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

by Arthur Hugh Clough

My own justification to myself for doing as I am doing is, I fear, one which would be as little approved of by you as my objections on the other hand. However, it is simply that I can feel faith in what is being carried on by my generation, and that I am content to be an operative—to dress intellectual leather, cut it out to pattern, and stitch it and cobble it into boots and shoes for the benefit of the work which is being guided by wiser heads. But this almost cuts me out of having any religion whatever; if I begin to think about God, there arise a thousand questions, and whether the thirty-nine Articles answer them at all, or whether I should not answer them in the most diametrically opposite purport, is a matter of great doubt. If I am to study the question, I have no right to put my name to the answers beforehand, or to join in the acts of a body and be to practical purpose one of a body who accept these answers of which I propose to examine the validity.

I will not assert that one has no right to do this, but it seems to me to destroy one’s sense of perfect freedom of inquiry in a great degree; and I further incline to hold that inquiries are best carried on by turning speculation into practice, and my speculations no doubt in their earlier stages would result in practice considerably at variance with thirty-nine-Article subscription. Much as I like, fond as I am of Oxford, and much as I should hate the other element undisguised, I verily believe that, as a preliminary stage, it would be far better to be at Stinkomalee (the London University acknowledges that agnomen, I believe). Amongst the irreligious, I should have Abdielitish tendencies; here, what religion I have I cannot distinguish from the amalgamations it is liable to, and I am, right or wrong, as matter of fact, exceedingly averse to act on anything but what I have got from myself, or have so distinctly appropriated as to allow my original tenants as it were time and space to state and vindicate their claim against the new comers.

Without in the least denying Christianity, I feel little that I can call its power. Believing myself to be in my unconscious creed in some shape or other an adherent to its doctrines, I keep within its pale; still, whether the spirit of the age, whose lacquey and flunkey I submit to be, will prove to be this kind or that kind, I can’t the least say. Sometimes I have doubts whether it won’t turn out to be no Christianity at all. Also, it is a more frequent question with me whether the master whom I work under, and am content to work under, is not carrying out his operations himself elsewhere, while I am, as it were, obeying the directions of a bungling journeyman no better than myself.

As the great Goethe published in his youth the ‘Sorrows of the Young Werther,’ so may I, you see, the great poet that am to be, publish my ‘Lamentations of a Flunkey out of place.’ You, perhaps, will say the lamentations are more out of place than the flunkey. And certainly Flunkey hath no intention of giving notice to quit just at present, nor of publishing lamentations at all. Thou, however, in thy wisdom, consider the sad examples and perplexities that encounter said flunkey amidst all the most flunkeyish occupations of his flunkeydom, and in the hope that at this time next year he will still be engaged in these same occupations, transmit to him advice and good counsel as to those same scruples and perplexities. In the meantime he must dress and put on his livery for dinner.

[Exit Flunkey.

To the same.

Liverpool: April 2, 1845.

Easter vacation should furnish forth a letter, more especially as I anticipate a singularly busy Easter Term, since one of our three tutors is to be examiner in the schools. First of all; you will be glad to hear that Matt Arnold is elected Fellow of Oriel. This was done on Friday last, March 28, just thirty years after his father’s election. Mrs. Arnold is of course well pleased, as also the venerable poet at Rydal, who had taken M. under his special protection. Mrs. Arnold I saw at Fox How; she was looking remarkably well, though the party seemed strangely small, all the boys being away.

The beauties of Parson’s Pleasure, where we were wont to bathe in the early morning, have been diminished by the unsightly erection, by filthy lucre-loving speculators, of a bathing-house, and I have therefore deserted it. But a substitute is to be found.

If you do not come soon, I shall perhaps have fled from my tutorial bower and committed something ἀνήκεστον.