The intellectual mood of many of the finest spirits in England and New
England during the second quarter of the nineteenth century had
something of the nature of a surprise to themselves, no less than to
those who came within their influence. It was indeed a natural though
unforeseen result of forces, various in kind, that had long been
silently at work. The conflicting currents of thought and moral
sentiment, which in all ages perplex and divide the hearts of men, took
a new direction and seemed to have gathered volume and swiftness. Hardly
since the Reformation had there been so deep and general a stirring of
the questions, the answers to which, whether they be final or merely
provisional, involve conclusions relating to the deepest interests of
men. Old convictions were confronted by new doubts; ancient authority
was met by a modern spirit of independence. This new intellectual mood
was perhaps first distinctly manifest in England in Carlyle's essays,
and correspondingly in New England in the essays and poems of Emerson;
it was expressed in 'In Memoriam' and 'Maud'; it gave the undertone of
Arnold's most characteristic verse, and it found clear and strikingly
distinctive utterance in the poems of Clough. His nature was of rare
superiority alike of character and intellect. His moral integrity and
sincerity imparted clearness to his imagination and strength to his
intelligence, so that while the most marked distinction of his poems is
that which they possess as a mirror of spiritual conditions shared by
many of his contemporaries, they have hardly less interest as the
expression and image of his own individuality.
Arthur Hugh Clough was born at Liverpool on New Year's Day, 1819.[A]
His father, who came of an old Welsh family (his mother, Anne Perfect,
was from Yorkshire), had established himself in Liverpool as a cotton
merchant. Toward the end of 1822 he emigrated with his wife and four
children to Charleston, South Carolina, and here for four years was
their home. For Arthur they were important years. He was a shy,
sensitive boy, "already considered as the genius of the family." He was
his mother's darling. She was a woman "rigidly simple in her tastes and
habits, of stern integrity"; of cultivated intelligence, fond of poetry,
a lover of nature, and quickly sympathetic with high character, whether
in real life or in the pages of romance. While his father taught him his
Latin grammar and his arithmetic, his mother read with him from Pope's
Iliad and Odyssey, from Scott's novels and other books fitted to quicken
the imagination. Her influence was strong in the shaping of his taste
and disposition.
[A] Ruskin and Lowell were his close contemporaries; they were born
in February of the same year.
In 1828 the family returned for a visit to England, and Arthur was put
to school at Chester, whence in the next year he was transferred to
Rugby. Dr. Arnold had then very lately become the headmaster at Rugby,
and was already giving to the school a tone and quality unknown
previously to the public schools of England. He strove to impress upon
the boys the sense of personal responsibility, and to rouse their
conscience to the doing of duty, not so much as a matter essential to
the discipline of the school as to the formation of manly and religious
character. The influence of his high, vigorous, and ardent nature was of
immense force. But its virtue was impaired by the artificiality of the
ecclesiastical system of the Church of England, and the irrationality of
the dogmatic creed which, even to a nature as liberal as Dr. Arnold's,
seemed to belong to the essentials of religion, and to be indissoluble
from the foundation of morality.
Clough became Arnold's devoted disciple, but he had intellectual
independence and sincerity enough to save him from yielding his own
individuality to any stream of external influence, however powerful.
What he called "the busy argufying spirit of the prize schoolboy" stood
him in good stead. But the moral stress was great, and it left him early
with a sense of strain and of perplexity, as his mind opened to the
wider and deeper problems of life, for the solution of which the
traditional creed seemed insufficient. His career at school was of the
highest distinction; and when he was leaving Rugby for Oxford in 1836,
Dr. Arnold broke the rule of silence to which he almost invariably
adhered in the delivery of prizes, and congratulated Clough on having
gained every honor which Rugby could bestow, and on having done the
highest credit to the school at the University,--for he had won the
Balliol Scholarship, "then and now the highest honor which a schoolboy
could obtain."
Clough went into residence at Oxford in October, 1837. It was a time of
stirring of heart and trouble of mind at the University. The great
theological controversy which was to produce such far-reaching effects
upon the lives of individuals, and upon the Church of England as a
whole, was then rising to its height. Newman was at the acme of his
popularity and influence. His followers were zealous and active. Ward,
his most earnest disciple, was one of Clough's nearest friends. Clough,
not yet nineteen years old, but morally and intellectually developed
beyond his years and accustomed already to independent speculation in
regard to creed and conduct, was inevitably drawn into the deep waters
of theological discussion. He heard, too, those other voices which
Matthew Arnold in his admirable lecture on Emerson has spoken of as
deeply affecting the more sensitive youthful spirits of the Oxford of
this time,--the voices of Goethe, of Carlyle, and of Emerson. He studied
hard, but his studies seemed, for the moment at least, to be of
secondary importance. Although unusually reserved in demeanor and silent
in general company, his reputation grew, not merely as a scholar, but as
a man distinguished above his fellows for loftiness of spirit, for
sweetness of disposition, and for superiority of moral no less than of
intellectual qualities. With much interior storm and stress, his
convictions were gradually maturing. He resisted the prevailing
tendencies of Oxford thought, but did not easily find a secure basis for
his own beliefs. In 1841 he tried for and missed his first class in the
examinations. It was more a surprise and disappointment to others than
to himself. He knew that he had not shown himself in the examinations
for what he really was, and his failure did not affect his confidence in
his own powers, nor did others lose faith in him, as was shown by his
election in the next year to a fellowship at Oriel, and the year later
to his appointment as tutor.
His livelihood being thus assured, he led from 1843 to 1848 a "quiet,
hard-working, uneventful tutor's life, diversified with reading parties"
in the vacations. He was writing poems from time to time, but his
vocation as poet was not fully recognized by himself or by others. He
had been obliged, in assuming the duties of tutor, to sign the
Thirty-nine Articles,--though as he wrote to a friend, "reluctantly
enough, and I am not quite sure whether or not in a justifiable sense.
However, I have for the present laid by that perplexity, though it may
perhaps recur at some time or other; and in general, I do not feel
perfectly satisfied about staying in my tutor capacity at Oxford."
The perplexity would not down, but as the years went on, the troubled
waters of his soul gradually cleared themselves. He succeeded in
attaining independence of mind such as few men attain, and in finding,
if not a solution of the moral perplexities of life, at least a position
from which they might be frankly confronted without blinking and without
self-deception. It became impossible for him to accept, however they
might be interpreted, the doctrines of any church. He would not play
tricks with words nor palter with the integrity of his soul. This
perfect mental honesty of Clough, and his entire sincerity of
expression, were a stumbling-block to many of his more conventional
contemporaries, and have remained as a rock of offense to many of the
readers of his poetry, who find it disturbing to be obliged to recognize
in his work a test of their own sincerity in dealing with themselves.
With how few are conviction and profession perfectly at one! The
difficulty of the struggle in Clough's case, the difficulty of freeing
himself from the chains of association, of tradition, of affection, of
interest, which bound him to conformity with and acceptance of the
popular creed in one or the other of its forms, has led superficial
critics of his life and poetry to find in them evidence that the
struggle was too hard for him and the result unsatisfactory. There could
not be a greater error. Clough's honest acceptance of the insolubility
of the vain questions which men are perpetually asking, and his
recognition of the insufficiency of the answers which they are ready to
accept or to pretend to accept, left him as regards his most inward soul
one of the serenest of men. The questions of practical life, of action,
of duty, indeed presented themselves to his sensitive and contemplative
nature with their full perplexity; but his spiritual life was based on a
foundation that could not be shaken. He had learned the lesson of
skepticism, and accepted without trouble the fact of the limitation of
human faculties and the insolubility of the mystery of life. He was
indeed tired with the hard work of years, and worried by the uncertainty
of his future; when at length, in order to deliver himself from a
constrained if not a false position, and to obtain perfect freedom of
expression as well as of thought, he resigned in 1848 both his
fellowship and tutorship.
It was a momentous decision, for it left him without any definite means
of support, it alienated the authorities of the University, it isolated
him from many old friends. Immediately after resigning his tutorship
Clough went to Paris with Emerson, then on a visit to Europe, as his
companion. They were drawn thither by interest in the strange Revolution
which was then in progress, and by desire to watch its aspects. The
social conditions of England had long been matter of concern to Clough.
He had been deeply touched by the misery of the Irish famine in 1847,
and had printed a very striking pamphlet in the autumn of that year,
urging upon the students at Oxford retrenchment of needless expenditure
and restrictions of waste and luxury. His sympathies were with the poor,
and he was convinced of the need of radical social reform. He therefore
observed the course of revolution on the Continent not merely with
curiosity, but with sympathetic hope.
In the autumn of this year, after his return home, and while at
Liverpool with his mother and sister, he wrote his first long poem, 'The
Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich; a Long-Vacation Pastoral.' It had no great
immediate success, but it made him known to a somewhat wider public than
that of Oxford. It was in its form the fruit of the reading parties in
the Highlands in previous summers. It was in hexameters, and he asked
Emerson to "convey to Mr. Longfellow the fact that it was a reading of
his 'Evangeline' aloud to my mother and sister, which, coming after a
re-perusal of the Iliad, occasioned this outbreak of hexameters." It is
a delightful poem, full of vitality and variety, original in design,
simple in incident. It has the freshness and wholesomeness of the open
air, the charm of nature and of life, with constant interplay of serious
thought and light humor, of gravity and gayety of sentiment.
Its publication was followed speedily by a little volume entitled
'Ambarvalia,' made up of two parts; one, of poems by Clough, and one, of
those by an old school and college friend, Mr. Burbidge. Clough's part
consisted, as he wrote to Emerson, of "old things, the casualties of at
least ten years." But many of these "casualties" are characteristic
expressions of personal experience, to which Clough's absolute sincerity
gives deep human interest. They are the records of "his search amid the
maze of life for a clue whereby to move." They deal with the problems of
his own life, and these problems perplex other men as well. "I have seen
higher, holier things than these," he writes in 1841:--
"I have seen higher, holier things than these,
And therefore must to these refuse my heart,
Yet I am panting for a little ease;
I'll take, and so depart."