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

by Arthur Hugh Clough

To R. W. Emerson, Esq.

Council Office, Whitehall: August 22, 1854.

My dear Emerson,—Your letter about a week ago was very welcome, and the silver candlestick which came in Felton’s box of treasures was very much appreciated, and I am to send the kindest possible thanks for it. I only hope fortune may indeed some day waft us over, at least for a visit, to your Northern Vinland.

Carlyle is, I believe, ruralising at Addiscombe, a few miles out of London, which always does him a great deal of good. I dare say we shall not meet till London begins to consider itself alive again in October.

This country has, as you say, its concentrated civilization to hold one to it—it seems waste of opportunity to leave such a mass of old knowledge. But I think you are better and more happily off in America, where the vastness of the machinery does not destroy the sense of individual purpose. The ship here is really so big that one cannot see that it moves, or that any one of the little petty services which people are for the dear bread’s sake set to do, can have any effect one way or another on its motion. If one has a place or business here, one is only standing in some other person’s shoes, who really could very likely do the thing as well.

You are so infinitely more plastic, again, as to opinions than, except in talk, the English are. As for your politics, certainly they do not look well at present, and one is afraid that New York may after all acquiesce in the fait accompli, and go back to its farm and its country-house without concerning itself further. I am afraid the English theory is, when one has done a wrong thing, to forget it as soon as possible. Farewell!

To F. J. Child, Esq., of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Downing Street: September 2, 1854.

I hope the Chaucer is going on prosperously. I think you should adopt means to make the metre quite obvious, at any sacrifice of typographical prettiness. Yet I don’t like the grave accent, ‘When Zephyrus eke with his sotè breth,’ and should almost prefer the ˘, sotĕ, but that it seems unmeaning to use a mark of quantity. Yet it is not a case of accent, either. I think I should in one way or another mark every syllable that would not now be pronounced, grevĕs and levès and Emperourè’s daughter—the most correct mark would be ë: Emperourë’s; sotë. And I should prefix to the whole a very plain and short statement of the usage in these points.

I suppose there is not much doubt about a few general rules, though Chaucer did not regularly observe them, as, for example, the use of the ĕ in adjectives after definite articles, which it seems to me he omits occasionally, with French adjectives, as if it was a matter of ear rather than rule. So also with such Saxon dissyllables as tymĕ, which is not invariably a dissyllable, I think. And yet it would be worth while giving a list of such words as are liable to be dissyllables. However, ere this, I dare say you have settled all these preliminaries. I don’t quite see what you should do about the Miller’s and the Reve’s tales. I think explanation might be a little retrenched there, so as to leave them in the ‘decent obscurity of a learned language.’ They are thoroughly English stories, but I don’t know whether they are New English. They are just what would be relished to this day in public-houses in farming districts, but I can’t say that I could wish them urged upon any palate that does not already fancy them, and I don’t much admire the element in the English character that does relish them. It is a great thing, no doubt, to do dirty work, and the English are pretty good at it; but when it ceases to be work, it is a different thing, and I don’t see much good in it.