The New Criterion

“Say not the struggle nought availeth” and “Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not strive/ Officiously to keep alive” are probably the only lines most people know by Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861), although the standard Oxford edition of 1974 contains nearly two hundred items, excluding fragments and translations. That edition, and the excellent annotated selection edited by J. P. Phelan in 1995, are out of print, so it is to be hoped that this new biography by Anthony Kenny, formerly Master of Balliol, Clough’s old college, will prompt a resurgence of interest in the work of a poet who has increasingly come to seem the most modern-minded of any in the nineteenth century.

Kenny is terse to the point of brusqueness, rattling us with no nonsense through Clough’s forty-two years, which were lived out in an atmosphere of personal and international ferment. The son of a Liverpool merchant, he lived with his family in Charleston, South Carolina, between 1822 and 1828 (Kenny says 1838, the first of a series of unfortunate misprints). Back in England, he was a star pupil at Rugby during the headmastership of Dr. Arnold. Kenny takes a disappointingly conventional view of this despotic bully, who wrecked sensitive, high-minded boys like Clough by turning them into neurotic prigs, magnifying their boyish lapses into grave sins, and saddling them with guilt. Clough eventually recognized this, but Arnold’s influence died hard. Having obtained a second-class degree from Oxford, rather than the expected first, Clough dashed to Rugby and blurted out to the Doctor, “I have failed!” Again, he later took a calmer view, deploring the pressures of competitive examinations and insisting that the question to ask of a pupil should not be “whom he has beat” but “what he has done.”

Clough’s time at Oxford was taken up less with academic work (he had already covered much of the syllabus at Rugby) than with theological controversy, about which Kenny is expansive. Dr. Arnold had been a liberal churchman—albeit intolerant of all views but his own. At Oxford, the Tractarian movement was at its height, and Clough fell under the influence of his tutor, the fanatical Newmanite W. G. Ward. Ward may or may not have been attracted to Clough (Kenny is typically disparaging about such a notion, though Clough at this period was prone to infatuations himself), but he was emotionally intense and certainly exacerbated the young man’s nervous tensions, as his morbidly introspective undergraduate diaries show. Theology was no academic game to these earnest souls, but literally a matter of life or death.

Buffeted between extremes, Clough gradually abandoned dogma, writing to his sister, “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.” He expressed his feelings in a number of short religious poems such as “Easter Day” which, as Kenny rightly says, “uses the language of the New Testament to negate the New Testament’s key message,” and “Adam and Eve,” which dates from 1848, the year Clough resigned the tutorial fellowship at Oriel College which he had held since 1842, feeling he could no longer give the required assent to the Thirty-nine Articles, the official statement of Anglican belief. “Adam and Eve” depicts the story of the Fall as the occasion for the birth of conscience and moral awareness in the human race, insisting that ethics is case law, not statute—a brave, unorthodox line. The year 1848 also saw the appearance of Clough’s first major poem, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (a bothie is a crofter’s hut in Scotland), which drew on his memories of vacation reading parties to tell the story of a radical undergraduate who weds a crofter’s daughter and emigrates to New South Wales.

In 1849 Clough saw at first hand the effects of the revolutions in Paris and Rome, experiences which bore fruit in Amours de Voyage (1858), another long poem, epistolary in form, which explores the failure of a relationship between an initially blasé tourist and a girl whose family is on the Grand Tour. (This sounds like an E. M. Forster novel, but surprisingly Forster did not read Clough until 1940.) Both The Bothie and Amours de Voyage are written in hexameters, imitating the quantitative meter of Latin poetry. The classicist in Kenny is keen on this; I feel the poems are nowhere near as rhythmically flexible as he claims. Clough starts from the premises that each line will have six stressed syllables, and wrenches the syntax to make that happen.

Moreover, the mode of each of these long poems is not handled with entire success. There are high spirits in The Bothie, as Kenny points out, but also archness; the mock-epic jokes pall after no long while. The epistolary form of Amours de Voyage, theoretically more promising, is compromised by nearly all the letters being by the same person (other voices existed in draft but were excised before publication). The situation is more interesting than its treatment. Having said all that, it should be added that these are among the most readable long poems of the time; Clough had the knack for being conversational in verse as Arnold and Tennyson did not, and he was never as grotesque as Browning.

From 1849 to 1852, Clough was Principal of University Hall, London, resigning after disputes with the governing body; then he had a year in New England, initially as Emerson’s guest; then, like his lifelong friend Matthew Arnold, he entered the Schools Inspectorate. This gave him an income sufficient to allow marriage and fatherhood, and a happy family life. Sadly, his health declined, and he died in Florence, where he had gone with his wife for what he had hoped would be a restorative holiday. His poetic legacy seemed small. In 1869, however, his widow brought out a two-volume collection of poems, letters, and other prose writings, to which she prefixed a valuable memoir. The major discovery was a third long dramatic poem, which she called Dipsychus and the Spirit. This was assembled from a mass of drafts and fragments which had been accumulating during the last decade of Clough’s life, and there is no agreed text even now. Had Clough finished it, Dipsychus would have been his masterpiece. As it is, he avoids the pitfalls of The Bothie and Amours by setting up within the poem itself a dialectic between the poetic and ethical platitudes he had earlier been drawn to, and a stance sharply critical of their pretensions and hypocrisies.

The result is an acute diagnosis of the mid-Victorian mind. The eponymous central character, whose name means “double-minded,” expresses in turn all the loftiest ideals of the time: selfless service, rational piety, social conformity, the virtues of home and hearth. The other voice in the poem (perhaps, as Clough suggested, a projection of another aspect of Dipsychus rather than a separate individual) belongs to the Spirit: a worldly, ironic-cynical questioning of all ideals and a bluff reliance on pragmatic egotism. Commitment to any system of belief is passé; self-interest is the only sensible option.

What makes Dipsychus unique is its sense of equilibrium. Clough had little or none of the high Victorian taste for elegy, which can so quickly become sentimental. Nor was he a conventional moralist. Dipsychus is anguished not so much about having good or bad experiences, but about the risk involved in having any experiences at all, as the Spirit tauntingly observes:

            Methinks I see you,
Through everlasting limbos of void time,
Twirling and twiddling ineffectively,
And indeterminately swaying for ever.

Kenny usefully notes that the work is organized on a pattern borrowed from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, with Dipsychus resisting temptations to unchastity (Clough’s outspokenness about sexuality is remarkable, and Mrs. Clough left out the most shocking passages), violence, and religious skepticism, only to sacrifice his idealism for worldly gain. There is an invigorating juxtaposition of contrasting styles; Clough mocks his own earlier sententiousness and humbug, yet he makes us feel the distress with which Dipsychus submits.

Dipsychus may well have had a more decisive influence on modern poetry than any other poem of its time. Who, one asks oneself, might have been especially struck by a poem assembled from fragments, encompassing a range of styles from the abstract to the demotic, whose hero is afraid of experience, condemning his own “twisted thinkings,” “caterwaulings of the effeminate heart,” “hurts of self-imagined dignity,” who states that he is “rebuked by a sense of the incomplete”, who “thread[s] the wandering byways of the town” in nocturnal ramblings, who is entranced yet terrified by passing pretty girls “showing/ Their dark exuberance of hair,” who takes an ice on café terraces while a band plays, or sits in corners “while the room/ Rings through with animation and the dance”? Where else has one met a young man who laments the need “To warp the unfinished diction on the lip/ And twist one’s mouth to counterfeit,” to “be rough and smooth,/ Forward and silent, deferential, cool” in the presence of others? There can only be one conclusion: T. S. Eliot had read Dipsychus before he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” That has been suggested in general terms before, but these quotations, I think, make it decisive. (Eliot’s possible debt to Clough was pointed out to me long ago by my friend Roger Noel Smith. All the quotations in this paragraph come from the text of Dipsychus printed in 1869, the only one that Eliot would have known.)

Indeed, in one astonishing passage, not noticed by Kenny, the Spirit virtually predicts Eliot’s career. What will Dipsychus do with his life, he asks himself: write novels, reviews, or poems in which he will “breathe out your dreamy skepticism, relieved/ By snatches of old songs”? Or perhaps he will take up philosophy, produce a dry-as-dust tome on metaphysics; or perhaps a little teaching, “so as to have much time left you for yourself.” There is something of Eliot’s manner, too, in Clough’s occasional critical writings. When we read, for example, “There has been a kind of dissolution of English, but no one writer has come to re-unite and re-vivify the escaping components,” or “There is such a thing in morals, as well as in science, as drawing your conclusion before you have properly got your premises. It is desirable to attain a fixed point; but it is essential that the fixed point be a right one,” we imagine Eliot, but we are hearing Clough, in essays on Dryden and Wordsworth respectively. A late summary statement “On the Religious Tradition” might have caught Eliot’s eye, too, with its criticism of Unitarianism (in which Eliot had grown up) as neglectful of tradition, and of Protestantism as excluded from what is valuable in Catholic thought. Kenny says merely that Clough’s “handling of intertextuality anticipated Eliot,” missing the detailed parallels in Dipsychus entirely.

Clough had personal charm and intellectual integrity. He was too honest to be conventional, and too upright to be an iconoclast. He detested cant, even if it supported orthodoxy, but revered sincerity even if it questioned fundamentals. His reputation suffered under the misleading picture of him in Arnold’s “Thyrsis,” which over-emphasized his melancholy and bafflement at the expense of his common sense and independence. Anthony Kenny, who is better known as a philosopher and historian of ideas than as a literary critic, has reminded us of the importance and value of Clough, even though his book is donnishly dry, and its air, though bracing, often starved of oxygen.