Prose remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, with a selection from his letters and a memoir

by Arthur Hugh Clough

Immediately after laying down his tutorship, he made use of his leisure to go to Paris, in company with Emerson, where he spent a month in seeing the sights of the Revolution.

It was in September of this year (1848), when staying at home with his mother and sister in Liverpool, that he wrote his first long poem, the ‘Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich.’ This was his utterance to the world on quitting Oxford, and not the theological pamphlet which was expected from him. In later days he would often speak of the amusement it had been to him to think of the disappointment which the appearance of these lively verses would produce among those who looked for a serious vindication of his conduct. Some further explanation of his feeling will be furnished by an unpublished letter, which we subjoin:—

‘My objection in limine to subscription would be, that it is a painful restraint on speculation; but beyond this, to examine myself in detail on the Thirty-nine Articles, and say how far my thoughts upon them had passed the limit of speculation and begun to assume the form of concretion, would be not only difficult and distasteful to me, but absolutely impossible. I could not do it with any approximation to accuracy; and I have no wish to be hurried into precipitate declarations which, after all, might misrepresent my mind. It is fair to say that the points in question with me would not be subordinate matters; but at the same time I feel no call to the study of theology, and for the present certainly should leave these controversies to themselves, were they not in some measure forced upon my notice. Of joining any sect I have not the most distant intention.’

This year he spent chiefly at home; and, in the winter of 1848, he received an invitation to take the Headship of University Hall, London, an institution professing entirely unsectarian principles, founded for the purpose of receiving students attending the lectures at University College. His tenure of office was to date from October 1849, and he determined before this to take his first long holiday of travel, and to go to Rome. Thus his visit coincided accidentally with the siege of Rome by the French; and this, though it deprived him of many opportunities of travel and sight-seeing, was historically and politically of very great interest to him. This was the scene and the time during which he wrote his second long poem, the ‘Amours de Voyage.’

In October 1849 he returned to enter on his duties at University Hall. His new circumstances were, of course, very different from those of his Oxford life, and the change was in many respects painful to him. The step he had taken in resigning his fellowship isolated him greatly; many of his old friends looked coldly on him, and the new acquaintances among whom he was thrown were often uncongenial to him. The transition from the intimate and highly refined society of Oxford to the bustling miscellaneous external life of London, to one not well furnished with friends, and without a home of his own, could hardly fail to be depressing. He had hoped for liberty of thought and action; he had found solitude, but not perfect freedom. Though not bound by any verbal obligations, he found himself expected to express agreement with the opinions of the new set among whom he had fallen, and this was no more possible to him here than it had been at Oxford. His old prestige at Oxford availed him little in London; it has been remarked by his friends that he often failed to show himself to the best advantage, and this was doubly the case when he felt himself not understood. This was without doubt the dreariest, loneliest period of his life, and he became compressed and reserved to a degree quite unusual with him, both before and afterwards. He shut himself up, and went through his life in silence.

Yet here too he gradually formed some new and valuable friendships. Among these, his acquaintance with Mr. Carlyle was one of the most important; and to the end of his life he continued to entertain the warmest feeling for that great man. It was part of the sensitiveness of his character to shrink from going back on old impressions; and though he always retained his affection for his early friends, yet intercourse with fresh minds was often easier to him than with those to whom his former phases of life and thought were more familiar. In the autumn of 1850 he took advantage of his vacation to make a hasty journey to Venice, and during this interval he began his third long poem of ‘Dipsychus,’ which bears the mark of Venice in all its framework and its local colouring.

We have now mentioned, at the dates at which they were composed, all his longest works—the ‘Bothie,’ the ‘Amours de Voyage,’ and ‘Dipsychus.’ No other long work of his remains except the ‘Mari Magno,’ which is properly a collection of short poems, more or less united by one central idea, and bound together by their setting, as a series of tales related to each other by a party of companions on a sea voyage. The ‘Ambarvalia,’ poems written between 1840 and 1847, chiefly at Oxford, though without any setting at all, have something of the same inward coherence. They are all poems of the inner life, while the ‘Mari Magno’ poems deal with social problems, and the questions of love and marriage. His voyage to America, again, produced a cluster of little sea poems, closely linked together by one or two main thoughts.

It has often been a subject of surprise, that with such evident powers and even facility of production, Clough should have left so little behind him, even considering the shortness of his life, and that for such long periods he should have been entirely silent. We think the best explanation is to be found in his peculiar temper of mind, and we might say physical conformation of brain, which could not work unless under a combination of favourable circumstances. His brain, though powerful, was slow to concentrate itself, and could not carry on several occupations at once. Solitude and repose were necessary for production. This, combined with a certain inertia, a certain slowness of movement, constantly made it hard for him to get over the initial difficulties of self-expression, and would often, no doubt, cause him to delay too long and lose the passing inspiration or opportunity. But, once started, his very weight carried him on, as it did in the ‘Bothie,’ ‘Amours,’ and ‘Dipsychus,’ and ‘Mari Magno.’

Besides this, much in the very quality of his poetry will explain this scantiness of production. His absolute sincerity of thought, his intense feeling of reality, rendered it impossible for him to produce anything superficial, and therefore actually curtailed the amount of his creations. His excessive conscientiousness winnowed away so much as to leave often a sense of baldness. His peculiar habits of thought also, his sense of being constantly at variance with the ordinary sentiments of those who surrounded him, his incapability of treating the common themes of poetry in the usual manner, his want of interest in any poetry which did not touch some deep question, some vital feeling in human nature (always excepting his love for the simple beauty of nature), all combined to diminish his range of subjects. He had to enter on a new line, to create a new treatment of old subjects, to turn them over and bring them out in the new light of his critical but kindly philosophy. This, in ‘Mari Magno,’ he had begun to do, and the rapid production of these last poems makes us believe that this new vein would have continued had he lived, and that we should have received a further expression of his views about the daily problems of social life.

Looking now to the facts of his life, we see that there were in it very few intervals during which he enjoyed the combination of favourable circumstances necessary to enable him to write. He never was free, except during those short intervals, from the pressure of constant hard practical work. He was constantly under the necessity of using his power of work for the purpose of immediately making a living. His conscientious efforts, first to relieve his parents from the burden of his education, and then to assist them, have been related before. As fellow and tutor his earnings were freely contributed, and no doubt the desire of doing this was one great reason for undertaking the tutor’s work at Oriel. It is true that this was a time of comparative wealth, but it was earned by hard labour of a practical kind, and it has been already shown that during this period he made a pecuniary engagement which burdened him for many years after. Thus his duty to others never allowed him for any interval to cast himself on his fortune, and run risks for a while for the sake of freedom and opportunities. To many men this burden would have been lighter, but he was a heavy moving vessel; he could not turn and set his sails to catch light favouring winds. He could not use spare half-hours to write well-paid reviews or popular articles, or even poetry. The demand for his wares seemed to spoil the supply. That it should be profitable, seemed to make it impossible to him to write. Thus he was driven to harder, less congenial work, simply because it was positive and certain. Nothing, for instance, would have been more grateful to him than after leaving Oxford to be free for a few years to roam about the world before settling to a new vocation, but this was never to be thought of. No doubt there is another side to the picture; the real acquaintance with life and men, which this entire acceptance of various positions taught him, not only gave him valuable training, but furnished him with materials which in a mind of his calibre would, we doubt not, have come out in some literary form. But for the time they simply choked his power of production, and no doubt prevented the utterance of many thoughts on religious and other subjects.