Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  What is it to grow old?

  Is it to lose the glory of the form,

  The lustre of the eye?

  Is it for beauty to forgo her wreath?

  —Yes, but not this alone.88

  This was a dramatic renunciation of the passionate unbelief that had animated so many of his earlier poems. Instead of the roiling nihilism of “Empedocles on Aetna” (1852), where he had his defiant hero boasting, “I only/Whose spring of hope is dried, whose spirit has fail’d … I alone/Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read/In all things my own deadness,” here an old man retails a life’s disappointments in a thin, eviscerate, defeated voice.

  ’Tis not to see the world

  As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,

  And heart profoundly stirred;

  And weep and feel the fullness of the past,

  The years that are no more.89

  This was senescence stripped of every consolation. Instead of what Eliot called “the evening with the photograph album,” Arnold describes an old age in which past and future are obliterated and the only thing that survives is a sense of adding “month to month with weary pain,” a sense of being “immured/In the hot prison of the present …” In his prime, the elegist in Arnold wrote to interrogate the past, to lament the evanescence of youth, promise, hope and glory. “Thyrsis,” “Rugby Chapel,” “Balder Dead,” “Memorial Verses,” “Heine’s Grave,” “Haworth Churchyard” are all threnodies. By contrast, in this most skeptical of stock takings, there are no backward glances. What is it to grow old? “It is to spend long days/And not once feel that we were ever young.”

  It is to suffer this,

  And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.

  Deep in our hidden heart

  Festers the dull remembrance of a change,

  But no emotion—none.90

  Arnold had regarded emotion as the touchstone of reality because, for him, it was truer than the exploded dogmas of an exploded Christianity. “The true meaning of religion,” he declared, improving on what his father had imagined, was “not simply morality, but morality touched with emotion …”91 Newman never confused moralism and religion, though he did recognize that emotion had an important, if subordinate role to play in religion.

  True it is, that all the passionate emotion, or fine sensibility, which ever man displayed, will never by itself make us change our ways, and do our duty. Impassioned thoughts, high aspirations, sublime imaginings, have no strength in them. They can no more make a man obey consistently, than they can move mountains … Conscience, and Reason in subjection to Conscience, these are those powerful instruments (under grace) which change a man. But you will observe, that though Conscience and Reason lead us to resolve on and to attempt a new life, they cannot at once make us love it. It is long practice and habit which make us love religion; and in the beginning, obedience, doubtless, is very grievous to habitual sinners. Here then is the use of those earnest, ardent feelings of which I just now spoke, and which attend on the first exercise of Conscience and Reason,—to take away from the beginnings of obedience its grievousness, to give us an impulse which may carry us over the first obstacles, and send us on our way rejoicing. Not as if all this excitement of mind were to last (which cannot be), but it will do its office in thus setting us off; and then will leave us to the more sober and higher comfort resulting from that real love for religion, which obedience itself will have by that time begun to form in us, and will gradually go on to perfect.92

  The sort of emotion that Arnold had in mind might have been rather vague but it had nothing to do with obedience or conscience or reason. And when it disappeared, as emotions do, it left behind nothing but remorse. Growing old in the religion of art, in the religion of knowledge was no cakewalk.

  It is—last stage of all—

  When we are frozen up within, and quite

  The phantom of ourselves

  To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost

  Which blamed the living man.93

  It is also to see the “order of ideas” collapse and something far grimmer emerge, something Jacques would find sans peace, sans faith, sans hope, sans everything … But the poem also ends on a self-accusatory note. Why does the hollow ghost blame the living man? Perhaps Arnold regretted abandoning poetry to write those “lay sermons” of his, with all their witty evasions, which might have won the world’s applause but left him “frozen up within.”94

  Of all Arnold’s works, Newman might have admired this poem the most. It has nothing of the grace or finish of his more formal elegies. Its unadorned diction owes more to Clough than to Milton or Tennyson, the eulogists whom Arnold most admired. It is bitter and it is unrepentant. But it is true, and Newman would have recognized its truth because he knew something himself of “hollow ghosts.” When he was near death with fever in Sicily, after he had left Hurrell Froude and his father, he recalled how “As I lay in bed the first day many thoughts came over me. I felt like God was fighting agst me—& felt at last I knew why—it was for self will. I felt I had been self willed—that the Froudes had been agst my coming … Then I tried to fancy where the Froudes were, & how happy I should have been with them—in France, or perhaps in England. Yet I felt & kept saying to myself ‘I have not sinned against light.’ … Next day the self reproaching feelings increased. I seemed to see more & more my utter hollowness. I began to think of all my professed principles, & felt they were mere intellectual deductions from one or two admitted truths. I compared myself to Keble, and felt that I was merely developing his, not my convictions.” Then, revealingly, he switched to the present tense (he was writing a year after the events in Sicily). “Indeed, this is how I look on myself: very much … as a pane of glass, which transmit[s] heat being cold itself. I have a vivid perception of the consequences of certain admitted principles, have a considerable intellectual capacity of drawing them out, have the refinement to admire them, & a rhetorical or histrionic power to represent them; and, having no great (i.e. no vivid) love of this world, whether riches, honors, or anything else, and some firmness and dignity of character, to take the profession of them upon me, as I might sing a tune which I liked—loving the Truth but not possessing it—for I believe myself at heart to be nearly hollow—i.e. with little love, little self-denial. I believe I have some faith, that is all—& as to my sins, they need my possessing no little amount of faith to set against them & gain remission.”95 Here, Newman saw his own hollowness with precisely the same uncompromising honesty that Arnold saw his.96 Five years later, in 1850, when the reconstitution of the English hierarchy inspired so much anti-Catholic frenzy, Newman wrote a brilliant sermon called “Christ on the Waters,” in which he demonstrated how his own weaknesses, his own susceptibility to hollowness, bound him to his contemporaries, both Catholic and Protestant: “No, I fear not, my Brethren, this momentary clamour of our foe: I fear not this great people, among whom we dwell, of whose blood we come, and who have still, under the habits of these later centuries, the rudiments of that faith by which, in the beginning, they were new-born to God: who still, despite the loss of heavenly gifts, retain the love of justice, manly bearing, and tenderness of heart, which Gregory saw in their very faces. I have no fear about our Holy Father, whose sincerity of affection towards His ancient flock, whose simplicity and truthfulness I know full well. I have no fear about the zeal of the college of our bishops, the sanctity of the body of our clergy, or the inward perfection of our Religious. One thing alone I fear. I fear the presence of sin in the midst of us. My Brethren, the success of the Church lies not with pope, or bishops, or priests, or monks; it rests with yourselves. If the present mercies of God come to nought, it will be because sin has undone them. The drunkard, the blasphemer, the unjust dealer, the profligate liver—these will be our ruin; the open scandal, the secret sin known only to God, these form the devil’s real host. We can conquer every foe but these: corruption, hollowness, neglect of mercies, deadness of heart, worldliness—these will be
too much for us.”97 Here was the light in which Newman saw culture and anarchy, a light which prompted him to speak not of Philistines and Barbarians but of “the wounds which one bears speechlessly, the dreadful secrets which are severed from the sympathy of others, the destruction of confidences, the sense of hollowness all around one, the expectation of calamity or scandal,” which was the “portion of St Paul’s trial, and of all … who have to work for God in this world.”98

  Chapter 12

  Newman and Arthur Hugh Clough

  “Hope is the patient subdued tranquil cheerful thoughtful waiting for Christ.”

  John Henry Newman, “Sermon on the Liturgy” (March, 1830)

  Francis Palgrave, the editor of the Golden Treasury, once remarked of his good friend Clough that “Many fragments of his verse show that whilst roused to a spirit of resolute self-reliance by what went on around him, he felt how much the war of conscience and conviction must be carried on within, until some clearer light should break upon the enquirer.”1 No nineteenth-century poet waited for that clearer light more agonizingly than Arthur Hugh Clough. Certainly, he was changed forever by “the war of conscience and conviction” that raged between Broad Church liberals and Tractarians in the 1830s and 40s when he was at Rugby, Balliol and Oriel. Of course, many were caught up in that war, but Clough had the singular distinction of being dragooned into it by two of its principal opponents, the latitudinarian Dr. Thomas Arnold and the dogmatical John Henry Newman. And yet, as Walter Bagehot showed, it was Arnold who prepared Clough for Newman’s more abiding influence. Most public school boys, Bagehot pointed out, were content “to leave dilemmas unsolved, to forget difficulties … But it was this happy apathy, this commonplace indifference, that [Dr. Arnold] prided himself on removing. He objected strenuously to Mr. Newman’s creed, but he prepared anxiously the very soil in which that creed was sure to grow.”2 Clough’s problem was that he recognized the power and indeed the appeal of Mr. Newman’s creed, without ever being able to embrace it. This is why it was so apt of V. S. Pritchett to call Clough “the poet of dilemma.”3 In this chapter, I shall revisit Clough’s life and work to show how in taking up questions of belief and unbelief, Clough confirmed Newman’s influence, even though he failed to turn it to account.

  Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) was born in Rodney Street, Liverpool—often referred to as the Harley Street of the North—where Gladstone had been born nine years before. Clough’s father, James Butler Clough (1784–1844), was a cotton merchant, who knew both boom and bust. If, as an exporter of cotton in America from 1806 to 1810, he had seen his cotton business end in bankruptcy, by 1819 he enjoyed something of the boom that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars.4 In 1822, when Arthur was three, he migrated with his family to Charleston, North Carolina, where the cotton trade was unpredictable, and he was reduced to taking on a ferry service from Charleston to Sullivan Island. From the few accounts that we have of his later career, he never regained his fleeting prosperity and much of his last years were blighted by debt. When the hapless trader died, his son wrote an epitaph for him that echoed Johnson’s epitaph for his friend Robert Levet, “Thy busy toil thy soul had ne’er engrossed/And when thy griefs had purified thee most/Its chains, that kept thee painfully below/With a most gentle hand God loosed and let thee go.” Clough might have been unconsciously emulating his father, as sons often do, when he followed up his early triumphs—the Rugby prizes, the Balliol scholarship, the Oriel fellowship—with a career of almost flamboyant failure.

  If his father bequeathed Clough his sense of failure, his mother gave him his love of learning. Anne Perfect (d. 1860), the daughter of a Yorkshire banker, educated her son at home and it was while vacationing with him in upstate New York to escape the blistering southern summer that she taught him to read. Clough’s sister Anne vividly recalled how central an influence their mother had on her brother:

  Arthur became my mother’s constant companion. Though then only just seven, he was already considered as the genius of our family. He was a beautiful boy, with soft silky, almost black hair, and shining dark eyes, and a small delicate mouth, which our old nurse was so afraid of spoiling, when he was a baby, that she insisted on getting a tiny spoon for his special use. As I said, Arthur was constantly with my mother, and she poured out the fulness of her heart on him. They read much together, histories, ancient and modern, stories of the Greek heroes, parts of Pope’s Odyssey and Iliad, and much out of Walter Scott’s novels. She talked to him about England, and he learnt to be fond of his own country, and delighted to flourish about a little English flag he had possessed himself of. He also made good progress in French. He was sometimes passionate as a child, though not easily roused; and he was said to be very determined and obstinate. One trait I distinctly remember, that he would always do things from his own choice, and not merely copy what others were doing.5

  This stubborn independence never left him. Although the Clough family resided in America until 1836, Clough returned to England in 1828 and attended school in Chester. In 1829, he entered Rugby School, where he became the famous headmaster’s prize pupil and formed lasting friendships with his two eldest sons, Matthew and Thomas. He also distinguished himself in football, swimming and running, edited one of the school’s papers, and even held office in the student government. How much of his boyhood successes blighted his later life is a nice question. Certainly there are aspects of Clough that put one in mind of Cyril Connolly’s famous claim in Enemies of Promise (1938) that “the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From this it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and, in the last analysis, homosexual.”6 Although neither sentimental nor homosexual, Clough could be decidedly adolescent. For instance, he was convinced that since he had worked hard as a boy at Rugby he was entitled to be idle as an adult. To his future wife he wrote in 1852, when he was 33, “Certainly as a boy, I had less of boyish enjoyment of any kind whatever either at home or at school … as a man I think I have earned myself some title to live for some little interval I do not say in enjoyment … but without immediate devotion to particular objects or matter, as it were, of business …”7 What his fiancée made of this admission is anyone’s guess.

  In 1837, Clough won a scholarship to Balliol, which, after Oriel, was Oxford’s most academically prestigious college. While Clough was in residence the college had some capable students, including A. P. Stanley, Benjamin Jowett, John Duke Coleridge and Frederick Temple. It also numbered A. C. Tait, Frederick Oakeley and W. G. Ward among its dons. Yet the most striking thing about Balliol when Clough entered in 1837 was how divided it was. Balliol’s Master, Richard Jenkyns (1798–1854), a diminutive, pompous, resourceful High Churchman, “found himself with fellows who were either edging towards Roman Catholicism with the Tractarians or moving in the opposite direction with Thomas Arnold.”8 The Oxford Movement was deeply abhorrent to Jenkyns and he did not hesitate to stop Ward teaching mathematics when he became convinced that the tutor was infecting his pupils with subversively Romish doctrines. Here Jenkyns was guarding against the same Roman influence at Balliol that Hawkins guarded against at Oriel, when he stopped Newman, Froude and Robert Wilberforce from tutoring along the same pastoral lines. The Balliol senior common room was equally divided between “Taitians and Wardians.” To make matters worse, A. W. N. Pugin’s plans to rebuild the college in accordance with Gothic principles was another cause of heated division, though Jenkyns made sure that they were shelved. Clough’s Balliol was thus an extension of his own inner divisions and aggravated his habit of seeing things in terms of irreconcilable opposites.

  If Clough’s interest in religion, which he had first acquired from his mother, intensified under Dr. Arnold at Rugby, it was brought to a boil by his Balliol tutor, William George Ward, the opera-loving Romanist who saturated Cloug
h in theological debate. In the Epilogue to Dipsychus, Clough referred to “over-excitation of the religious sense, resulting in … irrational, almost animal irritability of conscience,” which sounds an accurate description of the effect Ward’s febrile conversation must have had on him.9 A. P. Stanley, noticing the two men walking down the street together, quipped, “There goes Ward, mystifying poor Clough, and persuading him that he must either believe nothing or accept the whole of Christian doctrine.” Still, judging from Ward’s correspondence, one can see that there were aspects of Ward’s influence on Clough that made a very deep impression indeed, especially those tinged with what the dons of Balliol were fond of referring to as “Newmanism.” In one letter of 1838, Ward wrote to Clough:

  I had a long talk with Vaughan of Oriel last night who … says he is perfectly certain of this, that there is no mean between Newmanism on the one side and extremes far beyond anything of Arnold’s on the other; that Arnold and all Anglican Protestants are in a false position: for his own part he trusts himself to the progress not knowing whither it will carry him, but not feeling confident that any part of Christianity will remain, except the truth of the main facts (miracles and Resurrection of our Lord) and those virtues (humility, forgiveness etc.) which though first brought to light by Christianity, carried their own evidence with them. Neither the canonicity nor authority of Scripture he thinks will remain: further he thinks Newman seems to see the real bottom of the question … and the way of thinking of infidels better than any Christian alive …10

  From the first, with Ward’s prodding, Clough was ready to look beyond the Arnoldian Weltanschauung. As soon as he was settled in his rooms, he recognized the power of Newman’s work, asking one of his friends, “Have you ever read Newman’s sermons? I hope you will soon if you have not, for they are very good and I should [think] especially useful to us.”11 Then, again, he wrote to his Cambridge friend, John Philip Gell: “I wish you would come, or rather that you were at Oxford. It is, I am sure, so much better a place than Cambridge and you would have the great advantage of a good chance of becoming a disciple of ỏ μέγας Νέανδρος [the great Newman], whom I like much better than I did and admire in many points exceedingly. Have you read Froude’s Remains? If not, pray do.” Clough thought it “one of the most instructive books I have ever read … in this [line]” and regretted that It was “sadly abused.”12 He had spent too much time trying to live the devout life himself to join Sir James Stephen and the Edinburgh Review in mocking Newman and Keble for publishing “contrite reminiscences of a desire for roast goose, and of an undue indulgence in buttered toast.”13