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

by Arthur Hugh Clough

Terraque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu.

He from whom came man’s primal raw material—that Pharaoh, who fed while the harvest yet was lacking; He retains, and to those whom He shall send is due, in their proportion, that which hath come of it. Without Him we could not have laboured: that which His gift was to us, it is His will our labour should be found to others. ‘The earth hath He given to the children of men.’

No such thing can there be as a right to do what you will with your own. The property is not your own: scarcely your own at any time; during times of calamity in no wise, except to do good with and distribute. Neither again can you plead the good it does you: who made thee to differ? you cannot even plead the good which your cultivation, so obtained, does the nation; that cultivation could be better obtained without it. Nor yet that you are patronising arts and sciences; genius, and skill, and knowledge. You are so, no doubt—but the thing could be done as well and better if you employed painters and architects—engravers and jewellers—builders and engineers—not upon your own dining-rooms and drawing-rooms; but upon churches, and schools, and hospitals, public works and public institutions. And that patronage would be as superior to the present as the patronage of painting, properly so called, to that of the painting of portraits. Yet even for that higher kind this is hardly the season. Neither, again, can you defend yourselves on the ground of the ‘benefit of trade.’ Burn your candles, if you please, at both ends—to make your blanket longer cut off from the top to piece on at the bottom: but this is too serious a matter for playing with transparent fallacies.

But I am running into idle repetitions, and telling a twicetold tale: what is it then that I call upon you to do? Join the Association? Not I. Do as you please about that. But about one thing you must not do as you please. You must not insult God alike and man with the spectacle of your sublime indifference. The angels of heaven, one might believe, as they pass above those devoted shores, in gazing on that ordained destruction let fall untasted from their immortal lips the morsel of ambrosial sustenance. If we, as they, were nurtured on other food than our brothers, if no gift of ours could help to allay those pangs of famine, still methinks this undisturbed, unrestrained fruition were not wholly free of guilt. How much more when every crumb we touch is abstracted from that common stock, which in the eternal registers is set down, I fear, as scarcely less theirs than ours?

If then it is really the case that past extravagance has brought upon you present helplessness, if all you have and all you can this year expect is forfeit, ere it come to your hands, to the purveyors of past indulgence, wherefore, I beseech you, go on in that same foolish course? You need not, you ought not, you must not. Pay if you can: it is the tradesman’s due; he too has his difficulties, he too has his duties of charity: pay if you can; if you cannot retrench in any wise; let no childish fear of alarming suspicions, of awakening unpleasant importunities, withhold you; in the end it will surely be the best for creditor alike and debtor. Let not duns or imagination of duns frighten you into folly redoubled. Join, if you please, the Association: it professes no more than retrenchment for the sake of the Irish: you need not, in my judgment, pay one farthing to the box, you are serving its purposes otherwise. And it may perhaps be some assistance to your purposes of economy, it may give you a sort of vantage-ground of joint recognition, to place your name, either in manuscript or print, among its members. But about this I profess a most supreme incuriousness. Only, for Ireland’s sake, and England’s, and your own—abstain, be temperate, and save.

Will you tell me that the little we can do is too little to be worth doing at all? Surely for our own satisfaction simply it should be done. But further: do you not know that through increase of consumption in the year before last, the returns of customs and duties were raised by hundreds of thousands of pounds? I say, the mere customs and duties upon the increase. What is true of increase in the one way, will I think be admitted true of decrease in the other. If by the mere tax on our increased eating and drinking the exchequer filled so fast, will the total decrease amount to so very small a trifle?

Will you tell me finally that all this is the hot fume of a distempered imagination? that I am rather letting my fancy rest on what one saw in Oxford during last summer term, than looking steadily on what is occurring in this? that I am haunted by the ghosts of forgotten champagne bottles, the spectra of long-worn-out waistcoats, the simulacra of the fruits and the ices of Whitsuntide ‘46?

The shopkeepers, I am told, profess to feel a difference. Surely they did not count on exactly the same thing again! I trust indeed there is a difference. But then the weather has been so bad. Who wants ices with the wind N.N.E.; who likes Nuneham or Godstowe in the rain? When all the watering-pots of heaven are playing upon High Street, there will hardly be a quorum for examining one’s toilet. I only wish one could feel any sort of security that five or six fine warm suns would not make a great difference the other way; would not provoke the same exuberance of extravagant pleasure-hunting which shot up with such rank vegetation in the heats of last June. With the roses and the May will come out, I greatly fear, the champagne and the claret. For my own part, if the corn could only ripen in it, I could wish for rain and cold to the end of the chapter.

Or will you say this is all rhetoric and declamation? There is, I dare say, something too much in that kind. What with criticising style and correcting exercises, we college tutors perhaps may be likely, in the heat of composition, to lose sight of realities, and pass into the limbo of the factitious. Especially when the thing must be done at odd times, in any case, and if at all, quickly. The term is half over; while I write, the barometer rises; ere I correct the proof sheet, the hot weather may be here. But if I have been obliged to write hurriedly, believe me, I have obliged myself to think not hastily. And believe me too, though I have desired to succeed in putting vividly and forcibly that which vividly and forcibly I felt and saw, still the graces and splendours of composition were thoughts far less present to my mind than Irish poor men’s miseries, English poor men’s hardships, and your unthinking indifference. Shocking enough the first and the second, almost more shocking the third.

One word more. Nothing that is said here is intended to go against enjoyment, as such. It is perhaps scarcely natural for young men to feel strongly that which they do not see. It were absurd to affect a gloom which does not exist. But it is not absurd to avoid in our enjoyments that which a little reflection can show us to be wrong, to be hurtful or unfitting: it is not absurd to lay down a few rules beforehand which will keep up in our minds the general impression that those unseen miseries are, though unseen, not unreal: it is not absurd to do, with or without sensation and sentiment, those acts which tend to their alleviation; to avoid, simply because it has been shown to be the right course, expensive and ostentatious gratifications. And simple enjoyments are, if not the most voluptuous and delicately refined, assuredly the manliest and healthiest, the most honest and rational and permanent.