The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot, Vol. Iv
• William Pitt. 1 (1861.)
• The Prince Consort. (1861.)
• Count Your Enemies and Economise Your Expenditure. (1862.)
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 1 (1862.)
• The Ignorance of Man. 1 (1862.)
• Mr. Clough’s Poems. 1 (1862.)
• Bolingbroke As a Statesman. 1 (1863.)
• What Lord Lyndhurst Really Was. (1863.)
• Sir George Cornewall Lewis. 1 (1863.)
• The Tribute At Hereford to Sir G. C. Lewis. (1864.)
• Sterne and Thackeray. 1 (1864.)
• Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning Or Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art In English Poetry. 1 (1864.)
• CÆsarism As It Existed In 1865.
• Mr. Cobden. (1865.)
• Lord Palmerston. (1865.)
• Boscastle. 1 (1866.)

MR. CLOUGH’S POEMS.1

(1862.)

No one can be more rigid than we are in our rules2 as to the publication of remains and memoirs. It is very natural that the friends of a cultivated man who seemed about to do something, but who died before he did it, should desire to publish to the world the grounds of their faith, and the little symptoms of his immature excellence. But though they act very naturally, they act very unwisely. In the present state of the world there are too many half-excellent people: there is a superfluity of persons who have all the knowledge, all the culture, all the requisite taste,—all the tools, in short, of achievement, but who are deficient in the latent impulse and secret vigour which alone can turn such instruments to account. They have all the outward and visible signs of future success; they want the invisible spirit, which can only be demonstrated by trial and victory. Nothing, therefore, is more tedious or more worthless than the posthumous delineation of the possible successes of one who did not succeed. The dreadful remains of nice young persons which abound among us prove almost nothing as to the future fate of those persons, if they had survived. We can only tell that any one is a man of genius by his having produced some work of genius. Young men must practise themselves in youthful essays; and to some of their friends these may seem works not only of fair promise, but of achieved excellence. The cold world of critics and readers will not, however, think so; that world well understands the distinction between promise and performance, and sees that these laudable juvenilia differ from good books as much as legitimate bills of exchange differ from actual cash.

If we did not believe that Mr. Clough’s poems, or at least several of them, had real merit, not as promissory germs, but as completed performances, it would not seem to us to be within our province to notice them. Nor, if Mr. Clough were now living among us, would he wish us to do so. The marked peculiarity, and, so to say, the flavour of his mind, was a sort of truthful scepticism, which made him anxious never to overstate his own assurance of anything; which disinclined him to overrate the doings of his friends; and which absolutely compelled him to underrate his own past writings, as well as his capability for future literary success. He could not have borne to have his poems reviewed with “nice remarks” and sentimental epithets of insincere praise. He was equal to his precept:—

• “Where are the great, whom thou wouldst wish to praise thee?
• Where are the pure, whom thou wouldst choose to love thee?
• Where are the brave, to stand supreme above thee,
• Whose high commands would cheer, whose chiding raise thee?
• Seek, seeker, in thyself; submit to find
• In the stones, bread, and life in the blank mind.”

To offer petty praise and posthumous compliments to a stoic of this temper, is like buying sugar-plums for St. Simon Stylites. We venture to write an article on Mr. Clough, because we believe that his poems depict an intellect in a state which is always natural “to such a being as man in such a world as the present,” which is peculiarly natural to us just now; and because we believe that many of these poems are very remarkable for true vigour and artistic excellence, although they certainly have defects and shortcomings, which would have been lessened, if not removed, if their author had lived longer and had written more.

In a certain sense there are two great opinions about everything. There are two about the universe itself. The world as we know it is this. There is a vast, visible, indisputable sphere, of which we never lose the consciousness, of which no one seriously denies the existence, about the most important part of which most people agree tolerably and fairly. On the other hand, there is the invisible world, about which men are not agreed at all, which all but the faintest minority admit to exist somehow and somewhere, but as to the nature or locality of which there is no efficient popular demonstration, no such compulsory argument as will force the unwilling conviction of any one disposed to denial. As our minds rise, as our knowledge enlarges, as our wisdom grows, as our instincts deepen, our conviction of this invisible world is daily strengthened, and our estimate of its nature is continually improved. But—and this is the most striking peculiarity of the whole subject—the more we improve, the higher we rise, the nobler we conceive the unseen world which is in us and about us, in which we live and move, the more unlike that world becomes to the world which we do see. The divinities of Olympus were in a very plain and intelligible sense part and parcel of this earth; they were better specimens than could be found below, but they belonged to extant species; they were better editions of visible existences; they were like the heroines whom young men imagine after seeing the young ladies of their vicinity—they were better and handsomer, but they were of the same sort; they had never been seen, but they might have been seen any day. So too of the God with whom the Patriarch wrestled; he might have been wrestled with even if he was not, he was that sort of person. If we contrast with these the God of whom Christ speaks—the God who has not been seen at any time, whom no man hath seen or can see, who is infinite in nature, whose ways are past finding out—the transition is palpable. We have passed from gods—from an invisible world, which is similar to, which is a natural appendix to, the world in which we live—and we have come to believe in an invisible world, which is altogether unlike that which we see, which is certainly not opposed to our experience, but is altogether beyond and unlike our experience; which belongs to another set of things altogether; which is, as we speak, transcendental. The “possible” of early barbarism is like the reality of early barbarism; the “may be,” the “great perhaps,” of late civilisation is most unlike the earth, whether barbaric or civilised.

Two opinions as to the universe naturally result from this fundamental contrast. There are plenty of minds, like that of Voltaire, who have simply no sense or perception of the invisible world whatever, who have no ear for religion, who are in the technical sense unconverted, whom no conceivable process could convert without altering what to bystanders and ordinary observers is their identity. They are, as a rule, acute, sensible, discerning, and humane; but the first observation which the most ordinary person would make as to them is, that they are “limited”; they understand palpable existence; they elaborate it, and beautify and improve it; but an admiring bystander, who can do none of these things, who can beautify nothing, who, if he tried, would only make what is ugly uglier, is conscious of a latent superiority, which he can hardly help connecting with his apparent inferiority. We cannot write Voltaire’s sentences; we cannot make things as clear as he made them; but we do not much care for our deficiency. Perhaps we think “things ought not to be so plain as all that”. There is a hidden, secret, unknown side to this universe, which these picturesque painters of the visible, these many-handed manipulators of the palpable, are not aware of, which would spoil their dexterity if it were displayed on them. Sleep-walkers can tread safely on the very edge of a precipice; but those who see, cannot. On the other hand, there are those whose minds have not only been converted, but in some sense inverted. They are so occupied with the invisible world as to be absorbed in it entirely; they have no true conception of that which stands plainly before them; they never look coolly at it, and are cross with those who do; they are wrapt up in their own faith as to an unseen existence; they rush upon mankind with “Ah, there it is! there it is!—don’t you see it?” and so incur the ridicule of an age.

The best of us try to avoid both fates. We strive, more or less, to “make the best of both worlds”. We know that the invisible world cannot be duly discerned, or perfectly appreciated. We know that we see as in a glass darkly; but still we look on the glass. We frame to ourselves some image which we know to be incomplete, which probably is in part untrue, which we try to improve day by day, of which we do not deny the defects,—but which nevertheless is our “all”; which we hope, when the accounts are taken, may be found not utterly unlike the unknown reality. This is, as it seems, the best religion for finite beings, living, if we may say so, on the very edge of two dissimilar worlds, on the very line on which the infinite, unfathomable sea surges up, and just where the queer little bay of this world ends. We count the pebbles on the shore, and image to ourselves as best we may the secrets of the great deep.

There are, however, some minds (and of these Mr. Clough’s was one) which will not accept what appears to be an intellectual destiny. They struggle against the limitations of mortality, and will not condescend to use the natural and needful aids of human thought. They will not make their image. They struggle after an “actual abstract”. They feel, and they rightly feel, that every image, every translation, every mode of conception by which the human mind tries to place before itself the Divine mind, is imperfect, halting, changing. They feel, from their own experience, that there is no one such mode of representation which will suit their own minds at all times, and they smile with bitterness at the notion that they could contrive an image which will suit all other minds. They could not become fanatics or missionaries, or even common preachers, without forfeiting their natural dignity, and foregoing their very essence. To cry in the streets, to uplift their voice in Israel, to be “pained with hot thoughts,” to be “preachers of a dream,” would reverse their whole cast of mind. It would metamorphose them into something which omits every striking trait for which they were remarked, and which contains every trait for which they were not remarked. On the other hand, it would be quite as opposite to their whole nature to become followers of Voltaire. No one knows more certainly and feels more surely that there is an invisible world, than those very persons who decline to make an image or representation of it, who shrink with a nervous horror from every such attempt when it is made by any others. All this inevitably leads to what common, practical people term a “curious” sort of mind. You do not know how to describe these “universal negatives,” as they seem to be. They will not fall into place in the ordinary intellectual world anyhow. If you offer them any known religion, they “won’t have that”; if you offer them no religion, they will not have that either; if you ask them to accept a new and as yet unrecognised religion, they altogether refuse to do so. They seem not only to believe in an “unknown God,” but in a God whom no man can ever know. Mr. Clough has expressed, in a sort of lyric, what may be called their essential religion:—

• • “O Thou whose image in the shrine
  • Of human spirits dwells divine!
  • Which from that precinct once conveyed,
  • To be to outer day displayed,
  • Doth vanish, part, and leave behind
  • Mere blank and void of empty mind,
  • Which wilful fancy seeks in vain
  • With casual shapes to fill again!
• • “O Thou, that in our bosom’s shrine
  • Dost dwell, unknown because divine!
  • I thought to speak, I thought to say,
  • ‘The light is here,’ ‘Behold the way,’
  • ‘The voice was thus,’ and ‘Thus the word,’
  • And ‘Thus I saw,’ and ‘That I heard,’—
  • But from the lips that half essayed
  • The imperfect utterance fell unmade.
• • “O Thou, in that mysterious shrine
  • Enthroned, as I may say, divine!
  • I will not frame one thought of what
  • Thou mayest either be or not.
  • I will not prate of ‘thus’ and ‘so,’
  • And be profane with ‘yes’ or ‘no,’
  • Enough that in our soul and heart
  • Thou, whatso’er Thou mayest be, art.”

It was exceedingly natural that Mr. Clough should incline to some such creed as this, with his character and in his circumstances. He had by nature, probably, an exceedingly real mind, in the good sense of that expression and the bad sense. The actual visible world as it was, and as he saw it, exercised over him a compulsory influence. The hills among which he had wandered, the cities he had visited, the friends whom he knew,—these were his world. Many minds of the poetic sort easily melt down these palpable facts into some impalpable ether of their own. To such a mind as Shelley’s the “solid earth” is an immaterial fact; it is not even a cumbersome difficulty—it is a preposterous imposture. Whatever may exist, all that clay does not exist; it would be too absurd to think so. Common persons can make nothing of this dreaminess; and Mr. Clough, though superficial observers set him down as a dreamer, could not make much either. To him, as to the mass of men, the vulgar, outward world was a primitive fact. “Taxes is true,” as the miser said. Reconcile what you have to say with green peas, for green peas are certain; such was Mr. Clough’s idea. He could not dissolve the world into credible ideas and then believe those ideas, as many poets have done. He could not catch up a creed as ordinary men do. He had a straining, inquisitive, critical mind; he scrutinised every idea before he took it in; he did not allow the moral forces of life to act as they should; he was not content to gain a belief “by going on living”. He said,

• “Action will furnish belief; but will that belief be the true one?
• This is the point, you know.”

He felt the coarse facts of the plain world so thoroughly that he could not readily take in anything which did not seem in accordance with them and like them. And what common idea of the invisible world seems in the least in accordance with them or like them?

A journal-writer in one of his poems has expressed this:—

• • “Comfort has come to me here in the dreary streets of the city,
  • Comfort—how do you think?—with a barrel-organ to bring it.
  • Moping along the streets, and cursing my day as I wandered,
  • All of a sudden my ear met the sound of an English psalm-tune.
  • Comfort me it did, till indeed I was very near crying.
  • Ah, there is some great truth, partial very likely, but needful,
  • Lodged, I am strangely sure, in the tones of the English psalm-tune:
  • Comfort it was at least; and I must take without question
  • Comfort, however it come, in the dreary streets of the city.
• • “What with trusting myself, and seeking support from within me,
  • Almost I could believe I had gained a religious assurance,
  • Formed in my own poor soul a great moral basis to rest on.
  • Ah, but indeed I see, I feel it factitious entirely;
  • I refuse, reject, and put it utterly from me;
  • I will look straight out, see things, not try to evade them;
  • Fact shall be fact for me, and the Truth the Truth as ever,
  • Flexible, changeable, vague, and multiform, and doubtful.—
  • Off, and depart to the void, thou subtle, fanatical tempter!”1

Mr. Clough’s fate in life had been such as to exaggerate this naturally peculiar temper. He was a pupil of Arnold’s; one of his best, most susceptible and favourite pupils. Some years since there was much doubt and interest as to the effect of Arnold’s teaching. His sudden death, so to say, cut his life in the middle, and opened a tempting discussion as to the effect of his teaching when those taught by him should have become men and not boys. The interest which his own character then awakened, and must always awaken, stimulated the discussion, and there was much doubt about it. But now we need doubt no longer. The Rugby “men” are real men, and the world can pronounce its judgment. Perhaps that part of the world which cares for such things has pronounced it. Dr. Arnold was almost indisputably an admirable master for a common English boy,—the small, apple-eating animal whom we know. He worked, he pounded, if the phrase may be used, into the boy a belief, or at any rate a floating, confused conception, that there are great subjects, that there are strange problems, that knowledge has an indefinite value, that life is a serious and solemn thing. The influence of Arnold’s teaching upon the majority of his pupils was probably very vague, but very good. To impress on the ordinary Englishman a general notion of the importance of what is intellectual and the reality of what is supernatural, is the greatest benefit which can be conferred upon him. The common English mind is too coarse, sluggish, and worldly to take such lessons too much to heart. It is improved by them in many ways, and is not harmed by them at all. But there are a few minds which are very likely to think too much of such things. A susceptible, serious, intellectual boy may be injured by the incessant inculcation of the awfulness of life and the magnitude of great problems. It is not desirable to take this world too much au sérieux; most persons will not; and the one in a thousand who will, should not. Mr. Clough was one of those who will. He was one of Arnold’s favourite pupils, because he gave heed so much to Arnold’s teaching; and exactly because he gave heed to it, was it bad for him. He required quite another sort of teaching: to be told to take things easily; not to try to be wise overmuch; to be “something beside critical”; to go on living quietly and obviously, and see what truth would come to him. Mr. Clough had to his latest years what may be noticed in others of Arnold’s disciples,—a fatigued way of looking at great subjects. It seemed as if he had been put into them before his time, had seen through them, heard all which could be said about them, had been bored by them, and had come to want something else.

A still worse consequence was, that the faith, the doctrinal teaching which Arnold impressed on the youths about him, was one personal to Arnold himself, which arose out of the peculiarities of his own character, which can only be explained by them. As soon as an inquisitive mind was thrown into a new intellectual atmosphere, and was obliged to naturalise itself in it, to consider the creed it had learned with reference to the facts which it encountered and met, much of that creed must fade away. There were inevitable difficulties in it, which only the personal peculiarities of Arnold prevented his perceiving, and which every one else must soon perceive. The new intellectual atmosphere into which Mr. Clough was thrown was peculiarly likely to have this disenchanting effect. It was the Oxford of Father Newman; an Oxford utterly different from Oxford as it is, or from the same place as it had been twenty years before. A complete estimate of that remarkable thinker cannot be given here; it would be no easy task even now, many years after his influence has declined, nor is it necessary for the present purpose. Two points are quite certain of Father Newman, and they are the only two which are at present material. He was undeniably a consummate master of the difficulties of the creeds of other men. With a profoundly religious organisation which was hard to satisfy, with an imagination which could not help setting before itself simply and exactly what different creeds would come to and mean in life, with an analysing and most subtle intellect which was sure to detect the weak point in an argument if a weak point there was, with a manner at once grave and fascinating,—he was a nearly perfect religious disputant, whatever may be his deficiencies as a religious teacher. The most accomplished theologian of another faith would have looked anxiously to the joints of his harness before entering the lists with an adversary so prompt and keen. To suppose that a youth fresh from Arnold’s teaching, with a hasty faith in a scheme of thought radically inconsistent, should be able to endure such an encounter, was absurd. Arnold flattered himself that he was a principal opponent of Mr. Newman; but he was rather a principal fellow-labourer. There was but one quality in a common English boy which would have enabled him to resist such a reasoner as Mr. Newman. We have a heavy apathy on exciting topics, which enables us to leave dilemmas unsolved, to forget difficulties, to go about our pleasure or our business, and to leave the reasoner to pursue his logic; “anyhow he is very long”—that we comprehend. But it was exactly this happy apathy, this commonplace indifference, that Arnold prided himself on removing. He objected strenuously to Mr. Newman’s creed, but he prepared anxiously the very soil in which that creed was sure to grow. A multitude of such minds as Mr. Clough’s, from being Arnoldites, became Newmanites.

A second quality in Mr. Newman is at least equally clear. He was much better skilled in finding out the difficulties of other men’s creeds than in discovering and stating a distinct basis for his own. In most of his characteristic works he does not even attempt it. His argument is essentially an argument ad hominem; an argument addressed to the present creed of the person with whom he is reasoning. He says: “Give up what you hold already, or accept what I now say; for that which you already hold involves it”. Even in books where he is especially called on to deal with matters of first principle, the result is unsatisfactory. We have heard it said that he has in later life accounted for the argumentative vehemence of his book against the Church of Rome by saying: “I did it as a duty; I put myself into a state of mind to write that book”. And this is just the impression which his arguments give. His elementary principles seem made, not born. Very likely he would admit the fact, yet defend his practice. He would say: “Such a being as man is, in such a world as this is, must do so; he must make a venture for his religion; he may see a greater probability that the doctrine of the Church is true than that it is false; he may see before he believes in her that she has greater evidence than any other creed; but he must do the rest for himself. By means of his will he must put himself into a new state of mind; he must cast in his lot with the Church here and hereafter, then his belief will gradually strengthen; he will in time become sure of what she says.” He undoubtedly, in the time of his power, persuaded many young men to try some such process as this. The weaker, the more credulous, and the more fervent, were able to persevere; those who had not distinct perceptions of real truth, who were dreamy and fanciful by nature, persevered without difficulty. But Mr. Clough could not do so; he felt it was “something factitious”.1 He began to speak of the “ruinous force of the will,”2 and “our terrible notions of duty”.3 He ceased to be a Newmanite.

Thus Mr. Clough’s career and life were exactly those most likely to develop and foster a morbid peculiarity of his intellect. He had, as we have explained, by nature an unusual difficulty in forming a creed as to the unseen world; he could not get the visible world out of his head; his strong grasp of plain facts and obvious matters was a difficulty to him. Too easily one great teacher inculcated a remarkable creed; then another great teacher took it away; then this second teacher made him believe for a time some of his own artificial faith; then it would not do. He fell back on that vague, impalpable, unembodied religion which we have attempted to describe.

He has himself given in a poem,4 now first published, a very remarkable description of this curious state of mind. He has prefixed to it the characteristic motto, “Il doutait de tout, même de l’amour”. It is the delineation of a certain love-passage in the life of a hesitating young gentleman, who was in Rome at the time of the revolution of 1848; who could not make up his mind about the revolution, who could not make up his mind whether he liked Rome, who could not make up his mind whether he liked the young lady, who let her go away without him, who went in pursuit of her, and could not make out which way to look for her,—who, in fine, has some sort of religion, but cannot himself tell what it is. The poem was not published in the author’s lifetime, and there are some lines which we are persuaded he would have further polished, and some parts which he would have improved, if he had seen them in print. It is written in conversational hexameters, in a tone of semisatire and half-belief. Part of the commencement is a good example of them:—

• • “Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand, but
  • Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it.
  • All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings,
  • All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages,
  • Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future.
  • Would to heaven the old Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it!
  • Would to heaven some new ones would come and destroy these churches!
  • However, one can live in Rome as also in London.
  • Rome is better than London, because it is other than London.
  • It is a blessing, no doubt, to be rid, at least for a time, of
  • All one’s friends and relations,—yourself (forgive me!) included,—
  • All the assujettissement of having been what one has been,
  • What one thinks one is, or thinks that others suppose one;
  • Yet, in despite of all, we turn like fools to the English
  • Vernon has been my fate; who is here the same that you knew him,—
  • Making the tour, it seems, with friends of the name of Trevellyn.
• • “Rome disappoints me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it.
  • Somehow a tyrannous sense of a superincumbent oppression
  • Still, wherever I go, accompanies ever, and makes me
  • Feel like a tree (shall I say?) buried under a ruin of brickwork.
  • Rome, believe me, my friend, is like its own Monte Testaceo,
  • Merely a marvellous mass of broken and castaway wine-pots.
  • Ye Gods! what do I want with this rubbish of ages departed,
  • Things that Nature abhors, the experiments that she has failed in?
  • What do I find in the Forum? An archway and two or three pillars
  • Well, but St. Peter’s? Alas, Bernini has filled it with sculpture!
  • No one can cavil, I grant, at the size of the great Coliseum.
  • Doubtless the notion of grand and capacious and massive amusement,
  • This the old Romans had; but tell me, is this an idea?
  • Yet of solidity much, but of splendour little is extant:
  • ‘Brickwork I found thee, and marble I left thee!’ their Emperor vaunted;
  • ‘Marble I thought thee, and brickwork I find thee!’ the Tourist may answer.”

As he goes on he likes Rome rather better, but hazards the following imprecation on the Jesuits:—

• “Luther, they say, was unwise; he didn’t see how things were going;
• Luther was foolish,—but, O great God! what call you Ignatius?
• O my tolerant soul, be still! but you talk of barbarians,
• Alaric, Attila, Genseric;—why, they came, they killed, they
• Ravaged, and went on their way; but these vile, tyrannous Spaniards,
• These are here still,—how long, O ye heavens, in the country of Dante?
• These, that fanaticised Europe, which now can forget them, release not
• This, their choicest of prey, this Italy; here you see them,—
• Here, with emasculate pupils and gimcrack churches of Gesù,
• Pseudo-learning and lies, confessional-boxes and postures,—
• Here, with metallic beliefs and regimental devotions,—
• Here, overcrusting with slime, perverting, defacing, debasing
• Michael Angelo’s dome, that had hung the Pantheon in heaven,
• Raphael’s Joys and Graces, and thy clear stars, Galileo!”

The plot of the poem is very simple, and certainly is not very exciting. The moving force, as in most novels of verse or prose, is the love of the hero for the heroine; but this love assuredly is not of a very impetuous and overpowering character. The interest of this story is precisely that it is not overpowering. The over-intellectual hero, over-anxious to be composed, will not submit himself to his love; over-fearful of what is voluntary and factitious, he will not make an effort and cast in his lot with it. He states his view of the subject better than we can state it:—

• “I am in love, meantime, you think; no doubt you would think so.
• I am in love, you say, with those letters, of course, you would say so.
• I am in love, you declare. I think not so; yet I grant you
• It is a pleasure indeed to converse with this girl. O, rare gift,
• Rare felicity, this! she can talk in a rational way, can
• Speak upon subjects that really are matters of mind and of thinking,
• Yet in perfection retain her simplicity; never, one moment,
• Never, however you urge it, however you tempt her, consents to
• Step from ideas and fancies and loving sensations to those vain
• Conscious understandings that vex the minds of mankind.
• No, though she talk, it is music; her fingers desert not the keys; ’tis
• Song, though you hear in the song the articulate vocables sounded,
• Syllables singly and sweetly the words of melodious meaning.
• I am in love, you say; I do not think so, exactly.
• There are two different kinds, I believe, of human attraction:
• One which simply disturbs, unsettles, and makes you uneasy,
• And another that poises, retains, and fixes and holds you.
• I have no doubt, for myself, in giving my voice for the latter.
• I do not wish to be moved, but growing where I was growing,
• There more truly to grow, to live where as yet I had languished.
• I do not like being moved: for the will is excited; and action
• Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something factitious,
• Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process;
• We are so prone to these things, with our terrible notions of duty.
• Ah, let me look, let me watch, let me wait, unhurried, unprompted!
• Bid me not venture on aught that could alter or end what is present!
• Say not, Time flies, and Occasion, that never returns, is departing!
• Drive me not out, ye ill angels with fiery swords, from my Eden,
• Waiting, and watching, and looking! Let love be its own inspiration!
• Shall not a voice, if a voice there must be, from the airs that environ,
• Yea, from the conscious heavens, without our knowledge or effort,
• Break into audible words? And love be its own inspiration?”

It appears, however, that even this hesitating hero would have come to the point at last. In a book, at least the hero has nothing else to do. The inevitable restrictions of a pretty story hem him in; to wind up the plot, he must either propose or die, and usually he prefers proposing. Mr. Claude—for such is the name of Mr. Clough’s hero—is evidently on his road towards the inevitable alternative, when his fate intercepts him by the help of a person who meant nothing less. There is a sister of the heroine, who is herself engaged to a rather quick person, and who cannot make out any one’s conducting himself differently from her George Vernon. She writes:—

• “Mr. Claude, you must know, is behaving a little bit better;
• He and Papa are great friends; but he really is too shilly-shally,—
• So unlike George! Yet I hope that the matter is going on fairly.
• I shall, however, get George, before he goes, to say something.
• Dearest Louise, how delightful to bring young people together!”

As the heroine says, “dear Georgina” wishes for nothing so much as to show her adroitness. George Vernon does interfere, and Mr. Claude may describe for himself the change it makes in his fate:—

• “Tibur is beautiful too, and the orchard slopes, and the Anio
• Falling, falling yet, to the ancient lyrical cadence;
• Tibur and Anio’s tide; and cool from Lucretilis ever,
• With the Digentian stream, and with the Bandusian fountain,
• Folded in Sabine recesses, the valley and villa of Horace:—
• So not seeing I sung; so seeing and listening say I;
• Here as I sit by the stream, as I gaze at the cell of the Sibyl,
• Here with Albunea’s home and the grove of Tiburnus beside me;1
• Tivoli beautiful is, and musical, O Teverone,
• Dashing from mountain to plain, thy parted impetuous waters!
• Tivoli’s waters and rocks; and fair under Monte Gennaro,
• (Haunt even yet, I must think, as I wander and gaze, of the shadows,
• Faded and pale, yet immortal, of Faunus, the nymphs, and the Graces,)
• Fair in itself, and yet fairer with human completing creations,
• Folded in Sabine recesses, the valley and villa of Horace:—
• So not seeing I sung; so now—Nor seeing, nor hearing,
• Neither by waterfall lulled, nor folded in sylvan embraces,
• Neither by cell of the Sibyl, nor stepping the Monte Gennaro,
• Seated on Anio’s bank, nor sipping Bandusian waters,
• But on Montorio’s height, looking down on the tile-clad streets, the
• Cupolas, crosses and domes, the bushes and the kitchen-gardens,
• Which, by the grace of the Tibur, proclaim themselves Rome of the Roman,—
• But on Montorio’s height, looking forth to the vapoury mountains,
• Cheating the prisoner Hope with illusions of vision and fancy,—
• But on Montorio’s height with these weary soldiers by me,
• Waiting till Oudinot enter, to reinstate Pope and Tourist.
• . . . . . . . . . . . .
• Yes, on Montorio’s height for a last farewell of the city,—
• So it appears; though then I was quite uncertain about it.
• So, however, it was. And now to explain the proceeding
• I was to go, as I told you, I think, with the people to Florence.
• Only the day before, the foolish family Vernon
• Made some uneasy remarks, as we walked to our lodging together,
• As to intentions, forsooth, and so forth. I was astounded,
• Horrified quite; and obtaining just then, as it happened, an offer
• (No common favour) of seeing the great Ludovisi collection,
• Why, I made this a pretence, and wrote that they must excuse me.
• How could I go? Great Heavens! to conduct a permitted flirtation.
• Under those vulgar eyes, the observed of such observers!
• Well, but I now, by a series of fine diplomatic inquiries,
• Find from a sort of relation, a good and sensible woman,
• Who is remaining at Rome with a brother too ill for removal,
• That it was wholly unsanctioned, unknown,—not, I think, by Georgina.
• She, however, ere this,—and that is the best of the story,—
• She and the Vernon, thank Heaven, are wedded and gone—honeymooning.
• So—on Montorio’s height for a last farewell of the city.
• Tibur I have not seen, nor the lakes that of old I had dreamt of;
• Tibur I shall not see, nor Anio’s waters, nor deep en-
• Folded in Sabine recesses the valley and villa of Horace;
• Tibur I shall not see;—but something better I shall see.
• Twice I have tried before, and failed in getting the horses;
• Twice I have tried and failed: this time it shall not be a failure.”

But, of course, he does not reach Florence till the heroine and her family are gone; and he hunts after them through North Italy, not very skilfully, and then he returns to Rome; and he reflects, certainly not in a very dignified or heroic manner:—

• • “I cannot stay at Florence, not even to wait for a letter.
  • Galleries only oppress me. Remembrance of hope I had cherished
  • (Almost more than as hope, when I passed through Florence the first time)
  • Lies like a sword in my soul. I am more a coward than ever,
  • Chicken-hearted, past thought. The cafés and waiters distress me.
  • All is unkind, and, alas! I am ready for any one’s kindness.
  • Oh, I knew it of old, and knew it, I thought, to perfection,
  • If there is any one thing in the world to preclude all kindness,
  • It is the need of it,—it is this sad, self-defeating dependence.
  • Why is this, Eustace? Myself, were I stronger, I think I could tell you.
  • But it is odd when it comes. So plumb I the deeps of depression,
  • Daily in deeper, and find no support, no will, no purpose.
  • All my old strengths are gone. And yet I shall have to do something.
  • Ah, the key of our life, that passes all wards, opens all locks,
  • Is not I will but I must. I must,—I must,—and I do it.
• • “After all, do I know that I really cared so about her?
  • Do whatever I will, I cannot call up her image;
  • For when I close my eyes, I see, very likely St. Peter’s,
  • Or the Pantheon façade, or Michael Angelo’s figures,
  • Or, at a wish, when I please, the Alban hills and the Forum,—
  • But that face, those eyes,—ah no, never anything like them;
  • Only, try as I will, a sort of featureless outline,
  • And a pale blank orb, which no recollection will add to.
  • After all, perhaps there was something factitious about it;
  • I have had pain, it is true: I have wept, and so have the actors.
• • “At the last moment I have your letter, for which I was waiting;
  • I have taken my place, and see no good in inquiries.
  • Do nothing more, good Eustace, I pray you. It only will vex me.
  • Take no measures. Indeed, should we meet, I could not be certain;
  • All might be changed, you know. Or perhaps there was nothing to be changed.
  • It is a curious history, this; and yet I foresaw it;
  • I could have told it before. The Fates, it is clear, are against us;
  • For it is certain enough I met with the people you mention;
  • They were at Florence the day I returned there, and spoke to me even;
  • Stayed a week, saw me often; departed, and whither I know not.
  • Great is Fate, and is best. I believe in Providence partly.
  • What is ordained is right, and all that happens is ordered.
  • Ah, no, that isn’t it. But yet I retain my conclusion.
  • I will go where I am led, and will not dictate to the chances.
  • Do nothing more, I beg. If you love me, forbear interfering.”

And the heroine, like a sensible, quiet girl, sums up:—

• “You have heard nothing; of course, I know you can have heard nothing.
• Ah, well, more than once I have broken my purpose, and sometimes,
• Only too often, have looked for the little lake steamer to bring him.
• But it is only fancy,—I do not really expect it.
• Oh, and you see I know so exactly how he would take it:
• Finding the chances prevail against meeting again, he would banish
• Forthwith every thought of the poor little possible hope, which
• I myself could not help, perhaps, thinking only too much of;
• He would resign himself and go. I see it exactly.
• So I also submit, although in a different manner.
• Can you not really come? We go very shortly to England.”

And there, let us hope, she found a more satisfactory lover and husband.

The same defect which prevented Mr. Claude from obtaining his bride will prevent this poem from obtaining universal popularity. The public like stories which come to something; Mr. Arnold teaches that a great poem must be founded on a great action, and this one is founded on a long inaction. But Art has many mansions. Many poets, whose cast of thought unfits them for very diffused popularity, have yet a concentrated popularity which suits them and which lasts. Henry Taylor has wisely said “that a poet does not deserve the name who would not rather be read a thousand times by one man, than a single time by a thousand”. This repeated perusal, this testing by continual repetition and close contact, is the very test of intellectual poetry; unless such poetry can identify itself with our nature, and dissolve itself into our constant thought, it is nothing, or less than nothing; it is an ineffectual attempt to confer a rare pleasure; it teases by reminding us of that pleasure, and tires by the effort which it demands from us. But if a poem really possesses this capacity of intellectual absorption—if it really is in matter of fact accepted, apprehended, delighted in, and retained by a large number of cultivated and thoughtful minds,—its non-recognition by what is called the public is no more against it than its non-recognition by the coal-heavers. The half-educated and busy crowd, whom we call the public, have no more right to impose their limitations on highly educated and meditative thinkers, than the uneducated and yet more numerous crowd have to impose their still narrower limitations on the half-educated. The coal-heaver will not read any books whatever; the mass of men will not read an intellectual poem: it can hardly ever be otherwise. But timid thinkers must not dread to have a secret and rare faith. But little deep poetry is very popular, and no severe art. Such poetry as Mr. Clough’s, especially, can never be so; its subjects would forbid it; even if its treatment were perfect: but it may have a better fate; it may have a tenacious hold on the solitary, the meditative, and the calm. It is this which Mr. Clough would have wished; he did not desire to be liked by “inferior people”—at least he would have distrusted any poem of his own which they did like.

The artistic skill of these poems, especially of the poem from which we have extracted so much, and of a long-vacation pastoral published in the Highlands, is often excellent, and occasionally fails when you least expect it. There was an odd peculiarity in Mr. Clough’s mind; you never could tell whether it was that he would not show himself to the best advantage, or whether he could not; it is certain that he very often did not, whether in life or in books. His intellect moved with a great difficulty, and it had a larger inertia than any other which we have ever known. Probably there was an awkwardness born with him, and his shyness and pride prevented him from curing that awkwardness as most men would have done. He felt he might fail, and he knew that he hated to fail. He neglected, therefore, many of the thousand petty trials which fashion and form the accomplished man of the world. Accordingly, when at last he wanted to do something, or was obliged to attempt something, he had occasionally a singular difficulty. He could not get his matter out of him.

In poetry he had a further difficulty, arising from perhaps an over-cultivated taste. He was so good a disciple of Wordsworth, he hated so thoroughly the common sing-song metres of Moore and Byron, that he was apt to try to write what will seem to many persons to have scarcely a metre at all. It is quite true that the metre of intellectual poetry should not be so pretty as that of songs, or so plain and impressive as that of vigorous passion. The rhythm should pervade it and animate it, but should not protrude itself upon the surface, or intrude itself upon the attention. It should be a latent charm, though a real one. Yet, though this doctrine is true, it is nevertheless a dangerous doctrine. Most writers need the strict fetters of familiar metre; as soon as they are emancipated from this, they fancy that any words of theirs are metrical. If a man will read any expressive and favourite words of his own often enough, he will come to believe that they are rhythmical; probably they have a rhythm as he reads them; but no notation of pauses and accents could tell the reader how to read them in that manner; and when read in any other mode they may be prose itself. Some of Mr. Clough’s early poems, which are placed at the beginning of this volume, are perhaps examples, more or less, of this natural self-delusion. Their writer could read them as verse, but that was scarcely his business; and the common reader fails.

Of one metre, however, the hexameter, we believe the most accomplished judges, and also common readers, agree that Mr. Clough possessed a very peculiar mastery. Perhaps he first showed in English its flexibility. Whether any consummate poem of great length and sustained dignity can be written in this metre, and in our language, we do not know. Until a great poet has written his poem, there are commonly no lack of plausible arguments that seem to prove he cannot write it; but Mr. Clough has certainly shown that, in the hands of a skilful and animated artist, it is capable of adapting itself to varied descriptions of life and manners, to noble sentiments, and to changing thoughts. It is perhaps the most flexible of English metres. Better than any others, it changes from grave to gay without desecrating what should be solemn, or disenchanting that which should be graceful. And Mr. Clough was the first to prove this, by writing a noble poem, in which it was done.

In one principal respect Mr. Clough’s two poems in hexameters, and especially the Roman one, from which we made so many extracts, are very excellent. Somehow or other he makes you understand what the people of whom he is writing precisely were. You may object to the means, but you cannot deny the result. By fate he was thrown into a vortex of theological and metaphysical speculation, but his genius was better suited to be the spectator of a more active and moving scene. The play of mind upon mind; the contrasted view which contrasted minds take of great subjects; the odd irony of life which so often thrusts into conspicuous places exactly what no one would expect to find in those places,—these were his subjects. Under happy circumstances, he might have produced on such themes something which the mass of readers would have greatly liked; as it is, he has produced a little which meditative readers will much value, and which they will long remember.

Of Mr. Clough’s character it would be out of place to say anything, except in so far as it elucidates his poems. The sort of conversation for which he was most remarkable rises again in the “Amours de Voyage,” and gives them, to those who knew him in life, a very peculiar charm. It would not be exact to call the best lines a pleasant cynicism; for cynicism has a bad name, and the ill-nature and other offensive qualities which have given it that name were utterly out of Mr. Clough’s way. Though without much fame, he had no envy. But he had a strong realism. He saw what it is considered cynical to see—the absurdities of many persons, the pomposities of many creeds, the splendid zeal with which missionaries rush on to teach what they do not know, the wonderful earnestness with which most incomplete solutions of the universe are thrust upon us as complete and satisfying. “Le fond de la Providence,” says the French novelist, “c’est l’ironie.” Mr. Clough would not have said that; but he knew what it meant, and what was the portion of truth contained in it. Undeniably this is an odd world, whether it should have been so or no; and all our speculations upon it should begin with some admission of its strangeness and singularity. The habit of dwelling on such thoughts as these will not of itself make a man happy, and may make unhappy one who is inclined to be so. Mr. Clough in his time felt more than most men the weight of the unintelligible world; but such thoughts make an instructive man. Several survivors may think they owe much to Mr. Clough’s quiet question, “Ah, then, you think—?” Many pretending creeds and many wonderful demonstrations, passed away before that calm inquiry. He had a habit of putting your own doctrine concisely before you, so that you might see what it came to, and that you did not like it. Even now that he is gone, some may feel the recollection of his society a check on unreal theories and half-mastered thoughts. Let us part from him in his own words:—

• • “Some future day, when what is now is not,
  • When all old faults and follies are forgot
  • And thoughts of difference passed like dreams away,
  • We’ll meet again, upon some future day.
• • “When all that hindered, all that vexed our love,
  • As tall rank weeds will climb the blade above,
  • When all but it has yielded to decay,
  • We’ll meet again, upon some future day.
• • “When we have proved, each on his course alone,
  • The wider world, and learnt what’s now unknown,
  • Have made life clear, and worked out each a way,
  • We’ll meet again,—we shall have much to say
• • “With happier mood, and feelings born anew,
  • Our boyhood’s bygone fancies we’ll review,
  • Talk o’er old talks, play as we used to play,
  • And meet again, on many a future day.
• • “Some day, which oft our hearts shall yearn to see,
  • In some far year, though distant yet to be,
  • Shall we indeed,—ye winds and waters, say!
  • Meet yet again, upon some future day?”

[1 ]Poems. By Arthur Hugh Clough, sometime Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. With a Memoir. Macmillan.

[2 ] This essay was originally published in The National Review.

[1 ] “Amours de Voyage,” v. 2.

[1 ] “Amours de Voyage.”

[2 ]Ibid.

[3 ]Ibid.

[4 ] “Amours de Voyage.”