The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough. With a Memoir. By Charles Eliot Norton. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1862.
Arthur Hugh Clough was an English gentleman of high university education and honors, and gifted with liberal and progressive views in politics, who, after distinguishing himself somewhat in his native land, resided for one year in this country as an instructor at Cambridge, Mass. On returning to England to take a place in the Education Department of the Privy Council, he wrote: 'I am rather unwilling to be re-Englished after once attaining that higher transatlantic development. However, il faut s'y soumettre, I presume, though I fear I am embarked in the foundering ship. I hope to heaven you'll get rid of slavery, and then I shouldn't fear but you would really 'go ahead' in the long run. As for us and our inveterate feudalism, it is not hopeful.'
It is needless to say that an English poet with such feelings must be, if not vigorous, liberal, and original, at least ambitious of becoming such, and this Clough is. A vigorous naturalism, such as is becoming half the religion and all the art of the scholars and thinkers of the present day, inspires every page. Truthful yet picturesque, he is more than pleasant to read, he is good to think, and most relishing to feel with. Had he been a meaner mind, he would have been a mere Adam Bede-ish pre-Raffaelite in word-painting—'the Bothie of Taber-na-vuolich,' the first poem in this volume is often photographic in its rural views, as well as in its characters. As it is, literal nature is to him material for fresh brave thought. Through all his poems, owing to this simple vigorous truth, and an innate sense of refinement, he rises head and shoulders above the 'sweet-pretty' Miss Nancy Coventry Patmores or spasmodic Alexander Smiths or other cotemporary English stuff of later poetry.
England has of late years deluged and wearied us so much with thousand times told tales of herself and her social life, and her writers have run so exceedingly in ruts, that there are few really thinking men in America who have not begun to tire woefully of her endless novels and worn-out poetry. We could write against the whole 'connu, connu,' and at the end a 'deliver us'—from evil it might be, certainly from no great temptation. Let the world believe it—it will some day—English thought is at present exhausted, stagnant, and imitative. It is cursed with mannerism, even as the Chinese are cursed, and every honest man of mind knows it. In such a state of national art it is cheerful to open a volume like these poems, in which one hears, as it were, the first lark-notes of an early dawn and sees from afar a few gleams of morning red. It is not the full light nor the great poetry which reforms and awakes nations, but it is the forerunner in many things of such, and will be read with great pleasure by those who long for some faint realization of the great Nature-Art of the future.
EDITOR'S TABLE
It is evident enough that all questions between North and South must settle themselves, should the war only go far enough. When it comes to the struggle for life; to the last most desperate effort on either side for political and personal existence, then people will begin to open their eyes to the fact that the one who conquers must conquer effectually, and hold the vanquished at utter will. Very few among us have as yet realized this extreme case as the nations of the Old World have done a thousand times. We who lived at home, have, looking at the late wars of Europe, imagined that 'the army' might beat or be beaten, but that 'the country' and the mass of its in-dwellers would remain unharmed. We have not seen cities captured, farms laid waste, and experienced the horrors of war. When it comes to that, the case becomes desperate, and nothing is left at last but unconditional victory or defeat. Had we done so, we should have 'gone to extremes.'
The South has begun the war, dared its terrors, encountered them, and become desperate. It is win or lose with them. We too, with every loss gather fresh strength. Ere long we shall probably have every man in the Federal Union capable of bearing arms summoned to the field, and that less by Executive command than by an individual sense of duty, or dread. Our people have learned very slowly indeed what disasters may befall them in case of defeat, but they are gradually coming to the knowledge, and are displaying a rapidly advancing energy of interest and of action. They have immediate and terrible disasters from hostile armies to repel, and they have to apprehend in the future such a picture of ruin and disorganization as the result of secession as no one can bear to contemplate. We are coming to it, and may as well make up our minds at once to the fact that it is to be a Southern rule in the North or 'Northern' rule over the South—if we may call that 'Northern' which means simply the principles of the Constitution as applied to all States, and of justice as recognized by all nations. He must be blind who can not see that it is to this extreme stage of war to the knife that we are rapidly advancing, and that its result is far more likely to be complete conquest than reconciliation.
The nations of Europe are waiting for the crisis of the fever to be passed before they intervene. The sympathy of England is in great measure with the South; yet England may well doubt the expediency of any partial interference. This tremendous North can yet send forth another million if needs must be, and still leave those who with tears in their eyes and stern resolve in their hearts would plant and weave and work to sustain the soldiers a-field. When it comes to this death-struggle—when we begin to live in the war and for the war alone—where can the foe be? They have long since sunk in great measure from the social condition of peace into that olden-time state of full war, when as in Sparta, or Rome, in her early days all things in life were done solely with reference to maintaining the army. With us it has been—is as yet—very different. The voice of the highly-paid opera-singer is still heard in our large cities—Newport and Saratoga never saw gayer seasons than those of 1862—splendor and luxury are still the life of thousands, and even yet there exists in the North a large political party who are so far from feeling that there is any desperation involved as to still dally and coquet with the political principles of the enemy, and talk largely of compromise. When it comes to the bitter end, those trivial, superficial, temporary men will, we believe, in most cases, be changed into good citizens, for necessity is a hard master.
For surely as we live it is approaching; the terrible struggle of rule or ruin, which so few have dared to anticipate. We have ever been so free from tremendous crises of life and death that even with a war devouring scores of thousands of our best men, very few have realized what we must come to with a brave and desperate foe. Union victories may defer such a struggle—and God grant that they have such result!—but in case they do not, what hope remains for our foe? They have fought well, they are willing to hang out the black flag; but what then? They have not and can not establish a real superiority of strength, and yet have voluntarily forced upon a stronger opponent a war which must become deadly.