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

by Arthur Hugh Clough

the prophetic soul

Of the great world dreaming o’er things to come.

Into details of critical remark on Shakespeare I do not now purpose to carry you. Let me but mark one point. It is impossible, I should suppose, for any reader who does not come to the plays of Shakespeare with a judgment overborne by the weight of authority or the force of general sentiment—it is impossible, I should imagine, for any ingenuous, dispassionate reader not to find himself surprised, checked, disappointed, shocked, even revolted, by what in any other author—in an author of modern times—he would call gross defects in point of plot, flagrant inconsistencies of character. In ‘As You Like It,’ for example, who is not astounded to meet in Act V. the unnatural brother of Act I., by the rehabilitation of a most cursory Deus-ex-machinâ sort of penitence, or shall I call it regret, qualified for the love, wedlock, and happiness which honest people had been working up to through the whole long drama? Whom does the marriage of Angelo and Mariana leave quite easy in his mind? Whose moral sensibilities are not a little ruffled by a strange phantasmagoria of good people becoming bad of a sudden, and all of a sudden good again; good and happy, too, after every sort of misconduct, after the wickedest and foulest actions, with one touch of the wand all made right; guilt converted to innocence, with not a stain left behind—long-suffering virtue shall wed quick repentant vice—and all, it would seem, simply to bring the play to a happy ending?

For the explanation of these apparent blemishes—these obvious incongruities in the comedies (for that is their region) of our great poet, I might refer you to M. Guizot’s criticism on Shakespeare. One element in it consists in the fact, which we are pretty safe in assuming, that with the story Shakespeare had little or nothing to do; he simply took what was given him, and made of it what he could—what he had occasion or time for. And yet that the taste of the time, and that he himself should acquiesce in such a representation, is a matter, I think, in some degree appertaining to that balanced, speculative character which I attempted but now to describe, natural to the age and characteristic of the writer.

Free and serene in youth, newly emancipated from teachers and directors, unfettered any longer by precept or injunction of others, unbound as yet by any self-imposed restriction, or even any formed determination—in the richness of a reflectiveness which even now is all but a malady, in the fulness of an almost premature maturity of thought—in a distant preconception or presentiment wandering undecided in the garden of the infinite choices; free as yet to select, loving much rather as yet to forbear; with a tranquil wistfulness, with a far-sighted consciousness, looking down those unnumbered, diverging, far-reaching avenues of future actuality, each one of which, but, if any one, then not any other, he may follow—such I venture to picture to myself the second poet of the English series—the second and the greatest—the creator of Othello and of Falstaff, of Hotspur and of Hamlet.

Not uncompromised, not uncommitted any longer, self-committed, strongly, deliberately, seriously, irreversibly committed; walking as in the sight of God, as in the profound, almost rigid conviction that this one, and no other of all those many paths is, or can be, for the just and upright spirit possible, self-predestined as it were, of his own will and foreknowledge, to a single moral and religious aim—such, I think, are we to imagine the writer of ‘Paradise Lost’ and of ‘Samson Agonistes,’ the third of the English poets. To what purpose these myriad phenomena, entering and traversing the field of that mighty object-glass of the speculative intellect? Is it life to observe? Is it a man’s service to know? As if it was a thing possible for us to forbear to act; as though there were not in God’s world, amidst ten thousand wrongs, one right, amidst the false choices that offend Him, the one that is His will. And yet, though in 1623, when the players put out the first collected edition, the first folio of the tragedies, comedies, and histories of William Shakespeare, Milton, aged sixteen, was translating psalms, to the second of these folios, in 1632, were prefixed the verses by John Milton, ‘What needs my Shakespeare.’ And among the productions of that pure protracted youth, ending, we may say, only in his thirty-third year, and devoted to books and letters,—though ‘Comus,’ it is true, seems prophetic of the stern and religious virtues of the after-manhood and old age—‘L’Allegro’ meantime, ‘Il Penseroso,’ and parts of ‘Comus’ itself show lineaments of a gentler and less positive, more natural and less merely moral character. Is there not here in these earlier poems, lingering still, and as yet undismissed, a little of that poetic hesitance, that meditative reluctance to take a part which I attributed but now as his characteristic to Shakespeare? Does not the youthful Milton, while in this immature period, pondering, examining, testing, as it were, upon his spiritual palate the viands of life, approximate, I will not determine how closely, to that personal undramatic Shakespeare, who sadly and almost remorsefully could say of himself?—

Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view.

Gored my own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.

Or again,—