Arthur Hugh Clough

“ What indeed the really instructive, the serious and significant form of literature is, were hard to say: it seems even doubtful at times whether it possesses at all any form deserving any such high-sounding epithets; at times we cannot refrain from the belief that the whole energy, moral, intellectual, and vital, of the nation has passed off into the common business, the ordinary hard work of individual everyday life; that what we see in the name of literature is but a mere dead and mechanical repetition, an aimless and meaningless observance of traditional habits. ”

“ The ‘Iliad’ is but the scum of the mind of Homer, and Plato’s dialogues the refuse of his thought. Who that reads the ‘Odyssey’ perceives not that it is an act of penitence for the ‘Iliad,’ and feels not that, had the poet lived, the ‘Odyssey’ also would have had its Palinode? In the divine eloquence of Plato there are intonations in which I hear him saying to me, ‘You know I don’t quite mean all this.’
Alas! ”

“ Suppose Oxford became truly good and truly wise, would it not be far more important, and a far greater blessing than Cambridge in the same condition? And in this consists the superiority I used to stick up for of the Balliol set, because I believed them truly wise, and withal full of the Oxford public and political and national feeling. But to live in, and among, and as mere society, you are doubtless better and more delightful. ”

“ Or is it, that to be widely popular, to gain the ear of multitudes, to shake the hearts [Pg 357] of men, poetry should deal, more than at present it usually does, with general wants, ordinary feelings, the obvious rather than the rare facts of human nature? Could it not attempt to convert into beauty and thankfulness, or at least into some form and shape, some feeling, at any rate, of content—the actual, palpable things with which our everyday life is concerned; introduce into business and weary task-work a character and a soul of purpose and reality ”

“ In Milton, the gems of pure poetry lie embedded in the rock of scholastic pomp. And in Wordsworth, you must traverse waste acres of dull verse, that had better far have been, if anything, plain prose, to seek out the rich felicitous spots of fragrance and pure beauty. There is no doubt, I think, that he wrote over much. Posterity, we must hope, will have an instinct to cast away the dross and keep the good metal, and judiciously to reduce his seven volumes to one. ”

“ To what purpose these myriad phenomena, entering and traversing the field of that mighty object-glass of the speculative intellect? Is it life to observe? Is it a man’s service to know? As if it was a thing possible for us to forbear to act; as though there were not in God’s world, amidst ten thousand wrongs, one right, amidst the false choices that offend Him, the one that is His will. ”

“ Each day grew older and learnt something new. And, since the something new may possibly contradict, and will assuredly modify, the everything not so new before it, at what age may one consider oneself entitled, for example, to write letters in print to the editor of a magazine? At what figure does one attain one’s real majority and right of speech? How soon may one venture to affirm anything which everybody else does not already know and believe? And, in the meantime, is there any good in talking merely to be assented to? ”

“ But that however essential be these higher classes, still there remains the question, Is there not a holier land than Cockaigne; is not temperance as efficient a sapper and miner as wine of Burgundy; is not labour better than enjoyment; is it not higher cultivation ‘to do justice and mercy, and walk humbly,’ than to ‘eat and drink and be drunken’; and though thought and study be glorious, may we not combine ‘plain living and high thinking’; though science, and art, and philosophy be divine, is not charity ‘yet a more excellent way’? ”

“ The joy and satisfaction of making really good things is destroyed by the criminal eagerness to make them to suit the market. The love of art, which, quite as much as virtue, is its own reward, used in the old times to penetrate down as far as to the meanest manufacture, of kettles, for example, and pots. With us, on the contrary, the miserable truckling to the bad taste of the multitude has gradually stolen up to the very regions of the highest art—into architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature. Nay, has it not infected even morality and religion? ”

“ Or is this, peradventure, confined to our own weaker selves, our more impatient, irretentive, unthoughtful age? For, certainly, my dear sir, what you and I and the young people read in any modern page is, in the manner aforestated, ‘the thing that is not.’ Each striking new novel does but reveal a theory of life and action which its writer is anxious to be rid of; each enthusiastic address or oration is but that which its speaker is just beginning to feel disgusted with. ”

“ O ye, born to be rich, or at least born not to be poor; ye young men of Oxford, who gallop your horses over Bullingdon, and ventilate your fopperies arm-in-arm up the High Street, abuse if you will to the full that other plea of the spirits and thoughtlessness of youth, but let me advise you to hesitate ere you venture the question, May I not do what I like with my own? ”

“ The memory of Arthur Clough will be safe in the hearts of his friends. Few beyond his friends have known him at all; his writings may not reach beyond a small circle; but those who have received his image into their hearts know that something has been given them which no time can take away, and to them we think no words will seem fitter than those of the poet, happily also his friend, which have cherished the memory of another beautiful soul ”

“ And believe me too, though I have desired to succeed in putting vividly and forcibly that which vividly and forcibly I felt and saw, still the graces and splendours of composition were thoughts far less present to my mind than Irish poor men’s miseries, English poor men’s hardships, and your unthinking indifference. Shocking enough the first and the second, almost more shocking the third.
One word more. Nothing that is said here is intended to go against enjoyment, as such. It is perhaps scarcely natural for young men to feel strongly that which they do not see. ”

“ Are you aware that life is very like a railway? One gets into deep cuttings and long dark tunnels, where one sees nothing and hears twice as much noise as usual, and one can’t read, and one shuts up the window, and waits, and then it all comes clear again. Only in life it sometimes feels as if one had to dig the tunnel as one goes along, all new for oneself. Go straight on, however, and one’s sure to come out into a new country, on the other side the hills, sunny and bright. ”

“ Whose moral sensibilities are not a little ruffled by a strange phantasmagoria of good people becoming bad of a sudden, and all of a sudden good again; good and happy, too, after every sort of misconduct, after the wickedest and foulest actions, with one touch of the wand all made right; guilt converted to innocence, with not a stain left behind—long-suffering virtue shall wed quick repentant vice—and all, it would seem, simply to bring the play to a happy ending? ”

“ Pure intellectual action is apt, no doubt, to be for the time so absorbing as to draw to itself all the agencies of our nature, as to suspend the just and fitting exercise of other, and it may be nobler, functions. Philosophers are frequently dim of sight for the phenomena of everyday life, a little hard of hearing for the calls of plain humanity. Let that moral purpose which should first embark, and through the whole voyage should accompany, the true philosopher be his justification. ”

“ No such thing can there be as a right to do what you will with your own. The property is not your own: scarcely your own at any time; during times of calamity in no wise, except to do good with and distribute. Neither again can you plead the good it does you: who made thee to differ? you cannot even plead the good which your cultivation, so obtained, does the nation; that cultivation could be better obtained without it. Nor yet that you are patronising arts and sciences; genius, and skill, and knowledge. ”

“ O blessed ages of pure, spontaneous, unconscious, unthinking, unreasoning life and action, to you, either in the past or the future, the human heart is still fain to recur—still must dream, even though it be but a dream, of how sweet it were to grow as the green herb, and bloom as the spring flowers, to be good because we cannot be otherwise, and happy because we cannot help it. ”

“ But there will be so many and such friends at Cambridge and Oxford, and so happy a situation at school where I know that I am loved by many, and where I am ever living under and gathering wisdom from a great and good man. Such a prospect makes one tremble, for it seems to be too fair for earth: at least it makes one resolve to do all to fix one’s affections on things above, lest God should see that such fortune was too great for one, and that one could not bear it. ”

“ And now then some one will tell us—that society has higher objects than the preservation of the lives of individual members. A great heritage of civilisation, of law, and thought, and religion has come to our hands: shame upon this generation, if for the sake of prolonging to some wretched and short-lived beings their brief tenure of misery, we sacrifice our father’s hard-won gains. Better that many perish than that the nation lose a Bacon, a Burke, or a Shakspeare. There are things worse than starving. ”

“ We must not lose it—we must hold fast by it, precious to us as Shakespeare’s intellectual or Milton’s moral sublimities; while our eyes look up with them, our feet must stay themselves firmly here. Such, I believe, is the strong feeling of the English nation; the spirit of Newton and of Locke possesses us at least in as full measure as that of any one of their predecessors. ”

“ I am, I know, sometimes carried away into a world of abstraction when I write or study, or so forth. I believe my ambition also, such as I have (it is only lately that I have begun to believe that it exists in my composition at all) , tends in that direction. Yet I am always so glad to come away from it. It is odd how much better I like this Plutarch than I do anything which requires distinct statement of opinion. Yet it bothers me a good deal, for mending [Pg 202] up an old translation seems often like putting new wine into old bottles. ”

“ It is, I believe, that instead of looking directly at an object, and considering it as a thing in itself, and allowing it to operate upon him as a fact in itself, he takes the sentiment produced by it in his own mind as the thing, as the important and really real fact. The real things cease to be real; the world no longer exists; all that exists is the feeling, somehow generated in the poet’s sensibility. ”

“ This gives to his writings, compared with those of Scott and of Byron, an appearance of sterility and unreality. He cannot, indeed, be said, like Cowper, to be an indoors poet; but he is a poet rather of a country-house or a picturesque tour, not of life and business, action and fact.
This also sadly lessens the value which we must put on that high moral tone which we have been hitherto extolling. To live in a quiet village, out of the road of all trouble and temptation, in a pure, elevated, high moral sort of manner, is after all no such very great a feat. It is something, indeed, anywhere. ”

“ What, however, must always be remembered is, that Clough was happy in his work, and happy in his home life. It would be easy, were it necessary, to show from his poems how strong in him was the sense of family feeling, how tenderly and delicately he appreciated the family relations, how fond he was of children and young people, how naturally he enjoyed domestic life. Nor can any one doubt that in work itself he found full satisfaction, especially in such work as made him helpful to others, and brought him into vivid human contact with his fellow-workers. ”