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

by Arthur Hugh Clough

I.

My dear Sir,—I left this country as nearly as possible (next June, I believe, will complete it) one quarter of a century back, to go to school. I was sent ‘home,’ as they called it—that is, away from home, to the land which my parents, and, I presume, yours also, long ago belonged to—to be educated.

Does one get educated in twenty-five years, I wonder? The wisest of the seven wise men of Greece describes to us how that he

Each day grew older and learnt something new.

And, since the something new may possibly contradict, and will assuredly modify, the everything not so new before it, at what age may one consider oneself entitled, for example, to write letters in print to the editor of a magazine? At what figure does one attain one’s real majority and right of speech? How soon may one venture to affirm anything which everybody else does not already know and believe? And, in the meantime, is there any good in talking merely to be assented to? Is it so agreeable an exercise on the part of the reader to express mentally to himself that assent? If agreeable, is it therefore useful? ‘Were it not better done as others use?’ to follow the plough or the ledger, to find a Neæra in agriculture, or an Amaryllis in commerce? ‘What boots it, with incessant care, to tend the slighted’ bookmaker’s trade, ‘and strictly meditate the thankless muse’ of magazines? Will posterity know anything of our miserably imperfect, impotent fugitive verses, or contemporaneity be none the worse for them? Are we not most likely corrupting the pure taste which would otherwise turn with a natural appetite to Shakspeare and Milton, to Addison and Goldsmith, to Virgil and Homer? Goethe, I have heard, said not long before his death, that had he known ere he began writing how many good books there were in the world before, he would never have written a word.

There is one thing, indeed, I think one might do, could one only believe that one could. No so certain a way of learning the merit of a great picture as an attempt to copy it or represent something like it. And as we, if we look to it and take pains, may by our indifferent writing learn to appreciate the worth and merit of great writers, whom before we thought but little of, so it is also possible that our faithful, though small attempts, may help people to appreciate the great originals.

Every new age has something new in it—takes up a new position; the view presented by the writers of an anterior age is not readily seized, or adopted by those born in a later century. It may, I think, be one good work attainable to the efforts of the humble, modern littérateur, to elevate and direct to the noblest objects the tastes and enjoyments of his contemporaries. He holds a position common with them: he may avail himself of this for their edification. As the traveller who knows the country will show his less experienced companion at each new stage, each further remove, under changed aspects, the high mountain points they are retiring from; will point out the Mont Blanc whose shadow they stood in at Chamouni, in its full magnificent outline at Sallanches, and again, far distant, yet not less rose-tinged, at sunset from Geneva, so the writers (that is, or should be, the more instructed readers) of each new century may successively restore each successive generation to connection with the teachers of the past. Such is a possible function for a writer. Do twenty-five years educate one, I wonder, for this—twenty-five years of the universal slovenly habits of writing, speaking, hearing, thinking, remembering, which pervade our time? ‘Twenty-five years have I spent in learning,’ said the young man to the old. ‘Return,’ said the sage, ‘and spend another twenty-five in unlearning.’ ‘Each day grow older and unlearn something’—is this to be our other reading of Solon’s maxim? Alas! it would seem there is need of it. We submit ourselves for instruction to teachers, and they teach us (or is it our awkwardness that we learn from them?) their faults and mistakes. Each new age and each new year has its new direction; and we go to the well-informed of the season before ours, to be put by them in the direction which, because right for their time, is therefore not quite right for ours.

Upon the water in a boat,

I sit and sketch as there we float;

The scene is fair, the stream is strong,