by Simon Heffer
He was a promising poet when still at school, but at Oxford became obsessed, to judge from his letters, with the religious controversy that would come to amuse Strachey so much: the Protestantism of Arnold being challenged by the Anglo-Catholicism of John Henry Newman. Ward, who was Clough’s mathematical tutor, became such an adherent of Newman that he was thrown out of his tutorship after supporting Tract XC. Ward followed Newman to Rome. Later, Ward inculpated himself for Clough’s distraction by religious unease, which led to his underachievement as an undergraduate. Eventually it derailed his academic career, quite possibly shortened his life and, in doing so, robbed Victorian Britain of one of its most brilliant men. Ward wrote that ‘I must account it the great calamity of his [Clough’s] life that he was brought into contact with myself. My whole interest at that time . . . was concentrated on questions which to me seem the most important and interesting that can occupy the mind . . . it was a very different thing to force them prematurely on the attention of a young man just coming up to college, and to drive him, as it were, peremptorily into a decision upon them; to aim at making him as hot a partisan as I was myself.’10 He felt that ‘the power which Mr Newman then wielded throughout the University’ compounded the effect of his own questioning. ‘The result was not surprising,’ he added. ‘I had been prematurely forcing Clough’s mind, and there came a reaction. His intellectual perplexity for some time preyed heavily upon his spirits; it grievously interfered with his studies; and I take for granted it must have very seriously disturbed his religious practices and habits. I cannot to this day think of all this without a bitter pang of self-reproach.’
Ward was not the only influence upon Clough. He started to read Carlyle, whose essays he found ‘very fine’.11 He obtained a copy of Chartism soon after it was published: he was a prime example of the influence the Sage, not least through his highly original use of the language, had on the intelligentsia of the younger generation. His earlier priggishness was dissipating, and he was attracted by Carlyle’s wit: he loved Carlyle’s description of Parliament as ‘the National Palaver’.12 However, despite his conscious intellectualism, he missed taking a first-class degree, the first of Balliol’s scholars ever to do so. He went to Rugby in 1841, after his finals, and told Dr Arnold: ‘I have failed’. Arnold’s second son, Tom, who recalled the event more than half a century later, noted that ‘my father looked gravely and kindly at him, but what he said in reply I do not remember, or whether he said anything.’13
Clough failed also to get a fellowship at Balliol, but in 1842 secured one at Oriel, Arnold’s old college. By 1844, however, Arnold might well have been turning in his grave beneath Rugby chapel: for Clough was having the most extreme form of doubt. He doubted the power of the Deity; he doubted the special force of Christianity: ‘Is Xianity really so much better than Mahometanism, Buddhism . . . or the old Heathen philosophy?’ he asked Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, and an old friend of Dr Arnold.14 His immersion in the controversy at Oxford had caused him to analyse the foundations of his own religious belief, and the outcome had not been constructive.
At about this time Matthew Arnold lost his belief in the Resurrection: Carlyle, with his own incomprehension of the Christian miracles, is usually blamed for the apostasy of both men. In the autumn of 1843 Clough doubted he could adhere to the Thirty-nine Articles, a requirement for his proceeding to the degree of Master of Arts and to his Oriel tutorship. He wrote that ‘it is not so much from any definite objection to this or that point, as general dislike to subscription, and strong feeling of its being a bondage, and a very heavy one, and one that may cramp and cripple one for life.’15 He overcame that problem and signed. Yet a year later, in November 1844, he described himself as merely an ‘operative’ whose role was ‘to dress intellectual leather, cut it out to pattern and stitch it and cobble it into boots and shoes for the benefit of the work which is being guided by wiser heads. But this almost cuts me out of having any religion whatever.’16 He continued:
If I begin to think about God, there [arise] a thousand questions, and whether the 39 Articles answer them at all or whether I should not answer them in the most diametrically opposite purport is a matter of great doubt . . . I further incline to hold that enquiries are best carried on by turning speculation into practice, and my speculations no doubt in their earlier stages would result in practice considerably at variance with 39 Article Subscription . . . Without the least denying Xtianity, I feel little that I can call its power. Believing myself to be in my unconscious creed in some shape or other adherent to its doctrines I keep within its pale: still whether the Spirit of the Age, whose lacquey and flunkey I submit to be, will prove to be this kind or that kind I can’t the least say. Sometimes I have doubt whether it won’t turn out to be no Xty at all.
By 1846 he knew it would be impossible to take orders and told Hawkins so: Hawkins was disappointed but did not try to change Clough’s mind.
The following year Clough was distressed when Hawkins said that he regarded a Tutor as ‘a teacher of the 39 Articles’; for, as Clough explained, ‘for such an office I fear I can hardly consider myself qualified. I can only offer you the ordinary negative acquiescence of a layman.’17 He offered to leave Oriel if Hawkins thought it appropriate; Hawkins, although citing a University Statute that required tutors to subscribe to the Articles, wanted Clough to stay, suggesting that another tutor could lecture on the Articles. All Clough would be required to do was to ensure that his pupils attended a lecture on them and knew them before the examinations. He agreed that Clough, although having originally subscribed, could change his mind: ‘No-one, I admit, pledges himself by subscription to hold the same opinions for ever,’ Hawkins told him. ‘His subscription per se implies only his assent at the time.’18
Clough did not ‘feel debarred’ by what Hawkins had told him; but was ‘doubtful’ how long he would be able to continue.19 In a lengthy correspondence both he and Hawkins danced on the heads of various pins – not that they probably saw the exercise in those terms – and by January 1848 Clough felt he should resign as a tutor: his fellowship expired in any case the following year. Hawkins did not wish this: ‘You have no occasion to give a Lecture on the 39 Articles, and I have entire confidence in your not seeking in the interval either to teach anything contrary to them’.20 The position was untenable, however, given Clough’s cast of mind. He saw Ralph Waldo Emerson during the American’s visit to England in the winter of 1848, and they spoke much of their mutual friend, Carlyle: but on seeing Emerson off from Liverpool that spring, Clough said to him: ‘Think where we are. Carlyle has led us all out into the desert, and he has left us there.’21 He resigned his fellowship on 8 October 1848, telling Hawkins ‘I can have nothing whatever to do with a subscription to the xxxix articles – and deeply repent of having ever submitted to one. I cannot consent to receive any further pecuniary benefit in consideration of such conformity.’22
Hawkins did not let Clough go so easily. He wanted them to talk confidentially about his ‘religious difficulties’, for ‘it is possible that I might suggest some view of things which might prevent the necessity of your resigning’.23 Clough resigned nonetheless, though he and Hawkins spoke on 18 October. In a note Hawkins kept of their talk, Clough told him that ‘he could not honestly pursue Truth, whilst under fetters of Subscription to articles.’24 He added that the only others with whom he had discussed this were Matthew Arnold and Stanley; and he admitted Stanley had been against his resigning. Hawkins proposed discussing it with Stanley, but to no avail. Clough moved into lodgings in Oxford and sought to make a living by taking private pupils: he had hardly any money. He considered emigration; he considered falling in love; he was writing poetry; he told Hawkins he might travel in Europe with a private pupil.
Clough’s life from this point takes a course not unlike that of the unfortunate Mr Hale. However, rather than suffer in the industrial north, Clough accepted (after some negotiation about the religious requirements, and ‘with a good deal o
f misgiving’) the post of Principal of University Hall, London, an extension of University College.25 Although funded largely by Unitarians it sought a non-ordained principal, who was not a Unitarian. Hawkins was still unwilling to announce Clough’s resignation of his Oriel fellowship. He wondered whether Clough’s difficulties were ‘still no more than doubts’. He hoped Clough might be ‘pursuing [a] serious line of study with a view to probe your difficulties further or to remove them’.26 At least resignation spared Clough public humiliation: James Anthony Froude resigned his fellowship at Exeter College in February 1849 but, having committed his heresies to paper in his novel The Nemesis of Faith, had to endure being preached against in chapel, denounced in hall, and his book burnt publicly in the college by the Rector of Exeter, William Sewell. If anything this was more medieval treatment than received by Ward, who was merely degraded from his degrees.
Clough published a long poem in 1848, The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich, that had elicited praise from Emerson, Froude, Thackeray and Kingsley. It was about a love affair between a young Oxford scholar on a walking holiday and the daughter of a crofter: it was considered radical in its treatment of relationships and class, and in its conversational style. In January 1849 he and a friend, Thomas Burbidge, jointly published a book of verse. Arnold, as always, was frank about the quality of his poetry, and submitted constructive criticisms: the most depressing observation, though, was his injunction to Clough to ‘reflect . . . as I cannot but do here more and more, in spite of all the nonsense some people talk, how deeply unpoetical the age and all one’s surroundings are. Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving:- but unpoetical.’27
When finally writing to Clough on 28 February 1849 to say he had given in and submitted Clough’s letter of resignation to the fellowship, Hawkins disclosed that he had read The Bothie, and castigated him for it. ‘There are parts of it rather indelicate; and I very much regretted to find also that there were frequent allusions to Scripture, or rather parodies of Scripture, which you should not have put forth.’ Hawkins added: ‘You will never be secure from misbelief, if you allow yourself liberties of this kind.’28 However, Hawkins was genuinely trying to solve problems such as these. He asked Clough: ‘I remember you said in one of your letters that such studies as I recommend would not meet the difficulties of young men in the present day. Will you do me the favour, some time or other, to tell me what class of difficulties, according to your observation, most perplexes young men at present.’
Clough, having stated that ‘I do not think I have sinned against morality’ in his poem, advised Hawkins to read The Nemesis of Faith to grasp the ‘difficulties’. He added that ‘elsewhere I think there is a general feeling that the Miracles are poor proofs’ – a view straight from Carlyle. ‘The doctrine must prove them, not they the doctrine.’29 Young men, he added, ‘have no Christian ideal, which they feel sure is really Christian, except the Roman Catholic.’ Clough’s view of religion appeared to corrode continually. In his notes ‘On the Religious Tradition’, published in Prose Remains and attributed to the last period in his life, he writes that ‘whether Christ died upon the Cross, I cannot tell; yet I am prepared to find some spiritual truth in the doctrine of the Atonement, Purgatory is not in the Bible; I do not therefore think it is incredible.’30
During the 1840s Clough began to show he had inherited Arnold’s Whiggish-Liberal views and, indeed, taken them (as Matthew Arnold did) to a further remove. He had told Burbidge in a letter on 25 June 1844 that he believed ‘that capital tyrannizes over labour, and that government is bound to interfere to prevent such bullying; and I do believe too that in the some way [sic] or other the problem now solved by universal competition or the devil take the hindmost may receive a more satisfactory solution.’31 He began to correspond with Carlyle and with Emerson. He also supported his sister Anne, who had set up a school, in her aim to further the education of girls and women: she would become the first principal of Newnham College, Cambridge.
Clough had all the social concerns of his class and of the faith in which he had been schooled. He helped the local poor by working for the Mendicity Society in Oxford. One night in June 1844 he ‘administered relief to about 6 people only’, but told Burbidge that ‘they used to come by twenties and one night I remember 80. Yet even now the hay harvest is so scanty that many who usually have work are thrown out . . . they get a pint and a half of broth and a piece of bread for supper, and (at present, only) a small piece of bread for breakfast.’ Clough also said he approved ‘highly and wholly’ of Gladstone’s bill that compelled railway companies to reduce their fares if their profit margins exceeded 10 per cent, and forcing them to provide seats for the poor.32 Yet his approach was practical; and he rejected the romantic fantasy of his political contemporaries in Young England. In 1845 he read Sybil. ‘There is not much merit in it,’ he told Burbidge. ‘The story is somewhat flimsy, the thoughts obvious where they are good; and where they are original, I should say, very extravagant.’33
He was in Paris in the spring of 1848, as Chartist agitation was reaching its climax in England, and observed the Revolution there. ‘Ichabod, Ichabod, the glory is departed,’ he wrote to Stanley on 19 May, in an apparent pastiche of Carlyle. ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, driven back by shopkeeping bayonet, hides her red cap in dingiest St Antoine.’34 A few days later he wrote to his sister, who had complained of the paradox and the problem of the population increasing the more wretched it became: ‘I suppose the thing wanted in society is to raise the lower classes either in material comforts or morality or both to that state where they will of themselves feel the duty and find the inclination to refrain – as the upper classes, for the most part, do, at present.’35 He felt unrest in France would ‘on the whole accelerate change in England’ and would create a ‘palingenesy’ there: a rebirth of the nation.36 When he returned to England he saw Arnold, and one of the first things they did was visit Carlyle.
The surviving Arnold–Clough correspondence is one-sided, because only one letter from Clough to Arnold is extant: written in the summer of 1849, on Italian politics. What the editor of their correspondence calls a ‘really remarkable letter’ comes next in the sequence. Written by Arnold from Switzerland in September 1849, its interest lies in what it reveals to us about Arnold’s poetic temperament: but one also needs to weigh up what the sentiments would have meant to the recipient, at a profoundly difficult stage in his life. His Oxford career had been derailed; his first excursion into poetry had been merely a succès d’estime; and he was about to embark upon a risky academic venture at University Hall. In this delicate, lonely and unsure state of mind, the outpouring of discontent from his best friend cannot but have been salutary.
Arnold told Clough he had been ‘snuffing after a moral atmosphere to respire in’ more ‘than ever before in my life. Marvel not that I say unto you, ye must be born again.’37 He laid out not so much his own feelings – the expression of which was one of the necessities of a poet – as the power of those feelings and, by inference, how the social critic interpreted society. ‘What I must tell you is that I have never yet succeeded in any one great occasion in consciously mastering myself: I can go thro the imaginary process of mastering myself and see the whole affair as it would then stand, but at the critical point I am too apt to hoist up the mainsail to the wind and let her drive.’
Arnold’s experience of the zeitgeist seems to overwhelm him: of an England in which change has been postponed rather than cancelled; in which a rising class of semi-educated people, manipulated by those who ought to know better, seems to be moving against reason and civilisation to create an unpleasant modernity. ‘My dearest Clough these are damned times – everything is against one – the height to which knowledge has come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficul
ties’. Carlyle’s choler – clear in his unpleasant essay The Nigger Question and clearer still the next year in his bilious Latter-Day Pamphlets – was starting to grate with his apostles. Clough had already told Emerson they had been abandoned by him in the desert: now Arnold confirmed to Clough that Carlyle offered them no hope at all. All they could do was to avoid fanaticism and follow their rational hearts.
University Hall was slow to start: two years into Clough’s tenure he still had just a dozen students, which worried the governors. As Clough’s memoir in Prose Remains states, unvarnishedly: ‘The change [from Oxford] was in many respects painful to him. The step he had taken in resigning his fellowship isolated him greatly; many of his old friends looked coldly on him, and the new acquaintances among whom he was thrown were often uncongenial to him.’38 Clough saw the writing on the wall, and applied for the classical professorship at the new college opening in Sydney; the post was combined with that of principal, and was entirely secular. He wanted it not just to escape University Hall, his time at which had become (according to his memoir) ‘without doubt the dreariest, loneliest period of his life’, but also to raise enough money to marry Blanche Smith, with whom he had fallen in love. He sought a testimonial from Hawkins, who gave it on the condition Clough did not teach divinity; and Arnold wrote that ‘it is especially in respect of his moral qualities, and of the intimate manner in which his intellectual qualities are affected by them, that he is distinguished from the crowd of well-informed and amiable men who generally offer themselves for public situations.’39