, especially in the last-named poem, the sadness which the want, or rather the loss of faith must produce in a serious nature. Now, while it is by no means essential, for poetry to be good, that it should aim at propagating the tenets of the Church of England, it certainly touches a lofty chord of the human heart when it takes up the general question of man’s relation to religion. For a long time Clough was wrestling with these problems, always with sincerity and reverence, even when far from orthodox conclusions. Such a state of mind is expressed by these lines: —

Or again in these: —

These poems, however, express but one phase of mental struggle. They are worthy of all respect for their honesty and earnestness, but from their nature they cannot appeal to a large class of readers. They express a state of tension in the author’s mind which was right enough in its time as part of his intellectual growth, but which normally is succeeded by the contemplation of other questions, which crowd upon the mind with maturer and probably more active years. At times he expresses a certain pensive ness at the thought of the separations and estrangements unavoidable in life, and nowhere more beautifully than in the following verses, which, although they are perhaps the best-known of all that Clough wrote, we venture to quote; certainly no one will be harmed by giving them another reading: —

The same feeling is otherwise expressed in the following poem, one of the Songs in Absence, composed either during his voyage across the Atlantic to this country, or during his stay here in the year 1852: —

In these verses it is not at all by beauty of rhythm nor by ease of expression that the reader’s attention is specially attracted. They are not lacking in these qualities, but they are noteworthy much more for the feeling that they express. Those who take up Clough for the first time will have to prepare themselves to encounter occasional ruggedness of phrase, which will be more noticed perhaps by those accustomed to reading poets who are masters of facile expression, but this fault is never great enough to mar seriously the enjoyment of those who have any fancy for this earnest - minded writer. Certainly towards the end of his brief life — he died at but a little over forty, and he was a man who matured slowly — he found it easier to give appropriate and poetical wording to what he had to say. The most carping criticism can find no fault with these lines: —

There is no weakness in his longer poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, which was the first of these to appear, is an idyl of country-life, as fresh as a breeze in summer, into which is woven a social problem of love-making such as Clough was fond of introducing into his more ambitious poems. With even its decided merits, it is less characteristic of the author than one piece written in the succeeding year, 1849, which first saw light, nine years later, in the earliest pages of The Atlantic. The poem we mean is the Amours de Voyage. In it, we find drawn with great comprehension a character such as Clough imagined might well be the result of the uncertainty, self-questioning, and wondering indecision consequent on the inactivity of æsthetic enjoyment. The poet saw the danger of our delicate civilization, and in the hero of the Amours de Voyage, who certainly is not the usual hero of poetry or of fiction, he draws a very delightful man, cultivated and accomplished, who lacks the energy and enthusiasm requisite for the most urgent of the practical affairs of life, for certainly choice in marriage deserves to be included in this category, at least for the purposes of the writer of novels or poems. In Rome he meets and falls in love with a young girl, sensible and refined, but with a much truer knowledge of the world than that which he possesses. The story is told in a series of letters, in which the hero, Claude, portrays himself at great length as a halting, hesitating creature, looking at both sides of a question and weighing every argument, capable, to be sure, of falling in love with the girl, but meanwhile doubting, as the motto prefixed to the poem says, about love. In short, Clough drew here a picture of one of the dangers of the present day, as truly as Goethe, in his Sorrows of Werther, represented one of the follies of his time. To us there is something bordering on the old-fashioned in Werther. We read it without being moved to suicide, just as we are able to see Jack Sheppard without taking to the road for a livelihood. But in its day it was a most fatal story. It described what was at the time a common disease, and thereby helped to spread it among its readers, who caught the infection from its pages and suffered like pangs, just as beginners in the study of medicine imagine themselves the prey of every new ailment they come across in their text - books. Werther is the greater book because it describes what has been a more widelyspread evil, and because its passionate outbursts take stronger hold of the reader’s imagination than do Claude’s tepid self-communings. Then the tragic ending of Werther outweighs the uneventful termination of the Amours de Voyage, if not in truth, at least in dramatic effect. A conclusion of this sort to the

poem would have been impossible; the hero, who, as it was, had self-conscious trepidation about the part he was playing in the comedy, would have shrunk from a tragedy as from the most violent breach of decorum. The whole portrayal of Claude’s state of mind deserves great praise. Clough very wisely chose for a background to the unenergetic hesitation of his hero’s mind the futile activity of the struggle of the Roman republicans against the French in 1849. To tell the story of the poem over again in prose, or by means of brief extracts, would be treating it with but little justice. It may be fairer simply to call the reader’s attention to certain passages, as, for instance, to the naturalness with which the brief spasm of energy is introduced into Claude’s mind by the consciousness of his folly in letting happiness, or rather the chance of it, slip from between his fingers. His ineffectual efforts to find the heroine, after she had left Rome, are soon followed by a resignation which is in some measure the result of doubt about the reality of the feeling which is urging him on. For a time he had acted instinctively, without analyzing his emotions; but his habits are too strong, and he soon relapses into pondering about the good of everything except his usual uncertain state of mind. What is pathetic in the poem is not his suffering, which is so speedily consoled by reflection, but, rather, the gently indicated disappointment of the heroine, who sees very clearly, being unaccustomed to the sophistication of clever selfishness, how benumbing is the web which the hero spins about himself. In comparison with her straightforwardness his vexatious hair-splitting, which is nowhere exaggerated, stands out in its proper light. It is nowhere contemptible, otherwise she could not have been willing to love him, but it is truly pitiable. With him it is not a crime, it is a disease, and it is a form of disease which is known to those who complacently suffer from it as the spirit of the nineteenth century; for the self - consciousness of the age has reached the height of recognizing and naming its own spirit in this fashion, and of calling a man who represents that spirit a representative man of the nineteenth century. This is a habit which was unknown to those who lived in other centuries. The flattering model of characters like these is Hamlet. Nowhere in literature is there to be found a better picture of a man of this sort than in the Amours de Voyage, and hence it is that Clough so well deserves the credit of having understood and drawn one of the people of his time. It is not in this study of character alone that he has been successful. There is a charm in his verses which is very noteworthy. The poem itself, like the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, is written in hexameters. In the hands of a master like Clough this metre shows itself adapted to the practical purpose of telling the story in an impressive and artistic way, while at the same time it shows great fitness for poetical expression, as in the extract given below:-

In general Clough’s hexameters do not have the misfortune of reminding the reader that he is dealing with that muchabused and often mechanical metre. One reads them without recollecting that they are hexameters. Even more marked is his success with elegiacs. In this measure are written the brief introductory and concluding lines of each of the four cantos. For one example the following passage may be quoted: —

And, in addition, these ringing lines with which the poem ends: —•

Certainly these verses need no comment stumbling along after the impression made by them, and vainly trying to explain it. The reader has a deaf ear who does not perceive their charm, and no argument or appeal can aid him. It will be hard, however, to find any one insensible to the grace and dreaminess which characterize so much of Clough’s poetry. It is not so much that he fascinates us by power of description, as that he represents the feeling made on the soul of man by objects of beauty. For this purpose he does not analyze his sensations, he sings the mood which the sympathetic reader is able to recall as the one inspired in him by similar circumstances. This art is not prettiness, nor technical or, if the expression can be used, professional elegance, so much as an exaltation of the poetic power; for it appeals to the highest feelings of men, not to their more easily gratified enjoyment of what is perceived through the senses alone. This rare quality makes Clough a poet for the faithful few rather than for the hastily reading multitude, averse to reflection, and prone to measure poetic worth more by the intensity of the impression than by its quality. As an example of what is meant, the following lines, introductory to Canto III., deserve quotation: —

Another of his long poems is Dipsychus, which was written in dramatic form, not with any design for the stage, but as a proper means of expressing what was to be said. The subject of the poem is the conflict between a tender conscience and the world. The dramatis personœ, representing these two opposing forces, are Dipsychus and the spirit. Dipsychus has a yearning for what is good, and the spirit is the vulgar, sneering, ironical mood which is one of the results of excessive mental culture. For with all its merits for the inspiration of those who are able to make use of their accumulations, there is a certain danger lest cultivation, carried too far, should unfit its owner for activity by inspiring his self-consciousness to make comparisons between him and others, and lest it should destroy the enthusiasm which inspires work, by precocious application of the lesson of experience, that everything is vanity. Sitting in a room lined with mirrors is not apt to produce unconscious manners, and, in the same way, too much theoretical knowledge is likely to have for its result the negation of everything on which activity depends. The ardor of youth may be foolishness, but its cynicism is cheap wisdom plagiarized. The spirit represents this cynicism, and Dipsychus suffers from the self-consciousness which paralyzes the will.

If the Amours de Voyage is a modern Werther, the Dipsychus is a modern Faust. An attempt has already been made to show that there is some resemblance between the first-named books; and it is easy to detect a certain similarity between the other two. While Faust stands for the man of all time, the Dipsychus represents merely the modern man with his newly acquired imperfections, and there is consequently a great difference in the proportions of the two poems, but they are alike in quality. The emotional nature of Dipsychus, who has ardent longings for what makes life most honorable, is well portrayed. He is perpetually baffled by irresolution, the bane of reflection. At times this, when carried to the extent of ridiculing honest effort, is the part the spirit acts; he is the embodiment of all worldliness, while Dipsychus, with nearly the uniformity of a pendulum, swings from the pondering of what he shall do to satiety of the whole matter. As he himself asks: —

And there is always to be heard the corroding voice of the spirit, turning reverence to ridicule, and mocking every pure feeling. This poem is indeed a tragedy, for it describes the death of a soul which, although morbid, is at least human. Perhaps a thoroughly healthy soul knows nothing of tragedies.

Even an unobservant reader can hardly fail to notice the skill with which Clough has set the remarks of the spirit in a jingling, vulgar metre, which mocks the poetical language to which Dipsychus occasionally rises. One of the many cases of this is to be found in Scene II. Dipsychus has just said, —

To this the jeering spirit replies, —

And when Dipsychus goes on,—

the spirit sings his song beginning,—

While dramatic action is wholly wanting, dramatic feeling has inspired the whole of this wonderful poem. It is a marvelous picture of the contending impulses of the human mind, and especially under the temptations of the present day. It lays bare the mysteries of a reserved nature. While it is not to be read for statistical information with regard to Clough’s life, it throws a great deal of light upon his character and manner of thinking. His letters, such at least as have been published, are very interesting, but the reader gets the impression of the writer’s constant unwillingness to make much of himself; he rather eludes than invites observation; but in his poems we get, very markedly, the impression of what was always perplexing him, namely, man’s relation to unseen things. His position of reverent uncertainty is, indeed, far more deserving of respect than is that of the mock pagans who eat, drink, and make merry, because to - morrow they die. When they write poetry they may express what certain people do in this century, but its real life, and the questions agitating it, are best set forth in Clough’s poems. His seriousness may make him less generally read, but those who read him will only value him the more.

The Mari Magno is a collection of tales told upon the high seas by a few passengers of a steamship, in them there is none of the subjective discussion which appears in those poems already mentioned, but in its place a most concise directness, a truly Chaucerian simplicity. The narrators are well described. Here, for example, is one; —

This book of poems gives evidence of his tardily-attained maturity. It seems as if at length he had found his place in life, as if he had passed safely through the experiences which make up so much of his earlier poems, and as if while sympathizing with others he had found firm ground under his feet, from which he could examine what went on about him, without losing himself in wonder.

All of these poems treat of different questions about love and marriage. The last subject was in his mind during his final illness. They serve to show what it would have been fair to expect from him if he had lived longer; but that is not all: they are, though brief and few, good models of narration, by means of both their simplicity and their seriousness. The first of them, The Lawyer’s First Tale, or Love is Fellow-Service, is a fair example of what Clough had attained to when his brief life ended. The hero is just the hesitating, over - conscientious youth who was always a favorite with this poet, who, while presenting clearly the character he has chosen, and understanding him thoroughly, was able to state his troubles, doubts, and fears, as something outside of himself. The other stories of the Mari Magno have the same distinctive quality. It is by no means clear that he had abandoned his former method of expression; indeed, the Dipsychus, as well as the Mari Magno, was published only after his death, but he gave in the latter the first proof of a willingness to employ a directly objective method. It is not probable that he would have abandoned a form in which he had been so successful already, and which his thoughtfulness and sincerity inspired with such vivid truth.

In these few pages an attempt has been made to set before the reader some of the distinctive traits of one of the wisest of modern poets, of oue who has most sympathetically perceived what was peculiar to his time, and most fairly stated it. His tone is, perhaps, too lofty for him to attract a multitude of readers, but he is sure to count among his admirers those who are not repelled by seriousness, and who feel that the poet does his duty when he busies himself with the highest emotions of man. When the literary fashion of the present day has gone to the same limbo as the writing of pastorals, or, it may be, of epics, it will be found that there wrote at this time a poet who refused to join the melodious singers that lived upon the past; who saw what was distracting the hearts of his contemporaries, and put it down in his verses; who was like the ancients in seeing what was present to him. He, and one or two of his contemporaries, will receive the credit of having written poetry really characteristic of this century.

T. S. Perry.