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

by Arthur Hugh Clough

Looking over the valley,

All day long have seen,

Without pain, without labour,

Sometimes a wild-haired mænad,

Sometimes a Faun with torches.

But now, we are fain to ask, where are we, and whither are we unconsciously come? Were we not going forth to battle in the armour of a righteous purpose, with our first friend, with Alexander Smith? How is it we find ourselves here, reflecting, pondering, hesitating, musing, complaining, with ‘A’? As the wanderer at night, standing under a stormy sky, listening to the wild harmonies of winds, and watching the wild movements of the clouds, the tree-tops, or possibly the waves, may, with a few steps, very likely, pass into a lighted sitting-room, and a family circle, with pictures and books, and literary leisure, and ornaments, and elegant small employments—a scene how dissimilar to that other, and yet how entirely natural also—so it often happens too with books. You have been reading Burns, and you take up Cowper. You feel at home, how strangely! in both of them. Can both be the true thing? and if so, in what new form can we express the relation, the harmony, between them? Such a discrepancy there certainly does exist between the two books that have been before us here. We close the one and open the other, and feel ourselves moving to and fro between two totally different, repugnant, and hostile theories of life. Are we to try and reconcile them, or judge between them?

May we escape from all the difficulty by a mere quotation, and pronounce with the shepherd of Virgil,

Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites:

Et vitulâ tu dignus, et hic.

Or will the reader be content to bow down with us in this place, and acknowledge the presence of that highest object of worship among the modern Germans, an antinomy? (That is, O unlearned reader, ignorant, not impossibly, of Kant and the modern German religion—in brief, a contradiction in terms, the ordinary phenomenal form of a noumenal Verity; as, for example, the world must have had a beginning, and, the world cannot have had a beginning, in the transcendental fusion or confusion of which consists the Intelligible or unintelligible truth.) Will you be content, O reader, to plod in German manner over miles of a straight road, that seems to lead somewhere, with the prospect of arriving at last at some point where it will divide at equal angles, and lead equally in two opposite directions, where you may therefore safely pause, and thankfully set up your rest, and adore in sacred doubt the Supreme Bifurcation? Or do you hold, with Voltaire, who said (à propos of the question then debated among the French wits, whether there were or were not a God) that ‘after all, one must take a side?’