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

by Arthur Hugh Clough

Between them two shall with much ado

Scarce get a double second.

‘This turned out only too true an oracle. Since the beginning of class-lists, the succession of firsts among Balliol scholars was unbroken. And few Balliol scholars had equalled, none ever surpassed, Clough’s reputation. I well remember going, towards the end of May or beginning of June, with one of the scholars of my own standing, to the School quadrangle to hear the class list read out, the first time I had heard it. What was our surprise when the list was read out, and neither of our scholars appeared in the first class. We rushed to Balliol and announced it to the younger Fellows who were standing at their open window. Many causes were assigned at the time for this failure—some in the examiners, some in Clough’s then state of spirits; but whatever the cause, I think the result for some years shook faith in firsts among Clough’s contemporaries. It made a great impression upon others; on himself I fancy it made but little. I never heard him afterwards allude to it as a thing of any consequence. He once told me he was sick of contentions for prizes and honours before he left Rugby.’

Thus he missed his first class, of which perhaps the worst result was that for the time it seriously distressed his parents and his friends, especially Dr. Arnold, who had looked forward to his achieving great distinction, and whose well-known dislike of the Tractarian movement made him doubly grieve at what he regarded as indirectly one of its consequences. Clough himself seems always to have felt a solid confidence in his own powers, and perhaps to have too little regarded the outward means of displaying them. Perhaps, too, he was somewhat conscious of that inaptitude to put himself forward to the best advantage, which many of his friends have noticed, and accepted it with his usual stoic philosophy. At any rate his failure did not long produce the effects he most feared, of want of pupils; for through Dr. Arnold’s kindness he was soon provided with profitable employment in teaching a number of Rugby boys who were kept at home at Liverpool by the breaking out of fever in the school. During this time he stayed at home with his family. In the autumn he returned to Oxford, and tried for a fellowship at Balliol. In this he was unsuccessful. He continued, however, to reside at Oxford, and supported himself on the exhibition and scholarship which he still held. In the spring of 1842 he was elected fellow of Oriel, which was in every way a great and cheering success to him. It healed the disappointment which his former failure and the judgment of others on it had caused, and seemed to give him a new life. It is clear by this determination of his to abide by Oxford and to seek his career and his living there, that he had as yet formed no definite views at variance with the principles of the Church. He had come, we believe, to see the unimportance of many things commonly insisted on; his intellect could no longer accept the ordinary formulas of religious opinion; but he was not provided with any other scheme to set up; his habits and his affections all clung to the old ways; then and many years afterwards he continued to feel that real liberality, width of view, and mental and moral cultivation were more commonly found among those nursed in the Anglican Church than in any exclusive sect, and probably the idea of any violent move, of quitting the home in which he had been reared, had never yet crossed his mind. His pleasure in his success in obtaining the fellowship was much enhanced by the satisfaction which it gave to Dr. Arnold, and in a practical way it was doubly valuable, because more troubles were now thickening round him and his family. Money difficulties pressed hard on his parents at this time; his help was much needed, and was unsparingly given. For some sketches of this period and a little later we will again quote Mr. Shairp’s words.

‘In the November of the same year he tried for a Balliol fellowship, but was not successful. Tait,[2] however, was strong in his favour, and, I believe, some other of the Fellows. I remember one of them telling me at the time that a character of Saul which Clough wrote in that examination was, I think he said, the best, most original thing he had ever seen written in any examination. But Oriel had at that time a way of finding out original genius better than either Balliol or the Schools. In the spring of 1842, Arthur Hugh Clough was elected fellow of Oriel, the last examination I believe in which Newman took part. The announcement of that success I remember well. It was on the Friday morning of the Easter week of that year. The examination was finished on the Thursday evening. I had asked Clough and another friend, who was a candidate at the same time, to breakfast with me on the Friday morning, as their work was just over. Most of the scholars of the College were staying up and came to breakfast too. The party consisted of about a dozen. We had little notion that anything about the examination would be known so soon, and were all sitting quietly, having just finished breakfast, but not yet risen from the table. The door opened wide; entered a fellow of another college, and, drawing himself up to his full height, he addressed the other candidate: “I am sorry to say you have not got it.” Then, “Clough, you have;” and stepping forward into the middle of the room, held out his hand, with “Allow me to congratulate you.” We were all so little thinking of the fellowship, and so taken aback by this formal announcement, that it was some little time before we knew what it was all about. The first thing that recalled my presence of mind was seeing the delight on the face of Clough’s younger brother, who was present.

‘In the summer of 1842, while I was reading in a retired part of Wales with two or three others, Clough, then wandering through the Welsh mountains, one morning looked in on us. I took a walk with him, and he at once led me up Moël Wyn, the highest mountain within reach. Two things I remember that day: one, that he spoke a good deal (for him) of Dr. Arnold, whose death had happened only a few weeks before: another, that a storm came down upon the mountain when we were half-way up. In the midst of it we lay for some time close above a small mountain tarn, and watched the storm-wind working on the face of the lake, tearing and torturing the water into most fantastic, almost ghostly shapes, the like of which I never saw before or since. These mountain sights, though he did not say much, he used to eye most observantly.

‘Early in the autumn of 1843, Clough came to Grasmere to read with a Balliol reading party, of which I was one. He was with us about six weeks, I think staying till towards the end of September. This was his earliest long vacation party, all things on a smaller scale than his later ones by Loch Ness, or on Dee-side, but still very pleasant. He lived in a small lodging immediately to the west of Grasmere church; we in a farm-house on the lake. During these weeks I read the Greek tragedians with him, and did Latin prose. His manner of translating, especially the Greek choruses, was quite peculiar; a quaint archaic style of language, keeping rigidly to the Greek order of the words, and so bringing out their expression better, more forcibly and poetically, than any other translations I had heard. When work was done we used to walk in the afternoon with him all over that delightful country. His “eye to country” was wonderful. He knew the whole lie of the different dales relatively to each other; every tarn, beck, and bend in them. He used, if I remember right, to draw pen-and-ink maps, showing us the whole lineaments of the district. Without any obtrusive enthusiasm, but in his own quiet manly way, he seemed as if he never could get too much of it—never walk too far or too often over it. Bathing too formed one of his daily occupations up in a retired pool of the stream that afterwards becomes the Rotha, as it comes out of Easedale. One walk, our longest, was on a Saturday, up Easedale, over the Raise by Greenup, Borrowdale, Honister Crag, under the starlight, to Buttermere. In the small inn there we stayed all Sunday. Early on Monday morning we walked, by two mountain passes, to a farm at the head of Wastwater to breakfast. On the way we crossed Ennerdale, and up the pass close under the nearly perpendicular precipices of the Pillar—a tall mountain, which is the scene of Wordsworth’s pastoral of “The Brothers.” From the head of Wastwater, up past the great gorge of the Mickledoor, to the top of Scawfell, then down past the east side of Bowfell towards Langdale Pikes, and so home to Grasmere. As we passed under Bowfell a beautiful autumn afternoon, we lay a long time by the side of the lovely Angle Tarn. The sun, just before he sunk beside Bowfell, was showering down his light, which dimpled the smooth face of the tarn like heavy drops of sun-rain. Every now and then a slight breeze would come and scatter the rays broadcast over the little loch, as if some unseen hand was sowing it with golden grain. It was as memorable an appearance as that different one we had seen a year ago on Moël Wyn. These things, though Clough observed closely, and took pleasure in, he did not speak often about, much less indulge in raptures.

‘Some of our party were very good hill-men. One day, five or six in all set out on a race from our door by Grasmere Lake to the top of Fairfield. He was the second to reach the summit. His action uphill was peculiar; he used to lay himself forward almost horizontally towards the slope, and take very long strides which carried him quickly over the ground. Few men, so stout as he then was, could have matched him up a mountain.

‘Shortly after this time at Oxford, somewhere that is between 1843 and 1845, I remember to have heard him speak at a small debating society called the Decade, in which were discussed often graver subjects, and in a less popular way, than in the Union. Having been an unfrequent attender, I heard him only twice. But both times, what he said and the way he said it, were so marked and weighty as to have stuck to memory when almost everything else then spoken has been forgotten. The first time was in Oriel Common-room; the subject proposed—“That Tennyson was a greater poet than Wordsworth.” This was one of the earliest expressions of that popularity—since become nearly universal—which I remember. Clough spoke against the proposition, and stood up for Wordsworth’s greatness with singular wisdom and moderation. He granted fully that Wordsworth was often prosy, that whole pages of the “Excursion” had better have been written in prose; but still, when he was at his best, he was much greater than any other modern English poet, saying his best things without knowing they were so good, and then drawling on into prosaic tediousness, without being aware where the inspiration failed and the prose began. In this kind of unconsciousness, I think he said, lay much of his power. One of the only other times I heard him speak was, about the same time, when a meeting of the Decade was held in Balliol Common-room. The subject of debate was—“That the character of a gentleman was in the present day made too much of.” To understand the drift of this would require one to know how highly pleasant manners and a good exterior are rated in Oxford at all times, and to understand something of the peculiar mental atmosphere of Oxford at that time. Clough spoke neither for nor against the proposition; but for an hour and a half—well on two hours—he went into the origin of the ideal, historically tracing from mediæval times how much was implied originally in the notion of a “gentle knight”—truthfulness, consideration for others (even self-sacrifice), courtesy, and the power of giving outward expression to these moral qualities. From this high standard he traced the deterioration into the modern Brummagem pattern which gets the name. These truly gentlemen of old time had invented for themselves a whole economy of manners, which gave true expression to what was really in them, to the ideal in which they lived. These manners, true in them, became false when adopted traditionally and copied from without by modern men placed in quite different circumstances, and living different lives. When the same qualities are in the hearts of men now, as truly as in the best of old time, they will fashion for themselves a new expression, a new economy of manners suitable to their place and time. But many men now, wholly devoid of the inward reality, yet catching at the reputation of it, adopt these old traditional ways of speaking and of bearing themselves, though they express nothing that is really in them.

‘One expression I remember he used, to illustrate the truth that where the true gentle spirit exists, it will express itself in its own rather than in the traditional way. “I have known peasant men and women in the humblest places in whom dwelt these qualities as truly as they ever did in the best of lords and ladies, and who had invented for themselves a whole economy of manners to express them, who were very ‘poets of courtesy.’”