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

by Arthur Hugh Clough

To his Sister.

Oriel: May 1847.

You will see that the adorable Swede, Jenny Lind, has enchanted all the world. I greatly rejoice at it, and think I must go and see her. I have promised to go and see Tom at Whitsuntide, and so I dare say I shall do the thing then. Have you seen the lady’s picture? Look and see if you can find a not very beautiful but very pleasant and true-looking face, lithographed.

I have not read ‘Emilia Wyndham,’ but I did read a long time ago ‘Two Old Men’s Tales,’ by the same author, and they certainly were, as I am told ‘Emilia Wyndham’ is, too pathetic a great deal. I don’t want to cry except for some good reason; it is ‘pleasant, but wrong,’ in my mind. A novel ought to make you think, and if it does that, the more vivid it is the better, and of course it follows that now and then it will make you cry; but I am not aware that Mrs. Marsh does make you think.

Schiller made the same impression on me, when I used to read him in St. James’s Terrace, which he does now on you. Coleridge has been to me the antidotive power; he was a philosopher and a firm believer (so far as one can make out) in Christianity, not only as a doctrine, but as a narrative of events. My own feeling certainly does not go along with Coleridge in attributing any special virtue to the facts of the Gospel History. They have happened, and have produced what we know, have transformed the civilisation of Greece and Rome and the barbarism of Gaul and Germany into Christendom. But I cannot feel sure that a man may not have all that is important in Christianity even if he does not so much as know that Jesus of Nazareth existed. And I do not think that doubts respecting the facts related in the Gospels need give us much trouble. Believing that in one way or other the thing is of God, we shall in the end know, perhaps, in what way and how far it was so. Trust in God’s justice and love, and belief in His commands as written in our conscience, stand unshaken, though Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or even St. Paul, were to fall.

The thing which men must work at will not be critical questions about the Scriptures, but philosophical problems of Grace, and Free Will, and of Redemption as an idea, not as a historical event. What is the meaning of ‘Atonement by a crucified Saviour’? How many of the Evangelicals can answer that?

That there may be a meaning in it, which shall not only be consistent with God’s justice, that is, with the voice of our conscience, but shall be the very perfection of that justice, the one true expression of our relations to God, I don’t deny; but I do deny that Mr. M’Neile, or Mr. Close, or Dr. Hook, or Pusey, or Newman himself, quite know what to make of it. The Evangelicals gabble at it, as the Papists do their Ave Marys, and yet say they know; while Newman falls down and worships because he does not know, and knows he does not know.

I think others are more right who say boldly, we don’t understand it, and therefore we won’t fall down and worship it. Though there is no occasion for adding, ‘there is nothing in it,’ I should say, until I know, I will wait, and if I am not born with the power to discover, I will do what I can with what knowledge I have—trust to God’s justice, and neither pretend to know, nor, without knowing, pretend to embrace; nor yet oppose those who, by whatever means, are increasing or trying to increase knowledge. This is not very clear, perhaps, but one can’t correct in letter-writing.

To the same.

[On hearing of a case of stealing among school-children.]