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

by Arthur Hugh Clough

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

And made myself a motley to the view,

is the Great Dramatist’s profoundest feeling about himself, his doings, his sayings, his writings. Virgil bade his ‘Æneid’ be burnt; and what we read as his is not his deliberate word, but that of Varius and Tucca. As Rousseau, it is said, in his old age, smiled sadly at the fervent disciples of the ‘Social Contract,’ the ‘Émile,’ and the ‘Julie’; so, doubt it not, did greater than Rousseau. So felt Raphael of his paintings, and Phidias of his sculptures; Michael Angelo, also, of his Pantheon suspended in the heavens. Dante, from some strange region of the spiritual spaces, looks down, half scorn, half remorse, on the worshippers of the Divine Comedy of his human spleen and bitterness. Cervantes laughs aloud to hear philosophers discriminate the pure reason in Don Quixote and the understanding in Sancho; and Montaigne, with open eyes of more than mortal wonder, repeats his ‘Que sçais-je?’ at the sight of grave worshippers of his levities. May it not be true that when I quote from Milton, a shade of severe vexation darkens his spiritual features, and when I repeat the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, an ethereal frown contracts the immortal forehead of the Preacher?

You are feeding, oh you students of Greek and lovers of Latin, you that add to your German, French, and to your French, Italian and Spanish, you inquirers afar off into Persian and Sanscrit, you devotees of Chaucer and votaries of Shakspeare and Milton—you are feeding upon that, precisely, which was tried by these wise men of old and found wanting. You stand picking up the dross where those before you have carried away the gold; you are swallowing as truth what they put away from them—expressed, because it was false or insufficient.

Or is this, peradventure, confined to our own weaker selves, our more impatient, irretentive, unthoughtful age? For, certainly, my dear sir, what you and I and the young people read in any modern page is, in the manner aforestated, ‘the thing that is not.’ Each striking new novel does but reveal a theory of life and action which its writer is anxious to be rid of; each enthusiastic address or oration is but that which its speaker is just beginning to feel disgusted with. Oh! happy and happy again, and thrice happy relief to the writer; but to the reader——?

Said the Tree to the Children, ‘How can you go and pick up those dirty dead leaves I have thrown away?’ Said the Children to the Tree, ‘Will you grow us any better next year?’ Said the Tree to the Children, ‘What! are you positively going to put into your mouths those horrid things (fruit, do you call it?) that have fallen from my branches?’ Said the Children to the Tree, ‘Why, they are very nice.’ Said the Tree then to itself, ‘Suppose I were to restrain myself next spring, and not grow any leaves, and to suppress, ascetically, all tendencies to blossom? Should I not then produce something better? By all that is wise and moral I will try.’ Said the Springtime six months after to the Tree, ‘My dear Tree, that is out of the question.’ The Children came again the next fall, and the Tree made no remark.

An illustration, however, is not the same thing as an argument; though sometimes, indeed, it may be better. It is a game, in any case, for two to play at. For it is also told of the Phœnix, that, having reached its term of years it proceeded to Arabia, and built up carefully its pyre of odoriferous combustibles, and sat down to expect the new birth. But when the fire began to kindle, and the odoriferous sticks crackled, the odours indeed were beautiful (ornithologists, however, are uncertain whether the Phœnix has any sense of smell), the flame meantime was most undoubtedly painful in the extreme when it got within the feathers (the Phœnix, there is no question, has the sense of touch). The Phœnix started up and exclaimed to itself, ‘Oh! surely, surely, I am young again now!’ ‘Sit still, sit still, poor Phœnix; not till pain has deprived thee of the very sense of pain, not until thought and self-consciousness are burnt out and out of thee—not, by many pangs, yet—is the new creature born in thee!’ with which exhortation the story concludes.

And with which illustration, upon which side, my dear sir, is the truth, or the most of the truth? ‘As the leaves are, so are the lives of men;’ and so also their writings? Shall we yield to the promptings of nature, and let the eager sap aspire forth in germination, and the leaflets open out, and display themselves, to fall from us dead and uncomely in November? Or shall we burn slowly, in silence, that hereafter something better may be born of us? Quien sabe?

Was it the silence or the speech of previous ages that formed the more perfect writers? Was Perugino necessary to Raphael, or had Raphael been more himself without him? Some function, indeed, higher than that of mere self-relief, we must conceive of for the writer. To sum up the large experience of ages, to lay the finger on yet unobserved, or undiscovered, phenomena of the inner universe, something we can detect of these in the spheric architecture of St. Peter’s, in the creative touches of the ‘Tempest.’

Imperfect, no doubt, both this and that is; short of the better thing to come—the real thing that is. Yet not impotent, not wholly unavailing.